By Aaron Halevy

Life on Earth has faced many extinctions in its past. These extinctions are recognized to be on a scale of magnitude at least as big as our galaxy. What force could oppose such an immense fate? So far no life on Earth has figured out the solution to avoid such a crisis. But since mankind is not only a living being but also the only known cognitive species, our exemption from such a fate will be in appreciating and acting on this unique difference.

In the recent video “Is the Past Fixed?“, the thesis was raised that the belief in the Euclidean-Laplacian-Newtonian versions of “time” and “space” is a mathematical fantasy, and that a higher, inseparable “space-time-matter” of reality is a more valuable understanding of the real universe, as Riemann, Einstein and Vernadsky would agree.[1]

Now ask yourself, if this is the case, then what is it you are really looking at when you look at yourself in the mirror? If time does not exist in a linear fashion, where past, present and future are not separate but fully connected, then where is your spouse? And can you say when your grandfather died, as you look to his grave at your feet? These questions are not as existential as they might seem when you keep the fundamental issue of the nature of mind investigating itself in “space-time-matter.”

In Part one of this report, I outlined some of the development, from the 19th to the 20th centuries of the concept defined by Vernadsky as “the Noösphere.”

To review: this domain is ubiquitous, and just as living organisms are inseparable from the biosphere as a whole, mankind and the entire Noösphere are absolutely inseparable. It has been shown that this domain is a purely creative domain and one participated in and connected to every human being of past, present and future generations. What are the ways we can self-consciously understand this domain of mind? How can we interact with other living human beings on this basis?

The question becomes more subjective when you ask: if this domain is ever-present around us and within us, where then is my identity? Can mind efficiently exist beyond the body? The modern version of this question might be called the “mind-brain paradox.” Is that which we call the soul just a set of memories and neural connections firing off in the brain, as automatic responses to the complex set of sense stimuli entering the body, or is there something more? From what point does sense stimulus enter into mind?

If Vernadsky understood the space-time of minerals by their crystal formations, and looked to understand the space-time of living matter by its several evolutions upward of its transforming envelopment of elements and their isotopes, what might be a beginning point where we can gain insight into our own selves in this highest domain, could we look down, as if from the outside of our species? Where would a human locate identity?

A perception of ones self or others, “outside the normal sensuous readings of the world,” more specifically, the feeling of being outside of space and time, is often treated as the outermost of human experience. Any close examination of this phenomenon might disturb our “sense” of ourselves, it might cajole us out of our comfort and security of habit as to what it means to be a living human being. Yet, peeking down that rabbit hole, we might receive a prescience of this real world, which is waiting to be further explored and utilized by our conscious minds. The subject of this paper is to bring some such unique reflections to the table.

Looking at some of the anomalous phenomenon of experience, from a wide range of individuals in recorded anecdotes, speeches and interviews, we should not be surprised to find that these experiences land on the shores of what has been called by the poets, “the realms of gold.” Also known by its fruits: classical poetic and musical composition, and their daughter, scientific discovery.

Forget not that individuals’ relationships to any facts are still only hypotheses, and each colored by unique experience. Therefore, to investigate any anomalous and often misnamed “mystical” phenomenon which lie at the boundary of thought, we must leave sense perceptions and cultural habits of established opinion at the door, while we think critically, as scientists, upon what could be the truth hiding beneath such shadows. The documented anecdotes of those people who have experienced the phenomenon of a so-called “life after death” will serve us well as an introduction to the discussion.

“Mysticism is foreign to me, but I am aware that vast domains of consciousness are unknown to us, and are, however, ultimately accessible to scientific investigation, lasting generations.” ~Vladimir Vernadsky [2]

 

1. Life after Death

In the book, Life After Life,[3] 150 people were interviewed who had near-death-experiences, many of whom were “declared dead” for some period of time. What is most useful of such testimony, beyond the oft cited seeing paradise, the light, are those experiences which are related to us about a different sense of time and space and a super-sense of communication to other still living-human beings, which people in this “near-death” or “after-death” state try to express in such situations.

