Retrocausality: 'From All things One and From One all Things'
The Archetype of the Apocalypse and Abba
I find it fascinating that Heraclitus, one of the world’s great philosophers, if not the greatest, who lived 2,500 years ago in Greece, is known to us today only through 130-or-so surviving fragments of his work. The title of this article, “From all things one, and from one all things,” paraphrases one of those fragments.
Heraclitus taught the concept of panta rhei, which translates to ‘everything flows’ — all things are in flux. Another of his famous sayings, “You cannot step into the same river twice,” animates this truth. The river is always flowing and with each moment brings a new experience.
As a word picture, this keen insight depicts the tableau of a lonely fly fisherman expertly flicking the feathered hook into a peacefully meandering stream or river. Flowing water becomes a metaphor for a patient, idyllic life, albeit one in constant flux. We were taught by wise elders to ‘go with the flow’ and surrender to life’s ebb and flow; to endure, with untold optimism, its endless eddies and frequent whorls.
An ability to do so is not a measure of intellectual or physical wherewithal. No. It is a measure — even a test — of life-affirming spiritual willpower. It is not a call to religious or mythic membership, and it certainly is not a call to political dogma. It is a call to hear and heed the Voice of the indwelling divine spark, the essence of what it means to be a human-being.
Today, the test of our spiritual willpower has been elevated to a stratospheric level. The river’s eddies and whorls suddenly have morphed into whirlpools of insanity merged with riptides of chaos. Yet there remains, paradoxically, a strange and disquieting seductiveness. A aery sense of calm as the cunning abyss beckons. We wrestle a dilemma — should we follow the advice of the optimistic elders and surrender to the currents, or to fight against the turbulent undertow?
In truth, this dilemma belies a Hobson’s choice; in reality, there is only one option and no real alternative.1 Stronger and wiser forces are in control, a distasteful and painful blackpill for the Ego to swallow. Taking it does not foster nihilism. Not at all. It fosters an acceptance of and surrender to the river’s flow. The blackpilled, which is simply a spiritually charged redpill, relinquish their illusions of control. By choice.
The philosophical argument authored by Blaise Pascal comes to mind. ‘You may as well believe in God. If you’re right, you win everything; if you’re wrong, you lose nothing.’ Pascal added, it’s a shallow seed of faith but one that can dam the tide of atheism and sow further exploration. It is a seed that permits one to hear, ever so faintly, the call of the Divine Spark.
Man may help or man may resist, but the Zeitgeist2 works, shapes, overbears, insists.
Sri Aurobindo
The Archetype of the Apocalypse
C.G. Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, taught that archetypes are ancient forms of human knowledge passed down through generations. Transcending cultural boundaries, archetypes serve as fundamental building blocks that shape our experience of the world. Archetypes are emergent coherent attributes from humanity’s Collective Unconscious, a reservoir of shared knowledge and experiences that all humans inherit via DNA.
Like God, archetypes are both immanent and transcendent.
Rational Spirituality views the Collective Unconscious as a cosmic energy field, a subfield of the Akashic Record. Furthermore, we envisage archetypes as unique nodes or clusters of correlated information in this vast interconnected rhizome-like network called the Collective Unconscious.
Archetypes are universal patterns or templates that shape human experience and understanding. In this essay, we focus primarily on the Archetype the Apocalypse, one of the more energy-intense significant nodes. The Greek word apocalypse means ‘revelation,’ although in modern usage it has become synonymous with total destruction. The word implies creative-destruction, but not ‘world-ending’ total destruction.
In reality, the Archetype of the Apocalypse refers to a unseen force that compels us to undertake historic changes in our contemporary Zeitgeist or worldview. It represents the revelation of a new age or paradigm shift and becomes particularly relevant in times of significant global change. We wrote extensively about this archetype here. In this piece, we focus primarily on the metaphysical mechanism or process of how this archetype (or any other archetype for that matter) compels change. The process sketches out a river of flux where the archetypes guide life’s eddies and whorls, both individually and collectively.
The archetype of the Apocalypse necessitates activation of another archetype, the archetype of Self. This is humankind’s central archetype of meaning, according to Jung. This combined activation, which happens perhaps once every 2,500 years, brings forth a new worldview and a new relationship (understanding) with the Divine, as well as a new journey of psychological maturation for the entire world. The process now appears to be unfolding globally, although progress will vary depending on the depth of established cultural roots in different regions, i.e. the degree of resistance or acceptance.
