A Ladder With Nothing In Between

[TJ Reeves]

I found two great songs by a little-known musician named Stuart Davis. One of them is featured in the Audiobook Kosmic Consciousness with Ken Wilber, which I will put a review of later.

Ladder

The first song is called "Ladder." It's a lovely song about our personal and species-wide evolution and the natural clash with psychological entropy. That is, as we grow more complex as individuals and as a species, we also have more stuff that can topple us. 

I've got brains
like antique floors
I built each one
on the one before
I use all three
but they don't agree

One of them
wants to love you
Another one
would love to club you
I guess my old natures
move like glaciers

Chorus:
The fish became a lizard
The shrew became an ape
Will the ape become an angel?
The higher that we climb
The more the ladder sways

I'm the bastard child
the one who got
the head of Einstein
and the soul of Pol Pot
there's no compassion
but I can split the atom

Better give me a microscope
for a different eye
Better give me a telescope
for the inward sky
and a ladder leading
up from Eden

Chorus

If Ramana Maharshi
came from clay
there's more to evolution
than a little DNA

Cut off the moorings
to the inward ark
Aiming it into
a question mark

The fish became a lizard
The shrew became an ape
will the ape
become a Mother Teresa?
She came from clay
There's more to evolution
than a little DNA

Personal Commentary:

Ladder bases itself off of the integral idea of Holarchy. Holarchies are made out of Holons. A holon refers to the something being both a whole and a part with no actual distinction between itself and other whole/parts other than arbitrary measures. Each holon is a system (or phenomenon) that is an evolving self-organizing dissipative structure, composed of other holons, whose structures exist at a balance point between chaos and order.

Higher level holons are always at a more precarious position than lower level holons. This goes for physical objects, ecological systems, psychological stages, social organizations, and even spiritual development. 

With reference to holarchical human development, Alan Watts serves to help us see the issue:

"how is man to be best related to his environment? Especially in circumstances where we are in possession of an extremely powerful technology and have, therefore, the capacity to change our environment far more than anyone else has ever been able to do so. Are we going to end up not by civilizing the world, but by Los-Angelizing it? In other words, are we going to foul our own nest as a result of technology?

But all this gets down to—the basic question is, really, what are you going to do if you’re god?

If, in other words, you find yourself in charge of the world, through technological powers, and instead of leaving evolution to what we used to call, in the 19th century, the blind processes of nature—that was begging the question, to call them blind—but at any rate, we say, we’re not going to leave evolution to the blind forces of nature but now we’re going to direct it ourselves.

Because we are increasingly developing, say, control over genetic systems, control over the nervous system, control over all kinds of systems; uh then, simply, what do you want to do with it?"

This song responds to Watts inquiry by pointing out that Perhaps there is a universal Telos. That there is a point to all of this and the despite the hemming and hawing and guffawing that we know as human violence and suffering, it works out in the end such that we become the gods that oversee us. We made a universe that is perfect for ourselves, despite seeming otherwise. Creating Heaven is Heaven.

Watts echoes this sentiment at the end of his own lecture.

What is your idea of heaven? What would you really like to have happen, if you could make it happen?  That’s the first thing that really starts people thinking because you soon realize that a lot of the things you think you would want are not things you want at all.

Supposing, just for the sake of illustration, that you had the power to dream every night any dream you wanted to dream. And you could, of course, arrange for one night of dreams to be seventy-five years of objective time, or any number of years of subjective time, what would you do?

Well, of course, you’d start out by fulfilling every wish. You would have routs and orgies and uh uh all the most magnificent food and uh sexual partners and everything you could possibly imagine in that direction.

When you got tired of that, after several nights, you’d switch a bit, and find yourself involved in adventures, and uh contemplating great works of art, fantastic mathematical conceptions; you would soon be rescuing princesses from dragons, and all sorts of things like that.

And then one night you’d say, now look, Tonight what we’re gonna do is, we’re going to forget this dream is a dream. And we’re going to be really uh shocked, and when you woke up from that one you’d say, ‘Oooh, wasn’t that an adventure!’

-----

Nothing In Between

The second song is called Nothing in Between. It is a wonderful tome about Nothingness, aka God.

There is nothing in between us when we sleep
Every night the bliss begins to leak
Nothing in between us when we laugh
it’s something that our head will never grasp
It’s seen in between

There’s nothing in between your joy and mine
It’s all a lot of nectar on the vine
Joy is how my parents were entwined
and there’s nothing in between their lives and mine
We’ve seen

There’s nowhere to hide in the open Reality
Love is so wide, there isn’t a boundary
There is only one eye without any enemy
when you’ve seen in between

There’s nothing in between our skin and light
Nothing in between the wind and kite
Nothing in between our lips and grace
Nothing in between the tongue and taste
It’s seen

(Refrain)

There is nothing in between you and I
Nothing in between blue and sky
Nothing in between us and love
Nothing in between wings and doves

(Refrain)

There is nothing
in between

Personal Commentary:

This song struck me as a great way of pointing to non-distinction.

This morning as I meditated using Headspace, I was instructed to feel that the center of creativity deep in my heart.

I was then asked to extend my awareness of that center past my chest and to my whole skin. From there I was asked to expand this awareness to the walls around me.

From there I extended it to my whole apartment complex... The City of LA... Earth... The Solar System... The Galaxy... The Virgo Cluster... The Laniakea SuperCluster... The whole Observable Universe that seems to form a universal Brain/mind complex...

Then I pushed further - I asked what would be beyond that -- where is that universal brain? And I kept pushing outwards to see the next order of fractalization... and what came up was me!

That is, I saw that cosmic brain complex residing in my own head or another version of me or maybe an alien or maybe some computer who itself resides in some version of the city of LA which is itself on some version of earth... And so on for all of eternity outwards.

And so on for all of eternity inwards as well!

Which is to say, I can't describe it as One because it has no end or beginning to its outwardness and inwardness. And to call something one, it must reach an outward and inward end.

I could call it zero because it has no ground, but it's clearly here and now. 

"  _____?!?!NOTHING?!?!______ " is all I that can be said about it.

There's me =  you = everything, which breaks down into ____!?nothing?!?!____ upon further investigation.

There's ___!?!nothing?!?____ between physical material and conscious object. 

There's ___!?!nothing?!?_____ between past and future. It all happens Now - the only place that remains Absolutely unchanged EXCEPT that its also Absolutely Relative as proven by Einstein. 

There's ___!?!nothing!?___ between me and you. 

There's just ____!?!nothing??!___ between anything.

There is no distinction. There no such thing as a thing-without-some-other-thing which means that there is No thing-other-than-the-whole-thing which means I cannot point to any-one-thing as-itself in-and-of-itself other than ___!?!nothing?!?____ . This is the Holarchical perspective. 

----

Putting the ideas of both songs together we can intuit a holarchical ladder with nothing in between. We see an universe of other universes with no part distinct from other parts as it builds itself and destroys itself at the same time - Now - in a fashion that is relative to the timeline of each observer. This universe would:

•  know all from a wide perspective
• and it would know all from a limited perspective - the one "we" see out of in our everyday understanding. Indeed, in knowing all it would know what it is like to not-know it all. 
• It is from each one of these limited perspectives that the wide perspective gets generated.  
• The manifestation of such wide perspective gives universal purpose. It would be a wild adventure. 

Edited August 22, 2017 by TJ Reeves