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A Cosmic Revelation
Orchestrated by God
Mostly from part of Chapter 4 of Fisherman's Guide with some explanatory phrases and notes added.
by Robert Campbell
(Most passages first written in 1969)
Explanatory Note
The following description of an unusual cosmic insight is offered here to indicate the source of the work on the physical, biological, and social sciences outlined on the website. Although a reader may be excused for dismissing this article as illusory in some way, I am simply being honest about how these ideas originated. The point is that this work is not an intellectual contrivance of mine and it does provide practical application to the sciences. Despite the profoundly spiritual nature of the insights, they focused mostly on a methodology of delineating the cosmic order in a way that can complement traditional approaches to the sciences. They focused more on science than on religion, although with profound religious implications. Since the experiences were explicitly orchestrated by the Supreme Source of All Being, they were not deniable. It is a mistake to dismiss it as spiritual nonsense opposed to reason and science. Many varieties of spiritual experience may be possible just as there are many varieties of rational self-deception.
This work requires a non-linguistic intuitive quest into the roots of meaning. It cannot be a language based belief system because it must find direct confirmation in sensory experience from which all language derives. The astute reader may find clues in the description of the experience as to how it relates to the development of ideas expressed in the articles and books on the website, although these are also intended to stand on their own merit. The Void is an especially important part of this work. It has been recognized in more esoteric spiritual traditions especially in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, but there are also references to it in esoteric Christian and Sufi experience. There is also solid support for it in physics as is demonstrated in some of the physics articles.
The Organizational Dispute
An insight into the System first came as a result of a prolonged intensive effort to understand the nature of a business organization. The spiritual aspects of life were the farthest thing from my mind, or so it seemed at the time. I was not a very religious or spiritual person in a traditional sense, nor was I an atheist. I did wonder about the nature of reality. While still in my mid twenties I became responsible for the design, planning, construction, and maintenance of all buried plant in a natural gas utility company. I was directing several hundred company and contract employees. It was a unique situation. Natural gas had just come from western Canada and the old manufactured gas company in the steel making city of Hamilton had expanded many times in size overnight. The old manufactured gas mains dried out and the leak count was infinite. A couple of homes had exploded. I was just there and capable and the task to remedy the dangerous situation fell to me.
There were very difficult times following conversion of the old manufactured gas system to natural gas. Public safety was at serious risk due to extensive leakage problems that required the redesign and replacement of the entire buried system through many hundreds of miles of city streets. Over a period of years we had successfully created a safe and efficient distribution system and had built a smooth running organization out of the chaos. By the time I was in my late twenties I was a key management figure in a political battle that followed the recent hostile takeover of our company that ensued for several years. The new parent company, although a much larger sprawling company, lagged far behind us in safety and had serious organizational problems. They nevertheless wanted to centralize control to the point where we would lose control over the safe operation of our much more concentrated franchise area that we had struggled so hard to achieve. Their staff organization of over 300 experts at their new head office had no line authority over me. I was expected to voluntarily agree with measure after measure that I knew would not work in our context, and counter suggestions were not accepted.
I had human resources at my disposal and as the struggle became very intense, I undertook a detailed quantitative study of all formal and essential informal communications in the entire company, in an effort to show decisively that the system the new parent company wanted to impose would not work. It would not provide us with the communications we needed to function and it would leave us without direct access to essential records. It would throw us back into chaos, while many thousands of pieces of paper would flow into the new head office a couple of hundred miles away.
During this period of intensive analysis, including self analysis, an intuitive insight gradually formulated itself that had implications far beyond the organization of a company. This insight did not involve a logical or linear process of cause and effect. It was a structurally cyclic process. It integrated what we think of as time and space. I was very taken by the dynamics and implications of this intuitive pattern to experience generally. It focused my attention in a new way and I began to see implications in the natural order of things. It excited me with possibilities that I had never considered before.
I had just finished compiling a condensed report of nearly 200 pages of charts and tables on the formal and informal communications in the whole organization. I had been at it long hours for many months, along with the team that I had assigned to work on it. After it was finally submitted, I was exhausted and my mind was in a tumult, churning with new possibilities. I felt on the brink of something immense.
Five Days of Ecstasy
One evening I came home from work feeling drained. I had done everything that I felt I could do and could only wait to see if there would eventually be some response to the report. I entered my apartment where I lived alone and immediately lay down on the sofa, my head on a cushion, my hands folded across my chest. My eyes fell closed.
Almost at once the tension and turmoil of the preceding months fell away. I became aware of the inside of my head, what I thought was my own mind. I thought this kind of awareness unusual. Can one be aware of one's own mind? Then who is aware? My focus wandered like a kind of independent perception through my whole body. My attention fell to the rhythmic rise and fall of my breathing of its own accord. Then a strange phenomenon occurred. Inside a rear corner of my head as I observed it, in or near where the right occipital lobe of the brain is located, there as suddenly a tiny spark of light, little bigger than a pinprick. From it, a little shower of lights trickled across my mind as I conceived of it inside my head. It was like a miniature fireworks that I simply observed. It was odd but it didn't disturb me. My attention fell again to the rhythmic rise and fall of my breathing.
Then a wondrous thing began to happen. It started ever so gently. I became aware of the form of my body as I became more absorbed in the rhythmic rise and fall of my breathing. I made no effort to interfere. I had no thoughts. My mind was empty. There was only a clarity of awareness of events that were taking their own course. Then, I became aware of a form to the form of my body. My breathing began to assume a vibrant harmony between the two. I became an impartial witness to a vibrant harmony of breathing.
The harmony of breathing gradually enveloped my whole body with a wondrous feeling that filled every fiber of my being, every nerve, every muscle, every cell. As it did, the area of my chest seemed to open wide and become alive. A vibrant golden light began to glow within my chest and it blossomed forth to fill my mind and engulf my whole body in a field of golden light. I became a vibrant ecstasy of living golden energy. The energy encapsulated me in an effulgent globe of inexpressible rapture. It filled my vision.
Then, in what seemed a most ordinary fashion, a mirror image of my face appeared before me in rich, full color. It was just my head and face, looking impartially and intently at myself. The eyes of my mirror image were looking directly into my own eyes as if they were open, as I lay there with my eyes closed. There was nothing dream-like or trance-like about it. I was more fully aware than I had ever been. It was like looking into a mirror of living gold. My face just quietly appeared, then faded in a moment leaving me immersed in a formless ecstasy of living gold.
