We always seem to underestimate the business of ‘transformation’. This is perfectly understandable when we look at the particular type of transfiguration the human might undergo; The process sometimes termed ‘enlightenment’.
In this case we are forced to speculate from an entirely occluded position. It is like the caterpillar hypothesizing on the butterfly; They are creatures belonging to entirely separate worlds.
But there are clues dotted around; Every night the ‘thinker and doer’ is completely transformed into the ‘dreamer’.
There is a real element of ‘death’ in all this. The old sacrifices itself, to usher in the new.
In the words of Zarathustra as imagined by the German philosopher:
“Man is a rope stretched over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.”
We can bandy around, speculating on degrees of change, but in reality transformation necessarily entails a ‘death’.
It is change of a different order.
I am always interested in ways we can conceive such unknown vistas. We cannot think about them in our ordinary way, as such speculation would only turn out to be a mirror onto our own predicament.
We are only able to approach these things by analogy; That is, if we persist in tackling them with the intellect.
Physicists, when imagining ‘higher’ dimensions, artificially reduce our perceivable three-dimensional universe to a membrane-like, two-dimensional surface model. This enables us to envision how our reality might act when embedded in a higher dimensional ‘bulk’.
It can be imagined that the particles and fields of the ‘standard model’, ie our standard laws of physics, are confined to our (mem)brane and can’t get out into the bulk. But string theorists suggest gravity, carried by gravitons, can get out.
“If the universe is a brane in a higher-dimensional bulk, then there is the possibility of short cuts through higher-dimensional space,” Heinrich Päs
we can also similarly analogise with the topic of human transformation.
Like the physicists imagining our 3 dimensional reality as a 2 dimensional ‘brane’; We can pictue that our waking everyday selves are sleepers in a dream with the possibility of being transformed into a being, awake in a more fundamental world.
With this analogy we can, in an instant, see that ‘transformation’ for us would entail an entire change of being. The dreamer and the dream would ‘die’. We can also begin to speculate about what kind of information and influence is possible from the ‘waking world’ to the ‘sleeping world’. Messages and influence can certainly get through, but they become transformed and woven into the dream.
The dreamer and the ‘woken’ both possess a body capable of ‘real’ action, but the dreamer’s lies inert. The dreamer’s deeds, thoughts and will are really only phantom.
