Another World
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Another World (see in Gallery / Store) | Image by Bruce Harris
The coffee grows cold again this morning. I've forgotten it exists, lost in the brief escape where thoughts and words are colliding in a tenuous weave. The computer screen glows in the coming light. One moment words are a failed lift off, the next it’s outer space. Into the wormhole and time bends into a different realm. What I am left with, the words assembled on the screen, is a mystery as to how they appeared and where time went. What just happened? Where did I go? How did the images that inspired the words appear? I’m always a better writer free of gravity rather than pushing against its force.
I’m not the first to experience that mystifying slip. When that peculiar occurrence, more frequent and strongly felt for some, feels less like generation and more like reception. Like tuning into something that already exists. False starts and conscious effort are constants. But on rare occasions, that effortless, anti-terrestrial vanishing occurs. Boundaries of self and that other self disappear.
It's an age-old wonderment, simple description solving for inexplicable. The Muse. The zone. Flow state. It’s that millisecond when the mind imagines and the body follows as if directed by someone or something else. Whatever name we give it, the experience seems universally tied to the very human impulse to create. Artists of all sorts. An inspired leader, could be in any vocation (the word itself related to the concept of calling), an athlete acting on a future momentarily glimpsed through the ether.
Is it the impression of cosmic connection by simple neurochemical quirk? Or is there something that exists beyond our individual consciousness?
Long ago, I used to get my college classwork done at the library. Before I would head out to whatever I would do for fun, I would take a walk between the fluorescent lit stacks and see what books might grab my attention. Carl Jung asked me to pick up one of his. I browsed through and the concept of the collective unconscious entered my consciousness. Beneath our personal experiences, Jung proposed, we are all filled with inherited archetypal patterns that influence the tides of our lives and are reflected in our art and stories.
The idea was striking to a wanna-be writer. I thought about that possibly too-mystical idea all the way to the bar where it drifted around with the cigarette smoke and crashing music and hoarse voices and the world bending with cheap tequila and cheaper beer. The idea that creativity comes not from individual consciousness, but from an unseen collective. I screamed that into my friend’s ear, who then shook his head and bought me another round.
A few years later, with serendipity doing its thing, a screenwriting teacher took a few of our classes to play The Power of Myth series on PBS. Watching the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell, identify the commonalities of symbols and stories across the vast cultural experience of humanity was hair-raising (or hair-losing as it turned out for me…).
Jung and Campbell, and many others, made careers out of turning art into archaeology. There are plenty that do not agree with the concept of a universal unconscious, but for me, when I read portions of each man’s work, it provided answers that perhaps I didn’t fully believe, but I wanted to fully believe. Although, the cross-cultural work of Campbell is hard to deny. So much is the same between countries and cultures, and yet we are so often tragically blind to each other.
Through the wormhole we go, and decades later I find myself reading an article about quantum entanglement and discussing it with an AI chatbot, both circumstances, had you asked me thirty years ago, were as likely as Donald Trump being elected to the White House. What’s the expression; stranger than fiction?
Why was I interested in such a topic? Behind our perceived reality is a reality that has been proven to defy the laws of the physical world as we see it. Our certainties, which we are inherently quite proud of, are possibly uncertain. The most fascinating aspect, to me at least, is that in the quantum world, it is possible that particles can remain connected regardless of distance, which is what physicists call entanglement. There are whiteboards full of math that can prove these concepts along with continued experiments by smarter people than me. Connection despite distance. When I read it, it brought me back to the idea of the collective unconscious; part of something yet separate. And to that odd sensation that, in the moment of creation, our thoughts aren’t entirely our own. What if consciousness, like those particles, extends beyond the boundaries we assume?
The AI chatbot, this one with skills in deep research, surveyed over 190 websites in a relative blink, and brought Physicist David Bohm and his theory of the implicate order to my attention. The chatbot, through many rounds of simplifying so I could get my head around the concept, taught me that Bohm’s theory states that everything we perceive as separate is actually folded together in a deeper reality. Had I yelled that into my friend’s ear in that bar all those years ago, he would have asked me if I was stoned and if I intended to share…
I realized how closely it resembled what happens when writing flows; the sense that I'm unfolding something already complete rather than constructing it piece by piece. But, as I learned, folded reality does not imply already complete. As an example, a piece of fiction I finished wasn’t already completed in some near future. Nothing is pre-destined in its final form. Bohm’s theory, again, math supported, is that despite the unfolding from the folded all things are connected. It made me wonder as a writer if the spark of creativity, bringing connection to seemingly unconnected things – ideas, images – is really, in the gravity-free zone of artistic creation, just a momentary sensing of the imperceivable web of all things.
Somewhere in this orbiting of connection, largely possible through the development of said chatbots, is the pattern matching and connecting-of-disparate-things abilities of these uncanny machines. Ask the AI to find the commonalities in any two things and its synthetic mind processes the infinitesimal possibilities of almost everything we have ever made. Amazingly, or sadly, that is not an exaggeration, or soon enough, it will just be fact, not fiction. If only my creative abilities could process in the same way in just seconds of time. When I need inspiration, I grab my camera and take a long walk. Like several hours long. Or I mumble to my miserable reflection in the computer screen wondering where the through-line went. Fractions of the possible connections finally appear, and I chase a few of them onto the page. I’m trying to take flight by flapping two stray bird feathers while the machine is lifting off with plumes of flames and exhaust. Either way, the seeming disconnected becomes whole, if for only a moment.
In the time after those connections may be brought gratefully to the page, the canvas, the screen, the stage… it goes on and on. Then they need to be crafted. Then the writer gets to revision. The painter provides additional dabs. The athlete repeats the requisite enhancement to their game. That work is likely alone. The craft, the honing; it is possible that it is only then, after years of skill building, prodigies aside, that the receptor can truly receive. And in that reception, it may be that the receptor is hardly alone.
If Jung's work on the collective unconscious and Campbell's research on universal myths - supported, oddly enough, by quantum physics - suggests that separateness is not always separate, maybe consciousness isn't solely contained within our skulls after all. Maybe that sense of connection, that sensation of a vast otherness, isn't aberration but recognition, glimpsing a state where seemingly unrelated patterns flow through us rather than from us and allow for the newly created.