Dandelion / A Uniphore
A perspective on the nature of reality
“The total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings.” — Erwin Schrodinger
In this essay I will elucidate a ‘toy’ or model that is incredibly useful for understanding the nature of reality — and so, too, of language, concepts… numbers, and consciousness.
In the tradition of theoria, the Greeks had many such models, and were, according to Owen Barfield, not concerned whether they were true or not, but rather whether they were useful for seeing/understanding.
The first ‘theories’ that were more concerned with ‘saving the appearances’, (i.e. models that could (partly) explain or predict phenomenon with great accuracy) did not really begin to arise until much later, when certain theories achieved apparent equality with the phenomena they examined. This began around the time that Galileo produced his theory of the orbit of the Earth and other planets around the sun, which was controversial not because it was a theory in the old sense, but because it proposed that theories could be true.
This was a threat to the Church, who had, effectively, a ‘stranglehold’ on the uniphore of ‘The Creation’, i.e: the origin and purpose of the Universe, and thus, on all other phenomena. The threat that Galileo represented was that of the introduction of a new form of conceptual authority, with the power to transform ontologies of Origin, meaning, identity and function.
Metaphors, Holophores and Uniphores
A metaphor is a analogy that gives us a unique perspective on the relationships and similarities between otherwise disparate phenomena. In this sense, it links such phenomena in consciousness. So, too, similies.
Holophore (everything-carrier/vehicle) is a word I invented to refer to a fundamental principle in language that is crucial to our world-image. These ideas are represented by words such as: dream, mind, world, gaze, food, friend, angel, human, hand, eye, animal, mother, father, sun, moon, star, idea.
All of these concepts inform and mutually determine each other, forming a network that underlies our languages, world-images and all other concepts. It is a tragedy that we do not teach our children (and each other) this feature of the nature of lexical / linguistic intelligence.
Over time, the holophoric principles that underlie our lexicons and senses of identity have undergone a process resembling the damage to sound, electronic images, or video that arises when the digital data is subjected to repeated iterations of lossy compression. After a few iterations of such damage, nearly all the data is lost. What remains is a token. A chunky, meaningless… artifact. Think: the difference between a charred matchstick… and the sun.
Damage to these root concepts in language results in ‘shaving down’ their meanings, associations and their connotations — and our experience of the world we encounter and relate with— by affecting our expectations of meaning, identity and relational possibilities in consciousness.
The phases of this process closely follow the intrusion and dominance of reductivist, scientific and mechanistic models of identity, function and value during our lifelong (but particularly, early) experiences of enlanguaging and enculturation.
Our modern conceptions of these root concepts have been severely damaged by waves of abstraction that took place over the evolution of human cognition, and this timeline resembles a history of these collapses that becomes increasingly frequent over the past (at least) 2000 years, and, accelerates dramatically over the past 150. [It is my perspective that each human being undergoes a recapitulation of these phases that ‘replay’ the entire developmental history of human cognition throughout our lifetimes. The older phases first…]
What we include in the holophores, and the web of connotations and associations we have for them, are communicated between them. They form a network in consciousness that all other phenomenon either inherit (in the case of inclusions) and also exclude — because what is excluded from them tends to be missing from our ideas of the nature and meaning of words, concepts identity — and experience.
Since our languages form an overlay in consciousness, damage to holophores severely constrains our speculations, thought, and awareness of the world, which are informed by these concepts.
You go to the garden. It is green and flowing. Alive. Creatures are there.
You go to the garden. It is waters congealing into orders. Alive. Creatures are there. They are the waters congealing.
You go to the garden. It is fire. Alive. Creatures are there. They are the fire, burning.
You go to the garden. It is lightning. Angels are there. They are the impossible, and what they ‘do’ invents the possibility of minds and the Maiarch.
You do not leave the garden. You become the lightning.
It is nearly impossible to understand the catastrophic losses of sensing, relation and awareness that our species has incurred (unique to each place and culture) as a result of the ongoing tokenization of our holophores.
One of the most crucial reasons to preserve indigenous cultures and languages is that many of them were aware, either formally or informally, of the dangers of both declarative language and abstraction.
