As a blue collar rank and file union activist for 28 years, let me assure you wondering about these topics is wide-spread. While crew in ship engine rooms, I've participated in conversations about scientific assumptions of reductionism, economic materialism, and metaphysical topics in general. We just tended to use the "f" word much more than is usually the case among academics.
Because of a series of intense mystical encounters and other experiences of what I call high weirdness, I became one of Jeff Kripal's correspondents. I've also been in Facebook discussions with Bernardo Kastrup. I own books by close to all of the writers you mentioned. Incidentally, re-reading Wilbur closely became off-putting. He seems to me too sure and a bit of an elitist.
As for "bootstrapping," conservatives and capitalists misuse "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps." It wasn't admonishment about personal responsibility and individual hard work as all that are needed to become successful, but just the opposite--try it! It meant we need each other and was acknowledgement of the reality of structural inequalities.
At 77, a two-spirit and elder, I can say with confidence I know less at this age than I did in my 40s-50s. If forced to pick, I'd opt for panentheism. Maybe dual aspect monism, but it's not quite persuasive. Pantheism seems too close to a form of materialism. It also has the problem of explaining how greater consciousnesses would arise; clearly parrots are more self-aware than pebbles. Therefore not solving David Chalmer's Hard Problem, either. Nor does the New Age talk about energies; I get that's a metaphor for some(thing) we can't quite grasp, but since matter and energy are interchangeable forms, that's another non-solution.
Because of my encounters I decided, despite being raised without religion, to go to grad school in theology in my 50s--maybe the trad religions had some truth to them. Maybe they do. But for me, it was a Procrustean bargain and I couldn't remove enough of myself to fit. Moreover, using the term "God" makes it seem we understand what we're talking about. No way can finite minds, even if pieces of or participants in a whole Mind, fully know an Entity spread across the cosmos and perhaps beyond. Besides, the Christian insistence "God" is all good is a mess. Evil then has to be blamed on some other entity or on humans. Which means whether "God" is a poor designer, not omniscient, or okay with what that bad entity does, She/He/ Them/It is still responsible. Look at black holes and supernovas; destruction (evil?) from the beginning. Even if organizing centers for galaxies and the source of elements heavier than iron we living beings need, any other living beings too close to either are killed. So...??? But I think Carl Jung was onto something with Answer to Job and The Red Book. And I think linking consciousness to time but not to space is worth some contemplation.
One last point. The idea "we" will not survive. Reminds me of a joke I heard in the '60s from a Native reservation relative about the '50s TV show The Lone Ranger. The Lone Ranger and Tonto, his Native sidekick, are surrounded by what appear to be hostile (Red to you Brits) Indians. The Lone Ranger says "We have to fight them, Tonto!" To which Tonto replies "What's this 'we', white man?!" Some of us Indigenes never lost the connection to Earth Mother and to the spirits of animals and plants. Look at the health of our environments. It wasn't because of intellectual inferiority, technological ignorance, or an inability to understand empirical data. It was a deliberate choice.
Thank you Rafi. This is all heartening to hear. Too much to respond to for today but I like the bootstrap nuance and I loved the poignancy and elegance of the line “I couldn’t remove enough of myself to fit.” I also agree that the unqualified “we” is on borrowed time. 🙏
Hi Jonathon ... You wrote: peace?” I looked at some of the heterodox but peer-reviewed research from 1988, indicating that having large groups of meditators near a conflict zone might help reduce conflict - the theory of change was effectively a theory that conflict arose from collective stress, and the presence of advanced (Sidhi) meditators could reduce stress in a sufficiently reliable way that there would be a measurdable reduction in conflict. I then extrapolated to the relationship between consciousness and peace more generally, including a nod to The Global Consciousness Project, ...
I was one of around 200 (alleged ) 100 UK and 100 US "Advanced (We had advanced a lot of money 🤦♂️) TM Siddhi Meditatirs" who sat in "close proximity" (in hotels) to a specific conflict (The Fall of the Shah in Teheran) and meditated 6 hours a day in hotels ... 1978-79 in Teheran.
In hindsight it feels like a form of service to something larger than oneself ...
Just for the record
I appreciated the essay enormously Bohm floats my boat and you brought many new voices to scan under my radar THANK YOU. Loved the numbered building aha's 👏👏
🙏💙🙏
Rob R³ Running, Rambling, Rob
My personal favourite Bohm quote is:
Reality is what we take to be true.
What we take to be true is what we believe.
What we believe is based on our perceptions.
What we perceive depends on what we look for.
What we look for depends on what we think.
What we think depends on what we perceive.
What we perceive determines what we believe.
What we believe determines what we take to be true.
What we take to be true is our reality.
.... David Bohm
I first encountered the poem / quote in the Epilogue of Perfect Brilliant Stillness by David Carse* on p380. It took me nearly ten years to find a source ...
Quote: In considering the constructed nature of reality, Ricard quotes from a 1977 Berkeley lecture by David Bohm (December 20, 1917–October 27, 1992), in which the trailblazing theoretical physicist offered an exquisite formulation of the interplay between our beliefs and what we experience as reality:
If you scroll down there are four crude maps and an attempt to address the dynamic (trinity) at the heart of the quote / poem
Descending from Reality into our experience creating mechanism where the three way interaction between: (a) perceptions (b) what we look for, and (c) what we think, generates our unique personal history in memory (a) affects (b) affects (c) affects (a) in a dance of perpetual re-inforcement and feedback loops. Then depending on our dominant inner tendencies, ascends in the last three lines leads to the projection of our inner sense making, onto the external world as encountered by the individual interacting with the Actual.