It was some time before I slowly sat up. As I opened my eyes, it was like having been asleep from birth, living out some distorted dream, and then waking up for the very first time. The root of all anxiety was gone. Everything was bathed in living light that worked in and through it, making it what it is. There was a spontaneous awareness of every cell in my body that was far more than just awareness. Every cell in my body was in organic union with the form to the form of my body. Every cell was in a state of ecstatic ongoing orgasm that showed no sign of letting up. The walls of the room were cast in living light that filled the air. I could see the vital energies teeming within the potted plant in the room. A sparrow landed on the railing of my balcony, chirping and hopping along in a dance with the energies that bathed it. I could visually see the tiny wheels of energy turning within its little head and breast and I implicitly felt a unity of appreciation for its avian concerns.
It went on like this for several days, everywhere I went. It never left me for a moment. The energy transformations of all living processes were illuminated and could be seen visually in meticulous transforming details that were infinitely too complex to attempt analysis. The whole of physical existence was a transparent projection cast upon a world of living light.
I called the next morning to say that I wouldn't be into work, then the weekend came. My concerns at work seemed futile and wasteful in this wondrous new world in which I now found myself. It was the same old world, but seen and experienced in a profoundly more meaningful and intelligent way. I was a living part of a living whole that was pulsing and teeming with cascades of energy that were the very essence of life itself. The whole world that I saw swarming in brilliant life giving patterns around me was also living in and through me. I was in intimate personal contact with every living thing, every blade of grass, every tree, every leaf on every tree, every dog, every cat, every bird, every human being, every creature under the light drenched heavens above. Each night I drifted effortlessly off to sleep in blissful thankfulness. Each morning I awoke to another adventure in ecstasy. I bathed in a world that was a living being of intelligent energy of immense complexity and proportions.
Ecstatic though the experience was, it was at the same time mundane. It wasn't like a euphoric fantasy induced by some kind of wish fulfillment. There was a depth of reality and discovery in every perception. An effortless balance and equanimity pervaded the rapture. I functioned completely normally, although something of my condition must have been apparent and strange to others, if for no other reason than nobody has the right to be so incredibly happy and at peace.
The emotional problems and attachments of total strangers could be seen visually as they passed on the street. I could see their emotional energies generated within their body, then rising up through their cerebral consciousness and projected out in a way that returned to them and generated endless cycles of the same problem. Endless streams of living energy were churning painfully through them. They were locked in a wheel of suffering that was self perpetuating, yet they were powerless to see it themselves. They were powerless to do a thing about it. The sorrow of this was fully apparent, but not in a way that disrupted the equanimity of the experience. If I could have done anything to help I would have, but the streets were full of people like this, some of them carrying terrible burdens. I had been through some difficult periods myself and now those burdens were lifted from me completely. I did see people with clear minds and they seemed constructive, but their numbers were very few.
I didn't rationally understand what had happened to me. I had no preparation for it, no discipline of spiritual practice of any formal kind, apart from growing up with an empathy for nature on a farm in a backwoods village in Northern Ontario. I had a normal Christian upbringing as a young child, like everyone else in those days, but there was no hint in this of the quality of experience that I now enjoyed. And I didn't enjoy reading. I enjoyed fishing, swimming, hockey, and the outdoors. My only other passion was art, and other interests and demands submerged that in my teens. I truly shunned reading. I had read little or nothing about such matters.
But I had heard or read briefly about the Hindu and Buddhist religions - hardly more than a few rumors. I had heard vaguely of enlightenment, although I had no idea that it could be like this. Had I somehow lucked into an experience of enlightenment? Was this possibility open to anyone? I thought at the time that that must be it. Whatever had happened, it didn't seem to require analysis. It was impossible to explain. It was impossible to articulate the living insight that flooded through me in a continual deluge.
As the days passed, I began to wonder what I would do. I decided to resign from my job. My boss came to see me early the following week and I told him of my intention. I could see that there was little hope that the strife at work would subside of its own accord. So long as I stayed, I would only help to perpetuate it. There was no way to convey this sublime perspective to anyone. I couldn't change the whole world. I was not a messiah and I was far from perfect. To stay would be to perpetuate an exercise in frustration, like the tragic legions I saw walking on the streets. I had some savings to tide me over for awhile and I had no dependents. I lived a disciplined life. Still, I wondered what I would do in this state that was both sublime and mundane, and at the same time, so foreign to everyone else in the world around me. For all the splendor and rapture of the experience, it was mute. It set me apart. I could see no way to translate it in a socially meaningful way that would be acceptable to those around me. I was beyond the pale.
The Suffering Face of Humanity
It was as I was sitting alone in my apartment one night, wondering what I would do, that the rapturous experience of organic union came to an end. It just gradually faded away, and as it did, I had the feeling that something was turning around backwards. The end was in fact the beginning of something new, another side. I received a direct and unmistakable telepathic message. Twelve words.
"You have seen my face and now you will do my bidding."
The words were deliberately articulated within my being in a way they could not be denied as a message from someone other than my person. They were not like thoughts. They were explicit words that penetrated my whole being. There was a severe intensity to them. They were startling.
At the beginning of the experience I had seen a mirror image of my own face, but this was not myself talking to myself. What other face had I seen? What was this sudden invasion of what I regarded as my privacy? Was my own mind not private? I did not reply aloud. I replied to the message in deliberately formulated words in my mind. I instinctively had the ability to project them in similar telepathic fashion.
"I haven't seen any face."
Suddenly the walls of the room again became transparent, but they were not filled with living light. There was a transparent spatial depth extending indeterminately beyond the wall, but it was not space as we know it normally. It was a vast field of balanced energies. The field itself was boundless. However, a face appeared directly in front of my eyes. My eyes were wide open, every nerve alert. I was aware that something was backwards, the inverse of what it should be. The face appeared after the message. I will never forget the exact words of the message as stated above. It was in the past tense. Time was backwards. I was aware that something had turned around. Something had become perceptually transposed.
