A COSMIC STORY OF A HUMAN HYBRID

Join me as I continue a series of cosmic stories about human hybrids.

 Over the past decade I have become increasingly aware that the evolutionary Spirit is birthing a very different form of humanity. Barbara Marx Hubbard calls this evolutionary manifestation of human: homo universalis. Like the mainstream science descriptive term, homo sapiens sapiens, I take Barbara Hubbard’s term to be hopeful but premature. We are neither wise nor universal in our development. At least, not yet.

Clare W. Graves, research psychologist par excellence, probed the developmental phases of humans and their values when quite suddenly he discovered to his great surprise a unique manifestation of our species, one he called informally, a new breed of cat altogether. These humans he discovered in research functioned in a qualitatively fresh dimension of integrative awareness and were able to move easily through a variety of perspectives without judgement. Later, I will explore Clare Graves as exemplary of the new human hybrid.

Today, I invite you to take a good series of breaths. Slide your shoulders down your back. Smile. And listen to a story about our human hybrid of the day: theoretical physicist, David Bohm.

Here are a few beginning headlines about Bohm, in case he is new to your purview. Toward the end of the 20^th Century, it became clear to many physicists that David Bohm was pushing the envelope of our most basic science. In the second decade of the 21^st Century, his work is gaining even more attention posthumously. In other works I have commented that Bohm is to physics what Jung is to psychology. Bohm died in October of 1997, but is well represented on YouTube even today.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mst3fOl5vH0) Einstein, a colleague of Bohm’s, once commented that Bohm wrote the definitive book on quantum mechanics. Yet, a short time later, Bohm countered that there was no such thing as quantum mechanics but only quantum movement. Something he called holomovement.

Before I talk briefly about quantum movement, I want to tell a brief cosmic story from Bohm’s life.

A Cosmic Story

At age ten or twelve Bohm walked in the woods with a band of explorative boys when they came to a stream traversed by a series of rocks.(Peat, p. 14) David was not a very physical boy, and it was just this kind of physically challenging situation that greatly bothered him. As the boys approached the stream, which Bohm knew was an obstacle from previous hikes, he hatched a plan. He noted the position of the rocks and willed his feet rationally to step on each stone. He would, he planned, move only when he had placed himself securely on each stone. Then, he would go on to the next step. Yet, as soon as he jumped to the first stone, he realized it was impossible to stop long enough to execute a plan for the next stone. So, he fell in. He knew if he stopped to think about what he was doing, he would fall in almost every time. His mistake in perception was to think of the crossing as being fixed.

 He returned to the bank, near tears. As he gathered himself, his intuitive brain took over from his linear brain, and, in a flash, he saw a pattern of stones. His only hope was to move holistically like a dancer across the stones. He listened to the sound of the water moving, ever moving. It seemed as if the stones themselves were moving. He looked at the moss on the stones and saw that they were alive and in motion.

Suddenly, he stood up and whisked across the stones in uncharacteristic grace, something like an NBA point guard or Bolshoi ballerina.

“This moment of insight became so significant to him that he told the story many times during his life. Up to that point, David had assessed each situation in his life, never fully committing himself, always fearful of being pulled along by irrational currents. At that moment, however, he suddenly realized that security does not require control and stillness but can come only in freely flowing movement. (p. 14)

Brief Reflections:

Einstein created the theory of special relativity from a hike to a lake with friends, and Bohm has created a new view of the universe from his boyhood experience. In my view you could say Einstein’s lake gave us relativity through Einstein. You could say Bohm’s brilliant research comes to us from the eco-field of the stream through its human representative. Human hybrids seem so connected to that aspect of nature not controlled by humans that they can access its information for a larger perspective.

At least, that is my Mother Tongue hypothesis.

Speaking fluently in the intimacy of the mother tongue means giving up a thing epistemology, or way of knowing centered on fixed things. Bohm shows us, eventually, that even stones are not fixed. Immanuel Kant was right: You can’t know das ding an sich, the thing in itself. The reason you can’t know the thing in itself is because there is no thing in itself.

There is no such thing as a fixed thing.

All is movement, and a particular kind of movement called holomovement. Holomovement is not aimless motion but movement with aim toward coherence and expanding the consciousness of the Whole.

At least that is the case according to the lens of the mother tongue hypothesis, one that tells us there is a new form of human rising, one that speaks and hears the mother tongue. Next week, more on cosmic stories with David Bohm.

Peat, F. David. INFINITE POTENTIAL: The Life and Time of David Bohm. Reading, Mass: Helix    Books, 1997.

Taegel, Will. MOTHER TONGUE: Intimacy in the Eco-field. Wimberley, Texas: 2nd Tier Publishing. 2012.