THEURGY 1

WHY NOT THEURGY?
And What Is It, Anyway?
Iona Miller, (c)2018

"The practice of magic consists in making what is not understood understandable
in an incomprehensible manner." ~Carl Jung, The Red Book

"At last I discovered that they [The East] call the unconscious consciousness,
indeed enlightenment." ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 204.

"Seeing into darkness is clarity.
Knowing how to yield is strength.
Use your own light and return to the source of light.
This is called practicing eternity."
--Lao Tzu

INTRODUCTION

"The creation of the world becomes the archetype of every human gesture, whatever its plane of reference may be. Every construction or fabrication has the cosmogony as paradigmatic model." --Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane

Like our Medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment counterparts, we are rightly concerned with the true nature of reality. Philosophies and rituals evolve over time. The 'New Renaissance' paradigm recognizes an urgent need for change and multidimensional renewal in a period of crisis for philosophy, the arts, science, and society. Our awareness allows us to confront and engage the symbolic dimension of the imaginal.

The great enigmas of our existence remain the riddle of matter, the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the human mind or consciousness (including supramental activity). Post-metaphysical philosophy has become a matter of therapy and discovery. We are looking at them now as self-organizing, open systems beyond the individual self, appearing as the phantasmagoria of the unconscious.

Consciousness, dimensions, and infinity consciousness are divine forces. Extended consciousness and the laws of nature impact and influence us and we are impacting and influencing there -- a greater capacity for life and creation.

Phenomenology investigates the consciousness-self as lived experience. Deeper understanding comes only through direct experience which kindles the light of knowledge. In modern terms, it concerns ego-transcendence into cosmic selfhood. Self, a dynamic multiplicity, is the unifying archetype and the organizing principle of Psyche.

Archetypal Cosmos

“Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists...
But 'the heart glows,' and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being.” --C.G. Jung

We are philosophers; we seek wisdom. We are in a romance with the Cosmos, the dark hunting ground of the Unknown. What is reality and what is it to be a human being? Like pandisciplinarian research, natural philosophy explores the cosmos by any means necessary to understand the universe. Form maps onto meaning. Nature is integrated biological wisdom. 

Theurgy, natural magic, is the intuitive handmaiden of natural philosophy, a conscious experiential approach. Theurgy allows the soul to participate in creation as a co-evolving, co-creative presence in spiritual practice and psychological inquiry. The felt presence of direct experience is direct experience of felt Presence.

Consciousness experience is constructive in the sense that it is the result of ongoing self-organizing and self-creating (autopoietic) processes. The combined effect is an 'associational trance,' accomplished through associational strategies which access experiential responses.

We either consciously or unconsciously co-create the world we cognize. In the transcendental sense the word “world” signifies the absolute totality of the sum total of existing things. Self , (the stateless state prior to thoughts, memory, emotions, associations, perceptions, attention or intentions), increases while ego diminishes within the intentional relational field.

What is driving our psychology? What is the one concept that organizes everything in our
life? Disidentification clears the content of consciousness so we can celebrate the Self (multivocal dialogical nature).

Lived experience includes both self-referencing and no-self-referencing states of mind. Only self-referencing contains the constitutional shifts reflecting major changes in development and health. The indivisible continuum of life is a therapeutic premise.

It's not enough to just have a philosophical discussion. We extract from the code what it is we are to be doing. It's not what we learn but the doing that matters. Real magic is the imaginal power of the psyche, divine inspiration. It is a natural acquisition of human development, refinement of the soul, the spirit of fluid movement, expanded consciousness.

Consciousness, self-organization and information are connected at the level of semantic significance. Transpersonal consciousness, interconnects nonlocally in a participatory holistic and indivisible way with all levels of the universe. The unconscious is a source of latency, ingenious expressions of natural intelligence, indeterminacy, and pure potential.

"That is how we should understand the pleroma, the fullness, which is the origin of the existence of the world, where everything is contained but in potentia, as a possibility, anything can come out of it." (Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pg. 254).

What is the potential of awareness? Are we entangled with all minds? Is there a collective unconscious? What is the focus of consciousness, attentive awareness, and role of intention? How does it relate to the information of perception and objects of perception?

