The Serpent's Wisdom

For a while now i've been toying around from time to time with the idea that mind is a field. Under this view, mind is given the respect it is due as a phenomenon in its own right, but without a metaphysical dualism of the sort with which mind/body theories typically wrestle.

Some implications of this are interesting. Fields have properties like resonance, and theoretically extend over the whole universe. Noön particles would be quantum-interlinked just like other particles. So our individual minds, thoughts, feelings, are not as isolatedly individual as we seem to experience them. While noöns may be concentrated inside living brains, they wouldn't be found only there.

If noöns exist, why haven't we seen them? I think they possess a rather unique place in nature, in that they serve as an explication factor which draws spacetime reality into being from the melange of the holomovement. Trying to observe one directly would be difficult for the same reason it is hard to pinpoint the exact nature of first-person experience. Noöns are, in my hypothesis, what acts on quantum fields to produce what we perceive as the "quantum wave collapse." In other words, what defines "reality" as distinct from the fullness of existence is the influence of a noönic field. So to look at a noön would be analogous to looking at a mirror; you don't see an image, but only a reflection of what is around. Seeing anything at all *is* the process of seeing a noön.

(It sounds like i am proposing a duality here between explicated and otherwise, but i do not imagine a universe where explicit matter is free from influence by that which remains enfolded. If you said this sounds like a hidden-variable-invoking Bohmian interpretation, you'd be right. Heck, noöns themselves are a hidden variable.)

There is a lot that might be explained by the supposition that each mind extends over all of spacetime. It might partly explain, for example, instant attraction or repulsion. Have you ever met someone and felt like you recognized them immediately? Perhaps there is a strong resonance between your noönic fields. If however you meet someone whose noönic field is dissonant with your own, you might be inclined to dislike them, and you'd likely be right: that person would think and act in ways very different from you.

Many different aspects of collective human behavior might be explained this way, from mob consciousness to the intuitive appeal of ideas like Jung's collective unconscious, or Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere as the endpoint of human evolution.

It also allows for the possibility of noönic solitons or persistences. I could write a whole entry on what that means, persistent noönic waves floating around free of brains to shape them, affecting thought, feeling, and perhaps even matter. Some memes might be noönic solitons -- as might memories or experiences some people attribute to "reincarnation." Perhaps instincts and patterns of human behavior i referred to recently as "human nature" are noönic solitons as well.

There are interesting implications regarding will and causation, too. Jeffrey Schwartz proposed a notion he called "mental force" to explain the observable change in brain structure which can result from focused meditation. That the brain is capable of self-reprogramming is fascinating and opens a wide range of potential for human improvement. But this result also gives us hard evidence that consciousness is something real. (Contrast the views of Daniel Dennett and other eliminative-materialists who claim that consciousness and self are pure memetic illusion, on the basis of the observation that there is no place within the brain where consciousness resides.)

I've come to think that being abusive, hateful, and intolerant is evidence of having a weak will in the face of external influence. A person who displays these traits is less of an individuated person; they are blown about and easily carried along by external currents. In my opinion, the work of individuation, of learning to focus one's will by way of discipline (meditation, contemplative prayer, martial arts, esoterica, and other kinds of discipline) is inseparable from the work of cultivating a better human society.

This fits in perfectly with things i have been saying about "the hypostatic reverie," the "conscious censor," and pseudo-religion memetic parasites.

Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects' brains were monitored while they pondered.

The results were announced today.

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts."

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," Westen said. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning.

from Democrats and Republicans Both Adept at Ignoring Facts, Study Finds (thanks to chipuni for the link)

A lot of the occultists I know think of themselves as bold innovators, taking unchanging and ancient esoteric traditions and creating a personal variation on a theme.

The only real problem with this image is that esotericism is nothing but innovation. If you dig into the history of esoterica, you see that there has been constant evolution. Virtually everyone who's written anything in this field has left some personal mark on it.

What causes this impression of "unchanging ancient tradition" is the written word. To see a text and know it was written 1500 years ago gives a sense of long-term unchanging solidness. Esoteric orders, seeking to appear rooted and authoritative, do their part to encourage this impression.