Hi Rob, how wonderful that you were there. I never did the siddhi programme but was tempted a few times. I missed my hours meditating in hotel for world peace(!)…but yes I also hear you on the cost of being “advanced”. And thanks for that Bohm statement which I feel I have seen before. And the R3 in your name is its own kind of synchronicity because earlier today I was thinking of it as a short hand for Realisation as “get real, become real, make real.” Thanks again. J
Hi Jonathan. As someone who has been wrestling with these questions for decades, let me say you've done well with your summary here. As your physics references are those two books from the 70s (on my shelf since then but outdated), you might find of interest something more current, a paper by leading physicist Lee Smolin, 'Temporal Naturalism'. Smolin favors time over space, dovetailing nicely with Sheldrake and Pierce in claiming that natural laws evolve, and consist of something like habit. This implies the question, which I don't know Smolin addresses, yet Sheldrake does (if without full answer), of where and how such habit resides, and whether the memory which is foundational for so much of our own consciousness resides with it, rather than in some sort of neuronal storage -- of which there is no settled theory. It's downloadable at https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/9781800613737_0001.
Now, if we take time -- and memory -- as foundational to the identity of processes in material existence, where does that leave us? If natural laws evolve, they are still, in our time within their evolution, laws. If memory is stored deeply in reality, is it Jung's collective unconscious? Are the gods themselves habits among the laws of nature, synchronicities among their calling cards, and we their cousins?
Merry Christmas, Jonathan! What a way to end the Perspectiva Substack year with this rich exploration. I'll no doubt revisit it often and discover new insights each time. Today I simply wondered about "knowing" consciousness without the word. What, if anything, expands when we encounter consciousness (or what we refer to as consciousness, oneness, awareness, etc.) from the heart, through experience, silence and indeed stillness, rather than through intellect – although I'm greatly fond of the intriguing fact that 100s of intellectual attempts exist, but would also be keen to metaphorically speaking feel, dance, love, play, touch my way there too. Consciousness seems then something fugitive, liminal, ghostly in a beautiful ineffable way, and maybe even deeply a matter of desire.
Thank you, Minna, and Merry Christmas to you too. I think you’re right that trying to understand consciousness with a relatively narrow intellectual approach has limitations. I particularly like the idea of consciousness being fugitive (and I know that’s a term Bayo uses a lot) because it does seem almost comically elusive, and therefore trickster-like, as if we’re not supposed to catch it but are nonetheless obliged to chase, perhaps while dancing along the way…
Thank you for this, Jonathan. Since you quote my colleague Freya Mathews, 'The communicativity of reality... is not necessarily a given of our experience but may need to be activated via practices of address or invocation...' it is precisely this that we have been exploring in Living Waters, our series the co-operative experiential inquiries over the past five year in collaboration with Schumacher College, now in its 'wild' new identity https://www.schumachercollege.org/. Our view is that the intellectual dimension of philosophy must always have implications for practice. You and your subscribers may be interested in this kind of exploration see https://www.schumachercollege.org/living-waters and accounts of both practice and theory at Learning How Land Speaks, peterreason.substack. come
2nd, this article was recommended by Gregg Henriques, he of the Unified Theory of Knowledge (UToK) and involved with the organization (Institute of Applied Methatheory) you have now agreed to be (and written about) a reviewer of its journal - Integration - the Journal of Big Picture Theory and Practice.
Gregg said the following about this vis a vis his theory - "A great summary of the... confusion that exists regarding this concept. There is a profound gap in our knowledge. It is properly framed as the Enlightenment Gap. It can be seen in: i) the hard problem of consciousness and related confusions; ii) the problem of psychology: iii) the equivocation problem regarding mind in the cognitive sciences; iv) the problem of consilience of aligning the natural and social sciences; v) the problem of physical reductionism versus emergence and the strict reductionists and the liberal naturalists in philosophy.
Extended Naturalism is a new framework for natural philosophy. It properly extends the concept of emergence so that we can actually: 1) dissolve the hard problem and be clear that what remains is properly framed as the Neurocognitive Engineering Problem; 2) solve the problem of psychology with UTOK and mindedness; 3) generate a proper synoptic integration of cognitive science via John's 3R/4P metatheory of cognitive agency; 4) bridge the natural to the social sciences via UTOK's JUST, and 5) solve the problem of natural philosophy with EN's extended framework for emergence, ontology, definitions, epistemology, and phenomenology in a way that assimilates and integrates the key functional findings from psychology and cognitive science on human consciousness."
So, where does this leave me? I know that if I jump off a 20 story building onto concrete my body will break and I along with my consciousness will likely die... at least as far as I know. I know that you, me and everyone reading this will die, but we don't really know what that means beyond the fact that the person we are here will no longer exist for those remaining in the form they possessed while still living.
Boris Shoshitaishvili is a Fellow at the Berggruen Institute (BI), a non-profit founded in 2010 by Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels.
Last year, Shoshitaishvili hosted a Colloquim on the need for a “Planetary metaphysics.” This research initiative hopes to develop a “common language of “the Planetary” which can make available new perspectives on collective action challenges across a range of political, social, economic and scientific domains.” “Planetary metaphysics” “describes the ongoing effort to understand the relationship between our humanity and our planet.” https://berggruen.org/news/planetary-metaphysics-Colloquium.
So, let's bring forth this new metaphysics and address our meta-crisis of the 21st century while we are still alive and for those that follow us.
