The Consciousness Wars

A victim of the consciousness war will exhibit the conscious/sub-conscious schiz and will have
been forced to choose where identity shall reside .

 

Now that is very interesting.

In Eastern Meditation there is this process of moving ones focus into the pit of one's stomach---as if one was literally moving inward into the pit of the stomach.

In the archaic, more powerful and lucid experience of the Shamanic State of Conscousness, there is no such thing that I am aware of, however there is a movement through a portal, which can be a move to the underworld or a move upwards. The move to a lower world could be metaphorically symbolize moving into one's gut. My own rational explanation of this, having experienced the Tungusic version of the technique, is that it involves allowing the conscious mind to enter into the subconscious and consciously experience and manipulate archetypal motiffs and complexes. (I meditated as a teenager, and in contrast to the experience of the shamanic journey, I rationalized that in meditation, one merely opened up the ego to peer into the subconscious. Though I have never had any amazing revelations or what Maslow would call a peak experience while meditating. Nonetheless, my understanding of the experience of 'enlightenment' is that one has no control over how or when it happens, or even in what is learned.)

My own experiences of the Shamanic journey makes me wonder if the whole body, or the whole system (gut-brain complex) is part of the subconscious. But of course this is not a scientific study.

I'm curious to see how the gut plays out in my next sweat lodge. When exiting the lodge you typically find yourself extremely relaxed---much more so than in meditation, and on a natural high.

 

It seems a valid notion, it will probably eventually be discovered its the whole body.

 

Curious to hear about that . It's important : we have a sincere need to know a
focused , forthcoming perspective .

 

Reason sets the boundaries far too narrowly for us, and would have us accept only the known – and that too with limitations – and live in a known framework, just as if we were sure how far life actually extends. . . . The more the critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes. . . . Overvalued reason has this in common with political absolutism: under its dominion the individual is pauperised. – Carl Jung

 

This section of the article addresses this abandonment of the supposed inaccuracy of the left-brain, right-brain scenario


It would seem that what is needed is a way of relaxing our ‘survival consciousness’ so that we can appreciate the ‘irrelevant’ but meaningful aspects of reality, but without incapacitating our ability to act. A book published in recent years suggests the possibility of this, and I’ll close this essay with a brief look at it. The book is The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, and it is important because it reboots the discussion around the differences between the left and right brain. The idea that the left brain is a scientist while the right is an artist is by now a cliché, and it is precisely for this reason that most ‘serious’ neuroscientists abandoned investigating the differences between the two cerebral hemispheres some decades ago. Contrary to popular belief, that has the left dealing with language, logic, and time, and the right handling patterns, intuition, and space, it turned out that both sides of the brain are involved in everything we do. Scientists, eager to disassociate themselves from ‘New Age’ and ‘pop’ psychology, said that the differences between them, if any, weren’t important. McGilchrist disagreed, and, as a neuroscientist as well as a professor of English, he is well placed to do so, having a foot in each camp as it were. His argument is complex and demanding but in a nutshell it is this: the difference is not in what each cerebral hemisphere does, but in how it does it. Both sides of our brain do the same things, but they do them differently.

The right brain, McGilchrist tells us, is geared toward presenting the whole, which it perceives as a living, breathing Other. Contrary to conventional neuroscience, which sees the left as dominant and the right as a kind of dispensable side kick, the right brain is older, more fundamental, and is the ‘Master’ of McGilchrist’s title. It is concerned with patterns, relationships, the connections between things, and with their immediate ‘is-ness’, the Istigkeit of the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart – who, incidentally, Huxley draws on when describing his mescaline experience. Its job is to present reality as a unified whole; it gives us the ‘big picture’, the forest and not the individual trees. It’s concerned with implicit meanings, that can be felt, but not pinned down exactly. When in our warm, hazy mood of well-being, we reflect that life is good, more times than not we can’t say exactly why. We just know it is. Poetry, metaphor, images are some ways in which we try to communicate what the right brain shows us.
The left brain, on the other hand (literally, as the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain the left), is geared toward breaking up the whole which the right presents into bits and pieces which it can manipulate. It’s job is to analyze the big picture presented by the right, and reduce it to easily manageable parts which it can control. Where the right is open to ‘newness’ and appreciates the ‘being’ of thing-in-themselves, the left is geared to representing reality as something familiar, and sees things in terms of their use. It has a utilitarian approach to reality, whereas the right just accepts things as they are. It focuses on discreet, individual, self-contained parts: the trees, not the forest. It is concerned with explicit ‘facts’, which it communicates in precise detail in very literal prose.

