If one is keeping up with the essays on this site, one can see that most of the stories are vignettes from my own life, bits and pieces that, by and large, are not all that remarkable.  Many other people have lived far more adventurous lives (although I would have liked to have lived more), either in exotic travel or in jobs that bring them into contact with the extraordinary and unusual - jobs such as a teacher or a policeman or an EMT.  In fact, there are dozens of these types of professions - how many remarkable stories do we now have coming from the battlefields and hospitals of Afghanistan and, until recently, Iraq? But the quasi - ordinariness of my own life is the point - the point being that remarkable things are happening to all of us if we take the right perspective.

For instance, the last essay, My Guitar, talks of an infatuation gone sour, of the oft-told and well- experienced story of unrequited "love."  The heartache and sense of emptiness and loss might seem all there is to it.  However, the very point of this website is to help others, as well as myself, understand that our ordinary lives are not ordinary at all - that rather, they are, all of them, imbued with cosmic importance.  In most essays, then, I take an episode that qualifies as something easily set-off - a trip, a love affair, a specific experience - and then try to refocus from a higher perspective - a perspective from the great spiritual traditions of the world.  Considering My Guitar, for instance, what would the Buddha or the Christ say about this infatuation and loss?  Thinking in that way, one can quickly see that such cases are not mere anecdotes, but strong lessons about behavior and cosmic meaning (which, taken these sacred beings, can be looked at in two ways - for the Buddha, suffering led to to his enlightenment; for the Christ, enlightenment led to a martyred suffering).  What can be seen is multi-layered - for instance, in this essay's case, to rely on things or associations of this world, from physical love to fame to wealth, is foolish and inevitably leads to disappointment and suffering.  But then, when suffering comes, we come to learn that it can be our salvation, especially if we are stripped, left empty and hopeless.  This is the "dark night of the soul", depicted and understood as the great night sky, with its feelings both of hopeless impersonal space and magnificence.  And this is the gateway to Truth or God - for all of creation is God's metaphor, and in this grandeur and loneliness is the feeling - the feeling that beyond oneself is something of eternal greatness - which cannot be reached while immersed in the ego, which will seldom be transcended in happiness, simply because one is happy being there.  And the beyond, the eternal, is Love, not in the Hollywood sense of infatuation and personal sexual desire, but rather the unity of ALL that might be seen once one goes beyond the perspective of isolation.  This is TRUE love, but it is mirrored in ordinary sexual and platonic love - in that in the latter a union of sorts is made, which is what produces the desirable feeling - but which we find out is as small when compared to Absolute Love as ourselves, even our Earth and sky, is when compared to the universe.  

An essay for today, My Guitar, under "Essays" on the web page.  FK

In the continuation of my leap into psych theory in "Irreducible Minds" I have come across some surprising surmises.  One already mentioned it the idea of multiple selves in healthy people.  This, I find, is surprising because Freud wrote against it; and because Freud became the main man for the first half of the 20th century, we are "unconsciously" saddled with his perspective on the layered conscious.

For Freud, there was no subliminal "other', only consciousness and complexes to which the consciousness shifted at certain times.  Complexes were not full-blown personalities, but rather intrusions of psychic movement from a base (lower or primitive) level that could alter the otherwise uniform consciousness.  Thus we get the view that most of us have in our heads: that there is the world of light, our "selves" as we know them, and the subterranean world of the unconscious, where primitive urges are often hidden, sometimes leading to pathological behavior in people torn by the hidden and the open, social self.  

This is where most of us are in our thoughts, and thus the surprise of the multiple selves (with a unifying subliminal self - much more on that in the future).  But Freud, really, is the surprise: for to form complexes is to hide information and urges, but who or what is doing the hiding?  If we are not conscious of this act (and we usually are not), then, what?  Is the unconscious really controlling the conscious?  And would not this unconscious be more like the uniting subliminal self?  I for one had always taken the view that the Freudian concept, at least regarding the superficial personality, was a done deal.  And yet it is not.  Not only is it fraught with a fatal contradiction, but it is now under fire by a more surprising view.

