KASTRUP AND SHELDRAKE ON THE COSMIC MIND

[ScottRoberts]

Scott,
If you look at the comments below your essay, you will see that I read it and enjoyed it at the time. But I now think that “final participation” is a promissory dream. Even if it’s not, I choose what I perceive or currently experience over what I’m sometimes asked to believe. For instance, I perceive that Mars is a dead world, so if I’m asked to believe that it’s the Buddha’s new home, I am sceptical, even if Mars has incorporeal planes of existence (which I cannot perceive). But if you can perceive them, or believe in them with the promise of one day perceiving them, then OK: perhaps that means you’re more evolved than me. Still, in my defence, I do reject the label of "naive dualist".

Just to clarify, "naive" here just means how we perceive and think about things before we philosophize about them. So I call myself a "naive dualist" because I perceive rivers and rocks as mindless, while I perceive people and animals as engaging in mindful activity. It is only after the philosophical effort of adopting idealism that I can claim that rivers and rocks are the appearance of mindful activity. But that doesn't change the fact that I still don't perceive that mindful activity.

Regardless of what one thinks of Final Participation, there is the evidence that 3000 years ago, people did perceive that mindful activity, yet we don't. Which is to say that we have evolved from being original participators to having no conscious participation in our perceptions of the physical world. Yet we have subconscious participation. That is, we engage in subconscious mental activity to perceive, say, a tree. Without that, we would only perceive disconnected color splotches. What all this means is that if idealism is true, then we should be perceiving nothing but mindful activity. But we don't. We are not perceiving reality as it is. The name I give to this state is "insanity", although one could give less harsh terms to it, like "Maya". But whatever one calls it, I think it indicates that we need fixing. (Note: this does not mean that the original participators, who were naive idealists, were sane. Just not insane in the way we are.)

[Ben Iscatus]

Interestingly, Scott, A Course in Miracles thinks the world of Maya is insane too., because it sees the idea of spiritual separation (in effect, dissociation) as ridiculous.

Whilst what you say about mindful activity may apply to a tree, I don't so easily see how we might say this about a rock. A rock is static; it seems to us like an idea that has been abandoned. Now of course it's possible to place a rock with an interesting shape, colour or crystalline formation on an altar and worship it as a representation of a god or a devil, as a naive idealist might. And consider a skeleton, once supporting a living breathing being; now literally inanimate, at best a memory of life. How would you raise that from the dead? Would you want us to resurrect it with scary voodoo? Presumably not - again, that was activity for the naive idealists. But how might 'final participation' see these "separate" nominal forms? The only way I can think of is that they are all elements or properties or ideas emanating from the Cosmic Mind and participating in that Mind's dream. So 'final participation' would only be possible for the Cosmic Mind itself, when it understands its own dreamstuff. Dissociated life is there to help in that process - but I would not expect dissociated lifeforms themselves to ever be omniperspectival whilst 'in the flesh'.

[Lou Gold]

Scott,
If you look at the comments below your essay, you will see that I read it and enjoyed it at the time. But I now think that “final participation” is a promissory dream. Even if it’s not, I choose what I perceive or currently experience over what I’m sometimes asked to believe. For instance, I perceive that Mars is a dead world, so if I’m asked to believe that it’s the Buddha’s new home, I am sceptical, even if Mars has incorporeal planes of existence (which I cannot perceive). But if you can perceive them, or believe in them with the promise of one day perceiving them, then OK: perhaps that means you’re more evolved than me. Still, in my defence, I do reject the label of "naive dualist".

Just to clarify, "naive" here just means how we perceive and think about things before we philosophize about them. So I call myself a "naive dualist" because I perceive rivers and rocks as mindless, while I perceive people and animals as engaging in mindful activity. It is only after the philosophical effort of adopting idealism that I can claim that rivers and rocks are the appearance of mindful activity. But that doesn't change the fact that I still don't perceive that mindful activity.

Regardless of what one thinks of Final Participation, there is the evidence that 3000 years ago, people did perceive that mindful activity, yet we don't. Which is to say that we have evolved from being original participators to having no conscious participation in our perceptions of the physical world. Yet we have subconscious participation. That is, we engage in subconscious mental activity to perceive, say, a tree. Without that, we would only perceive disconnected color splotches. What all this means is that if idealism is true, then we should be perceiving nothing but mindful activity. But we don't. We are not perceiving reality as it is. The name I give to this state is "insanity", although one could give less harsh terms to it, like "Maya". But whatever one calls it, I think it indicates that we need fixing. (Note: this does not mean that the original participators, who were naive idealists, were sane. Just not insane in the way we are.)

