In finishing Eva Herr's book on consciousness, the last chapter hit me with the greatest strength because it explained something in a better way than I have. It was an interview with Thomas Campbell, a physicist who had worked with Bob Monroe, famous to many as the man who could control his out-of-body experiences. Campbell was taught to do this as well, and came up with a particularly wonky way to describe what he had learned from his "trips." He used computer game comparisons, and normally I don't like these - I am not into it (probably because of my age) and I do not think the mind works like a computer. However, to describe that which is outside our normal reality, we all must use metaphors that never are completely adequate: metaphors require reference, and one can only bend reality with symbolic references so far.
Still, at first my eyes glazed over when he talked of the Big C (full reality, the big conscious) and little c (our individual conscious) as the ultimate programmer and the programmed. But as I continued to read, it began to make sense. For some time I have tried to put into language an inner sense that ours is a flat world, incorporating only an infinitesimal amount of information about the Real world. That would be little c and Big C. And further, that our life has these limited parameters because that was the nature of the game - when you enter as a human in any society or age, you are born into this set of rules to work within. They are not THE set of rules for the universe as a whole, but ours. There is the Real beyond, but to access that takes either an act of grace or a great effort to keep the continual hum of this reality at bay - to open up to at least a part of the true Reality.
In effect, this can be explained very well by Campbell's analogy. We are a virtual reality - complete of itself, but really only a screen being viewed - or at least in the presence of - the greater outside reality. Unlike the virtual reality, however, we are connected to the creator - the designer - and can escape the virtual reality. That, explains Campbell, is our true difference, for the nature of the Big C is to counter entropy - that is, to make things, everything more rather than less coherent. The greatest coherence is Love. The creator wishes us (unlike a game - or perhaps like a game with outside consequences) to achieve this and will help us with our efforts - if we give an effort. We must create openings (through stopping the virtual noise) for the creator to come through with this greater information which we will then experience as real - a greater reality, if not THE Reality.
That's it in a nutshell and it helps to understand a lot - especially mystical insight and practice, as well as "miracles" and sudden epiphanies. The ego is the virtual reality, what must be transcended, although it is not an evil in itself; it is the source of free will, necessary for the willful realization of 0 entropy, or Love - which, as we all know through song, can only manifest when it is free (this free will is usually relegated to the rules of the "game." The object, I would presume, would be to overcome the limiting rules of that game, and eventually move into total Love, or the Big C). Miracles of many kinds - including the more common faith healings - come about when the game boundaries are cracked (and with the help of the creator). Sudden epiphanies - realizations beyond mechanical thought - also come about this way,and so on.
I must now get his book, "My Big Toe," even though I know I will have to hold my nose at the cyber-rhetoric. Campbell claims to have figured it ALL out through his research - in body and out - and it will be interesting to see what lies beyond the electronic references. But the metaphors presented hit the nail on the head. Our world itself offers these same metaphors in nature - spring, death and birth, the movement of water, others changes of the seasons and so on, but we have de-sacrilized the world now to such an extent that these cosmic and natural metaphors are hard to see, let alone grasp (I hold, with Joseph Campbell, that ALL the world is a metaphor for the real - the key word being metaphor). But computers, we know. And it seems such a change in metaphors might just help, perhaps a lot. FK
Still, at first my eyes glazed over when he talked of the Big C (full reality, the big conscious) and little c (our individual conscious) as the ultimate programmer and the programmed. But as I continued to read, it began to make sense. For some time I have tried to put into language an inner sense that ours is a flat world, incorporating only an infinitesimal amount of information about the Real world. That would be little c and Big C. And further, that our life has these limited parameters because that was the nature of the game - when you enter as a human in any society or age, you are born into this set of rules to work within. They are not THE set of rules for the universe as a whole, but ours. There is the Real beyond, but to access that takes either an act of grace or a great effort to keep the continual hum of this reality at bay - to open up to at least a part of the true Reality.
In effect, this can be explained very well by Campbell's analogy. We are a virtual reality - complete of itself, but really only a screen being viewed - or at least in the presence of - the greater outside reality. Unlike the virtual reality, however, we are connected to the creator - the designer - and can escape the virtual reality. That, explains Campbell, is our true difference, for the nature of the Big C is to counter entropy - that is, to make things, everything more rather than less coherent. The greatest coherence is Love. The creator wishes us (unlike a game - or perhaps like a game with outside consequences) to achieve this and will help us with our efforts - if we give an effort. We must create openings (through stopping the virtual noise) for the creator to come through with this greater information which we will then experience as real - a greater reality, if not THE Reality.
That's it in a nutshell and it helps to understand a lot - especially mystical insight and practice, as well as "miracles" and sudden epiphanies. The ego is the virtual reality, what must be transcended, although it is not an evil in itself; it is the source of free will, necessary for the willful realization of 0 entropy, or Love - which, as we all know through song, can only manifest when it is free (this free will is usually relegated to the rules of the "game." The object, I would presume, would be to overcome the limiting rules of that game, and eventually move into total Love, or the Big C). Miracles of many kinds - including the more common faith healings - come about when the game boundaries are cracked (and with the help of the creator). Sudden epiphanies - realizations beyond mechanical thought - also come about this way,and so on.
I must now get his book, "My Big Toe," even though I know I will have to hold my nose at the cyber-rhetoric. Campbell claims to have figured it ALL out through his research - in body and out - and it will be interesting to see what lies beyond the electronic references. But the metaphors presented hit the nail on the head. Our world itself offers these same metaphors in nature - spring, death and birth, the movement of water, others changes of the seasons and so on, but we have de-sacrilized the world now to such an extent that these cosmic and natural metaphors are hard to see, let alone grasp (I hold, with Joseph Campbell, that ALL the world is a metaphor for the real - the key word being metaphor). But computers, we know. And it seems such a change in metaphors might just help, perhaps a lot. FK
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