ZEN FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF QUANTUM MECHANICS - 11

Matrix - 3

Now I’ll dwell on what it means that some complex systems must be broken from within to achieve a more advanced state -- especially when it comes to the development of consciousness and hence, understanding. I’ll also look at what viewing these problems through the lens of Zen can offer us, and why adopting this Zen perspective really means something revolutionary.

Creative destruction

The idea that some complex systems must be broken from within to reach a higher level of advancement isn’t new. I asked ChatGPT and DeepSeek what they knew about it, and here’s their list:

1. Hegelian Dialectics (Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis)
In this sense, the old system is “destroyed” or transcended to reach a more advanced state.

2. Creative Destruction (Schumpeterian Economics)
Joseph Schumpeter argued that capitalism advances through “creative destruction”, where outdated industries and systems collapse to make way for innovation.

3. Revolutionary Theory (Marxism, Anarchism, etc.)
Revolutionary ideologies often argue that stagnant or oppressive systems (feudalism, capitalism, and so on) can’t be reformed and must be overthrown from within by the exploited classes. The collapse of the old order is seen as necessary for a more just one to emerge.

4. Systems Theory & Complexity Science
Some theorists say breakdowns (financial crises, ecosystem collapses, etc.) are necessary for systems to reorganise at a higher level of complexity.

5. Mythological & Psychological Perspectives (Phoenix, Nietzsche, Jung)
The phoenix myth symbolises rebirth through destruction. Nietzsche’s idea of “eternal recurrence” and Jung’s “individuation” also involve breaking down old structures (ego, social norms) to reach higher consciousness or authenticity

One simple principle for how consciousness develops

What interests me most is that this is exactly how consciousness develops. To reach a higher level of consciousness -- deeper self-awareness, wider perception, greater clarity of mind -- it can only happen from within. It's always got to be your own effort, although you can be inspired by someone else's example, of course. (Otherwise we could just use hypnosis to get the best results, but it doesn’t work like that.*)

It's easy to see why this is so: becauise the very nature of understanding -- it's something one can only achieve on one's own. Everything we call “development of consciousness” is simply another name for understanding. And as we’ve already seen, understanding can sometimes be a form of destruction from within.

This is also how psychoanalysis works: you don’t need to create a new, more advanced self -- it's already there potentially. All you need to do is remove the roadblocks in your way.

It’s now becoming common awareness that this simple principle lies at the heart of personal growth. As brain coach Jim Kwik put it: “When an egg is broken from the outside, life ends. When an egg is broken from within, life begins. Great things always begin from the inside.”

Dynamic systems

Actually, we can get some intuitive idea of why destruction can sometimes bring such surprising results if we think in terms of dynamic systems: as potentialities -- some might call them energy, or even chaos -- turning into actualities.

This transformation can be imagined as a flow of potentialities that’s guided, shaped, and constrained by an attractor. I call such attractors Matrices** -- they’re like straitjackets, restricting potentialities and turning them into actualities. (This image may at least show why it’s so important to implement reforms in a timely manner if you don't want to trigger a revolution.)

And for some unknown reason, when these potentialities, by their own natural pressure, disrupt or even destroy their confines from within, the system evolves to a higher level of complexity.

What does Zen have to offer?

This is where Zen can give us some insight. The idea of potentialities transforming into actualities is how the Zen mind perspectives the world: when time flows for you from the future to the past. In other words, in this state of mind, you experience a reversed arrow of time, which particularly means that your present state is determined not by past states, but by the future -- that's how one can become free from one's karma, one's past in other words.

There are two theories that are, on the one hand, closely related and, on the other, study completely different phenomena: Chaos Theory and Complexity Theory. The former looks at cases like the butterfly effect, where small changes can have huge impacts on a system and plunge it into chaos. The latter focuses on situations where order spontaneously emerges from chaos.

We can say these are two perspectives from two different arrows of time. The oppositely directed one suggests the existence of anti-entropy, so that when potentialities destroy their attractor from within, a new one -- a new Matrix -- emerges spontaneously, forming an even more complex structure for the same reason that in the quantum world, the formation of new hierarchies means an increase in entropy.

Of course, this is speculation. But, firstly, I completely agree that speculations and guesses should always be tested empirically -- so that the two arrows of time can match in their wholeness. And secondly, you can only really understand how something works when you look at it from the right perspective. But this new perspective -- this new model or theory -- can't be worked out empirically in principle.

A unique perspective

And Zen offers us a unique perspective -- one of an entirely unentangled, free entity -- the perspective from the oppositely directed arrow of time. Only from here can you really understand how the mind works (and the Universe in general).