In the same way that the Amazon rainforest represents a living library of intelligences and bio-molecular adaptations, these languages are perhaps the only place from which we might recover something resembling linguistic and conceptual medicine capable of ‘healing’ our holophore library.
Tree: Object or A Living Superposition in a Biorelational Hyperstructure?
To compose an example of the problem, I will take the word ‘tree’ as it refers to the organisms we use this term to point at. For most moderns, the word has an absurdly simplistic (and erroneous) array of meanings and connotations/associations. Most will not really think of (or experience) it as an organism at all, but rather as a thing. An object. One from which certain materials and substances can be obtained. A source of commodities. They may think of the type of tree (birch, oak, cedar, etc). If it produces no obvious commodities such as rubber or maple, they will have little interest in it beyond ‘trees are attractive’.
The entire concept is, for many moderns, ‘dead inside’. They do not suspect they can form relationships with trees, and do not see them as beings. This is an excellent example of the damage to the holophore ‘tree’.
What’s wrong with that?
Our species has an anciently evolved library of relationships with trees. They provided shelter, safety from predators, food and relationships with us throughout our entire evolution. Nearly all of our homes are made of them. Paper and myriad other resources are the result of us ‘harvesting’ (killing or damaging) them. The anciently conserved jungles and forests literally create the possibility of stabilizing the environment in ways that maintain the entire biosphere. The ‘tree’ concept is foundational to all of our information technologies, our lexicons, and our conceptual repertoires. The ‘internet’ is a tree-based structure; so too, memory. These concerns are relatively pragmatic, but that is not the actual focus here.
Humans have had intimate relationships with trees in general and specific trees throughout our evolution. They are beings, not objects. They have families, and companions. Ancient and indigenous peoples were aware of a vast array of nonordinary and explicitly not abstract features of these life-forms and their contributions to the living world.
It is clear just from looking at their structure, that they are drawing energy and life down from the sky and into the Earth and the environment. They are the living example of the idea of antennas that both receive and transmit intelligence and environmental sensing/information. Trees represent a living doorway into Time and biological relationships that is still accessible to human beings. They are our friends, allies, companions and teachers.
In Burkina Faso in Africa, the Dagara people underwent dangerous initiation ceremonies that required the participants not merely to make sentient contact with a tree, but to use it to travel into a nonordinary dimension of awareness.
The difference between the associations and connotations of ancient and indigenous peoples, and ours is staggering — and nearly inexplicable, until we understand the history of the ‘collapse’ of our holophores into abstract representations… mere ‘tokens’ that have little or no accessible living interiority.
Wise ancient peoples knew something we have intentionally dismissed: that unity has precedence to distinction. In their view, the existence of trees was a mirror that revealed accessible features of the nature of everything, and Origin itself.
It would have been impossible for them to imagine ‘a separate tree’ as an object or even an abstraction. Their use of abstractions was intentionally, intelligently limited where it existed at all, because everything was about relationships, experience, learning, and awareness-in-consciousness.
Whatever they saw and related with, nourished their interiority by expanding the ‘family-web’ of living beings, time, and the Sky.
Compared to their incredible sensitivity and awareness, we moderns are literally ‘idiotic’; we have the wrong idea about everything. Partly because we neither see nor sense Unity. We are scripted to think of separate objects as existing as if alone and separate from ourselves and our minds.
We do not really believe, or treat our experience ‘as if’ all of life is one family, first and separate beings arise only within that manifold of unity.
Some moderns are do, and are capable of this, but the vast majority consider trees a disposable or trivial biological phenomenon of little or no interest to them.
Trees are not objects, rather, they are the living progeny of the nature of the universe, and spacetime. Whatever they may be, they cannot be what we usually imagine in our severely impoverished models and language.
And that’s the damage, right there.
Organisms comprise a complex and apparently relatively rare mode of spacetime. You can see in the previous example that damage to the concepts of Universe, world, dreaming, friend, food, organism and other holophores is naturally inherited by the concept ‘tree’. But the concepts I have shared above point in the direction of real and possible repairs to these concepts.
