The Mental Fabric

 

The Mental Fabric

by Craig Willms

There is no there there. 

What does that even mean? We hear this, or some form of it all the time. It simply means there is nothing to it - whatever 'it' is. An empty suit so to speak. We like to think that we can put everything in its box, sorting out what is and what is not, what is real and what is fantasy. The key to the previous sentence is the word think. We think, yes, but what is that? Thinking is mental, it's immaterial, there's nothing to it. Now we've come full circle. 

Clearly, we exist in material form. It's also obvious we exist in thought, possessing an immaterial mental presence that is tied to our bodies. Fortunately, our lizard brain autonomically keeps our life-sustaining physical processes going, no thinking needed. Our bodies have inputs and outputs all of which can be measured, that is all except our mental output. Our thoughts are invisible, silent, odorless, tasteless and tactless. So, what are they? Spent energy? Where do our thoughts go if that's the case? It's a good question.

We all live a material life. We also live an inner life. As unlikely as it would seem we can be materially poor, our lives tough and miserable, while at the same time our inner lives are rich and fulfilling. It is possible, it does happen. Certainly, the opposite is true.

This dichotomy between our minds and bodies has been the source of speculation and disagreement since the beginning of time. The greatest minds to have ever lived have wrestled with it and yet we still have no definitive answers. Once materialism became the dominant tenet of existence the interest in the mind/body relationship has waxed and waned but has never been declared solved and dismissed. Recent years has seen a resurgence of interest in this so-called ultimate question. The advent of AI technology has ramped up the interest to new levels. Will one day we declare machines alive, conscious and capable of self reflection? Who can tell... 

It's fun to speculate, and as long as you do not commit the ultimate sin of bringing God into the discussion, it can be illuminating. 

We humans don't usually consider the universe as a whole when we contemplate our personal existence. The physical universe is so large, potentially endless, that we can't really wrap our minds around it. Yet we are part of the universe and to whatever degree we consider our place in it we need to understand that without us to ponder these questions the universe may not exist at all. That's a difficult concept to comprehend at any level. Interestingly enough we don't consider the endless potential of our mentation in the same way. Are the thoughts we have any less real than the star dust we are made of? I don't think so.

We accept the fabric of spacetime and our presence in it, but what about the mental fabric of the universe? Are we not present in our own minds? Since each of us is connected to all of existence at a physical level simply by being, why wouldn't we consider that we are all connected at a mental level? I contend we are. 

What if I tell you there is a part of your mind that is humanity's and not solely yours alone. Call it the impersonal will. Consider it an aspect of your mental being that does not care what you think, what you want, or care one wit about you or anyone else. It is that aspect of you that does things that are not necessarily in your best interest, the reason you occasionally say things like "I don't know why I did that, it's just not like me". We make connections with others in an instant without our even thinking about it. The impersonal will is like a silent partner you don't recognize. It's the part of us that joins the madness of crowds. Sports fans and rioters will understand this. It's the reason we can fall prey to the rhetoric of a wannabe dictator, the reason we can fall prey to seduction of all kinds. 

The universe, it has been said treats all of creation with pitiless indifference. It's absolutely true, it is a cruel existence that is essentially endless suffering and pain. If we were simply instinctual biological creatures, we would not consider our own suffering let alone the suffering of another, we'd exist and then we'd die. But we do acknowledge suffering in ourselves and others. We rise above the impersonal will; we do the necessary to alleviate pain and suffering where we can. Therein is the difference we make by the power of our will, the personal will we impose on our beings. 

Where does the personal will come from? If it isn't material, if it isn't physical, does it really exist? The empathy we feel for ourselves, and others isn't something that can be quantified or measured scientifically, does that mean it isn't real? Or is it actually what makes us truly human? I pick the latter.

The impersonal will is something we don't control. We can only exert influence through thought and contemplation. We have to do this; we would be crushed by it if we let it run us. It is a force of nature; it can be as merciless as mother nature in a rage. People who don't try to mitigate the impersonal will, being too meek or indifferent to the wake it creates, can be dangerous, even deadly. Others harness the impersonal will for their own benefit by bringing it to the surface and triggering it in others. When we say "so and so pushes my buttons" it's a recognition of this phenomena without real understanding. We've all been there. 

Childhood is all about learning to live with the impersonal will. Spend enough time with an infant through early childhood until the age of reason, and you'll actually see this battle of the wills develop. This skill isn't something we have innately, we learn it. 

We all know exceptional people and we know people that seem to fail at everything. They both face struggles, but what do they really, deep down struggle with? We say about the failure "he's his own worst enemy". We say about the successful guy "he's a force of nature, strong willed!" Just picture the image of little beings perched on each of your shoulders whispering in your ears... One says, "just do it, you know you want to" while the other says "it's dangerous and someone could get hurt". One of these imps is portrayed as the devil, uncaring of any consequence, and the other an angel, with your best interest at heart. This concept illustrates the battle of the wills in simple terms, it is for all intents and purposes the epic battle between good and evil.

This dual nature we all possess sits at the basis of all our human stories. This dance, this battle we must all face, defines us. We don't know it intuitively; we rarely recognize its significance, yet it influences every decision we make. How do we know which of these natures is right, which one should we listen to? Humanity has been struggling with this since the beginning of time. It would seem we need some guidance, a teacher perhaps. 

Is it any wonder we conjured God? Of course not! But what is God really? Where is God? What if God is that part of our will that rejects the cold indifference of spacetime and brings compassion and empathy to the suffering. The man who says he doesn't believe in God doesn't realize that "God" is in him whenever he acts like a decent person or helps out when asked. God is right there, in him. We don't have to get hung up on religion to understand this. God is there when a new mother welcomes her baby, ready to sacrifice everything for it. God is there at the accident scene in the actions of the paramedic and then again at the hospital in the emergency room where doctors and nurses save lives. God is there in the woman who drops off groceries at the food shelf. God is there in the teenager who comforts his friend who has just lost her grandma. God is at the lab in the scientist who is exploring a new treatment for disease. God is the hedge against the cold, cruel impersonal world. 

All these actions and millions more happen every day in every corner of the world. We may call it common decency, we may consider it simply doing what's right, but it is caring, compassion and empathy put into action. We are choosing to act Godly through the power of our will. We do this without conditions, without expectations of recompense. This is where God is. It doesn't have to be any harder than that. 

     

The Story

 The Story

by Craig Willms

 

The most compelling aspect of humanity through the ages is our love of stories and the very necessity of stories to define our existence. We appear to need stories to convey what is important, to educate and to know right from wrong. We individual humans will expire but our stories remain. The story is the thing.

Before there were books or movies, before the printed word there were spoken stories, the oral tradition. It was the way humans communicated ideas and concepts for the greater part of our existence. Our social hierarchies, our allies and enemies, our belief systems are to this day defined by our stories. Often, it's the only way to convey the social impact certain behaviors might have. The prefix we use, for example is most often followed by a story that exemplifies the lesson at hand. It's clearly one of the things that differentiates humans from other animals. Surely there are story tellers in the animal kingdom, but nothing that approaches the human propensity to tell and rely upon stories. 