I looked him up because the name "Shoshitaishvili" caught my attn. It's Georgian; therefore a person belonging, at least in part, to a group whose language is an isolate. Georgians are also Eastern Orthodox, a form of Christianity as old as Roman Catholicism but with a very different Weltanschauung. That heritage of difference would be a help for someone trying to bring together social disciplines and the hard sciences. Or the contrasting aspects of being human--arts v. sciences. My simplistic example of which is: Scientifically, a painting is a chunk of botanical fibers with splotches of chemically derived pigments. It's the artistic, mystical, poetic, spiritual, and religious aspects by which we give it meaning.
We are not one. It is the orientation that 'we are one' which sets up the problematic that you discuss through the rest of this very well-written and illuminating argument. Transformation of the sort you are conjuring comes when you realize we are not one; when you start in a place that is not one, and not two. Because in realizing 'we are not one', you have to realize there is something beyond the categories (very real, very helpful) which you discuss here. This shift is so challenging (of self, of structure, of solidity) it is most often dismissed before given a chance. But to really start with 'not one' and 'not two' is the portal we are all dancing towards these days. Once we move through, all these theories of consciousness that you discuss can be helpful in exactly the way you (seem to?) criticize a future Alex for suggesting. And indeed we can know what it is like to be a bat.
We are one! And we’re not one. I don’t see the problem?
And I’m definitely not criticising Alex, or the notion of an un theory of consciousness; I think it’s good to get to the point where you see that theory serves pragmatic purposes.
I’m not sure we can know what it’s like to be a bat, with anything like unassisted normal consciousness, but we can imagine it. Curious to know what exactly you’re saying there…
I've considered twoness, even multiplicities. I'm familiar by long personal experience and cultural lore how the complex, many colored threads of living diversities seem to weave into patterned webs linked to a unitary Consciousness. But consider an entity that for brevity's sake call "God." What would be interesting to Them? How about finiteness, individuality, personality, emotions, beliefs, relationships and what it is to be a bat? Or rock? Or kelp? These require separateness and particular identities.
Which can be dismissed as illusions, but that's rather smug and no more than the logical fallacy of argument by assertion. I tried my best, as a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism for 6 years, to convince myself I wasn't real. I'd bet cats would find the idea self-evidently false. Finally I come to the conclusion the western way had merit and was a counterbalance for eastern oneness.
And why not argue with God? Why believe in submission? Although having twice experienced direct connection to Deity/Mind, I can testify it was like being hit by a 480 volt circuit. Not only overwhelming mentally, but actual burns. Both times in front of witnesses. Assuming that wasn't merely psycho-physical, it could indicate something real behind the adage to fear God.
We are not one. And we are not two. If you start by saying we are one, you have already set limits and assumed there is a set of shared regularities that has to be reconciled, which is what every single theory of consciousness tries to do, and which can never be done, though a lot of productive thinking comes from it. To be irreconcilable assessments of some ongoing process is not to be one. Your hand is not one with your foot even if they are both assessed as parts of what you might understand as your body. They are part of the same process (from your position of assessment) but they are not one.
We are one, and not one, and two, and not two. We are one in all sorts of ways and two in all sorts of ways and neither one nor two in all sorts of ways. I think what I was trying to convey in the piece is something like Jung meant by Unus Mundus - that we can make sense of something like a universal mind/soul of which we are part. And the part/whole relationships have their own complexity, of which atman/brahman is the touchstone.
I understand and I think Jung made a wonderful step there and we can now make another rather than assume that framework. He starts with One. One World. And this sets us up for the binary. What if we explore what is holding one? What if we do let ourselves hold what is not countable or contrastable and thus also not unifiable? There really is a difference here. It is an important shift that happens between saying 'we are one and we are not one' and asking what is 'not one and not two' because the limits and the line being drawn is no longer drawn. When we (and when Jung) discusses Unus Mundus, there are assumptions of 'one' and one is itself a set of limits and parameters. This feels frustrating when questioned precisely because it is what we assume and take for granted. It's also a bit dangerous.
Can we say we’re one, not one, and neither one nor not one.” ? (And I’m not wedded to Jung, but if I was, unus mundus is not ‘one world’ as such, even if literally so).
It comes with those scaffolds even if implicitly. His use of contrasts is directly related to binary scaffolding. Dark/light and so forth. Again, all towards better understanding. But contrasts do their best work when viewed from beyond their either/or paradigm (not by trying to resolve them into one). We could explore spaces that are not set by those scaffolds even while we are still able to use and appreciate them. I have the feeling this really matters for transformation in the way you've been circling. It also matters for issues of technology, finding meaning and motivation, and what worth we place on precarity (It's worth a lot!). Leading with 'all is one' sets us up to imagine reconciliation of what cannot be reconciled or some sort of pinnacle to what is not directional. Like the 350 theories of consciousness. Or materialism and idealism. The point is: consciousness as we mean it (our awareness of our own living or the knowing that 'it is something to be like') is not one; it is the word we use to communicate as life about life recognizing life's many irreconcilable positions of assessing itself. Which brings us back to how we can indeed know what it is like to be a bat. Perhaps we can discuss this further in the new year. (Bernardo Kastrup was an early reader and supporter of my next book so maybe you would be interested to browse through it and discuss themes via the lens of this piece on consciousness). Thank you for the discussion.
Once we move into this (which means we are no longer the self we thought) we can understand what it is like to be the bat; we may even be here to do exactly that. It doesn't mean we become the bat or that we have solved 'bat-ness' or that this knowing is somehow absolute and bat-like and 'finished' in any sense (in fact, we've only perpetuated it). But whatever part of life we might be calling the particular bat, we can better know what it is like to be it. And this is a good reason to be coming into awareness of life as life, to extend the circle of this knowing of life as shared life as best we can. To be the knowing of the part of what we share that we call the bat. To do all we can to try and know what it is like to be all these other beings in what we understand as life.
