Sitting under the oak trees in the quart yard of the Farfa Abbey, I contemplate consciousness as a cosmic property. In the Cartesian world of material matter, it has become harder and harder for people to imagine their Cosmic Connection. We feel cut off, caught up in a material world (even Madonna sings this..), trapped in scientific facts and a consensus reality where we have to be part of a “norm”. Regardless of what we think or believe, the so-called “evidence of research” predicts our reality.
The emptiness that so many people experience notwithstanding, it is more and more dif cult to imagine a Greater Consciousness that connects us, never mind guides us.
The Cosmic wave is a numerical Ponte and Schäfer. As in quantum physics, the non-material wave that is beyond all of the material matter is the numerical blueprint, the perfect ratio, that comes into matter based on this numerical formula. Sounds a bit whacky – well, think about it. There is a Cosmic energy/wave at the core of all material form that connects us the way that for example trees are connected.
If a herd of cows are chased into a new field and there are trees in the field, they will happily start eating the low-hanging leaves of the trees. Within minutes, a wave of energy (or whatever you want to call it) is sent across the field, a warning of loss that is registered for miles across the field. All the trees will produce a bitter excretion to their low-hanging leaves that will be of distaste to the cows, stopping them from eating the leaves and focussing on grass, as cows should!
Why do we not want to “believe” THIS scientific fact? Too airy fairy? Is it perhaps too frightening for us to contemplate a Divine Consciousness, that might stop us from killing and destroying if we had to acknowledge the Divine Presence/Quantum Wave that connects all life on earth?
As I have mentioned many times before – in dementia, “consciousness is never affected”. We know this, it is not something that is required of us to BELIEVE. Yet, do we treat people whose minds have changed with the same respect that we treat everyone else? No, we don’t. Because somehow we think there is no Consciousness, “they are no longer here”. I want to propose that there is a Higher Consciousness in people living with dementia, that they are more in tune, and that their distress is based on OUR inability to acknowledge, to honour, their state of Being-in-the-world.
This is not a religious belief in the traditional sense of the word. Ponte and Schäfer hold that “The word religious is used in this context in the sense of its
etymological roots, in which Re-Ligare means “to reconnect,” or “to be in bond,” or “to re-unite”. As Anniela Jaffé wrote: “Individuation must be understood in religious language as the realization of the ‘godly’ in the human, as the fulfilling of a ‘godly mission’. The conscious experience of life becomes a religious experience, one could just as well say, a mystical experience.”.
The mystical Being of a person living with dementia is our challenge – it is indeed mystical, not for us to define or qualify or diagnose necessarily, but to hold, to contemplate, to honour.
More on this tomorrow…