The Star of Truth (2/2): Why It Matters So Much

Given that I justified republishing the sequence on Mapping Consciousness by stating that art, as well as science and religion, has a role to play in understanding consciousness, it seemed only right to republish this short sequence which goes some way to explaining why I feel that to be the case.

Last time I explored a new realisation. On the back of a fleeting comment I made, in a recent conversation, that Iain McGilchrist, in his recent book The Matter with Things, was stating that art can serve as bridge between our consciousness and the ineffable aspects of reality, I came to see all too clearly a truth that I have been blind to all these years: art is not just a meaningful but subordinate domain to science and religion – it is of equal importance. We need all three if we are to mobilise all parts of our brain to enable our minds to grasp almost any important and complex truth more completely in all its aspects. One of these domains is in itself not enough for most of us, at least.

Now I need to try and pin why that insight is so important.

Why It Matters So Much to Me

Not everyone will jeopardise the balance I am about to describe by piling all the eggs of understanding into one basket, though there is an unhealthy drive in our culture towards specialization, as McGilchrist points out in The Matter with Things, and a contempt for what seems like a more superficial dilettante approach. While I have probably never gone to that extreme, I have had a tendency to let my enthusiasm for newly discovered lands carry me away for long periods of time.

For example, when I came to realise that my too exclusive focus on literature was motivated by what books taught me about people, and then shifted my attention to focusing on psychology, the same monochrome method induced me to neglect poetry as no longer relevant to my life. Novels, plays and films were acceptable as stories about people though I no longer trusted them to be reliable vehicles of truth. When, later still, psychology and psychotherapy triggered an interest in Buddhism because of its obvious deep understanding of the mind, rooted in centuries of meditation, the resulting blend of spirituality and psychology tended to even ease narrative forms of art out of focus.

Each time I got a dream reminder to recalibrate – first the Dancing Flames dream pointed me back towards poetry and diluted my obsession with psychology, then, after my decision to tread the Bahá’í path had to some degree reversed the correction, my Hearth dream not only reminded me about the value of art but also that of nature too. Both of these dreams are explored in some detail elsewhere on this blog.

Even so, in my conscious mind I still had this prejudicial sense that psychology and spirituality were somehow more trustworthy guides along the path towards truth than the arts, no matter how much (guilty) pleasure I derived especially from poems, songs and paintings.

Now, at last, I seem to have consciously realised that I must keep all three in balance.  Different people will privilege different domains at different times and in different places, as I have tried to illustrate in the three different diagrams fronted by different aspects of the STAR: what is critical is that discounting any of them reduces our ability to draw as close to the truth as we are able and desperately need to. Various forms of destructive dogmatism and fanaticism lurk in the shadows created by these discounts. When science disparages spirituality, for example, as I have explained many times on this blog, the mind gets reduced to the brain. When religion dismisses science we topple into fundamentalism. When either of them closes the door on the rich symbolism and metaphor of the arts, not only do they risk depriving themselves of the language by which their understanding can be more effectively conveyed, but they also impoverish their own ability to tune into aspects of the truths they are discovering. For this reason, not only are there three versions, each with a different domain at the front, but the colours of each domain are not primary colours, as that would suggest they do not overlap as much as they do.

Reductionisms

Such reductionisms must be avoided at all costs and ideally everyone should be open to and seek information and experiences from all three domains, or risk descending into illusion at best, or dangerous delusion at worst. If I hear anyone disparaging any of these domains as pointless, I’ll know not to trust a word they say. It is interesting to note here, as just one example, that metaphor, myth, symbolism, story and allegory, the tools of literature as an art form, are crucially important in Bahá’í and other religious scripture. Without parables where would the gospels be. Physics, confronted by its awareness of the role of consciousness, seems to be leading the sciences towards a more spiritual perspective and a felt need to use more metaphorical language.

Any form of reductionism or potentially toxic over-simplification is to be avoided at all costs in all three domains. The richness of artistic vehicles of understanding and communication can be a strong antidote. A reductionist ‘science’, a materialistic ‘art’ or fundamentalist ‘religion’ is neither art, science nor religion. I think with this model, if I am immersing myself in any kind of genuine manifestation of any one of those three domains, there is no need to feel guilty, or slag myself off for betraying the other two and wasting my time.

Imbalances

Because the Bahá’í Writings talk so much about the harmony of religion and science as paths towards the truth that, even though they praise the role of the arts in expressing spirituality, I failed to see that there is more to the arts than that. This is where my obtuse misunderstanding of the Bahá’í path in this respect did not quite get me to this new level of understanding, and has caused me to limp along more slowly in certain respects than I would have been able to do otherwise.

I think these insights might help me shed the burden of guilt that prevented me from spending more time enjoying and learning from literature, painting and song in the way I used to. Fortunately I haven’t got as close, as in my early days of my immersion in psychology, to the position McGilchrist reminds us that Darwin found himself in:

He draws from Charles Darwin’s Autobiography which speaks of the great pleasure he derived as a young man from poetry, music and art, something now almost completely lost to him (page 619):

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts . . . And if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through the use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

But still slightly too close for comfort.

Basically, I think I have come to a firm realisation that my path entails using an exploration of the arts, social sciences and spirituality, in an effectively balanced way, to help me enhance my understanding of reality and ease my own existential pain as well as lift the understanding and ease the pain of others. I think that has always been my unconscious priority, but my discounting of the arts tended to make my exploration of them feel like a stolen pleasure and reduce the efficacy of my search for deeper meanings both within experience and within the Bahá’í Writings.

Maybe the fact that ‘arts’ and ‘star’ are anagrams might make it easier for me to hold onto this insight now I’ve gained it. The cube below places sciences at the top because that is where our culture sees it as belonging, while religion has been sidelined. My hope is that this post will help redress that imbalance, and also bring the arts closer to the front in this dynamic.

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Irreducible Mind – a review (3/3): the self & the Self

What is the dust which obscures the mirror? It is attachment to the world, avarice, envy, love of luxury and comfort, haughtiness and self-desire; this is the dust which prevents reflection of the rays of the Sun of Reality in the mirror. The natural emotions are blameworthy and are like rust which deprives the heart of the bounties of God.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Promulgation of Universal Peace – page 244)

Even though it’s barely a year since I last republished this sequence, it’s relevance to my sequence on Science, Spirituality and Civilisation is unmistakable, so here it comes again!