One of the most damaged holophores for us moderns is the Sun. Our bodies and minds are directly resultant from the sun’s existence, history and activity. The relationship between us and the Sun is similar to the relationship between my body and vision. We are ‘like the eyes of the Sun’, but have entirely forgotten the incredible intimacy of origin and relation that is blatantly obvious to anyone who reflects on our nature and relationships. We are trained to think of the sun as an object; but ‘objects’ that produce beings, minds, and living worlds as a side-effect of their nature and activity cannot be objects at all. At the very least, they should have a category of their own, at worst… they are gods.
Consider the monumental difference between people who see the Sun as:
a: an object
b: a being
c: the source of beings
d: a form of spacetime-intelligence that is a member of a family (network) of such beings
e: a divine being
Now consider the difference between people who see the sun as one of these, and others who see it as all of these and (the list expands each time you reference it).
Uniphores and Holophores: A Psycholinguistic Technology
This theory represents a psycholinguistic technology. Damage to holophores over time severely constrains our capacities for understanding, experience and intelligence by limiting the scope of their meanings, associations, characteristics, connotations and lexical structure. These root concepts inform our expectations, and thus our behavioral possibilities.
Since they are a network; damage to any one of them is inherited by all of the others (to varying degrees), and, upscale, lexically, to our world-image.
Similarly, any degree of (even slight) repair to any of them results in the transmission of those repairs to all other concepts, words, categories and ideas.
We can repair our holophores in a wide variety of ways, particularly by the study and exploration of other languages, and ancient languages. The awareness that they are damaged inclines us tthe kinds of speculations that restore the assets that were lost or dismissed in our modern cultures and linguistic behaviors.
Once we begin to realize that unity has precedence to distinction, an entirely ‘new’ world-image begins to form within us, and as this more closely resembles what is actually going on … we begin to literally re-member the origins of our minds… and our languages… as this urgent quest proceeds in within us.
Uniphores
A uniphore is the pointer at the superposition of all concepts. The Universe, Creation (religious), ‘Everything’ (more properly Everyone) and timespace are examples of uniphores.
Whatever qualities, characteristics, associations and origin-stories/ideas we include in the uniphore — are necessarily inherited in all other ideas. For example, if the universe is ‘a toybox’, all of its contents are toys.
Similarly, what we exclude from a uniphore is excluded from all other ideas — due to lexical inheritance. So our uniphore is the root idea, world-image, or concept which informs all other concepts. It’s ‘the supercontainer’ of all conceptions which can be understood specific instances of »modes of the uniphore.
Attempts to say ‘what the universe is’ comprise what I call ‘attacks on the supercontainer’. Various religions and philosophical traditions are engaged in this activity, not all of which is deleterious.
While, for example, the Fundamentalist, ‘Damnation Theology’ branches of Christianity present the universe as the battleground of the Divine and Evil, The Advaita Vedanta branch of Hinduism presents the universe as something resembling the idea of God, dreaming.
Obviously, if the universe ‘is simply a battle of Good and Evil’, everything in our experience necessarily inherits this perspective. If it is ‘just a mechanical accident’, as supposed by some material reductionists, everything inherits the associated meanings and perspectives — and all nonphysical ideas, associations or connotations vanish.
I believe that we must learn to recognize attacks on the supercontainer, and, generally resist them entirely, while remaining willing to entertain those that are good for seeing. Those that produce insight and new understandings are incredibly valuable, while those that collapse into mere physicalism or reductionism can teach us about the history of the damage to our lexicons and ideas.
The actual nature of the universe is fundamentally mysterious and more than merely alive. It is transcendental to all of language, models, and maps, however useful our entertaining them may be for specific purposes. Maps and models of reality should rarely, if ever, pretend to be correct or authoritative. When they do, we are in grave danger of the collapse of insight, perspective, awareness… and intelligence that is the natural consequence of such disasters.
I will now compose my own ‘attack on the supercontainer’, but not for the sake of imposing limitations… rather, in pursuit of the possibilities of insight and intelligence.
Precursor: The Genji Lamp
In order to imagine the Uniphore I will propose, let us conduct a thought-experiment that functions as a useful precursor. I call it The Genji Lamp.