It is axiomatic that Western Civilization, which has served as the world’s unipolar axis since WWII (the U.S. in particular), constitutes the epicenter of resistance to the emerging multipolar worldview or paradigm. Rather than to allow the process to proceed at its own pace, the West has collectively chosen to bewail and fight the currents of change. The West today is like a drowning man simultaneously fighting the water and those trying to save him.
It appears to me that the West has swallowed the feathered hook of fate and labors under a mighty delusion. An entire civilization has been conscripted by an evil Globalist entity, a fisher not of men but demons. The West (Europe and the U.S.) naively believe that ze new godless and globalist World Order will allow it to maintain its coveted unipolar and prized hegemony. Fools, all!
God sends upon them, therefore, the full force of evil’s delusion, so that they put their faith in an utter fraud and meet the inevitable judgment of all who have refused to believe the truth and who have made evil their play-fellow.
2 Thessalonians 2:11
Retrocausality, Indefinite Causality and Theurgy
Let’s first contextually define these terms. Retrocausality implies that the present somehow directly influences the past. That’s an intriguing philosophical notion, but not one for today. The term also implies that the future, or some highly detailed, well-mapped version of the future, influences the present, e.g. we might not know what’s downstream of today in the river of time, but the river secretly knows. The river is the overbearing, insistent Zeitgeist.
In this instance, the river’s eternal flow points to an emergent revelation or ‘apocalypse’ — a broken dam speeding everything up. We all notice this phenomena. It’s been going on for all our lives, but became almost unbearably intense in 2020. It’s incumbent upon us indeed to ‘go with the flow’ and do the best we can and, as difficult as it may be, navigate the turbulent eddies. Among the tools in our survival kit, in addition to a life jacket or Mae West,3 is theurgy.
Indefinite causality is also a topic for another day. Indefinite causality refers to a scenario where the causal order of events is not fixed. In other words, events can exist in a superposition of different temporal orders.
Theurgy describes the spiritual practice aimed at direct communion with divine beings, such as gods, angels or archetypes. The practice will allow one to experience a bird’s eye view of the treacherous bends and narrow straits ahead and, like a wise owl, work them into our collective psyche and then assimilate them. Evil has no countermeasures for theurgy, only ridicule and mockery.
Thomas Cahill argues that the Bible chronicles the evolution of human consciousness as a theurgic process that has traversed several stages. While the Old Testament, particularly the Pentateuch, is rooted in the Mythic Age, the New Testament was written shortly after the Axial Age.4
Some futurists envision the coming age as the ‘Holistic Age,’ one that transcends the boundaries of ego, values collective well-being and heralds an evolution of consciousness referred to by some as Cosmic Consciousness.5
According to philosopher Karl Jaspers, the Axial Age marked a shift from the Mythic Age to an era of heightened self-awareness, where humans became conscious of their existence, their inherent limitations and the nature of Being itself. Jesus arguably embodied this evolution of consciousness more than any other figure. And perhaps will again.
Rational Spirituality’s Theory of Retrocausality
Now we cut to the chase. Our theory, which is a work in progress, is based primarily on an alternative interpretation of quantum mechanics developed by physicist Yakir Aharonov and his collaborators. It is called ‘Two-State Vector Formulation’ (TSVF). Aharonov sought to elucidate a more symmetric description of quantum events in time.
In TSVF, the traditional description of a quantum system is expanded to include two state vectors: the predominate forward-evolving state vector from the initial conditions, and a second, backward-evolving state vector from the final conditions. The backward-evolving state vector acts as a bridge between the timeless, archetypal realm of the ‘Akashic Field’ and contemporary human agency. In other words, it conjoins present reality with future idea.
From All things One and From One all Things
The Akashic Field,6 as explained by scientist and author Ervin Laszlo, is a cosmic repository and source of all information, events, thoughts, and experiences that have ever occurred or will occur in the universe. It is a higher-dimensional, conscious entity that underlies and interconnects all physical reality and is the foundational and dynamic energy field for archetypes.
