Cosmic Game Mind of God 1

The Mind of God

What was “I” thinking?

And just what was in the mind of God, aka the Cosmic Creative Principle, or Absolute Consciousness. What did Absolute Mind have in mind in creating the universe?

In his book, The Cosmic Game, Dr. Stanislav Grof (1998a) gives us a clue. From Grof's pioneering research into consciousness, reflecting almost five decades of inquiry, Grof suggests that our universe

is a playful and somewhat arbitrary product of the cosmic creative principle, an infinitely sophisticated “virtual reality,” a divine play created by Absolute Consciousness and the Cosmic Void. Our universe that appears to contain countless myriads of separate entities and elements, is in its deepest nature, just one being of immense proportions and unimaginable complexity. (p. 39)

Grof came to this conclusion after accumulating vast experiential research into nonordinary states of consciousness. He personally conducted over four thousand psychedelic sessions and had access to the work of over two thousand sessions conducted by his colleagues. In addition, along with his wife Christina, Grof has supervised over thirty thousand holotropic breathwork sessions. Holotropic breathwork is a process created by the Grofs to enable people to experience these states using a combination of breathing and evocative music (K. Taylor, 1994). [link to GTT]

Grof’s (1998a) findings essentially confirm the position of various ancient philosophical, spiritual and mystical traditions, along with esoteric teachings from around the world, that “consciousness is a primary principle of existence and plays a critical role in the creation of the world” (p. 3). Grof’s research in concert with that of other contemporary consciousness researchers “radically changes our conception of the human psyche. In its farthest reaches, the psyche of each of us is essentially commensurate with all of existence and ultimately identical with the cosmic creative principle” (p. 3). While all of this is big news to the modern Western world view, this view is very much in keeping with what Aldus Huxley termed the “perennial philosophy” of these great ancient traditions. It is interesting that cutting edge science is now coming to realize what ancient wisdom has known all along.

Which Way?

Now that we have glimpsed into the Mind of God, or the big “I” in the sky as it were, we will take a longer look by delving more deeply into Grof’s considerable conclusions. At times, as we go along, we will bounce back and forth between ancient wisdom and modern science and we will see that everything old is new again. So, to learn about cosmic play, first we will turn to modern science so we can get a feel for the “whole” thing, and then examine ancient wisdom, especially the Hindu notion of lila—the play of the gods. We will then explore the concept in general and then look into maya and the movies. Next, we will briefly contemplate the mechanics of creation, and contemplate the kaleidoscopic implications of divine control.

Divine Play is not an uncommon concept, and so we will explore its Western roots and then we will go East and delve into the ludic cosmologies of India in particular, and become timeless witnesses to the gods playing dice. We will then come back closer to the present and explore the eternally recurring eternal return, get a crash course on chaos and end up with Grof’s cartography of the psyche and the implications for the Psychology of the Future, and see how it all "plays out" in my own version of the Cosmic Game.

Thru the Looking Glass –Here’s Looking at “u”

WARNING: Along the way, you might get the feeling that we have been here before, that we keep circling around different ideas, eternally returning to the same things over and over again. And you will be correct, however, each time we will get different insights and see things a bit differently. For David Bohm, “an insight isn’t a fixed truth, but an act or angle of perception” (Briggs & Peat, 1984, p. 99). Heidegger likened the wholeness of truth to a drinking glass: As you turn the glass to see one aspect, you necessarily have to conceal another aspect, you can never see the whole glass although it's all there in whatever aspect you do see” (p. 103). In Looking Glass Universe, Briggs and Peat while discussing Hoffstadter’s (1999) book Gödel Escher and Bach note: “Hoffstadter describes a reality or wholeness composed of continual returnings and reflections. From any of the many levels of this whole reality there is always something we can’t see.” Gödel Escher and Bach “provide Hoffstadter with illustrations of an order that constantly turned back on itself, like a möbius strip” (p. 275). The conflict between holism and reductionism is ultimately an ouroboros, a dragon biting its own tail. From time to time, we, too, will turn to Escher, to illustrate what we are talking about.

This is the big picture with which we will be playing. Think of it as a picture on the top of a puzzle box that helps you to see where all the pieces fit. By setting this out ahead of time, I hope to prevent any unnecessary dizziness, providing a kind of “literary spotting.” It is just something to keep in mind as we keep turning and returning, like a dancer does to keep from spinning out of control and landing on her . . . . well you get the picture.

Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science Converge on the “Whole” Thing

Campbell (1995) explicates that the “great experience in Indian thought—indeed, the fundamental illuminating principle throughout the orient—is this realization that all of these beings that seem so various are one” (p. 263). Briefly, we will explore a few instances of how modern science is in sync with this view of wholeness that Grof and Campbell describe— in the areas of cosmology, quantum physics, holography, chaos theory, and mathematics. Other links between ancient wisdom and modern science are described in Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science (Grof 1984) and Lost Discoveries (Teresi, 2002) —but they would take us off on further tangents.

Mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme, in Canticle to the Cosmos (1995) talks about the universe’s creation from the fireball that came out of a singularity, commonly referred to as the “Big Bang.” Everything comes from the fireball and so at one time was interconnected. Swimme says that the universe as an ongoing energy event, and the universe’s continuous unfolding can properly be thought of as an embryogenesis. Grof (1998) mentions that the vacuum state of quantum physics is a plenum, a “pregnant void” of which Heinz Pagels said: “The view of the new physics suggests: the vacuum is all of physics. Everything that ever existed or can exist is already there in the nothingness of space… that nothingness contains all being” (pp. 32-33).

Systems theorist Ervin Laszlo (2004) also sees in the quantum vacuum, a physically real cosmic plenum, a superdense sea of energy and information (p. 50). In two of his most recent works, The Connectivity Hypothesis (2003) and Science and the Akashic Field (2004), Laszlo discusses his paradigm of universal connectivity that embraces quantum, life, cosmology, and consciousness, as he seeks to reconcile existing paradoxes that exist in these different branches of science. Most of these anomalies or puzzles, as he calls them, that confront the current scientific “Cartesian/Newtonian” world view are of coherence and correlation. Laszlo discusses the coherence of our universe at length—from the subatomic realm to consciousness, from biology to cosmology—and how this coherence points to the presence of an interconnecting field, which he originally called the "psi field" but now calls the "A-field." Laszlo’s (2004) inspiration was to seek the “simplest possible scheme that can tie together the observed facts” (p. 90) and his connectivity hypothesis was the result and aspires to do just this. Similar to Bohm’s implicate order, as we will see, this subquantum domain, or A-field is “a cosmic field that underlies and links all things in the world” (p. 105). Laszlo continues explaining that this subquantum domain is a:

perennial intuition, present in traditional cosmologies and metaphysics. The ancients knew that space is not empty: it is the origin and the memory of all things that exist and have ever existed. But this knowledge was based on philosophical or mystical insight, the fruit of private and unrepeatable if often seemingly indubitable experience. The current rediscovery of the Akashic Field reinforces qualitative human experience with quantitative data generated by science’s experimental method. The combination of unique personal insight and interpersonally observable and repeatable experience gives us the best assurance we can have that we are on the right track: that a cosmic information field connects organisms and minds in the biosphere, and particles, stars and galaxies throughout the cosmos. Nature’s information field is now being rediscovered at the cutting edge of sciences. (p. 112)

This cosmic information field that underlies and informs everything does much to explain such disparate things as nonlocality and the collective unconscious. Grof (2004) in discussing this field say that it is like a cosmic Hollywood archives, where everything that ever happened is recorded and stored.

David Bohm, another quantum physicist, agrees. He talks about wholeness as the implicate order that is behind all of the diverse “things” of our world that he calls the explicate order: “For Bohm, our universe is filled with nothing or no-things—it is a vast fluid no-thingness in which everything is” (Briggs & Peat, 1984, p.145). For Bohm, reality is a coherent, unbroken whole involved in an unending process of change, which he calls holomovement. Everything that we perceive is derived from this undefinable and unknowable whole. Bohm was influenced by the theory of holography when developing these ideas (Briggs & Peat, 1984).

Bohm says that what we perceive as reality, the unfolded or explicate order is like a projected holographic image, while the enfolded or implicate order is a level of reality that is analogous to the hologram that we are not able to perceive. Grof (1993), describes the process:

A hologram which might be compared to a photographic slide from which we project a picture—is a record of an interference pattern of two halves of a laser beam. After a beam of light is split by a partially silvered mirror, half of it (called the reference beam) is directed to the emulsion of the hologram; the other half (called the working beam) is reflected to the film from the object being photographed. Information from these two beams, required for reproducing a three-dimensional image, is “enfolded” in the hologram in such a way that it is distributed throughout. As a result, when the hologram is illuminated by the laser, the complete three-dimensional image can be unfolded from any fraction of the hologram. We can cut the hologram into many pieces and each part will still be capable of reproducing an image from the whole. (p. 7)

Karl Pribram’s research indicates or suggests that the brain functions holographically as well (Briggs & Peat, 1984).

Quantum physics is not the only place where wholeness shows up. Honorable mention should also be give to mathematics and chaos theory. In mathematics, deMarrais (2001, online) playfully discusses double cusp catastrophes and the equations of Vladimir Arnol’d which shows, of all things, the “mysterious unity of all things.” Lastly, we come to chaos theory, where at the turn of the Twentieth Century, when Henri Poincaré first glimpsed chaos: “it was not in terms of a disorder and lawlessness in the universe. What he saw was that chaos is wholeness.” (Briggs & Peat, 2000, p. 153). We will return and look further into chaos later.

Continued on page 2