Any parent can attest to the hunger little humans have for stories. From the time a child can process the language they want to hear stories, sometimes the same ones over and over. Anyone who has spent time reading to a child before bed knows how much children love to hear stories - read me another story! Yes, the child might be fighting sleep, or wishing to extend that close and personal one on one time with Mom or Dad, but the story is the thing that cements the joy they feel. The stories are helping to build the imagination of the young mind.

The phenomenon of story time only increases from there. Modern man thrives on stories, both the fictional and the true. The absolute truth of the story is less important than the lesson or idea being conveyed. Myths, legends and fables are powerful tools for passing cultural cohesion from one generation to the next. The Bible is a collection of stories that provide a narrative for believers. Each religion around the world uses stories to present its beliefs. These stories are powerful and motivating.  As well, we moderns love our movies, TV shows and novels. Little is as powerful as an emotional scene in which we have been drawn in by the story. In fact, we tell each other stories every day. We build our futures by the stories we tell ourselves and others. Almost every important concept of the human condition comes out of our story telling tradition. World wars and blood feuds all have started from the stories that were told and retold. Feuds lasting for decades, spanning multiple generations over actions taken by people long dead. Quite often the hatred and continuing violence far exceed the initial act. The stories get embellished by repeated telling's until the actual reason for the feud is long forgotten. 

All this leads to the realization that we are a story above all else. Everyone in and of themselves is but a story, some are easily forgotten, some become legend. Interesting stories are told and retold. You can liken your life to an actor embodied in a role, and what is an actor doing but acting out a story. Flesh and blood comes and goes, the story is all that remains. If we consider that all of matter has a shelf life and that each type of matter has its own, we come to a realization that nothing lasts forever. The stars, planets, mountains, rivers, rocks and trees all have a lifespan. Some last billions of years, some last thousands and some hundreds. We, humans, last about 80 years or so. Our bodies eventually transform into dust and then there is nothing. But is that true?

The story remains. 

What is Real?

 What is Real?

by Craig Willms

It seems like a strange question. Obviously when we open our eyes and look out at the world around us, we see reality, you know, the real world, right? Well maybe. Our reality in a physical sense is limited by what our five senses can convey to our conscious mind. Our bodies with our built-in senses are essentially measuring devices we use to survey the physical world. We know other animals have senses we don't possess or like our cats and dogs have heightened senses that work in ways we can't conceive. How the world looks to them would be completely alien to us. Clearly, we experience only a fragment of reality.

There are a thousand of theories and philosophies as to nature of reality, it's not a novel subject at all. Until the enlightenment era all theories and philosophies were equally valid. Through the pursuit of knowledge of how the physical world works some dangerous and exploitative notions were put down. Welcome to logic and reason. Materialism rose up and soon dominated the world. This was good in countless ways, obviously. So, what's the problem? 

Well, just this, materialism has no space for the metaphysical, for spiritualism. It was spiritual notions that provided the cohesion and belonging, the sense of purpose and the promise of salvation among other things that human societies had always been built around. The belief in a realm beyond the physical world where God(s) dwells is ancient, cross cultural and worldwide. As the materialist mindset marched on it pushed out any perceived need for this higher plane. I call it throwing the baby out with the bathwater syndrome. 

There are many things scientism can't explain and likely never will in a purely physical sense. Experience is most often cited. What is the scientific formula or mathematical equation for what it's like to taste chocolate, to feel the cool breeze of the ocean air? Things like love, courage, honesty, joy, intuition and integrity which are in fact mere words, but mean something so real they can't be denied. They cannot be reduced to a formula or equation. This suggests that there is something beyond the hard physical world. There is a mental realm where our consciousness and our inner life exist separate from the physical world. There seems to be a connectedness that stretches out from every living thing. Almost all people have had odd sensations, gut feelings, inexplicable connections and surreal occurrences that have shocked them or left them puzzled. The point is, it does not seem out of the realm of possibilities that a universal shared domain exists if you will. 

Therefore, you have a version of reality that allows for both the physical and the mental/spiritual. Call it dualism. This concept is simple enough to wrap the mind around as there seems to be evidence that both the physical world and a mental/spiritual world do exist. Dualism is mind and matter living in harmony. Mind, which is information and experience at its root, and matter, which is the domain where existence is physical, both seem quite real.

There's also an ancient philosophy that says all reality is beyond of the realm of the physical world, only the mind at large exists. It's called idealism. It is rooted in the idea that ultimate reality lies in a realm that transcends phenomena, that the essential nature of reality lies in consciousness. Only mental states are knowable. This type of belief has ancient roots across cultures, across time. It has been diluted by the success of materialism. It's now being re-examined as the fruits of strict materialism are found to be wanting. 

A strict materialist philosophy ultimately leads to nihilism and despair. This notion may be disputed by logic and reason types, particularly those of strong will and above average intelligence. Still, I believe the evidence of decay in the greater human spirit is overwhelming. The modern world breeds social disfunction and personal loneliness, and the materialist mindset is at the heart of it. As materialism gives us more and more material wealth and extended lifetimes among other things, human beings are less happy, less fulfilled, more stressed and suffer suicidal despair like never before. What changed? What hasn't? Brush away the debris of modernity, and underneath it all we'd see that at the same time the clarity of materialism was celebrated an ugly, tireless degradation of spirituality and faith had been unleashed from all corners. Thus, the throwing the baby out with the bathwater... 

All this begs the question: is reality what we 'see', touch and measure or is it what we think, feel and perceive mentally - or both? No one knows, hence this battle of ideas. The idealist believes that mind (consciousness) is all there is, and the materialist believes consciousness is merely an illusion. 

There are unanswerable questions, eternal questions, questions of meaning, questions we've all wrestled with in our own minds. To the materialist the mind is contained within the individual physical brain and extinguishes upon death. It's there one minute and gone the next. Where did it go? Does it just disappear? This denies the law of conservation of energy. Another unanswerable question. The mystery of death, I guess.

It is our perceived wants and needs, desires and fears, likes and dislikes that are not easily explained by the materialist simple black and white view of a purely physical reality. The materialist will not even consider the question of idealism's premise. Either consciousness is an illusion or physicalism/materialism is false, or both are true as dualism suggests. I myself do not have enough philosophical chops to make a determination, but I'm open to possibilities.

There's enough evidence that shows us that we are connected to each other and all of nature by something outside our physical selves. Perhaps it is God. Or something so base as to be indistinguishable from God. It has been at the heart of all religions and has been a source of our moral codes for millennia. It shouldn't be smugly dismissed by so-called experts and university students. So, to ask the question 'what is real' is to ask the ultimate question. 

Meaning:

 

Meaning: 

by Craig Willms

 

What is meaning? Why do we search for meaning? When do we know something has meaning? 

 Meaning, it's there in one of the eternal questions; what is the meaning of life? It's not an easy thing to answer, but answer it we must, every day.

Webster's dictionary has three definitions for meaning: 1) the thing one intends to convey especially by language, 2) something meant or intended, 3) significant quality. There, that clears it up nicely, don't you think? Clear as mud.

Meaning seems to guide us at the most basic level. The need for our lives to have meaning defies a simple explanation. Like breathing, we hardly take time to think about it in any 'meaningful' way, we ignore it most of the time. Most of us want our life, our work, our relationships to mean something, but it becomes abstract background noise day in and day out. It's still important even when we shove it into the back of our minds. When we perceive life as meaningless it can affect us in serious and profound ways. In the face of meaninglessness people can become depressed, despondent or dangerously cynical.

