Decades ago, a professor who had done fieldwork in Africa said repeatedly that "we think that our selves end at our bodies. Maybe that is not the case; we think that magic cannot happen, but maybe that is not the case." She said this in such a conspiratorial way that we knew she believed it, and had the secret - but she never went on to explain. What the heck was she getting at?
Finishing Bernardo Kastrup's Brief Peeks Beyond, promises answers to such questions, and more. For instance (as an aside), Kastrup believes that the finding of life outside our planet would be a paradigm shift for science. Why? Because, if life happened by chance, as materialists say, then what are the odds that it would happen elsewhere, only by chance? We might say that the conditions for life can exist elsewhere, and therefore would happen with the same frequency, but would it? If it took billions of years to appear on Earth, exactly how likely would it be to happen elsewhere - unless the universe were set up to produce life? Interestingly, he adds his own aside: if life were produced by chance, what would be the odds that this life would be self-producing, as it had to be? For to come to life is one thing - but to come to life equipped for creating another life is another.
Thoughts to ponder, but back to the main issue: what is the consistent reality for humans? In other words, how malleable can human reality be? In Kastrup's view, we are nothing but consciousness - or at least, can never know anything beyond consciousness. How we appear physically, then, is simply how a particular perspective of consciousness makes us appear. Our bodies are what consciousness appears to be from the outside (from consciousness's perspective). This perspective is not Truth (the end-all), but rather a limited view of total reality that is shared by everything that appears to us in this reality. Thus, what we see as a rock demonstrates a condition in our reality set; and what we see (really, experience) as a human also demonstrates a certain substrate of possibilities. What is human, then, constitutes a certain set of possibilities in all humans.
And so, humans, as consciousness perceives itself, are of the same mold. Put in group terms, what people in one culture experience should be amenable to what people in another culture experience.
But this realization is not as easy as it looks. Kastrup believes that our reality - that is, what separates us from the "one-ness" of the cosmic stream, is like a whirlpool in this stream. It is of the same stuff, but localized, particularized. We and all things in the whirlpool, then, are part of the same dream (albeit, a different sort of dream than our sleeping one) and thus are subject to the same laws of that dream. However, Kastrup says that we as our ego - that is, what we relate to in waking life - focus only on a small substrate of the possibilities in the vortex. Our "sub-conscious" as it is called, is really no "sub" at all, but another part of the consciousness of the vortex complex that we do not focus upon in the waking, egoistic state. Therefore, all sorts of possibilities abound within this reality subset that no culture can ever exhaust. What appears to be our bodies might, then, not limit our pesoanl influence on physical nature; and what seems like magic to us might just be part of the vortex that has not been focused upon in our cultural fixation (our group ego).
Thus it is quite possible that healing techniques, for instance, might be successful if they operate on a part of us that is not visible in our egoistic state. We have in our own science buzz terms such as "psychosomatic illness" and "the placebo effect" which really explain nothing - except that our science cannot understand the nature of the disease, or its cure. While other people from other cultures might have a problem with imagining microbes and cellular division (and thus call our medicines magical), they might be comfortable with the concept of the psychic realm, just as their doctors would be comfortable with manipulating it for health (or, for sorcerers, harm).
My professor never told us why she asked the questions she did, and I wonder if she really had an explanation. But in Kastrup's view, it would be easy to see that the physical influence of the will could extend beyond the body; and that what we call magic could indeed exist.
A fascinating book with much more than can be discussed here, from UFO's to the future of the world. Perhaps for other blogs. FK
Finishing Bernardo Kastrup's Brief Peeks Beyond, promises answers to such questions, and more. For instance (as an aside), Kastrup believes that the finding of life outside our planet would be a paradigm shift for science. Why? Because, if life happened by chance, as materialists say, then what are the odds that it would happen elsewhere, only by chance? We might say that the conditions for life can exist elsewhere, and therefore would happen with the same frequency, but would it? If it took billions of years to appear on Earth, exactly how likely would it be to happen elsewhere - unless the universe were set up to produce life? Interestingly, he adds his own aside: if life were produced by chance, what would be the odds that this life would be self-producing, as it had to be? For to come to life is one thing - but to come to life equipped for creating another life is another.
Thoughts to ponder, but back to the main issue: what is the consistent reality for humans? In other words, how malleable can human reality be? In Kastrup's view, we are nothing but consciousness - or at least, can never know anything beyond consciousness. How we appear physically, then, is simply how a particular perspective of consciousness makes us appear. Our bodies are what consciousness appears to be from the outside (from consciousness's perspective). This perspective is not Truth (the end-all), but rather a limited view of total reality that is shared by everything that appears to us in this reality. Thus, what we see as a rock demonstrates a condition in our reality set; and what we see (really, experience) as a human also demonstrates a certain substrate of possibilities. What is human, then, constitutes a certain set of possibilities in all humans.
And so, humans, as consciousness perceives itself, are of the same mold. Put in group terms, what people in one culture experience should be amenable to what people in another culture experience.
But this realization is not as easy as it looks. Kastrup believes that our reality - that is, what separates us from the "one-ness" of the cosmic stream, is like a whirlpool in this stream. It is of the same stuff, but localized, particularized. We and all things in the whirlpool, then, are part of the same dream (albeit, a different sort of dream than our sleeping one) and thus are subject to the same laws of that dream. However, Kastrup says that we as our ego - that is, what we relate to in waking life - focus only on a small substrate of the possibilities in the vortex. Our "sub-conscious" as it is called, is really no "sub" at all, but another part of the consciousness of the vortex complex that we do not focus upon in the waking, egoistic state. Therefore, all sorts of possibilities abound within this reality subset that no culture can ever exhaust. What appears to be our bodies might, then, not limit our pesoanl influence on physical nature; and what seems like magic to us might just be part of the vortex that has not been focused upon in our cultural fixation (our group ego).
Thus it is quite possible that healing techniques, for instance, might be successful if they operate on a part of us that is not visible in our egoistic state. We have in our own science buzz terms such as "psychosomatic illness" and "the placebo effect" which really explain nothing - except that our science cannot understand the nature of the disease, or its cure. While other people from other cultures might have a problem with imagining microbes and cellular division (and thus call our medicines magical), they might be comfortable with the concept of the psychic realm, just as their doctors would be comfortable with manipulating it for health (or, for sorcerers, harm).
My professor never told us why she asked the questions she did, and I wonder if she really had an explanation. But in Kastrup's view, it would be easy to see that the physical influence of the will could extend beyond the body; and that what we call magic could indeed exist.
A fascinating book with much more than can be discussed here, from UFO's to the future of the world. Perhaps for other blogs. FK
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