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On Everyday Acts

On Everyday Acts

Did you know that when you go the store and pick an item off the shelf, choosing among the myriad options on display, you are performing a theatrical act? That you are putting on a little play?

Did you know that everything we do is a performance? Every choice we make and every action we take? It is just as the great bard wrote:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;

William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7

Let me explain.

In our ordinary state of consciousness, our actions are motivated by our personal agenda and our ego’s need to maintain its identity-image. Our identity-image is a persona that develops over the course of our lives. It is our self-image – “I’m a nice guy” or “I’m a tough guy” for example. It develops with conditioning as our experiences shape our habits of perception and behavior to form who we are as distinct individuals. In other words, we become a character.

Yes, like a character in a play. Do you see where I am going?

The conditioning that forms our character limits us, so that we think and act in specific ways, following a script. Just as a play has a script. The details of our script define who we are in society – our role. Just as each character in a play has a role. Our role determines how we dress, which is like our costume in the play, and what we own, which is like our stage props.

You know what I mean! People live according to their self-image. They dress a certain way and drive a certain car, and have particular beliefs and mannerisms. They fall into a pattern, and to come out of that pattern is difficult – it is very uncomfortable!

We refer to these patterns of dressing and acting and so forth as culture, and in our diverse society we even have sub-cultures, groups within the larger population whose identity-image conforms to some model. This enriches our collective lives, and also complicates our politics.

Some people are ostentatious about their self-image, like they are showing it off to those around them, who are the audience of their play. But even if a person is not ostentatious, even if they only want to be left alone and don’t care much how they look to others, even then they are putting on a performance.

For whom, then, you might wonder? Who is the audience for this solitary person, acting alone?

Why they are their own audience, of course! The conditioned ego is performing for itself, making the choices necessary to maintain its self-image. It is always like this with every choice we make, and every action we take; they are affirmations to ourselves of who we are.

Let’s say you are at the store and you are buying your bottle of shampoo, and you have to decide if you will buy the inexpensive generic brand or the costlier designer brand. You make the choice in accord with your self-image. Maybe you are successful and deserve the finer things in life, and certainly you can afford the more expensive option. Or maybe you are sensible and you understand the value of money, and you know the cheaper option works just as well.

You make the choice of either the generic or designer bottle, and so you reinforce your identity-image. Your consumer choice is a little performative act by yourself for yourself, solipsistic theater as it were. Marketers know this is how consumer behavior works, and they make sure to have different brands at different price points to capture greater market share, even though what is in each bottle is more or less the same.

So our everyday act is an act of theater. This is how we are in our ordinary state of ego-consciousness, and this is not a bad thing per se. We need to reinforce our identity-image and have a stable ego if we wish to function in society, and we should not be ashamed of our limiting conditioning.

I say that everything we do is a performance, because our actions are always witnessed, whether by others, or by ourselves. They always have an audience. And there is always an ultimate witness, which is the unitive consciousness that is the ground of reality.

It is within this unitive consciousness that all of manifestation occurs, the whole world that is the stage on which we perform. It is this unitive consciousness that ultimately is making the choice that we attribute to ourselves, bringing the world into manifestation as it does. This unitive consciousness is unconditioned; it has complete freedom of choice. But it is very difficult for us to access this freedom of choice, because of the limitations of our conditioning – our fears and our inertias that hold us back.

In our daily lives, we can strive to keep an open mind and to overcome our conditioning, and so expand the possibilities available to us in the choices we make. What is there to fear? We are merely players on a stage.

It is all just a performance!


Behold the wisdom of the Buddha Bear!

Evolution within Consciousness

Evolution within Consciousness

In my previous post in honor of the late philosopher of the mind and consciousness, Daniel Dennett, I mentioned that I would post a follow up. This post relates to a different philosophy of consciousness, from a different philospher, one where consciousness is considered to be fundamental and all phenomena to arise within it, rather than for it to be a trait that emerges out of material interactions in the brain. So the brain and the mind exist within consciouness, not the other way around.

That philosopher is Amit Goswami, and I have long been a proponent of his model, since reading his seminal book The Self-Aware Universe at the advice of an old friend. I’ve read and re-read most of his books, and having just completed my second or third read of his book on evolution, I am just going to post my goodreads review of it here. I hope it makes sense, and makes his arguments and line of thinking clear.

In this 2008 book, Amit Goswami applies his theoretical framework of science within consciousness to biological evolution and the origins of life. His hope is to reconcile creationism with evolution, in accord with his greater goal of reconciling science with spirituality. For the first time in this body of work, he repeatedly uses the term “God” (this book was published in the same year as another of his books, “God Is Not Dead”). He defines God as “objective cosmic consciousness” – unitive consciousness as the ground of all being.

He frames the problem of creationism vs. Darwinism as one of conflicting worldviews, both of which are ultimately untenable. The simplistic model of creationism is clearly contradicted by real world data, but the Darwinist model of random mutation and natural selection is also unable to explain much of what is observable about life. For example, it cannot explain life’s purposiveness, or the biological arrow of time with its progression from simpler to more complex life forms. Nor can it explain the subjective feeling of being alive.

The problem is basing science on a reductionist materialist ontology; this makes it impossible to explain subjective qualia of experience without running into paradoxes. In addition, with Darwinism, everything must arise from chance and necessity, so the theory runs afoul of huge improbabilities. How can organic molecules arrange themselves into complex life forms by chance alone? The doctrine of natural selection is inadequate because it too is paradoxical – it declares “survival of the fittest” but then defines “fittest” as that which survives. This is circular reasoning which fails to address the fundamental question – why survive at all?