Curiously, over time what we believe is meaningful fades and becomes no longer meaningful, something else replaces it. We don't even ask why, it just happens. Does that make us shallow? Or is it just the way it's supposed to be? I suspect the need for meaning is a coping mechanism, a very necessary one.

By and large we don't know why we are here, it's a question that seems pointless to consider, we just are, and we need to carry on. We integrate into the world we find ourselves in, and we try to cope with whatever life throws at us. What would be the point to seeking meaning in the day-to-day machinations of living? Yet we do, and we need to, or the world would fall apart around us. Those who fail at this end up discarded in prisons or on the street and act as reminders to the rest of us why meaning is important.

Most people find an equilibrium in their environment, not really thinking in terms of meaning except those times when confronted by hard choices. The rest of the time we distract ourselves with our jobs, family obligations, busywork or mindless activities, just passing the time. Searching for meaning all the time would be exhausting.

Certain people take the question of meaning as central and devote themselves to that which is outside of themselves. They tend toward serving others and often busy themselves with introspection, questioning their own motives when they feel they are falling short. Others don't, and almost never entertain any deep philosophical thoughts like the meaning of meaning, considering it utterly pointless. They are practical people, getting on with business of living, untortured by their own apathy. The world needs both kinds. I think we all occupy both these positions in some ratio over the course of our lives. It's important to understand that not everything means something, living life should outweigh an endless search for meaning. 

If and when we settle into a contemplative state, we might ask ourselves what does it all mean? What should we be doing? For me knowing that my death is far, far closer than my birth I tend to dwell on these thoughts from time to time. As it goes for me, later in life, retired from my "day job" I have time now to ponder these sorts of things. It can be unsettling to say the least. I will think of my mother who is already gone and my wife and children who will be left behind when I'm gone, and I wonder what did it all mean? 

Life will go on without me, this is a universal truth. In this world I'll be just a fading memory in the minds of those left behind. How quickly we disappear. For the millions and billions of people who came before us, what of them? The memories of them and everyone they knew are gone. Were their lives meaningless? What about all the children who died young, or the ones never born. Were their lives also meaningless? It doesn't seem possible. The meaning of our lives, our purpose, our ultimate contribution seems to me to be shrouded in mystery, and death an absolute finality, but is it? Is there transcendence for the mind and soul once the body dies? We really won't know until it happens. Thanks Captain Obvious...

I can't find a way to accept that once the lights go out that's it, we just cease to exist in any form. Entire cultures and religions for millennia have been premised on the foundation of a continued existence beyond the grave. Mankind clings to it. 

I cling to it. 

        

Time

Time

by Craig Willms

One of the greatest songs I know is a number called "Time" by Pink Floyd. A cut from their classic album Dark Side of the Moon. Funny, these guys were young men when they wrote it, what did they know about the passing of time? Well, they sensed where things were going, and they got it right. When I read through the lyrics now, 50 years after they were penned, they ring true to me, now more than ever.

Time by Pink Floyd/Gilmour and Wright

    Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day

Fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way.

Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town

Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

    Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.

And you are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.

And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

     Ahhhh...

    (Oooh ahhhh)

    So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking

Racing around to come up behind you again.

The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older

Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

    Every year is getting shorter; never seem to find the time.

Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines.

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way

The time is gone, the song is over

Thought I'd something more to say.

The two lines that always jumped out at me were...The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older - and... Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way - These lyrics have so much meaning and wisdom in their simplicity.  

The sun is the same in a relative way... Imagine a man looking up at the sun 1000 years ago. He sees the sun exactly as you do. He feels the warmth, and the pressure of the light and accurately predicts where the sun will be a few hours from now and where it will be tomorrow morning. His sun is consistent. As is yours. It's the same. Some things are timeless. 

Yet time marches on.

He wakes up one day and half his life has passed him by. What happened, or actually, how did this happen? This is something I think we can all relate to. Suddenly you realize after all your work, all your plodding along and all your caring about every minute detail of your life it's all seemingly for naught. You are no closer to understanding or fulfillment than you were as a child. Except now there is so much less time in front of you. 

Now that you're older you expected to have achieved a mature wisdom, and you have to a certain degree, but it's so small and incomplete. For some reason you think you're the only one who doesn't get it, but you're not alone. No one has this thing figured out. Innately we know it will never click for us; we are destined leave this world as blind as when we came into it. There is acceptance, there is peace, but it's unsatisfying. So, you hang on in quiet desperation, because that's what people do. Then you die.

Still, time marches on.

After we're gone life goes on, time marches on, relentlessly so. No one can stop it. Is there a lesson to be drawn, is there a point to all this? If there is, it's so personal, no one can adequately explain it to another. Short of just advising you to be aware, keep your eyes open and take it all in as best you can, there's nothing more to say...

to Love:

 

to Love:

by Craig Willms

What is our purpose as human beings? What is it we are supposed to do, who are we supposed to be?  Most people would say something like - to be a good person. Of course, that means little without context, still most people aren't going to have much more than that. It's not an easy question. An atheist or scientific materialist would likely scoff and declare that we have no purpose, being merely an accident of nature and all. I think instinctively we know that's not the whole story, we know that we need something meaningful sustaining us, something higher than mere existence, without which our lives would be brutal and joyless, ideally, we need to love. 

When we consider that humans are only one of more than a million species to have roamed this earth, are we really set apart from all other life? We are clearly connected to all other living things by our very make up, we are all made of the same things, but are we humans somehow special? If we take a simple look around it becomes clear that we are different in both subtle and profound ways. Harnessing and taming nature being one major differentiator, but we also interact with each other in unique ways. Those of us who can see beyond the simplistic notion that we are just brainy animals driven by instinct can see that humanity has two natures, one being good and the other evil - each of us possess these natures.  This, I say, makes us different than other higher order animals we share the Earth with. A great white shark, a high functioning killing machine, cannot be considered good or evil, any more than a cottontail rabbit can. Can you say the same thing of the human being? No, no you can't. We can be saints and we can be devils. 

Taken as a given that evil is undesirable, destructive and deadly, what is the antidote to our innate evil? An enduring notion that has been present since the dawn of man is that love is the opposing force to evil. What is love? There is that moment when a child is born, when the mother holds the baby for the first time, the feeling she has, the look on her face witnessed by those present. That is a special kind of love borne out by her willingness to care for this helpless infant with every fiber of her being. Skeptics, themselves having been the beneficiary of this kind of love, dismiss it as a natural side effect of brain chemistry that all new mothers feel regardless of the species. Since we are physical beings, chemistry is part of it, of course. Again, it's not the whole story. We are more than just physical beings; we have a spiritual side, something that connects us with all of creation. Every human culture since the beginning of time has expressed a spirituality and given metaphysics a central role in their story. Who are we to just throw that away? We clearly seem to be doing just that in the modern materialistic world. If material meaninglessness is all there is, then who needs love? Well... You do.

It isn't being loved that gives our lives meaning. We can't force anyone to love us. But we have the ability regardless of all else to love. We have the capacity to love others whether they love us or not. It's the only thing we have control of in this life. To love something, to love someone, to love yourself is fulfillment, is success. 