In the previous two posts I’ve been moaning about how I was robbed when my training in psychology steered me away from the work of thinkers such as FWH Myers as though they had the plague. What I probably need to do to redress the balance is mention how much I was influenced by thinkers who were deeply influenced by Myers. In one case I know that for certain because I still have Roberto Assagioli‘s introductory text on psychosynthesis, which I read in 1976 and which cites Myers in the list of references at the end of Chapter I. Another was a seminal book I borrowed but never bought, so it is impossible to say whether the influence was direct and acknowledged: this was Peter Koestenbaum’s New Images of the Person.

Assagioli explained in his book the importance of what he calls a ‘disidentification exercise’ (page 22):

After having discovered [various elements of our personality], we have to take possession of them and acquire control over them. The most effective method by which we can achieve this is that of disidentification. This is based on a fundamental psychological principle which may be formulated as follows:

We are dominated by everything with which our self becomes identified. We can dominate and control everything from which we disidentify ourselves.

(For the psychosynthesis disidentification exercise see the following link.)

Then, in another exciting moment, I came upon Koestenbaum’s ideas about reflection six years after I had read Assagioli. Reflection is the ‘capacity to separate consciousness from its contents’ (Koestenbaum: 1979). We can step back, inspect and think about our experiences. We become capable of changing our relationship with them and altering their meanings for us. It is like a mirror learning to see that it is not the same as what is reflected in it. So here was a writer in the existentialist tradition speaking in almost the same terms as psychosynthesis. I had practised Assagioli’s exercise for a long period after reading his book. Now I was triggered into resuming the practice again by what Koestenbaum had written.

I came across Koestenbaum’s book just before I discovered the existence of the Bahá’í Faith (for a fuller account see link). It helped me take what I had found in Assagioli and fuse it with what I had found in the Faith and create an experiential exercise to express that understanding in action in a way that helped me immensely to adjust to spiritual concepts which until that point had been completely alien to me for decades – all my adult life in fact. The Baha’i Writings talk about certain key powers of the soul: loving, knowing and willing as well as introducing me to the idea of the heart, the core of our being, as a mirror. I pulled this into my version of the exercise (see below). What I didn’t realise until later was that Assagioli had corresponded with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and had therefore to some degree been influenced by Bahá’í thought. (See Disidentification exercise for the final version that I used myself rather than this one I revised to share for the use of others).

How amazing then to find Emily Kelly, in the book Irreducible Mind, quoting Myers quoting Thomas Reid, an 18th century philosopher (page 74):

The conviction which every man has of his identity . . . needs no aid of philosophy to strengthen it; and no philosophy can weaken it.… I am not thought, I am not action, I am not feeling; I am something that thinks, and acts, and suffers. My thoughts and actions and feelings change every moment…; But that Self or I, to which they belong, is permanent…

What I regret therefore now is that the usefulness of this exercise did not make me trace it back to its source and find out more of what Myers thought about this and many other things of great importance to me. So, better late than never, that is what I am about to do now.

Myers’s the self and the Self

The disidentification exercise rattled the cage of my previous ideas about who I was in essence. While I didn’t quite buy into Assagioli’s other ideas about consciousness at that time I felt, both intuitively and from the experiences I was having, that his idea was completely right, that there is some form of pure consciousness underpinning our identity.

So, as good a place as any to pick up the thread of Myers’s thinking again is with his ideas of the self and the Self. There are some problems to grapple with before we can move on. Emily Kelly writes (page 83):

These ‘concepts central to his theory’ are undoubtedly difficult, but despite some inconsistency in his usage or spelling Myers was quite clear in his intent to distinguish between a subliminal ‘self’ (a personality alternate or in addition to the normal waking one) and a Subliminal ‘Self’ or ‘Individuality’ (which is his real ‘unifying theoretical principle’). In this book we will try to keep this distinction clear in our readers minds by using the term ‘subliminal consciousness’ to refer to any conscious psychological processes occurring outside ordinary awareness; the term “subliminal self” (lower case) to refer to ‘any chain of memory sufficiently continuous, and embracing sufficient particulars, to acquire what is popularly called a “character” of its own;’ and the term ‘Individuality’ or “’Subliminal Self” (upper case) to refer to the underlying larger Self.

Myers believed that the evidence in favour of transcendent experiences, used here by me in the sense of things that leak through the membrane from above, is strong enough to warrant serious consideration and he distinguishes between that and basic subliminal experiences that come, as it were, from underneath (page 87):

Supernormal processes such as telepathy do seem to occur more frequently while either the recipient or the agent (or both) is asleep, in the states between sleeping and waking, in a state of ill health, or dying; and subliminal functioning in general emerges more readily during altered states of consciousness such as hypnosis, hysteria, or even ordinary distraction.

He felt that we needed to find some way of reliably tapping into these levels of consciousness (page 91)

The primary methodological challenge to psychology, therefore, lies in developing methods, or ‘artifices,’ for extending observations of the contents or capacities of mind beyond the visible portion of the psychological spectrum, just as the physical sciences have developed artificial means of extending sensory perception beyond ordinary limits.

Midsummer Night’s Dream

Thin Partitions

He also has much that is interesting and valuable to say about the implications of a proper understanding of these upper and lower thresholds, especially when they are too porous, for both genius and mental health (page 98):

When there is ‘a lack of liminal stability, an excessive permeability, if I may say so, of the psychical diaphragm that separates the empirical [conscious] from the latent [subliminal: unconscious] faculties and man,’ then there may be either an expansion of consciousness (an ‘uprush’ of latent material from the subliminal into the supraliminal) or, conversely, a narrowing of consciousness (a ‘downdraught’ from the supraliminal into the subliminal). The former is genius, the latter is hysteria.

This is slightly confusing here but the main point is that genius expands what we are aware of, and more comes above the threshold, whereas hysteria narrows our experience so that less comes into consciousness. This is partly clarified by Kelly explaining (page 99):

In short, Myers believed that hysteria, when viewed as a psychological phenomenon, gives ‘striking’ support to ‘my own principal thesis’, namely, that all personality is a filtering or narrowing of the field of consciousness from a larger Self, the rest of which remains latent and capable of emerging only under the appropriate conditions.

