Author Archives: trishnowland

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A tiny ripple of positive on the sea of negative ~ Roy Bhaksar

Between ‘Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom’ and the ‘metaReality’ series, there is a resounding echo, a reverberation created, a shockwave on the ocean of absence. Across both works, Roy Bhaskar works to revindicate the negative, which in his terms was eschewed by Hegel in the name of Hegelian ‘becoming’ – with Hegel emphasising a positive account of becoming, at the expense of fully embracing, embodying, revealing and shedding a full and stratified revelation of the negative and absence, pure of form.

‘We know that matter is largely constituted by empty space at whatever level we look. We know that this room, whatever way we look at it, is punctuated by absence. Actually there is no way you could have purely positive being. There is no way in which positive being, unmarked by absence or space, could exist. But the contrary is not the case. You could have nothing, there is no logical impossibility in having no positive being at all. So actually absence and negativity is in ever way prior to presence and positivity. Absence is essential to change. What happens when anything changes is that there is an absenting of something which was given, which was already there, and a presenting of something new. In human action what we are always doing is transforming what was there and presenting something new. So every human act is a transformative operation on the world. Obviously then, absence is a critical category. And the mystical shell in the Hegelian dialectic and indeed in western thought was just the absence of the concept of absence. Because, what Hegel had done in his Logic was to go from being to nothing to becoming. After nothing, which is indeterminate, no more negative concepts are treated by Hegel. Instead, arguing that negation always cancels itself in the process of becoming, he had removed the very concept which would enable him to reflexively situate his own scientific discovery. That really is the rational kernel and the mystical shell in the Hegelian dialectic clearly accounted.’

pg 130 – 131, ‘Social science and self-realisation: Non-duality and co-presence in ‘Reflections on metaReality’ by Roy Bhaskar

Ontological monovalence for Bhaskar is a purely positive account of reality which is fatally flawd by the failure to account for real negation or absence, screening epistemological assumptions via an ontological actualism. He identifies it as part of an ‘unholy trinity’ accompanied by the epistemic fallacy (where knowledge is confused with simple being) and the primal squeeze (between metaphysical categories, for example, speculative illusion, experience and empiricism, all together, a mash of meta-something. Probably with peas.). It is corrected by ontological polyvalence. The deal with ontological polyvalence is that we need to account for absence not only in the alter, which is often negated in positivist accounts, we need to account for absence across different planes of being (causality, spatio-temporarily, totality, agency and morality for example) to stratified depths (non-being, nothing, absent and emptiness are all different).

Bhaskar’s dialectic of freedom is entirely grounded on the absenting of absences, giving a ground for fact/value relations that can be guidance for human behaviour. But more than this, I thoroughly adore that he draws our attention to the space of not-ness, this space where even as we see it, we can acknowledge in some way that we are, even when we are clearly not. 

Alien-nation suddenly becomes a visible, adoptable, and definitely lovable and re-enchanted space, to inhabit. :)

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A stone is given, received in gratitude and joy ~ adapted from Raimon Panikkar, ‘The Rhythm of Being’

24 steps beyond dialectic, into the heart of the Real:

1. A stone is given, it rests in my palm, this thing evoking a sense of gratitude and joy;

2. This stone has qualities of stability, intelligibility and mystery (interconnectedness with all);

3. We make concepts of unity, knowing this stone as we know all stones;

4. Things are thus both sensible (it sits in my hand) and conceptual (it sits in my mind);

5. The stone and its concept are apprehended in mutual relation, invoking a ‘new’ reality, of relation;

6. We can make a temple out of many of these such stones. The contemplative sees the temple in the stone and the stone in the temple, indeed, sees the entire universe emerge, in this one view of relation.