One woman put it thus,

“Now, there is a real problem for me as I’m trying to tell you this, because all the words I know are three-dimensional.  As I was going through this, I kept thinking, ’Well, when I was taking geometry, they always told me there were only three dimensions, and I always just accepted that.  But they were wrong.  There are more.’ And, of course, our world-the one we’re living in right now- is three-dimensional, but the next one definitely isn’t.  And that’s why it’s so hard to tell you this.  I have to describe it to you in words that are three-dimensional.  That’s as close as I can get to it, but it’s not really adequate.  I can’t really give you a complete picture.”

Is this a fantasy? Is this just something which people are coming up with in a state of mind outside of control of their body? There is extreme physical stress and yet also self-consciousness, but reminiscent of dreaming. Unfortunately not much else can be really determined from such experiences, because it is highly personal and often incommunicable. Dr. Moody comments that,

“… almost everyone remarks up on the timelessness of this out-of-body state.  Many say that although they must describe their interlude in the spiritual body in temporal terms (since human language is temporal), yet time was not really an element of their experience as it it in physical life.”

Dr. Moody explains it further as a problem of language in the conceptualization of the individual in coping with the extreme situation.

“The events which those who have come near to death have lived through lie outside our community of experience, so one might well expect that they would have some linguistic difficulties in expressing what happened to them.  In fact, this is precisely the case.  The persons involved uniformly characterize their experience as ineffable, that is, inexpressible. Many people have made the remarks to the effect that, “There are just no words to express what I am trying to say,” or “they just don’t make adjectives and superlatives to describe this.”

Must it be that the language used was wrong, or could they have meant really what they said? Why can’t it be communicated? For now we shall leave this phenomenon to further research and speculation and move on to the second, more solid example.

2. “The ZONE”

“Ninety percent of hitting is mental, the other half is physical.” ~Yogi Berra

Mind-body paradoxes often leave us only to grope around through unique personal experiences, like the claimed religious experience of the baptist revival, it is most often a case of, “you had to be there to believe it – you had to feel it yourself!” Could a broader socializing of one’s activities likely increase the possibility for such experiences?

Many people can in fact recognize that they have already experienced something akin to an out-of-body experience, in the realm of sports. There is a well known phenomenon among athletes that there exists an extreme concentration of mind which heightens physical performance. On the training level, and in competitions it seems to be a fairly common and openly discussed goal to achieve.

The phenomenon can be connected to the mental side of the so-called runner’s high, i.e. when someone is running a marathon or long race and they are physically exhausted, and then, as if by miracle, they are able to rise above the pains of their bodies and are able to force it to continue on for much longer, turning the pain into a pleasure of sorts. The mechanism to explain this has been reduced to body chemicals and endorphins, but that does not explain the state of the mind achieved.

The mental aspect of these athletic miracles is sometimes referred to as getting in the zone. The most famous case of is the 1992 NBA Finals Game of the Bulls against the Blazers, in which Michael Jordan was in “the zone” to the witness of millions of screaming fans. Yet Jordan could not explain it at all, “I was in the zone, my threes felt like free throws man. I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I was taken ’em, and they [were] going in.” [4], for him, at that time, space was altered.

A few professional athletes, like Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics, speak of the zone as a “mystical feeling“ that would, on occasion, lift the action on the court to the level of time-bended hyper-awareness:

“At that special level all sorts of odd things happened…. It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion. During those spells I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken. Even before the other team brought the ball in bounds, I could feel it so keenly that I’d want to shout to my teammates, “It’s coming there!“ – except that I knew everything would change if I did. My premonitions would be consistently correct, and I always felt then that I not only knew all the Celtics by heart but also all the opposing players, and that they all knew me.”

Former NFL linebacker, Dave Meggyesy said that,

“… the zone is the essence of the athletic experience, and those moments of going beyond yourself are the underlying allure of sport.”

Several psychologists have studied this more broadly as mind enhancing, or surpassing the performance of the body by some extreme self-conscious concentration.[5] Taken as a general phenomenon, the psychologists would say, these experiences exemplify an innate human tendency to surpass one’s limits. More broadly one can find that many eastern sports, medicines and religions speak of self-consciously heightening one’s self through meditation, an enlightening, or separation of mind from body.

