Naturally I’ll post updates here as publication approaches (early 2012 a good estimate), but I’ve also kicked off a website for the project with a sign-up for a special mailing list dedicated to the book. The book’s title isn’t confirmed, but the site is named with rough aptness ‘Polar Cosmology‘.

There is the nihilism to be found in too many inheritances, the burden of history, a tangled nightmare from which one tries to awake; and there is the nihilism found in isolation, alienation, lack of reference points, the terror of infinity.

There is the enthusiasm to be found in deep connections, multiple correspondences, a heady excess of relationships; and there is the enthusiasm found in an open road, the blue sky, the shedding of the weight of obligations and contact.

Any philosophy of enthusiasm that sides with either connectivity or freshness condemns itself to obvious shadows.

As I ended up stalling halfway through series 3 of Battlestar Galactica, I skipped over Amy Kind’s discussion of Cylon identity when I heard her spoiler warning—straight to Erik Davis‘ discussion of “the Imaginal”.

This term was coined (or, at least, popularized—if even that is the right word) by the French scholar of Islam, Henry Corbin, in an attempt to distinguish the realm of visionary reality that holds its own between the worlds of pure matter and pure spirit, from the “merely imaginary”.

I’ve become aware of Corbin’s work via James Hillman, but I’ve yet to dive into what I gather are the immense depths of his writings. The Imaginal is a slippery concept, and I suppose getting any kind of grasp on it involves either the arcane, discursive tactics of complex intellectual perspectives, or a form of mirroring it in allusive artistic expressions.

Characteristically, Erik manages to hold his own between these two, conducting an engagingly loquacious trip through the term’s ramifications in philosophy, rooted in psychedelic encounters and his “tactical skepticism”. It’s as thorough and sophisticated a refutation of the fundamentalist materialism of Dawkins et al. as I’ve heard of late, all the more potent for its pointed yet light embrace of doubt and disbelief. An excellent primer in the Mundus Imaginalis that can be imbibed on the way to work. Do check it out.

Another recently posted Davis fix worth checking out is his talk from last year’s Burning Man festival on ‘The Imagination and the Environment’. Vital issues, discussed by Erik & audience with aplomb.

A lot of perceptions have crystallized, or come into sharper focus, through all this, but writing publicly about them hasn’t happened so far. I’m very busy in the months to come, but hopefully they will seep into future works.

Meanwhile, I find myself immersed in Nietzsche in Turin, Lesley Chamberlain’s fascinating account of the great philosopher’s final year of sanity in 1888. This was a hugely fruitful year, producing Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist and Ecce Homo. But it culminated in his collapse into helpless insanity just after the New Year.

It’s clear from Chamberlain’s book – if you didn’t know already – that Nietzsche’s life was a particular failure in many respects. In 1888 he was relatively impoverished, jobless, single, persistently ill, his work only just beginning to make any slight impact on the world. His most intense friendships had foundered, and his one real love, with Lou Salomé, was unrequited and years behind him.

His character and philosophy have their notorious rough edges, but what Chamberlain manages to delineate so well is how poignant and significant Nietzsche’s approach to his hardships is. His “self-overcoming”, which his rough edges have managed to pass down to history as a grim ideal for lonely right-wingers, was his way of accepting life, of rising above the world’s trials and pains by a kind of bold artistry of the soul.

Perpetual re-creation and a refusal to rest in the safe harbours of fixed concepts and other “idols” implies much rigour and summoning of impossible strength, to be sure. But equally it involves a tremendous sensitivity, a delicate poise of perception amidst boldness that manages to pick out textures and patterns and, neither clinging nor rejecting, allows them to enrich one’s love of life.

Quoting from The Science of Joy, Chamberlain exposes this unsung side of Nietzsche, showing vividly how his capacity for compassion and sense of beauty is belied by his morbid popular image. It sums up an important lesson of my past year better than anything I could write.

One must learn to love – this is what happens to us in music. First one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life. Then it requires some exertion and goodwill to tolerate it despite its strangeness, to be patient with its experience and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity. Finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense we should miss it if it were not there; and now continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.

But that is what happens to us not only in music. That is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our goodwill, our patience, fairmindedness and gentleness with what is strange; gradually it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way: for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned.

You will see I want to be just to the Germans: I would not like to be untrue to myself in this—so I must also tell them what I object to. Coming to power is a costly business: power makes stupid. [...] Deutschland, Deutschland über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1888)

I saw Richard Linklater’s excellent, provocative Waking Life last night. The film gets points straight away for giving practical, accurate, still relatively little-known tips on lucid dreaming (John Christensen is hilarious in this little scene). And of course, I’m fascinated by any film that furthers and expands our culture’s capacity to represent and communicate the dynamics and textures of dreaming itself. Bob Sabiston‘s wonderful animation techniques should serve Linklater’s upcoming Philip K. Dick adaptation, A Scanner Darkly, very well.

Art, classically, is meant to transcend its time. But, when I get specifically interested in how film manages to capture the slippery nuances and atmosphere of dreaming (which is often), there’s a certain technological aspect that’s hard to avoid. Films such as Waking Life and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind excite me because technical developments seem to be increasingly successfully married to artistic flair in the effort to depict various dream states and quirks. There is also, I think, a two-way traffic between dreams and technology. Technology exteriorises mental constructs, which in turn create new breeds of metaphor that are ably digested by our dream-generating processes. An incredibly frequent "device" in my dreams is of flipping back and forth between watching a film of something and actually being there. I wonder how this dynamic was experienced by pre-film dreamers? My guess is there was probably some sort of correlate, but that the quality of this dynamic has been evolved in the process of developing film technology.

I’m not entirely sure whether it’s just "special effects" that are starting to enable the depiction of certain dream processes; I suspect it’s a combination of this, and an increasing interest in dreams, a will to share this odd other half of our lives. It’s always a wonderful feeling to experience art that gives you a sense of connection by expressing things you’ve thought or felt that don’t seem to have been expressed elsewhere. I find this particularly potent when characteristics from dreams are represented accurately. It’s very visceral, surprising and affirmative. The bit in The Holy Mountain, where the protagonist jumps on the fish hook and is hauled to the top of the tower, where Jodorowsky’s alchemist plays his chakras like psychosomatic percussion—the whole dynamic of the interaction between these two characters as they meet flummoxed me with its resonance with some scenes from my dreams. Jodorowsky’s training in mime, of course, and his potent lack of concern with appearing silly, evoked dreamtime logic better than many misapplied uses of special effects. There’s the character in Eternal Sunshine at the book shop desk who, aside from blurring a little, just won’t turn round. That’s familiar. And there’s the brilliant scene where Joel takes the piss out of Clementine’s idea for "waking up" for being too simplistic, only to find that it works—who hasn’t explored lucid dreams and had that shock of the power of simple, direct actions?

The bit in Waking Life that made me feel like someone else has been there was the pinball-playing guy’s description of meeting a psychic in a dream, and being really cynical about them. Then he suddenly found himself rising up in the air, and was like, "Whoah! I believe you!"

With philosophical ideas, especially trippy ones about ontology, seeping more and more into the mainstream, boundaries are dissolving, and people are insecure. Some people seem to dive in, wide-eyed, and the net is full of their speculations on The Matrix. Equally, many react against these cultural artefacts of growing philosophical awareness, dismissing them and their believers, usually with the phrase "half-baked" somewhere in the mix. Both seem to think that films are supposed to present some kind of coherent philosophical position; they only disagree on whether something has succeeded or failed. I think films, like dreams, are more about possibilities than truth, and wrote a post on IMDb in a probably vain attempt to counter the mostly half-baked criticisms of half-bakedness.

