enso

Formulations:

Lets start from a beginners understanding of quantum physics. I know everyone cringes when they hear those words, because it seems like such an esoteric and overly technical, literally chaotic, field of information. But that is only because people dont take the time to look at it from a conceptual point of view.

I remember one of my professor hedging himself before he explained the quantum explanation for the big bang; This is a good storya fairly accurate way of describing what happened using our current knowledge. i.e. Though man continues to strive to figure out Gods formula it will forever remain beyond his bounds, but we can make up some pretty good stories to share in our common experiences.

Lets talk about an extremely important resultant of quantum theory: namely, that we live in a non-local universe.

What the hell is that supposed to mean, you say?

Consider a simple example: say we shine a beam of coherent light through a prism which splits that light and sends it traveling in opposite directions. Now we wait several million light years until that light is on opposite sides of the universe. Now we take a polarizer and polarize a photon on this side of the universe. Our friend who is waiting on the other side of the universe will notice that a photon will instantaneously polarize.
This brings up a seeming paradox with Einsteins theories of relativity. Remember how he said nothing could travel faster than the speed of light?
Then how on earth did the one photon tell its twin on the other side of the universe that he had just become polarized, so it would be good if his bro did the same? Besides being one hell of a long distance charge, the phone communication would have to be instantaneous. The paradox goes away, however, if we consider that the two twin photons are actually part of the same essential thing; i.e. though they do not occupy the same space, what you do to one will necessarily affect the other in the same way because they are one thing.
Is this too abstract? Consider the example of the two twins separated at birth named bob became firemen, who married and divorced a woman named Susan then married a woman named Alice, and before being reconnected for the first time got the idea to build a white bench around a tree in there backyards. Though they never knew each other they were bound by the same material and therefore without local influence were nevertheless intimately connected.
So what? We live in a non local universe how does that effect me on a daily basis, I mean I still have to sit in traffic for two hours to get to work why can I just be there?
Good questionIt does seem that our physical manifestations occupy a local space at least most of the time. But we experience examples of non-locality all the time and usually discount them as coincidence. For example, have you ever thought of a friend you havent seen in a while, and a moment later the phone rings, and there they are?

The fact that we find ourselves here manifest and living in, at least, the illusion of locality is an interesting one. In fact it leads to the big question why am I here?
Awareness is a tricky subject and with concepts like Jungian collective unconscious, ones ideas about the ego and identity come into question and often falter. Unfortunately without building a stable ego platform to stand on it is almost impossible and often quite destructive to leap off that platform into the realms of a collective unconscious.

I am
Unfortunately incumbency
Of psyche preoccupies
Even the least local
Entities.
Its in this sort of self-aggrandizing vanity
That hell arises.
Effective to a limit in math.
Lacking in mutability to those trapped there.

Most people live with a certain amount of suffering, malaise, or lack of joie de vivre. Inevitably they become trapped in what appears to be a mundane world of rigmarole and routine, they seek to break free of this world often through inebriation. This escape allows them to experience a few drunk, stoned, or otherwise spend hours seeing the world through fresh eyes, a different lens, a skewed perspective. Unfortunately, they use these trysts into altered states as methods of avoidance, therefore, upon returning to their normal states all the issues and challenges that were being avoided come flooding back with the convenient addition that more time has been spent avoiding the issues usually increasing the inherent anxiety therein.
This is not to say that efforts to transcend the mundanity of everyday life are a complete avoidance of ones problems and a waste of time. The method of, and intent behind such efforts must be carefully considered. Non-ordinary states of consciousness, be they through meditation, dreams, or drugs, offer us a chance to see the world from a new perspective. If we find ourselves in one of these states and are presented with a challenge we often find new and creative solutions to said challenge. These lessons are learned in what Ill call The Great Non-ordinary State Interdisciplinary School or GNOSIS (cheeky, I know but it gets the point across, and youll probably remember it). The next challenge is to bring knowledge gleaned at GNOSIS back into ordinary states of mind. This transformation of knowledge from GNOSIS through transition states into ordinary states is not an easy one, and lying in this sort of transcoding is a great challenge. This arises out of a phenomenon called state dependant learning, which effectively says: the knowledge learned in one state of mind is most easily accessed again in a like or at least similar state of mind. The easiest example to consider is your dreams. When you first wake up from a dream it is often vivid and you can remember a great deal of detail and the essential plot. However, as you become more fully awake and as the day wears on, the details slip away; often everything just disappears. I frequently find myself saying I know I had a dream and I remembered it this morning, but now its gone (CHALLENGE TO YOU: get a dream log, when you wake up jot down a sentence, something, some seed from that world: seeds grow into trees). So, its this transmission or transference of knowledge through transition states that becomes a real crux for growth because if we learn something but dont remember learning it; we havent learned anything.