Thank you Jonathan for this deep dive into "consciousness." I think I'll be reading this one a few times, to better take in all of its muchness.
I appreciate the inclusion of Sheldrake's panentheism, which I think is an important perspective, and I fully resonate with how you end the essay in reference to Cynthia Bourgeault's teaching about Jean Gebser's conception of the structures of consciousness.
On that note, I also highly recommend Katie Teague's hour-long video featuring Cynthia: "The Signature of our Time."
Well it’s good to know there are so many options! I like Alex’s take you shared, how gentle, that we can use them here and there, depending. Yesterday driving home the sky was lit up flaming orange and hibiscus pink, gray lavender clouded, a brilliant expanse, as the solstice sun went down. The sky was itself. It was so beautiful that the little bird of my soul was soaring. Other times, the hoofed animal of me just slogs along. Seems alright to do that jig. Merry Christmas and thank you for the wonderful article.
Also like that bit about a perspective that obliterates the problem. Best go to solution for most things as far as I know.
Please also find an essay titled The Forgotten Spiritual Esotericism of Saint Jesus of Galilee in which the author provides a unique Understanding of the "New" Testament as a work of religious fiction created by the institutional church. He points out that religious fiction was a common old-time way/method of communicating religious concepts etc.
Thank you, Jonathan, for your thoughtful and generous inquiry. In my work, the metacrisis shows up as a crisis of belonging, and belonging can’t be restored through systems alone. It emerges in relationship, where experience is honored as real and meaning arises through contact. In that sense, your exploration of ontopoetics feels like a return to a mature sanity — one that remembers we are not just in the world, but in conversation with it.
Jonathan I have to write this morning, and I'm full of that fervour of a zealot without being a zealot I hope, that what's needed is a rolling out of the the idea of 'The Reality of Scale'.
It may be that the phrase alone triggers enough cognitively for you to know what I mean. You might even, charitably, agree! Or, it might just be a tiny bit of word salad. And if this is the case hopefully my future communications will make good on the promise the phrase currently captures for me as I use it...
Yes, it does speak to it. I found it quite affecting. (Morgan Freeman is a safe hand, isn't he.) And yet one could feel it speaks only to the reality of space, as so much in my (word salad?) phrase turns on "reality". But yes.
I just glanced back at your consciousness piece, occasioning that there are the scales of different processes in real time, and how these relate, depend on, and constrain, each other, for instance. And there's the personal, and super- and sub- personal. And then there's functions, nested within others, and reasons, nested within others.
When I was at university there was a playful (jockeying) moment when our teachers asked, what's the opposite of hierarchy? The answer they had in mind was heterarchy. I think the very general quite abstract idea I have of 'the reality of scale' arises from a concern with structure, and complexity, and thinking holistically, and amounts to an idea about making complexity more tractable, but in a 'realist' over 'nominalist' frame. Making the whole more tractable then?
And I just now had to refresh my memory of the key word in the name 'constructor theory', which I've marginally heard of on YouTube, by the way, as it connects.
And btw I'm trying to centre stage in my ongoing urgent musings the problem of collective transformation, in case you hear echoes of relevance, but the 'reality of scale' formulation arose listening to Vervaeke (Pageau less so, Peterson previously, McGilchrist too I shouldn't wonder...), but was probably nascent in puzzling at what 'emergence' means... amongst other things.
Forgive, please, the ramble. And wishing you well, as always,
Aha 5. Relations among experiences, and the idea of the phenomenology of experience IN GENERAL, and kinds of experience as indicating the phenomenology of a fundamental stratum of experience in particular. Yes our lives are lived as consciousness, can we, though, reach realistically to a ground containing our lives so lived that is other than the mereological sum of lives so lived?
Aha 4. Anomalous experiences. Anomalous. And 'nomalous' experiences? Coincidence of opposites? What 'episteme' is drawing the line we find we've been walking? Hume on miracles? Was Hume making a pragmatist's observation? Let metaphysics hover, remain moot. Abductively, locating within the most abstract framing, and a choice between alternatives at that level, seems legitimate. But if the admonition is negative, to NOT firm up an outermost algorithm for the possible Vs impossible, then.... Let's keep an open outer bound whilst grounding thinking immanently in a lived, shared, communication-space...
Aha 3. To do less than zero justice to this fabulous section: isn't it all a matter of our epistemic situation, rather than our metaphysical situation? "We are all looking for foundations, and it can feel validating when you think you’ve found them, even if they don’t look like ‘foundations’ at all." Can't the here and now, the this and us, be the foundational? Can't THAT be the flip? (Metaphysical 'answers' becoming somewhat moot!)
As a blue collar rank and file union activist for 28 years, let me assure you wondering about these topics is wide-spread. While crew in ship engine rooms, I've participated in conversations about scientific assumptions of reductionism, economic materialism, and metaphysical topics in general. We just tended to use the "f" word much more than is usually the case among academics.
Because of a series of intense mystical encounters and other experiences of what I call high weirdness, I became one of Jeff Kripal's correspondents. I've also been in Facebook discussions with Bernardo Kastrup. I own books by close to all of the writers you mentioned. Incidentally, re-reading Wilbur closely became off-putting. He seems to me too sure and a bit of an elitist.
As for "bootstrapping," conservatives and capitalists misuse "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps." It wasn't admonishment about personal responsibility and individual hard work as all that are needed to become successful, but just the opposite--try it! It meant we need each other and was acknowledgement of the reality of structural inequalities.
