Today a new essay, "An Amish Table," under "Essays" on the web page.  FK   

From Irreducible Mind: first, a question: if the brain is the insertion point of consciousness, then how are certain consciousnesses destined for certain individuals?  From Fred Myers, but also many other accounts, many irrefutable to my mind, comes evidence that some children are born with very accurate memories of a past life - such that they know their relatives from that past life and many details that could only be known by the deceased who they say is their former body (for instance, certain details about the wife, where they hid or left money or papers, etc.), as well as identical birth marks to the deceased - and so on.  In some cases, a dying person will say he will be born in such and such a place - meaning he might have volition as to the choice of the next body (many take place in areas where reincarnation is expected).  Or it could mean that they have been given the insight - but by whom?  We have read in some other books that choices are made on another plain, where a future life is decided based on certain cosmic needs.  This, of course, necessitates a hierarchy of powers above the individual.  

Surprisingly, with Myers, the idea concerning personality and ability dovetails with the homonucleus - in his case, a belief wrought by experimentation, usual with hysterics or the hypnotized, that within us lie parallel selves, selves often like the Overmind, that know much more than the quotidian personality.  For Myers, it seems that other lives within ourselves are experiencing their own timelines and experiences unbeknownst to the daily personality - which comes to the for during said crises, hypnosis, or other events or emotional instabilities that enable another self to come forth.  Myers connects this to genius as well - how works of art, science and so forth seem to come full blown to the recipient.

What this means to the overall view of our greater intellectual environment I cannot say yet - I have to read more.  But what I can say is that I have encountered this in my own writing.  Sometimes - many times - it seems that I am only the stenographer - that another identity has already figured out the book and it is for me to put it down as best I can with a portion of my own abilities.  Others have said that this is only the workings of the unconscious, but in a way, this is meaningless - only a word to cover an unknown process.  I believe we all experience this "outside" force in one way or another all the time.  It may look like an odd coincidence or luck in our lives, but I think if we examine our own dreams we can get an inkling: most are just noise, but a few solve problems or enlighten us in certain aspects of our lives (not to mention, give us extra sensory knowledge of some distant or future event.)  What intelligence is this that seems to work apart from our own will, for it surely has its own will? Is this a parallel self working within us?  Myers had many examples of deft automatic writing, where the person writing might also be reading a book while his hand is writing another, in another voice about another subject.  Certainly something to think about - and I am not very sure I am comfortable with it.  Caramba, I'm not also so comfortable with one self.

But the really, the evidence is everywhere.   In Julian Jayne's "Bicameral Mind, " he posits the view that the prophets were dealing with aspects of their right brain, where information is arranged in broad symbolic strokes.  He believes more primitive people had less of a separation between the verbal and rational left side and the emotional, symbol-laden right - and thought that visions of God were real.  The information that they got from this "god" came from a more generalized piecing together of a vast array of information which would be too large to process for the rational mind.  

And yet: the (hidden) personalities encountered by Myers were often full-blown and rational.  Different streams of consciousness, many available to the single brain?  And beyond - do these streams continue to flow, still integrated, beyond the brain?  More to come, FK          

Ah - back to "The Irreducible Mind" - of which, my Kindle tells me, I am only 40% through -
The path taken by the authors is academic, exhaustive, and at time tortuous.  There is a reason for this, and a good one - the conclusion that they are aiming for - that is, that there are unknown powers and even individual life after death - is fraught with skepticism and outright mockery - not by myself or many of the readers, but by the mainstream scientific community.  It is this community that requires the tortuous proof.   And yet the authors know that they will persuade few; without the use of sarcasm, they clearly show that the world view of the empirical scientist is as obstinate to change as that of the most fervent of religious believers.  It is the young, the undergraduate and graduate students they wish to persuade before it is too late, not because they fear for anyone's immortal soul, but because they want an expanded field of inquiry which will enable us to gain knowledge about the whole which can only be done by including the unusual, the weird, or the generally hidden (odd dreams, unusual coincidence, visits from the "the other side," etc).  And so we come to the idea of the "homonucleus" when discussing such things as intentionality and memory.

Think of memory - what is your conception of it?  I bet it's the same as mine, which is the same  as most psychologists and neuropsychologists; that is, a memory storage area, like file cabinets or, for many nowadays, electronic computer storage.  But here's the problem: to retrieve the information requires someone behind the retrieval, with both the intention of what he wants and knowledge of where the information is stored.  Thus comes the idea of an infinite regression, or of one being inside another inside another.  This being is called the "homonucleus", or smaller  being in a larger one, and it of course does not solve the problem of the empirical scientist.  Who is the intendor? Where are HIS memory files of the memory files?  
The answers I think the authors are looking for are revealed in these statements (of generality, they admit) they quote by psychologist Henry Bergson: that the conscious "overflows" the organism; that the brain is the "point of insertion of mind in matter."  That is, that consciousness is all around us, not dependent on the brain, but rather using the brain to be actualized in our dimension of understanding (or becomes us by the intersection of mind and matter).  
There will be much, much more on this in the book; but we can see   the general direction, which has been stated by many experimental quantum theorists such as Ervin Lazlo: that is, that the universe is information, and that we are loci in that information web.  For the purpose of this book, following Fred Myers, that would make after-death awareness or survival possible, if not very different.  We shall see what things new come in the next 500 pages.  FK 
       
       

A new essay today, "The Tent," under "Essays" on the website.  FK