There seem to be many factors in achieving “the zone” and its relative experiences, and although the effects on one’s performance can be witnessed, it still is mostly personal to the one experiencing it. Is the athlete reaching back in time to achieve this supremacy over the limits in the body? Not really. Is the connection between the athlete to the other players reciprocal? Possibly. How about to the audience? Definitely not, other than generally witnessing the phenomenon.

3. Classical Artistic Performance

There is a place, where the experience is highly social, whose effects can be transmitted to all other participants, whose success begins in the mind and is something which is uniquely human, and that is the realm of art.

Returning to Vladimir Vernadsky, in developing his concept of the Noösphere, he makes this short diary comment in the year 1932:

“Discussed with Ivan [Grevs] on religion. I think that penetrating deeper than anything into the understanding of the universe is music and those states of mind connected with creativity – and for me, scientific creativity. What may give rise to such moods may even be of a philosophic-religious character, if these are expressed by the words and the formulae of our social life.”[6]

Without assuming endorphins or a chain of mechanical causes, what happens to those people who are subjectively involved in the performance of such classical music or science?

In the midst of singing, or using an instrument of some kind among the very best artists and performers there is often described an “out of body” like experience. Among them, those artists who have struggled predominantly to re-animate the classical compositions of the greatest minds such as Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann, Verdi, et. al. are most capable of describing in the richest metaphors, the phenomenon they subjectively experience within their participation with such composers and attentive audiences.

Magda Olivero (b. 1910), a famous Italian Soprano of the verismo-school said, made the following comment about what it is like for her to sing on stage.

“For me the notes are not just notes, but moods, expressions of the soul. And it’s wonderful to enter this marvelous – magical world. Each time I went out on stage and the music started, it was as if, in the middle of the stage, a halo opened – I called it a magic halo – I would enter the halo and only emerge from it at the end of the opera.” [7]

What happened? She is totally conscious, and she was able to perform an entire opera, in this state of mind? How? Where did she “go”?

Flutist Sheryl Cohen, in a book on technique wrote,

“In 1991, the National Flute Association honored Jean-Pierre Rampal with a Lifetime Achievement … For the gala concert in his honor, I was invited to perform Mozart’s Andante in C accompanied by flute choir.  Rampal was seated on the stage directly in my line of vision.  As he heard the opening chords of the music, his face took on the emotion of the piece as if he were performing it himself.  Simply seeing the expression on his face instantly transported me away from the physical aspect of performing before thousands of flutists and into the world of music. At that moment, I completely forgot myself and became Mozart’s Andante.” [8]

Jason Robards, an American actor,

“… We did eight performances a week of [O’Niell’s] Moon For The Misbegotten and it’s a three hour and forty five minute play… And you get to a point doing a 3 hour and 45 minute play where you say we’re doing eight shows a week and you say between a matinee, “Jeez, I don’t know if I can make it, … I’ll give you everything I got but I don’t know if I can get the full emotional value in the latter half of the play” … But sure enough, I got halfway into that, I was just going along and all of a sudden a hand came out and it came right in the middle of my back and just gave me a push. Up and soar, everything was there. And it was O’Neill; it was his writing and his hand and it was him. And I know that he filled me with that. And it happened again on the evening performance… and then I never worried about it again.

…That’s the eternal triangle: the writer, the audience, and the actor, where they join. And here’s the thing, when this hand comes up and pushes you, you go in there to a three hour and forty-five minute performance or five hours, like in The Iceman and if it’s going right, it seems like about 2 minutes. You break time and space and time. Ralph Richardson said, “Every time we go on the stage at 8:30,” when we used to be in the old days, “we break time, if we do it right, we break space and it’s our time to dream. We dream, we have to be able to dream.“ What a line, he says. Is that unbelievable?” [9]

In 2010 this author had the great opportunity to visit Italy and to participate in a week long musical masterclass series. There were singers, pianists, guitarists, accordionists, cellists, and violin players – all the students were between 15 – 35 years old. In the night, the groups would get together and have joint performances. It was a really fantastic opportunity, because one could visit the other masterclasses which were all ongoing at the same time. As a singer I was interested to see how a cellist must learn to bow the instrument, how a violinist must breathe, and how a pianist must sing.

