Because Wolfgang Smith, in his last recorded video, responded to his interviewer’s question as to what his next project would be by saying “to get ready for a good death,” I composed the following letter/illustrated essay and sent it to him by snail mail. Some time later I received an email from a Catholic priest who had just administered the last rites to Wolfgang, after which he found my letter—which included my email address—on Wolfgang’s nightstand, and read it. Here it is:
Dear Wolfgang: Greetings; I hope you’ve been well. Jenny and I have been following your videos on YouTube, which have finally brought me to a sufficiently global understanding of your Thomistic/Aristotelian solution to the “measurement problem” to allow me to produce the short illustrated essay below. All I did was take one step back and place your idea that observation collapses the wave-function, by projecting Form into formless materia, in a larger context, one that understands how God creates the universe by precisely the same method, allowing me to posit Humanity not as a co-creator in partnership with God but as a sub-creator who recapitulates the method of God, by His command and by the use of His power. Dante said the same: that human beings create not by imitating natura naturata, nature already formed (which was William Blake’s basic critique of naturalistic art), but by participating in the Divine act and process of manifesting archetypal forms as created entities, in natura naturans. And I was also able to find some amazingly apt illustrations by Blake that perfectly illustrate my thesis. Here it is:
The Metaphysics of the Measurement Problem
If observation collapses the wave-function by bringing Form into contact with the materia of quantum potentiality, what exactly is observation—by which I essentially mean, who is the observer? Only human consciousness and intent have the power to conceive of experiments in technical and mathematical terms, to design and construct the equipment necessary to conduct them, and to develop mathematical expressions of those experiments’ results. Neither a star nor a rock nor a tree nor a cat can do any of this. Therefore it must appear, to the atheistic scientist, that the human being is a kind of magician capable of transforming a mass of non-existent potentia into real existing substantial form by sovereign self-will alone, operating through the magical power of human consciousness. This is one of the factors behind the growth of our present magical technocracy, in which—as in the case of Jack Parsons—the technical and the magical worldviews have fundamentally coalesced. (Jack Parsons, for those who have not heard of him, was an American pioneer in rocketry who co-founded both the Aerojet Corporation and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; he was prominent enough in his field to have a crater named after him on the dark side of the Moon. He was also a student—along with L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology—of the black magician Aleister Crowley, who identified himself with the Beast of the Apocalypse. Both Parsons and Hubbard were associated with the Los Angeles lodge of Crowley’s Thelema religion. Jack Parsons would perform pagan invocations at his rocket launchings, claimed that his life’s mission was to destroy Christianity, and—as recorded in a video that may still be posted on YouTube—once presented and filmed a public demonstration of a sort of electronic ouija board he invented which, as he claimed in the video, was “how we invoke demons”, his own familiar spirit being a female entity named Babalon. His life came to an end when he blew himself up in his laboratory.)
[I mentioned Parsons in my letter because Wolfgang, as a “rocket scientist,” developed the equations that allow spacecraft to successfully re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, thus making Jack Parsons a kind of “evil twin” to Wolfgang Smith.]
However, seeing that human beings neither create themselves nor the world around them by their own action, the Human Form alone must hold the privilege of consciously participating in the same creative Act which produced it. In other words, the origin of our status of observers capable of collapsing the wave-function by introducing Form into a formless mass of potentia is the fact that the human being alone possesses what the Qur’an calls the Amana, the Trust, the role of the vicegerent of God in terrestrial existence. The same truth is manifested in Christianity by the fact that Jesus Christ, as both Son of God and Son of Man, is the epitome of the human form, “without [whom] was not any thing made that was made”, and by the story from Genesis that Adam possessed the knowledge that gave him the power to name the animals in Eden—that is, to confer Form upon an originally shapeless mass of biological potentia. He could do this by virtue of the fact that Man is the Final Cause of the creation of the universe, this being the essence of the Anthropic Principle—which appears in Genesis in the fact that humanity is the last creation of God during His six days of world-making—as expressed in Aristotelian terms. So we can say that the human being is capable of acting as the observer who orders and forms the corporeal world through the act of observation only because he is an object observed and thus created by the First Observer, who is God. The real creating and form-giving Observer is God alone, who surveys and so forms His corporeal and material creation precisely by observing it through the eye of Man. Plotinus taught that God creates the universe by contemplating it; therefore we must declare that God creates the human form, the epitome of universal manifestation, by exactly the same Form-giving act that the human observer uses to collapse the wave-function—because if we don’t place God hierarchically above humanity as the First Observer and Creator, then Man becomes God, and the only thing that Man can be when usurping the function of God is a magician—a magician who will inevitably call upon unholy Principalities and Powers to back him up, just as Jack Parsons did. In other words, if we don’t extend the axis of vertical causality all the way up to the Logos itself, we will commit the Promethean transgression.
This vertical causality is graphically portrayed by William Blake in the following images. The first shows the physicist (Newton) introducing order and measurement into the world of potentia; the second shows God creating the terrestrial universe by exactly the same method, and in so doing weaving the veil of Maya, a word derived from the Sanskrit root ma (cognate with the Greek meter) meaning “to measure.” The physicist introducing measurement into the chaos of material potentia and the figure of the God creating the corporeal and material universes and are shown as bent over to indicate that both the sensual corporeal world and the sub-sensual material world, though they are certainly real, are created through a contraction of consciousness and a limitation placed upon the fullness of Being. Likewise Maya is not pure illusion—as the Hindus traditionally describe it, it is “like a rope mistaken for a snake”—but a radical editing of the fullness of Being by the process of measurement, which only becomes an actual illusion when we mistake it for all that is.
Newton Collapsing the Wave-function
The Logos/Demiurge Creating the Corporeal World by Measuring It
The creation of the world conceived of as the union of forma and materia to produce Substantial Form was not invented by Aristotle; it is clearly laid out in the first chapter of Genesis: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (forma and materia). “And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep” (terrestrial existence was originally mere potentia). “Then the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (the Spirit being the breath of the creative and form-giving Word). In the first five days of creation the union of forma and materia was incomplete; it was only finished on the Sixth Day with the creation of the Human Form, who bears the imago dei, and is therefore Substantial Form complete—the one who, alone of all creatures, possesses the power to participate in God as Pure Act, Who is the perfect actualization in Eternity of the universal potentia. As for the Seventh Day when God rested from His labors, this represents His activation of the contemplative function in Man; the power that allows us to see creation whole, and therefore to contemplate its Creator; the faculty that frees us from the limitations of dimensional, created existence and sets us on the path of return to our Divine Source.
Sincerely,
Charles Upton