Our human stories spanning tens of thousands of years repeat this theme in one way or another over and over. Even in the stories of evil personified, the antagonist usually has a back story of a love lost that has driven him to seek evil as revenge against the world or God himself. The righteous stories end with the evil one learning to love again and they all live happily ever after. Other stories end in disaster for the antagonist, or worse his victims.  

It isn't clear to me that the ability to love is innate, it needs to be demonstrated and developed, like all other properties of our psychological make-up. Unloved babies are overwhelmingly unable to love later on in life without tremendous intervention. 

Popular music seems to whitewash the culture with love songs, even silly love songs, songs we often dismiss as superficial. I'm not so sure they are. If for no other reason than they seek to instill optimism and the hope of love. They serve to reinforce a universal truth, reminding us of a message John, Paul, George and Ringo used to sing "All you need is love, love is all you need".

In the Moment

 

In the Moment

by  Craig Willms

 

All we have is now, live in the moment.

That's so easy to say, so easy to aspire to, so easy to declare as some kind of mystical truth. It's also completely meaningless - all the while being an absolute fact. Obviously, we live in the moment, literally constructing the past from our memory and the physical objects surrounding us, where the future is in fact our only destination. So, why even bring it up? The uneasy answer is that we should simply strive to live in the moment, whatever that means.

We do seem to spend an awful lot of time living for the future instead of just living. That's just a fact of life, and what other way is there? Sacrificing the now for a more stable future is part of what makes us human. Regardless of what we do for a living we are always busy setting up our future selves. Even when we were hunter gatherers, we did things to prepare for our future. When we were agrarian, we literally lived every day with an eye toward the future harvest. How is our workaday world that much different? When we were young and just getting started, we'd work all day so that we could sit around drinking and watching TV that night before going to bed so that we can get up and do it all over again. We had to eat, and we had to pay the rent. Only the very rich can leisure all day and night, or work on projects of their own fancy. Not many of us are that rich.

In a perfect world we'd be doing just what we want and nothing more, that which makes us happy and fulfilled. The all-magical government would provide for all our needs so we could write books, paint pictures or sip cosmos with a little umbrella on the beach. Can I stop now? There is no magical government, it's a fantasy. In the real world we have to work so we can eat. 

The point being we all have to do what we needs to be done to make ends meet. That often means toiling away at boring, rote work that we can't wait to be over. The ideal is that we get to do work that we actually enjoy. This is why we try to educate and train ourselves for the possibility of a good and interesting job. However, that only goes so far, eventually we tire of everything that is required. Labors of love are few and far between. So, we work and plan and dream of the times to come when we can do what we want. 

I myself was a daydreamer in my early years. I'd pass the time planning or thinking about things I wanted to accomplish, big and small. At one time I was a field service rep and drove hundreds and hundreds of miles a day. It was the kind of job that didn't require brain power, just attention. It left a lot of capacity for deep thinking. The day was measured in endless miles, each and every thought was about was the future, I never lived in the moment. Years went by and I accomplished very little of the things I dreamt about. Later I trained in corporate network security and spent 25 years delving deep into the minutiae of network protocols and design. There was no time for daydreaming. Most of the time we lived in the moment, moment to moment, battling network outages or investigating security matters. In the moment yes, but not necessarily living. It was work that needed to be done and it may have kept me from the poor house, but was any of it really living?

You'd like to think there's a fine line between living and really living, but it's not fine, it's invisible. We live, we give 'the moment' the attention it deserves. There's nothing wrong with trying to be present, to be fully present in the now. It's probably even advisable. We shouldn't be worried when we're not. There's nothing wrong with being a dreamer, looking to a brighter day to come with joyous anticipation. There are days when we are just putting in the time, not enjoying the moment simply because the moment has so little to offer. The trick is to know when to pay attention and let life soak in.

When people say things like live in the moment, they generally mean to be present in your own life. They're saying don't worry about things you can't control, and they usually mean well. My mother used to say don't wish your life away when we kids would complain about having to grow up before we could do certain things. She was telling us to enjoy the moment, because soon enough we'd be in the workaday world, and we'd pine for the fancy-free days of our youth. We, of course, let it in one ear and out the other. She was right, we now know. It was good advice, to strive to live in the moment, and live without regrets.

Stream of Consciousness

 Stream of Consciousness

by Craig Willms

Have you ever had to listen to somebody running a personal monologue, never pausing to reflect on anything they said while in effect saying nothing at all. It can be annoying, right, but it's also instructive. It's a demonstration of how our minds work. A stream of consciousness is exactly what our inner voice is doing much of the time. Granted our streaming inner thoughts are often incoherent words out of sequence, bouncing from one thing to the next without reaching conclusions. We talk to ourselves to work things out, to think. Whether we need to think within the confines of language or not we do assign words to our thoughts, thus, our inner-voice, our inner-dialogue. It begs the question who or what is this voice inside our heads? 

One of the funniest things about the cat and dog videos we watch on the Internet is when words are assigned as the inner voice of the animal as we watch their antics. Obviously, the words represent the thoughts we'd like to suppose they are thinking. Of course, animals don't use language like we do - that's what makes it funny. We know animals exist on instinct, but thoughtful reasoning is clearly present. We can watch them figure things out, there is obvious intelligence there. Our pets think. While they are not thinking in words there is self-awareness and possibly a conscious inner life not unlike our own. It only makes the hard problem of consciousness that much more mysterious.

What is the hard problem of consciousness? In scientific terms reductive explanations are available in principle for all other natural phenomena, but not for consciousness. This is the hard problem; it cannot be functionally analyzed. In practical terms the lack of explanation for what consciousness is leads us to consider that either we eliminate consciousness by denying that it even exists, or we add consciousness to our ontology as an unreduced feature of reality, like gravity, electromagnetism or the photon. I don't think we can just deny the existence of consciousness, the evidence that it is something real seems overwhelming. If we can't deny the existence of consciousness, we are left with only the mystery, and then we have to accept that we may never know or we are incapable of knowing. 

Setting aside the hard problem of consciousness and just accepting that consciousness exists, there are still questions that defy easy answers. So here we jump from the frying pan straight into the fire. Throughout history we've assigned personal morals, right and wrong as a function of our conscience. While conscience and consciousness are not the same thing, they fall under the same rubric. They both describe a functioning inner life that is seemingly independent of our physical properties. When someone does something egregious, something underhanded, or just mean we'd say, "have you no conscience". Or we say something like "in all good conscience I just couldn't do that to him". As if doing something like that would be a sin against not only the person but the cosmos itself. Here our conscious awareness is directed both inwardly and outwardly. By exclaiming what we couldn't do to another we're protecting not only the other person but ourselves and the universe itself. 

The moral aspect is only part of it. There are also the analytical awareness aspect and the call-to-action piece. All three are tied into the decision-making process. In any situation the mind analyzes, then decides if action is needed and finally applies a moral code, however superficial it may be, to the action or inaction. All this in a fraction of a fraction of a second, all due to the marvelous biological computer known as the brain. A brain that is only fully functioning when we are conscious. Could consciousness be a series of 'IF' 'THEN' and finally 'WHY' statements? Where humans have a vastly larger capacity in the 'WHY' database than our fellow earth-mates.

