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The Mother
Matter
\Mat"ter\ (?), n. [OE. matere, F. matière, fr. L. materia;
perh. akin to L. mater mother. Cf. Mother, Madeira, Material.
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INTRODUCTION: In
this issue we explore our understanding of Matter. "The
English word matter is derived from the Latin word materia,
in which the Latin word mater,"mother", is clearly
present." Our
understanding of the nature of matter is the very foundation of our
lives (just as our mothers were). Our understanding of the
relationship of "spirit and matter" effects how we live
our lives and face our death, how we treat ourselves and each other
and our planet. The
authors whose ideas are presented here differ in their approaches to
the concept of matter and by doing so offer us a wonderful variety
of food for thought. This is surely a subject worthy of meditation -
meditation into the manifold aspects of Mother/Matter. Enjoy!
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"I have seen groups of people overcome incredible odds as they
become aware they are participating in a cause beyond self, and sense the
movement
of the inexorable which comes from unity. When you feel this principle at
work, when you see spiritual principles form the basis of active
citizenship, you are reminded once again of the merging of stardust and spirit.
There is creativity. There is magic. There is alchemy."
Dennis J. Kucinich
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Starhawk - 1998
Twilights
Last Gleaming
The setting sun
creates an aura
turning the sky a beauteous orange
reminding us of the peace and tranquility
that once was this Mother Earth
www.art.net/~starhawk/
twilight.jpg
STORIES
MATTER,
MATTER STORIES
by
Christian de Quincey
Are
rocks conscious? Do animals or plants have souls? Have you ever
wondered whether worms or insects might feel pain or pleasure? Can
trees feel anything at all? Ever wondered where in the great
unfolding of evolution consciousness first appeared?
If
questions like these intrigue you, you are in good company,
because they touch on the deepest mystery in modern philosophy,
science, and spirituality: How are minds and bodies related?
How
does consciousness fit into the physical world? These
are not just idle musings of philosophers. How we answer such
questions can dramatically affect the way we live our lives, how
we treat the world of nature and other people, and even how we
relate to our own bodies.
If
we are to feel at home in the cosmos, to be open to the full
inflowing and outpouring of its profound creativity, if we are not
to feel isolated and alienated from the full symphony of cosmic
matter—both as distant as the far horizon of time, and as near
as the flesh of our own bodies—we need a new cosmology story. We
need a new way to envision our relationship to the full panorama
of the crawling, burrowing, swimming, gliding, flying,
circulating, flowing, rooted, and embedded Earth. We need to be
and to feel differently, as well as to think and believe
differently.
Why?
Well, listen to this from Bertrand Russell, one of the most
respected and influential philosophers of our time:
That
man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end
they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and
fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental
collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of
thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the
grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all
the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are
destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system,
and the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be
buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these
things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain,
that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand (Russell,
1961).
This
may be the most terrifying story ever told—nevertheless, it is
the one we are born into. It expresses the terrible poetry of a
meaningless universe, rolling along entropic channels of chance,
blind and without purpose, sometimes accidentally throwing up the
magnificence and beauty of natural and human creations, but
inevitably destined to pull all our glories asunder and leave no
trace, no indication that we ever lived, that our lonely planet
once bristled and buzzed with colorful life and reached out to the
stars. It is all for nothing.
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Einstein accepted
the idea of an underlying Field of Being when he wrote:
"There is no
place in this new kind of physics for both the field and matter for the
field is the only reality."
Writing in the Spectrum
of Consciousness Ken Wilber indicates that consciousness within this
unified field is non-dual:
'Recall the
essential insight of the work of Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Einstein --
that the texture of reality is one in which the observer and the event,
the subject and the object, knower and known are not separable, (i.e.
they are one.) This type of knowing which is non-dual, intimate and
direct, does not submit to codification and analysis.'