The face was looking directly at me. It was three or four feet in front of me, if distance has any meaning in the Void. It was ghost-like in appearance with fuzzy edges, but it was more than a ghost. It was a real living being. It had an incredible presence that extended indefinitely in a two dimensional plane, like an infinitely extended open active interface of ordered energy with the face in the center. It was the face, the head, the neck, and the shoulders, of a smallish aging man. It had no color. I was aware of an intuitive connection between us. I was a part of it and it was a part of me. The face implicitly embraced the whole of humanity, from the genesis of human history up to the present. It was the genotype of the human species, a universal archetype associated with every human being who has ever lived. It was a holy ghost you might say.
It was this being that I had been in union with over the preceding days. This being was the universal archetypal form to the form of my body. This genotype of the human species subsumes and integrates all organically living energy processes on the planet. Union with it was union with our natural heritage, with the whole of life, and with every human being who has ever lived. Now I was seeing the other side. I was seeing it face to face, objectively out there apart from me, despite the intimate coalescence connecting us.
The depth of the face was incorporated into its presence through human suffering - incredible human suffering. It was terribly scarred - almost mutilated - by tragic events that reach back countless thousands of years. I could sense the events in general terms inherent in the energies of the boundless field behind it, like memories unable to rest. I could catch glimpses of them in the indeterminate distance, like looking backwards from the present through the whole of human history. I could feel the depth of its immense suffering. There was a particularly painful wound in its neck, a gash several inches long, that was still not healed over. It was an event in recent times, a mass carnage of some sort, a major war. There were many similar events that were written in the depth of its suffering and recorded on its face, reaching back to the origins of history. It carried the burden of the whole of human history integrated into its being. It was the genotype of humanity, the human archetype.
In spite of this social burden of mankind from its inception, the face embodied a will of absolute impartiality. It must sustain the burden despite overwhelming odds against it. Suddenly, I became intuitively and graphically aware of the future that it knew it faced. Impending events in the near future are cataclysmic. I could sense them viscerally and see inferences of them reflected in the face. They are staggering in their proportions and consequences for the whole human race. This archetype of the whole of humanity may not survive. In fact, it appeared certain that it could not survive the way things are headed. The fate of all humanity hangs in the balance. It was a fearsome realization - bowel wrenchingly fearsome. This impossible dilemma imposed an extreme severity to the presence of the being, yet it was sustained with gargantuan strength and depth. Its will was monumental.
As the face faded from view, I again replied to the being through deliberately formulated words in my mind. I might have asked what bidding it had in mind, but I didn't. I rejected the message completely.
"I don't care who you are, it's not right for anyone to impose their will on another."
The response was automatic. I'd been fighting this very thing for several years. I made a hasty retreat into another room, hoping it was over, but my feet were stopped in their tracks. Suddenly all organic feedback from my emotional apparatus to my cerebral mental processes was suspended. My slate was wiped clean in marked contrast to the living light that had filled me during the previous days. It was like I had stepped outside of humanity, though I was still the same human being.
The Void Associated with Universal Mind
There was a clarity of perception into an indeterminate formless distance that could be seen right through the walls of the room. The room lost its substantiality, becoming but a flimsy transparent veneer over a vast and shining sea of mist. I was gazing into the boundless Void.
A series of intuitive realizations came to me in an orderly sequence. They were intentionally fed to me from a source other than my personal being. I was aware that they came from another source that was different also from the tragic face of humanity. Organic feedback that normally fills one's mental processes was completely suspended. The ecstasy that I had enjoyed through the previous days, and that was also organic in nature, was gone. These intuitions were not organic in nature at all. They were cosmic.
First, there was a perception into the formless distance of unlimited possibilities. It was a recognition that possibilities need not be confined in any way, that the range of possibility is unlimited. I seemed able to see forever into the depths of the shining Void. This was followed by a few examples, most of which I cannot find words to describe. One of them, a little frightening in its implications, was the possibility of unlimited lifespan. This brought with it a trace of anxiety about how to relate to an indefinite lifespan when our thoughts are so conditioned to a brief lifetime of striving ending in death. But even this latter concern was an intuitive one that was part of the series that was fed to me. My thoughts and emotions were being controlled. I was a passive observer. I had no capacity for independent thought or reflection.
I took another step or two when the most disconcerting thing happened, although I didn't feel it so at the time. Everything vanished completely! The room, the city, the planet, the universe, even my own body, all just vanished completely! There was no loss of a sense of identity, despite not being identified with a body. I was still there, but I was an empty I. I had no thoughts, no physical body, no perceptible body of any kind. I was an integral part of the vast and shining sea of mist that contained no forms whatsoever. It was an identity in emptiness with the whole of being. It was experienced with wonder, a pure sense of being and wonder. There was no organic rapture, no heavenly bliss, no pain, no loss, no gain, no sorrow. Everthing was balanced in a field of pure being and wonder. It was like gazing into a silvery moonlit night without the moon or stars, even while being an integral part of the emptiness. It was a vast Void with a limitless quality of indeterminate depth.
In a moment everything returned again as a thin transparent veneer, but only for a moment. Then everything was gone again. This happened several times in succession, as if someone was switching the entire universe on and off to deliberately show me something. There was a correspondence between form and Void.
The Supreme Being Appears
Next, that someone appeared in the room directly in front of me, about eight feet away. But it was not part of the world of material form, so that distance or magnitude had no real relevance except to me. It was just suddenly there all at once. It was an awesomely indescribable and supremely intelliget being. It was a being of pure living energy, but not a being of light. It was round, but not spherical. It had depth within its being, but not as a physical spatial dimension. It was about two meters or so in diameter, both with form and without, both with color and without, constantly transforming within itself, yet staying the same.
There were multitudinous tiers of intelligent transformations going on within it, energies and colors transforming and changing in an infinite complexity of shifting patterns that were all meticulously integrated into the unspeakable dynamism of its being. I could see into them even as they transformed and changed. It had a million eyes and ears, so to speak, a million living brains transmuting into one another, all of them inter-dependent with one another and with the whole of its being. A million or a billion or a gillion, it is utterly impossible to describe. It was filled with a splendor and magnificence beyond all reproach. It was suddenly just hovering there in the room, immaculately ordered and harmonized unto itself, seeing and knowing all, yet perfectly balanced and impartial.