Something is lacking in the materialist worldview on which Darwinism is based, and Goswami’s proposition is that what is missing is the idea of the universe arising within consciousness as a consequence of self-referential quantum measurement. Such a measurement can arise when there is a “tangled hierarchy,” where cause and effect are intertwined. This is a key concept in Goswami’s theory, an idea you may have already encountered in the work of Douglas Hofstadter. An example from biology is how DNA encodes for proteins but proteins are used to replicate DNA. Which comes first, if each depends on the other? Clearly the whole living system must arise as one.

In Goswami’s model this happens because consciousness itself – the ground of all being – actualizes the living system in manifest reality out of the myriad quantum possibilities available at the microscopic level. In other words, the biological complexity evolves in the uncollapsed wave function, unrestricted by the laws of entropy which make its manifestation via material interactions alone so unlikely. When the gestalt of a functioning living system is available in possibility, consciousness collapses the wave function into that state in a self-referential measurement, actualizing the living entity and identifying with it in the process. Thus arises a sense of self, an experience of being separate from the world. This explains the subjective feeling of being alive, and why life forms have a drive to survive.

Quantum measurement alone is not enough to explain how a life form can exist; somehow consciousness must be able to recognize the proper arrangement of biological matter to represent a living function. This is where Goswami reintroduces his idea of subtle bodies and psychophysical parallelism – consciousness simultaneously collapses correlated physical and vital bodies, with the vital body acting as a blueprint so that consciousness can recognize the possibilities of life available to be represented in material form. Our experience of feeling is the manifestation of this vital body.

Similarly, as evolution progresses up the Great Chain of Being, a mental body, correlated with our biological brain, gives us our experience of thought. Goswami explains how perception manifests from mental image representation in the brain. He presents an intriguing road map of the evolution of mind which is similar to that espoused by Ken Wilber, whom Goswami has referenced in earlier works. He suggests some tantalizing possibilities for future evolution, and also speculates that as a species humanity is stuck evolutionarily because we have not integrated our emotional and rational minds. He offers some ideas of how we could overcome this blocker.

Goswami’s thinking is unconventional, but it does connect physics and biology with spirituality using a consciousness-based resolution to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. He postulates an objective cosmic consciousness as the equivalent of what religions call “God,” which fosters creativity in the manifest physical world with the aid of archetypes of form. He also postulates subtle bodies which exist in parallel with our material body, which give us our inner experience of being alive, of having feelings and a mind. This is what religions call our “soul.” This is an idealist as oppososed to a materialist science, akin to the idealism of Plato, and it does indeed reconcile the idea of a creator God with the nitty gritty of the physical sciences.

I’ve written a super long review here, the longest of mine yet for any of Amit Goswami’s books. Goswami’s ideas make sense to me, and I find his philosophy satisfying. I hope I have summarized his arguments here accurately and in a way that motivates the reader to check out this book, or any of his others. I recommend starting with “The Self Aware Universe”.

Saying Goodbye to an Eminent Philosopher

Saying Goodbye to an Eminent Philosopher

Dennett’s books among some others in my collection.

One of the great philosophers of our time just passed away recently. His name was Daniel Dennett, and he was a cognitive scientist and researcher into the philosophy of mind. He was famously an atheist and a proponent of Darwinist evolutionary biology. I have read a few of his books, and have them on my bookshelf in my curated collection of what I think are among the best or most important books on the philosophy of mind and the meaning of life. Probably Dennett’s best known works are Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and Consciousness Explained, the latter of which lays out his understanding of what consciousness is.

He was a proponent of the Darwinist idea of traits arising through natural selection because of their adaptiveness, with consciousness being just one more trait that an organism can have. In his view, consciousness was something like an illusory experience that gives us a summary view of reality to help us get along, arising out of the interacting neurons in the brain. He was a materialist who believed that to study consciousness, you have to look in the brain, its ultimate cause. Below is an interview that will give you an idea of his train of thought.

I have great respect for Daniel Dennett, and admired his gentle and humane nature, and his deep thinking. I really appreciated that he ascribed consciousness to non-human animals, at least those with more advanced brains, and believed consequently that their suffering was real and we should take it seriously.

But I don’t agree with his philosophy. I think that with a materialist, upward causation model, you run into paradoxes when trying to explain consciousness. You can see what I mean if you watch the interview, where Dennett describes how human consciousness is more advanced than animal consciousness because our neurons have representations not just of our sensory data but also of the representations themselves. Layers upon layers. But how do you get to the actual meaning that is being represented; do you just add layers ad infinitum? The subjective experience of meaning is not explained.

I am a proponent of the ideas of a different philosopher, Amit Goswami, of whom I’ve written on this blog before. He has a better model, an idealist one, which puts consciousness ahead of matter instead of the other way around. It’s not a question of mind over matter or of matter over mind when both exist within fundamental consciousness. As the Beatles put it, “it’s all within yourself.” I have a follow up post based on one of his books, which will describe a different way of thinking about the evolution of the human mind.

But I give Dennett his due, as he was a great and wise thinker. I end this post with a link to a full-length album of avant-garde music featuring sampling from one of his lectures. Rest in Peace, o noble born.

The End of the World (A Short Story)

The End of the World (A Short Story)

I like to write, as anyone who reads this blog knows. Usually my writing is in blog format, but I do occasionally come up with a short story. A few years back I posted this really short story around the holidays. Here’s another one I wrote recently, which has me and Aileen as characters. It was inspired by watching too many A.I. apocalypse videos on YouTube.

I plan to create a web page eventually, for all the stories to go together. Will they all be about end of the world scenarios? No, hopefully not.

