of my next chapter it should be pointed out that Bentov espoused that, “... all mass
(matter) contains consciousness (or life) to a greater or lesser extent that may be
refined or primitive” (Bentov, 1988:78). Thus, Bentov’s proposition also affirms a
possibility to be developed later in the thesis that there is an incessant and dynamic
relationship between human consciousness and place.
The French physicist Olivier Costa de Beauregard, while studying the
problem of entropy, came to the conclusion that the physical universe which the
physicist studies is not the whole but rather the aver or affirmation of a much more
primordial psychic universe, of which the physical cosmos is only a passive double.
This psychic universe he calls an infrapsychisme or subconscient, which he claims
should be regarded as coextensive with the four-dimensional Minkowski-Einsteinian
block universe (in von Franz, 1992:48-49). I ndeed, Costa de Beauregard came to
the following conclusions: That the infrapsychisme is something similar to what
Jung has called the psychoid aspect of the archetypes and the collective
unconscious, that which contains a sort of supraconscience - something very akin to
Jung’s absolute knowledge and thus the whole material universe is like a gigantic
cybernetic machine which serves the growth of consciousness in all individuals (in
von Franz, 1992:50-51).
All of these recent theories bear close resemblance to the Middle-Earth
avowed by the Anglo-Saxon, I celandic and Norse-European shamans of around 700-
1,000 CE. The Anglo-Saxon Middle-Earth shaman lived out a view of life called
Wyrd; a way of being which transcended our conventional notions of free will and
determinism. All aspects of the world were seen as being in a constant flux and
motion of the psychological and mystical polarities of Fire and Frost: a creative,
organic vision paralleling the classical eastern concepts of Yin and Yang. I mplicit in
this concept of Wyrd was a vision of the universe, from the gods to the underworld,
as being connected by an enormous all-reaching system of fibres like a three
dimensional spider’s web; everything was connected by strands of fibre to the all-
encompassing web. Any event, anywhere, resulted in reverberations and
repercussions throughout the web rather as described by Bates (Bates, 1983:9-14).
This also has a resonance with Thomas Keneally’s statement during my
interview with him that:
I just believe that all the equipment we need to be everyone else
is laid down in that noosphere ... I think of it existing both
spiritually and biologically, if there is any difference between those
two. And being the part of existence necessary to art ... I t can’t be
ron
(Ron)
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