What is objective and what is subjective? What are the roles of learning, habits, and phenomenology, the distinctions of perception and reality, positive and negative feedback? Is consciousness always unchangeably subjective, while information and the energy fields that carry it are always unchangeably objective? 

Theurgy is an integral art, rather than integral knowledge, opening doors into the realm of the collective unconscious. It clarifies ways of dealing with this primordial ocean, full of dangers and creative potentials. It presumes  an engaged spirituality transforms the world and that the world can exercise an influence on the foundational structures of human consciousness.

As transitional objects, symbols are the origins of works of art and the life of the mind. Magical consciousness is an associative mode of thought, a compliment to rational analysis. Theurgy generates and integrates patterns of experience, connected living systems within a timeless matrix, a phenomenological map of the “cosmic man.”

The first lesson in magic is to “Know thyself,” after the Delphic oracle: "My advice to you, whoever you may be, Oh you who desire to explore the Mysteries of Nature; if you do not discover within yourself that which you seek, neither will you find it without. If you ignore the excellence of your own house, how can you aspire to find excellence elsewhere? Within you is hidden the treasure of treasures. Oh Man! Know thyself, and you will know the universe and the Gods." (Temple of Delphi)

Characterized by its diffuse and holistic orientation and sense of permeability of boundaries between material and non-material perceptions of reality, magical consciousness leads to a certain “knowing with others.”

Al-Jili (Jili, 1983), the 12th century Sufi, says: "Each individual of the human species contains the others entirely, without any lack, his [her] own limitation being but accidental... For as far as the accidental conditions do not intervene, individuals are, then, like opposing mirrors, in which one fully reflects the other..." (p. xxv)

Mythical figures are eternal metaphors of the imagination, the dynamics of psychic reality. 
Consciousness of archetypes extends the limitations of our observations and knowledge base. This is the looking-glass of the soul, our imaginal interface with the divine and the laws of form.

The Cosmic Sublime

A cosmic sublime implies a noetic or global consciousness. The 'cosmic sublime' is an aesthetic ideal of a grandeur captured by a cosmic perspective, a sublime glimpse of cosmic power. It can be obtained from contemplating phenomena of a planetary scale, as well as the emotions associated with experience of the sublime -- unrepresentable grandeur.

Likewise, Cosmic Consciousness is grand, sublime, and beyond description. The mind and speech return from it baffled. This divine cosmology reflects an infinite cosmic space perpetually expanding into the exhilarating infinite.

Our awe of the sheer power of the universe is a transcendental engagement with space. The mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other. The passion aroused by the great and sublime in nature is astonishment.Understanding is the inner sense to which the outer senses are connected.

Kant said that as an earnest exercise of the imagination, the sublime permits the mind to go beyond limiting sensibility. The cosmic forces affecting human inner and outer senses are represented in the concepts of human understanding and in the ideas of human reason. All life “belongs to a single cosmic, dynamic system,” subject to a cosmological system of forces or primordial matter.”

What could be more simply magical than art which can continue to exert its influence and grandeur over centuries? The evolution of art styles through historical art cultures demonstrates the evolution of consciousness. 

The sublime works both in human art and cosmic nature. As an aesthetic category, the cosmic sublime provides a vantage point for us to view how the human mind confronts and conceptualizes grandeur of an infinite dimension. A Taoist approach merges the aesthetic subject with the primal simplicity.

The cosmic sublime arising from a material point of origin rather than the rhetorical is more sublime. A spectrum runs from painful finite experience of the cosmos to joyful ideas of the vastness of space.

Transcendence becomes immanence, thinking in terms of cosmic space. Energy, matter, and time are rendered transcendent in the cosmos, beyond space and time, beyond the Big Bang singularity, beyond ourselves, and narratives of spiritual transcendence.

Do we need this transdisciplinary approach for a better understanding of both Nature and human arts? Why is aesthetics more related and applicable to cosmology than other divisions of metaphysics? One arguments is that cosmology is not solely metaphysical but must relate to physics for the completeness of its conceptual representations. 