The right needs the left because its picture, while of the whole, is fuzzy and imprecise. The left needs the right because while it can focus with dazzling clarity on discreet bits, it loses the connections between things. The right can lose itself in a vague, hazy perception of the whole. The left can lose itself in a narrow, obsession with the part. One gives us context, the other detail. One looks at a panorama, the other through a microscope. One presents everything ‘allatonce’; the other bits and pieces ‘one-at-a-time’. One gives us a world to live in, the other the means of surviving in it.

It can be seen, I think, that the left brain is geared toward acquiring knowledge step by step; it is involved in episteme. The right, it seems, has more to do with gnosis. It can also be seen that the left brain, with its focus on utilitarian aims and purposes, has more to do with the kind of eliminative function that Bergson speaks of, while the right would be more involved with the kind of ‘irrelevant’ knowledge that is eliminated. The farmers who see a tree as something in the way of their fields and to be got rid of, see it with their left brains. Poets, like Wordsworth, who are sent into mystic reverie gazing at it, see it with their right. A tree can be something ‘in the way’, but it can also be beautiful. I would say that when Hermes Trismegistus, R. M. Bucke, William James and P.D. Ouspensky experienced gnosis and cosmic consciousness they somehow shifted their left brain focus to the right. They switched from the brain that cut out everything irrelevant to survival to the brain that let everything in.

McGilchrist argues that throughout history the two brains have been in a kind of rivalry punctuated by brief periods when they worked together. Neither he nor I am saying that we should jettison left brain or ‘survival’ consciousness in favor of the right. Both are necessary and we wouldn’t have them if they weren’t. But he does argue that there has been a gradual shift in emphasis toward valuing the left over the right, and that we are increasingly creating a left-brain dominated culture that is slowly squeezing out the input from the right. The fact that the most respected intelligences of our time – scientists – tell us that the universe is “pointless” seems evidence of this. Breaking down the whole into bits and pieces in order to understand and manipulate it (technology), we lose sight of the connection between things, the implicit meaning that the right brain perceives but which it is unable to communicate to the left, in a language it can understand. Poets, mystics, artists can feel this whole and try to communicate it, but the left brain only acknowledges ‘facts’ and dismisses their entreaties as well-meaning moonshine.

So where does this leave us? For one thing, recognizing that the kind of consciousness associated with mystical experience and gnosis is rooted in our own neurophysiology, and cannot be dismissed as delusion, mere emotion, or madness allows us to approach the question of gnosis in a way that the proponents of episteme cannot ignore, even if they do not agree with it. If, as McGilchrist argues, the right brain holistic perception is fundamental – is, as he calls it, the Master – then we can begin to see how the left brain analytical perception rose out of it, developed as an evolutionary aid to survival. (It is, perhaps, the source of the ‘ancient wisdom’ of the Hermeticists and other mystery traditions.) We can see that our present left-brain oriented consciousness is not, as mentioned earlier, consciousness per se, but has antecedents in earlier forms of consciousness. And if we recognize, as many have, that this utilitarian focused consciousness, while working wonderfully as a tool for survival, has been gradually eliminating the kind of right brain perceptions that give life a sense of meaning, we can see that this imbalance needs to be redressed. McGilchrist points to several periods in history when, as mentioned, the two worked together, with remarkable results: Classical Greece, the Renaissance, the Romantic Movement. And in our own experience, we can find moments when this happens too: moments of insight, ‘peak experiences’, creative moments when the big picture and the detail come together, when the particular seems to express some universal, and when the whole cosmos seems to reside in our own imaginations. (Poets may receive inspiration from the right brain, but they need the left in order to capture that inspiration in words.) McGilchrist argues that the times in western history when a creative union between the two hemispheres of the brain were reached were triggered by the urgent need for them to work together. Crisis, he says, can bring about the completion of our ‘partial mind’, as the poet W.B. Yeats expressed it. We are not, I submit, short of crises. Let us hope McGilchrist is right and that the evolution of consciousness, spurred by the challenges before us, unites our two sides in a creative gnosis for the twenty-first century.

http://realitysandwich.com/319408/mystical-experience-and-the-evolution-of-consciousness-a-twenty-first-century-gnosis/

 

I have come to realize that the materialist dogma of science is the miasmatic theory of the 20th and 21st Centuries, and that such experiments as the Double Slit experiment, or the experiments demonstrating the Zeno effect, are examples of the modern day versions of the 19th Century Cholera epidemics.