Even the expanded consciousness of genius, in this view, is still filtering a lot out – in fact, it still leaves most of potential consciousness untapped.

There is in addition a common quality of excessive porousness which explains why, in Shakespeare’s phrase, the ‘lunatic . . . . . and the poet are of imagination all compact.’ Myers’s view is that (page 100):

Because genius and madness both involve similar psychological mechanisms – namely, a permeability of the psychological boundary – it is to be expected that they might frequently occur in the same person; but any nervous disorders that accompany genius signal, not dissolution, but a ‘perturbation which masks evolution.’

For Myers dreams, though they may indeed be common and frequently discounted, they are nonetheless important sources of data (pages 102-103):

Myers argued [that] dreams provide a readily available means of studying the ‘language’ of the subliminal, a language that may underlie other, less common forms of automatism or subliminal processes. . . . Myers’s model of mind predicts that that if sleep is a state of consciousness in which subliminal processes take over from supraliminal ones, then sleep should facilitate subliminal functioning, not only in the organic or ‘infrared’ region, but also in the “ultraviolet” range of the psychological spectrum, such as the emergence of telepathic impressions in dreams.

This has certainly been my own experience. A post I wrote two years ago will perhaps serve to illustrate that for those who are interested. My dream of the hearth, recounted there, was, incidentally, the only remembered dream I have ever noted in which I experienced the presence of God, another reason for my attaching such great importance to it.

An important related topic he also addresses is that of ‘hallucinations.’ People tend to be quite closed minded on this topic, seeing visions and voices as the sign of a mind gone wrong. This is quite unhelpful. There is a mass of evidence that I may come back to some time to indicate that ‘hallucinations’ range from the darkly destructive to the life enhancing and it important to pay close attention to the details of them and the circumstances under which they occur before coming to any conclusion about them. Our society’s default position, the result of exactly the backward step under discussion here that both psychology and psychiatry took in the name of pseudo-science, is harmful rather than helpful quite often (I have explored a more positive approach on this blog – see the six links to An Approach to Psychosis). Pim van Lommel’s research into NDEs replicates the same kind of pattern in that patients whose families and friends were unsympathetic took much longer to integrate their experiences and found it a more painful process than those who were met with support and understanding. He summarises this (page 51):

When someone first tries to disclose the NDE, the other person’s reaction is absolutely crucial. If this initial reaction is negative or skeptical, the process of accepting and integrating the NDE typically presents far greater problems than if this initial reaction is positive, sympathetic, or neutral. Evidence has shown that positive responses facilitate and accelerate the integration process. In fact, without the possibility of communication, the process of coming to terms with the NDE often fails to get under way at all.

We tend to underestimate the frequency of ‘hallucinations’ in the ‘normal’ population, something the Myers was already aware of (page 108):

One of the most important accomplishments of Myers, Guerney, and their colleagues in psychical research was in demonstrating the previously suspected, but as it turns out not infrequent, occurrence of hallucinations in normal, healthy individuals.

Not all them should be dismissed as fantasy (page 109):

These studies and surveys also demonstrated that such hallucinations are not always purely subjective in origin. Some, in fact, are veridical – that is, they involve seeing, hearing, or otherwise sensing some event happening at a physically remote location. . . . . Using their own figures for the frequency with which people recall having hallucinations in a waking, healthy state, together with statistics regarding the incidence of death in the United Kingdom, they concluded that hallucinations coinciding with a death happened too frequently to be attributable to chance.

All in all, Myers’s mould-breaking approach to the mind and to the problems of consciousness is refreshing to say the least, and maps onto my own long-standing interests in spirituality, creativity and ‘psychosis.’ It was icing on the cake to find what he said about science and religion, a point to savour and a good note to end this post on (page 113) :

On the one hand, . . . he believed that science could ‘prove the preamble of all religions’ – namely, that the universe extends far beyond the perceptible material world. On the other hand., religion could contribute to ‘the expansion of Science herself until she can satisfy those questions which the human heart will rightly ask, but to which Religion alone has thus far attempted an answer.’

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Irreducible Mind – a review (1/3): how psychology lost the plot

. . . . the mind is the power of the human spirit. Spirit is the lamp; mind is the light which shines from the lamp. Spirit is the tree, and the mind is the fruit. Mind is the perfection of the spirit, and is its essential quality, as the sun’s rays are the essential necessity of the sun.

(Selected Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: page 316-317)

Even though it’s barely a year since I last republished this sequence, it’s relevance to my sequence on Science, Spirituality and Civilisation is unmistakable, so here it comes again!

I began studying psychology in 1976, long before I became a Bahá’í, and completed my clinical training in July 1982, at least four months before I met even a mention of the Faith in the following November.

Never once in my entire experience of being taught psychology did I ever hear of Frederick William Henry Myers. The closest encounter I ever had of this kind was with William James. He was mentioned in asides with a dismissive and grudging kind of respect. The implication was that he was an amazing thinker for his time but nowadays very much old hat. I gave him a quick glance and moved on.

Looking back now I realise I was robbed.

FWH Myers (1843-1901)

When I decided to become a Bahá’í at the beginning of December that same year, after a lightening conversion, my friends thought I was nuts, and when I met the quote from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá which you’ll find at the top of this post, I was thunderstruck. It ran completely counter to all I had been taught and all I had found in any psychology I had ever read. I really struggled to integrate that insight into my world-view.

The context included ideas such as Manifestations of God (symbolised by the stars in the picture at the head of the post), a spiritual realm (represented by the left hand line), and a link between that spiritual realm and our material one (the line that joins the left hand to the right hand line). If accepting the idea of God was a huge challenge for a former atheist, taking on board the concept of a soul was an even bigger one. At least the Bahá’í concept of God was definitely not the one I most certainly did not and could never believe in: it still seems such an unwarranted gift for beings like us to have an immortal soul though, considering how badly we behave most of the time. It took me four years at least of hard study and deep reflection to even begin to get my head around this stuff. (The poem I posted on 21 March, after this post was written, gives a sense of where I was starting from.)