At 77, a two-spirit and elder, I can say with confidence I know less at this age than I did in my 40s-50s. If forced to pick, I'd opt for panentheism. Maybe dual aspect monism, but it's not quite persuasive. Pantheism seems too close to a form of materialism. It also has the problem of explaining how greater consciousnesses would arise; clearly parrots are more self-aware than pebbles. Therefore not solving David Chalmer's Hard Problem, either. Nor does the New Age talk about energies; I get that's a metaphor for some(thing) we can't quite grasp, but since matter and energy are interchangeable forms, that's another non-solution.
Because of my encounters I decided, despite being raised without religion, to go to grad school in theology in my 50s--maybe the trad religions had some truth to them. Maybe they do. But for me, it was a Procrustean bargain and I couldn't remove enough of myself to fit. Moreover, using the term "God" makes it seem we understand what we're talking about. No way can finite minds, even if pieces of or participants in a whole Mind, fully know an Entity spread across the cosmos and perhaps beyond. Besides, the Christian insistence "God" is all good is a mess. Evil then has to be blamed on some other entity or on humans. Which means whether "God" is a poor designer, not omniscient, or okay with what that bad entity does, She/He/ Them/It is still responsible. Look at black holes and supernovas; destruction (evil?) from the beginning. Even if organizing centers for galaxies and the source of elements heavier than iron we living beings need, any other living beings too close to either are killed. So...??? But I think Carl Jung was onto something with Answer to Job and The Red Book. And I think linking consciousness to time but not to space is worth some contemplation.
One last point. The idea "we" will not survive. Reminds me of a joke I heard in the '60s from a Native reservation relative about the '50s TV show The Lone Ranger. The Lone Ranger and Tonto, his Native sidekick, are surrounded by what appear to be hostile (Red to you Brits) Indians. The Lone Ranger says "We have to fight them, Tonto!" To which Tonto replies "What's this 'we', white man?!" Some of us Indigenes never lost the connection to Earth Mother and to the spirits of animals and plants. Look at the health of our environments. It wasn't because of intellectual inferiority, technological ignorance, or an inability to understand empirical data. It was a deliberate choice.
Thank you Rafi. This is all heartening to hear. Too much to respond to for today but I like the bootstrap nuance and I loved the poignancy and elegance of the line “I couldn’t remove enough of myself to fit.” I also agree that the unqualified “we” is on borrowed time. 🙏
Hi Jonathon ... You wrote: peace?” I looked at some of the heterodox but peer-reviewed research from 1988, indicating that having large groups of meditators near a conflict zone might help reduce conflict - the theory of change was effectively a theory that conflict arose from collective stress, and the presence of advanced (Sidhi) meditators could reduce stress in a sufficiently reliable way that there would be a measurdable reduction in conflict. I then extrapolated to the relationship between consciousness and peace more generally, including a nod to The Global Consciousness Project, ...
I was one of around 200 (alleged ) 100 UK and 100 US "Advanced (We had advanced a lot of money 🤦♂️) TM Siddhi Meditatirs" who sat in "close proximity" (in hotels) to a specific conflict (The Fall of the Shah in Teheran) and meditated 6 hours a day in hotels ... 1978-79 in Teheran.
In hindsight it feels like a form of service to something larger than oneself ...
Just for the record
I appreciated the essay enormously Bohm floats my boat and you brought many new voices to scan under my radar THANK YOU. Loved the numbered building aha's 👏👏
🙏💙🙏
Rob R³ Running, Rambling, Rob
My personal favourite Bohm quote is:
Reality is what we take to be true.
What we take to be true is what we believe.
What we believe is based on our perceptions.
What we perceive depends on what we look for.
What we look for depends on what we think.
What we think depends on what we perceive.
What we perceive determines what we believe.
What we believe determines what we take to be true.
What we take to be true is our reality.
.... David Bohm
I first encountered the poem / quote in the Epilogue of Perfect Brilliant Stillness by David Carse* on p380. It took me nearly ten years to find a source ...
Quote: In considering the constructed nature of reality, Ricard quotes from a 1977 Berkeley lecture by David Bohm (December 20, 1917–October 27, 1992), in which the trailblazing theoretical physicist offered an exquisite formulation of the interplay between our beliefs and what we experience as reality:
See: https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/09/22/the-quantum-and-the-lotus-riccard-david-bohm-reality/
I tried to explore the Bohm Bohm further
My diagrammatic attempts at unpacking, which I think I shared before are at ...
https://lifebeinglife.wordpress.com/2020/08/16/search-results-and-bohm-maps/
(Originally posted
16 August 2020)
If you scroll down there are four crude maps and an attempt to address the dynamic (trinity) at the heart of the quote / poem
Descending from Reality into our experience creating mechanism where the three way interaction between: (a) perceptions (b) what we look for, and (c) what we think, generates our unique personal history in memory (a) affects (b) affects (c) affects (a) in a dance of perpetual re-inforcement and feedback loops. Then depending on our dominant inner tendencies, ascends in the last three lines leads to the projection of our inner sense making, onto the external world as encountered by the individual interacting with the Actual.
[Note added: 2025-12-16, maybe!]