Ok, if we are merely code running on a biological machine then who wrote the code? Where did it come from? This gets into a raft of first cause arguments and down the rabbit hole we go. Is it possible the code just wrote itself? We just don't know...

Most people think, if they think about it at all, that consciousness is something over and above our physical being and not merely an illusion as the physicalists claim. Whereas the secular scientific community tells us that physicalism – the position that only physical things exist – is the most basic principle. They contend that consciousness emerges from the physical brain and only appears to offer us an inner life. Take the brain out and consciousness disappears. Is that necessarily so? That's like saying destroy the TV or the radio and the broadcast disappears. Is consciousness like a broadcast? Not necessarily, but that's the point, we don't really know what it is. The nature of consciousness is a question as old as humanity itself, and despite our massive leap in scientific knowledge it is still unanswered.

Science will go on without care toward the hard questions of consciousness. And those who ponder the true nature of consciousness will contend with one of humankind's greatest mysteries. Whether it's an illusory mechanism within the brain or something more we benefit from the chance at introspection and the ability to mentally wrestle with our own thoughts. 

I Had a Moment...or two

 

I Had a Moment... or two

by Craig Willms

All summer I had been careful to mow around a particular weed out in the backyard. Early on my eye caught what was the faintest splash of fuchsia in the center of this weed. Today I was out mowing again, the grass is finally growing since we'd had a few rare soakers lately. I was in a mood, irritated by something that had happened earlier that morning, I was out of sorts and generally pissy. Then I saw it...

The weed had grown, and the splash of color was now revealed. What I had assumed was a tiny flower was actually the plant itself slowly changing color. It was as if someone had sprinkled colored powder on it. It was beautiful. My mood brightened and I realized then that this plant and its transformation was a sign. This simple beauty wiped away my frustration and rotten attitude. I had had a moment.

This is what life is about, these moments. They are so few and far between these days or so it seems. When you're younger the cumulation of your entire life is compressed, slowly unfolding as time passes. Those rare moments aren't necessarily that rare and you gave them almost no attention. With time these moments are so spread out that you can miss the significance unless you pay attention. We live on a magical world, and we tend to take it for granted. I know it's just a weed, but it has meaning to me.

By the way, my daughter, an amateur horticulturalist, identified the weed as Purple Goosefoot, widely found in Mexico, I'm in Minnesota. What a treat!

So, a couple a weeks back I was watching the grandkids at my daughter's house. Me and the middle child, a girl, were out in the backyard. There was a patch of clover, and I was telling her that all clovers have three leaves. It was extremely rare to come across a four-leaf clover and it is considered good luck if you find one. 

She set about looking for one as I walked across the yard and sat in a chair in the shade. I no sooner sat down, and she was there "you mean like this, grandpa?" There in her hand a four-leaf clover! I was stunned.

I'm sure we've all found a four-leaf clover or at least seen one - they are rare yes, but not unknown. But to find one within seconds of setting out to look for one is amazing. I'm thinking that was a moment too. I can now recognize it. I hope somewhere in her memory she'll think back to that day. It's possible, she's five now and our memories can stretch back that far. 

These events, these moments as insignificant as they are, only serve to remind us that these little things and those small occurrences are meant to be savored even if for only a few seconds. Being around children helps as they bring to us long forgotten experiences and the feelings of simple joy. We oldsters need to keep our eyes open and recognize them for what they are. Moments.

I Had a Moment...again, and then again

 

I Had a Moment...again, and then again

by Craig Willms

I can't believe what I saw today. We had a very slight rainstorm, there was hardly enough rain to even wet the road we were driving on. My wife said - oh, look at the rainbow! Sure enough there was a section of an arc of a rainbow in the distance. We were driving toward it, and I was looking at it intently because something seemed a bit off about this rainbow. This rainbow was too wide. Suddenly it struck me it was two rainbows. It was not a double rainbow, which we've all seen, it was stacked rainbow.

In other words, there was one rainbow stacked on another. The original rainbow was brighter and more pronounced, the second, fainter rainbow was immediately below the first. I could detect even a third rainbow which was so faint as to seem like trick of the eye. I had never seen anything like it before. 

Of course, I looked it up on the Internet and lo and behold there it was. These rainbows are quite rare, as they require very specific conditions in order to form. It is called a supernumerary rainbow, also known as a stacker rainbow. The supernumerary bows are slightly detached from the main rainbow, become successively fainter along with their distance from it. The picture above is from the Internet as I was not in a position to take a snap of the one I was seeing, but that is what I saw. Amazing! 

I may never see a stacker rainbow again - I definitely had a moment. However, that's not the only amazing thing I saw this week...

I was standing on my driveway looking up at the clear blue sky where I spotted a bald eagle circling in long lazy arcs. Then I spotted another also circling directly below the first, wow, I thought, that's cool. I looked higher in the sky and saw another large-winged bird circling above the other two. This one was so high I could not make out a white tail or a white head. I assume it was also an eagle because I was then stunned to see another circling above the treetops. Taking it all in I was seeing four bald eagles circling one above the other in a column. I have never seen anything like it. I've seen plenty of vultures circling, but never perfectly stacked in a column like that.

When I was young it used to be a treat to see even one bald eagle. Thankfully they've made a remarkable come back and seeing multiple bald eagles is not a rare occurrence anymore. This was something strange and different. I don't know what behavior I was observing, but I assume it was a rare sight. 

A moment indeed.

Small Dogs

 

Small Dogs

by Craig Willms

I'm a dog lover, always have been. I qualify that by stating I never liked certain dogs. I'm not a fan of pit bulls or dobermans, and I'm not a fan of small dogs, you know those little yappers, aka ankle biters.

All my dogs were large and lived outdoors. I didn't like dogs living in the house. Time passed and our dogs have left us, and we found we were sharing the house with a couple of cats. I was never a cat person either. Over the course of 15 years, I came to love the cats, a lot. I was stricken with grief over our little Bella when she left us suddenly and unexpectedly. Maybe because it was sudden, I felt so much more for that cat than I did any of the dogs whom I loved straight away. That's a study for another day, I'm still unclear of my inexplicable feelings for that, that, that cat.

A year or so later my pregnant daughter asked that we take in her "little" dog to cut down on the chaos in her house. They have two small children and a big chocolate lab already. We gladly took Willow home. Willow is mixed breed with Pomeranian and some other small breed. She goes maybe 6 or 7 pounds if that and is literally a little puff ball. 

We had her a little over a month and I found that -oh my God- do I love this little dog! She is the sweetest animal I've ever known. Never mind that she's extremely well behaved, she is so good as a house pet and sleeping buddy (she has a little nitch in the Lazy-Boy recliner we share). She sheds a little and shreds a little, all of which can be easily overlooked. What strikes me the most about her is that she is 100% love and 100% trust. She is so small that she trusts you unconditionally when you handle her. She never struggles or shows any annoyance. She just exudes happiness. Yes, of course she is a yapper, and suffers little dog syndrome, not understanding that she's tiny. But she is such a joy!

Again, I surprise myself, first cats and now this. I'm not easy to change, being as conservative in my lifestyle as I am with politics. But change is good - in small doses... Willow is about as small as they come.