There is am inherent relation between aesthetics and cosmology. Aesthetics investigates the appearance of physical objects, human understanding, sense-intuitions, and sensory perceptions. The source of any aesthetic concept arises in the way cosmic forces communicate human inner and outer senses.

We need a simultaneous transition between the sensible and supersensible realms for the completeness of human understanding. We apprehend transition only when the moving forces do not exceed our intellectual or intuitive capacities. Our sense-intuitions and understanding can't apprehend and conceptualize any motion beyond our imaginative capacity.

Poetic approaches claim contact with the gods for inspiration, passion, and poetry -- a flight of the mind, generating thoughts of the sublime. Poetry can create a sense of transcendence, grandeur and the infinite, through which we can penetrate the very heart of the universe and confront its immensity, even if those depths are overhead.

The sublimity is of the depths within heights or the bottomless heights. We stare down into the abyssal void where it all takes place. Infinity opens out into a vast depth, the innermost treasure of the sky, concealing nothing in any direction. 

Jung suggested myth is a revelation of the divine life in humanity, our unconscious grasp of the history of the world, the wild energies of creation, and our sense of embodiment. There are interdependent unconscious neural, phenomenological, and cognitive levels of embodiment.

Mind is not separate from bodily experience, but is naturally more than our conceptual experience. It is irrational. nonlinear, and entangled. There are no consistent level-independent truths. Even embodied truth is not absolute, objective truth, nor does it need to be but it allows us self-reflection.

Magic is a mytho-poetic irrational aspect of consciousness with its own form of reason -- associative thought, understood as a form of knowledge in its own right. What is going on when we communicate with spirits, divine the future or heal the sick? How can magic, as a mode of consciousness, be examined while avoiding the polarization of materialistic reduction and an uncritical belief in spiritual presence?

Lévy-Bruhl tried to described mystical mentality in terms of participation mystique, a mytho-poetic attitude with multi-leveled analogical relationships, a metaphorical holism with its own 'logic'-- a correspondence between phenomena. It is direct experience of the co-existence and identity of things that critical thinking would separate.

The two type of thought are present in all societies -- in pop terms, left and right brain thinking, a reasoning in different categories. Symbolically rich rituals amplify right-brain processing, the alternative consciousness of magical thinking. The psychological approach to such material is to engage it as an 'as if' reality, including autonomous personifications.

Pablo Neruda spoke of a literary genre, magical realism, a genre of narrative fiction, art (literature, painting, film, theatre, etc.) It encompasses a range of subtly different concepts, expresses a primarily realistic view of the real world, and adds or reveals magical elements. This narrative strategy that is characterized by the matter-of-fact inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction.

Amplifying our experiences can reveal their depth, purpose and significance. It creates sacred narratives. We inhabit a multiple metaphor environment. Initiates participate in myth as a lived experience through metaphor, gesture, and imagination.

Despite historical changes and enlightenment thinking, mystical and imaginal notion exist side by side with empirical knowledge. A magical orientation of mind makes analogical connections (rather than logical separations). Meaning, significance, purpose, and intentionality are hallmarks of magical thinking. Magical consciousness is a living, breathing unity-in-multiplicity, an intuitive “metaphorical language.”

Any dualisms of mind and body. mind and culture, or self and other are irrelevant in this perspective. The imaginal world is full of non-physical minds, acting not by mechanical laws, but by the entangled psychic laws of motivation, intention, desire, and emotion. 

Animism is a relational psychic ontology found cross-culturally. Magical thinking is predominantly animistic; indeed, magical consciousness could be said to be animist thinking in action. The psychic worldview requires no explanation with physical facts. Even consciousness does not arise from known physical laws.

Echoing Neoplatonic notions, physicist Nick Herbert suggests in Elemental Mind that, far from being a rare occurrence in complex biological or computational systems, mind is a fundamental process in its own right, as widespread and deeply embedded in nature as light or electricity.

Theurgy is a panpsychic philosophy. Panpsychism is the doctrine that mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe. Panpsychism, in philosophy, is either the view that all parts of matter involve mind, or the more holistic view.

