Paradigm Explorer 2018/2
Frenchman’s Cove 2018 Me and We: Self, Gaia and the Cosmic Hologram Roderick Dunnett, Eve Hicks and Diana Clift The jolts of long slow bumpy minibus night ride from Kingston Airport, Jamaica, to the delights of the verdant arboreal haven of Frenchman’s Cove were a bodily preparation for the mental jolts which the dazzling Jude Currivan imparted to our minds during the six days of our intense cogitations.
We students were lodged in a Jamaican wonderland, washed at its heart by a gently flowing river and at its edge by storm-driven waves pounding its sheltered beach. As in the setting, so in the mind: in our sessions of thought and discussion led by Jude Currivan, at times we floated gently on a flow of uplifting ideas and at times were bowled over by the waves of ideas emerging from the deep. The Red Queen, who told Alice that she sometimes believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast, would have been at home in our confabulations. Indeed, we had the pleasure of a modern day Alice present and amongst us in our Greene space. However, we did not enter this Wonderland by partaking of a bottle bearing the instruction “drink me!” The most exotic drinks we consumed were the drinkable Jamaican beer, Red Stripe, and cocktails made of excellent Jamaican rum. And before breakfast, on a grassy cliff top overlooking the sea, we did not think anything difficult but worked through the energising movements of paneurythmy, under David Lorimer’s direction. During this remarkable week, we walked in a world which even Lewis Carroll would have found strange. We left with a sense of the present turmoil in physics and of the prospect of a new paradigm. Our thirst to understand more was whetted. In no particular order, and with apologies to Jude for points on which I have traduced her meaning or added extraneous matter,
26
the following paragraphs convey something of what we learnt.
The universe and us As much as the universe has created us, we have created and are creating the universe. We are its co-creators. Mind and matter are all one. Minds embody consciousness not uniquely but only to a greater degree than apparently inanimate matter. The universe, Jude declared, is conscious. We act and are acted upon not just through and by local forces but through and by remote connections. Each of us may be entangled with a remote galaxy as much as with our near neighbours. Space and time are aspects of a single whole. What is true about space has to be true in some sense about time. It may be essential to think not just of a four-dimensional world but of higher dimensions. However, no experimental observation has yet unambiguously confirmed the existence of extra dimensions.
Information is the essence of it all The universe consists of information. Matter and energy are manifestations of information. They are mutually convertible and exist only in a fused abstract entity. Information has material content and handling it consumes energy. Consequently, the universe needs ever greater resources to store and use that information.
www.scimednet.org