It is plain to me now though how this situation came about. Kelly and Kelly capture it neatly and clearly in the introduction to their brave, thorough and well-researched book, Irreducible Mind (pages xvii-xviii):

[William] James’s person-centered and synoptic approach was soon largely abandoned . . . in favour of a much narrower conception of scientific psychology. Deeply rooted in earlier 19th-century thought, this approach advocated deliberate emulation of the presuppositions and methods – and thus, it was hoped, the stunning success – of the “hard” sciences especially physics. . . . Psychology was no longer to be the science of mental life, as James had defined it. Rather it was to be the science of behaviour, “a purely objective experimental branch of natural science”. It should “never use the terms consciousness, mental states, mind, content, introspectively verifiable, imagery, and the like.”

And, sadly, in some senses nothing much has changed. Psychology is still, for the most part, pursuing the Holy Grail of a complete materialistic explanation for every aspect of consciousness and the working of the mind. It’s obviously all in the brain, isn’t it (page xx)?

The empirical connection between mind and brain seems to most observers to be growing ever tighter and more detailed as our scientific understanding of the brain advances. In light of the successes already in hand, it may not seem unreasonable to assume as a working hypothesis that this process can continue indefinitely without encountering any insuperable obstacles, and that properties of minds will ultimately be fully explained by those brains. For most contemporary scientists, however, this useful working hypothesis has become something more like an established fact, or even an unquestionable axiom.

This is a dogma and as such can only be protected by ignoring or discounting as invalid all evidence that points in a different direction. Edward Kelly argues for a different approach in his introduction, believing as the co-authors demonstrate in this massive tome that there is a wealth of evidence to undermine this a priori belief (page xxii):

First and perhaps foremost is an attitude of humility in relation to the present state of scientific knowledge. . . . Second, we emphasise that science consists at bottom of certain attitudes and procedures, rather than any fixed set of beliefs. The most basic attitude is that facts have primacy over theories and that belief should therefore always remain modifiable in response to the empirical data.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

He quotes Francis Bacon (ibid.):

“The world is not to be narrowed till it will go into the understanding . . . but the understanding is to be expanded and opened till it can take in the image of the world as it is in fact.”

The Kellys try and practice what they preach, as their book demonstrates (page xxv):

Our own empiricism is thus thorough-going and radical, in the sense that we are willing to look at all relevant facts and not just those that seem compatible, actually or potentially, with current mainstream theory. Indeed, if anything it is precisely those observations that seem to conflict with current theory that should command the most urgent attention.

Their first chapter, to which I may return in a later post, takes a critical look at the current mainstream position. I want to start instead with their second chapter that looks in detail at the work of Myers. I want to do justice to a deep and creative thinker whom I was induced to neglect during my formal training, much to the detriment of my practice for a significant number of years.

I am plucking a quote from the middle of Emily Kelly’s chapter on Myers’s approach (page 76) because the last sentence cuts to the core of the challenge constituted by his position and the evidence that mainstream ‘scientists’ ignore:

This notion of something within us being conscious, even though it is not accessible to our ordinary awareness, is an exceedingly difficult one for most of us to accept, since it is so at variance with our usual assumption that the self of which we are aware comprises the totality of what we are as conscious mental beings. Nevertheless, it is essential to keep in mind Myers’s new and enlarged conception of consciousness if one is to understand his theory of human personality as something far more extensive than our waking self.

And perhaps it needs to be said in advance, in order to soften the shock for some readers, that he is not just talking about the kind of unconscious processes we all accept as definite, such as those which keep our hearts beating, or as probable, such as the projection of past experiences onto the present. He takes seriously not just what lies underneath our minds so to speak, the stuff that many dreams are made of, but also what soars above them, such as mystical states.

Emily Kelly’s preamble:

Before we look in more detail at what his exact position was in the next post, it might be useful to quote from Emily Kelly’s preamble. She puts her finger on the most significant loss incurred when psychology went pseudo-scientific (page 50):

All elements of the universe are not only inextricably related, but they all function according to the same basic, deterministic principles of cause-and-effect and are all, in the final analysis, of the same basic essence or nature. . . . The attempt to transform psychology into a science, however, raised some unique problems. The phenomena of psychology are unlike those of any of the physical sciences in that they are, above all else, mental. (Ibid.)

The pioneers of this approach were far too sure of themselves (page 54):

. . . . For many in the first generation of scientific psychology, the thoroughgoing unilateral dependence of mind on brain was “a practical certainty.”

The basic issue had been resolved (page 58):

. . . . For [T.H.]Huxley as for many other 19^th-century scientists, the exact nature of the dependence of psychical processes on physical ones with an open – though unresolvable – question; the general dependence of mind on matter was a resolved – and thus closed – question. (page 58)

I almost winced when I read her pointed explanation of how psychology had traded in the mind to buy itself a place among the sciences (page 59):

Scientists instrumental in the development of 19^th-century psychology thus in general had chosen to conceptualise science primarily not as a method with which to confront basic questions posed by contradictory aspects of human experience, but as a doctrine to which psychology, if it is to be a science, must conform. (page 59)

Lotus/I-Ching (From this Website)

She paves the way for a key component of Myers’s approach in her quote from Mill (page 62):

John Stuart Mill had been the leader and exemplar of mid 19^th– century liberal thinkers who believed that the cause of knowledge is best served, not by partisans, but by “those who take something from both sides of the great controversies, and make out that neither extreme is right, nor wholly wrong.” (page 62)

In the tomorrow’s post we’ll be taking a closer look at Myers’s approach.

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Book Review – ‘Living in a Mindful Universe’ (1/7): synchronicities & NDEs

Given that the post on 13 November makes reference to Eben Alexander’s near-death-experience I thought it might be helpful to republish this sequence albeit slightly soon. 

This is likely to be the most complex and ambitious attempt to integrate and express my understanding of some of these issues that I have ever undertaken. I mustn’t overload it though or the sequence might sink

As if all this was not already enough, in the interests of synchronicity I’m afraid much more needs to be said before I even start to describe the main trigger to this attempt.

Post-Covid I had been attempting to reconnect with friends and former colleagues after a long lapse in communication, but been pretty sluggish in taking any kind of consistent action.