In auditing the last day’s piano master class, led by Maestro Carmassi, the creator of the week-long school and an extremely passionate teacher of music, I was provided with yet another example of the magic of classical music. The student being taught was a depressive looking kid, probably 16-18 years old. He had long dirty blonde hair which almost covered his eyes, a white t-shirt fell on his skinny body like a hanger, his voice raspy and muffled, but underneath he was still very young and innocent.

After working on a piece familiar to him, Maestro Carmassi asked the student to work on a Mozart sonata which the student himself had somewhat forgotten. He knew it enough to play it from memory, and so as he was playing, while still remaining relaxed, he was committing to the expression and he was breathing just right, allowing the piano to sing as if for the first time. Just then, he moved to a minor passage, which Mozart beautifully resolves to major, and I saw a smile begin to blossom from the hair hidden lips of the student. He was beginning to giggle as he played. He began to lose control, and then he stopped to say in astonishment, “I don’t know what is happening, I feel funny.” Carmassi asked him to describe what had happened, and the student stuttered to say how the resolution surprised him as he played it, that he didn’t see it coming, and it was living through him as he played: a ghostly presence. Carmassi slowly nodded and looked at him and said, “this is Mozart.” He paused, and told the student in a comforting voice, “Now play it again with this. Not with yourself, but this, as Mozart.” By now the student was welled up in the face, his cheeks were red and his eyes began to moisten. He tried, once, twice, but was thus overwhelmed and, forcing back the tears, he declined and asked if he could step outside for some air. It was truly a beautiful moment in which I was glad to be human.

Carmassi then came over to those of us who were watching the lesson and described what he was thinking at this moment. He said that the reaction of the student was beautiful, but not to be preferred in a performance. You can not be emotionally surprised when you play, you have to create it in a surprising way; its impossible to be this surprised in a concert. But this is the only way to become a real musician, because music is not something only to understand, but something that you should feel, but this feeling is what you have to transmit, you can not be this impassioned in a physical way, otherwise you can not play the instrument. “What you have to do, is create a phantasma of the character. In this case it is a musical phantasma. It is there more clearly in staged drama. The actor on stage is a doorway for a character, they are not the character. You don’t have to be a killer to portray lady Macbeth, or you don’t have to be a courtesan to portray Violetta in La Traviata.”

William Warfield, the great American Baritone gave a speech in 1997 which is one of the first provocations to this idea which I ever encountered.

“… it reminds me of a situation in which I was with Pablo Casals, the great cellist and conductor, and we were rehearsing something one afternoon, and it was a Bach cantata. And it was one of those things in which everything happened in the rehearsal, and we finished the piece and we just sat there in silence, with a catharsis of having experienced something great that had come among us while we were doing it, and I looked up and the Maestro had a tear rolling down his cheek and he said, “aren’t we fortunate to be musicians.

I’ve never forgotten that moment, because he outlined for us that the profession that we were in, is a profession of calling and a profession of art and a profession that when you’re in … you are closest to God, I believe, when you are performing, because you are a vehicle for that wonderful thing that we’re getting from on high, that comes through us and makes us a bigger person and makes us the vehicle to transport that to other people. But you have to be, as they say in television, “online” to get it.” [10]

Antonella Banaudi, the powerful Italian Verdi-Soprano, in 2011 made the most insightful and bold observations that I am aware of to date, on the very point.

“When you sing, you don’t count! 1, 2, 3, and 4 do not exist; the bar line of the measure does not exist. … Going onto stage to perform is already a different dimension, but I have had the experience of “non-time” very often, like an experience of being separated from the reality of the performance itself, even as a character. There are long moments in which we don’t belong to ourselves. It is a magical sensation, almost a super-perception of one’s self.

