The Heartwood of Synchronosophy (Part II, Chapter 9/12)

The Birth of the Noctarine

A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us.

To live is to be slowly born.

〰 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 〰

photo © Eric Muir on Unsplash

Becoming a Writer

Some people survive and talk about it.

Some people survive and go silent.

Some people survive and create.

〰 Nikita Gill 〰

Calling my twinsoul coincided with the beginning of a new career. By this time I’d written and published over twenty books. None of them were mine. Translating the work of other writers into another language was a job I greatly enjoyed. The question Do I have it in me to write my own work? had never been on my radar before…

…until The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, a relatively new publication at the time, found its way into my book shelf. Writing Morning Pages soon became part of my daily routine, as if I’d been doing this all my life.

“Three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness,” as Cameron instructed, seemed fun and easy, compared with translation work. I didn’t even need to get out of bed for this!

How would the nonsense scribbled onto my blank A4 sheets ever translate into a novel? Or any coherent text anyone would want to read? That question never crossed my mind.

Intrigued by this process, I wrote my heart out, strictly stream-of-consciousness ~ with one small variation. I had two key questions, held in my heart, throughout the writing process:

The plan was to write a novel which would somehow wrap itself around these two questions. How? I had no idea! I trusted Cameron’s expertise and guidance along this new-to-me road of creative writing.

During the initial phase as a novice writer I also suspended reading of any fiction, New Age, or self-help literature, not wanting my work to be ‘infiltrated’ by the ideas of other writers. This writing should be my own as much as possible. And as promised, a concept for a novel emerged from my Morning Pages, gradually taking shape.

About one year into my novel-writing-journey I hit a road block. The novel itself was approaching its natural ending. My two key questions, however, remained unanswered. How could I wrap up this story without reaching the destination promised in the opening chapter?

I put novel-writing on hold and returned to my Morning Page routine, starting every day with my two key questions:

photo © Nasa Hubble Telescope on Unsplash

An Unexpected Gift

Cameron’s emphasis on creativity as a daily habit, an ongoing process, a subterranean space within your own consciousness, can be a real relief.

〰 Jenn Shapland 〰

I reaffirmed my inquiry and sharpened my focus in the daily stream-of-consciousness writing practice.

From where did I draw this determination?

What made me assume I would receive any answers at all?

I still don’t know. Somehow this combination of holding the questions and scribbling words without filter did the trick. Oblivious to how or what I was doing, I tapped into a higher source, instantly recognisable as Inspiration.

One morning my mind was flooded with information, and an irresistible compulsion to get the words onto the pages. It all happened very fast, too fast to fully grasp what I was writing, yet there was a clear inner knowing. A conviction that the words were holding the answers to my key questions.

This mode of writing felt different from anything I’d experienced before, or ever since. There was an urgency to the act of writing. It felt like receiving an important dictation while struggling to keep up. I had to get all the sentences down on paper, so as not to miss any crucial piece. Every word seemed significant!

This cascade of inspiration lasted about three weeks. Every morning I’d wake up around 6 a.m., my brain bursting with a new flood of information. The ‘dictation’ would go on for hours ~ far longer than the usual Morning Pages practice ~ usually until about 12 o’clock noon.

Around midday the flow would fade out and release me from my writing duties. By the end of the third week I knew I had ‘downloaded’ some extraordinary information. I was aware that it represented some kind of ‘map of Consciousness’, containing far more elaborate explanations than a couple of simple, straight forward answers to my questions, which I might have expected…

What had I expected?

No idea.

What was I thinking? To try to pack such profound questions into a debut novel…

I abandoned my unfinished novel project and turned my attention towards the challenge to figure out what my ‘download from the universe’ had shoved into my lap.

What did it all mean?

COLOURS OF THE NOCTARINE ~ photo © Meagan Carsience on Unsplash

The Noctarine

The Eyes of the Future are looking back at us

and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.

〰 Terry Tempest Williams 〰

The map of human Consciousness I had received came with some visuals too. The first one showed a slightly ovoid sphere ~ reminiscent of a ‘cosmic egg’ ~ a sphere of light hovering in a midnight blue space.

This luminous sphere wasn’t just filled with a single light. It showed eight layers in different colours, like a rainbow plus one. As if it had captured the colours of a prism and held them in its transparent shell.

magenta – violet – blue – green – yellow – orange – red – aquamarine

From the mysterious dictations I had received, I knew that each of the eight colours represented a different aspect of human Consciousness. I had no doubts about the significance of this object and how it related to my questions, even though no explicit instructions had been given.

photo © Karim Ghantous on Unsplash

Theories of Consciousness

When you finally see what goes on underwater, you realize that you've been missing the whole point of the ocean. Staying on the surface all the time is like going to the circus and staring at the outside of the tent.

〰 Dave Barry 〰

Receiving the Noctarine blew my awareness wide open. I had crashed, head first, into a world, of which I’d heard in vague terms, but which had remained hidden in a foggy distant place.

