I’ll use a Rubik’s Cube to illustrate the importance of feedback to the inter-connectivity of everything in the universe. It’s important to us because the prevailing worldview tends to undervalue personal introspection, especially if it occurs within a tarot reading or another misunderstood form of contemplation designed to engender self-knowledge and personal transformation.

As we learn about ourselves, we share the information with the entire universe. The universe, in turn, learns about us and, consequently, about itself. This also applies to universal archetypes we call gods, goddesses, spirit guides and angels, etc. Both the micro, in this case people, and the macro, the universe, consequently evolve in complexity and consciousness.

You could posit that in today’s worried world, it’s more important than ever to increase conscious awareness and knowledge, and to evolve a more rational understanding of how the world works and the co-creative role humanity plays in cosmic evolution. It’s important because our present way of living is unsustainable. A paradigm shift – a new worldview – is essential to the survival of our species, if not to the Earth itself.

To underscore this point, let’s say we give a Rubik’s Cube to a blindfolded person and ask he or she to make one random move every second, which is pretty fast. Probability dictates it will require around 100 billion years longer than our universe has existed before the cube could be ordered correctly by random chance.

Now let’s add simple binary feedback: someone who communicates either yes or no following each move. How long do you suppose it would then take to order the cube correctly? The answer is shocking: less than 5-minutes!

Evolution requires feedback; very little we see around us came into being by random chance. Without feedback, biology wouldn’t yet exist. Despite all our scientific understanding, physics still fails to account for biology.

Feedback, i.e. information, travels instantaneously throughout the universe on a vast network of vortices at the quantum level, vortices that connect everything. This quantum field, which is called, among other things, the vacuum, is known metaphorically as Indra’s Net. I refer to this in the Chrysalis companion book by quoting a passage from Stephen Mitchell’s book, The Enlightened Mind.

   The Net of Indra is a profound and subtle metaphor
for the structure of reality. Imagine a vast net; at each crossing
point there is a jewel; each jewel is perfectly clear and reflects all the
other jewels in the net, the way two mirrors placed opposite each
other will reflect an image ad infinitum. The jewel in this metaphor
stands for an individual being, or an individual consciousness, or a
cell or an atom. Every jewel is intimately connected with all other
jewels in the universe, and a change in one jewel means a change,
however slight, in every other jewel.

As we learn about ourselves individually, we grow in consciousness individually and collectively, as Mitchell noted. As we grow in consciousness, we approach our Higher Selves, the ultimate goal of destiny and personal transformation. As consciousness approaches the Higher Self, we comprehend our divine essence – our own divinity. We come to realize, and more importantly come to accept, that we are divine beings and that divinity is not a transcendent something “out there” but is “in here,” in the Psyche (soul).

Holistic consciousness, the next great leap on the ladder of human evolution, is the collective consciousness of the One. A reflection of the One that can be glimpsed in every jewel of Indra’s Net.

Holistic consciousness – the turquoise level on the spiral dynamics chart pictured above – stands in awe of the cosmic order. It sees “the big picture” and thinks in relationship to the collective other, not just the self. Turquoise views our world and the cosmos as a single dynamic organism with its own collective, divine mind.

Detail from Gareth Bate’s Jewel Net of Indra.

The previous blog in this series titled Spiral Awakenings.