Critical Axis: Consciousness of Choice in Times of Change

By Inely Cássia Cesna Esq. D.S.S. and Laurence Lyons Murphy Ph.D.

We are entities capable of creativity, beauty, choice, courage, and intelligence, as well as entities capable of almost unimaginable capacity for self- destruction, both individually and collectively. Which side of our nature will define us turns on the edge of the axis. Like a coin spinning in the air, not knowing whether it will land on heads or tails, in our search for ourselves in time, we are mystical travelers whose destiny may turn on the edge of a dime.
The challenge and choices we face in this task as co-creators of the world around us is to learn to read and interpret the signs of change, just as the reflections of stars in the evening sky are signs of energy that echoes the very origins of the cosmos itself, and even as the strata of our earth entomb a fossil record recording the history of life on earth—all of our world becomes a text—teaching us the grammar of energy, space and matter which led to the birth of a universe. Critical Axis explains this text written in the phenomenon of the Cosmos as we move toward its revelation, and as such, Critical Axis is a guidebook to the text of our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Aug 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781982250379

Inely Cássia Cesna Esq. D.S.S.

Inely Cássia Cesna holds a doctorate in spiritual science, a master’s degree in spiritual psychology, and a juris doctor in law. She is an international coach encouraging the development of meaningful levels of leadership and spiritual awareness, and the founder of the Institute For Next Level Leadership. Laurence Lyons Murphy holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University and has taught philosophy at Rutgers University and Tyler School of Art. At Temple University, Philadelphia, he served as the Executive Coordinator for the Intellectual Heritage Program and at Point Park University, Pittsburgh, the Director of Interdisciplinary Studies.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

DIRECTIONS

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go …?

"That depends a good deal on where you

want to get to," said the Cat.

I don’t much care where— said Alice.

Then it doesn’t matter which way you go …

—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Our physical bodies are composed of atoms created in supernovas, the explosions of stars. We are literally made of stardust. If the elemental table shifted slightly, then the atoms that compose our bodies would not exist—and we would not exist either.

The only proof that the universe contains intelligent life that questions the nature of this cosmos is the fact that we ask those questions.

And we not only consider questions of the great scale and scope of this phenomenal universe, but we also inquire about the incredibly small elements the universe contains: the electrons in a charged haze inside the atom, a single gene on a strand of DNA and the atoms that compose it, the simple elegance of a drop of dew on the miracle of a morning flower, or a passing poem uttered out of silence amid the march of human generations.

From the seemingly simple to the very complex, each element of the riddle of our existence, and the miracle of the improbable universe around us, plays a role. If 2 + 2 ≠ 4, then E ≠ mc². The simplest equation (in which the word equation itself means to make equal) must be equal to the most complex. Complexity, in fact, can only be built from the elegance and consistency of the simple. And the very simple can challenge our imagination.

For you to be born, for example, your parents had to have conceived you exactly as they did, with exactly the same sperm and egg uniting exactly as they did. This means that the same would have had to take place for your parents to be born. And your grandparents. And your great-grandparents (on both sides). And your—well, you get the idea.

We might trace these unions back to protohuman beings, and the mathematical odds against you and the authors of this book being born, according to reason and analytical logic, are infinitely against it. To make the odds even worse, the odds that you would one day read this are improbable at best. Even reading this text is an exercise in improbability.

In fact, if you sit in a room full of people and figure the odds against all those people in the room being born, added to the odds against your being born, let alone your being with them at the same time and in that room, the odds are infinitely against that altogether. Frankly, it’s impossible.

If you do sit in that room, however, the exception to this impossibility is that you are there. That it is so.

Similarly, by all laws of reason, life shouldn’t be here, in our cosmos, at all. The only exception to this improbability is that we are here. In this very real case, the whole of existence in the universe is a wonderland of improbabilities in which we, like Alice, have fallen down a rabbit hole of infinite mysteries the day we were born.

To add to this complexity of this improbable universe, in the midst of the mystery, we often mistake the exceptions for the rules. We see life around us, we witness our growth in time and the changing nature of all that surrounds us, and we may believe that this constantly changing world in which we live is the norm and the infinite universe, and the eternal vastness of our potential nonexistence, is the exception.

In fact, out of the improbability of existence, exactly the opposite is the case. Life is the exception; the eternal is the rule. Even, in all the time that has passed before one was born, each breath and moment of life is the exception. Amid this phenomenal context, the fact that we must at some point in time cease to exist is not an option. It is an inevitability.

But the exception of the existence of life itself is extraordinary. From the atmosphere that surrounds us to the ecological matrix that supports life on earth, life itself creates the conditions capable of sustaining our survival. Even in the vision of our planet amid all our nearest neighbors in the solar system, it is obvious that life is the exception, not the rule. It is a complex yet simple, fragile interweaving of conditions and adaptation that compose this rare exception. What we often think is real, and normal, even as the conditions of existence changes before our eyes, is temporary; it exists only in the flux and flow of time as time itself carries us along like a leaf on a river.