Interesting Synchronicities

The first event of interest here was a conversation with an acquaintance of my wife’s in town. She inadvertently dropped into the conversation that I was – or, perhaps more accurately, had been – a psychologist. The next day he texted to say that a psychology friend of his from abroad was wondering whether he could help her find out how to get work in that field in this country. It was proving difficult. When she first asked him he hadn’t a clue how he could help. After my wife dropped the hint he got in touch.

This triggered me to get off my procrastinating backside and contact a former colleague who not only was a psychologist but, as I knew, had a number of European friends in the same boat as the lady asking for help.

He kindly agreed to consult with her and see if he could help in any way. I thanked him and suggested we meet for coffee, which we did soon after. For two hours upstairs in the All Saints café we were immersed in in a deeply enriching exploration of spirituality, the afterlife and consciousness. I wish we had recorded what we discussed as I can’t remember half of it. But that’s not the main point here, but I will be sharing some of the material we covered later on this blog, I expect.

The day after we’d had the conversation and exchanged emails about how enlightening we had found it, a friend in Australia phoned and during the conversation asked me if I had any videos on NDEs. I explained that I preferred reading to watching, and apologised for not being able to help.

Within hours of that call, I got an email from the former colleague with an attachment. It was an essay by Jeffrey Mishlove titled Beyond the Brain:
 the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death. I’ll be touching on some of the content later but what is most relevant now is that is contained 71 links to videos on NDEs and closely related issues.

This is by no means the first experience I have had of synchronicity. There are many times in my life when I had read a book on a particular topic, usually consciousness related but not always, and within days someone asks me to help them understand exactly that topic and its implications for their current situation.

Even more importantly my discovery of the Bahá’í Faith depended upon finding a particular book in the Hendon Library, which I would not have dreamed of bothering to borrow if I had been able to find anything else to take away to compensate me for my trudge through the snow and bitter wind on a winter’s day.

Not surprisingly, the essay reactivated my exploration of NDEs once more, as well as enabling me to share 71 video links with my Australian friend.

As though to make sure my research was definitely reactivated at this point, I was also asked to make some comments on a draft text that was replete with quotations from the NDE literature.

Following the various threads, both in terms of reading the essay and watching two hour-long videos (yes, I really did break my pattern and do that!), not only left me with some new insights, which I will explore soon, but also flagged up a book by Eben Alexander and Karen Newell, Living in a Mindful Universe. That book will be my main focus in this sequence alongside an exploration of the way some of my previous insights map onto or complement their perspective.

Hearticulture

Early in life I had thought my interest in books meant I should be focusing on literature. Later I came to realise books were definitely not my calling for their own sake. My interest had always really been in what made people tick, in addition to our heart beats that is. My joke with my wife, who is a keen gardener and therefore a horticulturist, is that my specialism is hearticulture. 

This, though, involves not patronisingly treating other people as plants, but rather, as I also joke, practising heart-to-heart resuscitation. We’re all in danger of spiritual suffocation in this material world. The links between breath and spirit are close. Heart to heart resuscitation, it must be emphasised, is a reciprocal process, not a one-way street. We all need to work at helping everyone we meet to breath in the spirit. 

That’s why I’m grateful for Alexander and Newell’s book — Living in a Mindful Universe — which has been rather like visiting a spiritual optician. The book has tested my mind’s sight, given me a prescription for a new and much improved soul-lens, which is greatly enhancing my ability to see spiritual truths more clearly, and hopefully helping me be a better hearticulturist, if that makes sense.

I want to get to the bottom of the mind. That will not happen, of course, before I die, but I’d like to pothole down as deeply as I possibly can.

Near-Death Experiences

When I was about 11 years old I fell seriously ill. In the poem Solitude I recently tried to capture the experience I’d had:

At the time I bought into delirium as an explanation, but the experience has stuck in my memory in a way that other periods of delirium never have, even more recent ones. I don’t think this alone has been the trigger for my almost 40 years of unrelenting exploration of consciousness.

My well of pain revelation at the Encounter Group weekend in London in the mid-seventies certainly played its part. Clearly my mind was not what it had always seemed to me till then. From that point on various forms of therapy, Buddhist meditation, the study of psychology and existential philosophy, all focused on the nature of the mind, catapulted me towards the Bahá’í Faith where I met the words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá that set the core of the puzzle that bewildered the psychologist in me at the time:[1]

. . . the mind is the power of the human spirit. Spirit is the lamp; mind is the light which shines from the lamp. Spirit is the tree, and the mind is the fruit. Mind is the perfection of the spirit and is its essential quality, as the sun’s rays are the essential necessity of the sun.’

He went on to add: ‘This explanation, though short, is complete; therefore, reflect upon it, and if God wills, you may become acquainted with the details.’ Reflect upon it I certainly have: how well acquainted with the details I have become remains to be seen, I think.

My experience of the Bahá’í Faith has been very much a quest. I am travelling the Bahá’í path, my understanding influenced by all the twists and turns I’ve just mentioned that shaped my perception. I know I will never be truly a Bahá’í in this material life but I can at least try to inch closer to a truer understanding of spiritual truths.

The book I am about to explore has reinvigorated my desire to explore and understand all this far more deeply. In the process of sharing its impact, I will be going back to the Bahá’í Writings, poems I have been affected by, and other texts, to re-examine them with what I hope is now my keener gaze.

Eben Alexander

Eben Alexander’s NDE

Before we plunge more deeply into the book, we need to briefly go back to the experiences I have blogged about in my posts on Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven. Certain aspects are clearer now.

For example Mishlove explains how improbable during his coma was any kind of conscious experience, and afterwards how unlikely was he not only to survive, but if he did survive to have anything remotely like a full recovery of cognitive functioning:[2]

Bruce Greyson examined the medical records, over 600 pages, with two other physicians. Puss from a rare infection filled Alexander’s cranium. His Glasgow Coma Scale result indicated minimal brain function. The three physicians all agreed there was less than a one percent chance of survival and no possibility of a normal recovery. As Greyson describes… ‘This guy was as dead as you can be without having his heart stop.’