Scott,

This seems as a very useful clarification. Thank you.

Would you also think that the individual 'me' of different types of 'insanity' might usefully mix en route toward a species level collective 'we' in an ongoing process? How would you apply your perspective to this encounter between a modern Canadian trauma expert and a group of modern Amazonian shamans? (Please check out this brief 12 min video.)

[ScottRoberts]

Interestingly, Scott, A Course in Miracles thinks the world of Maya is insane too., because it sees the idea of spiritual separation (in effect, dissociation) as ridiculous.

Whilst what you say about mindful activity may apply to a tree, I don't so easily see how we might say this about a rock. A rock is static; it seems to us like an idea that has been abandoned.

First off, in my naive dualist state, I do not at all perceive a rock as "an idea that has been abandoned". I just perceive it as mindless, mineral stuff.

Anyway, there seems to be some confusion here. There is the mindful activity that (as an idealist) I assume is the source of trees and rocks. But that is theoretical, at least on my part. Then there is the mindful activity going on in my subconscious that lets me see a tree or a rock, rather than just (as James called it) "blooming, buzzing confusion" -- disconnected color splotches. I am connecting those color splotches with concepts. This latter mindful activity is Final Participation. That is, my inner mindful activity is participating in the mindful activity that is the source of the tree. Without it, I couldn't have perceived the tree. But since it is subconscious, I am not aware of the tree's mental source. With original participation, people were, but perceived it, as Barfield put it, "on the other side" of the tree. Which all means if we are to cure ourselves of the insanity of naive dualism, we have to make that subconscious activity conscious.

[ScottRoberts]

This seems as a very useful clarification. Thank you.

Would you also think that the individual 'me' of different types of 'insanity' might usefully mix en route toward a species level collective 'we' in an ongoing process?

Offhand, I'd say no. Why would one want to mix insanity types? In any case, we are still a ways from being individually free, and I would think we need to finish that project before going for a collective 'we'.

How would you apply your perspective to this encounter between a modern Canadian trauma expert and a group of modern Amazonian shamans? (Please check out this brief 12 min video.)

I wouldn't apply it. I have little interest in what they are going on about.

[Lou Gold]

This seems as a very useful clarification. Thank you.

Would you also think that the individual 'me' of different types of 'insanity' might usefully mix en route toward a species level collective 'we' in an ongoing process?

Offhand, I'd say no. Why would one want to mix insanity types? In any case, we are still a ways from being individually free, and I would think we need to finish that project before going for a collective 'we'.

How would you apply your perspective to this encounter between a modern Canadian trauma expert and a group of modern Amazonian shamans? (Please check out this brief 12 min video.)

I wouldn't apply it. I have little interest in what they are going on about.

Scott,

Thanks for checking it out. All of the best to you.

[AshvinP]

Interestingly, Scott, A Course in Miracles thinks the world of Maya is insane too., because it sees the idea of spiritual separation (in effect, dissociation) as ridiculous.

Whilst what you say about mindful activity may apply to a tree, I don't so easily see how we might say this about a rock. A rock is static; it seems to us like an idea that has been abandoned. Now of course it's possible to place a rock with an interesting shape, colour or crystalline formation on an altar and worship it as a representation of a god or a devil, as a naive idealist might. And consider a skeleton, once supporting a living breathing being; now literally inanimate, at best a memory of life. How would you raise that from the dead? Would you want us to resurrect it with scary voodoo? Presumably not - again, that was activity for the naive idealists. But how might 'final participation' see these "separate" nominal forms? The only way I can think of is that they are all elements or properties or ideas emanating from the Cosmic Mind and participating in that Mind's dream. So 'final participation' would only be possible for the Cosmic Mind itself, when it understands its own dreamstuff. Dissociated life is there to help in that process - but I would not expect dissociated lifeforms themselves to ever be omniperspectival whilst 'in the flesh'.

Ben,

Do you allow for the possibility, which can be investigated by healthy reasoning, that ancient cultures had an altogether different mode of consciousness? In other words, they were not looking at rocks like we do, as fragmented units that are entirely self-contained, and then after a process of ratiocination decided, 'Hey let's treat this fragmented unit as a symbol for a deity', like some new age people might do. For simplicity's sake, let's say they understood rocks as we now perceive a completely formed skeleton - the mineral kingdom was perceived as the skeletal system of the Earth Soul-Spirit. In other words, there could be no question that the mineral kingdom reflected intentional design, any more than we would question a skeleton in a museum as being a random accident or somehow mindlessly evolved.