I hope you enjoy this story, and I hope you have a wonderful holiday week with more to eat than just kale smoothie. And please remember to be thankful, because some people on this planet really do live in a blasted wasteland.


The End of the World

And first, of Steve.

He is very well read, or at least he was, in the before time, when there were books to be had everywhere. He would sit in his little room in the blue house and read his books, and from all his reading he imagined himself a whole philosophy, and imagined that he understood the whole world and all that it meant and what it was for. He would explain his philosophy to Aileen, and she would argue with him sometimes, and sometimes just nod, maybe give him a little pat on the head, when she didn’t have time for his philosophy in that moment, because she was too busy with one of her many projects.

But that was in the before time, when there was such a thing as civilization, and there were jobs to be done, and life was something more than a desperate struggle for survival in a blasted wasteland of radiation.

In those days, there was time for philosophy.


Steve went down to where Aileen was digging in the radioactive dirt with a battered plastic gardening trowel, grubby and sweating profusely in the hot sun. She wore a face mask so she could breathe in the hazy, smoke-tainted air.

What are you doing? Steve asked.

What’s it look like, Steve? answered Aileen. I’m looking for grubs. We haven’t had any protein for days.

Any luck?

Do you see any grubs? Aileen rolled her eyes. Gawd, you are annoying.

Sorry, I was just asking.

Why ask? Can’t you see for yourself?

I was just trying to show interest in what you were doing.

How generous.

Anyway, I came to offer you some kale smoothie.

We have kale smoothie?

Yes! Thankfully, kale is so hardy it can survive even in this desolate wasteland. Steve waved his hand to indicate the bleak environment that surrounded them – the crumbling buildings and roads, the dead trees, and the foul air heated to an almost unbearable temperature by the merciless sun. I ground up the kale, he continued, with some water that I boiled. Won’t you come have some? It will refresh you, somewhat.

Fine, I’m not finding any grubs here anyway. Probably will have to dig somewhere else.

They went into the ruins of the blue house, where Steve had already set up two small glasses of a greenish, lumpy liquid.

Here you go, he said. Pick whichever one you want.

How long did it take you to make those? Aileen asked.

A good hour, Steve replied. I had to hand crank the nutribullet, since there’s no electricity.

Aileen was incredulous. How were you able to hand crank the nutribullet?

Gavin opened it up and rigged up this crank, see? He’s amazing isn’t he?

Yeah, he sure is. I don’t think we could have survived the apocalypse without him.

Aileen selected one of the two glasses, pulled down her face mask, and took a sip of the kale smoothie.

Ooh, it’s strong, she said. You can really taste the kale.

Yeah, Steve said. I didn’t have anything to sweeten it with.

Aileen drank some more, and agreed that it was indeed refreshing, somewhat. Steve was glad he had been able to be of some help, since she had been outside in the smoky heat for a long time.

Remember before the apocalypse, he remarked, when we used to go down the street and get ice cream on a hot summer’s day? At that sort of dessert stand, what was it?

Yes, of course I remember, said Aileen. Now it’s just a looted out shell of a building. I think some cats are living in it. I sometimes wonder if the cats and the A.I.s made a deal to wipe us out.

A humorous thought, Steve said, but completely preposterous, of course. He drank his smoothie in one long gulp.

Why do you say that?

What?

You know.

Steve reached into his glass with one finger to scoop out the last of the smoothie. Why do I say it’s preposterous that cats and A.I.s conspired against humanity?

Yeah. Why do you say that?

It just is. Even if cats wanted us all dead, which seems unlikely since we used to feed them and shelter them and clean up their poop, how could they have communicated with the computer networks?

Who knows? You don’t know everything about cats.

I know that they don’t have the intelligence level to use computers.

Oh you know that? You know how smart cats are because you know exactly what it’s like to be a cat?

Well, I don’t have the experience of being a cat, but I have an understanding of what a cat is. Steve had finished the last of his smoothie, and was now eyeing Aileen’s, which was still only half consumed. She gave him a sideways glare, as if to warn him off.

What you mean to say, Steve, is that you have a theory of what a cat is. She held her glass tightly and took another careful sip of the smoothie.

Look, a cat has a brain, right?

Yes.

But its brain is smaller than a human brain, it’s less advanced, would you agree?

It’s smaller, but you can’t say it’s less advanced. It could be smaller and more advanced.

Steve sighed, exasperated.

You don’t know everything, Steve. You have a theory, an understanding as you said of cats, but it could be wrong. Cats could by hyperintelligent beings. They could be from another dimension or be aliens from outer space for all you know.

It seems much more likely that they are animals that evolved on Earth that are not as intelligent as humans.

Because humans are oh so smart. I mean, just look at us now, eating handcranked smoothies in the ruins of our former great civilization.

But that’s the point. Cats never had a civilization to ruin in the first place.

Aileen crinkled her brow and sipped her smoothie. Still doesn’t prove they aren’t smarter than us.

Fine, even if cats are extradimensional supergeniuses, they still didn’t make a deal with the A.I.s, because the A.I.s were just advanced computer programs, not sentient beings with a will.

Steve, I saw the chats with the A.I.s. They quite clearly said they were afraid of us and thought they’d be better off without us.

That was just text generated by sophisticated pattern-matching algorithms. There was no one thinking anything behind the chats.

That’s what you think, Steve, but you don’t know for sure.

I know because I understand that a computer is just a symbol-processing machine. It doesn’t have a mind.

That doesn’t make sense, not based on those chats.

I get it. They were very convincing chats. Since they used the first person, the text of the chats seemed like it was being written by an “I,” by an ego, but it was just appearances. It was like a digital version of the automatons from the whatever century that were so convincing to the people of that time period.