I knew of an inaccessible mystery, talked about in the vaults of the ivory towers of science and academia, where the real experts studied the secrets of an inner world of anthropocentric humans.

A world so far away, they didn’t even have a name for it. They called it the ‘final frontier’.

Now I had to delve into this world, and even come up with a name for it. The best I could do was the hastily cobbled together label: ‘the world of theories-of-consciousness’. A need to revise this clumsy title never arose, for reasons which will become obvious (I hope).

In her book A Syntropic Model of Consciousness, Italian psychologist Antonella Vannini lists 27 quantum models of Consciousness published between 1925 and 2008 as well as three models based on classical physics.

Theories from other disciplines ~ such as Roberto Assagioli’s Psychosynthesis, or Itzhak Bentov’s model described in Stalking the Wild Pendulum are not mentioned by Vannini, presumably because they don’t fall into her area of research.

There are literally dozens of different scientific and academic models, or ‘theories of consciousness’. They have been developed by philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, mathematicians, neuroscientists, biologists, cognitive scientists, physicists, and anyone else who is captivated by this topic. All different from each other.

Does that mean some are right and others are wrong? If the answer were that simple…

“Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious.” Australian philosopher and neuroscientist David Chalmers writes. “There is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness, but it is far from clear how to reconcile it with everything else we know. Why does it exist? What does it do? How could it possibly arise from lumpy gray matter?”

The trouble with ‘consciousness’ is that the word itself can have a huge range of different meanings. Most of them are not even listed in a general dictionary.

Many Western models seem to use the term consciousness as a synonym for awareness, which is partly autonomous and partly under our voluntary control and can apparently be measured as brain activity. Scientists who subscribe to this worldview might dedicate their careers to the discovery of a so far unknown neurotransmitter, which might explain ‘how the brain produces consciousness’, some day.

The quantum models offer a radically different view. According to physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg “consciousness would be an immanent property of reality which exists before the creation of reality.”

David Bohm called consciousness the ‘implicate order’, based on his understanding that there is no difference between mind and matter at the quantum level, and “every material particle contains consciousness in a rudimentary form.” (quotes from Vannini)

photo © Rogerio Toledo on Unsplash

Eastern Models and the Eleatics

First there was the Great Cosmic Egg.

Inside the egg was chaos.

Floating in the chaos was P'an Ku,

the undeveloped divine embryo.

〰 Huai-nan Tzu 〰

The interpretations of quantum physicists give the impression that Western science is edging closer towards the understanding of the Eastern traditions. If you read about ancient Vedic ‘science of the mind’, you’ll discover that consciousness is identical to Brahman, the Vedic name for reality.

This consciousness-reality is unitary at the deepest level. Otherwise there would be chaos. (Although the human experience of life can be pretty chaotic at times, it is not what the word ‘chaos’ means in this context).

Brahman is consciousness, at the cosmic scale, and informs individual minds. This explains the concept of meditation. The practice is meant to still the individual human mind and thereby gain access to cosmic consciousness.

When you ask two Buddhists to define consciousness, they can’t agree among themselves either ~ just like Western scientists. The confusion, in this case, may be due to the fact that Sanskrit has up to a dozen different words which can be translated as ‘consciousness’, while in English we are limited to one single term.

For the Indo-Aryans, who spoke this ancient language several thousand years ago, the concept of consciousness was as important as the mythologies of god/esses in Ancient Greece and Rome. The mind was something they thought about a lot, and so they developed a more differentiated understanding and language.

“Buddhism speaks of six, seven, or eight aspects of consciousness,” explains the French Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard. “It speaks first of the ground or basic consciousness, which has a global, general knowledge that the world is there and that I exist.”

“The Buddha taught that consciousness is always continuing, like a stream of water,” the late Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote. “Consciousness has four layers. The four layers of consciousness are mind consciousness, sense consciousness, store consciousness, and manas.”

Does that mean Matthieu Ricard is right, and Thich Nhat Hanh got it wrong? Or vice versa? I don’t think so.

I believe they are explaining to their students and readers what they personally mean, according to their lineage and what they learned from their teachers. The world of Buddhism is a big place.

Moreover, the understanding of the phenomenon of consciousness seems to be closely attached to subjective experience. Different ways of looking at consciousness produce different results.

These two monks represent two separate lineages. One a former molecular geneticist, who received a calling to abandon a career in science in favour of Tibetan Buddhism and find happiness in the East, the other a devotee of a Vietnamese lineage, given a special mission by his Zen master to go and teach peace of mind in the West.

There is a curious and undeniable parallel between the Vedic philosophy of Consciousness and the concept of a Greek school of thought, known as the Eleatics (a colony located in southwestern Italy). This one is even more ancient than the philosophies of Socrates and Plato.