Our arrival in time and our departure from it, and the events in between, is all we know. We could easily become lost in the vastness of the universe at any moment if memory fails, our consciousness fails to put together the evidence of what was here before us, or communications with one another fails altogether. Indeed, a good deal has been lost. Measured against the eternal, the few thousand years we record of our existence on earth, as well as a record of what we call civilization, is infinitesimally small.

It is in this context of uncertainty and change that we navigate our lives, guessing as best we can the elements of the cosmic drama of what life might mean. Like good detectives, we make some guesses on what direction we should follow based on the best evidence we can gather. We search for patterns. Whether we send robotic probes to other planets, gather evidence from the sea floors, or read the legacy of fossils of former species entombed in geologic strata, we string what evidence we can find together and try to tell ourselves a story, construct an intelligible symmetry, taking place on many levels that might unravel a few riddles, hint at new directions, and reveal the origins of life and its direction pointing to new horizons. The only way we can grasp the overwhelming complexity of this wondrous but nevertheless perplexing, phenomenal world around us is to tell ourselves a story, construct a narrative from the evidence we find that weaves the details that we are able to discover into some form of concerted whole, revealing the story of the world we find ourselves in, and thus the story of our lives.

CHAPTER 2

STORIES

The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard

seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field:

Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it

is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the

birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.

—Matthew 13:31,32 (KJV)

It can indeed be perplexing to decide what our next steps through this mystery should be, especially when time, the great context of our existence, is itself a mystery. We can only witness time in hindsight, search for what trace elements it leaves of former events, even as the light of the stars that we see overhead are merely light shadows of energy that once was, but no longer is, in time as we see it.

For example, it takes light one second to travel approximately 186,000 miles.

And 60 x 186,000 miles is approximately one light-minute.

It takes eight light-minutes for the light of the sun to travel to the earth.

The sun we see in the sky originated eight minutes ago, when the sun we perceive, and which affects us immediately, is no longer there.

The distance light must travel from the sun to reach us is already astonishing and nearly unimaginable. Depending on where we find ourselves, in life or in space, our definition for such distances is based on the simple question How long does it take to get from there to here, or here to there?

So we can think of the sun as eight minutes away if we use the speed of light as a measuring stick. We know that nothing can traverse space faster than the speed of light, so the sun being eight minutes away from us means that if the sun ceased to exist, we would not know for eight minutes.

Now imagine how far light would travel in an entire year. Clearly, we cannot imagine this distance because it is greater than any distance we know. But we often describe this great distance by saying simply that this is a light-year.

In short, because we know what a year is, we can at least conceive of all the seconds in a year in order to help us conceive of what otherwise would be far too vast a distance for us to imagine. We can nevertheless phrase this distance into a narrative that makes sense to us. We take the inconceivable and put it in the context of examples and stories we can understand. Advanced electronic systems are often referred to as digital, for example. But a digit is also a word for our fingers. We use that calculation because we initially counted on our fingers.

Such illustrations are used as well when we tell children stories so that they might learn, say, math for the first time. We tell a child a story about two imaginary children. Let’s say we name them Bobby and Susie. In this story, Bobby has three cherries and Susie has two. Then we ask, If Bobby and Susie put their cherries together, how many cherries do Bobby and Susie have?

In that story, we are not talking about cherries really, or Bobby or Susie. Rather, we are trying to teach a child a very abstract and advanced concept: namely, that three plus two equals five. The quantities of three and two can refer to everything in the world precisely because, as a mathematical principle, they do not necessarily stand for anything in the world at all! Rather, we have an example of an abstract system of logic and how this system is applied in various modes of our own experience in order to create an understanding.

The same is true of the parable at the heading of this chapter. Saying that the kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed, as Christ did, is not really a story about seeds, trees, or birds seeking shelter but an illustration in Christianity expressing that which is mild, meek, and may seem inconspicuous or of little value contains the possibility of offering us the greatest shelter and security in time—even beyond death—a far greater meaning than a story about seeds, birds, and trees.

The parable in this case is an artifact, just as a painting, a poem, a sculpture, a musical score, or any product of our imagination and making is an artifact. What makes us human is the existence of such artifacts. As will be reiterated later, it is art that is the first sign of our consciousness. It is our way. It is what makes us human. It expresses our notion of creativity in all of existence. The entity that drew pictures of animals on cave walls didn’t just hunt to stay alive. From the practical perspective, they drew these pictures to invoke magic in the act of hunting. But more importantly, these illustrations show they knew they hunted to stay alive. If the power of that idea seems elusive, then imagine if lions started drawing pictures of gazelles. This would mean that there was another self-aware intelligence on our planet on a completely different level from what we have thus far witnessed in our fellow species.