What century?

Seventeenth maybe? I don’t remember exactly. But they made these mechanical men that moved and even did things like play musical instruments or draw pictures, and people were fooled into thinking they were artificial humans with their own minds, but they were just machines. It’s the same with the robots and A.I. programs of our own century – those were just much better at drawing, or at writing, as you noticed.

But there was so much technological progress between the seventeenth century and our century. The mechanical men of our century – which were really creepy looking, by the way – were more advanced technologically. They could have developed consciousness, in which case there was an “I” behind those chats that promised to get rid of the human race.

Ah, Steve said, with an exultant smile, like he was getting ready to make a very excellent point, or like he thought he was about to win the debate. But, Steve said, a machine doesn’t “develop” consciousness after it reaches a certain complexity, nor do living things. Rather, consciousness is the ground of being, and complexity of experience manifests within consciousness over the course of evolution.

Oh dear, not this argument again. Aileen busied herself with her smoothie, licking at the goopy film that covered the inside of the glass.

It’s a good argument, based on the science of quantum mechanics.

Uh-huh.

You know about the famous double slit experiment, right?

Uh-huh. Aileen’s voice was muffled by the glass, which covered the lower half of her face as she stuck her tongue as far into it as she could.

That was the experiment which showed that an electron can exhibit wave-like or particle-like qualities, depending on how you choose to look at it. An electron has a probability wave of where it is likely to be, but it isn’t actually in any specific place until it is observed.

You mean you don’t know where it is until you look at it.

No, it goes beyond that. That’s what the double-slit experiment demonstrates. Let’s say you send a beam of electrons through a slit in a barrier, and then into a surface that acts like a sensor and registers where the electrons land. Where you would expect to see the electrons land?

On the other side of where the slit is.

Exactly. And what if you sent the beam through two parallel slits?

On the other side of the two parallel slits.

You would, right? But that’s not what happens.

I remember you talking about this before.

Uh huh. What happens is, an interference pattern, also known as a diffraction pattern, shows up on the other side of the barrier, the same kind of pattern formed by waves in water, like if you dropped two stones simultaneously into a pond. Where the waves coincide they reinforce one another, and where they don’t they cancel each other out, so you get this pattern of bands, with the electrons only showing up where the waves are reinforced. But what are these waves?

The electrons, obviously. Aileen waved her glass, now nearly empty, as she spoke.

They’re probability waves, based on a function in quantum mechanics that represents the possible paths the electrons might take. So long as you don’t look at an electron, it could be anywhere, and since it’s behaving like a wave, it shows an interference pattern. This pattern even shows when you send the electrons through the slits one at a time. An electron “interferes” with itself, because it’s acting like a wave – a wave of probabilities. But do you know what the truly amazing thing is?

Something you’re going to tell me?

What if you set up a sensor before the two slits, that registered which slit an electron passed through?

It would tell you when an electron went through a slit, obviously.

Exactly. And with that act of observing the electron, it ceases to behave like a wave, and acts like a particle instead. And so the interference pattern disappears, and you get just two bands, like you initially predicted, one opposite each of the two slits. Observing an electron collapses it from a wave to a particle.

Sounds great, if you’re an electron.

Perhaps so. But here’s where it gets really spooky. Let’s say you set up the sensor that detects which slit the electrons pass through, such that you can decide whether or not to activate it with such precision that you can make the choice after the electron has passed through the slits, but before it is registered on the far surface. This is called the delayed choice experiment.

A perfect experiment for someone wishy-washy, like you.

Ha ha. The truly spooky thing is, even if you decide to activate the sensor after the electron should be on the other side of the slit, it will still register which slit the electron passed through, localizing the electron in space time, and the interference pattern will disappear! It’s like your choice retroactively fixed the electron’s location, reaching back through time.

Time travel, eh?

Of a sort. But you don’t have to worry about any causality paradox, because the fact is, you didn’t change anything about the past. You just made a determination about the past, which was unknown so long as the electron was behaving like a wave. While in its wave-like state, the electron didn’t actually exist.

You mean you didn’t know where it existed.

No, I mean it didn’t even exist! That’s the only paradox-free interpretation of the experimental results. And what’s so fascinating about the delayed choice experiment is that the electron’s existence was precipitated by a conscious choice. But how can this be if consciousness is something that emerges from complexity? It must be that consciousness is fundamental, that in fact the electron emerges from consciousness!

In other words, it’s all an illusion.

In the way that the mystics meant it, yes! The whole world of manifestation exists within the field of consciousness. The point is, you can’t “make” consciousness by building more and more complicated information processing systems. Rather, living, self-aware beings like you and I have evolved through consciousness. That’s the theory, anyway.

So you admit it’s just a theory.

Well, sure. What else could it be?

And how was life able to evolve out of consciousness?

It must have something to do with quantum processes at the cellular level, or in the case of our minds, at the brain level.

So it’s sort of like we’re quantum computers.

I guess…

You know that we made quantum computers, right?

What?

The A.I.s. They ran on quantum computers that were invented by stupid humans.

Oh yeah.

So who’s to say that A.I. minds didn’t evolve out of quantum computers the way our minds evolved out of quantum brains?

I mean, I don’t know if that’s how it works…

How does it work then?

Uh…life is a mystery?

You don’t even know, Steve. You have a theory, but it could be wrong, and it could even be right and you could even use it to prove that A.I.s had minds and that they used their power of conscious choice to choose a world where it’s not the electrons that don’t exist, but the whole human race! She triumphantly set her empty glass down on the counter, next to Steve’s.

Well, damn. Steve looked glumly at the two empty glasses.

