For many months now, a different view of reality has flitted about in my mind that, when put into words, sounds about as profound as a guy high on weed saying, "oh wow, man!" Yes, I've been there. Back in those groovy times, my hip house-mates and I would often record our break-through, brilliant highs, only to find
later that what we thought - no, knew - were revolutionary developments in philosophy had a lot more "and like, it's all a whole, man" phrases than deep, mind-bending gems from Kierkegaard. And so, with time, we passed off much of it as the product of chemistry.
But really, we knew differently. Simply put, you had to be there, because the words, with our limited abilities, could not express the realizations. There is a whole essay to write on that alone, but here I want to focus on the author I have been reading lately who manages to do a far better job with words than my former group of college buddies and I did on one of the same topics we "realized" and that has now come to haunt me. That is, that the brain itself is a product of consciousness, not the other way around; that is, that the bleak limitations of our material understanding of reality are only in our imaginations.
The book is Brief Peeks Beyond by Bernardo Kastrup, and it is not an easy book to break into. It hits hard right off, and after 50 pages, I was ready to give up when it suddenly made sense. It is not solipsism - that is, that everything is just a made- up fantasy - because his view encompasses shared reality, and acknowledges that this reality is quite real, but only incomplete. Rather, he goes right to the nut, stating something so simple that it often eludes us: that everything we experience is a product of consciousness. Scientists might say, "here! Touch the brain right here and the patient will feel certain things. Surely, the brain is the seat of consciousness!," but, as Kastrup puts it, this is only the scientist's view from the outside of the mind at work. By touching certain nerves, they have no more a concept of the experience of that nerve touching than a nearby brick. They are only seeing what a materially-minded person can see of consciousness.
While he uses many such examples to clarify this, one of the best involves our common experience of dreams. In a dream, we believe we are individuals subjected to an exterior reality that binds us by the laws of nature and the action of others. But we know on waking that this is not true - that, instead, it is our consciousness that has controlled everything from the beginning, even though we didn't know it. As such it is analogously with waking reality. We feel impinged by the outside, but in truth, there is no outside; rather, we have consciously (for an elusive reason) chosen the reality set that we believe impinges and informs us.
To get another take on this, Kastrup brings up the functions of memory. Many of us believe that memory resides in discreet neurons that are accessible like office drawers, sitting ready for use. Many cases show, however, that memory resides throughout the brain in ways that are not understood. More importantly, however, is the question of the identity of the file user. A neurologist might point to a certain area of the brain imaged by a CAT scan and say, "see, now he is accessing a memory!" But who, exactly, is doing the accessing? Where is the image for the hidden hand that chooses a particular file, or memory?
Kastrup himself uses the analogy of a stream of water, where consciousness is an eddy, or whirlpool, in the stream. Shared reality is our collective focus on the whirlpool (the focus IS the whirlpool), but, as he puts it, "the whirlpool does not create the water. The whirlpool is created from the water." In other words, consciousness is a concentration on certain aspects of potentiality in the stream of being. It is not being itself.
Again, he does not attempt to understand the why and where-for of this focus, but such an understanding clarifies my recent "oh, wow!" moment, this time without the aid of chemicals. That is, that our view of the brain as the end-all and be-all of consciousness is simply a misunderstanding of focus. We "imagine" our brain (not as a hallucination, but as something only partial to the entirety) - our brain does not imagine us. Our brain places us in this focus of reality, but once it's gone, as happens with death, the consciousness that created the brain continues on its merry way. We do continue after death, only without the restraints of our current focus. This understanding allows for out-of-body experiences, various forms of ESP, and even quite possibly ET's, who might just be beings in a different "whirlpool" who have accessed ours. What is beyond the brain-mind experience, neither the author nor my nagging hint at a greater reality are ready to say. But all of us will probably know it first hand, once we leave this eddy for the greater stream. FK
later that what we thought - no, knew - were revolutionary developments in philosophy had a lot more "and like, it's all a whole, man" phrases than deep, mind-bending gems from Kierkegaard. And so, with time, we passed off much of it as the product of chemistry.
But really, we knew differently. Simply put, you had to be there, because the words, with our limited abilities, could not express the realizations. There is a whole essay to write on that alone, but here I want to focus on the author I have been reading lately who manages to do a far better job with words than my former group of college buddies and I did on one of the same topics we "realized" and that has now come to haunt me. That is, that the brain itself is a product of consciousness, not the other way around; that is, that the bleak limitations of our material understanding of reality are only in our imaginations.
The book is Brief Peeks Beyond by Bernardo Kastrup, and it is not an easy book to break into. It hits hard right off, and after 50 pages, I was ready to give up when it suddenly made sense. It is not solipsism - that is, that everything is just a made- up fantasy - because his view encompasses shared reality, and acknowledges that this reality is quite real, but only incomplete. Rather, he goes right to the nut, stating something so simple that it often eludes us: that everything we experience is a product of consciousness. Scientists might say, "here! Touch the brain right here and the patient will feel certain things. Surely, the brain is the seat of consciousness!," but, as Kastrup puts it, this is only the scientist's view from the outside of the mind at work. By touching certain nerves, they have no more a concept of the experience of that nerve touching than a nearby brick. They are only seeing what a materially-minded person can see of consciousness.
While he uses many such examples to clarify this, one of the best involves our common experience of dreams. In a dream, we believe we are individuals subjected to an exterior reality that binds us by the laws of nature and the action of others. But we know on waking that this is not true - that, instead, it is our consciousness that has controlled everything from the beginning, even though we didn't know it. As such it is analogously with waking reality. We feel impinged by the outside, but in truth, there is no outside; rather, we have consciously (for an elusive reason) chosen the reality set that we believe impinges and informs us.
To get another take on this, Kastrup brings up the functions of memory. Many of us believe that memory resides in discreet neurons that are accessible like office drawers, sitting ready for use. Many cases show, however, that memory resides throughout the brain in ways that are not understood. More importantly, however, is the question of the identity of the file user. A neurologist might point to a certain area of the brain imaged by a CAT scan and say, "see, now he is accessing a memory!" But who, exactly, is doing the accessing? Where is the image for the hidden hand that chooses a particular file, or memory?
Kastrup himself uses the analogy of a stream of water, where consciousness is an eddy, or whirlpool, in the stream. Shared reality is our collective focus on the whirlpool (the focus IS the whirlpool), but, as he puts it, "the whirlpool does not create the water. The whirlpool is created from the water." In other words, consciousness is a concentration on certain aspects of potentiality in the stream of being. It is not being itself.
Again, he does not attempt to understand the why and where-for of this focus, but such an understanding clarifies my recent "oh, wow!" moment, this time without the aid of chemicals. That is, that our view of the brain as the end-all and be-all of consciousness is simply a misunderstanding of focus. We "imagine" our brain (not as a hallucination, but as something only partial to the entirety) - our brain does not imagine us. Our brain places us in this focus of reality, but once it's gone, as happens with death, the consciousness that created the brain continues on its merry way. We do continue after death, only without the restraints of our current focus. This understanding allows for out-of-body experiences, various forms of ESP, and even quite possibly ET's, who might just be beings in a different "whirlpool" who have accessed ours. What is beyond the brain-mind experience, neither the author nor my nagging hint at a greater reality are ready to say. But all of us will probably know it first hand, once we leave this eddy for the greater stream. FK
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