The Heartwood of Synchronosophy (Part II, Chapter 10/12)
Subjective Experience as a Living Source of Knowledge
Take no one’s word for anything, including mine ~ but trust your experience.
〰 James Baldwin 〰
Experiencing Consciousness
You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it.
〰 James Gleick 〰
Amit Goswami, retired quantum physicist and scholar of the sacred Vedic scriptures of his native India, builds a bridge between the Eastern and Western concepts of Consciousness.
“Physics explains phenomena, but consciousness is not a phenomenon;” he concludes “all else are phenomena in consciousness. I had vainly been seeking a description of consciousness within science; instead, what I and others have to look for is a description of science within consciousness.”
Goswami’s observations lead to a radical shift in the definition of the word consciousness, as far as the Western paradigm of science is concerned. Cognitive science still looking for a ‘phenomenon’ emerging from ‘lumpy grey matter’.
“The mystical truth that there is nothing but consciousness must be experienced in order to be truly understood,” Goswami explains, “just as a banana, in the sensory domain, must be seen and tasted before a person really knows what a banana is.”
After the Noctarine burst into my life ~ and I had to upskill myself in this field of research ~ I soon realised the importance of a precise definition of the word consciousness. To find a definition that captured the essence of the Noctarine wasn’t easy. Goswami’s explanations edged closer to my embryonic understanding, except for a fundamental difference…
What I have been writing and thinking about over the past two and a half decades is not consciousness in general in the sense of ‘everything is consciousness’ but specifically human consciousness and our experience of it ~ and why does it matter?
Amit Goswami’s ‘consciousness’ is what I would now call universal consciousness. Not because I dare to differ with a highly accomplished professor of quantum physics and lifelong student of metaphysics. I love Goswami’s definition and couldn’t agree more!
However, universal consciousness is not what my newborn map was showing. I’ve never been writing or thinking about ‘the great universal everything’. This is not my expertise.
I needed to find an accurate definition of the Noctarine to capture one individual human as a node within the infinite totality of universal consciousness as described by Goswami.
How do you call one single ‘node of consciousness’ ~ one cell which contains all the experience of one individual human?
The person does not possess consciousness – the person is consciousness.
〰 Margaret Newman 〰
Then I read Margaret Newman’s book Health as Expanding Consciousness, and something clicked between my personal ’node of consciousness’ and hers.
“Persons as individuals, and human beings as a species, are identified by their patterns of consciousness,” she writes. And finally, her definition ››› “The person does not possess consciousness – the person is consciousness.” triggered a light-bulb moment in my mind.
Through this process, following the trains of thought of many philosophers, scientists, health professionals, and thinkers who puzzled over ‘the final frontier of the great mystery’ ~ I arrived at my own translation of the Noctarine as a map of individual human Consciousness.
The Noctarine is a map of individual human Consciousness.
This map represents subjective human experience,
viewed through the faceted lens of 8 vital Faculties.
This map doesn’t claim to show what individual human Consciousness looks like ‘objectively’ from the outside. The Noctarine offers insights into the living organism of our own Consciousness, via the inner subjective perception of the user of this organism from multiple perspectives.
The Discovery of Subjectivity
We have a sensory image within ourselves, an imagined world,
with which life is confronting us every moment anew.
〰 Raoul Francé 〰
In 1913, the Austro-Hungarian microbiologist and soil scientist Raoul Francé published a book with the title Das Edaphon. Twenty-three years earlier, at the age of sixteen, Francé had become the youngest member of the Royal Hungarian Scientific Society.
Under the tutelage of the Hungarian protozoa scientist Geza Entz, Francé was sent off on field trips into the Hungarian swamps and discovered that the soil is full of life, comparable with the plankton in water. Edaphon was the collective name he chose for these microorganisms.
Raoul Heinrich Francé (1874-1943) was not only a science Wunderkind. During his productive life he wrote 60 books and many articles, published in scientific journals, while doing scientific research, becoming director of the Institute of Biology in Munich, and developing his creative talent as a non-fiction writer in the emerging genre of ‘popular science’.