****
Hi Rob, how wonderful that you were there. I never did the siddhi programme but was tempted a few times. I missed my hours meditating in hotel for world peace(!)…but yes I also hear you on the cost of being “advanced”. And thanks for that Bohm statement which I feel I have seen before. And the R3 in your name is its own kind of synchronicity because earlier today I was thinking of it as a short hand for Realisation as “get real, become real, make real.” Thanks again. J
Hi Jonathan. As someone who has been wrestling with these questions for decades, let me say you've done well with your summary here. As your physics references are those two books from the 70s (on my shelf since then but outdated), you might find of interest something more current, a paper by leading physicist Lee Smolin, 'Temporal Naturalism'. Smolin favors time over space, dovetailing nicely with Sheldrake and Pierce in claiming that natural laws evolve, and consist of something like habit. This implies the question, which I don't know Smolin addresses, yet Sheldrake does (if without full answer), of where and how such habit resides, and whether the memory which is foundational for so much of our own consciousness resides with it, rather than in some sort of neuronal storage -- of which there is no settled theory. It's downloadable at https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/9781800613737_0001.
Now, if we take time -- and memory -- as foundational to the identity of processes in material existence, where does that leave us? If natural laws evolve, they are still, in our time within their evolution, laws. If memory is stored deeply in reality, is it Jung's collective unconscious? Are the gods themselves habits among the laws of nature, synchronicities among their calling cards, and we their cousins?
Thanks Whit. And good questions!
Merry Christmas, Jonathan! What a way to end the Perspectiva Substack year with this rich exploration. I'll no doubt revisit it often and discover new insights each time. Today I simply wondered about "knowing" consciousness without the word. What, if anything, expands when we encounter consciousness (or what we refer to as consciousness, oneness, awareness, etc.) from the heart, through experience, silence and indeed stillness, rather than through intellect – although I'm greatly fond of the intriguing fact that 100s of intellectual attempts exist, but would also be keen to metaphorically speaking feel, dance, love, play, touch my way there too. Consciousness seems then something fugitive, liminal, ghostly in a beautiful ineffable way, and maybe even deeply a matter of desire.
Thank you, Minna, and Merry Christmas to you too. I think you’re right that trying to understand consciousness with a relatively narrow intellectual approach has limitations. I particularly like the idea of consciousness being fugitive (and I know that’s a term Bayo uses a lot) because it does seem almost comically elusive, and therefore trickster-like, as if we’re not supposed to catch it but are nonetheless obliged to chase, perhaps while dancing along the way…
Thank you for this, Jonathan. Since you quote my colleague Freya Mathews, 'The communicativity of reality... is not necessarily a given of our experience but may need to be activated via practices of address or invocation...' it is precisely this that we have been exploring in Living Waters, our series the co-operative experiential inquiries over the past five year in collaboration with Schumacher College, now in its 'wild' new identity https://www.schumachercollege.org/. Our view is that the intellectual dimension of philosophy must always have implications for practice. You and your subscribers may be interested in this kind of exploration see https://www.schumachercollege.org/living-waters and accounts of both practice and theory at Learning How Land Speaks, peterreason.substack. come
Thanks Peter. It sounds like important work. I’ll look again at Living Waters.
Jonathan, a lot to digest here. Your first aha - "everything we know about the physical world is known through experience, and that we can’t really get beyond experience" reminded me of the essay I just read about a new emerging field of history and how historians can no longer assume what an experience historically felt like for the experiencer - see "You had to be there." https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/human-ancestors-emotion-history/684959/?gift=YRI4EEH83_xCFEy-xnh1S5LetRyejNFDHfEXvCoMwmI&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
2nd, this article was recommended by Gregg Henriques, he of the Unified Theory of Knowledge (UToK) and involved with the organization (Institute of Applied Methatheory) you have now agreed to be (and written about) a reviewer of its journal - Integration - the Journal of Big Picture Theory and Practice.
Gregg said the following about this vis a vis his theory - "A great summary of the... confusion that exists regarding this concept. There is a profound gap in our knowledge. It is properly framed as the Enlightenment Gap. It can be seen in: i) the hard problem of consciousness and related confusions; ii) the problem of psychology: iii) the equivocation problem regarding mind in the cognitive sciences; iv) the problem of consilience of aligning the natural and social sciences; v) the problem of physical reductionism versus emergence and the strict reductionists and the liberal naturalists in philosophy.
Extended Naturalism is a new framework for natural philosophy. It properly extends the concept of emergence so that we can actually: 1) dissolve the hard problem and be clear that what remains is properly framed as the Neurocognitive Engineering Problem; 2) solve the problem of psychology with UTOK and mindedness; 3) generate a proper synoptic integration of cognitive science via John's 3R/4P metatheory of cognitive agency; 4) bridge the natural to the social sciences via UTOK's JUST, and 5) solve the problem of natural philosophy with EN's extended framework for emergence, ontology, definitions, epistemology, and phenomenology in a way that assimilates and integrates the key functional findings from psychology and cognitive science on human consciousness."
So, where does this leave me? I know that if I jump off a 20 story building onto concrete my body will break and I along with my consciousness will likely die... at least as far as I know. I know that you, me and everyone reading this will die, but we don't really know what that means beyond the fact that the person we are here will no longer exist for those remaining in the form they possessed while still living.
Boris Shoshitaishvili is a Fellow at the Berggruen Institute (BI), a non-profit founded in 2010 by Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels.
Last year, Shoshitaishvili hosted a Colloquim on the need for a “Planetary metaphysics.” This research initiative hopes to develop a “common language of “the Planetary” which can make available new perspectives on collective action challenges across a range of political, social, economic and scientific domains.” “Planetary metaphysics” “describes the ongoing effort to understand the relationship between our humanity and our planet.” https://berggruen.org/news/planetary-metaphysics-Colloquium.
So, let's bring forth this new metaphysics and address our meta-crisis of the 21st century while we are still alive and for those that follow us.
