There are limitless sets of categories and schemas we may draw in to make sense of everything. Some appeal, others don’t. In one’s panoply of appeals—or “things” found appealing—some appeal more than others, of course (inevitably).

And there’s an ultimacy to anything, e.g., the appeal of appealing itself. Like peels in Time, milestones recurring, eras distinguising themselves—and in the peeling establishing themselves as belonging together, milestones with milestones, eras with eras, like chimes belonging together in some distant peeling of the campanile here in Berkeley, the appealing of appeals--The Appealing that belongs to any appeal—distinguishes its kind, as ours, yet also as belonging ownmost to itself in distinguishing itself as “The Appeal” made ours in accessible appeals.

There’s a potential ultimacy to anything, beyond its belonging to its kind: humanity of the human (i.e., The Human as such), Being of being (or is it being of Being, being Of Being?). “What is Being?” is commonly thought to be an ultimate question. That’s the question in which philosophy began—which led to Christianity, then Renaissance humanism, the literary mind, the university, and so on.

But who’s got time for all that? (And, for those who have the time, so what for those who don’t?) Most people just want an accessible, reliable pragmatic for holistically living well by design, I like to say. That could be what’s sought at heart by clinical psychology—and by religious ministry. “Spirituality” appeals to our need for holism. Religion was the first way we humans found the sense of holism that seemed to work best for flourishing, yet it’s the “spiritual” that inhabited religion, thus the apparance that religion primordially inhabits spirituality. Spirituality can be primordially secular—because religion is the first way of gaining coherence in our form of life, while our form of life belongs to that which preceded religion, succeeds religion, and emplaces religion in our overall, long-run worldmaking—which, by the way, makes the study of religion all the more important. Yet, as an online friend of mine emphatically attests, loving the study of religion is different from being religious.

Spirituality is part of the holism we need, not the whole of it, as we embodied minds—each in our own way—can participate in all manner of spiritualities, but cannot but be the embodied minds, the lives, that we are, that each one of us is, no matter how greatly one lives in intimacy with others or in kindredness of spirituality. (In some sense, there’s the Spirituality of any spirituality, which belongs to all spiritualities—so, what “is” Spirituality, as such?). The wholism, so to speak, belongs to embodied minds or selves—self-inhabiting minds (embodying a world) or self-minding habitations (expressing a life). Life, world, spirit, mind—choose your terms? Does it ultimately not matter? Are words just heuristics? For what would they be heuristic? What is ultimately going on, in being human?

We don’t need to know (as if we could). But should we seek to know (i.e., not asking a question, but just in case we do seek to know what can be known about what is ultimately the case), what’s relevant? Reality, surely. So, what’s Real? (What’s really real?) Frankly, relatively few people give much energy to the matter—relatively few; actually, lots of people give their lives to the matter (there being hordes of people, so “lots” still is “relatively few”). Who counts in the giving of a lifetime to ultimate questioning? Anyone you choose? Is there some singularity to the evolution of knowing that can be a basis for reliable guidance about knowing? Yes. In a word: the university—the university as historical archive of discursive inquiry and the literature of its areas of study. It’s the heir of the monastery—albeit industrialized as “higher education”. In its historicality, there is a singularity of continuity, represented in the conceptualities of its areas of inquiry. These conceptualities are pursued in the theoretical work of the areas, and we can focus on the interrelations of conceptualities of inquiry—even the Conceptuality of conceptualities. That is philosophy—which is to say that philosophy belongs to academia, with all due respect to the common senses of philosophy, which may make fine beginnings--as various psychologically useful doctrines—to appreciating truly philosophical work, and those folk psychologies can be fascinating for cultural studies (as well as clinical work). But questions of ultimacy cannot be really appreciated without truly philosophical questioning, and philosophical questioning includes getting real, so to speak, about conceptuality.

So, you are most heartened, enspirited, inspired, and influenced by the “entity” Michael? What is the nature of the revelation such that the “planes” of existence are 7? Is it just an accessible pragmatic for conceptualizing a holism? Is any conceptualization as good as any other?

“The Tao,” says Michael “channeler” Shepherd Hoodwin, “has created many universes, or overall experiments. (I am not speaking here of parallel universes.)”