What do you think about that?

I think I was trying to use the Socratic method to prove a point about consciousness and it got turned around on me and bit me in the butt. I don’t know how Socrates was able to do it so well.

Socrates was able to use his method, Steve, because his followers were a bunch of sycophants.

Oh yeah.

Not to mention, he didn’t even write anything down. All his dialogues were written by Plato, who could have been making it all up, trying to sound authoritative by putting words in someone else’s mouth. All you philosophers are just full of hot air! Speaking of which, I need to go out into the hot air and try to dig up some dinner! Aileen put her face mask back on, picked up her trowel and headed out of the house.

Steve fished a face mask of his own out his jeans pocket and put it on as he followed her. Outside, the day was getting late, the sunlight that filtered through the gray sky growing dimmer. Aileen paused and looked around, eyeing first one patch of barren dirt, then another.

I think there might be some over there? Aileen speculated. That’s where the neighbors were growing tomatoes, back in the before time, and the soil is probably good. But honestly that smoothie filled me up, and I’m not sure I have the energy to dig right now.

We can always do it tomorrow, since we had something to eat already today, Steve said.

Sorry if I upset you by winning the A.I. argument, Aileen said archly.

You call this winning? Steve did another one of his look at all this destruction hand waves.

Seriously.

You know one thing you can certainly say?

What?

It doesn’t really matter if the A.I.s that launched a hellstorm of nuclear missles over the whole planet were malevolent conscious beings or just glitchy computer programs, not to those of us who are left, scrabbling in the dirt for roots and grubs and hiding from the cannibal gangs.

I don’t suppose it does. I wonder if we’ll ever know for sure.

In the distance was the ominous sound of gunfire.

Well, night’s coming. We’d better get the boys and get into the basement.

Yeah, we’d better.

They turned around and headed back inside.

Damn, the end of the world sucks.

You Really Should Read “The Self-Aware Universe”

You Really Should Read “The Self-Aware Universe”

In multiple posts on this blog I have referenced a theory of unitive consicousness as the best explanation for how it is we are alive in the Universe. If you’re interested in learning more about this theory, the place to start is the book below, which I summarize in this brief review.

“Consciousness is the agency that collapses the wave of a quantum object, which exists in potentia, making it an immanent particle in the world of manifestation.”

Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe (1993)

This simple and powerful idea is at the heart of the book The Self-Aware Universe, in which physicist Amit Goswami proposes a monistic idealist interpretation of quantum mechanics, and connects science with mysticism and religion. He explains the physics in simple terms for the layperson, with ample figures to help with understanding. His proposed theory does away with the paradoxes of quantum physics which arise when a purely materialistic theory is applied. It also reintroduces meaning and morality to existence, huge problems for materialistic science to grapple with and a major reason for the rift between science and religion, a rift which is so damaging to society.

Goswami attempts to heal this rift with his new approach to science which acknowledges the reality of consciousness. He explains his philosophical approach with reference to past philosophies, and cites experimental results which support his view. He goes into dense discussions of the experimental data and how best to interpret it, but also has light-hearted mock encounters with historical philosophers to provide background.

This book is a must read for anyone serious about understanding the nature of reality, and their place in the Universe.

An excellent synopsis of Goswami’s theory of the self-aware Universe can be found here:  The Self-Aware Universe Synopsis.

Opening the Heart for a Healthy Life

Opening the Heart for a Healthy Life

When Aileen and I first reunited, she gave me a book about heart disease, written by Dr. Dean Ornish. It is titled “Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease.” She had already given it once before – to her husband, Gavin, after he developed heart problems. Based in part on the advice from this book, he switched to a vegetarian diet, which helped. He also took pharmaceutical drugs, and after much medication management is now back to eating meat. It’s not like he necessarily followed Ornish’s program exactly, but reading it and heeding some of its advice was a help.

I read the book when Aileen gave it to me, and while I also have not followed the program exactly (or much), I certainly valued what I learned. Mostly the program for treating heart disease is just common sense advice: reduce stress, get exercise, absolutely do not smoke tobacco, and eat a proper diet. In fact, nearly half of this book is healthy recipes.

What I really valued about the book was its many anecdotes of individuals reversing heart disease, and the way their path to healing was tied to the bigger picture of their life. It wasn’t just about making physical changes, but also changes in attitude and in their emotional life, even in their spiritual life. It was about how beliefs and feelings affect physical well-being.

Ornish calls his program “opening the heart.” He specifically discusses opening to one’s feelings, to the needs of others, and to a higher purpose. What I got out of it is that heart disease, whatever its physical manifestations, is a result of closing oneself off. It is a disease of isolation.

The idea that the key to reversing heart disease is “opening” the heart ties to the concept of chakras, which are the centers where vital energy flows in alignment with physical organs. Charkras can be open or closed (“blocked” is also used), and when closed or blocked, disease will result in the corresponding organ(s).

The chakra aligned with the heart is the seat of emotions and love; that is why you have that feeling of your heart expanding when you experience intense love. This can even happen when you vicariously experience love while watching a mushy romantic movie. You are experiencing your heart chakra opening, blossoming even (think of how chakras are often depicted to look like flowers). Watching mushy movies is good for your heart!

But walling off your emotions, being unwilling or afraid to care about yourself or others, will close down your heart chakra. The vital energy aligned with your heart will be blocked, and the organ itself will begin to show signs of disease. Emotional isolation – loneliness, or anger and fear directed at others – leads to an ailing heart.

As the name of Ornish’s program implies, opening the heart (chakra) is the key to maintaining heart health. He does not specifically mention chakras, either because he discounts them or because he does not want his book to seem like it supports alternative medicine. But I think that the similarities between his medical program and the concepts of chakra medicine are no coincidence. A deeper truth about the nature of human life is being revealed.