It could change its texture at will and communicate through emanations of energy that came like a shower of rain from every part of its being. After its initial balanced appearance, it began to emanate friendliness towards me, just like meeting a new and genuine friend, only much more so. There was no doubting the flawless quality of friendship it projected. It changed its texture again, this time to mercy. Unrestrained mercy came streaming from it in an unqualified torrent of magnanimity. It changed again to compassion, unlimited compassion with the purest of heart. Then came an absolute deluge of infinite love with a warmth and depth exceeding anything that we know in human experience. Unblemished love came gushing freely from the bottomless wellspring of its entire being without the least expectation in return. There was not the slightest stain in the immaculate quality of its entire being.
None of this came from me. Nothing of this was generated from within me or from within my physical body. It was not a product of my mind. It was infinitely beyond the powers of the wildest imagination. The Void was pure mind and it embraced the whole of existence. This incredible being was the universal center of the Void. It transcended and subsumed the Void. It was the Master of the Void and the whole of experience. It was the living enbodiment of universal values. It transcended the whole of space and time, the whole history of the entire universe. It had no origin in the universe. It was the living source of the universe as an eternal creation without beginning or end in space and time. It was a manifestation of God, supreme above all. I could only share without words or language in this common realization between us, transcending and subsuming creation.
I stood there dumbfounded, gazing into the face of this incredible Being that encompassed all Being. I had no thoughts, no feelings apart from awe and wonder. It was impossible to rationalize anything in the face of this Being, impossible even to think that one could not rationalize. Rejection of the Being was impossible, unthinkable. How can one reject the whole of creation including oneself? How can there be a being with separate thoughts or feelings in the presence of the Supreme Being? Can there be two sources of Being? It was unthinkable. I was an empty I, a mute and passive observer to what was happening out there, objectively in front of me. I saw as with my eyes, just as I would look at a tree, or a mountain, or another person, and yet what I saw transcended the whole of physical existence. I felt no friendliness, no mercy, no compassion, no love generated within me. These feelings rained from the Being out there in front of me in response to its own free will. They entered my presence from without as I stood there in dumbstruck wonder. And there was nothing in them that either sanctioned any flaws in my character or passed any absolute judgment upon me, despite having made serious mistakes in my life. This infinite Being was simply prepared to make me a compassionate gift of a revelatory insight into the whole creative process. In retrospect, I can only suppose that this was in response to the intensive quest I had been on for years, perhaps from birth. And I had been demanding answers to why I had to fight for the right to be responsible in my job. In any case, a revelation is what followed.
As I gazed in utter amazement at this Being, it became balanced again, just hovering as if it was considering something. Then it began to spin its wheels in meaningless activity that induced a similar minor activity in my chest. This was like a kind of assessment, perhaps an assessment of whether I could handle what was to follow, and perhaps an indication of what I should not attempt to do. It exposed involuted tendencies to identify with oneself and I observed them impartially. I shared in its impartial mind to the extent that it willed. It paused again for a moment, then increased the intensity of its living texture, became slightly smaller, and moved up and away a little bit. It became pure creative energy, a dynamo of every manner of creativity. It was unimaginably powerful, absolutely without equal. Then it changed to a complete independence of everything, an unthinkable freedom beyond all conceptions. It transcended the whole of creation, the whole universe, the whole of history, the whole of space and time.
The Vision of the Universe from Outer Space
It paused once more as if considering something. Then in its very center there was a tiny blip of light. From it came a transmission, like a bullet of energy that came speeding straight to me across the space between us. This brought a momentary self awareness, as if the light came on within me and dissipated as quickly. It was followed immediately by a sweep out into the Void. The world faded from view, just vanished completely as before. I remained aware of a body of some kind, although I was not looking to check on my physical parts. The Being was still with me. It had the ability to dispense with the whole of creation, then either create another reality, or transpose me to another place to provide a view of the same reality from an amazingly different perspective from outer space, all this in the blink of an eye.
A thin wand of energy suddenly extended an endless distance out from the center of the Being, like a projection of its will. It swept quickly in a vast limitless arc through the Void. As it did, a universe of stars appeared in a great spiral galaxy. I had been transported to intergalactic space. The Void had changed its texture and lost much of its silvery appearance. It looked like a night sky, but now I was suspended many thousands of light years out in space gasping in awe and amazement at the profusion of stars and perhaps distant galaxies cast in a great spiral swirl, with the Being beside me. It all happened quickly as if we were transported at great speed. Time had no relevance. The galaxy was seen from an angular perspective, complete with the feeling of being actually suspended many thousands of light years out in space viewing the galaxy from beyond its extremes. My utter astonishment at the spectacle filled my whole being as if I was at one pole of the phenomenon and the whole galaxy at the other.
Just as magically as it had disappeared, the transparent veil of the room returned. I was standing as before, although I had somehow made a partial turn to the left. The Being was still in my field of vision to my right, hovering there like a living dynamo that could work any miracle it wished.
Universal Hemispheres Demostrate the Cosmic Dilemma of Self and Other
Then the room vanished again as two titanic power masses became suspended in the Void. They were a bifurcation of the energies of the Void. They were facing one another, one on top, with an interface that curved upward, like part of a huge sphere, and one on the bottom with an identical interface that curved downward. Both interfaces were extended indefinitely - infinitely - being open in opposite directions, as if an unimaginably enormous sphere of energy had been ripped in two, and the top half placed underneath the bottom half. All events were being orchestrated by the Supreme Being.
Together, these two hemispheres had to do with the nature of wholeness. They represented a Rift in Wholeness. On the inside of both of them were dark, dangerous looking energies. They were striving for release against the inside surface of each hemisphere as if they were trying to rejoin the energies of the other hemisphere. They looked like writhing serpents of energy seething with raw power, concentrated against each interface and placing their boundaries under great strain to contain themselves. These energies were enormous. They were also complex in the trails that they made within each hemisphere that seemed to mirror each other. Since each hemisphere was infinite in the opposite direction, the only way the energies could try to rejoin their other half was to struggle against the interfaces that separated them. It was a rift in the energies of the universe, a juxtaposition of Self and Other than Self across their interfaces, and yet the whole consisted of both parts. One part was transposed with respect to the other. One part was inside with respect to the other part outside, and vice versa. Yet they were one whole. They represented the energies of the entire universe. They were presented this way to convey that they did represent the energies of the entire universe. There were Universal and Particular aspects implicit in creation. All creation derived from the need to bridge them.