The key to their thinking is metaphor. Their technical definition is: projecting or mapping qualities from a source domain onto a target domain. I would say: understanding one thing in terms of another. Their contention is that metaphor isn’t just some rarified literary technique, some flourish that only happens when we wax poetic, but that it is actually part of the bedrock of the way we conceptualise the world—that is, part of the foundations of thought. Metaphors are not just the domain of language; they work at the deeper but connected realm of conceptualisation, too. Lakoff & Johnson never seem to refute the existence of purely literal, non-metaphorical conceptions; they merely point out that such conceptions, when truly stripped of all metaphor, are so skeletal as to be virtually unusable. "Neural beings" such as us prefer "something to hold on to". Metaphor is the flesh of conscious thought, without which it would flail around like some ineffectual ascetic.

The main challenge to Western philosophy is that the "source domain" for what they call "Primary Metaphors"—the real meat as opposed to the non-essential delicacies we rustle up for florid writings like this—is the material realm. Specifically our bodily interactions with the world. Jim was pretty non-plussed and unimpressed when I ran some of their examples by him, such as the idea of emotional "closeness" (the "target domain") being metaphorically derived from its association in childhood with physical closeness (the source). Jim’s argument—and that of the many critics of the Lakoff/Johnson school of cognitive science and linguistics—is that these two senses of "close" are just homonyms (words with the same spelling or sound but with unrelated meanings). It’s an interesting debate that’s not going to be resolved here. Suffice it to say that the scientific evidence, such as it is, seems compelling. And if Primary Metaphors do form the foundations for the rational mind, the traditional Western philosophical notion of a disembodied basis for mind, untainted by the sensual world’s dynamics, has to be discarded. (If that is, you haven’t already joined the party with Blake, Nietzsche, Freud, Watts, and all the feminists, ecologists and neo-pagans who’ve pulled themselves together and embraced matter. An accurate criticism of Lakoff is that he hasn’t fairly acknowledged the shoulders he’s standing on.)

My thoughts on this are constantly, as ever, spinning off on tangents. I’m sure most people reading this are familiar with the way the mind itself has been understood metaphorically via contemporary technologies. The ambience of the Industrial Revolution gave Freud and his mates all their ideas of forces and pressures—consciousness as a mechanical engine. (Not to mention film and lighting tech’s contribution to the idea of "projection".) And the Information Age has given us the computer as a model of mind—it’s all hardware (or wetware) and software, all circuits and networks.

It’s always tempting, when you catch sight of such larger perspectives, to be dismissive. "It’s just a phase" is something we hate hearing applied to ourselves as teenagers, but love dishing out intellectually when we feel we’ve gained some higher, "superior" vantage point. As I’ve argued elsewhere, that word "just" is a little bastard. It undervalues things in a deceptively casual way. What if the phase is important? What if the process is the product? "Just a phase" stands in this light as an everyday inheritance of our Christian death-denying fixation on the importance of unchanging constants, something any good Taoist would point at and laugh.

The thing I like most about Lakoff & Johnson’s thinking so far is that they’re wholly anti-reductionist, and see metaphor—however temporary and limited the models we build with them are at any given time—as crucial to scientific advances:

Cognitive neuroscientists engaged in neural computation have a theoretical commitment to the reality of neural gates, synaptic weights, thresholds, and mathematical operations "performed by neurons" [...]. Of course, the numbers used in such calculations are not literally there in the cell bodies. The mathematics used in the computations is part of a critically important scientific metaphor for understanding how neurons function: the Neural Computation metaphor. [...] It is extremely common for computational neurobiologists to form what linguists call a "conceptual blend" of the source and target domains of the metaphor [...]. In such a blended discourse, biological structures are conceptualized as if they "changed (the numbers indicating) synaptic weights," "sent inhibition," "formed gates," and so on. Conceptual blends of this sort are the norm in scientific discourse.

And discussing the use of spatial metaphors for time in Einstein’s theory of general relativity, they’re careful to stress that we shouldn’t let our inherited feel for metaphors as literary "window dressing" lead to the idea that they’re putting the theory down:

One can see general relativity as metaphorical. This does not make general relativity either false or fanciful or subjective, since its metaphors can still be apt. That is, they can entail non-metaphorical predictions that can be verified or falsified. In general, to say that science is metaphorical is not to belittle it. [...] Indeed, metaphor is what allows mathematical models to be linked to phenomena in the world and to be regarded as scientific theories.

To get back to that whole thing of comprehending the mind in terms of technology, then, I found it amazing to happen across a link in a friend’s blog about someone I had, equally amazingly, never heard of: Paul Stamets (do check out all the links on this profile page). A visionary mycologist, this guy makes Terence McKenna’s allegiance to the mushroom look like a half-hearted fling. It seems his research is being taken seriously as well, as he uncovers the potential in mycelial mats (the dense networks of underground fibres that are to mushrooms as trees are to fruit) to process all kinds of hydrocarbon waste and pollutants, and regenerate damaged ecosystems ("mycoremediation").

Stamets’ Big Idea (at least, the main one I’ve found in articles and interviews so far) is that the structure and "behaviour" of mycelial networks is reflected in human neurophysiology, as well as our rapidly flowering technological network, the internet. I wonder, then, whether we would have come to such an understanding of the nature of mycelia if we hadn’t progressed thus far in neuroscience—itself inspired by our after-the-fact comprehension of the technologies we’re extruding. It all resounds with the tone of that old chestnut about us being the universe’s attempt to reflect on itself and know itself. Maybe (deep toke, long hold, slow release) Adam was the first metaphor… God’s little whizz-bang gadget that helped him on his oh-so-important journey of self-discovery:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.

Genesis 1:26

Understanding one thing in terms of another, remember?

Of course, shamans were comprehending consciousness in terms of nature, as a part of nature, long before they had enough tech to use for really sophisticated metaphors. But it’s interesting to note the conclusions that anthropologist Graham Townsley (cited in Jeremy Narby’s The Cosmic Serpent) came to studying the songs of Yaminahua ayahuasqueros in the Peruvian Amazon, which they learn from spirits in their hallucinations.

Townsley writes: "Almost nothing in these songs is referred to by its normal name. The abstrusest metaphoric circumlocutions are used instead. For example, night becomes ‘swift tapirs,’ the forest becomes ‘cultivated peanuts’ [...]" In each case, writes Townsley, the metaphorical logic can be explained by an obscure, but real, connection [...] Why do Yaminahua shamans talk in [what Townsley translates as] twisted language? According to one of them: "With my koshuiti [songs] I want to see—singing, I carefully examine things—twisted language brings me close but not too close—with normal words I would crash into things—with twisted ones I circle around them—I can see them clearly."