So where does this get us?
We live in a non-local universe:
Here is neither here, nor there; it is everywhere.
Now is neither now, nor then; it is everywhen.
Conceptualize it as a spectrum, a cosmic spectrum of energy made mater by the condensation of awareness.

Jesus, I know that sounds totally out there. This is where most of you start tuning out, its what I call the Hare Krishna at the airport effect. You see these dancing yokels in absurd garb dinging around while youre trying to catch a flight, they inevitably try to get in your way and sell you a book you dont want, about finding god or some such 1000-armed deity. You have no time for what theyre trying to tell you.
But thats mostly because they dont know how (more importantly when) to approach you on your time. (I must admit I can see the validity of their efforts at getting people to stop and think for at least one moment while they rush about the world on automaton mode, but thats a discussion left for the mindfulness section.)
For now

Conceptualize a Spectrum.
Visible light, for example, when interacting with a prism (a type of lens), that light separates into its constituent wavelengths ROYGBIV.
Now, we know that energy in the electromagnetic spectrum goes beyond just what we can see down into the infrared and up into ultraviolet, radio, and all the way through x-rays. So we can all share the common ground of some experience with the electromagnetic spectrum. How we come to interact with this spectrum is through lenses. Our eyes react to visible light, like a sieve the eyes gather information from a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. If we add up all the information from all our senses we get a picture of the world that is comprehensible but never the less a small portion of the entire cosmic spectrum. As Aldous Huxley points out the mind is like a reducing valve, reducing a cosmos of information into bite sized morsels that our minds can handle. Castaneda calls this reducing valve the assemblage point. In either case, it is that lens that selectively pairs down infinite spectrum into what we generally considered as the human consciousness (for simplicity sake Ill call it HAL: human awareness lens, and no the irony of 2001: a Space Odyssey is not lost).

Alex Grey's work here represents a nice visualization of what I'm talking about.



(please note i have no affiliation with Alex Grey, besides being a huge fan of his work, or the website that hosts this image)
?
Some energy or experiential lines coalesce and pass through a point on the horizon (which happens to be the 3rd eye in his painting.)

I say selectively because it seems that someone is at them helm steering this ship namely that I that is holding on to those experiences (those instances of focused spectrum) as they pass through the HAL or ones awareness. There are a couple of things that can happen to the HAL and they occur in what we generally consider non-ordinary states of awareness. However induced, in a non-ordinary state the HAL can be shifted and or expanded. Shifting of our normal awareness is what happens in most of our dreams. Most of our dreams occur in what we normally consider our physical body, though were not often aware of it because we are so damn used to it, we take it for granted as being there. During shifting we may experience different lands, emotions, maybe even different bodies but they remain in the human realm. By shifting our lens (HAL) we are getting a new and different perspective on the human realm of experience. Since shifting maintains the awareness in a human realm of experience it is generally easily translatable through transitions back into normal awareness. I mean its pretty common to relate a dream you had with little difficulty to a friend, even if it was sublimely bizarre, because your HAL had only shifted and maintained most of its interpretive structure.
On the other hand there is expansion of the Human Awareness Lens. Expansion occurs in peek experiences, be they mystical, transcendental, near-death, or psychedelically induced. These experiences are usually untranslatable and almost awefully incomprehensible to the normal HAL. The visionaries and the esoteric mystics keep stories and depictions of these states. Why? Expansion leads to boundary dissolution, which can have a profoundly negative effect on a person who never effectively built a stable ego platform to stand on, or return to once the peak experience has dissipated. Those with a stable platform can bounce back and forth trickling through tiny tidbits as they pass through transitional stages back to normal awareness. Those who dont have that platform become deresolute, and are unable to translate their experiences to others, they become deemed schizophrenic or crazy because they lack ability to close the Iris of the HAL. Overwhelmed with an onslaught of sensory information too great, and lacking the stable interpretive structure to translate to others, these people become social pariahs.