One of the intriguing consequences of the two-state vector formulation is that it seems to allow for a kind of retrocausality, where a future measurement or interaction can influence the past state of the quantum system. This has led to various thought experiments and proposals, such as the ‘quantum time-travel paradox’ and the ‘quantum eraser’ experiment, which explore the potential consequences of backward causation in quantum systems. However, those concepts are not on today’s list.
According to our Theory of Retrocausation, the backward-evolving state vector in the TSVF contains information about a potential (and presumably desirable) future reality. For today we concern ourselves with how humans help actualize (create) this future reality in time and space. The process summons human consciousness, which tends to eschew scientific understanding, to the forefront.
Newton regarded time and space as rigid. Einstein regarded them as relative. In 1908, Hermann Minkowski unified the three dimensions of space with the one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional continuum. We propose that an unseen fifth dimension is consciousness. Nobel Laureate Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, said:
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness.
Panpsychism, the philosophical view that posits consciousness as a fundamental feature of the universe, implicates the Akashic Field as a conscious entity and, by extension, archetypes. In panpsychism, everything is conscious to some degree. This implies that the Akashic Field is not merely a passive repository of information but an active (dynamic), intelligent and responsive presence that interacts with human consciousness — sort of a Divine Mind, if you will.
Humans can communicate directly with the Akashic Field and its dynamic archetypes through various modalities such as prayer, meditation, yoga and mindfulness. Sometimes knowledge is directly ‘infused’ into the human mind, but that’s not one for today either.
These theurgic practices allow individuals to harmonize their own consciousness with the Akashic Field’s higher consciousness (a form of resonance) enabling them to access and receive information from this higher-dimensional reality. Through this metaphysical communication, the Archetype of the Apocalypse, which incorporates all aspects of the revelation of the new Zeitgeist, is said to become constellated7 in human consciousness.
The notion that the Archetype of the Apocalypse is presently activated and constellated is adduced by the unparalleled flux, mad chaos and turbulent eddies we regularly experience on a daily basis. Deepak Chopra noted that, “Every great change is preceded by chaos.”
We have elaborated on the Archetype of the Apocalypse in previous articles, as well as having expounded upon Jung’s theory of archetypes, the Collective Unconscious and Laszlo’s Akashic Field. Links to these various pieces are located in the footnotes.8 Our complete End Times archive can be found here.
We postulate that the constellated Archetype of the Apocalypse acts as a conduit, encoding the information from the Akashic Field into the backward-evolving vector. By engaging with this archetype through focused, life-affirming intention via theurgic modalities, human consciousness decoheres the information in the backward-evolving vector.
We can assert that decoherence bridges the gap between the quantum and classical worlds, allowing potential futures to become our tangible reality. Indeed, this summarizes the scientific definition of quantum decoherence.
The Theory of Retrocausation therefore suggests that by virtue of the interaction between human consciousness and the Akashic Field, individuals and collectives, such as congregations and prayer groups, possess the power to shape and influence future reality. Our novel theory must eventually incorporate indefinite causality. For the time being, so to speak, we consider retrocausality to be a subcategory of indefinite causality within the TSVF framework.
By cooperating with the mystical and mysterious forces of Zeitgeist, rather than resisting them, we open up profound possibilities for personal and collective transformation, thereby continuing the evolution of cosmic consciousness and self-awareness.
In my dissertation, I proposed that consciousness evolves not in a manner consistent with Darwinian gradualism, but in emergent blasts of ‘punctuated equilibrium,’ reminiscent of the hallowed tell of a distant trumpet: From All things One and From One all Things.
In Conclusion
The upshot of our novel theory on retrocausality is particularly useful in today’s world. Most believers consider Biblical prophecy to be rock solid and reliable. Consequently, they accept that we are living in the end times, also known as the Eschaton.9
That common expression, the End Times implies the end of an age, not the end of the world. There is confusion on this point because the apostles themselves often appeared confused on this point. The Eschaton implies the coming of the Jewish messiah, the second coming of Christ and the appearance of the Mahdi, the prophesized redeemer in Islamic eschatology.
There is no reason to fear the eschaton. The admonishment to fear not appears 365 times in the Bible. Fear is paralyzing energy — it plows the soil for poor decision-making.
Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.