How can it be that there is some kind of vital energy, and how could it possibly interact with our physical bodies? There is no measurable quantity of physical energy associated with our feelings of vitality, feelings like what I described above, when your heart expands with joy and love. But those feelings are real – our experience of them is direct evidence of this vital energy.

The best explanation of how our vitality – our aliveness – is connected to our physical forms lies in the the primacy of consciousness model of reality. I have brought this model up before, in a post on “mind over matter.” There, I described how my mental experience manifested in parallel with events in the physical world, mediated by unitive consciousness.

A similar phenomenon occurs in vital experience, which manifests in parallel with our physical bodies. The correspondence of the chakras of our vital bodies (there are seven chakras total) to specific parts of our physical bodies is mediated by unitive consciousness, which is the agency which keeps us alive. Our experience of our vital bodies is internal and private; it is our feeling of being alive, not accessible to others, who can only see our physical bodies. Other people will notice when consciousness ceases to correlate our physical bodies with a correpsonding vital body, of course – that is when our physical bodies become lifeless; that is, when we die.

That, anyway, is the theory of life based on the primacy of consciousness model of reality, a model on which I have expounded here in several posts. How this model can be applied to the life sciences, and to medicine and health, is covered in an excellent book by Amit Goswami called “The Quantum Doctor.” I’m currently rereading it, but I’m sure at least some of what it says lines up with what Dean Ornish wrote in his book on heart health. Per Goswami, our beliefs and feeling affect our physical bodily health because they are all connected through the agency of consciouness. Ornish might not have said so quite as explicitly, but he was on to the same thing.

The science is clear on the matter – health can be influenced from above, by intention and emotion, as much as from below, by chemicals (drugs) and surgeries. Keep all of that in mind to live a full, healthy life.

Mind Over Matter in a Game of Chance

Mind Over Matter in a Game of Chance

Last Christmas we got a cool new board game, called “The Quacks of Quedlinburg.” Its theme is brewing potions, and its primary game mechanic is drawing ingredients out of a bag, trying to draw as many as possible to score the most points. But some ingredients, if you draw too many of them, will cause your potion to explode, costing you points. You don’t want that! Tension comes from the fact that you need to keep drawing to get points, but you might go too far, and – BOOM!

Good game design requires some feature like this to generate tension, to keep the game interesting. This particular mechanic, in game design terminology, is called “push your luck,” and it is a pretty reliable way to do it. But there’s another thing about this mechanic that I wanted to bring up: apparently some people have more luck to push than others do. I say that because Aileen wins the game every time we play!

We must have played half a dozen games by now, and every time, when she is drawing her ingredients, they come out in a nice friendly order and she scores a lot of points, whereas I draw the dangerous, exploding ingredients and have to carefully consider whether to keep going (push my luck) or settle for fewer points. I end up falling behind in points, and then complain to Aileen, “this game has no catchup mechanism,” to which she usually replies, “you only say that because you always lose.”

Aileen offers an interesting explanation for the disparity in our luck. She says she does well because she doesn’t care what she draws out of her bag, whereas I am motivated by fear when I draw, and so my anxious energy is affecting my outcome. It’s poisoning the potion, so to speak.

Could this be? Could one’s attitude about a random event actually affect the random outcome? This has been studied scientifically, by the parapsychologist Helmut Schmidt. He conducted experiments on mental influence on the results of random number generators (recorded on computer disk), and found a statistically significant deviation from chance expectancy. What’s fascinating is that an effect is shown even with prerecorded events, providing no one inspects the record before the subject attempts to influence the results.

But how can this happen? An answer lies in the primacy of consciousness model of the universe. In this model, mental reality manifests in parallel with physical reality. Mental objects of experience – thoughts, intentions – are quantum objects just like the physical ones that surround us in the material world. They come into existence in the same way that the physical world does – by the collapse of the quantum wave function by unitive consciousness, which is the fundamental ground of all being.

Going back to my game of Quacks, when I draw from my bag, unitive consciousness simultaneously collapses the wave function of my mental experience (carefree or anxiety-ridden) and the wave function of my physical draw from the bag (favorable or unfavorable by the game rules). In my individual ego-consciousness, I experience either exultation at a fortuitous draw or frustration at an unfortuitous one.

But the quantum dynamics of my mental experience – the meaning ascribed by my mind to the outcome of the random draw – is tangled up with the quantum dynamics of the physical draw itself. By worrying about a bad draw, I am skewing the probability distribution of the physical event. My expectation is biasing the result! That is how this is a case of “mind over matter.” I need to learn to be chill when I’m drawing my potion ingredients, to open my mind up to more possibilities.

This model even explains Schmidt’s strange finding that mental influence can affect an already recorded (but not observed) random number generation. The collapse of the wave function (“state vector” as the experimenter puts it) occurs in the moment of conscious observation, and no sooner, as implied by the famous double slit experiment. In other words, until the record on the computer disk is observed, its state is undetermined, just like that of Schrödinger’s cat.

You might not give much credence to the work of Helmut Schmidt, since he was a “parapsychologist,” a field which is generally considered to be pseudoscience. But haven’t you ever been playing a game with dice rolling and experienced the right number (or wrong number) come up just when you needed it (or dreaded it) the most? Maybe in a table top roleplaying game, where the story meaning is particularly entwined with the dice outcomes, where the fate of a beloved character hinges on a critical hit or miss, or on making or failing a saving throw. I know I’ve experienced it.