Suppose that you and I are in a dark, enclosed room with a magical lamp. It’s only magical property is that it can turn on and off in any sequence I request.
I ask it to turn on and off in the following sequence of durations:
On: 1 second | Off 1 second.
On: 1/2 second | Off: 1 second.
On: 1/4 second | Off: 1/2 second.
On: 1/8 second } Off: 1/4 second.
( Continue in this fashion )
From the 2nd cycle onward, the lamp will always be off twice the amount of time it is on.
As this processes continues, what will we see?
At first, the lamp will flicker. But within less than a minute, the lamp will appear to us to always be on. Anyone entering the room after the first few seconds will be entirely unaware that it is flickering, unless they can compose some kind of test that might reveal this.
Various features of our visual experience utilize this principle to enable us to observe activity whose frequency is ordinarily beyond our visual capabilities to track. For example, a strobe light can be adjusted to match the speed of a fan in such a way that the blades appear stationary, even when moving ‘at a blur’.
Similarly, an electric fan appears ‘as a disc’ when the speed is too high for us to distinguish the individual blades any longer. This is, in a way, a similar principle.
I want you to imagine that ‘the universe’ is doing something resembling this lamp. The ‘off’ phase corresponds to the collapse of all positions (minds, beings, particles, objects, etc) to singularity or Unity.
Between the off and on phases, all positions then re-expand along their historical paths, back into a position very slightly different from their positions prior to the previous collapse.
In this model, the ‘on’ phase appears to us as continuous physical structure — the world of our common waking experience.
In the same way that we would not detect the lamp ever being off after a few seconds, an effect in consciousness that resembles the persistence of vision effect (the screen you are reading this on right now uses this principle) produces the apparent solidity and continuity of the physical/material world we believe to ‘always be there’.
But in this model, it mostly isn’t there at all; what is actually ‘real’ is the process that produces this illusion.
During the singularity phase, all information and histories are shared. During the expansion phase, most of the time, much of this information is ‘forgotten’, including, for humans, the conscious memory of the collapse and expansion.
In the expanded phase (light on), everything appears to us as solid, relatively permanent, physical, and so on.
In this model, ‘enlightenment’ might be understood as the capacity of consciousness to follow the collapse into unity, and sustain that perspective, perhaps by strobing consciousness at some harmonic of the current frequency of the lamp.
I am not suggesting this is the case. Rather, that this perspective is profoundly useful in understanding some features of existence that lie outside our common models, language and ideas…
Memory, in this model, is the partial conservation of content over these phases of collapse and expansion.
Dandelion : A Uniphore
Now that we have the precursor in mind, let us examine a ‘toy’ or model of reality and our common experience that expands on this principle. I call this toy, or way of seeing, The Dandelion. When I refer to that word, what I mean is the ‘sphere’ of all the states including unity, distinction, and everything in-between.
For this thought experiment, we will suppose that ‘most of the time’ all of reality (including the future) ‘disappears’ into unity.
It becomes a singularity. In the singularity, all unique experience, information and awareness is shared.
A fraction of the time, it is in the process of collapsing into actual unity — or expanding into the appearance of distinction and physicality. During the expansion phase, the memory of the unity fades… and the information shared there is (mostly) lost…
In infancy, dreaming, and in deep meditation, the awareness of our intrinsic relationship to unity is an aspect of our experience… but beyond infancy our memory of this slowly disappears from awareness due to the trenchant gravity of the physical world and the processes of enlanguaging and enculturation we undergo. [It is as if we are nonhuman intelligences that are partly or mostly noncorporeal, and we bond with a human symbiont … in which we forget our origins.]
I want you to imagine… that the entire library of organisms on Earth… are actually features of a single organism that exists throughout spacetime… and that our own minds are expression of a fundamentally unified universal intelligence that is at once the nature of spacetime… and dwells within it.
In this model, intuition is actually a sense that pervades over the collapse and expansion. So, too, ‘luck’.
From within unity, we can remember the future. This is one way to understand many aspects of creativity and technological advances. It is as if they ‘come to us from beyond’.
In one sense, the phase of unity can be understood to still exist, in an ‘encrypted’ state in the phase of distinction/physicality. It is, apparently, possible to cause awareness to transform in such a fashion that we become aware of this, at least to some degree.