I should note that if anyone’s interested in delving into Lakoff’s ideas, Bob recently recommended his more linguistic work as a good introduction, and Mark Turner’s The Literary Mind: The origins of thought and language as "by far the most digestible exegesis of cognitive linguistics".

a review by Gyrus

• Event date: 24th-26th June 2004
• Venue: The Forum, Bath

It emerged on the last day of this eclectic 3-day conference that its genesis lay in Christian Rätsch’s observation at Psychoactivity several years ago that the UK seemed to lack the kind of coherence in its psychedelic scene that resulted in conferences. A brave attempt to address this curious deficiency, and simultaneously to broaden the agenda, to embrace other perspectives, avoid any psychedelic ghetto – to learn from diversity – Exploring Consciousness could have resulted in much more conflict and confusion than was evident. What resulted was surprisingly fruitful and wonderfully stimulating: a heady, convivial mixture of days spent mainlining information in half-hour bursts, and evenings spent allowing this new data to percolate and recombine amidst socialising, beer, boating and dancing. Speakers may have disagreed violently about whether gods and spirits reside in our brains or in some hyperdimensional otherworld; but wherever they were, they were fully behind this event.

The first morning wasn’t too auspicious, finding William Bloom and Susan Blackmore arguing the toss over various dualistic cat-fights about mind, body, reality and causality. Talking later to fellow occultural dilettante Mark Pilkington about Nicholas Mann (a speaker on the third day who pitched into the same muddled scrap), he pegged this arena of philosophy as the domain of teenage acid-heads. There’s truth in that, and perhaps less time and paper would be wasted in academic philosophy if the more professors had once been teenage acid-heads—you know, been through the stage where it seems crucial to really know whether the chicken or the egg came first, and emerged into the maturity of seeing the conundrum as a playful cycle, or a mystery to be respectfully left alone. That’s not to say I think we should all ape some earthy mystic stereotype and dismiss all such debate as so much verbiage; we may apply Hakim Bey’s position on the apparently anchorless nature of language to these specific topics, and allow a sense of overflowing play into proceedings, letting these essentially groundless but fascinating old philosophical chestnuts loose in the world without the kind of gravity that traps us in their infuriating orbits. Each of these speakers had something to say, but fundamentalisms such as Blackmore’s strident Darwinism (rivalled in the conference only by Christian Rätsch’s claim that LSD is "the Holy Grail of western civilisation") often crush valuable ideas in the dualistic clashes they engender.

My own reaction was that these people haven’t read enough Alan Watts. When Susan Blackmore related a reductionist view of the mind to the Buddhist doctrine of no-self, she was incredily engaging as a speaker; but at the conceptual level she was, in a way, treading very old ground, revisiting (presumably unwittingly) Watts’ lecture ‘The Individual As Man/World‘ from 40 years ago – with far less elegant conclusions. Max Velmans fared a little better, with his "reflexive monism" critique of the "Cartesian theatre" model of consciousness, but there was the sense that perhaps his linguistic toolbox, from the professional disciplines of psychology and philosophy, wasn’t equipped to vividly express the subtleties of his approach—certainly not within his allotted half-hour.

On this first day I also caught Sheri Ritchlin, who fell foul of the half-hour limit in a different sense, and didn’t really get to talk much about her ideas regarding 2012. She was the first, but not the last person I heard mentioning the 2012 date—this confluence of McKenna-motivated trippers and broad-minded astrologers was bound to bring this "end-date" to the fore, especially given the very recent Venus Transit, and its partner in this rare temporal region, the Venus Transit in June 2012. Even more interesting was the fact that Ritchlin’s theories pointed towards 2012 with both Mesoamerican and Chinese evidence, apparently independent of Terence McKenna (whose mushroom-fuelled imagination fashioned a signpost to 2012 from the I Ching before he encountered the Mayan calendar). I’ll certainly be tracking down Ritchlin’s book on her I Ching studies, One-Ing, and her Venus Transits study, Fields of Light: The Heart of Quetzalcoatl Becomes One with the Heart of Heaven (she advised people to email her if interested in this study).

Next I intended to go to a talk about MDMA research, but ended up in the wrong seminar room listening to astrologer Bernadette Brady expounding Complexity Theory. Deciding to go with the flow, I was very pleasantly surprised. I’ve never had much time for astrology—more out of a lack of personal resonance with it than any reasoned dismissal. But Brady’s entertaining and stimulating talk, while obviously not able to fully unravel her theories, certainly went some way to framing it with concepts that make it more attractive to my mind. The gist of her position seemed to be that anti-entropic phenomena occur in the slim "phase transitions" between systemic stability and systemic chaos, and from these evolve patterns, cycles and rhythms, in both physical and psychic systems, that mediate between "structure" and "surprise" in the life of these systems. Hence emerges an information model of myths and archetypes, and possibly a more sophisticated framework for astrology’s pluralism. It seems that that other woolly pseudo-science with a bad rep—economics—is getting wiser through Complexity Theory, with a major difference: economics has money. If astrology piggy-backs on this research, with eloquent proponents like Brady, I might be spreading zodiacal memes before long.

Rick Doblin, founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, gave a succinct overview of his work with MAPS and their vision for the future. It’s easy to forget that something similar to Doblin’s model of worldwide clinics distributing licenses to use psychedelics was originally propounded by the chemical trickster himself, Tim Leary. Of course, his excited, expanded consciousness got bored with this idea and he opted for mass proselytizing. Doblin—with sound reasons—advocates a return to a steady chipping-away at monolithic opposition to psychedelics, and "change from within the system". He naturally got heckled by the more extremely libertarian psychonauts, but once he reassured them he was advocating his current model as a cultural stop-gap, not as some "ideal" situation of state-sanctioned altered states, the audience united in applauding his obviously groundbreaking efforts to integrate these substances into our society.

Serena Roney-Dougal spoke lucidly enough on her "yogic parapsychological perspective on consciousness", but not with enough novelty of approach to leave much of an impression in my mind. The final speaker, author, lecturer and architect Charles Jencks, was another kettle of fish altogether. His blazing, effortless intellect was (when I wasn’t having trouble keeping up with it) a joy to behold, as he unravelled the ideas embedded in the project he details in his book, The Garden of Cosmic Speculation. From the slides he shared with us, this conceptual landscape (located in Dumfries, Scotland) looked stunning, a magnificent balance between earthy expression and abstracted refinements. Conceived as "a landscape that celebrates the new sciences of complexity and chaos theory", its sculptured installations and moulded topography form a series of meditations on our conceptions of the origins and destiny of the cosmos. My notebook from that day bears no trace from his talk; I was totally occupied with following his ideas. I’m just left with a clear mental Post-It note: "Look further into this guy’s work".

That evening some of us gathered for a leisurely boat trip on the River Avon, a great chance to break any remaining first-day social ice, and to eat, drink, and merrily dodge low bridges. I ended up chatting to one of the speakers whose talk I missed, Reverend Kevin Tingay, whose open-minded faith was as refreshing as the night air. Considering that the wonderful Art Deco venue for the conference, The Forum, is owned by the Bath Christian Trust, and that many speakers dealt unashamedly with the occult, the conference added greatly to my sense of health in west country Christianity, a sense initiated a while ago by the Bishop of Bath and Wells’ traditional, and usually well-received sermon at Glastonbury Festival.

The next morning, Ann Shulgin regaled us with a frank discussion of her highly bizarre, non-drug altered states—or, more precisely, state—that recurred throughout her early life, until the age of 25. The singular visionary experience of embracing infinite space, which she came to call "The Spiral", obviously affected her profoundly, and bore witness to the strangeness of human consciousness as well as any of the trip stories that emerged through the conference. The subsequent presentation, Philippa Berry’s exploration of recent continental philosophy and its conception of "the event" (Heidegger’s Ereignis) couldn’t have formed a sharper contrast to Shulgin’s personal anecdotes. Looking at mass (rather than personal) consciousness, and approaching it academically (rather than informally), I have to admit that I was left at the end with not much more than "9/11 was a shocking event". Another half-hour victim, Berry’s obvious intelligence couldn’t give any real background to those like me who have yet to wrestle with any philosophers (in the strict sense of the word) past Wittgenstein, and subtleties that other people explained to me later were lost.

