Action, Agency, Efficacy

According to Insight Timer, I have reached a milestone of forty consecutive days of meditation. If I put my mind to something, I can accomplish it. I can point to the actions I have taken, I can feel a sense of agency, and I can grow into the possibility and aspiration of efficacy. My intention from the beginning of this year has been to grow senses for co-creation. On Monday of this week, Veronica Anderson’s Instagram story called attention to The Creator card of the Osh Zen Tarot deck. This became the inspiration for translating it into the feminine pronouns and then into first person pronouns on Wednesday, which was my ensoulment anniversary. Dami Lee has a video about creating an architectural portfolio. She has some templates to help with that process. The Book of Soul is that sort of document, except that it is a way of considering my work as an alchemical architect, working with inner and outer architecture and inner and outer landscape. I have my articles from studies in communications and fine arts in 1992 and 1993 to refer to as my explorations of the connections between language, art, design, and architecture, and the human desire to make sense of life, to find meaning in the spiritual quest and a way to build the kind of world we want to live in, a world that loves itself, as Veronica Anderson expresses it.

• The Transformation of the Oral Landscape by Literate Architecture. March 10, 1992.
• Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus: The Spirit of Modernist Architecture. April 2, 1993.

I begin my paper about the Bauhaus with a quote from Paul Johnson’s book, Modern Times, that the “modern world began on 29 May 1919 when photographs of a solar eclipse… confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe”—that is, Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.

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I went to grab a book that has been sitting on my bookshelf unread, Walter Isaacson’s biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe. I was also reminded of Krista Tippett’s book, Einstein’s God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit.

Between the gravitational theories and the quantum theories, there appears to be a divide. This week, I was watching videos by Quantum Gravity Research that is building a model for a bridge between the two using e8 as the basis for the unifying structure of the universe.

How we ask our questions affects the answers we arrive at. Light appears as a wave if you ask it “a wavelike question” and it appears as a particle if you ask it “a particle-like question.” This is a template for understanding how contradictory explanations of reality can simultaneously be true.

We do a similar thing when we ask a religious question or a scientific question. One is a metaphysical question and the other is a physics or mathematics question. The difference is in qualities of experience and in quantities of experiment. The qualia and the quanta are different realms of reality. However, in our experience as humans, they are a synesthetic unity. Conscious experience unifies the physical and the metaphysical—not just for humans, but for all life, we can presume. At least, it would be presumptuous to assume that humans are the only living beings in this universe that are experiencing conscious awareness.

Can we bring together a unified theory of everything? We would need to ask different questions. Where are the connections between these areas of exploration that we have artificially separated and divided into non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA), as advocated by Stephen Jay Gould—“that science and religion each represent different areas of inquiry, fact vs. values.”

There is much talk recently about the ways that quantum physics and spiritual experience are converging and rediscovering what was lost by colonization and the erasure of indigenous ways of knowing and being.

As a product of a fusion of colonizer and colonized living on the stolen land of Indigenous Peoples, I find myself asking questions of ultimate meaning and ultimate reality to make sense of my existence. I am a walking contradiction and a living paradox. Yet, here I am.

In this morning’s 45-minute salient meditation, my mind did wander quite a bit. I was able to bring to mind the words and ideas I had listed yesterday, twenty-four ideas that make sense of the whole.

In the last 15 minutes, I was exploring the possibility of coming back to the breath and feeling the celestial bodies around me. That is outside of my experience and I don’t know whether that is possible, but it is a question that I am asking myself. I know I can sense the pull of gravity. My inner ear is equipped with a sensory system, the vestibular system, that helps me feel the difference between up and down. I can feel the pull of the earth’s gravity, moment by moment, as I fine-tune my sense of balance. It is a remarkable skill for a human being to be able to walk on two legs. Simply sitting on a chair requires fine adjustments of balance to remain upright. Both physics and metaphysics can be experienced together. As I sit without requiring conscious awareness of how my body maintains its upright position, I can feel wonder and awe about how this is happening from the perspective of physics, but I can also feel the unconditional love of the earth in the way it holds me in the embrace of its gravitational pull. I could not be thinking these thoughts except for a tangential relationship to Einstein and Buckminster Fuller through those who have shared their ideas. Fuller speaks of love as metaphysical gravity. Veronica Anderson speaks of the heartbeat of Mother Earth, and through an ensoulment process over the past year, has helped me to reconnect to my body, my emotions, my senses, my heart, and to the divine feminine within me, the Spirit of Creativity that I have defined as my Higher Power, as well as my inner child, my inner authority, guiding my actions, my sense of agency, and my aspiration for efficacy.

And I have felt the love of my beloved, my wife, Jayne Bau, who has been my life partner for the past thirty years, and my best friend for forty years. We have together co-created a daughter, Alexandria Quint, who has co-created with her husband, Aaron Quint, two children, our grandchildren. It is because of these relationships of love that I am exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together, to make a world that loves itself.

Jayne is an alchemist. She pours her love into crafting delicious meals for our family, nourishing our bodies and making memories at the same time, both a physical and a metaphysical act of love. I made a recipe book for my daughter and son-in-law, whose last name is Quint, called The Quintessentials. Although my last name, Bau is actually Cantonese, meaning abalone, for me, my last name Bau, drawing from the German, means to build, which means to love. This has been foundational to my approach to life.

Quintessence is the fifth element in Aristotle’s understanding of the classical elements, earth, water, air, and fire. According to Aristotle, “celestial bodies are made of a fifth element called quintessence and their natural behaviour is to move uniformly in circles indefinitely around the Earth (which does not move) either by spinning or by moving through the heavens.” (A Brief History of the Universe by J.P. McEvoy.) The scientific revolution upended this belief in these classical elements, but we still make movies, where (SPOILER ALERT) we discover that the fifth element is love.

By bringing spirituality and science, metaphysics and physics, gravity and quanta, female and male, body and mind, inner and outer, spirit and earth together, we make love, the relationships of energy and motion that hold everything together in intimate connection. Out of these relationships new life forms emerge, changing and evolving, making possible greater complexity and diversity and beauty. Physical bodies act, interacting, interdependently, in networks of complex interconnected relationships, learning collectively, but acting individually and independently of their families and groups in ways that transform the whole.

Tools and technologies and media are part of that process of extending ourselves into the world in ways that were not previously possible, but we must also be aware of how these extensions numb and desensitize, while taking on a life of their own that can overstimulate and overwhelm our senses.

Coming back to ourselves is a process of resensitizing ourselves to the connections and relationships that make this life not only possible but beautiful. In that sense, love, not money, makes the world go around.

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