Too bad that the Michael channeler isn’t speaking of parallel universes (as the Tao has no sense of the scientific physicality of the universe at all—the so-called “Tao of physics” is something the Tao itself cannot conceptualize, while conversely it’s the physicist who reconceptualizes the Tao!). Physical reality is at least as complex as that which allows for hypothesizing parallel universes. I have no idea how to conceptualize parallel universes (it’s a highly mathematical kind of work), but I respect that some people do—such as the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, in his new book Parallel Worlds: a journey through creation, higher dimensions, and the future of the cosmos (Doubleday, 2005). That’s part of a general quandry in theoretical physics about the “accidental” character of the laws of physics relative to a Big Bang, cooling into a physical lawfulness—a physicality—relative to random wrinkles of the energy-flow in the Beginning—a Bang that comes from where? Where other Bangs would have come from, making other universes with different physics. In any case, the physicality of our universe is almost completely known, which is a mathematicality, so to speak. To know the so-called “Physical Plane” is to know the relativity of physical understanding to mathematics, which happens to be quantum cosmological (and beyond my capabilities, though I enjoy metaphorizations of it by physicists writing for we laypersons).

Oddly, physics can’t explain biology—like summation can’t explain gestalt (or 3-D perception can’t be captured in 2-D pictures that analogize the living)—though life emerges from chemical processes that are reducible to physics. (The oddness is what happens in moving from 2-D to 3-D, chemistry to life—disentropic growth of complexity). Life (biochemistry) has self-formative processes that reproduce themselves; physical chemistry does not). A scientist could agree that biology happens at a different “level” or as a different kind of complexity (or natural dimension) than does physics. If “plane” has any real meaning, biology happens in a different plane from physics.

Life is only known to exist on Earth, so it’s Earthly life that is the distinguishing “nature” of that planar difference (while physics is proven to pertain throughout the universe—even some mysterious physicality of Dark Energy—70% of the universe!—between the webs of galaxies doesn’t annul the physics—the 30% Einsteinian continuum—in which the observable universe belongs: the tiny, tiny fraction of a percent of that space-time physicality that is observable). Maybe life “must” be essentially like Earthly life, wherever it may be besides Earth, in which case life here expresses something essential about life in the universe, life as such. But we don’t know. Astrobiology is in its infancy. We know that organic molecules are present in deep space between stars (as well as between Earth and Mars—we are the Martians that Mars couldn’t sustain?), while the basic chemical elements are literally universal.

As it stands, its us and the universe, i.e., it might as well be that the fundamental “plane” differentiation is existential between Earthliness and everything else (as if the Earth is the center of the universe because it’s the place of our conceptualization of planes). To think of us as essentially belonging to Earth is all the more compelling in light of the “Gaia hypothesis,” which is scientifically compelling: Life is a planetary emergence, not something that happens “on” a planet, rather something that belongs to the planet (of a certain kind of solar system).

The evolution of life is a breathtaking thing. We actually can’t represent to ourselves a billion of anything (only “planes” of counting, like powers of 10), let alone the diversity of life’s flourishing over 3+ billion years on Earth. But we can grow to appreciate our own form of life within that evolution, i.e., as belonging in the evolution of life that we share with other life—our belonging with other forms of life. Yet our belonging to Earth is distinguished by our intelligence, which arose from eonic beginnings we share with the intelligence of ants and octopi. Intelligence emerged from life on its own, not from a designer. We are the evolved designers who may reflect ourselves in appreciations of complexity in nature. The intelligence found in design belongs to our capacity for appreciating emergent complexity. The metaphor of a designer apart from us is a heuristic (as if there is some “entity”) that we design to make incomprehensible complexity denotable in our longing for life-orienting coherence, then scientific coherence, as if the totality of comprehension may one day belong to us as well, for this is what intelligence does: It longs for comprehensive coherence in The Appeal of its own evolutionarity.

We live by designs we make (and made), rather than just by designs that have resulted from the intelligence of eonic Earth (so to speak). We among the living are prevailing over designs received by eonic nature, as we evolve to design our own nature.

Paleontology knows that, given a planet like Earth in an average solar system like ours, life forms on its own easily, so it’s highly, highly likely that life formed in some of the billions of older solar systems in our galaxy millions and millions of years before us. We “modern” humans are only a few tens of thousands of years old. The “ancient” Sumerians are merely Yesterday (3,000-4,000 BCE?). Yet, our accelerating capacity to design our own nature implies that we can’t imagine the meaning of “being human” a thousand years from now, likely involving a self-designing form of life far beyond biological intelligence. Just consider our love of imagining such prospects—concordant with our ancient creation of gods that we aspire to reflect. It’s the nature of intelligence to thrive with imagination and so strive to embody what’s imagined—creating the horizon we trek to reach, only for the sake of some greater horizon made thereby imaginable.