Courtesy of the
Theosophy
Library Online
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Spirit and Stardust
by Dennis J. Kucinich
As one studies the images of the Eagle Nebula, brought back by the
Hubble Telescope from that place in deep space where stars are born, one
can imagine the interplay of cosmic forces across space and time, of matter and spirit dancing to the music of the spheres, atop an
infinite sea of numbers.
Spirit merges with matter to sanctify the universe. Matter
transcends to return to spirit. The interchangeability of matter and spirit means
the starlit magic of the outermost life of our universe becomes the
soul-light magic of the innermost life of our self. The energy of the stars
becomes us. We become the energy of the stars. Stardust and spirit unite
and we begin: One with the universe. Whole and holy. From one source,
endless creative energy, bursting forth, kinetic, elemental. We, the earth,
air, water and fire-source of nearly fifteen billion years of cosmic
spiraling.
We begin as a perfect union of matter and spirit. We receive the
blessings of the Eternal from sky and earth. In our outstretched hands we can
feel the energy of the universe. We receive the blessings of the Eternal
from water, which nourishes and sanctifies life. We receive the
blessings
of the Eternal from the primal fire, the pulsating heart of creation. We experience the wonder of life multidimensional and transcendent. We
extend our hands upwards and we are showered with abundance. We ask and we receive. A universe of plenty flows to us, through us. It is in us.
We become filled with endless possibilities.
We need to remember where we came from; to know that we are one. To
understand that we are of an undivided whole: race, color,
nationality, creed, gender are beams of light, refracted through one great
prism. We begin as perfect and journey through life to become more perfect in
the singularity of "I" and in the multiplicity of
"we"; a more perfect
union of matter and spirit.- -This is human striving. This is where, in
Shelley's words, " ...hope creates from its own wreck the thing it
contemplates."
This is what Browning spoke of: Our 'reach exceeding [our] grasp'.
This is a search for heaven within, a quest for our eternal home.
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remainder in printable form.
From the Praxis Peace Institute Conference
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Sunday, June 9, 2002
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From the Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky
'Matter is Eternal. It is the Upadhi (the physical basis)
for the One infinite Universal Mind to build thereon its ideations.' (SD
1:280) 'There can be no manifestation of Consciousness,
semi-consciousness, or even "unconscious purposiveness," except
through the vehicle of matter . . . [B]oth these aspects of the
ABSOLUTE . . . are mutually
inter-dependent.' (SD 1:328-9)
Courtesy of the Theosophy
Library Online
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Copyright
2001 Jean-Paul Avisse
Courtesy
Lightworks Visionary Gallery
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From
Cross Currents Magazine
THE AMBIGUITY OF MATTER
by Huston Smith
Modernity recognizes little or no connection between material
things and their spiritual roots. If this is so, primal peoples may well be the
better metaphysicians.
There is a perspective from which matter, along with everything else, appears
perfect. This is God's perspective, as when "God saw everything that he had
made," earth included, and judged it to be "very good"
(Gen. 1:31).
Human beings catch glimpses of this perspective. Wordsworth's childhood,
"when every earthly sight to me did seem apparelled in celestial
light," is an example; and romantic love can adorn the whole world with
loveliness. Theophanies and peak experiences can also arrive
unannounced, for
There are times of inherent excellence
As when the cock crows on the left and all
Is well, incalculable balances,
At which a kind of Swiss perfection comes. (Wallace Stevens)
Mystics succeed in stabilizing these gracious moments better than the rest of us
do, but for all human beings the world has its down side. To which matter
noticeably contributes -- this is the first side of matter's ambiguity which
this paper will address. It was the first three Passing Sights -- the ailing,
the aging, and the death of the body -- that forced the Buddha to conclude that
life is dukkha. "The body," the contemporary Sri Lankan monk Bhikku
Sivili pronounced shortly before he died, "is hopeless."