Separation and balance was maintained between these monstrous power masses by an exceedingly fine thread of light, just a glistening hair stretched between their closest points. This lone gossamer of light was the only avenue of communication across the gap that separated the hemispheres. It soon became apparent that creative order in and to the entire universe depended on the maintenance of this extremely intricate balance of energies. It was a dilemma of cosmic proportions. The energies of the physical universe were suspended in balance with those of the heavens by a hair. A filmy strand of light was all that stood between the inside and outside of everything. These enormous energies within the interfaces of the hemispheres are both open and closed. They must be independently contained, yet mutually balanced to the most minute degree. All of creation derived from it and depended upon it. The creative process depended on this living balance between the hemispheres to bridge the Rift in Wholeness and thus preserve Universal Wholeness.
No sooner was this recognized than these huge masses of sheer power began to tremble and quake on the verge of horrendous instability. The entire universe was suddenly in jeopardy, facing arrant destruction if the balance of energies could not be maintained. Filled with terror at the unthinkable consequences that this instability implied, the desperate thought came to me that there was some personal responsibility for maintaining the balance. I wanted to stop it, but the energies were infinitely beyond the capacity of one Particular human mind to control.
The above sketch cannot convey the immensity and associated intensity of the vision of balance between the two infinite hemispheres. God is shown by the circle above me, but it is quite impossible to represent Him.
The Bifurcation of Mind
Gripped helplessly by the horrific consequences that were about to occur, there was an eruption in my body that began in the lower part of my abdomen. Irregular uncontrollable energies came cascading up through my body into my head, where they were transformed into an extreme transverse tension that was not confined to my head or brain. My presence extended into the boundless Void. My conscious mind was being ripped open, stretched far beyond its limits in an impossible effort to hold both poles of the tension. It was as if an aspect of the tension between the two hemispheres was transposed to an extreme bilateral polarization of the hemispheres of my brain and my mind. My mind was wrenched open far beyond the confines of my physical body. I was struggling helplessly to restrain the tension that seemed about to tear me limb from limb. The horrendous hemispheres continued to quake on the verge of flying to pieces, while the Supreme Being hovered beside me looking passively on, seeing and knowing all. Then when it seemed that all was lost, the Universal Supreme Being intervened.
As I turned toward it, the Being increased its intensity and moved up a little more. It became unlimited universal power, conscious power that could be constrained by no obstacle whatsoever, exceeding all of the forces of the universe combined. Then it began to increase its power continuously, becoming smaller and much brighter as it moved up and away on a steep incline, a little to the right. There was nothing remotely conceivable to challenge its supremacy, not in the entire universe, nor in any realm beyond. Size, distance, and magnitude lost relevance to the world of form. The hemispheres were suddenly gone.
As its intensity and power reached extreme proportions, the Being began to consume the Void. It transcended all creation including the Void, and it began collecting the energies of the Void unto itself. The Void in the vicinity all around the Supreme Being began flying into it to be devoured in the intensity of its dynamism, revealing a pitch black emptiness beyond. The Being became an absolute Center of very bright, intensely active energy in an absolute Periphery of pitch black emptiness, as more and more of the Void was being consumed. The silvery energies of the Void were returning to their source. The balance between the active and passive aspects of creation were being wrenched asunder in the extreme polarization of Supreme Being as One Universal Active Center Inside, in a boundless pitch black universal Periphery Outside.
It was an extreme bifurcation of His Being. There is NO Being part from HIS Being. Invisible rays of His omnipotent will radiated from him like steely threads, polarizing the Void in all directions, as the Being enacted the awesome spectacle. I could sense the rays penetrating everywhere, penetrating through me. His will permeated the entire Void. There was no power to exceed His power, no will to exceed His will. All was created from the interplay of His active center of living energy and His passive periphery of total darkness. Neither could be known to the exclusion of the other. The whole of creation depended on how these two aspects of creation reconciled the universal inside and the universal outside of all phenomena across active interfaces between them. It embraced the whole Void and more. It was One and Supreme beyond all conceptions. It subsumed all creation.
It was thus apparent that the Void embraced the whole of experience, not only the universe and everything in it, but everything that has ever been. It embraced the whole of history. The energies of the Void are quantized and ordered through episodes of experience. The whole of experience is integrated via the Void, good or bad, right or wrong, true or false. The Void itself is amoral. It is a repository of all experience. All experience consists of energies balanced through commitments to experience. The Void is a master sensorium from which everything draws upon to sustain itself. It is a master memory bank. The Void is an eternal empty side to the world of form and to the totality of experience.
Now this Absolute Being, Almighty God, was bringing everything to its ultimate consummation, to a final end, before a witness that faced the same annihilation. It was a realization that transcended the whole of space and time, the whole of creation. The whole Void became polarized by the Being's will, being drawn inexorably towards it. I was one particular human being facing the source and consumation of all.
Yet I was staying where I was, my eyes glued to the terrifying spectacle of great tongues of the Void flying into the Almighty Being. The transverse tension in my mind that began with the hemispheres became unbearably immense. The awe of the spectacle polarized my being, bringing with it a tunnel-like opening in the energies of the Void within me, from my eyes that witnessed the incredible scene of God consuming the Void down through my body and beyond. I could see that I had a two dimensional transparent active interface through the mid-coronal plane of my body that was of indefinite extent. It distinguished a subjective inside behind from an objective outside in front.
I thus had an internal visual perception of the opening within me, behind the interface through me, even though my eyes were still frozen on the Being. A bottomless well opened within me that had access into and through the energies of the Void. The tunnel-like well was black, empty and bottomless, created by the extreme polarity between myself and the Supreme Being. More and more of the Void around the Being was still being consumed, and yet He did not complete the awesome spectacle. I realized after that He could not or there could be no distinctions between self and other than self in phenomenal experience. There could be no phenomena at all. (In the language of the System, God is System 1 subsuming all the higher Systems, and I saw this from the subsumed perspective of System 2 where I was one Particular human being face to face with the ONE Universal Supreme Being.)
Somehow I gathered the will to turn away from the Being in an act of utter desperation to stave off the destruction of the universe. I held my arms out in a gesture to stop it, as if I could defy the omnipotent will of God and succeed. Any concern for Self was overwhelmed by concern for the universe, for Other than Self. It was a manifestation of mending the Rift in Wholeness. (In the language of the System, I had done a perceptual transposition. The active interface through the mid-coronal plane of my body had turned around.)