… Starting with the first sound, we are no longer ourselves; we are another person who expresses an artistic language, a primary language. We create in ourselves another personality which we will succeed in taking possession of, to the extent that we have forgotten ourselves through studying it.

…The process of inquiry is one of revealing one’s own beauty, that is often greater than we had imagined at the outset. It is our own artistic being, which strengthens us and allows us to express ourselves with art for intellectual enjoyment, but also physical enjoyment, as a singer. At the same time, we will be the conduit for beauty and truth, so that others can enjoy them. Studying is thus a process of knowledge of the true Self, masked by the I.…

…The more we use our real instrument … the more we will transmit all aspects of the composer ’s intention, and we will be able to respect and convey the composer ’s imaginative power and become instruments of creation.” [11]

4. The Oppressor’s Wrong

Pause and imagine a generation of children without this respect for beauty, this connection to immortality, this happiness and joy in the connection with other human beings on sublime subjects of such art. Imagine these children slowly being denied access to this possibility in their public school music programs because of budget cuts. Imagine that the only thing that there is plenty of access to for these fragile minds is popular music, and popular culture which carries none of these powers of concentration and thought. Some of these children would hate music all together, and some of the children would be prone, in a crisis, to eat each other alive. That is exactly what is happening today and was intended by more sinister forces of history.

Yet this is not new. Some praised figures from the past with an obedience to brain and behavior over powers of mind have also found themselves distanced from music and poetry, a disgust for the beautiful. Take the following confession from Charles Darwin, who wrote near the end of his life in his autobiography:

“I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. … My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” [12]

In a note of bitterness, Emma Darwin, Charles’s mother, was a pianist and was trained by none other than the great Mocheles and Chopin.

Sigmund Freud, according to friends, had developed an avoidance of the emotional pull of any emotional tones, and a reluctance to surrendering to “the dark power of music,” [13]  And wrote himself,

“I am no connoisseur in art … nevertheless, works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often of painting … [I] spend a long time before them trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself what their true effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of the mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.” [14]

5. Ensemble Performance and the Audience

As the performance of a musical piece includes two, three, four or more people, the relationships become more complex and at the same time much more revealing about the social nature of man and where his mind can “go.” These become of special interest when one reflects on the fact that now the performer is participating in a several mind’s attempt at this connection with the composer and the audience. Anyone who has had the privilege to work in a chorus or an orchestra knows this in some way, when the group of people performing exit themselves and allow this music to flow through them there is often described a moment of connection with the other chorus members, a notion of “that really worked.”

Highly qualified string quartet players have commented on an experience of connecting to the other players in the quartet expressed as feeling that one is playing all the parts at once, and the composer which allows a higher discovery of the method intended in the performance. The great first violinist of the Amadeus String Quartet, Norbert Brainin speaks to this in an interview, commenting on the difficulty that his quartet had in figuring out how to play Mozart’s string quartets. With hindsight, he described that they were missing something, something about the way Mozart thought, or the way that he wanted his pieces performed, and that they only had to hear Mozart tell them, through them.

Brainin: [T]hat is where the major interpretative difficulties lay. The stages through which Mozart moves in his quartets—his intensive study of Bach while he composed the “Haydn Quartets,” along with the notion of Motivführung that Haydn himself had initiated, that was very, very hard for us to grasp. We simply had no inkling of it. Only in the course of time did we begin to understand the actual process of unfolding in each of Mozart’s quartets. Non-professionals will simply not get it; it will be a complete blank to them, because for the layman, Mozart is “just so beautiful.”

Ibykus Magazine: How did you begin to understand it?

Brainin: Paradoxically, at first I found that I understood less and less! But we refused to let ourselves be led down the primrose path, and we were intent on “listening into” the music, again and again. Through playing, very intensely, and listening to one another no less intensely, our essential aim was to grasp how his musical thought unfolded. We could not get enough of playing! Finally, we tried the following: I said: “I shall play, and you must follow. Naturally (at the relevant passages) you must play as you see fit, or better said, as it suits, and I’ll go along.” That was a huge step forward in our understanding of the work, and also, of ensemble playing.