From his discovery of the edaphon, followed by research and writings about soil life, Francé knew that life in nature was founded on cooperation. From earthworms to plants, rocks, and microorganisms, billions of creatures play their part in the complex cyclical dance of life, to produce the precious ‘black gold of the earth’, which sustains all life on our planet.
Inspired by keen observations of microlife in the soil, his curiosity lead to questions of how these principles might apply to the inner life of the human microcosm.
“We have a sensory image within ourselves, an imagined world, with which life is confronting us every moment anew,” Francé wrote in the 1920s, published in his work Bios: Die Gesetze der Welt (the Laws of the World).
Following in the footsteps of many philosophers, from Ancient Greece through the European Enlightenment Era, this virtually unknown Austro-Hungarian scientist set himself the task to identify the fundamental ‘laws of the world’.
What stands out in Francé’s work is his unique perspective. He doesn’t try to objectify the world by nailing down a ‘theory of everything’. Instead he approaches the big questions of life from the perspective of the experiencer, tuning into the processes of life itself.
This brings him to the conclusion that, “The true originator of the concepts of ‘things’, which synergise to become one world view, is us.”
Why are we not aware of this?!
Having spent hundreds of years distancing ourselves from nature, we (the offspring of Western culture spoon-fed on a diet of anthropocentric science) have lost touch not just with our natural environment, wildlife, plant-life, and soil-life ‘out there’ but with our own inner nature.
Taking a detached ‘objective’ perspective, the majority of our ancestors have tried to piece together a worldview, which is supposed to explain to us, from the outside, what life is all about.
Our own life! Our personal way of being in the world on a day to day basis. The humanoid creatures we have become as a result, are detached from themselves, confused, controlled, and manipulated by external ‘objective’ forces.
Raoul Francé corrects this view, saying, “We don’t know either absolute ‘Being’ or ‘absolute Substance’, but only relative Being.”
‘Relative Being’ means effectively that we only ‘exist in relationship’ ~ to our environment, other people, ourselves, the universe. This means, we can only know ourselves in from the perspective of living beings existing in relationship.
What we are all searching in life is harmony. All those microorganisms in the soil are continuously working towards this goal too, just like us. The homœodynamic balance of life’s processes ~ that’s what every individual human is attempting to achieve. To live in harmony with the environment, with others, with life, with oneself, which we experience as wellbeing.
According to Raoul Francé, “this alone is the objective of thinking, knowing, wanting, and acting. This alone is the ‘meaning of life’!”
Interestingly, a scientist oriented towards this goal does not seek to find ‘the truth’.
“No such thing exists,” says Francé, “and neither do matter, space, time, the world, ‘the good’, or ‘the beautiful’ exist… We are only seeking our truth, the ‘best life according to recognition of and alignment with the universally valid web of relationships of objects’, in other words, with the laws of the world.”
We are only seeking our truth,
life in alignment with the laws of the world.
〰 Raoul Francé 〰
Gœthe’s Tender Intimate Experiencing
There is a tender empiricism that makes itself identical with the object,
in the most intimate manner, and thereby becomes actual theory.
〰 Johann Wolfgang von Gœthe 〰
Over a century before Raoul Francé impressed the Royal Hungarian Scientific Society with his genius, a German polymath developed his own scientific theories. He studied animal and plant morphology, figured out his own theory of colour, and became one of the most celebrated German writers and poets of all time. His name is Johann Wolfgang von Gœthe (1749-1832).
While his literary writings hold a place equivalent to Shakespeare’s in English literature, Gœthe’s scientific theories never received much attention, despite the fact that he considered them his ‘most important life’s work’.
Gœthe described his approach as follows, “there is a tender empiricism, which makes itself identical with the object in the most intimate manner, and thereby becomes actual theory. This enhancement of mental capacity, however, belongs to a highly educated era.”
Empiricism means ‘reliance on direct subjective experience’ and actual theory in this context should be read as ‘true seeing, proper insight’.
