A Common Thread Extends Through Everything

Letter Response To Dr. Clifford's Questions

March 11, 1981
Dear Dr. Clifford,

During the discussion period following my presentation, you asked two
questions: How is freedom implied in consciousness and how is
consciousness connected to the aesthetic continuum (the "stuff" our
senses connect us up with)? I was not happy with my response. So, I
will try harder this time. As I recall, my response to the first
question was that freedom and consciousness are the same thing, and,
in response to your second question, I said freedom cannot be
conceived as a thing to be isolated, it must be conceived within the
totality of the relationships it expresses. Now that I have had more
time to think about your questions, I would like to add that there is
a common thread that extends through consciousness, freedom and the
aesthetic continuum. In Eastern philosophy this thread is called by
the name sunyata. Basically, sunyata requires that all things are
linked together, or, put another way, not a single thing comes into
being without some relationship to every other thing. I realize this
is probably not a concept familiar to you, and, for my part, I will
not bring it into this discussion except to say that it must be
considered in any final evaluation of what I am trying to say.

But, on second thought, and from another point of view, perhaps you
are familiar with this concept. Zukav, in his book The Dancing Wu Li
Masters, connects the idea of interconnectiveness up with the
wave/particle nature of light when he says:

Transferring the properties that we usually ascribe to light to our
interaction with light deprives light of an independent existence.
Without us, or by implication, anything else to interact with, light
does not exist. This remarkable conclusion is only half the story. The
other half is that, in a similar manner, without light, or, by
implication, anything else to interact with, we do not exist! As Bohr
himself put it:

"…an independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can be
ascribed neither to the phenomena nor to the agencies of observation."

By "agencies of observation", he may have been referring to
instruments, not people, but philosophically, complementarity leads to
the conclusion that the world consists not of things, but of
interactions. Properties belong to interactions, not to independently
existing things, like "light". The philosophical implications of
complementarity became even more pronounced with the discovery that
the wave-particle duality is a characteristic of everything. (1979 p.118)

Anyway, it's time to get back to my presentation, back to a
description of the significance of the indeterminate part of the
aesthetic continuum and the consciousness/freedom connection.