Next up was Julian Vayne on "The Magickal Art of Drugs". I’ve always harboured regret for encountering psychedelics in a profane context, one with some concessions to seeing past the "just for kicks" paradigm, but essentially providing no real framework for processing the psychic materials they fish out of the mind’s depths. Vayne was luckier, experiencing his first acid trip—one of scarily/hilariously misjudged dosage—after 4 years of occult practice and meditation, and was able to navigate the ensuing chaos using the Qabalistic Tree of Life. This synergy of energy and form could be sensed underpinning his talking style, which is both enthused and clear. He gave a good potted history of magickal models for the uninitiated—from Levi’s Will to the Golden Dawn’s Imagination, to the Belief and Trance that comprise the toolbox of Chaos. He made a compelling case for occult techniques and chemical aids being fruitful partners, pointing out, for instance, that the discerning mind fostered by occult training is of great use in dealing with the tricksterish "plant teachers" that one may meet in mushroom or ayahuasca visions.

Chas Clifton‘s subsequent rummage through the minefield of European witchcraft scholarship in search of the fabled "flying ointments" gave us a good critical baseline: you will find what you want in this arena. Obviously Clifton’s own conclusions—that these ointments had other more mundane medicinal uses, and that their use as psychoactives was probably more analagous to contemporary recreational codeine abuse than any form of organised religious sacrament—need to be subject to his own caveat, but he came across as an engaged, honest inquirer, one who had been through a period of "believing" in the reality of the Old Religion, but had emerged with a more reserved, critical appraisal.

As I learned through accidentally catching Bernadette Brady, it’s often wise to go for talks you might not be immediately interested in. It’s learning, remember? But I sorely regret missing both David Luke and Andy Letcher on various psychedelic topics in favour of Nicholas Mann. At the end of this day, down the pub, a Tasmanian guy piped up with an idea I’ve cherished for a while now: getting rid of the word "just", when used in the sense of "Consciousness is just a product of the brain". At this level, nothing is just anything. I chipped in with my observation that this kind of linguistic avoidance of complexity is usually only encountered in materialist reductionism. Spiritual reductionism is equally philosophically repugnant to me, but there seems to be a healthier attitude involved. People who reduce the world to matter very often belittle matter—and thus reveal their contempt for the world—with "just". Those for whom the non-material is the fundamental ground of being usually, at least, have some sense of awe and respect towards the world they (mistakenly, I think) apprehend. Nicholas Mann falls clearly into the latter group; but as his focus was directly on his spiritual ontological foundations, his reverence for spirit came across to me as an annoying exaggeration of his fallacy. The dynamic of his argument would be familiar to anyone who’s taken the several milliseconds necessary to see through the "two-party" political system. He rightly and ably demolished the opposition’s stance, ridiculing it as "Frankensteinian": put all the bits of matter together, jam loads of energy through it, and hey presto! Consciousness! Demonstrating the absurdity of this extreme segues swiftly (and deceptively) into advocating its rival, expressed with deliberate, awed tones that connote authority, appealing to people’s dualistic pleasure in finding the exact opposite of an established position to be true. "Don’t you see?! Not the chicken, the egg!" (For me, George Clinton settled the debate a while ago: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Depends on who’s gettin’ laid.")

The bona fide psychedelic luminary Alexander Shulgin—just closing in on his eightieth year—injected some much-needed verve and colour into the afternoon, and although he struggled throughout with his dentures, he was entertaining enough for everyone to give him plenty of leeway as he intermittently cursed and fumed. A true explorer, he raised questions rather than offered answers. He related a fascinating incident where a schizophrenic identified his own brain’s PET scan from the patterns formed by the trace substance (he knew the shape from his hallucinations). And naturally tales of his famed self-experimentation emerged, detailing bizarre experiments in using psychedelic consciousness to manipulate matter and time. Then Amanda Fielding, famed for her self-trepanation, presented her overview of human evolution. She took a prudently diverse approach to the origins of consciousness, citing the "Aquatic Ape theory" (the idea that human ancestors once adopted a semi-aquatic lifestyle, accounting for attributes such as our lack of hair and upright posture), dietary factors involving fish oils that are especially nutritious to neural tissues, and psychedelic plants, as all contributing to our current capacities for awareness. Her grand arc across the development of consciousness led to her introducing The Beckley Foundation, a charity set up to promote research into the neurophysiology of consciousness. This, along with Rick Doblin’s mention of American pot-head billionaires putting good amounts of financial backing towards psychedelic research, and the small but significant "corporate training" contingent at the conference, gave the encouraging impression of vital issues around consciousness getting at least some of the attention they deserve from the sectors of society with tangible leveraging power. The anarchist in us will leap around wildly with impassioned words of caution at this prospect, but the picture painted here was cause for some optimism.

TechGnosis author Erik Davis rounded off the second day with a compelling update on his ongoing investigations into the convergence between consciousness and technology. Psychedelics are frequently envisioned as technology, as tools, but Davis advocated a slight but significant shift in viewpoint, to see them as media—information tools. He related chats with experienced 20 year-old psychonauts from the west coast rave scene, who, he was fascinated to discover, talked of their experiences with new designer compounds with unselfconscious audio-visual tech metaphors. They seemed fascinated by the "gimmicky" surface sheen of the visionary realm, and related it to their experiences of manipulating sound and light with technology. Many people would turn off at this point, dismayed at the banalisation of gnosis. But Davis held true to his generous vision of the ambiguity of both spirit and technology—their Trickster nature—and, looking back to Baroque theatre, with its lavish use of "special effects" to convey the supernatural, suggested that postmodern culture’s collision of styles and techniques, with the gnostic rush of Hollywood f/x, multimedia psychedelic events and vital borderlands between the sacred and profane, maybe be seen as a development of "neo-Baroque". Further, he reminded us that the earliest forms of art, palaeolithic cave art, contain various geometric motifs (zig-zags, dots and grids) that many believe signify the pre-visionary motifs of shamanic trance. The implication is that as a culture we may well be a little too transfixed by the preliminaries of gnosis—the "special effects"—but this at least indicates our collective orientation, teetering on the tricksy brink of genuine visionary breakthrough.

It’s fitting that Davis conducted the last interview with Terence McKenna before his untimely death. There’s no real successor to McKenna, with his unique combination of swift humour, grandiose/absurd vision and linguistic alchemy. But Davis certainly shares with McKenna a rare facility that combines the complexity and playful paradox of psychedelic perception with the accessible vividness of metaphor that arises from a constantly active, imaginal intellect. Volleying perspectives back and forth over beer with Erik was one of the more memorable and pleasurable aspects of this conference for me.