That is, that we have no free will.  This idea, championed by Thomas (? Father of Aldous) Huxley in the late 19th century, has come into favor again by modern neuro-psychologists such as Wegner.  In this view, what we call ourselves is simply an interpretation of the state of the brain - that is, "automatisms" are the real, and conscious will only an illusory feeling.  One wonders if the authors of such beliefs also believe that they have no free will - which would mean that this theory is only an interpretation of the state of the brain at a certain moment or series of moments.  Could there then be any truth to it?  Another circular conundrum.  It also begs the question of what guides the particular functioning of the brain, for the brain takes in infinite information from the senses and delivers to us a real, coherent world.  If it is automatic, something or someone has made it so - such order does not come by accident.  So I could accept the theory only with the addendum that there is a force - some might call it God - that is at work behind the scenes.  And yet, somehow, I believe we will never see such an addition.  

In fact, the lack of free will has been posited by Hindu and Buddhist gurus, as well as by Christian and Muslim (and probably Jewish, although I cannot think of a particular one at the moment) saints and wise men that the unaware human IS more or less an automaton - if, that is, he gives in to his immediate desires.  The East calls that action by Karma - the West by sin or Satan, but both agree that we retain the FREEDOM to will ourselves out of this condition; that is, we can obtain free will by first using it to counter temporal impulses.  Unlike psychologists, the religious have no problem with identifying that willful agency - it is the Brahmin in the Atman, or the God-given and God permeated soul.  Which sounds a lot, so far, like Fred Myers unity (or primary) subliminal self.  FK                    
  

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

I have just put up the first 50 pages of my book, Hurricane River, under 'Books by Frederick Keogh.'  I hope to have this book published sometime in 2014.  The picture on top of it will be familiar - I switched it to this book section because it is an actual picture of Hurricane River as it empties into Lake Superior.

Back to the discussion on exposing all within ourselves to the outside:
It is a far more momentous thing to contemplate than I had first mentioned, naming only the social problems that might ensue for one so disposed.  It is, on greater thought, something akin to Jesus's admonition to "turn the other cheek" and see all as oneself, in that, if everyone would do it, it would make for a very, very different world.  It is the same with exposing all our inner thoughts, fantasies and so on: it would work if everyone did it; if not, it leads those who do to very vulnerable positions.  But how would it change the world?

In Arthur Clarke's book, Childhood's End, he is the first I know to use this metaphor for the human mind: that we are all like islands in the sea - seen and felt as individual specks in an ocean of separateness, but all connected underneath to each other.  In the book, a change takes place where nearly everyone realizes this - and then join together as a new, evolutionary entity that zips off into space, to another higher level or dimension, leaving behind a few desperate, stranded souls (a twist on the Left Behind series, but parallel in some ways).  That is one hell of a change, and not far from what I see would happen if all, everywhere, exposed everything.  As Cal's model states, new levels of the unknown would then be exposed, leading to - what? -Childhood's End?  Perhaps.  However, this won't happen any more readily than everyone behaving as Jesus counsels.  That is because the self, culture, and all our beliefs are based on separateness.  To make it more clear to the American reader, imagine a mullah from Iran giving up his notions of Allah, of Koranic Law, of the status of Iranian culture.  Not about to happen.

And so it runs with all of us.  Living in Venezuela for many years, I realized that the people carried many contradictions within themselves that allowed the culture to continue as it was.  For instance, all agreed that the culture of corruption was responsible for Venezuela's shambles of an economy and political structure.  Yet let a yankee join in, and suddenly it was all the fault of American Imperialism.  The bottom line being, in this and many other things, that they KNEW that they were kidding themselves - but indulged uniformly in doing so to keep the game running.  And  so it is with all of us - with our concepts of individuality, culture, right and wrong and so on.  The game doesn't go on if we are absolutely open and honest to ourselves and to others; and I suspect that if we behaved in such a way, the game would not only stop, but become obsolete as something else, a Childhood's End sort of event, would take place.

We won't do it.  But we can do it individually; that is the idea behind meditation, true introspection, and (at least temporary) ego suspension.  Such has been going on for thousands of years by most in a partial, culturally restricted way, and by a few in a very deep and life-altering way, usually through beliefs and structures arraigned through what we call religion.

