#2: Energetic pattern = energy + will
This principle was lifted directly from the title of Part Two, “Soul = Dust + Breath,” with the terms converted to a layperson’s vocabulary. The translation “soul —> energetic pattern” was covered in the first principle.
The next part, “dust —> energy,” could also be “dust —> material,” but I want to be very clear what is meant by the concept of material here: potential that has been made manifest by essentially willing itself into energy.
(See this essay for a fascinating take by someone much better informed than I am on this subject.)
Metaphysically speaking, potential means the reality of something that transcends its existence. For instance, there was the potential for the painting titled “Mona Lisa” before Leonardo da Vinci was born, developed mastery of the skills to render such an image with paint on a canvas, and completed the task; there will be the same potential after the earth and everything on it has disintegrated and returned to stardust. In the segment of time in between, the potential Mona Lisa exists as a manifest physical reality we can see and appreciate. But the potential Mona Lisa is, always was, and always will be. Its manifestation is temporary, but its reality as potential is timeless, and therefore unchanging. This is just like the principle in physics that energy is potential that has been manifested, except the metaphysical potential is recognized as a constant, whereas physical form is durable but temporary.
What we know as matter (which shares an etymological root with “matrix”) is a vast field of energy (manifest potential, aka spirit) moving in patterns (souls) that, to paraphrase Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, are “slow enough to be seen,” and stable enough to be consistent.
If the universe were a still life, created but once to be displayed on a wall in a celestial Louvre, that would be sufficient to explain physical existence. But the fact that material itself is a product of motion implies that this is a work of performance art, and creation is a constant process. So what moves an energetic pattern this way and that way but not the other way?
While the first two parts of this principle would be familiar to most advocates of non-dual spirituality, the last part is somewhat novel to the modern iterations which go out of their way (and perhaps, overboard) to avoid any theistic connotations of divine personhood. While understandable in the light of political shadows cast by “revealed” religions (which always reveal more about the character of their adherents than divine nature), this aversion creates a blind spot that obscures what I call the relative ease of nonbeing. In short, the manifest existence of anything at all implies a primordial desire, pre-existent to such manifestation, for something to be, because being requires energy. No matter what we consider the original state of existence to be, there is no getting around the fact that the proximal state is one that the original state desired sufficiently to overcome the relative ease of not changing or not becoming — of not acting upon its potential to be.
If God were the solitary reality, completely self-sufficient and without externality, then God-plus-something is a state that God desired — for what outside of God compelled that something’s potential to manifest? If we posit a state of undifferentiated Oneness in place of God, then differentiation was a state that the Oneness desired. The relative ease for God/Oneness to do nothing/remain unchanged makes this a simple logical conclusion that we can rationally accept without expressly knowing what that desire is or why it wants what it wants.
Those who are invested in denying this have a grab bag of physical work-arounds and mechanical hypotheses, oblivious to the fact that there is not yet anything physical to act or act upon — no quarks, no quanta to fluctuate — until something overcomes the relative ease of their nonbeing. Those who claim that there is no primordial state, and the fact that we perceive what appears to be one is due to an event horizon we cannot see beyond, offer two basic options: infinite linear regression (a logical fallacy), or a cyclical progression through cause-effect sequences in which the beginning of one cycle is caused by the completion of another. While the latter sounds like it jibes with “I and I” because it opens up the subject of cyclical time, the inference of “transtemporal causation” is simply trying to shoehorn linearity back into a nonlinear context, while also dodging the natural next question of wherefore these cycles. At some point, the presence of any finite parameters of being must acknowledge an infinite ground of being and a temporal origin of its being (or, if you can differentiate it from its environs, it had a beginning and it will have an end).
Will is a term of reification for the desire to exist as that desire manifests and sustains itself in the form of an energetic pattern. Will is a negentropic force, which means it defies the relative ease of dissolution into nonbeing. The more complex the pattern, the more willful potency is required to sustain it. “God’s will” is simply the will to sustain our universe, the ultimate energetic pattern, while individual wills are fractalized extensions of God’s will that maintain and give direction to individual patterns. (However, note what we covered previously about waves and energetic patterns: they don’t exist in isolation. What gives more complex patterns their potency is very often that their individuality is subservient to a greater pattern of interconnection, like a forest of quaking aspen trees which appear to be distinct organisms but emerge from a singular system of roots.)
This sustaining and motivating element at the core of every energetic pattern is the pneuma. The etymology is Greek, but also connected to a list of perennially reoccurring terms across all major traditions that translate as “breath.” This is what the book of Genesis called God’s “breath of life” which animates the allegorical first humans, although wisdom gathered before and since gives us reason to see pneuma in all living creatures and even inorganic material (though of a far simpler order in the latter).
From this, we can draw an important clarifying and axiomatic set of truths at the heart of the “I and I” concept:
1. The soul is what you are experientially within the four dimensions of space-time.
2. The pneuma is what you are ontologically outside of time. We can experience this by adding the 5th dimension of selfhood, a mental dimension that traverses our interiority.
3. Pneuma enters into 4-D space-time as desired and, by combining with energy/material, manifests the potential energetic pattern of its choosing. It doesn’t *enter* this particular body or soul — it *becomes* that embodied soul for a duration of time.
4. When an energetic pattern dissolves, that “soul-ride” ends, completing a life cycle and returning the pneuma to from where it came — eternity. If pneuma desires more experience, it reincarnates into another soul, ad infinitum. This procession is an individual “pneumatic lineage,” and though the circumstances and lessons of one soul-ride inform the next, the pneuma is a fractal of the divine and therefore not obligated to reincarnate. This is a major difference between pneumatic lineage and natural cause-effect or karmic sequences — one life cycle does not cause the next one. Each incarnation is a choice, and is caused by a desire for a novel set of experiences.
The Principles of “I and I”
a series of essays highlighting the foundational tenets of Noestan existential philosophy as described in I and I: a Perennialist Theory of Reincarnation and Cyclical Time
#1: The body is water; the soul is the wave
#2: Energetic pattern = energy + will
Noesta Aqui 