The universe is an organism that possesses a mind. It is stronger than animism, which holds only that all things are alive. Panpsychism doesn't believe that all matter is alive or even conscious but rather that the constituent parts of matter are composed of some form of mind and are sentient.

In context, mystical thought is normal, complex, and developed and not necessarily taken literally. To the mythmaking mind, rituals don't recall a miraculous event; they are that psychic and spiritual event. The environment as a holistic behavioral field is neither inner nor outer, but both/and non-material and material. 

This orientation can be described as analogical rather than logical, a web of connections. Within this conception, there is no contradiction between apparently mutually incompatible and exclusive states such as “life in death” or “unity and multiplicity of being.”

The key concept is engagement with an inspirited or ensouled world, primary process discourse working on conscious and unconscious processes. The core human psyche is an analogical mode of consciousness, multiples centers of consciousness.

A felt sense of the participatory awareness of magical consciousness and non-material perception of reality do not exclude a search for the naturalistic, with wide ramifications that affect the whole organism and its environment.

Analytical and analogical thought in reality occur simultaneously all the time. Such universal features of human thought were first reported by Plato and Aristotle and carried forward in Neoplatonism. Plotinus argued that the universe should be considered a god itself. 

Aristotle called the soul equivalent to the psyche, the animating “principle of life." He imagined psyche as the form or soul of all living organisms, including plants and other animals, as well as human beings. 

Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1453–1494) regarded magic as an elementary force pervading natural processes. Iamblichus and Proclus insist that true communion with Truth and the Divine are achieved not through rational contemplation alone.

Philosophy involves “theurgy” or ritual acts involving affective, associative magical thinking. There is no way to truly approach and connect with the Divine and highest level of knowledge without accessing non-verbal, physiognomic, and ecstatic/ emotional modalities. 

Magical experience is intrinsically personal, a network of connections special is its relation to a synchronous pattern of connections. Meaning comes through a process of associations. Experience changes how magic is perceived.

Magical Consciousness

Magic is an orientation of consciousness and mode of thinking. Jung notes, "Thinking is life just as much as doing is." Magical consciousness is affective, associative, and synchronistic, shaped through individual experience within a particular environment. The real impact of magic happens at a more fundamental level of individual awareness that includes emotions, feelings, and beliefs. 

Theurgy is an active intentional imaginal act. Archetypes [or gods] are rooted in gestalt, figure-ground perception. We look for objects that we can distinguish and name to make sense of what we see, and so interact with them. The figure-ground principle states that we instinctively perceive objects as what we should be focusing on.

Poets exploit our habitual figure-ground organizations in extra-linguistic reality to shift attention from one aspect to another by inducing us to reverse the habitual figure-ground relationships through poetic effect -- the event-structure metaphor, instinctive event cycles.

Theurgy is a primary modality for mythodrama, combining a variety of arts -- a transpersonal approach in the interdisciplinary sense, transforming old conceptual frameworks to account for new experiences and inner sources of human existence.

It is not so much about curing people as about assisting in psychospiritual growth, which can solve the pathologies of one stage by advancing a person to another, a profound personality transformation. Bringing to consciousness all deeper suppressed feelings liberates us from dependencies, fears and superficial boundaries.

Psyche is a multi-layered being relatively autonomous from consciousness, which encompasses the divine element. Mind, matrix, and metaphor integrate patterns of experience. If we talk too freely about anything within us that carries power, it starts to lose that power.

One tacit metaphor is the event structure metaphor "PURPOSEFUL ACTION IS A JOURNEY." The purpose of the action is expressed by the place   to which the journey leads. A more specific instantiation of this metaphor is "LIFE IS A JOURNEY," and it is revealed in autonomous self-arising images.

Purpose is reintroduced by the metaphor: light as knowing, understanding, or proper guidance. Emergence is a holistic approach to change. The nothingness or openness is light, luminous radiance, is the primordial ground of all that is.

Consciousness-at-rest and conscious-energy are the two primary manifestations of the one ultimate, self-contained consciousness. The power of the ground includes biological instincts, emotive potentials, autosymbolic imagination. It is a source of psychic energy, covert impulses, and unconscious projections. 