Not only that, but his recovery, in the light of Greyson’s data on his extremely dire brain state, would seem to be unique:[1]

. . . Any physician realises the basic impossibility of a complete medical recovery, and yet that is what happened. I have discovered no cases of any other patients with my particular diagnosis who then went on to benefit from a complete recovery.

One of the most moving aspects of his story for me, not suprisingly given my sense of connection with the sister who had died four years before I was born, was his discover of the identity of his companion during his NDE:[2]

Another interesting slant on his recovery he deals with in this book is how his memories returned:[5]

Most personal life memories returned by three weeks after awakening from coma. All prior knowledge of physics, chemistry, and neuroscience . . . returned progressively over about two months or so. The completeness of my memory return was quite astonishing, especially as I thoroughly reviewed my medical records and held discussions with colleagues who had cared for me, and I realised just how ill I had actually been.

Memory

What was even more astonishing than the return of his basic memories, was that[6] he  ‘[e]ventually, . .  came to realise through subtle evidence over the next few years that, in fact, [his] memories had come back even more complete than they had been before [his] coma.’

He goes into the specifics of some, such as:[7]

In expanded states of awareness, I have recovered memories going back very early in life, and these have included the realisation that the perceived abandonment by my birth mother, initially on day eleven of my life when I was hospitalised for ‘failing to thrive,’ was an event that was so dramatic and shocking that it left scars that are still apparent in my psyche.

His has led him to see memory in a different light[8]:

Just as filter theory allows that the brain is not the producer of consciousness, likewise, we use the brain to access memory from an informational field . . that exists outside of it.

According to Alexander, all systematic scientific attempts to identify the exact location of memory in the brain have failed:[9]‘. . .  The mechanism and location of long-term memory storage remains a complete mystery.’

There will be more on filter theory later. This is enough for now before we take a long look at the idea of a Universal Mind next time.

References:

[1]. Some Answered Questions – LV.

[2]. Beyond the Brain:
the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death – page 25.

[3]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 37.

[4]. Op. cit. – page 49.

[5]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 63.

[6]. Op. cit. – page 146.

[7]. Op. cit. – page 379.

[8]. Op. cit. – page 487.

[8]. Op. cit. – page 653.

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‘Proof of Heaven’: a review

Eben Alexander

The Great Being saith: The man of consummate learning and the sage endowed with penetrating wisdom are the two eyes to the body of mankind. God willing, the earth shall never be deprived of these two greatest gifts.

(Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh Revealed after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, page 171)

Given that tomorrow’s post makes reference to Eben Alexander’s near-death-experience I thought it might be helpful to republish it now. 

Thanks to Kristine’s comment on my sequence of posts about near-death experiences (NDEs), I have read a compelling book: Proof of Heaven.

Eben Alexander is a neurosurgeon with a dramatic conversion experience behind him. Seven days shifted him from sceptic to believer in the afterlife. Experiences he had had as a medic were completely reconstrued (page 87):

. . . . a coma patient was a kind of in-between being. Neither completely here (the earthly realm) nor completely there (the spiritual realm), these patients often have a singularly mysterious atmosphere to them. This was, as I’ve mentioned, a phenomenon I’d noticed myself many times, though of course I’d never given it the supernatural credence [before].

His recovery, his NDE apart, was to be a minor miracle (page 89):

. . . they did not know of anyone making a full recovery from bacterial meningitis after being comatose for more than a few days. We were now into day four.

The fact that he is now talking and walking let alone writing this book was highly improbable, verging on downright impossible (page 92):

The few who survive a case as severe as mine generally require round-the-clock care for the rest of their lives.

I’m not going to include any plot spoilers in this review. Though the book has been sniffed at by sceptics who feel Eben has gone soft in the head, I can assure you his experience was truly remarkable and his account of it sober and convincing.

Well, I would be convinced, wouldn’t I, since he confirms all my biases. I can only say that I do expose myself to the writings of those with whom I disagree, fighting my confirmation bias at least to that extent, but their arguments always seem to fall short of what I regard as measured and weighty (see below for more on that).

Coming out of Coma

Instead of recounting the experience in itself, I’ll pick up the narrative from when he comes back into the body and focus on what his experience could be said to have demonstrated. About his return from his coma he writes (page 117):

My mind—my real self—was squeezing its way back into the all too tight and limiting suit of physical existence, with its spatiotemporal bounds, its linear thought, and its limitation to verbal communication. Things that up until a week ago I’d thought were the only mode of existence around, but which now showed themselves as extraordinarily cumbersome limitations.

He acknowledges that on his return he was also the victim of something (page 118) called ‘ICU psychosis.’ However, he does not agree that this state accounts for his NDE experience (ibid.)

Some of the dreams I had during this period were stunningly and frighteningly vivid. But in the end they served only to underline how very, very dissimilar my dream state had been compared with the ultra-reality deep in coma.

The whole coma experience had been totally convincing (page 130):

What I’d experienced was more real than the house I sat in, more real than the logs burning in the fireplace. Yet there was no room for that reality in the medically trained scientific worldview that I’d spent years acquiring.

This is where he spells out the problem he now has with what I have called ‘scientism‘ in the pages of this blog (page 132):

I can tell you that most skeptics aren’t really skeptics at all. To be truly skeptical, one must actually examine something, and take it seriously. And I, like many doctors, had never taken the time to explore NDEs. I had simply “known” they were impossible.

Among the reasons he has for being convinced  of the reality of his own experience and the validity of its implications is his view that the illness he had was as close to death as you can get (page 133):

Given all of this, bacterial meningitis is arguably the best disease one could find if one were seeking to mimic human death without actually bringing it about.

He finds all the usual candidates that sceptics adduce to explain away an NDE, such as anoxia and drug/temporal lobe effects, completely unconvincing. Also, as he was utterly unaware of any of the literature on NDEs, he had no expectations to subtly influence his experience, and in any case, as you will see when you read his account, his experience was untypical in certain key respects. He outlines the explanation which he regards as the most plausible reductionist candidate (page 142):

The final hypothesis I looked at was that of the “reboot phenomenon.” This would explain my experience as an assembly of essentially disjointed memories and thoughts left over from before my cortex went completely down. Like a computer restarting and saving what it could after a system-wide failure, my brain would have pieced together my experience from these leftover bits as best it could.