7. As a temple is not only it’s stones, so Being is different from beings.

8. There is a prime Being.

9. Humans need to hold a stance of openness to admit the quasi-concept of Being.

10. Symbols can have Being.

11. Supreme entities (Gods) are too given the name Being.

12. entia – are all the beings in our perception, which with a formal jump becomes:

ens commune – which is an empty concept (of intellect), but which with an ontological jump into transcendence becomes;

ens realissimmum – which is a hierarchy of beings (evolving), which with a final plunge falls back into immanence, into the symbol of Being;

13. Aquinas tells us that the ‘ens commune’ is the negation of being –  our intellect, or logos, ‘negates’ ontology, with an empty concept. Heidegger progresses beyond this, to say ‘the nothing is more original than the ‘not’, or negation’. In this way, it is possible to understand that the intellect has a seemingly superhuman power, embodied in our carnal existence, that is, it can put a ‘no’ to any being.

14. If Non-being is a function of our intellect, we may say Being embraces Non-Being, insofar as that idea enters into our field of consciousness. Non-Being can be interpreted two ways: dialectically, as contradictory to Being, and dialogically, as that which pierces our logos (knowing mind), without full consciousness, or awareness.

Beyond Non-Being, there is Silence (turiya) which we can denote by saying it is ‘neither-nor’, beyond logic or metaphor.

15. Speech actually invokes this Silence – we know Silence’s presence not by enunciation but by the fact that speech occurs within, within the background of, Silence.  Being aligns with this Silence, not as consort to Non-Being, more in the presence of Emptiness.

16. In perceiving the stone we apprehend more than the stone, we apprehend too the ‘not-stone’ – a horizon of nothingness, out of which the stone emerges. This is the level of dialectic, this relative nothingness. Beyond the level of dialectic, the stone occurs as a dynamism on the horizon of Emptiness. There is no dialectic in this relation, the stone arises in absolute Emptiness.

17. Nothingness can be an object of our consciousness, it pertains to the logos; formless Emptiness cannot. At this point, there is no dialectic, Emptiness is not a negation of any affirmation, it is a blank horizon, beyond the impossible or possible.

Silence is that Emptiness from which sound emerges as sound. Pneuma or spirit is a Silence which does not suffocate the logos.

18. We do not have to negate Being in order to have ‘access’ to Emptiness. Whatever Being may be it is different from and irreducible to beings. The experience of Being belongs to the field of Emptiness.

19. Emptiness is outside of dialectic, even though Being and Non-Being (nothing)  maintain a dialectical correlation.

20. There is no hermeneutic for a symbol – a symbol speaks directly to overcome the subject-object split, for those that see it and engage it. To say Being is a symbol is to affirm Being as neither merely objective nor purely subjective. To say that the symbol is a symbol only for those who discover it as a symbol is to affirm the existence of the symbol against the horizon of Emptiness.

21. To pay heed only to the material aspects of the stone results only in a crude empiricism; to concentrate on the horizon of Nothingness leaves a crude nihilism – these  attitudes reduce to pluralism or monism, respectively. The advaitic intuition of every religion through time asks that we marry these two – the middle way which is neither one nor the other.

22. The advaitic intuition is not rational nor dialectic, it says ‘as well as’ without indulging in an either/or or perspectivalism. It emerges where the dynamism of knowledge is inverted – in touching, we know we are touched, in knowing, we are known, beyond the order of sense or intellect. A wholistic participation, from the purity of the heart.

23. The advaitic intuition does not need anthropology so much as anthropophany, where the spirit is present but not subordinated to the logos. Spirit discloses to us who, and what, we are.

24. The pebble in my hand is truly a revelation of Reality. Being is a metaphysical interpretation of reality. Non-being is a way to handle reality dialectically, Emptiness, mystically.

Being is the root, the dwelling place, and the foundation of everything. This ultimate essence, by which all is animated, that is truth, that is the atman, that art thou.

~ adapted from ‘The Destiny of Being’ in ‘The Rhythm of Being’ by Raimon Panikkar

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The Advaitic vision – The Destiny of Being – Raimon Panikkar

‘Here is the place for the function of the third eye in the mystical intellect. If an aristotelian epistemology offers the basis for empirical and rational knowledge, the advaitic vision requires illumination from a superior source of knowledge. This third degree of knowledge comes into being not when we see or know, but when we are conscious that we are seen or known. It is nether sense knowledge nor rational knowledge, yet it is inseparable from both. It is not irrationalism. It emerges when the dynamism of knowledge inverts its direction, as it were, we are aware that in touching we are touched, in knowing we are known. It is conscious that there is an illumination from ‘above’. I know fully a thing not when the thing is sensible that I may sense it, or intelligible that I may understand it, but when both subject and object are illumined by a light that comes from neither subject nor object. Then it produces an ‘understanding’ that is more than sense or rational experience; it creates a union between subject and object that is of an order other than a sensuous touch or a rational contact. It is a more holistic participation, which produces a conviction that is more than physical or rational.’

