There Is Nothing New Under The Sun

THERE IS NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

“What has been will be again,

What has been done will be done again,

And there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9)”

That is the condition and the context of existence. The agitation about globalization and the ensuing interfacing of cultures was, is and will be, although changes in form and quantity may occur due to the increase of the world’s population and changing technological artifacts. But there seems indeed to be - proverbially - nothing new under the sun. Peripheral changes should not blind one to the permanence of the essential. There is nothing fundamentally new under the sun in the sense that everything is cyclical. The sun, the moon, the stars, the rivers and the seasons, everything follows over and over again its predestined course: empires, emperors, civilizations, cultures and individuals come from dust and go back to dust.

This existential determinism of life on earth merits the use of the term programming at a higher or highest level: a vital, existential programming that has been enacted since times immemorial. And nothing seems to be able to change the laws of repetition of cycles. There seem to be unchangeable patterns on the entire continuum form the microscopic via the human level to the macroscopic cosmic level. Change is the only constant indeed, but if one takes a closer look at that change it is but the repetition of the same over and over again and therefore there ultimately seems to be no change whatsoever.

How can that perception be reconciled with the very opposite human experience of speed-up, information overload and other accelerations and increases beyond humanly comprehensible and manageable measures?

Well, from a pragmatic standpoint it is a matter of managing consciousness and awareness of what goes on from the most micro- to the most macroscopic level. Man is a creature of the middle between the vastest and the minutest as philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal noted long time ago. He has to search and find his specific human middle. This requires a consciousness that seeks the middle. It requires an awareness of the whole, the totality of the field from the subatomic to the supercosmic universe. Both can be evidenced today under the microscope and through the telescope: the infinitely small nano- worlds and the infinitely vast cosmic worlds. Both form one supercosmos, at which one may look in diverse ways, micro- or macroscopically or at the normal human perceptual scale. There may be expansion at both poles, beyond the minutest known today and beyond the vastest known today, but the center remains. That seems to apply physically as much as metaphysically.

So, amidst all the turmoil of changing cycles at the quantum level and at the level of the universe as a whole there is indeed a still point. All that seems to change, from the minutest to the vastest, is the speed of the cycles; unimaginably fast subatomic spins on the one hand and unimaginably slow revolutions of supergalactic cycles on the other hand - only endless cycles, rhythms and spins; the music and melody of life. And these cycles again are enshrined in the existential cycles which are born form dust and return to dust. Dust was and will be. - And yet we live and move amidst the beauty and the glory made from that dust through the Creator’s intervention or the Word. - This cycle of being and non-being is all that happens in the longer term. The absolute zero of the emergence and the return to nothing can be a beginning of understanding. For when everything created ends only the Creator or creative intelligence remains. It is like the pulse and breath of creation: breathing it in - breathing it out: the superordinate cycle of creation, the work of the spirit, the Holy Spirit.

When human consciousness reaches an insight into this absolute zero, mental phenomena appear in a clearer perspective. And when we talk about mental phenomena we include culture which is a spacio-temporal dialectical mental phenomenon. At the point zero there is nothing or emptiness or potential allness and fullness. It is unalloyed consciousness, pure consciousness and pristine perception. When the mind comes into play, consciousness seems to move away from zero or fullness and the many of diversity and the lack of fullness and therefore fulfillment enter the scene of consciousness which now functions as a dialectical mind. Cultural mind runs the risk of forever remaining unfulfilled and lacking the fullness humans intuitively desire. This lack of fulfillment creates the intercultural strife as much as different value preferences. The fundamental fragmentation of the zero which is total emptiness as well as total fullness and fulfillment necessarily creates a yearning for fulfillment. The root cultural problem is that man has fragmented his wholeness with regard to consciousness, structures and functions which results in diverse deficits. He seeks to compensate for the deficits by trying to reassemble the fragments in order to recreate his wholeness from which he distanced himself through the intricacies of the mind. However, he takes a perilous detour via the socio- cultural, mental and physical worlds to reengineer his wholeness which is full of struggle and strife with the other fragments who suffered the same destiny. When the whole with its fullness and completeness has forgotten about its essential nature the problem is frequently externalized as cultural conflict. The only sustainable remedy then is to facilitate the rediscovery process of man’s spiritual wholeness which heals his cultural fragmentation and makes cultural conflict completely superfluous, because through the integration process at a consciousness level the externalization of the consequences of fragmentation as conflict are no longer necessary. That is the road to cultural peace.

Practically this can be achieved approximately in the following way: We have already been using Pascal’s model of the specifically human middle as a logical integration of the biggest and the smallest. Let us consider this a horizontal spacio-temporal axis which is the object of astrophysics and quantum physics or scientific consciousness. This locates man in the material space-time of existence. But in order to account for man as a whole we need to introduce another axis, a vertical (science of) consciousness axis, so to speak. This is a continuum that runs from the highest realm of a unified all encompassing consciousness to the most diversified, differentiating mental pole. At the crossing of the consciousness of science and the science of consciousness axes man can occupy that middle which Pascal recommends and which befits humans. This center point is an ideal physical and psychological position, because it is a balanced position which integrates the totality of the field of existence. If man can remain there no intercultural or interpersonal conflict can arise. And if through some internal- external intervention a disturbance should arise it is autocorrected, because it is the position of healing and integration of the unified inner-outer field of existence.

This position of consciousness which I call quantic and therefore a quantum cultural consciousness allows looking at the human relational reality from a personal, a cultural and a universal standpoint alike and thereby integrating them. The very ability to see in this way is integrative beyond mental and verbal techniques. And this quantum capability acts on other communicators because all participate in the universal dimension. For, whether you throw a stone in a river from one side or the other, it will create waves in the river of the universal mind or consciousness in which all players participate more or less consciously by virtue of being humans. In this way, metaphorically speaking, the culture- consciousness cross or matrix which we have constructed becomes the cross- cultural facilitator par excellence.

People are rather less than more aware of the lower cultural pole of the vertical axis of consciousness. In intercultural theory we differentiate between the unconscious, daily consciousness and discursive consciousness and admit that most of our cultural information is unconscious and to some extent latently conscious. And intercultural training consists in making the unconscious cultural knowledge fully conscious, so as to manage it consciously, instead of being driven by it unconsciously. On the other, higher end of the vertical consciousness axis the situation is very similar. Although most cultures and civilizations have caught a glimpse of the universal pole of consciousness, there is only a low degree of conscious awareness of it in daily life so as to impact it healthily. In order to integrate and to achieve a balanced personal consciousness, conscious awareness of the continuum with its polarizations seems to be required, i. e. awareness and knowledge of both poles and skill at their integration. To validate the assumption of its feasibility more scientifically we may draw on the neurophysiologic law of functional subordination and postulate that analogously to the integrative function of higher nervous centers with regard to subjacent centers, higher psychological functions also have an integrative effect on subordinate functions. In other words the consciousness axis is a hierarchically integrated axis from top to bottom where the highest state of consciousness performs an integrating and controlling function. The central position in the space-time-consciousness model has to be qualified by this insight and the morphological center nuanced by the functionally integrative superordinate “center”.

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