A well-earned lie-in meant I missed the first couple of speakers on the Saturday morning, though I met Graham Harvey at lunch, and was pleased to hear he had been flying the Wattsian flag of open-ended dialectics, as opposed to the pantomimic back-and-forth of dualism so much in evidence. The first talk I caught was by former Director of Strategic Innovation at Saatchi and Saatchi, Stephen Fitzpatrick, on ‘Social Dreaming: A Practise in Search of a Theory’. Fitzpatrick peppered his rapid-fire talk with quotes from key surrealists, to provide some points of reference, but, as the title asserts, the foundation for this new phenomenon is the practice. A group of people gather and, supervised by a facilitator, share their dreams. There is no therapeutic intent, so people’s past and personal (waking) lives are not directly related to. Rather, through free association, the facilitator encourages participants to weave connections between each other’s dreams. A working hypothesis is that this process provides access to "the ‘substratum’ of feelings, thoughts and emotions that are integral to all social relations and social groupings which are not readily available for considered exploration and discussion in social groups, as they are unattended and not acknowledged." In any case, Fitzpatrick testified that astonishing things seem to occur as this process deepens, with people discovering potent insights into their lives in other people’s dreams, thus exposing the (as yet unexplained) social nature of deep psychic processes. Repeated sessions tend to generate bizarre synchronicities, and leave some ill-prepared participants on the verge of breakdown (naturally this is one of the aspects that warrant a trained facilitator). I have to say that it was this talk that introduced the most fascinating new concepts to me. Just before the conference I started personal dreamwork, using techniques of analysis that treat the dream as a self-consistent whole, avoiding (initially, at least) any reference to my waking life, to interpretive theories, mythologies, or other symbol systems. This process in itself reveals the astonishing internal logic of dreams, forming a basis for associations with other dreams, and eventually "real" life that is much more faithful to the dream itself. Social Dreaming seems to be the natural and obvious (though initially perplexing) extension of this methodology into the social sphere, showing the way for potentially incredible new ways of integrating the non-rational into our collective being.

The idea of dreams as hermetic, revelatory creative expressions from the unconscious is powerful. "My God! It’s a work of art!" I thought to myself as I broke a dream of mine down as a literary critic might tease apart the deep structures of a poem. Psychologist Benny Shanon, author of The Antipodes of the Mind, a major recent study of ayahuasca experience, propounded a similar thesis regarding the ontological status of the visions induced by this jungle brew. He began with one of the burning questions that any inquiring person will bring up on surveying even a moderate number of records of ayahuasca visions: "Why are the motifs so idiosyncratic, and at the same time common to people from diverse backgrounds and cultures?" Jaguars, coloured snakes and fabulous jewelled cities are, he rightly argued, not the type of obviously universal experience that might take up residence in the Jungian "collective unconscious". So what’s the deal? Well, I can only assume Shanon addresses this issue in his book, because he managed to leave that key question wholly unresolved in his talk. His argument about the visions being imaginal artworks was interesting, but it begs that very question about thematic consistency. It should be noted, though, that he was very careful not to fall prey to the reductionist attitude. He refused the indigenous position of postulating an independent "spirit world", not out of any lack of respect for these cultures, but out of fidelity to his own, which I can respect. Further, he stressed that he had no intention to reduce the mystery—he was merely saying he thought this great mystery was in the human mind. But regarding the question he set himself at the beginning—no cigar.

Robin Matthews‘s talk on mysticism, game theory and consciousness was sparsely populated due to the (I imagine) fascinating presentation being given by Jon Atkinson on Salvia Divinorum and Piers Gibbon‘s (I imagine) fun seminar on the use of sound and song being given at the same time (we heard the raucous noises emanating from the latter!). Attention paid to Matthews was well rewarded, though, as he vocally meditated on mysticism as a "search for a meaning that exists beyond the language we use to find it", and knowledge of death as the basis for authentic life. Claudia Müller-Ebeling was a dynamic speaker, but in her presentation on aphrodisiacs she didn’t manage to fit in much that went beyond her slides of wonderful obscenely-shaped plants that serve, in the morphocentric worlds of the indigenous cultures that use them, as multi-faceted sexual stimulants. But I did love her idea of ingesting psychoactive substances as some form of somatic yoga, in that one’s anticipation of their effects forces one into a very direct focus on the here-and-now of your body’s internal sensations. Claudia’s partner Christian Rätsch then took us on a spirited trip through his ethnopharmacological experiences (he said that Shulgin defined ethnopharmacology as "taking strange drugs in strange places"). We were treated to a re-enactment of his transformation into a panther on his first acid trip, and a passionate affirmation of the value of being "a stranger in a strange land", as he evoked the transformative, often painful isolation induced by his fieldwork.

Nick Campion, a tutor from the Sophia Centre that co-organised the event, obviously felt a need to frame the appearance of the eminent astrologer Liz Greene in his introduction to this final speaker. He got some mild heckling for doing more than just saying, "Here’s Liz Greene" (perhaps from some Greene devotees eager for their guru), but his emphasis on the sky—specifically its axial Pole Star in the Northern Hemisphere—as the foundation of the western esoteric tradition, resonated strongly for me (the Pole Star is the one stellar phenomenon that I’ve ever been obsessed by), and seemed to contribute to an important current in this final day. We’d already heard Benny Shanon’s contested but admirable refusal to adopt Amazonian Indian ontology; and later, Christian Rätsch, for all his exoticism, eloquently espoused the importance of seeking our own spiritual roots, citing Odin’s drinking from the Well of Remembrance as evidence of a European tradition of divine intoxication. This was in response to a Brazilian woman’s concern over the growing popularity of ayahuasca in the West, and its possible impact on South America. It seemed important that while the conference gave due respect to the indigenous cultures whose traditions have opened up so many doors for us, we were reminded of Jung’s assertion that wholeness and healing for Western culture will only come about through recovering and integrating our own spiritual roots. Ayahuasca is the "vine of the dead", the ancestors; if we are to learn anything from it, we must look deeply back into our history.

Liz Greene‘s oddly soporific delivery may not have gone down too well with those of us flagging after this hectic few days of information overload, but it couldn’t disguise the depth of her thinking. Narrating Neptune’s cycles through the past 50 years, she offered some shrewd observations as she associated its passage through the zodiac with various cultural icons that she saw as exemplary of our collective yearning for transcendence: Elvis for Scorpio, the Maharishi for Sagittarius, Thatcher for Capricorn, Princess Di & Blair for Aquarius. Again we saw a hint of 2012: Neptune’s next 14-year residence in a zodiacal sign will commence when it enters Pisces in 2011, apparently signifying the channelling of our thirst for transcendence through the imagination. This kind of generalisation will always stink of sloppy thinking to the literal-minded, but to me Greene exuded more than enough subtlety of thought to scent these insights with a sweeter, more complex aroma.

The final panel discussion was a satisfying conclusion. Much talk of animism led to the plants that had graced the stage throughout proceedings being personally introduced, Psychotria viridis, Ipomoea violacea and Lophophora williamsii being presented as if they were special guests on the panel. Piers Gibbon was encouraged to repeat part of his seminar with the whole audience—the part that involved a round of ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ being sung as a collective western icaro. And a Mexican woman in the audience offered her profound thanks to all involved for the healing experience, the encouragement to speak her mind that the conference had given her.

I was a little disappointed when the post-conference party initially seemed to be quite a mundane acid techno affair, but some great chats with new acquaintances, and the gradual emergence of funk and disco slowly woke my body up, and I was grateful to earth this information overload in drunken dancing. An obscure favourite track from my teenage years (Parliament’s ‘Come In Out Of The Rain’) got me, and everyone else left, dancing at the tail-end of the night, followed by some spontaneous balloon frolics that were a fitting foil for this mostly intellectual feast.