Although the Being was behind me now, I still had a visual perception of Him, as if I had eyes in the back of my head. I could still see Him in the same relative position behind the active interface that was aligned transversely across my body and identified with my person. It was an open active interface across the mid-coronal plane of my body of indefinite extent. The perceptual transposition had been induced by the Supreme Being also and it occurred when I turned around. Now there was another transmission from the center of the Supreme Being, another bullet of energy that came speeding across the inner space behind me to impinge through the back of my head. This time a tunnel-like hole opened in front of me down into the Void. I was looking into another bottomless well that had access into and through the energies of the Void. There was again a powerful polarization throughout my body as I saw a very rapid zigzag streak of light projected down inside of the tunnel to inscribe what appeared to be an irregular six-pointed figure that vanished as quickly as it was formed.
Cycles of Rebirth, Memory Recall, and Active Interface Processes
Almost simultaneously, there was a wheel of energy a few feet to my right, stationary, but churning over with the momentum of a speeding train. These energies were derived from the Void, born from the Void and returning again to the Void, to depict cycles of birth and death turning over like a flywheel aligned vertically beside me. It was about three meters or so in diameter so that I could see what was happening within the wheel in living color. Faces and fragments of human bodies were being mangled by the emotional energies they embodied, churning themselves over and over in repeated cycles of birth and death. They were being horribly mangled by their own emotional identifications and doing it again and again with gleaming grinning faces. Horrors devouring horrors with indulgent delight! Some of the faces I recognized and could relate the process of emotional identification to some aspects of their personalities.
I managed to take a couple more steps when my feet stopped again. From a point in one side of my back, a dark abstraction of quantized energy began to rise like a vapor through my body and into my head. I had an internal visual perception of the event. An invisible finger from the Supreme Being behind me had touched a tiny spot in my back to release associated energy from the Void. My body was transparent. As the energy flowed up through my neck into the center of my head, it became very bright and intense, then it went streaming out through my eyes as they watched on in sheer disbelief. This quantity of energy was ordered within itself, like a living quantum bundle of experience. As it streamed out twelve or fifteen feet into my visual field, it became a structured pattern of transforming energies a few feet in diameter. It was a visible idea, a memory derived from experience and replicated in brilliant color.
But the idea was not depicted as a normal sequence of events through space and time. There were several two dimensional active interfaces juxtaposed to one another in various configurations of inside to outside. Dynamic energy transformations were working through them and linking them up as the configuration of the active interfaces went through a sequence of perceptual transpositions of inside to outside with respect to one another. There were three dimensional virtual images projected in vivid color between some of the interfaces as they rapidly transformed through a sequence to demonstrate the idea and how it worked. Then the energies just vanished in the Void. No sooner was one gone than another abstraction of quantized energy began to rise from another point in my body up into my head in the same manner, then intensely out through my eyes to project a different idea in a similar way. This happened a number of times in succession. It demonstrated a method of delineating how the creative process works. (In the language of the System, virtual images are generated by Systems 5 and higher. System 5 has 5 active interfaces and there are only 20 possible ways that they can relate to one another with respect to the universal inside and outside. Each of these 20 "Terms" transform from one to another through complex transform sequences. System 4 subsumes System 5. It has 4 active interfaces or Centers and nine Terms in its transform sequences.)
The ideas that demonstrated how the process works were each recognized from memory. However, they had no particular significance other than to demonstrate a principle and a pattern associated with the process of memory and recall. For instance, when I was taking geometry back in high school, I had been very puzzled about why it is impossible to trisect an angle using only a ruler and compass. I had spent many hours trying various ways to do it without success. One of the ideas was about this problem. The way the energies and interfaces and images unfolded, it was obvious why it was impossible to do it. I could visually see the whole problem laid out before me, and I understood it before it vanished like the others into the Void.
But the message was not about geometry or any other specific subject. It was about how experience itself is organized, how memories are structured energies that are quantized as discrete bundles through episodes of experience that become an integral part of the Void. The Void is a master memory bank for the whole of experience, and yet personal memories are keyed to the individual's body, the body itself being an ordered integration of energies of the Void. Not all memories are personal however, and the recall process can vastly outreach personal experience, as I was soon to discover. Throughout all of this the room was like a transparent veil that faded out depending on the intensity of events, sometimes there around the peripheral vision, but often vanishing completely.
An Eternal City and Landscape
Suddenly there appeared in the Void a city of light in brilliant color. It was suspended in the Void in such a way that the underside of the city along its nearest edge was at first visible, and there were dark tendrils of energy reaching down into the Void, like roots from which it drew its sustenance. The city was recreated from the energies fo the Void, its variety selected and assimilated at will by the Being behind me.
Then my perspective rose to provide a clear view across the city and down into the streets on the nearest side below me. It was a beautiful city, immaculately clean, with cobblestone streets and mostly masonry-type buildings in a variety of pastel shades, none of which were over a few stories high. There were both peaked and flat roofs, an old English style house on a corner, domed structures, and varied shaped buildings extending over quite an area, but it was not modern or as large as many cities are today. It tended to have a Mediterranean character. No churches, temples, or mosques were noticed. It was brilliantly illuminated in a rich mosaic of colors, with no people or vehicles apparent. The city appeared to be empty.
While I looked on, amazed at the splendor of the view from my vantage point above the city, dark abstractions of energy began to rise through my body as before. This time they originated from the Void beneath and slightly behind my transparent body, the energies being stronger than before. They were not memories that I recognized and they were not keyed to my body. They came from beyond me, although they were subjective to or slightly behind the active interface associated with the mid-coronal plane through my transparent body. As they rose up into my head to be projected out through my eyes, the intensity was severe, accompanied each time by an inversion of emotional energy at they left me, like a minor death that exhausted the commitment that I invested in them as they went on their way. The ideas went streaming out through my eyes as if propelled by the powerful tension in my mind, only this time they went flying down into the city. This happened a number of times in succession, each idea impelled by powerful intention. This time the ideas could not be specifically recognized. They were being used in the completion of the city.
Then other ideas began flying down into the city from different points in the Void, as if they were being fired from invisible canons, although they must have been coming from unknown people. The city was an eternal creative undertaking that was still incomplete and unpopulated, another reality selected from suitable contributions to the familiar one that we know. It was a gathering of creative energies from diverse places and people, all being integrated from experience into the completion of the city. There was still a sense of terror associated with what was happening beyond my control, but also amazement, tension, awe, and wonder all at once. There was no opportunity to reflect or think. I marveled at it. The timing of everything was regular and ordered, with no energy wasted in between.
