ZEN FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF QUANTUM MECHANICS - 10

The Matrix - 2

So, I suspect that the process of understanding, in all its forms, works by breaking down established concepts and ideas. I call the set of all such concepts in all their forms the Matrix. To put it simply: understanding is the process of destroying the Matrix from within. And in this post, I'll try to show you why I think it works this way.

In my previous post, we saw how this works when it comes to the personal unconscious (in Jungian terms); but if this is truly a general pattern, it must also be true of the collective unconscious and, as I call it, the collective knowledge or experience.

The Collective Knowledge

By the collective knowledge or collective experience, I mean all the knowledge and experience that's been passed down from generation to generation through teaching and learning.* And in a social context, the term "Matrix" is used in exactly this sense: as a complex network of social rules, norms, traditions (including language), and structures that hold society together -- it's a framework within which individuals and groups interact and function.

So, when I claim that every time we have a lightbulb moment, we destroy our established concepts and ideas, it actually means we somehow destroy our previous knowledge -- including the rules of maths and the laws of physics. How can this work?

Understanding is indeed akin to destruction, as it is essentially a process of compressing information so that, instead of a multitude of facts, you perceive only a few fundamental rules. Good students know that understanding spares you from having to memorise too much. As Einstein put it: education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think. In essence, by discovering new rules and laws empirically, you multiply their number; by generalising, you reduce it.**

Think of the Matrix as boundaries; when you break them, you enhance your Possible, pushing the boundaries further. Of course, not every destruction of the Matrix leads to such a result: it should be destroyed from within -- what I mean by this I'll explain later.

I don't believe that consciously imagining the destruction of known concepts and ideas is a feasible way of generating new ones, but I've tried a simple experiment: I concentrate on -- say, a tissue (paper handkerchief) -- trying to feel the texture of its fabric, and then tear this impression, this feeling, apart. And indeed, sometimes it leads to suddenly jumping to another level: either feeling the texture more deeply, imagining what it's like even at the molecular level; or more broadly, comprehending all its connections to the rest of the world.

I'm not sure this trick will work for everyone -- sometimes I find myself thinking that I've lost track of how the "normal mind" works. The thing is, my Zen practice has completely changed how I come up with new ideas, specifically the nature of my moments of insight. If being creative once meant diving into past experiences and associations, now new ideas seem to emerge from the future, as if from nowhere -- and sometimes the easiest way to get there is to destroy my own default view.

The Collective Unconscious

According to Jung, the collective unconscious is a universal, inherited part of the psyche shared by all humans. It contains archetypes: primordial images and patterns that serve as blueprints for human thoughts, emotions and behaviour, and express themselves through symbols. Jung, by the way, called archetypes a matrix of our species.

At first glance, the collective knowledge and the collective unconscious are different things. The former is consciously learned and shared by people, while the latter is innate. But upon closer inspection, it turns out they were both the same thing once upon a time. Indeed, the collective knowledge isn't exclusive to humans -- it extends to other species as well. For example, a lion must be taught how to hunt. In this regard, zoo lions can't be considered fully-fledged ones -- they miss out on the learned behaviour part.

At some early evolutionary stage, Mother Nature decided that instead of overloading DNA, it'd be easier to pass new information down to generations through teaching and learning -- as life's evolved, there's been such a shift. Animals rely on both: their instincts -- their collective unconscious -- and their collective knowledge, in the same way as humans do, although not to the same extent.

Thus, if the collective unconscious and collective knowledge are so closely related -- like two sides of the same coin -- we can also expect them to behave in the same way when it comes to interacting with the conscious mind.

Indeed, with the collective unconscious, we see the same pattern as with collective knowledge: bringing symbols (the content of the former) into the conscious mind leads to their actual destruction -- it deprives the symbols of their emotional charge and energy, making them powerless, so they no longer affect you. This, in turn, leads to a better and deeper understanding of reality. The process of the development of consciousness -- in both senses: as the general evolution of consciousness across different species, and in the case of personal development --  essentially a process of desymbolisation. I've forgotten who said that Zen is a way of desymbolising the world.

In 2011, there was a discussion on NPR's blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture, and one of the contributors (she was a biologist, if I'm not wrong) started to ponder in one of her posts how symbolic language had evolved in humans. Her idea was that it'd emerged only in humans and then evolved, becoming more and more sophisticated. I couldn't help showing how clever I was -- there was a forum at the time where everyone could leave comments -- and I pointed out that it'd most likely been the other way around: symbolic language was the first way in which living beings began to perceive the world. Otherwise, a primitive living being wouldn't have known what around them was edible and what, dangerous.*** And then, as the brain evolved, symbolic language evolved towards its disappearing.

Indeed, what we see in humans is that the more primitive, archaic the mind is, the more symbolic it is -- that's why we say that the development of consciousness is the process of desymbolisation. I'd say this evolution is akin to a pixelated picture appearing on a screen: at first, the pixels are visible, making the image blocky and fuzzy -- like symbols at a very primitive, archaic stage -- but as they evolve and become finer, the picture becomes smoother.

To sum it up, the collective unconscious and collective knowledge make up what I call the Matrix. It determines how humans understand and interact with the world, and I suspect that, in a physical sense, it's made of pure quantum entanglements. It's very similar to Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphogenetic fields, which proposes that patterns of behavior, memory, and form are not confined to individual brains but are part of a shared, non-local field that can influence organisms across time and space. According to this idea, once something is learned or happens in one place, it becomes easier for the same to occur elsewhere, as if information is stored in a collective field rather than just in the brain. Though not widely accepted in mainstream science, the theory has been used to explore phenomena like intuition, telepathy, and the sudden spread of ideas that seem to arise before any direct communication.

However, don't make the mistake that some do endowing the Matrix with creative power. In all its forms, it's lifeless and of the past, and it's the individual who breathes life into it by destroying it from within. Only at this level does real magic happen.

It's only the individual perspective that really matters because, paradoxically, there is no other objective one in the entire Universe. Therefore, we must also add the personal unconscious. The three of them together make up your Matrix, which you're destined to deal with.

To be continued.

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* I even thought about calling it a collective consciousness, by analogy with Jung's collective unconscious.

** Indeed, the evolution of human understanding of the world seems to follow a pattern: first, you realise there are relatively simple rules that govern the Universe, so you can collapse its diversity into fewer, simpler models, making it much easier to deal with. Then facts start to accumulate that don't fit this theory, so you have to work out what lies behind these independent facts. You go from some clues to a new theory. It comes from the Possible, from the future, from nowhere -- not the past, playing with old ideas. The old theory, or theories, don't disappear, but becomes a special case of the new one.

*** In this regard, the design of slot machines is quite talented: the designer drew inspiration from very archaic levels of the psyche, reducing the perception of reality to just a few scrolling symbols -- cherries, lemons, bars, etc. Also, symbols extracted by artists can be even more attractive than the real objects they represent. For example, anime girls are still very sexy even when they're depicted as half-cyborgs. The symbol itself actually has very little to do with real women, but they feel how they should look to be sexy and try to fit in. The same way, I suspect artificial fishing baits can be more attractive to fish than their real food.