Procrastination is thy name

 Procrastination is thy name

by Craig Willms

"Procrastination has served me well," he said with a wry grin...

That's what I tell myself anyway. I'm starting to rethink this with each passing year. Having retired there is almost no claim on my time, therefore I should be doing or planning to do all the things I wanted to do when I had the time. I'm not. Something else is going on.

Procrastination was always thought to be a purely mental function, you know, laziness, aversion to thinking, lacking the gumption to follow-through, stuff like that. The reason we put off intentionally the doing of something that should be done, comes from a decision made inside the brain. Wait. What if it's not? What if there's actually a physical cause? 

I'm only half joking here. Obviously, I'm rationalizing my reticence get up off my ass and do something! As I get older, I've found that even when my brain has made the decision to do something my body just sits there. There are times I'll spend ten minutes sitting in my Lazy-Boy mentally contemplating getting up until I've forgotten why I wanted to get up in the first place. Even in situations when my wife is screaming something only the dog could hear, like seeing a bug on the wall, I've already grabbed a paper towel and killed the bug. In reality, I'm still trying to get up. The decision to save my wife has been made by my brain, but my body is balking at getting out of the chair. It feels physical to me.

This is a weird phenomenon. It might just be me; I don't know. That worries me. Rationally I know that I don't act on a whim like I used to - it's largely an energy issue. The older you get you'll find you just don't have the instant energy you use to have. By the time you reach 60 you notice the loss of muscle and strength and you wisely don't do things you once did. You've become clumsy... Even if you take care not to hurt yourself by trying to do what your body can't do anymore, it's different when you don't even want to. I think that's what's bothering me the most. 

This is real procrastination, the kind where no rationalization is valid. When you're young, working and raising kids you haven't the bandwidth to do everything you'd like to, even things you should do. You are constrained and taking on more might not be a great idea. Now, there are no excuses time wise, or priority wise. You are just paralyzed with empty excuses. 

I've also noticed that I lack any real creativity these days. Creativity in my past was inspired and, in a sense, released into the world as if it was always there, poised in the starting blocks waiting for the sound of the gun. Now it feels forced. I'm speaking as an artist and musician, who has been more of a mimic than a trailblazer - but there have always been sparks of genuine vision and conception - it's all gone now. That is what I think has led to my profound procrastination these days. I can't even think of what to do, let alone do it.

Men in general are motivated by doing things more than talking about it. Women are usually the opposite. That's just a hard-wired reality, it's not wrong or right, just the way it is. Therefore, when we men get old and tired and lack the vim and vigor we once had we tend to sit there and do nothing, or putz around as I like to call it. Women continue to talk. I definitely procrastinate far more than my wife. She, being roughly the same age still gets things done (often by gently reminding me to follow through) and thank the Lord! I can't imagine how staid I'd be without her.

My situation is probably not all that unusual, but how would I know, men don't talk about these things. I have all the time in the world, but I don't pick up the phone and call my friends or my brothers and sisters just to talk. I probably should, but then they'd think I want something, if I don't then they'd worry something's wrong. See what I did there? Rationalize much...

Right now, I'm procrastinating on how to finish this thought. I'm not seeking answers as they probably do not exist. I should give it some real thought and get back to you... Nah, I don't want to, not now anyway.

The Theory of Everything in Mind

 

The Theory of Everything in Mind

by Craig Willms

 

Part I

Recent events have had me turn my thoughts over to big picture topics. Contemplating one’s demise will do that. A combination of serious health issues and the coronavirus pandemic set me on a course to consider what will ultimately come of me.

Being born into a Christian family I’ve always taken it on faith that Heaven awaits me - provided I live well and fly right so to speak. For some that's enough, faith alone. Alas for many it’s not. There are those who wonder, those who need to know. Those with curious, logical minds not easily satisfied with simplistic sounding jargon. I say this as a seeker myself, blind faith is not enough.

Ahh, science my friend, science will provide the answers, right?

            Back in the 1990’s when the World Wide Web opened new and interesting worlds, I came across the term: The Theory of Everything, aka the unified field theory. I had been exploring something called String Theory in the process of reading Brian Greene’s book The Elegant Universe. I would never claim to grasp even 10% of what Greene and other theorists were getting at with String Theory. Neither could I really understand the related fundamentals of quantum mechanics. Nor could I, for that matter, wrap my mind around Einstein’s famous theories of General and Special Relativity. I understood just enough to be simultaneously fascinated and baffled.

            The problem it seems that despite more than hundred years of modern science and some of the most intelligent people who had ever lived The Theory of Everything is still elusive. Without going too deep the basic issue has always been that the four fundamental forces of nature have not been harmonized into one coherent theory. Quantum physics deals with the very small and the forces that control it, namely the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism. As it happens these three forces are nicely integrated. Then there is gravity, that which deals with the very large. Gravity has been defined by what is does, predictably so, but not what it is. No one knows. Gravity just doesn’t fit, there is nothing explains how these 4 forces condense into one tidy theory of everything.

          

         Modern physics, undaunted, continues to delve deeply into the minutiae of quantum mechanics seemingly unconcerned with the problems that gravity poses to an elegant theory, and likewise cosmologists continue to study the vast spaces between the stars and galaxies. I suppose each presumes they will reveal the “truth” with what they ultimately discover.

        In 2013 I stumbled across a what I believed to be paradigm shift that crashed down on gravity alone as the controlling force of the universe and replaced it with electric current at a cosmic scale. It doesn’t negate gravity; it merely surpasses it as an infinitely superior force. What space age observation with its modern tools has revealed is what seems to be a vast network of filaments connecting the planets, stars and galaxies powered by electric current. Modern imagery makes it clear that we are seeing these heavenly bodies as connected entities. The connecting medium is plasma, and the force is electricity. Thus, I remain intrigued by this idea despite the complete disregard that mainstream science and academia hold for the plasma/electric universe theory. More on how this all ties in later.

            As time went on, I became in some sense disillusioned by science, or rather I was disillusioned by smug atheistic scientists. This is primarily because they are so dismissive of man as anything other than a biological machine, incapable of having anything so amorphous as an independent soul or possessing any semblance of free will. Everything I ever believed or experienced in my nearly 60 years belies the notion that we are merely meat puppets driven by programmed instinct. We are not just smart animals.

            Make no mistake science has accomplished remarkable things, especially in manipulating materials and making of medicines and such. I don’t mean to diminish any of it or wish to become accused of being a luddite or - God forbid - a ‘science denier’.  The pursuit of scientific knowledge has enhanced human life exponentially. Still, there are things science can’t explain and never will. We need to be OK with that; science is not necessarily the last last word.

            When science exploded into the culture a few centuries ago it turned the lights on, illuminating so many of the misconstrued ideas of a dark past. It literally ushered a period of enlightenment that we enjoy to this day. What we call the hard sciences gave us many of the ‘hows’, but there are still a lot of ‘why’ questions, to say nothing of the eternal questions, science as it were, has no answers for.

Part II

            

            That brings us to the Hard Problem of Consciousness, something that materialist science has never been able to put its all-knowing stamp on. In my mind it is the most fascinating contemplation known to man. What is this thing we call consciousness? Is it an irreducible feature of reality or an illusion of biology. Turn the page to 2021 when I saw a YouTube video that at the same time gave me some clarity and a little comfort. Could consciousness be that elusive theory that explains everything?

