INTRODUCTION:

In this issue we explore our relationship with 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 many fold aspects of Mother/Matter.

Enjoy!

"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

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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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 Radical Nature: Rediscovering the Soul of Matter (Invisible Cities Press, 2002). Samples of his work in consciousness and cosmology are available on his website www.deepspirit.com.

Courtesy of the Institute of Noetic Science website

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

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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  From the Praxis Peace Institute Conference
  Dubrovnik, Croatia
  Sunday, June 9, 2002

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

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. 

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Source: Cross Currents, Spring 1998, Vol. 48 Issue 1.
http://www.crosscurrents.org/smith.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

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

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 

http://www.theosophy-nw.org/

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