Many would tend to think of Mozart’s music as light and agreeable, a view that one very frequently came across in those days—and one would play his works “softly.” I insisted that one should not play Mozart “softly,” but rather with intensity, as there is a terrific strength and dynamic in his music. It took years until we managed to really bring that to the fore. … We wanted to really understand Mozart’s music, and at the end of the day, we did.

Ibykus: Could one say that the Amadeus Quartet learned how to play from Mozart? Was the study of Mozart the keystone?

Brainin: Actually, yes, but not Mozart alone, it was Beethoven as well.

What he is describing is truly inspiring: the quartet could not figure out the method and therefore they discovered a way to collaborate such that they could invoke from the past, the living mind of the composer. Thus reaching across time.

Brainin: [Beethoven’s Op. 59, No. 3] was incredibly well-received, as I imagine that in London, no one had heard it played with such life in it. Needless to say, at our début we hadn’t really understood the piece; nevertheless, we had “listened into” the music so deeply, and we had allowed ourselves to be so uplifted and inspired by Beethoven (and by our audience too), that it became a terrific performance, and the audience was inspired.[15]

It is important to review the evidence we are reading here again. The human mind, in performing music is fully-aware, fully connected to the audience, to the other musicians, and to the composer, who (often) is no longer living. The other experiences in sports, in meditation or any other extreme physical stress, have no such eternal connection. In musical performance, there is also an efficient action of extension of the identity of the individual beyond the borders of the body, through the transitive medium of the music, and into other minds present for the performance. The performer expresses a sensation of an extension of themselves beyond simple space and time. So if this is possible, where is the mind of the performer located? And can this model serve us as the definite case, rather than an exception to the rule?

At this point in the investigation, as inspiring as these phrases may be, we find that these performers are still reflecting on their own experience and ultimately they still are only experiencing it. They can interpret for us what they are doing but these words are still as fleeting and inconclusive as those who experience a “life after death.” They’re able to describe the way their mind is working, but they don’t know how it works, why it works. They seem divinely inspired to most of us, because they are so near to a purely human and creative source. Thus we have relied on the fruit of the experience, but where is the tree which made the fruit? They are the truest shadows of experience, but nonetheless they are shadows.

As Shelley reminds us [from his Defense of Poetry]…

“The person in whom this power resides, may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, that power which is seated on the throne of their own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations: for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age.”

What then is this domain which is being participated in by the classical musical experience? Could anyone articulate, with any possible selection of words, that which is being counterfeited in these examples?

These questions were posed in Part I of this report: How can we develop our understanding of the “space-time” of the growing human consciousness which Vernadsky called the Noösphere? Where can we say it exists? How connected are we as human beings, and is this connection heightened, or more realized during classical musical performance and the act of discovery or composition? At this point, the conclusions are too weak to prove anything, but what has hopefully been presented here, in so many troublesome pages, has at least been sufficient to provoke your imagination. [16]

6. Fly, Thoughts!

When the mind, as Johannes Kepler was convinced, has struggled through to an understanding of the deeper plan of the universe’s work,

“then he becomes aware that he walks in the light of truth; he is seized by an unbelievable rapture and, exulting, he here surveys most minutely, as though from a high watch-tower, the whole world and all the differences of its parts.” [17]

It should not be surprising to realize that in this investigation of the mind transcending time and space, that we have climbed the rungs of reflection to reach the peaks of human thought, and find ourselves in the realm of creativity in its purest form: the creation of classical art and scientific discovery. Open any of the great works of poetry by Shelley, Keats, Schiller or Shakespeare and within it you shall find their reflections of such a higher domain known to Vernadsky as the Noösphere.