Gœthe’s ‘tender reliance on direct subjective experience’ ~ in my understanding ~ leads to such a high level of intimate familiarity with the object that the observer is truly able to see (= in the original meaning of theory) from the innermost perspective of the living object itself and thereby gain genuine knowledge.
Johann W. v. Gœthe and Raoul Francé understood that looking at any living phenomenon or creature through the lens of intimately relating ~ be it an animal, plant, or the living soil ~ leads to genuine perception and comprehension.
Any attempts to make purely rational objective external assessments about what’s going on inside a living organism ~ an approach promoted by anthropocentric science ~ can only lead to abstract speculations. These are bound to be incomplete and prone to falsification sooner or later.
True understanding of any living organisms can only come from intimate subjective experience in a tender, direct and subjective manner. The observer needs to enter into an intimate relationship with the object they intend to understand. This is the symbiocentric approach to science.
The inner ecosystem is a living organism, largely unknown to humans, despite the fact that we are the hosts and rightful owners of our inner soil and territory. There is no shortage of speculations and theories of how to handle the ‘mysterious phenomena occurring within our inner ecosystem’.
How do we know what to believe?
Gœthe offers a simple and reliable guideline: tender reliance on subjective experience.
Unless we approach our inner ecosystem with the tenderness of a loving intimate partner, true seeing remains elusive. The outlook of Gœthe and Francé demands that the observer’s mind is free from preconceptions, prejudice and judgement of ‘good vs. evil’.
Entering an intimate loving relationship with ourselves also demands trust, respect, unconditional acceptance, and an open mind. Given the self-abuse most of us have been trained to cultivate over a lifetime, this takes practice.
Is Subjectivity Trustworthy?
Subjectivity is really the heart of consciousness.
〰 Antonio Damasio 〰
Objectivity and subjectivity have been associated with ‘truth’ vs. ‘illusion’ since the mid 19th century. European philosophers, academics and scientists began to use the term objective in the sense of ‘impersonal, unbiased, impartial’ from around 1855.
With this definition, the terms subjective and subjectivity became associated, by implication, with bias, prejudice, one-sidedness, partiality. That the popularity of ’subjectivity’ plummeted, comes as no surprise.
A mere century + a few years later, the ‘scientific’ concept of objectivity vs. subjectivity revealed a fundamental error. Experiments in quantum physics ~ from the 1960s onwards ~ confirmed that ‘objectivity doesn’t exist’, because observers influence the results of any scientific experiment.
Despite this updated objective knowledge, the above mentioned associations with the two terms are still going strong. Objective = neutral, impersonal, open-minded, fair (!), whereas subjectivity = favouritism, cronyism, opinionatedness, closed-mindedness, unfairness…
The debate itself goes back thousands of years, to Aristotle in Ancient Greece, if not beyond, because it’s about a different topic entirely. Never mind objective or subjective ~ the smouldering underlying unspoken topic is::: how to know truth?!
When using subjective experience as a resource for self-knowledge, the key question is, whether we can trust this source of information to guide us in our search.
The Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio offers a reassuring answer to this question when he writes, “In the heart of consciousness is subjectivity, this sense of having a self that observes one's own organism and the world around that organism. That is really the heart of consciousness.”
In other words, our subjective experience is informing us about what’s going on at the heart of our Consciousness. Always. Continuously. It’s inevitable.
Does that mean your subjective experience is always telling ‘the truth’?
Yes and no. The answer depends on two preconditions:
a) What do you want your subjective experience to tell you about?
b) How accurately are you able to interpret your subjective experience?
Despite the realisation that our subjective experience can lead us ~ ultimately ~ to the heart of our own truth, subjectivity and an exclusively subjective perspective are fraught with risks and potential misunderstandings.
For example, as a result of ACE (adverse childhood experiences) many of us have (or remember having) a negative self-image. The subjective experience of ‘I am worthless’ is therefore true ~ in that moment, temporarily, and partially. Yet it’s not ‘the whole truth’.