            Modernity’s conventional acceptance places consciousness in the realm of the individual and confined to the brain. This makes a certain amount of sense since each of us is an individual and is capable of conscious thought. But is consciousness merely a bio-chemical process as the materialist insists? Do we only perceive this thing we call consciousness in our waking state due to our biological programming? Evolutionary biologists and logical thinkers describe it as the inevitable result of the function of our advanced biology. But is it?

            Science continues to pursue the question of consciousness with rigorous determination. One current speculation is that consciousness works as a predictive process which the mind/body uses it to navigate through the world. Consciousness therefore activates an affective response as needed when for instance if we should face severe distress or danger. For example: breathing is normally an unconscious process, not requiring direct attention. The affective response to sudden oxygen depletion would send alarm bells in the form of high emotion through the mind. This goes a long way toward defining a role consciousness plays in our survival, but does it really answer the big question, the hard question? I think not.

            In the long study of consciousness it eventually gets to a point where the next question can’t be answered. Despite decades, even centuries of study there is no definitive explanation as to what exactly consciousness is. What is it made of? Where does it come from? Ultimately where does it go when we die?

            The fundamental questions of experience and awareness and recall comes to mind. This is what consciousness means to most people. These things are difficult to explain in scientific terms. Again, science might say that like consciousness, self-awareness is the byproduct of biological processes, all perfectly logical. Is it though? There is a whole area of thought being studied by serious people like David Chalmers and Donald Hoffman that awareness and experience are just how we perceive objective reality in order to survive. Reality itself is essentially an illusionary construct, a simulation.

            When we think of simulations we think of computers, as in virtual reality or computer games. Taken to its logical conclusion this line of thought raises the question are we just a computer game to some vastly superior being? Are we all just changing voltages on a cosmic circuit board? It’s easy to dismiss this as so much crazy talk. I know I certainly did. For God’s sake we know what reality is, we live it every day.

            What happens if we try to extract ourselves from such a narrow notion of reality. By that I mean our biology, our five senses, clearly limit how we can experience the world. We humans see the world via a limited set of senses that by no means paints the whole picture of reality. Think about what reality looks like to a butterfly. He sees the world – the same world we live in– in a completely different way. His eyes are set up to find flowers in an extraordinarily different way than we “see” flowers. His marvelous wings catch and use the wind to move through the world.  He probes his bizarre tongue deep into the flower for the payoff of luscious nectar. His reality is totally alien to us. If we perceived the world as a butterfly does we’d quickly die. Every type of metabolic lifeform has a different perception of reality, yet we all live in the same world, the same so-called reality. Is it then so hard to understand that reality is what we perceive and experience based on our survival needs?

            Scientist Donald Hoffman has some compelling thoughts and conceptual underpinnings to the idea that our reality is an illusion, that we don’t experience reality as it actually is. Consider that literally everything is made up a smaller and smaller elements, molecules, cells, atoms, subatomic particles and beyond, that are sufficiently mysterious and impossible to perceive with our five senses without powerful instruments. Picture if you will an iceberg in the ocean. Your version of reality is the tip that protrudes above the water, whereas we understand but can't see the gigantic portion of the iceberg below the waterline. It's the tip of the iceberg that helps make sense of the world without actually perceiving all the complicated processes and forces that make up the underlying fabric of ‘reality’. 

            When I first heard that scientists were theorizing that we exist in a holographic simulation I was completely dismissive. They were telling me what I see and experience everyday isn’t real… Poppycock. My pain is real, and pain, more than anything else in this life is confirmation of reality. I wasn’t buying any of it – not even a little.

            It wasn’t until I saw the previously mentioned YouTube video did all the pieces start to fall into place. Computer scientist and philosopher Bernardo Kastrup laid out a case that consciousness is not something we possess one individual at a time, but rather something we and everything else are in. We are immersed in consciousness. The reality we experience is a mental process of the mind. The universal mind. Mind is all there is.

            Whoa, back up there. So he’s saying reality is just in our mind and that’s all there is? Something like that.

            How can that be you might ask?

What is Kastrup saying? What Kastrup is not saying is that the world, all the matter, all the things we see, feel, hear etc. etc. is just a product of our individual minds. Not at all. He’s not saying that reality ceases to exist beyond what we see and experience at any given time. He is saying that consciousness is something everything shares, that consciousness is everything, and that what we see as reality is an interpretation, a simulation of a reality we can comprehend - in order to survive.

            When we consider the world, indeed the universe, and we start to partition it into its constituent parts we have already started down the rabbit hole. The universe is one thing, not its parts. Without one part the rest doesn’t exist. The parts are simply an interpretation in our minds, all of which are useful in aiding our physical survival. Of course, in order to even process such bizarre notions, it becomes an endless chicken and egg exercise.

            If such a thing is true and consciousness is a shared thing rather than a uniquely individual phenomenon why can’t you read my mind, know what I’m thinking? According to Kastrup that’s where the brain comes in. The brain is our physical control center yes, but it also acts as the filter to cut off our consciousness agent from the larger mind. The term dissociative is used to describe this mechanism. Our individual brain dissociates us from the collective consciousness and each other. If it did not, we could not survive. Without this barrier it’s likely we would go insane. In fact, insanity might well be a defect in this dissociative mechanism. It makes some sense.

            What of other species? Is there an advantage for this level of dissociation in animals? Good question, perhaps not. There are all kinds of examples in the animal world of extraordinary communication that belies simple explanation, particularly in herding, flocking, schooling and insect behaviors. Creatures that do not thrive as individuals may have a limited consciousness or dissociative apparatus. The types of things we see in animal behaviors go beyond visual stimulus guiding the movement of thousands of individuals in such perfect synchronization.

            In higher order beings it’s not exactly clear where we order our movement and actions with conscious connections and where dissociation serves. When we sleep or are put under anesthesia our dissociative state is broken down and our minds are free to explore, re-join if you will, the collective consciousness. However, there is a fog around the sleep state and clearly around anesthetics so that we don’t remember it that well if at all. Still, many do remember their dreams in detail. Likewise, the anecdotal evidence for people being aware during surgery and during near death experiences is legend. Many other things can cause a breakdown of the dissociative state, or severely disable it. Drug use, alcohol use, mental illness, sexual ecstasy, meditation, thrill seeking and trauma of all sorts. In truth the dissociative state is our sanity and allows us to survive in this world as these biological beings.

            It seems to me that we humans desire, however sub-consciously, to be free of the dissociative state, to be one with the collective mind. There’s little doubt that mankind has tried to be free of the rigidity of sober reality and the weight of suffering since the beginning of time. Clearly this is true with alcohol, clearly… Same thing with drugs. DMT, a drug in the psychedelic category that users describe as altering reality in such profound and surprising detail to the point that it often changes their lives. Studies done with LSD and other psychedelic drugs show that despite people reporting massive visual activity and wildly heightened awareness their brain activity actually decreased when measured, shut down, much like during sleep or anesthesia. In other words when our brain activity decreases this dissociative state breaks down and we experience a reality that is quite different than our sober waking state. People will say they seek out and engage in reckless behaviors to feel something, to feel alive, as if the dissociative state is a repressive force that people intuitively resist in one way or another.