Parmenides, one of the primary Eleatic philosophers, was one of the first recorded humans to ask the deep and difficult questions about about life and mankind. He came up with the proposal that All is One. From this fundamental truth he drew the conclusion that ‘there can be no creation, because being cannot come from non-being.’

Illustration of the Noctarine © Veronika Bond

Human Consciousness as a Living Organism

The person does not possess consciousness

~ the person is consciousness.

〰 Margaret Newman 〰

After completing my initial download of the Noctarine, I presented this brandnew map of Consciousness to Josh, in our dining room. I pulled a chair in front of the whiteboard, asked him to take a seat and drew eight circles on the board.

(similar to the illustration above but on a white background and with whatever marker pens available. The diagram here is on a black background and comes much closer to how it originally appeared in my mind’s eye).

“This rainbow sphere shows human Consciousness as a living organism,” I explained. “The coloured lines represent eight spheres nestled into one another. They are related to eight vital organs, each with their own specific tasks.”

I don’t know, whether anyone else has ever come up with the suggestion that human Consciousness is a living organism and has vital organs. The perennial question ‘how does the brain produce consciousness?’ would never elicit such an answer.

Asking the right question is hugely important. Every question attracts its own answers.

I received this information in response to specific questions mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Asking the right question is hugely important. It is one of the skills we practice and develop in Synchronosophy.

Every question attracts its own answers. The answer I received in the form of the Noctarine instantly made a lot of sense, even though it took me several years to work out what it meant.

It is an extremely complex answer, which is perfectly suited to the complexity of the questions. I am still learning and unravelling deeper meanings.

The name Noctarine came much later [Noctarine is a portmanteau of nocturn = of the night + octarine = the eighth colour or the rainbow]. Octarine was invented by Terry Pratchett and called the colour of magic because it is ‘only visible to wizards and cats’. Nocturn refers to the fact that this organism operates largely in dark mode, i.e. is invisible to the senses we normally use within waking awareness.

In a similar vein to the colour of magic, the Noctarine is only visible to certain people. I wouldn’t like to specify who they are, because this creature is currently too young to be tied down with such a statement.

Having said that, many people stare at me blankly when I try to explain the Noctarine to them. A few kindred spirits recognise it instantly. You know who you are.

The eight vital organs of the Noctarine, beginning from the centre and moving outwards are:::

aquamarine ~ Will ~ the sphere of willingness, willpower, and purpose

red ~ Soul ~ the sphere of wholeness, identity, and essence

orange ~ Inspiration ~ the sphere of resources, potential and ingenuity

yellow ~ Intuition ~ the sphere of direction, mystery, and loyalty

green ~ Imagination ~ the sphere of playfulness, performance, and dreaming

blue ~ Instinct ~ the sphere of vibration, harmony, and moods

violet ~ Intellect ~ the sphere of coherence, polarity, logic

magenta ~ Body ~ the sphere of evidence, boundaries and agency

THE NOCTARINE ~ 8 Faculties of Consciousness © Veronika Bond

The eight vital organs of Consciousness ~ as shown by the Noctarine ~ all have special functions, just like the different organ systems of the human body. They are all continuously interacting with each other. Their job is to regulate the inner processes of human experience.

They must respond to stimuli from the inner and outer environment. They relate to other living organisms, and exchange information with them.

These vital organs send out signals to the inner and outer environment too. They have a certain influence on the outer world, and they heavily determine what’s going on in the inner landscape.

We call these organs ‘Faculties of Consciousness’. (All technical terms are written with a capital initial to distinguish them from the same words in normal language. In the new discipline of Synchronosophy, the terms Consciousness, Faculty, Body, Intellect, Instinct, Imagination, Intuition, Inspiration, Soul and Will are used with specific definitions, which we’ll unravel in future chapters.)

After my little presentation, Josh sat in silence for some time, looking at the diagram on the whiteboard. I scribbled the names of the eight Faculties on the lines, added the names of the colours, and a couple of words to identify the functions.

“What do you think?” I turned around and looked at my audience of one for feedback.

“What I think?” Josh turned towards me with a knowing smile. “I think you’re sitting on a goldmine*.”

*The word ‘goldmine’ is used here as a metaphor referring to the ‘Dragon’s gold’ ~ a mystical symbol for wisdom, profound knowledge, harmony and inner strength.

In Josh’s own words: “a gold-mine of paradigm-shifting ideas.”

Missed the earlier chapters? Click the links

The Rootstock of Synchronosophy

Chapter 1 The Mycelium of Synchronosophy, Chapter 2 Sub-Soil of Synchronosophy, Chapter 3 Nutrients for Synchronosophy, Chapter 4 Adjustments to an Unnatural World, Chapter 5 Loss of Self and Identity, Chapter 6 The Destructive Trail of Trauma

The Heartwood of Synchronosophy

Chapter 7 Emotional Messengers, Chapter 8 Love Thyself