Miasmatic theory held that cholera, the plague, and other diseases were the result of bad smells---mainly from rotting garbage, stagnant water, and human and animal excrement. This was the scientific and medical dogma of the time. The flush toilet, and sewer systems were actually invented to help stop the cholera epidemic, based on the idea that if waste was flushed away, the smells would not be around to infect the people. Part of the treatment involved encouraging diarrhea and so forth in order to get the 'smells' out of the body, as well as cutting down on fluid and food intake. Because of the fallacy of this scientific dogma, these treatments actually hastened the mortality of cholera, as the flush toilets and sewers, deposited the waste directly into the water supplies, which only spread the disease faster.

Personal prevention simply involved covering the mouth and nose with handkerchiefs and attempts to counteract the bad smells with good smells, such as perfumes and potpouris.

There were people that disagreed---both lay people and scientists. A well known anaesthetologist knew very well the action of gasses on the human body, and how the body reacted to them. He demonstrated to the scientific community that cholera could not be passed through smell, because its method of infection does not involve the airways within the human body. His work was readily dismissed because he was not the right kind of medical professional. A prison warden very significantly increased the survival rate of the prisoners dying of cholera in his prison just by giving them more water. He finally got a doctor to come out and see for himself but he quickly disagreed and blamed it on other unknown factors. He dismissed the idea of warden because he had no medical or scientific background.

Granted, the attempts to remove smelly stagnant water, which tended to be infected with cholera anyway, did help alleviate the spread of the disease thereby supporting the miasmatic theory. That is until it was reaching more and more of the city water supplies, causing infection levels to jump.

This debate went on for sometime---with lay people ignored, scientists shunned, and the status quo dogma well protected and in place. No matter what was attempted the epidemics only got worse-----until finally the scientific and medical communities accepted that contagionism was a factor.

The arguments that were presented to dismiss any credible research that suggested contagionism over miasmatic theory included: We need more information (to understand how miasmatic theory works); there is not enough data; there is insufficient evidence; any idea other than miasmas is ridiculous; and, there are other contributing factors that cause the results (that do not support miasmatic theory). Then of course, all too often there was the argument that the person making such claims against miasmatic theory did not have the proper credentials, or was not experienced enough to make such claims.

Isn't it interesting that these are the exact same arguments used to dismiss any role of a conscious observer in Quantum Mechanics, or the role and/or existence of mind in any scientific context. The idea, for example, that the measurement itself within the double slit experiment causes the probability collapse to happen as it does is not a good argument at all when you consider that decoherence happens all through the experiment anyway.

But this isn't just about the impact of the observer on the quantum world. It is really about the presence of this nonmaterial thing we call mind. There is scientific evidence of the non-local role of mind----the experiments at MIT, for example. But such things are completely ignored or dismissed, just as science did in the 19th Century...

 

you're big on rhetoric but small on ideas. your post can be condensed thusly: "Some scientists were once not good at science. It took good scientists to fix their problems. These days, I believe some science is bad science, and I believe I am a good scientist, who can see their errors. If you question me, that's because you're probably a bad scientist".

Also, there is no such thing as a dogma in science. There is no materialist dogma in science. There are only dogmatic people; some of whom are happy to make Idealism and Native Magic their security blanket. It just happens that materialism is a very common position to hold in societies which have scientific establishments. I don't even think it's "materialism" per se, Realism is a much better term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_realism

Most scientists would say that you have to believe there's really a world "out there" in order to have a good attitude to study it; as far as the ultimate constituency of the cosmos being matter or mind, I've never encountered anything approaching "dogma" either way, that's a highly non-empirical question at this point and so no good scientist takes a stand on it in either case.

 

I am pretty sure you can go through all my posts and not see where I attack another person. Granted, I will react to a personal attack with a bite, sometimes a deep bite----but outside of that, I attack the ideas and the concepts, not the person. I may attack the post, but I won't attack the person.

That is very objective of you to objectify me as someone big on rhetoric without any ideas---and yet you still haven't responded with a counterargument (in regards to the double slit experiment and what I have presented on decoherence). That would be a debate and we could very well learn from it. I might gain a new perspective----which is one thing I look for in these posts. I may get very stubborn and seem overly sure of myself----but its because I am seeking a strong debate. If you have an answer present it and defend it.

But how can you really know what my ideas are? Do you think, for example, that I would write a whole book on the double slit experiment? Maybe 5 or 10 pages tops----not a whole book, not to mention 3 whole books, which is what it is amounting to, each covering a different aspect of the Post-Modern Crisis.

Hmmmm... I reread my whole post, and that doesn't seem to be exactly what I said. First of all, I never said I was a scientist---good or bad. Second of all, I said that there were scientists and lay people that saw the fallacy of miasmatic theory. Third----well at least you used the words, 'believe,' and 'probably.' The point is that, considering the significance of the experiments, for example at MIT, they should not be ignored or dismissed, and minds should not be closed to the possibilities. Isn't that what science is ideally really about---having an open mind towards the possibilities of the universe? Also, there are scientists and lay people alike that see contradictions and problems with such reductionist conclusions of science----just like in the 19th century.