At some point in the evolution of life on this planet, a form of life, in this case us, abstracted itself into a higher dimension, expressing self-awareness. Thus, when we look at a sculpture by Michelangelo, we do not see just a piece of stone. The granite has been abstracted into a whole new dimension, and as the case with Michelangelo’s art, that stone tells you a story of life, passion, aspiration, mortality, the search for meaning, and always so much more. Art is our humanity, and living an artful life is far more than producing paintings or other artifacts. It is a creative way of life that is the essence of who we are. We are in part the creator of our realities. The artifacts are byproducts of that vision.

Perhaps we use stories to illustrate such points because the life we lead does not lend itself to the precision of logic or mathematics. Unlike an equation, we cannot truly calculate our lives, what will happen, or what we should do next with mathematical certainty. The future is unknown, and despite our expectation of what will happen next as similar to what has happened before, we are always caught between what is and what is to come without real certainty. Between one moment and the next is the twilight.

CHAPTER 3

THE AXIS

If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you

will have to settle for the ordinary.

—Jim Rohn

In Tibetan Buddhism, the Bardo is a dimension between two states—a sort of twilight without any real definition. It is the state of the soul just after death and just before birth in reincarnation. It is the tension between the yin and yang, the pause between inhaling and exhaling, the zero at the center of the arabic numeral system, the x of the algebraic equation, and the twilight from which existence emerges and in which it is extinguished. It could be described in other terms as that point on the cusp of a decision that will move events forward this way or that.

In one sense, the Bardo, that dimension of twilight, is freedom in that nothing yet is decided and nothing therefore is either predictable or inevitable. In another sense, it is existential freedom with an edge because all else is revealed as without form or necessity—an illusion that will become one thing or another, one way or another, out of the infinite possibilities arising out of any given moment.

In time, the Bardo is the space we occupy as now, which occurs at any given moment and which always slips through our fingers like water, even though it is the moment we always occupy. It is the move we make out of the moment that creates the possibility of what is next. When we review our lives, it is usually the nexus point of such moments that we remember and evaluate.

Often we lose ourselves in reverie of what life might have been like if we had chosen another way, a different direction, or had one chosen for us. On reflection, just before we made a move, decided on one direction or another, or made a decision, we were at a critical axis: a point of direction from which all events will turn. Out of this twilight, we create a path for ourselves through time.

In that sense, we are all time travelers. What we may seek in these travels varies in time, and our journey changes inside the context of our own lives and in the greater context of our own mortality, determined by what move we may have chosen out of a critical axis in time.

It can go either way, and whether we regret our past decisions or not, we are in one sense still fashioning our future, and what we will do next, based on how we feel about what we did last. The only reason we have any feelings about this at all is—well, because we have at least some awareness that the choices we have made have had an influence on the events of our lives. Maybe not all of what happens to us, but at least some of what happens to us, was based on sets of decisions we made when we were young, old, or somewhere in the middle.

If only I had known then what I know now … is the cliché associated with regrets concerning former decisions. Then again, if we had known then what we know now, the now in which we know better would never have happened at all.

In that case, it is not what we do but our awareness of what we do that really changes things because our awareness will change what we do next. Momentous decisions, and most often bad ones, can cause a catastrophic avalanche of events that may run beyond our control—and then the critical axis can change altogether. At the beginning of the last century, for example, such a series of mishaps changed that century as well as the next one.

The two massive world wars of the twentieth century determined and altered millions of lives. And even those who may have known better than the situation they found themselves in could not change the big event of the errors in judgment, ambition, and revenge coupled with power that transformed the world order. A good deal of tragic consciousness can be the result of being caught up in situations one knows better than but is incapable of doing much about. Sometimes such events are so much bigger than ourselves that there seems to be little chance, or point, in being aware of it at all, and no matter what we do, it is of no consequence.

At other times, it may seem that if we act in a situation and change the course of events, we can actually make the situation worse than it was in the first place. We are then caught up in Hamlet’s dilemma of To be or not to be, or to act or not to act—to emerge from the Bardo or opt for oblivion.

In such situations, it becomes clear that all choices are a risk; even the choice not to choose is risky. All choices put us on the edge of a critical axis, coming out of that indeterminate space between being and nonbeing: the Bardo.

Nevertheless, even if we choose to ignore our own consciousness and choose not to choose—once we are self-aware, we respond differently from merely functioning unconsciously by instinct alone. Rather, we respond to our condition as we understand and interpret it, and thus we also become responsible, whether we like it or not. We are responsible because we are responding. We are, in this case, willingly or unwillingly involved in the project of creating ourselves.

The full impact of this, as in Tibetan Buddhism, can come in that painful moment of eternity passing between life and death. Like the last light in one’s eye can be tangible and present right before the twilight extinguishes in the moment of death—in the infinite Bardo—what was once tangible and alive becomes only corpse and memory in a moment, then grief follows.

Such grief can create a profound doubt within us. How can our lives be only shadows of what has been—of what we become aware of only after losing it? So much of this feeling of loss in time, our sense of grief, can leave us staring over what seems to be vast, isolated, infinite oceans. If the universe is intelligent, and in one dimension, the fact that at least some of the physical laws under which it operates are intelligible, that sense of pain of loss may have a