The New Romanticism
There is a strong move afoot today to blink this harsh, remorseless side of
matter. It takes off by thinking of matter as nature, and goes on to elevate
nature to Mother Nature, or Gaia -- nature as Brahma and Vishnu, Creator and
Sustainer, not as Shiva, Destroyer. Steaming, pestiferous jungles are downplayed
in favor of the majestic Sierras. Attention is directed to the manicured
landscapes of England's Lake Country, or to life-giving rain-forests, not to the
ice-locked antipodes of our planet, or ravenous Black Holes in outer space that
devour everything within their reach. We are encouraged to think that women's
menstrual cycles, childbearing, and lactation bed them deeper in nature than men
are bedded, with the result that nature's putative benevolence infuses them
more, making them the gentler sex. The logic extends to primal peoples, where
the archetype is the hero in Dances with Wolves, not the cruel warriors in
Black Robe.
How much this romantic excursion is powered by fact and how much by the need to
create a myth for our times -- one that will point in more just and ecological
directions -- I do not know, any more than I know whether there is need to
address that question. I merely report what I sense to be a phenomenon which
seems to bear on matter's ambiguity. In The Archaic Revival, Terence McKenna
argues that when civilizations run into trouble they instinctively reach back
for the last sane moment before trouble set in. For Renaissance thinkers, trying
to make sense of the Black Plague and the cracks in Christendom that could no
longer be denied, it was the Greeks who appeared sane. Our troubles are larger
for being global and planetary, so we reach back farther, to the archaic. From
another angle, the more difficult it becomes to believe that we are headed for
utopia -- at the moment, technology seems to be pointing in the opposite
direction -- the more nostalgia seems to take over.
These speculations are interesting, but my concern is not the etiology of the
New Romanticism, or even that movement per se. What we want to understand is the
relation of matter to spirit.
Click
here to go to the remainder of this paper in a printable form...
Source: Cross Currents, Spring 1998, Vol. 48 Issue 1.
http://www.crosscurrents.org/smith.htm
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Francisco
Montes Shunna
La
Pachamana - Mother Earth
www.eden-project.co.uk/
painting/mother.htm
'Force and Matter, Spirit and Matter, and Deity and Nature, though they
may be viewed as opposite poles in their respective manifestations, yet
are in essence and in truth but one . . . [Spirit and matter]
are in short the two poles of the one eternal element, and are synonymous
and convertible terms. . . (CW 4:225-6)
Mahatma Letters (KH)
Courtesy of the Theosophy
Northwest website
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Implicate and
Explicate Order. In his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order the
physicist David Bohm suggests that behind the world as we know it there is
an 'implicate order' from which the material world becomes explicit by
unfolding like a rolled-out carpet. He says:
'This implicate
order implies a reality immensely beyond matter. Matter is merely a
ripple in this background and the ocean of energy is not primarily in
time and space at all.'
http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/science/prat-boh.htm
Courtesy of the Theosophy
Northwest website
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But the lightning which
explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On
one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog,
forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which
composes and decomposes nature,—here they are, side by side, god and
devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding
peacefully together in the eye and brain of every man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Drawing by Rei
Inamoto.
Gaea, or Mother Earth, was the great
goddess of the early Greeks. She represented the Earth
and was worshipped as the universal mother. In Greek mythology, she
created the Universe
and gave birth to both the first race of gods (the Titans) and the first
humans
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Mahatma Letters (KH)
'[Pure spirit] is a nonentity, a pure
abstraction, an absolute blank to our senses -- even to the most
spiritual. It becomes something only in union with matter -- hence
it is always something since matter is infinite and indestructible
and non-existent without Spirit which, in matter is Life.
Separated from matter it becomes the absolute negation of life and being, whereas matter is
inseparable from it. . . . Spirit, life and matter, are not
natural principles existing independently of each other, but the effects
of combinations produced by eternal motion in Space . . .' (ML l58-9)
http://www.theosophy-nw.org /
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Christian
de Quincey is managing editor of IONS Review, and a
professor of philosophy and consciousness studies at John F.
Kennedy University. This article is adapted from his new book 