To understand mind as such implies understanding the nature of our intelligence, which people in evolutionary psychology and cognitive science strive to do. Scientifically speaking, it is false to primordially distinguish physics and intelligence as belonging to adjacent kinds, such that “level” in the physical sense is kindred to “level” in the sense of human intelligence (i.e., as if there is a realm of levels belonging together—or realm of level-making— somewhere apart from our living minds), such that plane One is physical and plane Two is human emotional mentality (let alone mythical posits of a realm between lifetimes when “we’re finished with the physical plane,” as Hoodwin puts it). To think in terms of a physical and “astral plane” is to live in denial of the richness of possible knowledge—the cultural archive, The Library—between physics and our humanity—a possible knowledge which may have only as much instantiation as a life can comprehend.

There are no comprehenders but we humans singularly comprehending (albeit thanks to great communities of shared comprehending) what we can comprehend of reality. At best, the so-called “1050” souls of the “entity” are actually any number of faculty in a great university entity—really the uncounted thousands of inquirers, living and dead, who make up the archive (the abstract entity that is academia) that evolves piecemeal in current flows of inquiry.

The entity constituting the metaphorical Voice of Humanity is like a vast book—actually a concept of The Library (which could be called the anthropology of knowledge). The “concrete intellectual energy” (Hoodwin) of this is the life of the university complex of advanced societies (to give it a name, let me call it the universCity) that leads the evolution of knowledge. “Michael” is nothing more than a heuristic longing (in terms of some Bay Areans’ improvisations) for the intellectual historicality of evolving humanity. “The Causal Plane” is an unschooled metaphor of human evolutionarity in its vastly embodied actuality (i.e., the Causal Plane is a metaphoricity of denial about the locus and difficult nature of the universCity).

In the universCity, the sense of any “distilled knowledge of the universe” (Hoodwin) belongs to mathematical physics, as we are a relatively young species, as solar systems go, and science doesn’t pretend that human psychology expresses anything primordial about intelligence in the universe. Indeed, intelligent life in other star systems may have perished millions of years ago, leaving an archive circulating in the communicative network of advanced civilizations that we haven’t yet learned how to detect. But physics is such that the so-called “Askashic plane” is just a psychological construct expressing, it seems to me, longing for reconciliation about the incomprehensibility of our evolving universe.

There is no revealed place where “the distilled knowledge of the universe is recorded” really. The life of the cosmos is evolving. Not even is the knowledge of a university library distilled anywhere. Encyclopaedia Britannica does a good job (but many of its portraits of what’s known are outdated). Ha, the knowledge of the universe is at least as elaborate as the entirety of the Encyclopaedia! (I would have great fun dwelling with that. EB has heuristically classified everything into 8 areas, with many subcategories of the 8: society, technology, religion, history, art, mathematics, philosophy, and science.)

The nature of scientific intelligence is such that we never seek reconciliation; we press on, striving, in the search for ultimate coherence, not to expect to get it, but to foster evolution of knowing in our self-formativity. Even if we discover the holy grail of physics—the “Theory Of Everything” that unifies relativity physics with quantum mechanics—understanding biology, evolution, and humanity will be just where it was the day before. Sometimes I think that we’re ultimately going after scientific beauty, which likely most belongs to literary minds. I’ve thought something like this for over 30 years (conceived fall of 1974, “adult” by ‘95 or so, still learning).

But most people need closure on ultimate mystery—need a face on the Faceless Deep—as living with The Questioning is unmanageable—actually uninteresting, since the quest always was (with most of us) for a coherence of self-identity that could give peace and practicality to making a manageable life (and creative design to impulse channeling).

So, we find the cohering that most appeals and live in light of that—or find the appeal that’s sufficiently cohering. Given that, we look to see it embodied in our lives—embodied in the exemplar who mentors a life in the making. Thus, we descend from the mountain to find our own way into creative living, with highlands now at our back and the lowlands prevailing on the world, we become a midland. Call it the “Mental Plane,” if you please. It’s what any good professor knows: “truth” is a matter of appropriation, both relative to what a life is ready to understand (which education addresses) and relative to appealing domains of archived understanding that continues to evolve (back in the highlands, in depths of entity called The Library).

Primordial understanding is available, though it’s primordially evolving. Even good understanding in the midlands can be a difficult road. In fact, gaining even a good sense of that (relative to the great topography of human understanding facing evolution of Earth’s humanity) is a wonderful achivement. Bringing others to love the path of learning calls for the best of teaching—the better angels of human appeals—which involves authentically loving the learner’s ownmost way into pathmaking toward the midlands, which is what student-centered learning idealizes in educational psychology or what child-centered parenting idealizes in developmental psychology. Call that the “Messianic Plane,” if you please.

