Just a random collection of thoughts… I’ve been collecting ideas and reflecting on the past 15-ish years of my own question-and-answer research.
When I got started with meditation and had my first set of psychic experiences, I wanted to have it blend and make sense with the rest of the things I was learning in school (since it happened while I was still in high school). So trying to make conceptual ends meet has kept me on a somewhat compulsive track of research for a while.
The easy things to find are the New Agey things which jump to quantum theory and relativity to try and make sense of spiritual ideas. This generally doesn’t work because scientific theory only provides a formal description of observable things—and, if it doesn’t do that, it provides a conceptual tool for guessing about behaviors.
I could probably write multiple books about the sketchy concepts and thought processes that have gone into the development of relativity theory and quantum theory. But, to make a long story short, the New Agey ideas that get connected to these theories really only have a link because the theories represent empirical horizons. Relativity links to things that are either too big or too fast to observe directly, and quantum theory applies to things that are too small to observe directly (and is basically a form of applied statistics that guesses at where a particle may be). Hence (when you can’t see what’s going on) it’s easy to fill things in with your imagination.
So the common ideas for blending science and spirituality didn’t work out for me, they all seemed too naive and ignorant. I had then gone in two directions—a rationalist search and an empiricist search.
The rationalist search traversed the field of logic, mathematics, and notation. I had high hopes when looking at the works of Chris Langan and the CTMU, which would reduce everything to language. As a theory of formal languages, it definitely works. But, a bunch of highly contestable ideas are basically side-loaded into the theory right at the start and are taken as starting principles. That’s an effective rhetorical move, if you want to sneak in some unfounded ideas and then get people to accept them due to the robustness of the structure that has been assembled from them. But, I couldn’t accept it due to his rather uncritical acceptance of Wheeler’s it-from-bit. --And so, my view of the rationalist side of things slipped back into a Carnappian pluralism (where the math and logic can be neat things to explore on their own, but they say more about our thought processes/ideas and less about reality).
**I then went to the empirical side. There are a lot of interesting ideas and writings from the likes of Ernst Mach and Pierre Duhem–they, in fact, spawned an interesting group of people who were highly rigorous in their critique of mathematical theories and their related semantics. The electrodynamics of Maxwell and Heaviside (for example) are taken as the final word on electricity and magnetism by a lot of people. However, when closely analyzed, it is found they they gloss over unique empirical features of electricity. There are, in fact, newtonian electrical properties which don’t fit well into Maxwell’s theory. These elements can be found in the work of Weber and Coulomb and have been explored also in some works related to Helmholtz, Hertz, Duhem, Tesla and Steinmetz. --The limits of the Maxwell-Heaviside approach to electrodynamics also have modern relevance to security concerns with our electrical grid. In the work of Eric Dollard, it is mentioned that our overly simplified mathematics for electricity has caused laziness in our engineering and we no longer have countermeasures to the “Transients” (aberrant harmonics in the electrical current)—as a result, we are more vulnerable to natural disturbances as well as EMP weapons. There are also probably connections between this and Bearden’s work on Scalar dynamics.
**This is important because a number of the contested/contestable ideas from electrodynamics were inherited by relativity and quantum theory and have resulted in potential blocks and mis-directions in contemporary research.
Anyways, these ideas basically bring back the Aether theories. I’ve even encountered a writer on Vedic physics who was rabidly opposing the new age ideas related to science and spirituality because they basically gutted Vedic thought and removed the range of dynamics that show up with the atoms and elemental properties.
So all of that was interesting to me. And, when I encountered the concept of morphic fields here, it seemed to bring it all together. If there is an aether and it has electrical properties that are influenced by spatial configuration properties, then it is the interplay of existing force-configurations and the imposed changes to those force-configurations that creates the dynamic image of reality that we have.
With basic properties like that, it becomes an anti-reductive paradigm. All of the forms stand on their own exactly as they are. There’s just more to all of them than I recognized at the outset of my inquiry.
I always have an ongoing paranoia about information that I may be missing or ideas that I may need to adjust. But that’s a neat concept scheme and it seems to go full circle.