He find this also unconvincing (ibid.):

Everything—the uncanny clarity of my vision, the clearness of my thoughts as pure conceptual flow—suggested higher, not lower, brain functioning. But my higher brain had not been around to do that work.

This is what makes the NDE which resulted from a coma induced by bacterial meningitis so compelling as evidence. There were no higher brain functions to stitch together the kind of coherent experience he went through and could recall in such rich detail. He is scathing now about this panoply of reductionist pseudo-explanations (page 142-143):

The more I read of the “scientific” explanations of what NDEs are, the more I was shocked by their transparent flimsiness.

There was for him no escaping the probability that what he had experienced was real (page 144):

. . . when I added up the sheer unlikelihood of all the details—and especially when I considered how precisely perfect a disease E. coli meningitis was for taking my cortex down, and my rapid and complete recovery from almost certain destruction—I simply had to take seriously the possibility that it really and truly had happened for a reason.

He puts the basic reason very simply (page 144): ‘Medically speaking, that I had recovered completely was a flat-out impossibility, a medical miracle.’

Source Website

The Nature of Consciousness

This leads him to look at an experience whose true significance he had missed when viewing life through the lens of his sceptical persona (page 146):

Many others have seen that astonishing clarity of mind that often comes to demented elderly people just before they pass on, just as John had seen in his father (a phenomenon known as “terminal lucidity”). There was no neuroscientific explanation for that.

It is a short step from such a perspective to the even more radical revision of his concept of consciousness as a whole (page 150):

Far from being an unimportant by-product of physical processes (as I had thought before my experience), consciousness is not only very real—it’s actually more real than the rest of physical existence, and most likely the basis of it all. But neither of these insights has yet been truly incorporated into science’s picture of reality.

This links in with ideas I have explored elsewhere about consciousness as the ground of being. Which leads us back (page 152) to the core problem of scientism again!

Those who assert that there is no evidence for phenomena indicative of extended consciousness, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, are willfully ignorant. They believe they know the truth without needing to look at the facts.

His point about the astonishing fact that consciousness exists is also one that I have tackled before, both on my blog (see links in this sentence) and in the lion’s den of the Birmingham Medical School (page 154).

There is nothing about the physics of the material world (quarks, electrons, photons, atoms, etc.), and specifically the intricate structure of the brain, that gives the slightest clue as to the mechanism of consciousness.

In fact, the greatest clue to the reality of the spiritual realm is this profound mystery of our conscious existence.

The Great Being

I’d like to close with his carefully worded observation about the nature of God, which describes the sense he had of being closely connected in his NDE with that Great Being while at the same time this entity was nonetheless inherently beyond his comprehension and totally irreducible to anything he could ever comprehend (page 106):

While in the Core, even when I became one with the Orb of light and the entire higher-dimensional universe throughout all eternity, and was intimately one with God, I sensed strongly that the creative, primordial (prime mover) aspect of God was the shell around the egg’s contents, intimately associated throughout (as our consciousness is a direct extension of the Divine), yet forever beyond the capability of absolute identification with the consciousness of the created.

All in all this is a carefully written and rigorously examined account of a truly extraordinary experience whose reality I do not doubt, even though it is just the testimony of one person. I recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in this aspect of life.

Amit Goswami on Consciousness as the Ground of our Being

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The Third ‘I’ (3/7): the wisdom of dreams (a)

With some trepidation I am about to embark next Monday on a further exploration of the heart. So, it seemed a good idea to republish this sequence. 

We’ve seen how Jack responded to his problem and found himself between a rock and a hard place. Instinct got him swinging between anger and pity. Logic looked a bit different, more pragmatic, but it couldn’t unhook him from the pendulum even if the extremes took slightly different names – would he be subsidising certain failure or providing support for a workable possibility of success?

What could he have done instead? How else could he have approached the problem?

I am aware that self-styled hard-headed readers may be getting ready to jump ship at this point, because they feel they are in firm contact with reality and are convinced that all the valid possibilities have already been exhausted. I’d like to request a suspension of disbelief. While there isn’t room in this post to rehearse once more all the evidence I believe exists for another dimension of consciousness, this sentence makes much of it that I have examined on this blog only a click away. All this evidence, and more that I have not yet quoted, convinces me that the approaches that I am about to describe are fully warranted by evidence out there, even when they move into transcendental territory. The only reason they haven’t found their way into most mainstream text books yet is because of the dogmatic prejudice of conventional scientism that leads researchers to believe there is no point in looking at any of these things because we already know they can’t be true.

Now, I’ll step down from my soap box and describe some of these other approaches which have their roots, wholly or in part, in this other aspect of consciousness.

A. Why Dreams?

I’m going to start with one of the easiest possibilities to explain and the most likely to be acceptable to the sceptical, up to a point at least. I am, in the first two parts of this treatment of dreams, going to keep as best I can within a framework of evidence that does not draw on the transcendent while plainly proving that we have modes of thought which cannot be reduced to Kahneman‘s  System 1 and System 2. It also provides an area of experience that every single one of us can test out for ourselves if we are prepared to give it enough time. It’s far too tempting for me to add that if you are not prepared to test this out yourself over a period of months, at least resist the temptation to assume it’s valueless.

My main line of argument for now is that we can consult with our dreams. Dreams could offer a way for Jack to move beyond the stalemate of his pendulum swings.

What does this mean in practice?

Dreams clearly come from a different part of our beings than our usual daytime conscious thoughts. Visual elements predominate. Even verbal ones are often tinged with the surreal. The best way to conceptualise dreams for our present purposes is to see them as originating from a level of consciousness that is usually below the threshold of our awareness – subliminal in other words. None of this is incompatible with the generally accepted view of dreams as being involved in a process of consolidating memories from short-term to long-term store. This function gives them a special role in alerting us to the meaning of what is called ‘day residue.’

Once you accept the idea that dreams come from below the threshold of normal consciousness, it becomes possible to see how useful they can be in problem-solving. This is because they come at a problem from a completely different angle from Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2, and it will also become apparent that they can bridge the gap between the material and spiritual aspects of consciousness, drawing therefore in my view more easily upon the transcendental. I have chosen to start with dreams because not even the most reductionist scientist would deny we dream, even if he never remembers one.