What we are dealing with here, in our explorations guided by subjective experience is an unfolding truth. Therefore we must clarify what we mean by ‘truth’.
To define truth, it might be easier to begin with what truth is not.
In search of self-knowledge, truth is not an unchangeable certainty. It is not an immoveable reality, like let’s say a set of divine laws carved into a slab of rock (and even that is prone to erosion).
Truth is used here in the sense of authenticity. The search for self-knowledge leads us on a path towards an unfolding truth ~ via subjective experience ~ as long as we are ‘truthful’ (= honest + authentic) towards ourselves.
This is a personal truth, which does not need to match anyone else’s ‘truth’. Subjective experience is unique and different for everyone, which adds beauty and interest to this exploration. Even when there is a mismatch of ‘truths’ of two people, there is no point arguing about them, because the deeper truth is ultimately about a different issue.
This links to a surprising discovery, truth seekers of all eras make time and again:
The path of self-knowledge leads everyone to their own ‘deepest truth’, and at that ‘deepest level’ the truth of humans from the most diverse backgrounds, faiths, and cultures flow into one more or less corresponding stream of truth, like aquifers bubbling up from the subsoil of our Consciousness, into a common wellspring of life.
The Keepers of Human Experience
Experience is a wall that an active you runs up against.
〰 F. Scott Fitzgerald 〰
When I suggest to use subjective experience as a living resource, what I’m mainly talking about is negative subjective experience. The reason for this is simple. Positive subjective experiences in everyday life usually don’t require special attention. You can simply enjoy them.
It’s the conflicts, disturbances, distress, inner turmoil and external obstacles, emotional overreactions, arguments, irritations, in other words, the whole spectrum of negative subjective experience ~ usually brushed under the proverbial carpet or kept in a smelly closet reserved for dirty linen ~ that desperately need our loving care and support.
Not a popular topic, I know! I wouldn’t have chosen it either, if the Noctarine hadn’t turned up in my life in response to the reckless question I’d asked earlier.
››› What is the good reason for negative experience?
This core question of mine was based on an observation. Many well-meaning humans, including myself, intend to ‘create good experiences’ for themselves and their loved ones. They might follow the dream of ‘creating a better life for their children’ than previous generations managed to do.
I have seen many such dreams implode, leaving their dreamers disillusioned, discouraged, disheartened, cynical. In my own life, for some reason, I never gave up on my dreams.
Instead of blaming myself, other people, or the universe, I always thought there must be some piece(s) of the puzzle of life I haven’t quite understood ~ yet! So I did my best to figure out what that might be.
Having worked with the Noctarine for a quarter century, I believe it holds a missing piece of that puzzle ~ perhaps more than one. It holds clues to a fundamental paradigm shift from an anthropocentric mental construct to the symbiocentric mind.
(Anthropocentric thinking is built on hierarchy, supremacy, competition, and survival of the fittest with a focus on perfection and control. The structure of the symbiocentric mind is rooted in heterarchy, symbiogenesis, synergy, cooperation with a focus on regeneration and sustainability.)
Negative subjective experiences (NSE) are marked by inner turmoil and outer challenges. There are many ways to resolve an NSE. The anthropocentric approach is to (attempt to) eliminate, overcome, or defeat the external challenge.
Since this is not always possible, the anthropocentric mind has developed many clever techniques to ‘conquer’ NSEs, treating them as enemies, or dismissing them as ‘inferior’. For example, it has come up with ‘mind hacks’ suggesting to ‘reframe’ the event. To ‘reprogram’ negative beliefs. To detach from one’s own experience altogether!
Such suggestions all reveal a supremacist mentality:
Assuming we know better.
Comparing the human mind with the operating system of a computer, and we are in charge of this mind (despite ample evidence of the contrary).
Claiming that NSEs shouldn’t exist in the first place.
Treating them like defects caused by a failing or outdated program.
From the symbiocentric point of view, every NSE should be respected as a symbiont. NSEs are regular living phenomena occurring within the mystery of human life. If we learn to communicate with them and understand what they are trying to tell us, then we are able to not only resolve personal inner and outer conflict; we can emerge from the challenging incident stronger and wiser than before.