The "new consciousness" books that I often bring to this blog are a different approach to the same problem.  Eschewing religious archetypes, they seek to bring enlightenment through rational inquiry first.  This writer is not opposed to that - if it can be efficacious.  Eastern religions, for instance, while relying on myth imagery, DO see sin as a science, not a "guilt."  In a way, they are  pointing to the rationalist position on reaching the super-rational (or perhaps "beyond rational").  More on that later, as the reading continues.  FK          

I had some other ideas I was going to bring up - the science of sin, and the possible evolutionary effects of masturbation fantasies, but first to Cal Roeker's comment on different areas of the self that are known and unknown, and the positive effects of uncovering them - which kind of fits in with my original topics.

In the hey-day of my hippiness some 40 years ago, I had much the same idea - let all be known about yourself to everyone - and indeed I did, and this did, either for that reason or for others, push the frontier of the unknown.  However, when one simply tells others what one's thoughts are, there is inevitably a negative reaction.  It is far from all good.  There are expectations of how you are supposed to think, and if you expose taboo thoughts, it will not go well for you socially.  And here's the truth behind it: not only are our thoughts not always "politically correct" as we say now, but also that "correct" thoughts are always balanced by the shadow opposite somewhere in our mind.  This, simply, is how we perceive - as every esoteric tradition knows, the shadow exists, and the more one turns to the "good", the stronger the shadow gets.  Thus the expected calamity of all on the road to enlightenment: that at one point the shadow will grow so large that it will hurt your social, and even physical, life.  This is the material side of the "dark night of the soul."  The point is, of course, not to give in to the morally heinous.  But what if you're telling the world about your shadow thoughts?  As you try to be saintly, the very opposite will appear within you, more clearly to the clear and honest mind than to the clouded.  So you tell your friend, "you know, I understood the draw of the emotions that the rapist has."  Pass that around a little and see what it does for your reputation.  (it is why aspirants on the path often have special priest or guru confessors - people to whom this stuff CAN be told to, to help to get beyond.  Most do NOT understand this process).

On a much more mundane level, we can take masturbation fantasies as a good example of what NOT to expose to the world. Sex for many is a very strong drive, with many, many ideas and emotions attached to it.  We do not talk about our masturbation fantasies for good reason - they will necessarily not  be confined to the socially acceptable norms, which even our "liberated" society has, in spades.  Again, the concept of shadow opposites works in - they are not you in the actual world, but must be expressed somewhere in the mental (the point that I wished to make at first about sexual fantasies has to do with development of ESP, to be discussed at another time).  Simply put, we are even squeamish mentioning this fact.  Is it best to post your shadow fantasies to the world?    

On the other hand, to have a wise confessor probably is the best thing for mental and spiritual growth.  We can be deterred by our own sense of guilt or outrage at some of our thoughts - a perfectly satanical thing to emphasize, if one believes in Satan - (remember the movie "the Exorcist," where the demon exposed everyone's private thoughts of guilt or fear - as if the demon gave a damn, but it knew where to hurt).  And so the model proposed by Cal may be sound, but only in a limited way.  It does seem to me that our society is trying to get away from the detrimental aspects of guilt associate with sex, and I do believe that ultimately this is an attempt to clear the way for further spiritual growth.  It is, however, failing, and for two reasons: one, the taboo against homosexuality (for instance) has only lifted for homosexuals - but its constant reportage has caused even greater homophobia for those who are not homosexuals, but who still experience the shadow side of their hetero selves.  The younger people today, in my experience, seem more averse to being seen as homosexual than ever; and two, the shadow side has not decreased, but only shifted.  For instance, the increased openness about sex has only shifted the big "no-no" to other areas.  Publicly, "racism" comes to mind; whereas in Victorian days, even the exposure of a female ankle could cause a fit of excitement and outrage, now just about anything concerning race can and often does the same.  We cover up the realities  of what is really happening about certain things just as they did with sexual activity in another era.  Although much of this new Victorianism on race has been pushed forward for political gain, it has become very real in our culture. 

 We cannot avoid the shadow, en mass,  by opening up certain dark corners.  And some of those corners will never be admissible to society. 