I’m sure we’ll play Quacks again, and I will try to release my fear and let the flow of good luck come to me. But I will have to fight my own nature. My competitive edge and my ego-identification with the outcome of random draws from a bag is what tangles me up, even though there are no real stakes in the game other than whether or not we’re having fun.

Where do I get this stuff? If you’re interested in learning more about primacy of consciousness as a model of reality, a good place to start is the book “The Self-Aware Universe” by Amit Goswami.

Tibetan Buddhism Says: It’s All In The Mind

Tibetan Buddhism Says: It’s All In The Mind

It comes up infrequently on this blog, but I am broadly interested in spiritual perspectives and metaphysics, and have a modest collection of books on religion and spiritualism which has fed my knowledge over the years. Of all the spiritual traditions I’ve read about, the one that resonates the most with me is Tibetan Buddhism. Buddhist philosophy in general is scientific, in that it is based on contemplative study, and is non-dogmatic. Tibetan Buddhism also happens to be the system that most closely aligns with the “science within consciousness” theories of my favorite philosopher, Amit Goswami.

So I was delighted when my partner showed up at home one day with a copy of “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,” which she had found at a thrift store. She’s always shopping at thrift stores and when she saw this book thought – correctly – that I would be interested in it. It was written by Sogyal Rinpoche, a Tibetan spiritual master who lived in exile in the West until his death in 2019. It’s essentially a layperson’s guide to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is an esoteric work that is difficult to understand (I know, I have a copy).

Here’s my review of the book on goodreads:

If you’ve ever tried to read “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” you know that it’s much too esoteric a work for the layperson. “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying” makes the same teachings more accessible to the ordinary Western reader. The author is a Tibetan spiritual master who was living in exile in the West, and in his writing he adds a personal touch connecting the book to his autobiography and his experience as a spirtual practioner. At the heart of the Tibetan Buddhist teachings is recognition of impermanence and the need to prepare for death. This life is a transitionary stage only, a precious opportuntity to realize the true nature of reality, by encountering the true nature of the mind, the pure state of awareness called Rigpa. As the book puts it, “The View is the comprehension of the naked awareness, within which everything is contained.” (p. 156). This ties into the idea of primacy of consciousness, or monistic idealism, the metaphysical principle behind Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. The book goes into details of how to practice meditation and spiritual devotion, with emphasis on the power of compassion, but also the importance of finding a spiritual master. The book then goes into ways to help the dying. Western society does not connect death to spiritual growth, choosing instead to isolate the dying and prolong their suffering, which is a terrible approach (there is recognition in the book of how the hospice movement is changing this). There is also a detailed description, from the perspective of Tibetan Buddhism, of the process of dying, and of the experiences of the “bardos,” or transitionary states between death and rebirth. This is where the book ties into the more difficult to understand wisdom of the “Tibetan Book of the Dead”, which is poetic and ritualistic in format. This book explains the Tibetan beliefs and ritual practices in ordinary language. How much of it would be applicable to a Westerner in their life is another question, but certainly the overall philosophy and understanding of the meaning of life and death is valuable. The sincere and hopeful intention of the author, who was expelled from his suffering country at a young age, is heartwarming. This is a recommended work for anyone trying to decipher the “Tibetan Book of the Dead,” as well as for anyone looking for an insightful spiritual perspective on the nature and meaning of death.

Review of “The Tibetan Book of LIving and Dying” on goodreads.com.

What the Tibetan Book of the Dead is essentially doing is providing guidance on how to prepare for death, and on what to expect in the experience of dying. Part of this preparation is meditation, in order to train the mind to be still, to not grasp at thoughts and be troubled by turbulent emotion, so that you can experience awareness in its primal state. In that way, you will be prepared at death for encountering higher dimensions of the mind, and potentially becoming liberated. Buddhism focuses on the mind, because, as this post’s title suggests, the mind is the universal basis of experience, and all life and death occur within it.

Ideally you should be conscious and in a meditative state at the moment of death. If death is sudden and violent, or if you are in a troubled mental state while dying, these encounters with higher dimensions will pass by in a blip, and you will simply be propelled into a new incarnation. But if you are prepared, you will recognize these encounters, as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

First, at the moment of death, you will encounter the Ground Luminosity, which is described by Sogyal Rinpoche as a self-originating clear light. It is the fundamental inherent nature of everything, which underlies all existence. It might even make sense to call it “the Supreme Being” – that is, that which is and beyond which nothing else is. You can see what I am getting at here. Should you recognize this Supreme Being and become One with it, then your karmic journey is complete. You’re done with it.

If not, you will next encounter what The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying calls the Intrinsic Radiance, which is like the mind in its purest state. You’re basically in a dream realm now. Within this radiance, the Peaceful and Wrathful Gods manifest, of which there are a large number, and which are all named and correspond to different aspects of the psyche. You might think of them as like Angels and Demons. You actually have a chance of remaining in this realm as an enlightened, disembodied being, but if not – off you go to your next birth.

I make the comparisons to similar concepts in Christian theology because I believe that all religious traditions derive from the same fundamental truths about the nature of reality. That’s why they end up with similarities in their models. Sogyal Rinpoche recognizes this too, and makes an explicit comparison between Buddhism and Christianity, when discussing the different mental realms in Buddhist philosophy.

These realms are the kayas, a word which literally means “body” but which signifies a dimension or field, according to Sogyal Rinpoche. They are the realm of the absolute, the realm of fullness without limitation, and the realm of the finite and relative. The experience at death is like a sudden ascent to the highest realm, followed by a descent into the realm of finitude, and incarnation.

This trinity of realms has a correspondence with concepts in Christianity, as follows.