C.G. Jung, one of the pioneers of contemporary psychology, coined the term synchronicity as the experience of positive synchronous events (assumed not to be linked by causality). These have been promoted as a reliable measure of being on the right track towards a successful life. As if the universe is signalling a green light to the seeker on their path towards personal growth.
Synchronosophy focuses on negative synchronous events. The NSE signals a red light. We can take this opportunity to pause, delve into the inner world and go on a treasure hunt.
Using the Noctarine as a map to explore the inner landscape from the 8 perspectives of our vital Faculties, we can not only resolve the immediate NSE but gain many additional benefits, which evade superficial viewing of the anthropocentric paradigm.
[Please note: The type of negative subjective experiences we’re talking about here make themselves known through emotional overreactions triggered by irritating everyday events. This does not include acute trauma or PTSD!]
Processing an incident of NSE has several beneficial effects, including:::
1 ~ instant noticeable relief in relation to the acute adverse event, improved ability to cope with the situation (+ ‘magical’ solutions in the corresponding external constellation are not uncommon)
2 ~ significant curative impulses towards healing old trauma ~ including invisible trauma
3 ~ immunity against future adverse events related to the same issue and improved emotional balance in general
4 ~ indication towards dormant personal potential buried underneath the frozen-by-trauma experience
5 ~ opportunity to activate that specific dormant personal potential
6 ~ impulses for overall healthy growth within human Consciousness
To help us achieve such results, we draw on the knowledge of our innate Faculties of Consciousness a.k.a Keepers of Integrity. Each of these make a unique vital contribution and provide a distinctive view of subjective experience.
As a general guideline for working with the Noctarine and developing a practice of Synchronosophy we follow the approach recommended by two holistic scientists:
Johann Wolfgang von Gœthe and Raoul Heinrich Francé.
We look at the living phenomenon of our own inner ecosystem through the lens of intimately relating with ourselves, which leads to genuine perception and comprehension.
&
In every exploration of the dark, wild and difficult parts of life, we approach ourselves with tender reliance on subjective experience.
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, Chapter 9 The Birth of the Noctarine
This article shows how deep truths that have been elucidated decades ago, even centuries ago, can journey forward though time with minimal recognition, and thankfully eventually get gathered up, reconfirmed, and articulated for a new generation -- thirsty for some original and trustworthy input and clarity, pertinent to a contemporary and troubled society.
What struck me was that if you really want to understand something (or someone) you have to "walk a mile in their shoes" - ie: live the subjective experience. And this is the fundamental invitation of both Raoul Francé and Johann Goethe -- to engage in the true scientific method, to walk in the shoes of 'tender empiricism' where 'true seeing' becomes possible by an act of both humility and courage, by allowing oneself to meld into the negative experience in all its intensity -- and understand afresh.
It reminds me also of a couple of lines from Mary Oliver's poem "The Summer Day" where she writes: "... this grasshopper I mean -- / ... / who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes." How would it be to see the world through the 'multi-eyes' of a grasshopper? What an amazing reality would be perceived from such a place!
And likewise the invitation of Synchronosophy is to 'step inside' oneself and see the world subjectively, by walking in the shoes of Soul, Inspiration, Intuition, Imagination, Instinct .. and more.
“From the symbiocentric point of view, every NSE should be respected as a symbiont. NSEs are regular living phenomena occurring within the mystery of human life.” This chapter bears endless wisdom, and I especially appreciate how it can be applied from the microscopic all the way to the macroscopic. In Classical Chinese Medicine, the relationships between wood, fire, metal, water, and earth can be seen and felt n our natural world, but practitioners understand all disease patterns within the context of these relationships within as well. Your symbiocentric point of view is in great alignment with this 5000 year old medicine, though I see you taking it a step further in that you identify the negative experiences as phenomena to join, hold, understand and co-create with instead of eradicate. Your work is STUNNING.