In this chapter I will show how the mental realisation that everything is reductively the same can form the basis for an experiential union with reality.
Thusfar this book has treated the following chapters:
Part 1 Prolegomena.
The Star Trek of the Soul (poem)
Chapter 1 An introduction into Transcendental Metaphysics
Chapter 2 The Anta and Amrita of Technovedanta
Chapter 3 An Anthology of Bloom: A Solution to “The God Problem”
Chapter 4 The Substance of Emptiness
Chapter 6 A new Measure of Order and Chaos
Chapter 7 The boundaries of Infinity
Chapter 8 Find your Soulmate: Memetic alignment for psychological profiling
Chapter 9 The 15th meta-invention: The invention generator
The Quagmire of Ontological Disambiguation (a poem)
Now I will discuss Ontological Disambiguation in Meditation.
Background
Ontologies are taxonomical lists describing phenomena in terms of Species, Categories, Attributes, Relations, Functions, Restrictions, Rules, Axioms and Events. In fact all knowledge is a form of ontology. It constitutes the mental representation of what is perceived to be an object by the filters of the senses and the mind. An ontology per definition needs at least two elements, for otherwise it does not have enough elements to discriminate itself from anything else. It is therefore per definition minimally a so-called "didensity".
To know or identify a thing we use ontological categorisation. This takes place via perception of differences between phenomena and leads to abstractions on a meta-level, which can be strategically used to improve the survival chances of an entity.
The very process of abstracting patterns which are grounded in a multiplicity of singleton experiences, allows us to keep the essential in our memory and discard the non-essential, thereby forgetting non-relevant information. Ideally we "learn" that a set of co-occurring essential conditions leads to an effect and we store this as a cause-effect relation, which in the future we can use to predict the outcome of a certain event or to devise a strategy to advantageously employ the benefits thereof or conversely to avoid the detrimental effects thereof.
In fact this process of abstraction or pattern recognition is what enables living creatures including us to deal with the world in a meaningful manner: When comparing to phenomena we can conclude that they belong to a similar class or category if they share a significant number of correspondences or similarities, whereas a preponderance in differences may lead us to conclude that phenomena belong to different categories. Thus we taxonomically "determine" or "identify" a species, which is called "recognition". We cognise it again, because it resonates with the ontological structure we had built in our mind.
Ontological Disambiguation - but not as you know it
When you meditate on an object, you also do this in the first two stages, but you also do the opposite: You look for universal unity between the ontologies you have defined and you arrive at a kind of "ontological disambiguation", although not in the traditional meaning of the terminology.
In the traditional meaning a homonym is disambiguated by explaining its different meanings. In the meditational process the inverse occurs: The sameness of seemingly different instances is revealed, thereby taking away ambiguity.
Patanjali describes this in his Yoga Sutras in the topic of Samprajnata Samadhi (I.17: ) in conjunction with the Stadia of Gunas: Visesha, Avisesha, Linga, Alinga which correspond with consciousness state of Vitarka, Vicara, Ananda, Asmita.
1) Visesha means special: first you detect a single instance of a species and you identify all its ontological characteristics.
2) Avisesha means universal: Then you identify the class/category to which species belongs: Abstraction. This process is looped until you arrive at 3).
3) Linga means Glyph, Symbol. You provide the Universal with an identification Tag. This is a higher abstraction above level 2); According to Vivekananda it also entails realisation as to the material of which object is made. If you loop this realisation to ever finer material sates you end up in 4).
4) Alinga means without signifier. The objects fade, because you realise and experience it is all made of the same sat-chit-ananda energy-consciousness-bliss. The mental realisation fulfills you with awe and propels you into an experiential meditational state, in which -ideally- you become "one" with the object and merge at the highest level with the essence of being-experiencing-manifesting itself. Physical manifestations that accompany this state are currents of energy going up and down your spine, you shiver and your hair stands on one end. Your heart is filled with an energetic fullness, which is hard to describe in words. Some people even have visual experiences of light and/or concrescent energy streams.
Ultimately, meditation is then doing the opposite of what is needed to survive in the external world.
This four step process is very similar to Christopher Langan's "syndiffeonic analysis" in his “Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe”.
As already mentioned before, Langan's analytical tool is the so-called syndiffeonesis. To remind you: Reality is a syndiffeonic (“difference-in-sameness”) relation just as any other relation: Any assertion to the effect that two things are different implies that they are reductively the same: the difference or relation map can be described in quantities of terms/qualities they have in common. The differences and correspondences build the ontology.
Said in other words: All phenomena have a relation, which can be expressed in terms of how they differ from each other. Yet this difference is written in a common language quantifying the differences of qualities they have in common. If you do this recursively as regards the differences between differences of relations etc. eventually you arrive at a sameness of all things which form reality together.