Did I ever say I was a scientist? I said I consult with scientists. I think you are the only one to throw labels around.

Yes, you could say that---as much as you could say that there is no dogma in religion. Then again, we could say that a religion could be dogmatic, just as a science can. (Why don't you look up the definition of dogma on wikipedia). I have an anthropologist friend who has spent many years doing work in Egypt. In fact, we met on an Egyptian Airlines flight. He complains bitterly about the dogma of Egyptology and what it takes to even try to present a new idea----even with very strong evidence.

Yes one could say realism---after all the Modern World has such a deep foundation in Cartesian philosophy that we are all demoted to a fairly insignificant cold-hearted observer looking out at the objective world all around us. Some like to use the term physicalism----but in the end it all boils down to a materialism, unless the possibility of a non-physical aspect to reality can be explored. Why don't you read Materialism on Wikipedia? Realism, physicalism---it is all about a material reality----even if we argue space-time, for example----unless one proposes that space-time includes a non-physical aspect-----as I have (but never mind that, I am small on ideas).

I don't need a security blanket. I questioned idealism from the time I was a child. What I needed was a way to explain the phenomena I have experienced regularly, especially over the past decade or more, phenomena which broke apart my own materialist understanding of reality, my own rational objectivism. It is something you wouldn't understand----but I am fairly certain that I have told you how to experience some of it for yourself. (let me know if you forgot how).

I would say that the Hindus, for example, are dogmatic on the idea of mind (they call it dharma). There are scientists who refer to the scientific idea of matter as dogmatic-----obviously no one you would respect, but they are scientists nonetheless with phD's and published peer reviewed research.

I, by the way, even within my phenomenalist philosophy----incorporate a world 'out there.' But I have believed in a holographic reality for a good 6 or 7 years now, and the number of scientists who agree is growing rapidly. If you go through the archives of Newscientist on the web, you will probably find an article or two from last year or so of how more and more scientists are turning to a holographic model to resolve the differences between the Theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

Anyway----I am always open for respectful, and fierce debate. There is no need for personal attacks. I would never resort to one, even if I was losing a very heated debate. I find such things as petty. (Though I do often bite back when someone attacks me----it's only fair.)

 

In the other thread I refered to, rather than respond to what I presented he simply tried to attack my intelligence by posting one of the variations of the Schrodinger Equation and asking me if I could do a Fourier Transform of it.

Unfortunately for him, I take my writing very seriously and am very familiar with the Schrodinger Equation. And on top of that, as a Securities Analyst in the 1980’s I attempted to do a Fourier Transform of various market cycles in the stock market. It was interesting, but as a bona fide predictive tool, a bit problematic. However the investment bank I worked for was awed with it, and tried to push it, though fortunately I let any buy-side analyst and fund manager know the real score before it could be relied too heavily upon. (Not that a Fourier Transform is BS in Quantum Mechanics, mind you, it is just not that predictive in the stock market. And of course, it hasn’t yet served any purpose for me in what I am writing about.)

I also pointed out that there really is no need to go through the exercise because there are physics classes all over the country that have detailed .pdf’s on the web of how to do this. And, that while he is convinced that Quantum Physicists are geniuses doing the most difficult math on earth, that what he was asking was an undergraduate exercise for someone majoring in that field.

Anyway----I can’t blame him. For one thing, I am an old hippie and I continuously challenge beliefs---including my own. And it is far harder to challenge your own beliefs than those of others. I don’t expect others to do that too. Besides, I too was always skeptical of anything supernatural or religious. I travelled around the world and tried to experience every religion first hand as a believer to try to find proof. By the early 1980’s I had given up on there being such proof. I debated a lot of Christians over science vs their beliefs----mainly because they always felt like they had to convert me.

Then when I least expected it, some very crazy shit happened. It got me interested, but it still took many years of crazy shit, and my continuous rationalization of it before I accepted it----that and something that I could no longer deny.

On the one hand it may seem to him like I am trying to convert him, when I am really just looking for a strong debate which strengthens my writing. On the other hand, while I am not trying to convert anyone to any belief, I am trying to break the materialist dogma of Modern Culture, and introduce a new metaphysical philosophy that incorporates mind as non-material. In the spirit of being multiplistic, I include a materialist and atheistic segment of my philosophy, but I may make him feel threatened.

Its a very sticky subject and people feel very strongly about their beliefs in this matter.