There was a call for the conference to become a regular event at the final panel discussion, which was met with hearty applause. I’ll second that. Roll on ‘Exploring Consciousness 2005′…

by Seamus ben Qin

I. Neuroscience and the Sacred?

It has been a few years now since the first inklings of what were to come to trouble my mind, how science and religion relate to each other, made their initial appearance. Accompanying my first few excursions into chemically induced "religious" states of consciousness were radical reappraisals of my views on religion and spirituality. The reactive position that I had held against religion, seen as both a mode of social control and a product of the imaginations of our pre-scientific ancestors, gave way to thoughtful inquiry and a reinterpretation of the original value of religion. If religion was not the arch foe of science, a leftover from the superstitious past, then perhaps, I reasoned, the core of religion, which I took to be its reports of nonordinary states, would fall under the jurisdiction of psychology and the neurosciences. Science and religion could be reconciled by way of the human brain.

My central idea was that somehow prophets, saints, shaman, mystics, etc. were individuals who had learned to change their brain-states at will, achieving psychedelic-like states without an external catalyst. The possibility that such altered states of consciousness could be a natural potential of every owner of a human nervous system also intrigued me. The host of questions spinning off from these two main principles took me from book to book in search for answers that satisfied both intellect and intuition.

Pioneers in the pursuit of a reconciliation between science and religion are few and far between, as it is easier in some respects to keep ones professional and personal beliefs in separate compartments. Any attempts at synthesis made between the two paradigms are often subject to attack from adherents of both sides, and the transgressor is deemed heretic by both alike. Among those major figures in this tradition, such as Jung and Teilard de Chardin, I recently came across a contemporary thinker of similar calibre. The Body of Myth, J. Nigro Sansonese’s first and only book as far as I know, has been one of those texts that has ‘accidentally’ come my way and proven to both confirm ideas that I had been musing over, and also lay out a veritable feast of related thoughts. In his own words, "a grand synthesis of science, consciousness, and myth—by means of yoga—is the goal of this book."

II. The Body of Myth

The uncanny similarities in the narrative structure of myths from human cultures worldwide led Carl Jung, and later Joseph Campbell to assert the existence of ‘universal archetypes’. Archetypes can be briefly defined as patterns of experiencing-responding to reality common to all human beings, which would result in apparently universal mythic structures. Both Jung and Campbell, however, experienced difficulty in expressing the ontological foundations of archetypes; Jung claimed that archetypes existed in what suspiciously sounded like a Platonic realm of Ideas existing beyond Time and Space, the collective unconscious. Campbell more concretely suggested that they were somehow rooted in human biology. While the posited archetypes had explanatory value, they fell short in providing a rigorous model that didn’t require some leap where ‘a miracle occurs.’ Given the abyss between psychology and biology, these vague notions, although intuitively appealing, failed to bridge the gap and remained speculative and unverifiable. What if myth was essentially a description of human biology? This notion is essentially what Sansonese suggests.

Broadly speaking, the centerpiece of his hypothesis is that myths are esoteric descriptions of the internal life of the body, which archaic humans were more experientially familiar than we are today.1 Such a bold statement elicits many questions that demand to be addressed. What relations could possibly be made between human biology and myth? What evidence suggest that archaic humans were any more privileged than we today are with a greater awareness of their own bodies? Or for that matter, that a knowledge of what is generally unconscious body activity is even possible? To answer these questions, the fundamental framework within which he makes his observations must be explained.

What is the sound of one hand clapping? The answer to this two thousand year old koan, according to Sansonese, is a reference to the resting voltage of the auditory nerve. The auditory nerve, which transmits sounds from the ear to the auditory centers of the brain,2 is always "hearing" even in the absence of external stimuli. Since any stimulation of the auditory nerve is a sound, it will register any stimuli regardless of whether its source is external or internal. The internal stimulations of the auditory nerve are the sounds of the vital activities of the body itself, ordinarily masked by external sounds; this almost imperceptible static is the sound of one hand clapping. Similarly, this "static" is registered in all of the cranial nerves linking the sense organs to their respective processing areas in the brain, so that one could in principle turn the senses in upon themselves, say for the auditory nerve to hear itself, and hence listen to the life of the body proceeding beneath the threshold of consciousness. The term Sansonese uses in referring to these magnified experiences of ones internal biological events is a heightened proprioception, and the prerequisite to have heightened proprioceptions is the ability to pass into sublime trance.3

Before we go any further, let’s examine these two new terms because of their importance and repeated appearance in Sansonese’s book. The formal definition of a proprioception is simply the awareness of one’s body. The body, by way of the proprioceptive system, is made known to the brain so that even if your eyes are closed, you can tell which direction your arms are pointed, whether you are upside-down or just feel the presence of your own body. This body knowledge is subject to radical enhancement. Imagine being simultaneously conscious of your breathing and heartbeat. Not too difficult if you meditate; in fact, you might not have to imagine at all. But add to the list the flow of blood through your circulatory system, the position and activity of the internal organs and glands, or even the firing of neurons within the brain itself. These would be examples of heightened proprioceptions.

In order to experience heightened proprioceptions, a person must be able to hold their attention in place, without allowing distractions to interfere. This requires the ability to concentrate, and when ones concentration has become profound, the state one has entered is sublime trance. Anyone who has practiced meditation knows how difficult this can be. When one first begins, it takes very little time for the mind to wander off, getting caught up in the constant chatter of the mind conversing to itself. "Discursive thought is the single greatest distraction from trance" asserts Sansonese, and it is also the main reason he cites that archaic humans entered trance with greater ease than contemporary humans. Discursive thought is exacerbated in a culture like our own full of "books, magazines and advertisements", not to mention computers, television and newspapers. This is not to assert a value-judgement on such things, but in the relative absence of such inflammatory stimuli for the chatter of thoughts, the inner life of the organism instead of the inner talk becomes more apparent. It is the constant flow of thoughts that masks the far more subtle background noise of the sound of one hand clapping.

How Sansonese views the evolution of human consciousness in light of his proprioception hypothesis also proves to be compelling, but still tantalizingly undeveloped. Just because pre-civilised humans had a greater sensitivity to the internal activities of their bodies does not mean that this ability was painstakingly developed in all individuals. Proto-shamans were specialists in utilizing techniques to train and expand this natural capacity for heightened proprioceptions. These techniques for cultivating heightened proprioception, as well as the mythic worldview in which the techniques were embedded, were for hundreds and possibly thousands of years transmitted by oral tradition. The invention of written language was the instrumental first step leading to the ‘voiceless speech’ of thought, and the gradual occlusion of internal body activity from awareness.

The emergence of early civilizations proved to instigate a novel role in the function of the human brain and nervous system. The pioneering neurologist Anthony Damasio, author of Descarte’s Error, points out that the brain’s original duty prior to the emergence of mind was to keep track of the goings-on in the various subsystems of the organism, and to assist in regulating all the body’s internal functions, along with keeping track of the environment in which the organism was situated. Awareness of these biological activities became more and more unconscious as the importance and complexity of social interactions in early civilizations exacerbated ‘voiceless speech’. Under such conditions, Sansonese asserts that the techniques for inducing sublime trance and heightened proprioceptions became systematized, using written language, under the guise of different esoteric religions. He gives as some examples the pre-Christian mystery cults, the Yoga-Sutras of Patanjali and early Christianity with it’s emphasis on gnosis, "’divine knowledge’ of the subliminal life of the body."