This comparison is wanting because it still treats the mode of consciousness the same. Again for simplicity's sake, we could say they perceived the World in what we now experience as a dreaming state, except a dreaming state that was experienced as much more objectively real and concrete. If all we knew of sensory qualities was the dream state, we wouldn't treat it as "subjective fantasy" like we do when we have differentiated into the waking state of cognition. So the question is, do you even allow for this as a reasoned possibility that might have a drastic influence on how we understand our own current stage of cognition-perception?

[AshvinP]

Ben,

Do you allow for the possibility, which can be investigated by healthy reasoning, that ancient cultures had an altogether different mode of consciousness? In other words, they were not looking at rocks like we do, as fragmented units that are entirely self-contained, and then after a process of ratiocination decided, 'Hey let's treat this fragmented unit as a symbol for a deity', like some new age people might do. For simplicity's sake, let's say they understood rocks as we now perceive a completely formed skeleton - the mineral kingdom was perceived as the skeletal system of the Earth Soul-Spirit. In other words, there could be no question that the mineral kingdom reflected intentional design, any more than we would question a skeleton in a museum as being a random accident or somehow mindlessly evolved.

This comparison is wanting because it still treats the mode of consciousness the same. Again for simplicity's sake, we could say they perceived the World in what we now experience as a dreaming state, except a dreaming state that was experienced as much more objectively real and concrete. If all we knew of sensory qualities was the dream state, we wouldn't treat it as "subjective fantasy" like we do when we have differentiated into the waking state of cognition. So the question is, do you even allow for this as a reasoned possibility that might have a drastic influence on how we understand our own current stage of cognition-perception?

To supplement the above with a quote from someone who studied these things in an empirical and detailed way, by visiting indigenous people who still retained something of the old mode of 'original participation'

(Lou, you may also appreciate this if you don't get too caught up on the term "primitive man" ):

Primitive Man is unpsychological. Psychic happenings take place outside him in an objective way. Even the things he dreams about seem to him real; that is his only reason for paying attention to dreams... God now speaks in dreams to the British, and not to the medicine-man of the Elgonyi, he told me, because it is the British who have the power. Dream activity had emigrated. Occasionally the souls of the natives emigrate, and the medicine-man catches them in cages as if they were birds; or strange souls immigrate and cause diseases.

This projection of psychic happenings naturally gives rise to relations between men and men, or between men and animals or things, that to us are inconceivable. A white man shoots a crocodile. At once a crowd of people come running from the nearest village and excitedly demand compensation. They explain that the crocodile was a certain old woman in their village who had died at the moment when the shot was fired. The crocodile was obviously her bush-soul. Another man shot a leopard that was lying in wait for his cattle. Just then a woman died in a neighboring village. She and the leopard were one and the same.

Levy-Bruhl has coined the expression participation mystique for these curious relationships. It seems to me that the word "mystical" is not well chosen. Primitive man does not see anything mystical in these matters, but considers them perfectly natural. It is only we who find anything strange about them, and the reason is that we seem to know nothing about such psychic phenomenon. In reality, however, they occur to us too, but we give them more civilized forms of expression. In daily life it happens all the time that we presume that the psychic processes of other people are the same as ours. We suppose that what is pleasing or desirable to us is the same to others, and that what seems bad to us must also seem bad to them.
...
Equality before the law still represents a great human achievement; it has not yet been superseded. And we still attribute to "the other fellow" all the evil and inferior qualities that we do not like to recognize in ourselves. That is why we have to criticize and attack him. What happens in such a case, however, is that an inferior "soul" emigrates from one person to another. The world is still full of bêtes noirés and of scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves.
...
The simple truth is that primitive man is somewhat more given to projection than we because of the undifferentiated state of his mind and his consequent inability to criticize himself. Everything to him is perfectly objective, and his language reflects this in a radical way... we often represent a person as a goose, a cow, a hen, a snake, an ox, or an ass. As uncomplimentary epithets these images are familiar to us all. But when primitive man attributes a bush-soul to a person, the poison of the moral verdict is absent. Archaic man is too naturalistic for that; he is too much impressed by things as they are to pass judgment readily...