The written record itself, though, belies this idea of unchanging esoteric tradition. The Gnostic library includes almost a dozen variations on the theme of Genesis alone; and as Irenaeus wrote, the Gnostic sects saw and encouraged ongoing innovation (although his way of putting it was that the Gnostics created a new heresy every day). The history of alchemical writing, too, shows this trend as well. Anyone who thinks that kabbalah has come to us from millenia of unchanging tradition should have a peek at Gershom Scholem's Kabbalah, which is dedicated to kabbalah's evolution over the centuries.

Even within a magician's own record there can be considerable evolution. See for example the record of Dee and Kelly, which goes on and on and on, stuff building on top of other stuff. My own record shows the same -- which is one of the reasons I took a long break from esoteric work; I didn't feel as though I was really making any progress, though I now believe that the real power of esoteric innovation is not in the content one receives, but in the effects of the method itself on the unconscious parts of the brain.

Innovation can include the revival of ancient traditions with no clear line of esoteric succession to the present, also called reconstructionism. The written and anthropological record includes many gaps which have to be filled in, and there are many aspects of modern society which cannot be matched one-for-one with assumptions underlying the old traditons, and this is where innovation plays a role.

So esoteric innovators are not doing anything special. In fact I daresay that if you aren't innovating, you aren't doing it right.

So far, I am truly enjoying Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer. It's one of the most thought-provoking books I've read in a long time.

The author begins by examining some of the popular explanations for the existence of religion and explaining why they fall short.

The first 'explanation' he examines is the assertion that religion exists to explain puzzling phenomena. He points out, though, that anthropologists have found that cultures do not express the same degree of urgency for explaining mysteries or calamaties in general, though they will often seek explanations for particular calamities. Also, people understand the difference between religious and "naturalistic" explanations for things; religion provides certain kinds of answers which the human mind is predisposed to find plausible. He writes,

The mind does not work like one general "let's review the facts and get an explanation" device. Rather, it comprises lots of specialized explanatory devices, more properly called inference systems, each of which is adapted to particular kinds of events and automatically suggests explanations for these events. (p. 17, emphasis in original)

Then he takes on the idea that religion exists because humans need a spiritual security blanket. To this, he writes,

Religious concepts, if they are solutions to particular emotional needs, are not doing a very good job. A religious world is often every bit as terrifying as a world without supernatural presence, and many religions create not so much reassurance as a thick pall of gloom. ... Reassuring religion, insofar as it exists, is not found in places where life is significantly dangerous or unpleasant; quite the opposite. ... Note that [the reassuring teachings of New Age] appeared and spread in one of the most secure and affluent societies in history. (p. 20)

He also takes on the idea of religion as a social glue and promoter of morality. He points out that religions with widely-varying beliefs nonetheless have nearly identical moral codes. The "social mind" appears to be something in each person which comes "factory-installed" -- that is, we are born with faculties that direct the ways in which we form societies and interact with one another.

Another point made in the first chapter is that the diversity of religious teaching does not, in itself, cause problems for his goal of explaining how all of it has a biological origin. While religious beliefs vary quite a bit, religious doctrine as a whole covers a particular well-defined province regarding supernatural existence.

1. The first part of this thesis suggests that there was a shift in human awareness that began to show itself roughly 3000-2600 years ago. (Though I recently invoked the bicameral mind theory of Julian Jaynes, this thesis does not depend on that argument, though it draws somewhat from the concept and offered evidence.) This shift was meme-driven in form, as a response to the shocks of civilized life. The net result of this memetic innovation has been the enhancement of the "individual self." (For other sources on similar proposed shifts in human consciousness, see for example Ken Wilber's Up From Eden and Erich Neumann's The Origins of Consciousness.)

2. The first level of influence on human thought is a biological imperative, which governed human behavior prior to civilization and memetic influence. This perspective emphasizes the survival of the species. We would expect that individuals with notable deviations from the norm in apperance or behavior would be dis-favored, as instinct would tell us that notable differences are a sign that an individual is less likely to contribute to the survival of the species. This could be the origin of prejudice along the lines of race, mental disability, or physical disability -- and by extension of other forms of prejudice that developed later.