Thank you Jim, there’s a lot here to read up on. I’ll try to do so and revert. 🙏 J
Well, your essay and a few others inspired my latest essay, here it is. https://medium.com/@jylterps/who-are-we-ee9d6db14a96?postPublishedType=repub
I looked him up because the name "Shoshitaishvili" caught my attn. It's Georgian; therefore a person belonging, at least in part, to a group whose language is an isolate. Georgians are also Eastern Orthodox, a form of Christianity as old as Roman Catholicism but with a very different Weltanschauung. That heritage of difference would be a help for someone trying to bring together social disciplines and the hard sciences. Or the contrasting aspects of being human--arts v. sciences. My simplistic example of which is: Scientifically, a painting is a chunk of botanical fibers with splotches of chemically derived pigments. It's the artistic, mystical, poetic, spiritual, and religious aspects by which we give it meaning.
We are not one. It is the orientation that 'we are one' which sets up the problematic that you discuss through the rest of this very well-written and illuminating argument. Transformation of the sort you are conjuring comes when you realize we are not one; when you start in a place that is not one, and not two. Because in realizing 'we are not one', you have to realize there is something beyond the categories (very real, very helpful) which you discuss here. This shift is so challenging (of self, of structure, of solidity) it is most often dismissed before given a chance. But to really start with 'not one' and 'not two' is the portal we are all dancing towards these days. Once we move through, all these theories of consciousness that you discuss can be helpful in exactly the way you (seem to?) criticize a future Alex for suggesting. And indeed we can know what it is like to be a bat.
We are one! And we’re not one. I don’t see the problem?
And I’m definitely not criticising Alex, or the notion of an un theory of consciousness; I think it’s good to get to the point where you see that theory serves pragmatic purposes.
I’m not sure we can know what it’s like to be a bat, with anything like unassisted normal consciousness, but we can imagine it. Curious to know what exactly you’re saying there…
I've considered twoness, even multiplicities. I'm familiar by long personal experience and cultural lore how the complex, many colored threads of living diversities seem to weave into patterned webs linked to a unitary Consciousness. But consider an entity that for brevity's sake call "God." What would be interesting to Them? How about finiteness, individuality, personality, emotions, beliefs, relationships and what it is to be a bat? Or rock? Or kelp? These require separateness and particular identities.
Which can be dismissed as illusions, but that's rather smug and no more than the logical fallacy of argument by assertion. I tried my best, as a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism for 6 years, to convince myself I wasn't real. I'd bet cats would find the idea self-evidently false. Finally I come to the conclusion the western way had merit and was a counterbalance for eastern oneness.
And why not argue with God? Why believe in submission? Although having twice experienced direct connection to Deity/Mind, I can testify it was like being hit by a 480 volt circuit. Not only overwhelming mentally, but actual burns. Both times in front of witnesses. Assuming that wasn't merely psycho-physical, it could indicate something real behind the adage to fear God.
We are not one. And we are not two. If you start by saying we are one, you have already set limits and assumed there is a set of shared regularities that has to be reconciled, which is what every single theory of consciousness tries to do, and which can never be done, though a lot of productive thinking comes from it. To be irreconcilable assessments of some ongoing process is not to be one. Your hand is not one with your foot even if they are both assessed as parts of what you might understand as your body. They are part of the same process (from your position of assessment) but they are not one.
We are one, and not one, and two, and not two. We are one in all sorts of ways and two in all sorts of ways and neither one nor two in all sorts of ways. I think what I was trying to convey in the piece is something like Jung meant by Unus Mundus - that we can make sense of something like a universal mind/soul of which we are part. And the part/whole relationships have their own complexity, of which atman/brahman is the touchstone.
I understand and I think Jung made a wonderful step there and we can now make another rather than assume that framework. He starts with One. One World. And this sets us up for the binary. What if we explore what is holding one? What if we do let ourselves hold what is not countable or contrastable and thus also not unifiable? There really is a difference here. It is an important shift that happens between saying 'we are one and we are not one' and asking what is 'not one and not two' because the limits and the line being drawn is no longer drawn. When we (and when Jung) discusses Unus Mundus, there are assumptions of 'one' and one is itself a set of limits and parameters. This feels frustrating when questioned precisely because it is what we assume and take for granted. It's also a bit dangerous.
Can we say we’re one, not one, and neither one nor not one.” ? (And I’m not wedded to Jung, but if I was, unus mundus is not ‘one world’ as such, even if literally so).
It comes with those scaffolds even if implicitly. His use of contrasts is directly related to binary scaffolding. Dark/light and so forth. Again, all towards better understanding. But contrasts do their best work when viewed from beyond their either/or paradigm (not by trying to resolve them into one). We could explore spaces that are not set by those scaffolds even while we are still able to use and appreciate them. I have the feeling this really matters for transformation in the way you've been circling. It also matters for issues of technology, finding meaning and motivation, and what worth we place on precarity (It's worth a lot!). Leading with 'all is one' sets us up to imagine reconciliation of what cannot be reconciled or some sort of pinnacle to what is not directional. Like the 350 theories of consciousness. Or materialism and idealism. The point is: consciousness as we mean it (our awareness of our own living or the knowing that 'it is something to be like') is not one; it is the word we use to communicate as life about life recognizing life's many irreconcilable positions of assessing itself. Which brings us back to how we can indeed know what it is like to be a bat. Perhaps we can discuss this further in the new year. (Bernardo Kastrup was an early reader and supporter of my next book so maybe you would be interested to browse through it and discuss themes via the lens of this piece on consciousness). Thank you for the discussion.