The theme of bush-soul, which seems so strange when we meet with it in primitive societies, has become with us, like so much else, a mere figure of speech. If we take our metaphors in a concrete way we return to a primitive point of view... since all unconscious psychic life is concrete and objective for archaic man, he supposed that a person describable as a leopard has the soul of a leopard. If the concretizing goes further, he assumes that such a soul lives in the bush in the form of a real leopard.

These identifications, brought about by the projection of psychic happenings, create a world in which man is contained not only physically, but psychically as well. To a certain extent he coalesces with it...

In the primitive world everything has psychic qualities. Everything is endowed with the elements of man's psyche - or let us say, of the human psyche, of the collective unconscious, for there is as yet no individual psychic life.

- Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)

[Ben Iscatus]

Ashvin said: So the question is, do you even allow for this as a reasoned possibility that might have a drastic influence on how we understand our own current stage of cognition-perception?

I honestly don't know Ashvin, but my gut instinct is not. If the shaman said, "this rock is linked to the soul of the tribe", the tribesfolk believed it, just as folk here believed the shaman Brian Cox when he said the Big Bang happened 13 billion years ago. Humans are pretty gullible - I mean plenty think that Trump was a more caring president than Obama. Cultures change, but our DNA is still our DNA. Meanwhile, if you are truly on the path to thoughtful understanding of noumena, can you see in a landscape more than an artist can? Do you see fractals and souls in it? That's the question! If so, and others see the same fractals and souls, I will gullibly concede that I am wrong . I just need reasonable evidence, that's all.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin said: So the question is, do you even allow for this as a reasoned possibility that might have a drastic influence on how we understand our own current stage of cognition-perception?

I honestly don't know Ashvin, but my gut instinct is not. If the shaman said, "this rock is linked to the soul of the tribe", the tribesfolk believed it, just as folk here believed the shaman Brian Cox when he said the Big Bang happened 13 billion years ago. Humans are pretty gullible - I mean plenty think that Trump was a more caring president than Obama. Cultures change, but our DNA is still our DNA. Meanwhile, if you are truly on the path to thoughtful understanding of noumena, can you see in a landscape more than an artist can? Do you see fractals and souls in it? That's the question! If so, and others see the same fractals and souls, I will gullibly concede that I am wrong . I just need reasonable evidence, that's all.

Ben,

Alright, so nothing anyone in the 20th century provided in the way of the systematic and empirical study of the evolution of consciousness has been 'reasonable evidence' for you to even take the first steps in exploring the inner gradient for yourself.

So do you think Jung, Levy-Bruhl, etc., mistakenly concluded those populations had a distinct mode of consciousness, which perceives psychic processes objectively in the natural world, when in reality those populations were simply perceiving rocks, plants, and animals like we do and intellectually matching them up with human souls? None of the people who studied these populations up close and personal could account for your explanation that they were all gullible and deluded by the tribe elders, who presumably were either lying or deluded themselves? Why are you so willing to throw out all this objective research to defend the materialistic assumption that DNA is what causes consciousness and its changes? (btw, even recent secular research shows DNA is much more plastic and responsive to environmental conditions than previously assumed).

Of course, none of us would be here and inspired to share these ideas for months and years if our meaningful experience of the perceptual flow was not changing in significant ways, and more importantly, we had a clear intuitive sense of why it was changing and how it could continue to change through our efforts. This can't be 'proven' to others who refuse the effort any more than a mathematical thinker can prove he perceives deeper meaning in algebra equations than the person who only knows arithmetic, or the trained musician can prove he perceives deeper meaning in the wood, strings, keys, etc. of musical instruments than the person who has never learned the scales. And if think about it, there is almost nothing of significance in our lives that we prove to ourselves in some rigid way before engaging in it. Did you prove there would be deeper meaning to your marriage beforehand, or to having kids, or starting a new job or business? Could someone have proved to you that you would resonate more deeply with your partner's soul life before you even took the first step in the relationship?

We can see such a demand for rigid proof actually divests life of its living element and renders it nothing more than cold calculation. But for some reason we expect exploration of the deepest spiritual mysteries to be different. "Just show me a spoon coming out of Saturn and then I might believe." But no one is asking for your belief or wants to prove these ideas to you, even if we could, because that would rob you of spiritual life and freedom. We are simply giving you hints in which direction to look so you can freely experience the ever-deepening layers of meaning in the perceptual flow for yourself, to which no other experience in life can compare. It would be an unspeakable travesty for either the Gods or us 'mere mortals' to rob you or anyone else of that experience.