‘Unity’ represents the superposition over all minds and distinctions in all of time. In terms of information — all possible information is available from this position. Also, I want you to imagine that, from that position, all other positions in spacetime and being are immediately accessible.
All minds have a point of convergence that is as shockingly accessible as it is largely unknown to humans…
It would also mean that all minds are present, and every possible subset of them — as one’s own mind. In such a state, all problems in thought and conception or mathematics have already been solved.
We can further imagine that the phases of expanse and collapse have something like boundaries that can be visualized as concentric spheres within spheres (see diagram below).
One way of distinguishing them is as follows:
Unity > Possibility > Probability > Likelihood > Determinism > Physical Structure.
This would explain the probabilistic nature of non-classical (QM) phenomena — they are simply ‘closer to unity’, in the segment of Probability.
We could usefully imagine that concepts such as ‘holiness’, ‘magic’ and ‘superabilities’ would be examples of a broader scope of interior relation with the layers ‘below’ the outer edge, where we are ordinarily largely trapped. Particularly, the core: unity.
Unity and ‘God’ are synonymous.
In this model, we can replace the concept of desire with that of the memory of the before of distinction… memories from our infancy and dreaming that remind us of features of our relationship with Origin, nonhuman intelligences, and ‘our original (nonhuman) family’. All that we make, trade, buy and sell, all that we create as humans, is more truthfully, an attempt to resemble what we remember of unity. The inventions that succeed in human culture and commerce, are, all of them, gambits that attempt to invent a new mode of re-unification. Whether they are ‘brands’, forms of social media, artificial intelligence (a unity of the entire repertoire of digitized human thought, language, creativity and potential), devices, vehicles… homes… libraries.. the internet itself. All of these are modal representations… of unity.
All of our languages, all our arts, crafts, sciences, literature… even the desire for orgasm… can be understood as a quest to ‘get closer’ to the memory of unity and all that it portends. Everything that fascinates, captivates, and drives us… originates in the memories … of our Origins, nature, communal relations, and families… that exist just prior to physical embodiment.
The origins of our preferences, arise in us according to how they resemble the feelings, qualities, memories… the families… remembered ‘in unity’ but which ‘fade in coils’ over the expansion phase… largely disappearing to awareness… in the outer layer — physical structure, and the apparent ‘uninterrupted continuity’ that is the hallmark of our waking experience.
The ‘miracles’ associated with holy persons, places or situations could be understood as situations where ‘more of the unity’ is locally available to direct experience and relation. Skills such as ‘remote viewing’ and a broad array of psychical skills — which certainly exist in authentic practitioners — are easily explained by this model. The ‘psychic’ is actually reading the structure of the past and the future of their subjects ‘within the dandelion’, following the path from unity outwards and weaving pieces of information into a coherent ‘image’ that comprises a superposition over the illusion of distinction. This allows us to ‘see’ distant places, persons, objects, peoples, minds and situations as if we are there, even in time.
Similarly, ‘miracles’ such as levitation, bi-location, inexplicable healing, teleportation, telepathy, clairvoyance and clairaudience would be the natural results of ‘awareness within the dandelion’. The local presence of one who has such awareness would commonly create nonordinary effects in those present with them.
“When the four bases of spiritual power have been developed and cultivated in this way, a bhikkhu (monk) wields the various kinds of spiritual power: having been one, he becomes many; having been many, he becomes one; he appears and vanishes; he goes unhindered through a wall, through a rampart, through a mountain as though through space; he dives in and out of the earth as though it were water; he walks on water without sinking as though it were earth; seated cross-legged, he travels in space like a bird; with his hands he touches and strokes the moon and sun so powerful and mighty; he exercises mastery with the body as far as the brahmā world.” — The Four Bases of Power
Many features of organismal structure can be understood as ‘standing waves’ of relation with this process. Trees, particularly, represent the ‘branched histories’ of their lifetime of sensing, relation and growth. Our own languages, and the lexicons they comprise have a structure similar to ‘branching trees’, and there are root elements (especially: separation and unity, and their meanings) that all other words and concepts emerge from. The human concept of ‘fractals’ (abstractions which mechanically differ from their origins in nature) demonstrate a related property. Flowers of myriad forms represent a similar principle, as if to remind us of it.