The fluid self reveals the myth of the fixed personality. The thoughts we experience as idle and free-flowing, for example, echo the flow of figures moving in and out of the ground that is the conscious mind. If we focus, these figures can become more fully formed and brought completely into awareness by attending to them more vigorously.

Figure-Ground

Figure-ground organization shows that, “Insight is a patterning  of the perceptual  field in such a way that the significant  realities are apparent; it is the formation of a  gestalt in which the relevant factors fall into  place with respect to the whole.” (Heidbreder, 1933)

We are strengthened by exposure to a range of perspectives. The figure is the image that stands out from the ground. The gestalt principle that applies most to space is that of figure-ground. The principle of figure/ground is one of the most basic laws of perception. A figure 'stands out' against an undifferentiated ground.

The unbounded and formless ground does not move us towards meaning-making and figure formation. But it provides the "context that affords depth for the perception of the figure, giving it perspective but commanding little independent interest" (Polster & Polster, p. 30).

Ground evolves from our past experiences, from our unfinished business, and from the flow of the present experience. Our entire life forms the ground for the present moment (p. 32). Perceptual organization drives us to creating a figure to pay attention to. They are based more on our creative application of prior experiences instead of the data and information directly available to us in the moment.

We need to consciously understand patterns being constructed in the human pre-conscious mind. These pre-conscious effects simultaneously impact the human psyche and beliefs: Enhance, Obsolesce, Reverse and Retrieve (McLuhan, Laws of Media). They impact our memory storage and retrieval. Our technologies and religions are all about re-membering.

Our environment is structured by our paradigms or worldview. The deeper we go the more the ground comes to the fore. It reminds us to attend to what is out of awareness where nothing is determined as much as what is in awareness.

Thought-creating beings live in a mental universe beyond conceptualization (universal mind), patterns of continuity and discontinuity, unremitting invisible effects that shape us whether we notice or not, and natural consequences. The One is ineffable, incomprehensible, super-celestial unconditioned reality. Plotinus's maxim claims the Absolute "has its center everywhere but its circumference nowhere."

Root drives animate archetypal expression, forms, and metaphors drive its action in the psychological landscape it operates in. The confluence of the rational and irrational that helps or hinders the soul's ascent to the divine is perhaps best described as imaginal -- the realm of soul. Ordinary consciousness becomes extraordinary.

Even our physics tells us we only experience an illusory sliver of an infinitely larger reality. There is a kind of progression that leads us to wisdom. Contemporary art also explores and questions notions about vague beliefs and subliminal conceptions. 'The Other' means that the subject is imaginal, the otherness within the self, beyond the artist's own range.

Jung’s archetypal Self is the archetype of wholeness or unity, ultimately and inescapably  otherness itself. This “ultimate other” is always purely potential, forever beyond our experience. There are elements of consciousness -- objects, ideas, beliefs -- that may be illusory. Religion is a natural phenomenon.

Imagination is the liminal space that is essential for consciousness and the unconscious to connect. Ritual practices encourage us to reconnect to the renewing function of affect and imagination. Imagination is a piece of heaven concealed within us, a divine connection to the cosmic One Mind, “the Star in Man, a celestial or supercelestial body.” (Rulandus, Lexicon of Alchemy, 1612). We voice various possibilities.

The tacit self is grounded in embodied practices, generally inaccessible to conscious awareness. Tacit, inarticulate, taken-for-granted contexts of human meaning are grounded in our embodied capacities, dispositions, shared practices and forms of life. They constitute a fundamental condition of intelligibility of meaningful human activities and expressions.

Our individual encounter with our psyche, dialogical otherness within the self, and the bringing of its elements into consciousness is central to the process. The sense of the other in self is animated by its own agency. The Other can't speak for itself, so we speak for the Other, and as we do the Other becomes us. From necessity, myth breaks into being. As Blake said, "Imagination is not a State: it is Existence itself."

Philosophy of nature (Latin, philosophia naturalis) is described as the philosophical study of nature and the physical universe. Theurgy, a Neoplatonic practice, is active participation in the theurgic world as theophany, a 'breathing with' the divine, divine inspiration, a living moment granted by a deliberately and exquisitely configured universe.