The question of how our capacity to experience heightened proprioceptions came to arise in the process of evolutionary development is explained by Sansonese in one of at least two major possible ways. He suggests that given the thousands of years of low technological levels, and the innate curiosity of homo sapiens, it seems quite natural that humans would be predisposed to explore in detail the experiential inner activity of their bodies. This argument could be interpreted as assuming that heightened proprioceptions are exclusive to humanity, and a product of human self-exploration. One could also argue that heightened proprioceptions are common in nonhuman animals, and this capacity was part of our inheritance as animals ourselves. Along this line of reasoning, it was only with humanity’s acquisition of symbolic language, which allowed development and communication of the techniques for cultivating these states, that humans expanded on this inherent capacity. Ironically enough, this same ability which allowed the creation of myths and oral traditions for transmitting heightened proprioceptions eventually came to dominate and occlude them. While Sansonese doesn’t distinguish between these two possibilities, I am more in favor of the latter position. I believe this is especially so considering that the majority of one’s nervous system is committed to the regulation of internal systems, and as stated above, this was the central nervous systems original function.

What does all this have to do with myth? The role that myths played for our proprioceptively inclined forebears were akin to catechisms, "lessons prefatory to initiation." An adolescent initiate, having grown up hearing the tribal myths, would have their esoteric meaning explained during initiation. Sansonese states that the esoteric meanings that myths alluded to were descriptions of heightened proprioceptions, those most important in the practical teaching of trance craft. Since Sansonese believes the techniques of raja (royal) yoga expounded in Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutras to be representative of the archaic trance craft practiced by humans in prehistory and early civilizations, his interpretation of myths draws largely from the main body of techniques and goals of the yoga of sublime trance. Implicit in his argument is that the similarity of human biology, regardless of culture, would result in a general similarity in the techniques to induce trance.

Humans have a strong tendency to interpret what is unknown in light of what is known. The example most often given in reference to archaic consciousness is that our ancestors projected human forms over impersonal Nature in order to comprehend the capricious and awesome forces around them. We don’t have to go back into prehistory to realize that modern science uses known models to comprehend what is not clearly understood. One conspicuous example is the overworked ‘brain as computer’ metaphor. On the proprioceptive hypothesis, we see the same pattern of human behavior: what is proprioceptively apprehended of internal body structures/processes is projected onto external objects that bear some structural resemblance to what is propriocepted. An apt example of this projection is in the use of animals as theriomorphisms4 of the senses. Assuming archaic humans had recognized the superior sensory acuity possessed by other animals, they would naturally associate them with the various senses. Sansonese claims that many of the associations were based on proprioceptive analogy: since the horns of a ram are fused together at their base in the same way that the optic nerves are fused at the optic chiasmus, rams would be theriomorphisms for vision. Similarly, since the horns of a bull jut out from the sides like the auditory nerves, bulls would be theriomorphisms for hearing, both attributes coinciding with astrological correspondences.

The myths that Sansonese spends the most time analyzing are western in origin; Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian myths primarily for their proprioceptive significance. Because it would be virtually impossible for me to do justice to the entirety of his densely interconnected arguments, I will set to the simpler task of explaining his basic ideas that fall more within the scope of this paper before proceeding to some of the philosophical conclusions that I’ve drawn on this theme. A central idea to his hypothesis is the experientially distinct three worlds of cognition, perception and stereognosis.5 In Greek myth, this primary division is made between the three cronid brothers, Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, who cast lots over which kingdom each would hold rulership. Thus Zeus, who ends up ruling over the heavens, is an anthropomorphism for cognition, while Poseidon and Hades are connected with perception and stereognosis respectively. The entire Greek pantheon, especially the major gods and goddesses, turn out to be anthropomorphisms of propriocepted body states particular to one of the three worlds. So Hephaestus, for example, was an anthropomorphism for diaphragmatic breathing, proper to the first world of stereognosis. That this would be the case is due to a number of factors. Linguistically, Hephaestus is composed entirely of aspirates which describe the sound of breath. In myth, his being repeatedly hurled from Mount Olympus only to return again recapitulates the up-down motion of the chest during respiration, not to mention the artwork of him on Greek pottery commonly depicting him with a set of bellows. While at first sight this might seem contrived, one should remember the tendency of humans during this time period to think in terms of correspondences.

Other myths, such as the story of Jason and the Argonauts, is, in the words of Sansonese, "a myth about internal vision, involving both root gazing and breath control." The Argo is an esoteric description of the human skull and the hero Jason, whose name is also sibilant, describes deep meditative breathing.6 The harrowing passage through the clashing Cyaenean rocks into the Black sea describes the "dizzying, disorienting and often terrifying" ascent into trance by concentrated meditation upon the frontal suture, a fissure running directly down the center of ones forehead. Success in this task leads to proprioceptions of the effects of breath within the skull itself, and particularly of the optic chiasmus, esoterically represented by the Golden Fleece.

While I will curb further explanation on the specifics of his proprioceptive hypothesis of myth I’d like to mention in passing how especially fascinating I found the application of this hypothesis to the Eleusinian mysteries, and the significance of gnosis, "knowledge of the subliminal life of the body" to early and Gnostic Christianity. Besides these two exceptional topics, my main interest in his work revolved less around myth than his occasional but insightful commentaries of direct relevance to the philosophy of mind.

III. Heightened Proprioceptions in Philosophy of Mind

What I have found most gratifying has been questioning the underlying epistemological implications of Sansonese’s hypothesis, in the attempt to resolve what appears at first glance paradoxical: that the brain should be able to know itself. Like the recursive images screen within screen in video feedback, or the experience of standing between two mirrors facing each other and looking at yourself looking at yourself ad infinitum, the notion of ones brain trying to experience itself evokes the alchemical Ouroborous as a fitting metaphor.7 The question of how the brain can know itself forces one to give thought to the observer-observed dichotomy. In experiencing heightened proprioceptions of ones brain, who would be the ‘I’ observing the proprioceptions? This is especially important to explore if one does not wish to invoke a nonphysical spiritual essence who is doing the observing, which I think is unnecessary.

Before tackling such an immense question, it would be instructive to examine the indirectly stated propositions behind Sansonese’s proprioceptive hypothesis. Perhaps the most important is that all conscious experience of the world, our own bodies, and internal states like thoughts & feelings are elaborate constructs of ones brain and nervous system. When one looks at an object, say a tree, a person or a house, what one sees is a sensory representation of that object generated8 by their brain. This is not to deny that trees, persons, and houses exist but that how we experience them depends upon the kind of sensory organs we own and the complexity of our nervous systems. A human and a bee "seeing" the same flower will have two completely different sensory experiences, because bees see in infrared, while we see "visible" light. While there is a biological constraint on our being able to see in infrared because of the design of our eyes, this does not mean by any stretch of the imagination that we actually see everything that is "out there".9 The gist behind this arrangement is that there is a great deal of information "out there" that never makes it above the threshold of consciousness, but is within experiential access.