To the poets, the discoverers, the philosophers and the statesmen, their minds, their words, their dreams and their ideas all live in the future and are made of eternally future substance. They remind us that there is a pervasive principle of mind, and that it is a dominant cause in the entire universe, and we are only now in the beginning of the 21st century, beginning to realize this principle. These great people live in such spaceless-timeless-matterless worlds, and it is their encapsulating of such undiscovered countries which broadens the imagination of all mankind and drives the evolution of the entire species. It can be seen in the penetrating gaze of Rembrandt’s eyeless Homer, and it can be heard in the silences within the music of our greatest composers. These are our ambassadors from the Noösphere, this invisible nation of humankind which exists outside the brain and outside of time. As life does not come from non-life, creativity does not come from non-creativity, thus the only true way to study this domain is to recreate the discovery of such future states in your own mind. Only through a culture committed to beauty and truth we can find an Elysium already waiting for us in the future.

People who do not think in the future are paralyzed, like the congress in Washington D.C.: they go through the motions of life, and do what they’re supposed to do – they function and even solve problems, but they’re not creative.  An Empire culture, one which will always tragically end in collapse, destroys creativity by discouraging this future vision, this creative consciousness, holding the mind down with chains of popular opinion.

Have you ever had a prescience of an idea which would appear to the front of your mind months, maybe years later? Have you ever worked so closely with a few people that you begin to share the thoughts of the others? Hearing your own thoughts from their mouth? Have you ever loved someone so much that you can think what they will say, even when they are not near you? That this connection even extends with equal power over death’s cold clutches, whether it’s the words of someone dead, or their music or their effects on the world we live in, this should reveal something about the shape of space of mind.

It is this resonance of mind with mind, soul with soul, which is a reflection of the domain of the interconnectedness of humanity; the fuzzy, flickering boundary between what we usually think of as separate individuals disappears for just a moment, and another crack through which you can barely see that your mind isn’t only your mind.

Like a developing language over time, there is an inherent directionality to the human species outside of the individuals themselves. Nothing momentary can keep that direction from progressing, and woe to those who try. But could humankind control our own direction? If this is real and it is embedded in a higher conception of physical-space-time, could we predetermine the future, in this poetic way, and manifest the future state? How would this be possible? Are ideas really embedded in all substance, or is there a dualism? How could one test this?

What we call future society becomes the completed action of these past ideas, that which shall become the future’s present. In the handful of discoveries such as Kepler’s and compositions such as Beethoven’s which exist for us today, what can be found is that the mind of the composer travels ahead of the body through these works, and that the range of effects of such a mind travel from the “past” into the “future” as a incessant fiber woven into the Noösphere.

Footnotes

[1]Is the Past Fixed part 2, on LPAC.com

[2]Small Soviet Encylopedia, 2nd Edition, Volume II. Moscow 3_8_7.1934. Page 375.

[3]Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon—Survival of Bodily Death By Raymond Moody. (Harper San Francisco-1975).

[4]Post game interview with Michael Jordan, 1993

[5]Dr. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, wrote an in-depth study on this “state of mind,”generalizing it to all life experiences. “ Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

[6]Excerpt from Vernadsky’s Diary, March 15, 1932

[7]The Art of Singing: Golden Voices of the Century, directed by Donald Sturrock produced by Nvc Arts in 2002. The quote starts @1h27min of the DVD

[8]The Bel Canto Flute: The Rampal School, by Sheryl Cohen, 2003, pg. 35

[9]The full interview can be seen here: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/oneill/

[10]A video recording of this presentation can be found here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8wwL-yrRE0

[11]The Musical Soul, by Antonella Banaudi. Schiller Institute Conference, Russelsheim, Germany (July, 2011). A video of her speech and performance can be downloaded HERE: archive.schillerinstitute.com

[12]Darwin’s Autobiography, pg 26

[13]The Haunting Melody: Psychoanalytic Experiences in Life and Music by Theodor Reik (1953)

[14]Introduction of The Moses of Michelangelo by Sigmund Freud, (1937)

[15] Ibykus Magazine, 2004. Available at http://www.schillerinstitute.org/music/brainin_interview-2005.html

[16]The list of examples from musicians and performers on such a process could go on and on, and in fact, if something comes to your mind which I don’t have quoted in this piece, please feel free to send me you own stories or those of others.

[17]Kepler, by Max Caspar, pg. 273

This 2012 article was published with permission of the author.