So, it may seem odd to many people that the highest achievement of wisdom works in very ordinary ways. You look at a picture of Einstein, and you see a kindly grandfather who knew how to entertain with violin, or a teacher who seems to know as much as you but not a lot more, because s/he’s with your pathmaking (Great philosophy professors are funny this way—I mean, actually funny in their conceptual play). Ironically, the “highest” can be comfortably near—comfortable immanence belongs to what’s most “high” in so-called “enlightenment”. Its “abstractness” is the invisibility of its dwelling (as such) in our comfortable challenges. Call it the “Buddhaic plane,” if you please.

September 2, 2014 webmailed to...

Dr. [ ],

Tonight, I’m in the middle of struggling through the tedium of updating some HTML pages, as I’m no expert in the matter, but love to write.

I came across an old page I’d nearly forgotten (I had nothing else linking to it), which was the larger part of a letter I deleted from one of the tens of e-mails I exchanged with [my dear friend named] over the years. I was unsure how old she was at the end. I wanted to note on the page [here] her age when she left life.

The eerie Internet answers: Google “[name] born” and you get a listing near the top of the results: [date].

Some other results, too: An old Yelp! listing with kudos from former clients. And your “business card” listed. I see you’re a graduate of [her professional program], too.

I met [her] when she was an undergraduate in Psychology at [her university], 1984. I “went through” all of her growth into professional psychotherapy. Over the years, I doubt there’s much she hadn’t shared about her struggles. We loved each other very much.

So, in the wake of mourning years back, a puzzlement has remained. No matter how much I feel I know, I still startle myself to realize that she’s dead. [She] can’t be dead. She’s [she]! I bet you feel what I mean: She weathers everything! Or that was what she caused me to believe over the decades.

You’ll remember that chapter she wrote for a book on [her creative focus]. That [person]! I had to not hide with her my queasiness about her “Michael” thing, which arose around 2000 and grew to be so important to her. Indeed, the HTML page I’m looking at is a critique of it all which I prudently kept to myself.

I can berate myself for not seeing some sign that would have caused me to try to Be There for her more intensely—that I “failed” to be available enough for her. I can blame her for not reaching out to me, letting me know that she was nearly leaving. (I can blame her for not taking my advice in the 1990s to build a practice with a group practice, rather than going it alone, going bankrupt, then continuing to try to succeed alone.)

But she knows—see: still alive—she knew that those who loved her wouldn’t let her go.

She had to go. That’s what I can’t understand, even though I understood (I feel) what she meant about the “fire” in her brain that she refused to weather through one more cycle (indicated in her suicide note that [her sister later] transcribed and forwarded to everyone).

“It was all the ecstasy you did, [friend]. It burned out your brain.” It wasn’t the bulimia or chronic depression alone. It was too much high living!

So, she had to go.

Persons harm themselves, knowing that they’re doing harm, yet do it anyway. I know the story, from too many years of working with mental health professionals (the general rubric is apt) in [a major health care provider]. Long-term therapy is too expensive to offer folks. There was no place for the [Hers] of the world. So, we do brief intervention, cognitive-behavioral strategies with a population managerial ethic of follow-up. [She] couldn’t fit in with that, and I admire her for it.

Oddly, though, there were openings for MFCCs at [the provider], and during 2008, early 2009, I had been putting off talking with [her] about it. (If her private practice was failing, she hid it from me.) I was just a few weeks from contacting her about the openings in new [name brand] programs and mental health classes that needed instructors. I meant to call [her] “last week” (I might of said, summer of 2009). “Next week.”

Now, ObamaCare is gradually causing more attention to be given to insurance coverage for mental health services in health plans. (You might know that the main reason [she] “bothered” getting licensed—after years of doing good post-[graduate program] work unlicensed—was so that she could take insurance payments.) The world is evolving to more and more validate the work that [she] did—the work that you do. It is “Gods work,” as they say (like going to Africa to treat ebola patients!).

My “answer” from [her] comes from the air, as if there is “Michael,” and she is home. The answer is to carry on fruitfully, meaningfully, fulfillingly—to make love of life.

That requires the creativity that [she] was devoted to teaching others to nurture.

So, here is a diary entry, which I’m sharing, in honor of [her] and the important work that you do. I’m remembering, in the name of [her], what spiritual calling is basically about.

No reply needed. But if you happen to feel you understand why she left, in some way I’m missing here, I’d appreciate your thoughts. You know, people didn’t know that Robin Williams was dealing with Parkinson’s disease. Maybe [she] was dealing with something she couldn’t share, like cancer. But she would have mentioned that in her suicide note.

I hate you [dear] for leaving me to guess.

[signed]