It should be said that the world "out there" should not be mistaken to be solely the external world, but includes also our physical bodies and the brain activity giving rise to conscious experience. To avoid confusion on this point, let me emphasize that the experience of our own body is representational. For example, one’s body representation (or body schema) can be subject to feelings of disintegration, stretching and warping under the influence of certain drugs (or illnesses like schizophrenia), despite the fact that the actual physical body is undergoing no such change. The experience of our body schemas allows us to infer that there is a physical body "out there" of which the body schema is representative. This sheds light and possible resolution onto the whole debate over the existence of a ‘soul’ in a person’s body. Instead of conceiving of souls as non-material, it’s possible that the direct experience of the normally occluded, internal life of the body in all its awesome complexity and intricacy might have been the origin of the idea of a soul or spirit within.10

Similarly, despite appearances of solidity and stability, our sensory representations of the ‘external world’ can take on a life of their own for the same reason. Along these same lines, one can also regard all of her or his conscious experiences as indirect observations of brain-states. For example, in looking at a tree one is indirectly observing the brain activity of the visual cortex that lies behind the visual experience. Watching thoughts arise and decay while meditating is an indirect observation of the brain-states responsible for the experienced thoughts. It is in this respect that I mean that physical brain-states are also "out there", projected behind our sensory experience. There are interesting implications to this proposition, albeit speculative, that relate to why animism or panpsychism were postulated by our pre-scientific ancestors, not by logical inference11 but because of experiential knowledge.

Simply put, since our brains are alive, and given that our entire sensory experience is the product of brain activity, it is conceivable that what we experience, including inanimate objects, can appear alive. In effect, the brain’s aliveness would be, so to speak, "showing through" one’s sensory representations. It is then possible to understand how yogi adepts can say that the stone they sit upon has intrinsic aliveness or consciousness, because his sensory construct of that rock is itself alive, the product of a living brain. Before dismissing this as utter foolishness, consider the aliveness of the hallucinations reported by the person with schizophrenia. The animist who talks to the forest is, likewise, talking to his own brain, or the brain is talking to itself.

This, however, is not to say that such experiences are all in ones head. One’s brain/body receive a great deal more information than what actually becomes conscious. The shaman’s "spirit familiar" can be understood to be the brain’s way of bringing to consciousness inaccessible information of the world "out there" by way of what appears to be an independent entity, but is conceivably emergent from brain activity. Given the proprioceptive hypothesis, learning to discern brain activity behind our sensory constructs could be interpreted as seeing the "spirit" behind physical appearances, which would coincide with the goals of both the Gnostics and medieval alchemists, the redemption of spirit from the prison of matter.

Another useful example comes from a ‘thought experiment’ drawing from virtual reality. In a similar way that a futuristic VR mainframe would generate not only a virtual space but also a virtual body for the user to fully interact with the environment of cyberspace, one’s brain and nervous system create a sensory construct of the body and the external world surrounding it. The difference between the two lies in the fact that (presumably) while in cyberspace, it would be impossible to directly know the physical computer activity "out there" underlying the VR construct. Following the proprioceptive hypothesis, it is possible12 to access hidden representations of very subtle activity in the physical body and brain that is commonly regarded as outside the range of conscious inspection. What would it mean, in terms of sensory qualities, to have direct knowledge of the firing of neurons in ones brain? Or the motions of the subatomic matter that comprises ones body? Without myself having had (yet) direct experiences of my own neural underpinnings, I have discovered some partially illuminating thoughts regarding this question from an unexpected source.

It is ironic that at the same time I was entertaining these admittedly speculative ideas, I came across Paul Churchland’s brief but tantalizing essay on the prospects of an "expanded introspection".13 Certainly one of the more imaginative proponents of reductionism, Churchland speculates himself that a ‘matured’ neuroscience, one that has unravelled the Gordian Knot of the mind-body dilemma, would allow a suitably trained neuroscientist to be capable of discriminating the objective neurological states behind thoughts, emotions and other mental phenomena. He uses as an analogy the discriminatory talents of an expert wine taster. In the same way a wine connoisseur can accurately guess the age and make of a particular vintage by distinguishing subtle characteristics of taste that would remain undifferentiated to an untrained person, perhaps also future neuroscientists would be able to notice and recognize such objective knowledge as glucose levels in the frontal lobes, concentrations of dopamine, activation levels of specific brain regions, and so forth. This would undoubtedly have a profound effect on language. With such capabilities, humans could by-pass the comparatively unsophisticated verbal communication, and communicate more directly the brain-states that currently have to be turned into clumsy and easily misunderstood utterances.

What an intoxicating thought! What is even more so is that just as one has to develop an awareness of something unknown before it can be influenced, knowledge of one’s brain-states logically precedes being able to manually direct one’s own neurochemistry. Again, it seems the primary concern is who would be the controlling, or observing ‘I’? The Buddhist would say that there is no ‘I’, and I (or perhaps my brain) would be inclined to agree that an answer lies somewhere in this direction. Perhaps heightened proprioceptions of the brain would experientially validate the illusion of subject-object dichotomy. Is it possible that this is what that most overburdened word ‘enlightenment’ actually refers to? I presently have only leads as to the truth value of these statements, but I trust that persistent meditation and active intellectual inquiry will slowly bring more resolution.

IV. A Closing Thought

Assuming that mind has its source in purely physical activities of the brain/body system, then we can conceive of the whole human organism as a network of semi-autonomous, but mutually interdependent "intelligences" that are constantly altering relative to changes in the internal environment of the body. Conceptually, the leap to logical acceptance of the Buddhist’s notion regarding the illusory nature of the self is made easier by this realization: we are networks of bio-intelligences, there is no neuron/neural assembly where our sense of "I" resides, there is no unchanging self, but multiple processes interweaving. Implications: by virtue of being a bionetwork in and of ourself, we should be capable of learning to mutually influence the myriad sub-networks that comprise the entirety of our physical body. With a necessary sensitivity to inherent body wisdom, one could adjust and play with potential hormonal-endocrinal configurations, or direct the micro-activities of the immune system, like having a million nanomachines at your disposal. Pushing the envelope to its limit suggest the possible human who can change sex, body-morph, self-evolve, using hir body as if it were ones own laboratory. Transhumans, New humans.

Footnotes

1. Barring, of course, so-called primitive cultures that are less influenced by modern society. [back to text]
2. In the form of electrical spikes. [back to text]
3. Called ‘samadhi’ in Buddhism. [back to text]
4. def: when animal forms are used to represent traits, ideas, divinity – compare anthropomorphism. [back to text]
5. The medically proper term for visceral proprioceptions. [back to text]
6. Also notably because of his relation to both Sisyphus, another myth describing the up-down motion of respiration, and to his great grandfather Aeolus, god of the wind. [back to text]
7. This would be the paradox of having a knowledge of the brain-states responsible for generating that knowledge of the brain-states that one is experiencing. [back to text]
8. "Generated", "created" as words describing how conscious experience "emerges" from brain activity are misleading because they can be taken for an explanation. Because our language doesn’t currently contain the proper descriptive words, I will be forced to resort to these. [back to text]
9. This is a useful term referring to the world as it exists beyond our sensory experience of it. Using the example of the flower, what we experience is a sensory representation of the flower. We can never experience it "in and of itself", Kant’s ding an sich, which is to say that we can never know the world "out there" except as a representation, but following the proprioceptive hypothesis, we can have far more enhanced experiences of what is "out there". [back to text]
10. "Behold, the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.", Luke 17:21 [back to text]
11. As has been the explanation supplied by classical anthropologists like Taylor. [back to text]
12. And apparently quite difficult. [back to text]
13. ‘Matter and Consciousness’, P. Churchland [back to text]