The city gave way to a magnificent landscape and my perspective rose as to the top of a mountain. Like the city, it too was brilliantly illuminated in vivid color. It extended objectively out to a distant horizon as far as I could see. Its contrasts were splendid, with very high wooded hills in the distance, a river flowing along the base of a high precipice, with ravines and areas of semi-desert to one side in the foreground. The ideas stopped streaming from my eyes as my body went unnoticed, but they started flying from various points in the Void above it, down into the landscape, completing it and filling it out. A world of light was being gathered and integrated through real commitments actually made, their energies preserved for recall in the timeless Void.
Holistic Bursts of Universal Knowing
The room returned, with time for another couple of desperate steps, but there was no escape. I became aware of acquiring a degree of active discretion in the phenomena that were occurring and otherwise beyond my control. The transverse tension in my mind was still severe together with a good deal of terror at the prospects of what was going on. Even as I gained a degree of discretion this was orchestrated by the Supreme Being as well. The thoughts that came to me were part of the orchestration. He was still there behind me.
A series of thoughts on various subjects began to come to me as if I had discretionary access to them. My will seemed to be able to reach beyond the confines of my body into the surrounding Void of quantized energies. The energies were not seen as dark abstractions as they moved from the Void as before, but were much more refined, hardly visible until they were drawn toward me as an act of will that gave me discretionary access to them. Now, I was drawing the energies of the Void unto myself, although on a much smaller and more refined scale that the Supreme Being had done in consuming the Void. Nevertheless, I had a visible perception of these energies that were drawn towards me from diffuse areas of the Void, estending outward an indeterminate distance around my body.
As these energies infused my body, they transformed my consciousness. There was a coalescence of my emotional and cerebral processes as my perceptions exploded into a burst of intense white light in which absolutely everything relative to each thought was spontaneously known. There was a "historic integration" of everything associated with every thought or question that I focused upon. It was all there at once in a burst of white light that was extended as a field of vision in front of me while also being subjectively filled with white light. My subjective and objective aspects were spontaneously unified in each burst of white light. Although there were no explicit forms or activity visible in the field of light, it was teeming with fully integrated content all relating to the thought or question involved. All associated meaning was seen and felt and known unequivocally. I was aware of the process as "historic integration".
As I read later, this was similar to how some Zen writers (not all) have described a satori or kensho experience of enlightenment. The only problem was that I could not stop them from coming. Every question that came to me accessed energies from the Void that infused me, bringing another burst of white light in which everything relevant to the qeustion or thought was spontaneously known. Again and again and again it happened, many times in succession. My thoughts turned to science. A new series of insights into space, time, relativity, was there in burst after burst of white light. And so on, to the evolution and integration of experience generally. The process by which these insights came was itself transparent. I could see my discretionary access to the quantized energies from the Void, followed by the coalescence of emotional and cerebral processes resulting in the burst of a field of light that both filled me within and the visual field out there, an indeterminate distance in front of me.
But then my thoughts turned to the "System" by which it all worked, to the Cosmic Order that both determined and integrated the whole of experience, followed by burst after burst of white light. There seemed no limit to what I could know and these insights themselves transcended the whole of creation, the whole of space and time, infinitely beyond the puny confines of my organic birth or my death. But there it all was, integrated in burst after burst in my mind.
Unlimited Access Into a Well of Universal Knowing
That bottomless well that had been opened down into the energies of the Void within me gave me incredible access. The transverse tension in my mind again became extreme as the questions turned to the Cosmic Order. The more I had access the greater the bilateral tension in my mind, and the greater the tension, the more I had access, in cycles that expanded insight to infinite proportions. There was no limit to what I could know. It was total omniscience, but this became a horror to match the consummation of the universe. How could anyone live like this, with unlimited access to the whole of experience?
All of this too was orchestrated by the Supreme Being behind me, who suddenly brought it to an end. He suddenly just seemed to drop me, so far as controlling my experience was concerned. As He did, a jungle of energies came crashing in from the Void to inundate my usual thought processes. They were the energies of the normal social milieu in which I was obliged to function. I could see them come swarming in, coarse and confused and oppressive. Uncontrollable energies began coursing through my body in wild ragged patterns. I could see them as huge grey dark serpents of emotional energy snaking through the energies of my whole being, re-ordering me, shaking the very foundations of my being. I became girpped with the thought that complete madness must have seized my mind. But if that was true, how could everything make such complete sense? Even a belief in madness was madness. This was part of the experience too. The Supreme Being must have known that I could not deny what had happened.
And I still had access to the energies of the Void. The well within me deepened, with the transverse tension in my mind unbearably immense. Again and again the tension would build to extremes too impossible to hold, then break, with the whole of phenomenal existence slipping away in a vortex. Then I would capture the tension again, holding on until it broke again, everything spinning away in waves of nausea, then I would capture it again. My capacity to survive as a living being was stretched beyond the breaking point again and again and again.
I needed words to hold the tension. I needed language to make some left brain sense of it. I had to bridge the two hemispheres, establish some contact between them, however flimsy. The experience was mute and I needed left brain words to give it rational meaning. I had to find words, and words did come: "Everything is, and it is not, it both is and is not, and it neither is nor is not."
Although it may seem like nonsense to the uninitiated, this was the only thread of common sense that I could find. I kept repeating it over and over. For the next few hours it was especially important. I found out several years later that this was an ancient quadrilemma in Hindu philosophy, with Jain and Buddhist versions as well. I was left in a very bad way. Fortunately, I was able to get medical attention quickly. I was in a general hospital for about ten days on powerful medication that I continued for a couple of months. I was walking on eggs for months. Everything that I thought I knew was brought into question. I had to find ways to make rational sense of it all. There was no one I could talk to about it who could possibly understand. If I spoke to anyone about it they would think me crazy. I was on my own. The only evidence that I can offer that I am not in fact deluded or off my balance is the science articles on this website, including the ones on how the human nervous system has structurally evolved to meaningfully integrate sensory experience.