Seeing the world from this perspective -- or being in this state of mind -- lets you:
Firstly, anticipate the future -- what I call Zen intuition.
Secondly, grasp a situation or subject as a whole, and this is what understanding actually is -- if you really understand something, you can do it -- so let's define understanding this way.
And thirdly, derive a general rule based on just a few clues -- one of the few areas where humans are certain to keep an advantage over AI. In fact, this ability is intrinsic to the process of thinking.

How do we actually think?

The majority simply don't realise how they think. They believe that thinking is their internal dialogue. But in fact, when they start to reflect on some matter, they're just saying to themselves what they already know, or let's say potentially know -- in other words, what they've already managed to grasp as a whole, to understand  -- and this potential knowledge is a real mystery.

Note: when we talk to ourselves, we drain ourselves. And to re-charge, we need to interrupt our train of thoughts -- by sleeping, doing zazen, concentrating on reality etc -- that's when the real magic happens.

Also note that in this case you reach the next level of understanding as if without needing to destroy your prejudices and complexes, but simply by quietly getting around them -- sometimes it works this way.

To summarise what understanding is

So, let's summarise what we can learn about understanding from Zen perspective.

Understanding, as we've defined it, is the ability to perceive things as a whole. But you can experience it in slightly different ways.

You can experience it as a result of destruction of your previous delusions, the Matrices, that restrict you.You experience the result of this destruction as Nothingness -- I've no idea what it means in physical sense -- and as your true self and pure understanding. I'd say you feel that Nothingness is the ultimate negation or denial of everything. What Zen calls kensho is exactly this kind of experience -- when you suddenly feel like a bomb is about to go off in your tanden. This experience could be quite profound so that you may conclude that if there is anything that can be considered as God or Truth, it's the process of destruction on Matrices (from within).

Sometimes you can reach the next level of understanding without needing to destroy your delusions, but simply by getting around them. And then from there, from the standpoint of your new more advanced self, you can look at your previous delusions (and maybe destroy them).

But in either case, to destroy your delusions, you must already have outgrown them -- that is, already potentially be at that higher level.

And when you're like a wave-function, unentangled and not restricted by anything, you can experience understanding as pure negation -- that is, you deny really and by this you understand it. Negation in this sense is another word for true self -- it's like Nothingness, but usually not that deep.

The conclusion that begs

If we want to get anywhere close to understanding how the Universe -- and the mind in particular -- actually works, we've got to consider a phenomenon that has remained elusive to scientific methods so far. This is because it may be empirically undetectable in principle: the reverse arrow of time. And Zen -- the correct version of Zen, mind you -- is precisely the practice of viewing the world from the perspective of this time's arrow.

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* In fact, any external influence or suggestion can only bring a person to the level of average tribal thinking. Suggestion is, by its very nature, a tribal thing -- religion is a prime example of this.

** For example, in this view, the personal unconscious is a personal Matrix for each individual, while the collective unconscious and collective knowledge might be something like Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields: a Matrix that's one for many:

ZEN FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF QUANTUM MECHANICS - 10

ZEN FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF QUANTUM MECHANICS – 10

Matrix – 2

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 Matrix. Put simply: understanding is the process of destroying Matrix from within. 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 in relation to the personal unconscious (in Jungian terms); but if this is truly a general pattern, it must also apply to 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 passed down from generation to generation through teaching and learning.* 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 -- 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 -- even the rules of maths and the laws of physics as we understand them.

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 memorising 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 facts and rules empirically, you multiply their number; by generalising, you reduce it.** Think of Matrix as boundaries; when you break them, you expand your Possible, pushing those boundaries further.

Of course, not every destruction of 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 have 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 once the same thing. 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 -- they miss out on the learned behaviour part.

At some early evolutionary stage, Mother Nature decided that instead of overloading DNA, it would be easier to pass new information down through teaching and learning -- as life evolved, there was 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 interacting with the conscious mind. 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 -- is 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) began to ponder how symbolic language had evolved in humans. Her idea was that it had emerged only in humans and then grown increasingly 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 had 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 being wouldn’t have known what around them was edible and what was dangerous.***

And then, as the brain evolved, symbolic language evolved towards its own disappearance. 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 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 stage -- but as they evolve and become finer, the picture becomes smoother.