Some people may be genetically predisposed to ritual by the VMAT2 gene, associated with mystic experiences, including the presence of God and feelings of connection to a larger universe. It plays a key role in regulating the brain levels of serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine.

A 40% of the variation in self-transcendence is due to genes, but beliefs are social memes. In one sense, we approach religion like a relationship: the fantasy that there is a Magical Other out there who will fill all our voids and meet all our needs.

We are wired to experience God. Different researchers have slightly different names for the religious syndrome. Ramachandran calls it “the God module.” Persinger calls it the “God experience.” Both researchers indicate waves of temporal lobe excitation with hemispheric coherence underlie spiritual experience and religious belief. “The Kingdom of heaven is within.” Sub-clinical temporal lobe epilepsy also correlates with so-called spiritual experiences.

This later spiritual interest can be rooted in subjective experiences of a variety of phenomena kindled by electrical instabilities in the brain. They include, but are not limited to depersonalization, time distortion, anxiety or panic, floating or falling sensations, peripheral imagery.

A sense of presence either sacred or malefic, apparitions, downloading of memory sequences and false memory confabulations or fantasies, voices and visionary experiences range from heavenly to hellish, and a panoply of psychophysical manifestations.

Grounded in the fundamental nature of the soul, consecrated ritual work is directed towards the gods. We create simulations of alternative realities. By becoming receptive to their illumination, we become like them. Gods that had once been worshiped as idols became worshiped through the whole living self.

Knowing their ontological essence means we learn to live ethically through them. Our living reality is that as individuals we secure our being by transcending our individuality for identification with the universal.

The theurgist performs actions, facilitating natural sympathies in the quest for transcendence that align soul with continual revelation. It affirms primordial particularity while elevating the particular to the universal. The private realm of introspection is a non-social phenomenon that simulates an encounter, so we can 'live out' fulfilling imaginative occurrences within that analogue space.

Soul participates in all material things. Connectedness is a biological imperative. The physicality of ritual affirms the divinity of the material cosmos against thoughts that it is irredeemably fallen. All objects naturally participate in the divine. All objects are considered images or symbols of the gods -- the immanence of divine energy. The universal is only active and authentic in the particular.

Psychic influence can be drawn down into terrestrial likenesses. Theurgy connects heaven and earth; theurgists are those who connect the heavens and earth, who gain mastery over the illusory nature of reality itself, while realizing there is no question of 'controlling' the gods. The universe and the unconscious are inherently irrational.

An aesthetic approach to astrological symbolism and significations aligns it with the hieratic arts, particularly through visual representation, poetry and music. Music of the spheres, like harmonious sensory music, is divinely rational, though capable of manipulating the irrational parts of the soul for the purpose of the ascent to the divine or the One, the hypercosmic realm.

Neoplatonism included a complex relationship between divination, rationality, and ritual. Theurgic magic neither seeks to manipulate nor constrain the gods. Theurgy and contemplation were interlinked ways to truth of transcendental mysticism.

The help of the gods for the soul to ascend was actualized through theurgy. The general non-coercive theory of ritual practice is that symbols draw down divine energy into the theurgists's soul, permitting a union with the gods.

The highest stages were noetic, immaterial, and incorporeal conceptions -- 'seeing' drom the perspective of the gods. Inner ritual needs no overt physical expression for transforming the theurgist's consciousness. Truth is perceived beyond reason. The final stage of union is non-discursive.

The gods 'call' to us and the theurgist 'calls' back by invocations.  The cosmic feedback loop is closed, like the serpent biting its tail. Theurgy works by invoking the gods through their symbols connected to their divine causes, a continuous emanation of divine energy, or divine love allowing sympathy to arise. The Chaldean Oracles alluded to divine love and reversion of the soul to the divine and the transcendent One.

Plotinus claims that magic is always already there in nature. It culminates in a loss of self, absorption into the divine by becoming one (henosis) with God. The last words of Plotinus were "Strive to bring back the god in yourselves to the God in the All" (Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 2).  Such transcendental idealism and self-consuming love was the telos of post-Medieval philosophy. 