The mere fact that the difference can be linguistically or geometrically expressed implies the difference is only “partial” and both “relands” (the relational aspects of each of the ontologies) are manifestations of one and the same.
In other words, syndiffeonesis is nothing else than the first three steps of Patanjali's recipe for meditation. Langan concludes that the ultimate nature of the linking unity is a process called "Infocognition". However, Patanjali does go beyond Langan's system in Patanjali's step 4 where the absolute medium is revealed and experienced from which the relationary network is built: Consciousness itself, which can manifest via the process of "Infocognition" but also transcends that concept in the blissful state where nothing is manifested yet bliss is experienced.
Pancomputational and/or Panpsychic Reality?
Any didensity or ontology is ultimately reducible to what we'd call digital computer code. Therefore some people tend to believe we're living in some sort of simulation. However, duality alone does not provide solely to the world as it is. Exist (ex-sist) means to "stand out". To stand out from what? From the underlying reality, the subsistent absolute Hypostasis from which everything is made: Consciousness. Thus an alternative to living in a simulation is that is that existence is a form of living self-organising protocomputation in the medium of consciousness.
If every energetic relation is information and if consciousness underlies every phenomenon, this fits the concepts of hylozoism or panpsychism: Every self-organised (autopoietic) system is then alive even at the level of atomic and subatomic particles.
In fact existence always is a manifestation of a polarity, a duality or a didensity. It is an interference pattern of waves, a proximity co-occurrence of mutual experience. When two waves collide and interfere they establish a relation; they have an overlap and an exchange of information. And thereby they establish a meaningful relationship called meaning. The same is true in semantics. Any two concepts which contextually meet each other establish a contextual meaning together.
This is also exemplified by the double-slit experiment in physics: If single photons are not detected at the double slits through which they go, this creates an interference pattern, and a wave nature of photons is concluded. But if they are detected at one of the slits it does not create such a pattern and a particle nature is concluded. In other words there is a mutual recognition between the detector at the slit and the photon to be detected. When their respective energies collide and communicate upon proximity co-occurrence, the photon becomes fixed in its pathway by their mutual interference and a particle is observed at one of the slits, namely the slit it was attracted to. If not observed at the slit, no energy is sent from the detector, so the photon either passes as a wave through the two slits and interferes with itself or goes through one slit but then interferes with the resonant patterns of its past predecessors or future followers, because within a photon, there is no time. In chapter 1 of part 2 I will discuss yet another possible explanation.
In other words wave collapse occurs upon mutual recognition of sensing energies, establishing a didensity, geometrical space and particularity. If no detection takes place, the wave is in a state of eternity where there is no time and space: It is always everywhere.
Wave collapse establishes an event and a thing. It establishes space, time and matter. Time of material phenomena is merely a measure of the self-convolution of the created polarity: A dance between two spheres, like the Moon and Earth, like a proton and an electron.
Because primordial Consciousness (i.e. the consciousness immanent in everything) connects everything it is the ultimate glue. It can be considered as the Love that binds everything together.
Illusory landscapes
Things and instances are in fact an illusion. There is only the One consciousness wave in which interference patterns emerge at its surface. Everything which we call a thing or a being, is essentially without dimension, it is everywhere, always. It is a whole in a whole: a Fractal of wholes. Only our senses distort reality in that they focus on parts of the whole. They try to make sense out of transient interference patterns and thereby create a distorted vision which we call "reality". But everything that exists changes and has therefore as such no independent and ultimate reality: It means that the contexts change and also the content of the ontology. How can it then still be the same? It was transient and therefore ultimately illusory. Not so the Hypostatic primordial consciousness: It is always the same. The content of (our) consciousness can however change: That is called mindstuff (thoughts, emotions). Think of a world in which everything is made of clay (as a metaphor for hypostatic consciousness): The clay is always the same, but you can make an infinite variety of forms with it. The forms stand out, exist from the underlying truth which is the subsistent clay.
Mind and matter are ultimately the result of the same process of infocognition establishing meaning, particularities and spacetime coordinates. Thus matter could also be considered as some form of "mind" resulting from Cosmic ideation i.e. living self-organising protocomputation in the medium of consciousness.
In part 2 we will see how these notions that hint towards pancomputationalism can be harboured in a complete philosophy and how they can find their technological application in a Webmind.
Conclusion
You have seen in this chapter how when in meditation the process of “ontologising” is carried out in reverse, the mental realisation thereof prompts your Mind to shut down. Then the unity of all things as a manifestation of primordial consciousness as underlying reality can be experienced. This is Bliss, the most rewarding experience of completeness and union with everyone/everything.
By Technovedanta a.k.a. Antonin Tuynman.
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