Conclusion

To sum up, the collective unconscious and collective knowledge make up what I call Matrix. It determines how humans understand and interact with the world, and I suspect that, in a physical sense, it is made of pure quantum entanglements. It’s very similar to Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields, which proposes that patterns of behaviour, 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, as some do, of endowing Matrix with creative power. In all its forms, it is lifeless and of the past, and it is the individual who breathes life into it by destroying it from within. Only at this level does real magic happen.

It is 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 -- while the former two may be shared by many, this Matrix is only yours. The three of them together make up what 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.

ZEN FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF QUANTUM MECHANICS - 9

Matrix - 1

As a Zen practitioner, I discovered an astounding fact that I've been trying to explain to myself ever since. Freeing yourself from your mental problems doesn't work the way Freud and other pillars of psychoanalysis think it does; in fact, it works in the exact opposite way. You break the bonds, and this gives you the understanding of what's been hidden behind them. Not the other way round, as psychoanalysis claims.

Let me remind you that, according to psychoanalysis, you're supposed to bring your fears and complexes from the unconscious into the conscious mind, more precisely, to recall what initially triggered and gave life to these issues, so that you realise what's been hidden behind them. In theory, this should dissolve the associations -- or ties, or bonds, as I prefer to call them -- that have caused the neurotic reactions. (And let me also remind you that complexes are just clusters of emotionally charged associations.) Sounds plausible.

But I found that it works exactly the opposite way: you mentally destroy, for example, your idea of a person you wish to work out what is hidden behind their exterior and why they make you feel uneasy, and this leads to the understanding of their true intentions and why they've evoked this feeling within you. Since our ideas, internal representations of objects are just clusters of associations, or bonds, one can put it this way: severing bonds is the cause of the understanding of what's been behind them. (I prefer to think of states of mind in terms of being either unentangled or entangled in the quantum sense, that is, as free or bound by bonds.)

Mind you, this is not far from what psychoanalysis itself claims: destroy the roadblocks, and your new self will unfold naturally -- it already potentially exists. The only difference is that psychoanalysts don't dare to assume that new knowledge can arise as if out of nowhere. I suspect they simply don't understand why their methods actually work sometimes.*

The Technique

The technique in question is simple at first glance, but I can't recommend it to everyone. You must already be a more or less advanced Zen practitioner; to perform it correctly, you must be impartial, i.e., unentangled. In a nutshell: if you want to know what a person hides behind their exterior, their hidden intentions,** or why they evoke certain feelings within you, you need to imagine this person as a woman (regardless of whether they're a man or a woman), that is, imagine the female part of their personality and then tear this image apart. (I suppose I'll need to write a separate post explaining why I'm not a misogynist, and I'll also explain further why it must always be only your idea of a person that you destroy, not the real person.) By destroying it, you'll realise what's been hidden behind their exterior and even what Nothingness is.

(Actually, to understand reality, sometimes it's enough to simply deny it -- that's why the practice of zazen as complete denial is so important -- but if you already have bonds with the object of your interest, you'll need to break them.)

By 'the female part of the personality' I mean that part which tends to merge (i.e., to become entangled), to gain something; in other words, the pure form of what we usually mean by the ego. I don't know why, but I usually get the best results by imagining it as a woman -- hence the terminology.

At the same time, you yourself must remain impartial, that is, unentangled. Impartiality in this situation is the result of you either trying to remain independent (unentangled), or trying to break the bonds that have already been formed -- you're not proving to yourself that your ego is stronger, but simply studying what this person really is from the point of view that we humbly called the perspective from the centre of the Universe. Also, bear in mind that this technique won't work if applied to your loved ones due to the force of merging that you need to overcome.

This way, you can explore your unconscious further in much the same way as psychoanalysis does. In one of the following posts, I'll describe this technique in more detail: there's a simple rule that can help anyone get rid of their mental problems easily.

Moreover, this isn't the whole story. I then began to suspect that this is how understanding works in general: by destroying established concepts and ideas. We just usually don't notice it.

This is one of the reasons I brought quantum mechanics into this blog: I reckon that what I've found can't be explained without assuming that Possibles are real in the sense that they don't simply exist in our minds. Fundamentally, through Zen practice you realise that the Universe works not as we usually think.

So, what do we destroy every time we have a light bulb moment? Can you say it in one word?

To be continued.

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*I suppose the historical reason for that is Freud's early adherence to determinism, which was a trap for him; indeed, if neuroses are attractors that channel energy and thoughts in a certain way, then you'll achieve nothing by simply following the flow of cause-and-effect interactions. You have to break the very vicious circle to change things.

**Or perhaps the intentions they aren't even aware of themselves: their Shadow, in Jungian terms.