(Note: In the language of the System, God is the living manifestation of Universal Values as System 1, including Universal Truth, transcending and subsuming all the nested higher Systems that delineate how the whole of creation is structurally organized to work as it does. It is values that bridge the gap between self and other than self. God is a supreme universal aspect of self in other than self. He is alive within all creation and yet he also transcends the whole of creation. The System exhausts all possible varieties of phenomenal experience with respect to inside and outside, neither of which can be known to the exclusion of the other. The hemispheres demand a balance. The System demonstrates that the cosmic order evolves to transcend itself by knowing itself. He explicitly revealed the Cosmic Order to me in this way. As System 1, He thus requires that we can only know active interface processes between a universal inside and a universal outside. All phenomena are presented to us in this way. We can never know one to the exclusion of the other. He is both and neither, and can manifest as either in relation to the other. As an active center, He is male. As a passive periphery, he has a female aspect also. This is at the root of the quadrilemma associated with the nature of Universal Truth.)
The Aftermath and the Work of Delineating The System of the Cosmic Order
It was three months before reluctantly deciding to return to work. The report had stalled the political battle. There was no words to really describe the experience or the effect that it had. Only a distorted glimpse can be given, and the wisdom of giving it is questionable.
The workings of the mind and of the universe had been revealed, but in a way that brought everything that is normally accepted and that I thought I knew into question. It resolved nothing, yet offered unlimited promise. It begged to be given expression, yet language was hopelessly inadequate. I began to search the literature for others who may have had similar experiences, but after scavenging through hundreds of books, I found precious little that could help directly. I did find a book called Long Pilgrimage about a Hindu man who had spent 25 years alone in the forest striving to come to God realization. The English author J.G. Bennett met him twice in the last years of his life. After seeing God, he set out to fulfill a promise to his Grandfather who had given him some valuable gemstones to finance a journey on foot around the world, a task that took him 40 years. He met many famous people, including many heads of state. He visited Queen Victoria many times and stayed in the UK four years until her death, at her request. He met Theodore Roosevelt and travelled through Mexico and Peru to see historic sites, then on to Japan and China. He completed his long pilgrimage at the outbreak of the First World War. He died in 1963 in Nepal. He is quoted by Bennett as briefly mentioning a triple vision of seeing God in relation to himself and the universe. This is similar to one sequence of what happened to me. While there was nothing in the book that could help me decipher the cosmic order, I found it reassuring that there was at least one other person who claimed to have actually seen God in a manner somewhat similar to me in one detail, but very different in other respects. He was not left with a task to perform, except to honour his Grandfather's request.
This may have helped in some way to assure me that there had to be a way of communicating the System and I was obliged to turn back to the experience that revealed it. I also began to research the sciences and their philosophical underpinnings in great depth. Other experiences came of their own accord, many over the succeeding years, all of them awesome, all of them involving the Void. All of them were cosmic in nature, orchestrated by God as distinct from organic spiritual exprience, as in the first days of joyous organic union. Most of them were relevant to the task of delineating and communicating the System. A few of them were very personal. They were never capricious, yet none of them were so complex or intense as the first. Nor were they traumatic, not even those that brought me very close to death, sometimes for hours at a time. They came as needed to help me make rational sense of how the cosmic order works in a variety of contexts. Most of them are described in the book, God Reveals The Cosmic Order.
Although these cosmic experiences were of a spiritual nature, they were explicitly orchestrated to communicate who the cosmic order works and they thus related mainly to our sciences and to how our mental processes work. The intention behind them was not my personal salvation, despite profound religious implications. A few of the expereinces were of a personal nature, but these came a number of years later, after the bulk of the most difficult work was done. One of these is described in the related article The Archetypal Jesus.
Some Fortuitous Research
Shortly after that initial experience in 1968, I happened to see a TV interview with Michael Gazzaniga who was a post graduate colleague of Roger Sperry, who won a Nobel Prize for his experimental work on people who had their brain hemispheres surgically separated for the treatment of severe epilepsy. I located a copy of Sperry's original 1968 article in the university library. It clearly demonsrated for me that the left brain is concerned with the rational assimilaton of sensory input and behavior through the use of langauge, while the right hemisphere is mute and intuitively concerned with the holistic structural integration of meaning. In other words, the left brain functions within the context of intuitively perceived frameworks of understanding entertained by the right brain that are not themselves reducible to language. This gave me a partial structural handle on the challenge I faced. The cosmic experiences had been intensely seen with both hemispheres, but without a word of left brain language. Their right brain meaning was intuitively realized as a structural whole embracing all creation. This is the human dilemma associated with the cosmic hemispheres between Self and Other, or One and Many, or Universal and Particular.
At about this time, I also came into possession of Arthur Koestler's book, "The Ghost in the Machine." Koestler drew extensively on the research of Paul MacLean on the split between the old part of the brain associated with the reptile and lower mammal structured into the human brain, and the new part of the brain that Roger Sperry worked on. This ancient emotional brain, with evolutionary roots going back several hundred million years, is primary to memory and intimately connected to our emotional apparatus, the autonomic nervous system. Called the Limbic System, it functions autonomously. The new brain to which we owe our intellectual capacity has no direct biological controls over it. MacLean called it a structured-in schizo-physiology that accounts for our tragic human history. We have the intellectual capacity to build atomic bombs and send rockets to the Moon and Mars harnessed to the emotional capacity of a crocodile and a horse.
In short, I discovered that we have three distinct brains that function completely independently, constrained to live in the same house together by seeking a mutually sustainable balance. It helped enormously to discover this research. Without it, or if the revelations had come a decade sooner, I would have been permanently lost. I feel this work had to wait for these evolutionary developments. We need a new synthesis consistent with the cosmic order if we are ever to bring our three brains to a sustainable balance with one another and the biosphere. Our collective and personal spiritual survival depends upon it. For some fortunate aboriginal individuals, this may come naturally in a spirit culture.
But our sciences derive exclusively from external sensory input reducible to to a belief in language that is divorced from a holistic right brain intuitive realization of the Cosmic Order. It provides us with many conveniences, but it cannot breathe life into living processes. The task that has fallen to me (for reasons beyond my ken) offers a new right brain structural methodology that can far more meaningfully integrate the direct empirical evidence accumulated by the sciences. Otherwise we are forever lost to speculative interpretations such as probability waves, infinitesimal strings, dark matter, and a big bang, that can never find direct confirmation in sensory experience of any kind. Science has wandered into a swamp of fantasy and we need a way out. We have become inextricably dependent on science.
This problem is outlined more fully in my article The Two Faces of Our Three Brains.