Joshua 1:9
While ‘we the living’ appear to hold a ticket to ‘The Big Show,’ it’s incumbent upon believers to become more than mere spectators. Believers are Ezekiel’s appointed Watchmen and thus have an important role to play.10
Watchmen must sound the trumpet (shofar) to a world choking on evil — defined as privation of the Good. The world’s wayward souls and assorted midfits include the Agents of Chaos, the nihilists, the elitists and the disruptors who believe in and worship only themselves. And, of course, include the woke Useful Idiots, ever poised to parrot the prescribed claptrap.
Run for your lives, you people of Benjamin! Get out of Jerusalem! Sound the alarm in Tekoa! Send up a signal at Beit HaKerem! A powerful army is coming from the north, coming with disaster and destruction.
Jeremiah 6:1
Christians, too, are people of Benjamin. We were graciously (and without merit) grafted onto the vine of the Abrahamic covenant. In fact, Beit HaKerem translates as ‘house of a vineyard.’ In the above verse, Jeremiah alludes to the coming Gog-Magog War and to a powerful army descending on Israel from the north.
We shall conclude on a joyful, life-affirming note (and video), with a hat tip to our friend
and to the nonpareil phenomenon that is Abba. Keen followers of Abba may have discerned the subtle, ethereal echoes of their haunting lyrics throughout this essay.
A ‘Hobson’s choice’ refers to a situation where there appears to be a choice, but in reality, there is only one option or no real alternative. It’s akin to being offered a single path, regardless of preference or desire. The phrase is said to have originated with Thomas Hobson (1544–1631), a livery stable owner who offered customers the choice of either taking the horse in the stall nearest to the door or taking none at all: “Take it or leave it.”
Zeitgeist: The Spirit of the Age or the prevailing worldview, which is radically changing in our time.
From the name of the American film actress Mary Jane ‘Mae’ West (1892-1980), renowned for her generous bust, the informal noun Mae West (plural Mae Wests) denotes an inflatable life jacket, originally as issued to Royal Air Force aviators during the Second World War.
The Axial Age refers to the period from approximately 800 BCE to 200 BCE, during which similar revolutionary thinking appeared in Persia, India, China and the Occidental world. Key figures of the Axial Age include Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), Confucius and Laozi, among others. The Axial Age marked a turning point in human history, as it gave rise to many of the world's major philosophical and religious traditions.
Philosopher and theologian John Hick, in his book '“An Interpretation of Religion," argues for the existence of a Second Axial Period, which he dates from approximately 200 BCE to 1500 CE. This period encompasses the rise of Christianity, Islam and Mahayana Buddhism, as well as the development of Neo-Confucianism and Hindu Bhakti traditions.
Maurice Bucke, a 19th-century psychiatrist, adventurer and thinker, is renowned for his articulation of Cosmic Consciousness. His work has influenced generations of thinkers, including Albert Einstein, Erich Fromm, Abraham Maslow, Alan Watts, and Steve Jobs. Bucke’s exploration of Cosmic Consciousness offers a bridge between science, spirituality and the interconnectedness of all existence.
“Ervin László's 2004 book, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything, posits a field of information as the substance of the cosmos. Using the Sanskrit and Vedic term for ‘space,’ Akasha, he calls this information field the ‘Akashic field.’ He posits that the ‘quantum vacuum’ [once called the aether] is the fundamental energy and information-carrying field that informs not just the current universe, but all universes past and present.” (source)
Typically associated with the language of depth psychology, particularly that of Carl Jung, ‘constellate’ refers to the coming together or grouping of psychological contents (thoughts, feelings, experiences and symbols) in a way that forms a coherent and meaningful pattern within the human psyche. The symbolism aspect is particularly important!
In the realm of depth psychology, and particularly within Jungian analysis, symbols are the language through which archetypes communicate and reveal themselves to the conscious mind. They serve as bridges between the unconscious and conscious layers of the psyche, enabling individuals to access and integrate profound, often universal themes into their personal experiences.
Symbolism is not just a vehicle for understanding archetypal patterns; it is also a transformative mechanism that facilitates the unfolding of these patterns within the psyche, potentially leading to personal and collective insights and changes.
Eschatology is the branch of theology that deals with the biblical study of end times prophecies and the events of the last days. The term comes from the Greek eschatos meaning ‘last,’ ‘end’ or ‘culmination.’ In Rational Spirituality the term always refers to the end of an age.
“Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the people of Israel; so hear the word I speak and give them warning from me.” (Ezekiel 33:7)