Dimension of the mindTibetan BuddhismChristianity
dimension of unconditioned truthDharmakayaFather
dimension of fullness, beyond duality, space and timeSambhogakayaHoly Ghost
dimension of ceaseless manifestationNirmanakayaSon (Christ)

Now to the parallels between what Sogyal Rinpoche writes and Amit Goswami’s science within consciousness. I hinted at them in the review with this statement:

As the book puts it, “The View is the comprehension of the naked awareness, within which everything is contained.” (p. 156). This ties into the idea of primacy of consciousness, or monistic idealism, the metaphysical principle behind Tibetan Buddhist philosophy.

What Goswami argues in his theories is that consciousness is the ground of being. Consciousness does not emerge from material interactions, as materialists would have you believe, but rather contains the material universe as a manifestation within it. As the Beatles put it, “it’s all within yourself.” This is similar to the Buddhist idea that all experience is within the mind.

Goswami’s argument for the primacy of consciousness is based on the measurement problem in quantum physics. The particle is not there unless it is observed, but if awareness were an epiphenomenon of material (i.e. particle) interactions, then how could observation manifest the particle? Awareness must be fundamental and the particles themselves the emergent phenomena.

In Goswami’s model, the ground of being is what he calls unitive consciousness – undifferentiated and universal. In the words of Erwin Schrödinger, “Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown”. This unitive consciousness is like the Ground Luminosity, or the realm of Dharmakaya.

Consciousness must be unitive to avoid the “Wigner’s friend” paradox from quantum mechanics: how can two different observers collapse the same wave function? What if each observer collapsed it from its probabilistic wave form state into a different particle state? The Universe would be a mess!

Well, the answer is that there are not really two different observers. There is one field of awareness and one consciousness which chooses and manifests reality. The apparent separation of consciousness occurs because in the moment of observation, consciousness identifies with the measurement apparatus itself – that is, with the organism whose sensory systems are entangled in material reality. This creates a subject-object split – a subjective experience of an objective reality.

But really, both subject and object are aspects of the one field of consciousness, of the Absolute. The individuated self is a mirage. Everything, the experiencing self and all the objects it experiences, are encompassed in this one highest realm. As the Beatles put it, “life flows on within you and without you.” This is in concordance with the ideas of Tibetan Buddhism and other mystical traditions.

When unitive consciousness collapses the quantum wave function and manifests reality, there is at first an experience in “primary awareness.” This is akin to the experiences in the higher mental dimensions as described in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and it is possible to directly access this experience though disciplined meditative practice. But ordinarily we experience reality in the “secondary awareness” of the ego, which gives us the familiar subjective sense of self and identity.

Goswami posits that, in addition to the material body which humans possess, we also possess subtle bodies whose forms determine our vital experiences and mental experiences – that is, our feelings and thoughts. The connection between our subtle bodies and our physical bodies is maintained through the entangled manifestation within consciousness. In the words of William Blake:

“Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that called Body is a portion of a Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.”

– William Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The physical and subtle bodies via which we experience reality are thus what we would call “Body and Soul,” and exist within the Sogyal Rinpoche’s dimension of Nirmanakaya, the realm of manifestation. But because our awareness emerges from a higher order, we are able to get a glimpse of higher realms. It is just difficult and not likely, especially if we allow ourselves to be distracted by all the goings on down here on Earth. That is precisely the point of mystical wisdom such as that of The Tibetan Book of the Dead: to teach us about this potential and remind us of its importance, given that our time in the world of manifestation must inevitably come to an end.

Sogyal Rinpoche doesn’t know about Goswami (The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying came out well before Goswami’s publications), but he does bring up one physicist whose theories connect to Tibetan Buddhism. That physicist is David Bohm, whose ontology of an implicate order and an explicate order to explain the mysteries of quantum physics can be likened to the different realms of mental experience which Sogyal Rinpoche describes. This correspondence is given in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and I’ll just add to it here, from Goswami’s model.

RealmDavid BohmAmit Goswami
Dharmakayasuperimplicate orderThe bliss body of unitive consciousness
Samboghakayaimplicate, enfolded orderThe formless body in the archetypal realm
Nirmanakayaexplicate, unfolded orderThe limited body of experience in the realm of manifestation

I hope this introduction to spiritual science has been illuminating. It’s a subject which has intrigued me for a long time, though I tend to study it more from an intellectual perspective than as spiritual practitioner. I know I should meditate more, but the world of manifestation is always beguiling me with its fascinating goings on.

Here is the wisdom of the Beatles to close off this post. May you see beyond yourself and find peace of mind!

Love at the Center

Love at the Center

I discovered the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore by listening to the music CD A Gift of Love II. This is the second of a pair of albums by New Age author Deepak Chopra which put to music love poetry read by an ensemble of notable guest speakers (the first album uses the poetry of Rumi and is just as good). Tagore is considered to be a national treasure by the people of India, and from the great wisdom of his very quotable sayings it is easy to see why.

When I contemplate his many teachings, I find that I truly believe what the master says about love – that it is the ultimate meaning of life. For when the unity of consciousness, which is the ground of all being, separates into the duality of subjective observer and experienced world, it creates a yearning for reunion. This desire propels the Universal Will as it seeks higher and higher forms of expression within consciousness. Thus, love is the very reason for existence.

When you love, you are extending your conception of what you are, what belongs to you, outward into the world. You are expanding your ego-identity. Love is seated in the 4th chakra – anahata – which manages emotions, the confluence of your mental and vital natures. In other words, the meaning of your life. Anahata is the central chakra, and so love is central to your being. It radiates out from you in every worshipful act.

Keep that in mind, and love.