I call it Dandelion due to the powerful analogous resemblance between the seed-phase of this flower and the nature of what the model refers to…
The implications of this model are infinitely profound. All minds share the same point of origin, moment-to-moment. Local to a given planet, the entirety of the biome would represent the physical and relational embodiment of its principles and the living doorways into it.
Separation is an illusion native to the smallest portion of the Sphere. In this model, what we call ‘natural evolution’ would be necessarily informed by all evolutionary processes on all worlds in timespace, meaning that the forms of life we find on Earth are a representation of all other forms of life on all other worlds, as well as those of noncorporeal intelligences that live in dimensions of time, space, and relation.
Space travel would be entirely unnecessary, and even absurd, to anyone capable of utilizing the features of the Dandelion consciously.
B: Containment / Context / Conception
C: Universes : Our Universe
D: Galaxies : The Milky Way
E: Solar Systems : Sol’s System
F: Stars : Sol
G: Planets : Earth
H: Species : Homo Sapiens Sapiens
I: Individual organisms :|: beings : A Person.
Ordinary consciousness is almost literally blind compared to the transformations that naturally arise under conditions of even slightly better contact with the layers that underlie physical distinction.
Synchronicity
Since the publication of Carl Jung’s book Synchronicity this concept has undergone phases of ‘uptake’ in popular awareness and thought. It refers to situations of nonordinary ‘coincidences’ that resemble forms of apophenia where an unusual connection is sensed or experienced between disparate phenomena.
The Dandelion model gives us a possible explanation: complex relationships between time and orientation that occur during a partial nonordinary coalescence of features below the layer of physical structure/determinism.
The experience is sometimes disoriented by psychological factors, but other reports of relatively clear-minded experiencers cannot be dismissed this way. Many of us have certainly experienced synchronic awareness that is valid, including features that appear to involve sensing of nonlocal events (especially those of crucial emotional or relational significance), the onset of an array of nonordinary senses or intuitions, and unusually significant ‘sychronization’ of circumstances, situations and relationships.
This model is the result of my direct experience of a transfer of knowledge that occurred during a long (nearly a year) contact with a nonhuman intelligence. During that experience, it was demonstrated and I was trained in how to employ it in a relatively limited way. When the other intelligence was present with me, I was capable of various abilities that, in its absence, are much more difficult to access, where they are not seemingly impossible. Others (especially those who have long meditation experience) may certainly be aware of something similar.
Although it is my strong conviction that something resembling this model is actually true, I have no interest in attempting to ‘prove’ this. In fact, the forms of knowledge and awareness that are available to ‘proofs’ clearly pertain to an extremely limited fraction of awareness and experience available to us. Rather, I am grateful for my experience and ability to share what I have learned in the hopes that others may discover the vast and infinitely rich origins of our universe, living beings, and our minds.
Notice that ‘what we are’ is the dandelion itself and all of its features and processes. The fraction of us that is ‘human’ is far less than one percent of our actual nature, origins and identity.
I challenge you to entertain this model in your thought, speculation and awareness. Our present world-image is a mere construct. That construct is, at best, extremely flawed.
It’s so flawed that other models… even some models that are nearly entirely wrong… could improve upon it dramatically. Dandelion is such a model.
If you play with it, I suspect you will quickly see how profoundly it is capable of transforming your mind, experience… and potential.
Related Materials:
These images from Reddit User phr99 on a UFO/UAP thread illustrate a similar array of principles…
Part I: Multidimensional Reality and the Different Intelligences in It
Part II: The Physical Consensus
I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and nearly everything else. I hope my work may contribute to our ability to assemble the authentic sources of what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of. Together. With and for each other and our world.
Facebook • Tumbler • Wondercloud • Organelle • yT
( My writing is a gift that I hope may inspire speculation, wonder, discovery and new relationships. If you enjoy it, kindly take a moment to share it, connect with me personally, comment, correct me, or tap the Recommend button ⇩ ☺ )