Mental illness, often thought to be a chemical imbalance can’t be ignored in the discussion of altered states of consciousness. One must consider that something has gone wrong with the normal functioning of the dissociative state. The condition called Dissociative Personality Disorder commonly known as multiple personality disorder, has shown to be invaluable in demonstrating the proclivity of brain activity to present differently for each alter personality. The study that Bernardo Kastrup relayed in the video was fascinating. The patient claimed to be blind in one of her alters despite there being nothing wrong with her sight in other personalities. Images of her brain while she was associated with the blind personality showed zero activity in the visual cortex with her eyes wide open - she was not faking it. This is a clear indication that dissociation can block a brain’s otherwise functional processes.

            Small children often say they see things or have imaginary friends or other seemingly fanciful experiences adults dismiss out of hand. But should we? The child’s brain is too underdeveloped to deal with survival and therefore potentially unconditioned to fully suppress/dissociate from the collective consciousness. Whatever these childhood experiences really are it is at least extremely interesting to contemplate in this light.

            What explains the eerie feeling of being watched only to turn around and find that you are being watched? Or for that matter the thought you have of a friend or colleague only to have that person call you in that minute. Had your minds reached through the collective consciousness and connected? We have a word for it: coincidence. That word always accompanies a mystery.

            If you truly think about your own mind with honesty, you realize that you don’t really control what you think or feel. You don’t even control what you like or don’t like. We are mystery to ourselves. Do you control the ideas that pop into your head? Do we control which people we are attracted to?  What is creativity? What is imagination? It’s as real as the chair you’re sitting in, but what is it made of? It’s a thought yes, but it’s so much more than that, a thought that spawns more thoughts… The crazy part is you don’t even control your next thought. What is self? It’s something we know instinctively, but do we even really know ourselves? Personally, all my life when I’d see myself in a mirror, I’d ask why am I stuck in that body? I feel like there is so much more, I’m so limited being trapped inside this body. Of course, the moment passes, and I get on with it, but the feeling recurs over and over and always with a bit of despair. 

 

The Materialists will dismiss all this as so much woo woo (the official term). They can explain hallucinations, near death experiences, drug induced phenomena, and other pyscho-physical phenomena by citing cellular mechanical/electro-chemical functions within the brain. A purely mechanistic explanation, no need for witchcraft or the spirit world.

But they are explaining apples with oranges. Science can’t explain experience or awareness. No mathematic equation can describe the taste of chocolate, the pain of loss of a loved one, the feeling we have when smelling lilacs, the melancholy of a rainy afternoon or the joy of love. Science can’t explain creativity, intuition, loneliness, rage or the transference of grief from one person to another without a word. Science can’t quantify honor, courage and sacrifice when acting on any of these could violate the prime directive: survival itself. These are experiences of the mind, qualia if you will.

Part III

It is the greatest mysteries in life that science hasn’t conquered. These are usually filed under the rubric of God only knows. Sometimes they are just unanswerable questions. Why is there something rather than nothing is one for the ages.

Dreams may be the one the best examples of experience of the mind we can all relate to. The experience of dreaming, where sub-conscious mentation creates a world from nothing that seems every bit as real as this one. We become totally immersed in the experience complete with emotions. We sometimes see, experience and encounter things, concepts in we have no waking knowledge of. How? Could it be that we tap into the larger consciousness when our dissociative guard is down?

Interestingly not all of our waking senses are engaged during the dream state. We see and hear, so to speak, but do we smell or feel touch? Rarely. I'm a vivid dreamer and rarely recall smell being invoked. The sense of taste and touch is also seemingly rare. I would speculate that since survival is usually not threatened during dreams these senses are just less important.

What of simultaneous invention? It brings to mind the famous quote by psychoanalyst Carl Jung: 'People don't have ideas. Ideas have people'. There are cases where people have had a revelation, invented a new device or method, or grasped a concept simultaneously on opposite sides of the world. Serendipity, coincidence maybe, but might there be a case for the collective consciousness connecting these thinkers via the larger mind?

Science has by and large dispensed with the wisdom of the ages. Tens of thousands of years of human thought and experience free of the noise of the modern world has been relegated to the realm of superstition or unenlightened ignorance. Yet the mysticism of Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism among others persists and is validated by experience to this day. These ideas and notions are nothing new. Eastern religions are based on them. The scientific enlightenment of the last few centuries has pushed them into the shadows of the modern age.

Consider that while they dig down into the minutiae of the quantum realm scientists continue to find something smaller and then something smaller still that makes up the parts of physical reality. Conversely cosmologists keep seeing farther and farther out as their observational tools advance. In both directions the observable fields act like Mandelbrot fractals, never ending patterns repeating themselves as they shrink or grow. It’s as if there is no bottom or pinnacle.

Interestingly when you see modern conceptual images of both the fabric of the universe and its filamentary connected stars and galaxies (as described by the plasma/electric universe) and the neural network inside our brains they look remarkably the same. It’s uncanny.

If consciousness is the basis of everything, this illusive theory of everything, what does it mean for us? What happens when we die? This is where I drew some comfort. If our brains are dissociating us from the greater mind, then when we die does our separated conscious agent re-join the collective? Well, it sounds somewhat like Heaven, don’t you think? Would we not be able to reconnect with loved ones that had previously passed - just like we are told about Heaven? The thing is, this concept leaves space for God, in fact, the whole thing seems like God to me.

So, I ponder… 

When Jesus said in the Lord’s Prayer “thy Kingdom come thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven” was he alluding to Heaven being right here on Earth, that they are connected? That when we die we go nowhere, we don't depart to a separate place, but rather just pierce the veil and join the greater consciousness? Are we separated from Heaven by this same dissociative barrier that separates us from each other? And what of Jesus? What was He? Was He a super-conscious being, human like us only fully connected to the larger consciousness, connected to God like He said He was? When He used the term “I am” to describe himself, was he alluding to His oneness with the greater mind, with God, with the universe itself? Was He able to heal through the power of a sub-conscious connection with the sick? It’s fascinating to consider.

The final question should be if it’s not: why? Why would our little slice of this greater consciousness be separated from ‘Heaven’ and each other? Maybe we’ll get to know when the time comes. Philosophers through the ages have often said life is suffering and clearly it is. Why should we suffer in this way, separated, alone? Is it that our individual conscious agent feeds the collective with our experiences? So that God can know himself… Perhaps our job is to find love and purpose amid the suffering. Perhaps suffering is the disease and love the cure.

Back to Earth…

Serious scientists like Kastrup, Tom Campbell, David Chalmers and Hoffman among others don’t go there, they don’t call it God, or allude to Heaven or Nirvana or whatever. But they don’t dismiss it out of hand. That attracts me to what they are positing so much more than atheistic scientists like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennet and other Materialists, who, while fascinating in their own right, leave me depressed and cold. I plant my stake with the Idealists.

In the end what difference does it make which side you fall on? I think it makes a huge difference. In the Materialists view you have is this one life and then nothing. It’s essentially nihilism at its core. Nothing really matters, everything is meaningless. Those who are destined to suffer just suffer pointlessly. Life is unfair, cruel. What it is my friends is hopelessness… I don’t want to live without hope.