Once we move into this (which means we are no longer the self we thought) we can understand what it is like to be the bat; we may even be here to do exactly that. It doesn't mean we become the bat or that we have solved 'bat-ness' or that this knowing is somehow absolute and bat-like and 'finished' in any sense (in fact, we've only perpetuated it). But whatever part of life we might be calling the particular bat, we can better know what it is like to be it. And this is a good reason to be coming into awareness of life as life, to extend the circle of this knowing of life as shared life as best we can. To be the knowing of the part of what we share that we call the bat. To do all we can to try and know what it is like to be all these other beings in what we understand as life.
Thank you Jonathan for this deep dive into "consciousness." I think I'll be reading this one a few times, to better take in all of its muchness.
I appreciate the inclusion of Sheldrake's panentheism, which I think is an important perspective, and I fully resonate with how you end the essay in reference to Cynthia Bourgeault's teaching about Jean Gebser's conception of the structures of consciousness.
On that note, I also highly recommend Katie Teague's hour-long video featuring Cynthia: "The Signature of our Time."
https://www.patreon.com/posts/signature-of-our-137974184
Well it’s good to know there are so many options! I like Alex’s take you shared, how gentle, that we can use them here and there, depending. Yesterday driving home the sky was lit up flaming orange and hibiscus pink, gray lavender clouded, a brilliant expanse, as the solstice sun went down. The sky was itself. It was so beautiful that the little bird of my soul was soaring. Other times, the hoofed animal of me just slogs along. Seems alright to do that jig. Merry Christmas and thank you for the wonderful article.
Also like that bit about a perspective that obliterates the problem. Best go to solution for most things as far as I know.
Please also find an essay titled The Forgotten Spiritual Esotericism of Saint Jesus of Galilee in which the author provides a unique Understanding of the "New" Testament as a work of religious fiction created by the institutional church. He points out that religious fiction was a common old-time way/method of communicating religious concepts etc.
http://www.dabase.org/up-5-1.htm
A related essay.
The Spiritual Gospel of Saint Jesus of Galilee http://www.dabase.org/up-6.htm
Thank you, Jonathan, for your thoughtful and generous inquiry. In my work, the metacrisis shows up as a crisis of belonging, and belonging can’t be restored through systems alone. It emerges in relationship, where experience is honored as real and meaning arises through contact. In that sense, your exploration of ontopoetics feels like a return to a mature sanity — one that remembers we are not just in the world, but in conversation with it.
This is awesome
Jonathan I have to write this morning, and I'm full of that fervour of a zealot without being a zealot I hope, that what's needed is a rolling out of the the idea of 'The Reality of Scale'.
It may be that the phrase alone triggers enough cognitively for you to know what I mean. You might even, charitably, agree! Or, it might just be a tiny bit of word salad. And if this is the case hopefully my future communications will make good on the promise the phrase currently captures for me as I use it...
Thanks Joe. There’s a class in short documentary called powers of ten that speaks to “the reality of scale”. Do you know it? https://youtu.be/44cv416bKP4?si=saGQXBt7CkTshewu
Thanks Jonathan. And Happy Christmas!
I didn't know it.
Yes, it does speak to it. I found it quite affecting. (Morgan Freeman is a safe hand, isn't he.) And yet one could feel it speaks only to the reality of space, as so much in my (word salad?) phrase turns on "reality". But yes.
I just glanced back at your consciousness piece, occasioning that there are the scales of different processes in real time, and how these relate, depend on, and constrain, each other, for instance. And there's the personal, and super- and sub- personal. And then there's functions, nested within others, and reasons, nested within others.
When I was at university there was a playful (jockeying) moment when our teachers asked, what's the opposite of hierarchy? The answer they had in mind was heterarchy. I think the very general quite abstract idea I have of 'the reality of scale' arises from a concern with structure, and complexity, and thinking holistically, and amounts to an idea about making complexity more tractable, but in a 'realist' over 'nominalist' frame. Making the whole more tractable then?
And I just now had to refresh my memory of the key word in the name 'constructor theory', which I've marginally heard of on YouTube, by the way, as it connects.
And btw I'm trying to centre stage in my ongoing urgent musings the problem of collective transformation, in case you hear echoes of relevance, but the 'reality of scale' formulation arose listening to Vervaeke (Pageau less so, Peterson previously, McGilchrist too I shouldn't wonder...), but was probably nascent in puzzling at what 'emergence' means... amongst other things.
Forgive, please, the ramble. And wishing you well, as always,
Joe
Aha 5. Relations among experiences, and the idea of the phenomenology of experience IN GENERAL, and kinds of experience as indicating the phenomenology of a fundamental stratum of experience in particular. Yes our lives are lived as consciousness, can we, though, reach realistically to a ground containing our lives so lived that is other than the mereological sum of lives so lived?
Aha 4. Anomalous experiences. Anomalous. And 'nomalous' experiences? Coincidence of opposites? What 'episteme' is drawing the line we find we've been walking? Hume on miracles? Was Hume making a pragmatist's observation? Let metaphysics hover, remain moot. Abductively, locating within the most abstract framing, and a choice between alternatives at that level, seems legitimate. But if the admonition is negative, to NOT firm up an outermost algorithm for the possible Vs impossible, then.... Let's keep an open outer bound whilst grounding thinking immanently in a lived, shared, communication-space...
Aha 3. To do less than zero justice to this fabulous section: isn't it all a matter of our epistemic situation, rather than our metaphysical situation? "We are all looking for foundations, and it can feel validating when you think you’ve found them, even if they don’t look like ‘foundations’ at all." Can't the here and now, the this and us, be the foundational? Can't THAT be the flip? (Metaphysical 'answers' becoming somewhat moot!)