Also, dreams highlight a key problem which permeates this whole area of human life: there is a world of difference between an experience and the interpretation of that experience. Nevertheless, it is not good science to dismiss the experience just because you don’t like the explanation that someone has pinned to it. Dreams undoubtedly exist. They are an unusual state of consciousness. What they mean and where they come from is open to interpretation. As such, therefore, they are potentially perfect illustrations of what I am hoping to convey.

At the most basic level you have the possibility that they can bring to our attention purely physical factors that were below this threshold of consciousness during the day. One such example is of the man who had a recurrent dream that a tiger had its claws in his back. After several frightening nights of this he asked his wife to check the skin there where he couldn’t see it. She found suspicious blemishes which a visit to the doctor and subsequent tests confirmed was a form of skin cancer. By paying attention to his dreams, he had been alerted in time and was cured.

One of my own experiences was less dramatic but none the less helpful for all that. I dreamt that I had been electrocuted by my turntable. When I checked the record player the following day I got a slight shock from the metal arm and, when I looked at the plug, I discovered that the earth wire was disconnected. During the previous day I had presumably had a shock from the arm but not noticed it consciously.

We have all heard of other examples where complex problems were solved by dreams (see link for more examples):

Kekulé discovered the tetravalent nature of carbon, the formation of chemical/ organic “Structure Theory”, but he did not make this breakthrough by experimentation alone. He had a dream!

B. Working with Dreams

There are reported to be cultures which, when the community has a problem, encourage everyone to seek dreams that yield a solution. Apparently this works.

There are books that explain ways in which we can all learn how to tap into this subliminal reservoir of creative thought to find a way through our problems. We can for example, before we sleep, deliberately ask for guidance in our dreams. As most of us, until we have practised it, fail to remember our dreams it is advisable to have a notepad and pencil handy by the bedside to record any dreams we are aware of when we wake during the night or as we wake in the morning. They need to be noted down right then because they fade so quickly that by the time you have got downstairs to make a cup of coffee you will have forgotten them.

Different books have different advice about how best to understand what you have dreamt. Personally, I never got much out of any material that claimed to give me standard interpretations of dream symbols. Our imagery is too personal for that to work most of the time.

I found two approaches useful, the second more than the first.

Calvin Hall recommended recording sequences of dreams and looking for the meaning in the sequence rather than in any one dream. That is probably good advice but not very practical, though I did manage to keep a detailed dream diary for about a year, recording the dreams on filing cards. In the end though I tended to just look at one of the more striking and significant dreams and ignored the rest.

This caused me to abandon Hall’s method. I took an immediate liking to Ann Faraday’s approach once I found her book The Dream Game in 1977. I still have my very battered copy of her book in the Penguin Edition.

There are two stages to her method. The first is uncontentious for the most part, once you accept the importance of dreams. Stage 1 focuses on how to record your dreams. Stage 2 is concerned with how to understand what they mean for us as the dreamer. We are a long way from System 1 and a fair distance from undiluted System 2 already.

Stage 1 – Catching the Dream

There are nine elements to capturing what you need to hold on to about a dream. This is a brutally simplified summary (pages 48-54):

1. Have the means to record your dreams within easy reach at night;
2. Date it in advance;
3. Prime yourself to dream by suggestion or prayer;
4. Don’t delay. Record every dream as soon as you wake;
5. Don’t dismiss a dream as too trivial to record;
6. Record it as fully as possible;
7. Enthusiasts should invite the next dream before going back to sleep!
8. Transcribe your dream the following day; and
9. Relate the dream to the events of the day before or that period of time (this does not mean that it is only an echo of them).

Stage 2 – Decoding the Dream

Much of the rest of the book concerns how to decode the dream. Rather than simply regurgitating what she describes, which can best be experienced and understood by reading her book, I thought it would be more interesting and helpful to share the approach to dreams I came to rely on during a difficult period of transition in my own life. Much but not all of it came from her approach. At the core is the belief that dreams are not couched in some esoteric and deliberately mysterious language of symbols. We may think we don’t understand images very well, but this may simply be an easily remedied mistaken assumption (The Dream Game – page 62):

When the dreaming mind expresses itself in movie terms, cutting out all the “as ifs” and showing us literally crossing roads and bridges when we are facing major life decisions, or literally being devoured when we feel “eaten up” by something, it is using the most fundamental of all languages, shared by men and women of every age and race.

a. Transcribing the Dream

After I recorded a dream, when I was transcribing it to work on I would write it in the present tense. ‘I am sitting in my living room. The radio is on. Even so I hear the sound of movement from the kitchen through the open door. I turn and look and to my horror I see a large and shambling figure walking out of the full length fridge-freezer and turning to come towards me.’ And so on.

b. Noting the Possibly Related Event(s)

I would note at the bottom of the transcript the ‘day residue’ and any other previous or pending events that might have triggered or influenced the dream. I found that dreams are not just sensitive to what has happened the day before but also to what I am aware has recently happened or is going to happen, like a recent trip or a forthcoming job interview. Even the events of a week earlier can leave traces in a dream. It is all a question of whether their meaning is still alive in the mind in some way.

I would then spend a little time deciding whether simple implications of the ‘day residue’ probably exhausted the dream’s meaning, or whether there were other resonances. For example, the electric shock from the record player arm seemed to be the main point of the dream. It was a simple warning. I fixed the earth wire. There was nothing else to think about. However, even if my fridge had needed fixing, the figure stepping out of it was clearly not reducible to a loose wire somewhere, except possibly in my head.

c. Giving the Dream a Title

I followed the advice to do this even though it was inconsistently effective. Sometimes I was right about the key theme and caught it in the title I created. Sometimes, though, I was hopelessly off the mark. When it was close it helped: when it was wrong it could slow down the process of arriving at a true understanding of the dream.

We have reached a point in the process where the basic but all-important spade work has been done. We have the raw material. Now we must find a way of decoding the imagery to decipher what the dream might mean. That, I’m afraid, must wait till next time, as must how this all sheds light on the limitations of System 1 and System 2 as models of all we have and on how this package might help Jack stop swinging on his pendulum of indecisiveness.

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