Renaissance theurgy and alchemy were concerned with techniques to transfigure or spiritualize the human body, to divinize the soul. The body is considered a location of greatest individual authenticity. The most authentic center of Individual soul and the All-Soul are one (Ennead IV.1). Nature is Soul's expressive act. Pico emphasized that high magic is not
so much working wonders as diligently serving nature as she works them.

Consciousness is the crown of Nature. Consciousness of Crown is super-consciousness. The entire universe implodes through our consciousness. It remains our greatest mystery and frontier. It is rooted in the internal qualitative aspect of the quantum functioning of the 'ground of being,' at the threshold of psyche and matter. The “threshold” represents the metaphorical separation of conscious mind from the unconscious, the invisible, unbounded realm. 

Indivisible awareness of the absolute space of all phenomena is beyond the duality of external and internal space. Primordial consciousness of the process of reality is non-dual consciousness/awareness. Absolute space is the central metaphor, void of of matter but not devoid of an infinite subquantal ocean of energetic potential.

Natural  philosophy  returns as the concept of mind, life  and matter emerging from the
nature of the quantum vacuum, the energy sea that underlies all of spacetime. Space is no longer secondary to matter. Absolute space of the vacuum is the primary reality.

Things we know as matter (mass, with properties of inertia and gravitation) appear as the consequence of interactions in the depth of this universal field. Our “essential nature” must be here, now. And in the emerging concept there is no "absolute matter," only an absolute matter-generating energy field.

All manifestations emanate from configurations of this absolute vacuum. Empty space is full of seething energy. Psyche or soul is a purposeful self-regulating system that is directed toward amplifying innate consciousness and individuation. We can consciously realize our role in the universal drama taking place.

So, knowledge of the source field is self-knowledge. Consciousness is described as the root of matter, including our own matter. Whether we call it the boundless reality of God, or the pre-spacetime vacuum that gives rise to matter, this Mystery is the quintessence of impenetrable darkness that contains the spark of life.

Ervin Laszlo proposed that the quantum vacuum, the field from which the universe is born, is conscious with all the information from the Big Bang to now. Laszlo says the universe as conscious life emerges from the quantum vacuum. Such field theories are a metaphysic so can never be known in their entirety.

Even Scientific American (Kastrup, Stapp, Kafatos; 2018) reports, "our argument for a mental world does not entail or imply that the world is merely one’s own personal hallucination or act of imagination. Our view is entirely naturalistic: the mind that underlies the world is a transpersonal mind behaving according to natural laws. It comprises but far transcends any individual psyche." (May 29, 2018, "Coming to Grips with the Implications of Quantum Mechanics").

"The claim is thus that the dynamics of all inanimate matter in the universe correspond to transpersonal mentation, just as an individual’s brain activity—which is also made of matter—corresponds to personal mentation. This notion eliminates arbitrary discontinuities and provides the missing inner essence of the physical world: all matter—not only that in living brains—is the outer appearance of inner experience, different configurations of matter reflecting different patterns or modes of mental activity."

"According to QM, the world exists only as a cloud of simultaneous, overlapping possibilities—technically called a “superposition”—until an observation brings one of these possibilities into focus in the form of definite objects and events. This transition is technically called a “measurement.” One of the keys to our argument for a mental world is the contention that only conscious observers can perform measurements."
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/coming-to-grips-with-the-implications-of-quantum-mechanics/

"What preserves a superposition is merely how well the quantum system—whatever its size—is isolated from the world of tables and chairs known to us through direct conscious apprehension. That a superposition does not survive exposure to this world suggests, if anything, a role for consciousness in the emergence of a definite physical reality."

"Now that the most philosophically controversial predictions of QM have—finally—been experimentally confirmed without remaining loopholes, there are no excuses left for those who want to avoid confronting the implications of QM. Lest we continue to live according to a view of reality now known to be false, we must shift the cultural dialogue towards coming to grips with what nature is repeatedly telling us about herself." (Bernardo Kastrup, Henry P. Stapp, Menas C. Kafatos)