Back out of the shadows, FK 

   

More from The Irrudicible Mind (Kelly and Kelly et al.)  Overmind: I have come across this again and again, first through my own experiences, and then through the writings of others, and that is the existence of the Hidden Observer, as Hilgard called it, or the Subliminal Self, from Fred Meyers.  Oddly, the first time I encountered it in myself, I began referring to it as the Overmind without ever having heard of it before.  I have already written about it, as many others have as well; it is based on a notion of the  hierarchy of mind, similar to ideas about the hierarchies of "worlds" or realities that have been described in Islamic, Jewish and Eastern traditions (for instance, "7th heaven").  A tremendous writer on esoterica, who is still alive and whose name I currently cannot remember, I think described it best: as a glass multi-storied building where one can only look down or around, but not up.  In this case, those above can see all  below, but nothing above themselves.  At the top, all can be seen; at the bottom, only that one level.  But it can be thought of in many other ways: as adults compared to children, children not being able to understand the conversation of adults but adults, having already been children, being able to understand theirs; or as circles, as in the Hindu tradition and many Native American traditions, where we look inward from rings further and further out, perceiving all those rings between us and the center.  Or in many, many other ways (for instance, a  musician will hear in music qualities that others can't hear, etc), but all pointing to a hierarchy of knowledge.  What makes the Overmind so odd, however, is that this hierarchy of knowledge is within ourselves; that is, one can "become" the Overmind through various means (or by accident, as far as we know) and suddenly understand what his life is about and where it is going, only to return to the normal self and not understand a thing - that is, the knowledge becomes "ineffable" to the ordinary or "supranormal" (Meyers) self.  Regular meditation will bring this about, and it could be that much of mystical realization is exactly that: a realization of higher knowledge that cannot be quantified, or understood at all, by the ordinary self.  By this definition, the mystical traditions, all of which are bent on reducing the noise from the quotidian self, can be seen in a more functional and less moralistic light (or not - both can be integrated).  I would guess that we have all experienced flashes from our Overmind, whether in "hunches" or feelings, or outright dreams and visions of things distant in time and /or space.  

Many things can be correlated with this idea, and one of the more interesting things highlighted in this book is the existence of hierarchy and odd physical phenomena associated with Multiple Personality Disorder. For one, the personalities are usually arranged in hierarchical order, one personality being aware of another or all the others while the others might only be aware of themselves, mimicking the hierarchical view of knowledge.  This creates a working example in traumatized minds of what happens to normal minds in a larger (cosmic) arena.  More interesting to some would be the different physical manifestations coming from the different personalities.  For instance, personality X might have 20/20 vision and an allergy to strawberries, while personality Y might be extremely myopic and absolutely fine with strawberries.  In both cases, the personalities will have been physically tested for the maladies or lack thereof - the one who is myopic will show cortical imperfections, while the other will not; and the one will get a rash or flush or whatever with strawberries, and the other will not.  Moreover, some sufferers will have been, say, beaten in their childhood, and when regressed to a child personality, will exhibit welts, sometimes bloody, in exactly the right places (recall religious stigmata).  In such cases, the physiological changes will be noted, as well as changes in brain chemistry and activation, but NO ONE has empirically proven how these changes initialy take place, such that they cause direct physical changes.  

The upshot being, the Overmind knows.  What is at question to me is whether or not this Overmind is an "outside osberver" or an active, molding force.  Does the Overmind work in coordination with a higher, directive force, or is it simply a passive observer?  And if the latter, exactly WHAT is running the show, creating, for instance, people struggling with MPD or many other problems?  And, as usual, why?  

My own experience suggests this: that the Overmind is a gently passive voice that does indeed see higher processes at work, but seldom interferes.  It is like a graduate student teaching for a professor, in that it understands the lesson but is not in charge.  And like the grad assistant, it is there, if we can hear it, to offer help in explaining what is happening on an intermediary level - kind of like a priest or, on a higher plain, Jesus or the saints or prophets or bodhisattvas.  And it exists because we exist on many levels in that glass building, this "level"from which I write being called "being human on earth."

But we shall see what the book has to offer further on. The inquiry is open.  FK