Primate society is typically heirarchical. Heirarchy is a sublimation of dominance (which reflects duties as well as access to food and reproduction), abstracted so as to reduce the amount of violence. This reduction in violence is helpful in maintaining the peace among primates, as they are highly social animals.

For an exploration of the many ways in which biological imperatives might shape human culture and behavior, see the works of Desmond Morris.

3. Before the individuation shift began, there is little evidence that humans were much concerned with what we would call the inner life. They may or may not have had the ability or the sophistication to do this; but it is notable that ancient moral codes and myths from before the start of the shift all have an outward emphasis -- describing the place of each person in society and the place of humankind in the cosmos -- but have little, if any, emphasis on the thoughts, temptations, and feelings, that go on inside.

Moral codes, in particular, guide the action of each individual so as to maximize each person's contribution to the national economic output. Little regard is given to the welfare of each individual; the smallest unit to command any concern in Old Testament codes, for example, is the family.

A second factor shaping the ancient moral codes is a tension between instinctive primate behaviors and the peaceful co-existence of hundreds or thousands of people who don't know one another very well. Essentially, civilization required that people be "housebroken." Domesticating naked apes involved the learning of what I will call "rudimemes" -- the groundwork of domestication which does not require sentience or high intelligence, as they can be learned by dogs, horses, oxen, donkeys, etc.

The earliest sets of moral teachings identifiable as such, then, were developed in a mindset just above what we might expect from talking animals. There is an absence of introspective sophistication, but a collected understanding of what actions are good or bad for the good of the family and the nation. There is no thoughtcrime in early moral codes; similarly, motivation is not mentioned as a mitigating factor when deviation is judged and punished.

The biological imperatives have been extended conceptually to a small degree. As the scale of civilization expands, so too we might expect the memetic analogues of the tense compromise between biology and culture to grow. The primate resource-duty heirarchy has been abstracted into social class structure and even into caste systems, particularly once career specialization became practical. The "alpha male" has grown into a figure that is larger than life; he now possesses attributes we would recognize in a tribal ruler, a god, and a national proxy.

4. The shift began when awareness grew that civilized life was unpleasant. This awareness would not have required the notion of individual welfare, simply the observation of wasted life and potential. It could be that civilized life was so dreadful that human survival was at stake, and the survival instinct was triggered. The archaeological record shows that in early agricultural society extreme malnutrition was endemic. There also appears to have been a lot of warfare. Some archaeologists have argued that once agriculture was introduced to a region, it grew so rapidly that it was not possible for nomads or pastoral herders to resist being caught up -- so there was no way to simply "walk away" and abandon civilization as a failed experiment.

Early radicals became non-participants in the system. They "dropped out" and became wandering mendicants, beggars, and hermits. Siddhartha Gotama sought a way out from the cycle of dread he saw around him; Diogenes the Cynic lived in a jar and carried around only what he needed to exist as a beggar. The Jewish prophets were an interesting case in point, separating the divine figure of the Lord from the ruling king and priests and seeing him as a higher authority whose moral code (blueprint for human survival) prohibited the ruling classes from exploiting and abusing orphans and widows.

It is long past time that a new model of divinity be defined.

In the past, when one said, "This is God's will," (for whatever this happens to be), the statement was not merely what we think of as a religious doctrine. It was also a statement that "this" was supported by the current government, was economically beneficial, defined one's nation and culture, furthered the ends of the aristocracy and the priestly class, and matched current understanding about what was proper and natural. Such statements were entirely wrapped in a prevailing cultural paradigm that defined rigid roles for people based on age, wealth, gender, class, race, and nationality.

If thinkers like Erich Neumann, Ken Wilber, Julian Jaynes, and Leonard Shlain are even partially right, then over time there has been more than just a "paradigm shift" which we might think of as "software updates"; there have been fundamental changes in the nature and experience of human consciousness, and in the way the brain works and processes information. In other words, there have been "hardware updates" too.

( Read more... )

Crossposting to my journal and crossposting to unitarians

I'm amazed no one has brought up self-flagellation or hair shirts.

I just created a poll in darkpaganism regarding the connections between sex and spirituality, and a subject of interest to me, possible parallels between BDSM and esoteric practices like yoga.

Respondez, sil vous plait.
http://www.livejournal.com/community/darkpaganism/197733.html