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Who Am I? Reflections on metaReality ~ Roy Bhaskar

‘The source of the paradoxical nature of the self is as follows: whatever it is that is said about the self, there is something other which is not said which is tacitly presupposed. Thus if I say that the self does not – or for that matter does- exist I presuppose something which asserts the non-existence or existence of that which I talk about. In the philosophical discourse of modernity, modernism and modernisation we have characteristically, powered by individualism, an ego and an anothroprocentricity coupled on to an abstract universality. In postmodernism this coupling is rejected and displaced, but the bearer of the deconstructive discourse remains mysterious, unsusceptible to the reflexive situation.

 

Whatever the self is, it is clearly very important in contemporary society, being the bearer of legal, social and religious rights and responsibilities. It is ‘I’ who comes of age and marries, possesses and owns, votes and talks, loves and fights, is punished and rewarded, becomes ill and dies – an event which ‘I’ either do or do not survive. We live in a very egocentric world, curiously coupled with its abstract universality.

 

Here I argue that the self in the sense of the ego, separated from other selves and a world of objects (including emotional states) to which it is attached, is a ‘causally efficacious’ illusion. As (emergent) embodied personalities we do however, exist, but our existence is both dependent and limited. On the other hand, everything we do depends upon a transcendentally real Self, in essence unlimited,  which is the ultimate source of our causal agency in the world. Moreover, all projects of human emancipation tacitly presuppose such a self. This ‘Self’ has no sense of self (and it does not even talk or think about itself), but uniquely displays itself in the here and now of spontaneous, loving creation.

 

Thus the ‘I’ in the sense of ego, that is ‘I’ which apprehends itself as existing separately from other ‘I’s and asserts itself against an object world, both of which may be regarded as afield for the egos play and manipulation, that ‘I’ is an illusion in the sense that it has no real object; just as a mirage is an illusion. But though an illusion, it is like a mirage, causally efficacious, and as such is real, that is, the illusion is real, though it remains an illusion ie has no real object. This is what I have called a ‘demi-reality’. This ‘I’, this little self, is however a property of real (non-illusory) embodied personalities. These are complex, relationally defined and constituted entities, themselves stratified, differentiated, and changing- constituents of what I have called relative reality. Underneath such embodied personalities is a transcendentally real Self which is the source of their causal agency and powers, and such selves are unlimited and absolute realities.’

 

~ pg 71 – 72

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Absence and Emergence – Reflections on MetaReality by Roy Bhaksar

‘Marx talks about the rational kernel of Hegelian dialectic which he said Hegel had mystified. So what is the rational kernel? The rational kernel is in fact a developmental process driven by absence. What happens in scientific theory for example, is that you have incompleteness. You leave out some aspect of reality; that incompleteness generates a contradiction, which necessitates a move to a greater totality as described and explained by a new transcending concept. That is the fundamental process of development in science and in all walks of life and arguably nature. It all depends on absence. It is driven by absence and is rectified by absence because the new idea does not come from induction nor from deduction, it comes from neither, from nowhere. The synthesising concept of the movement of breakthrough is an irruption out of the blue, de novo, it comes from a level of reality that is beyond the threshold of discursive consciousness. That is the inspiration in science. It is not really understood that imagination, visualisation is important to keep even ordinary science going. Ordinary science is not algorithmic. Ordinary science is a very creative, dynamic, expansive process. But it is in the very moment of breakthrough to a new concept that you have genuine novelty, that is the emergence of something that was not there before.

Absence and emergence go hand in hand. Emergence is the positive bi-polar of absence. What happens in these flashes of inspiration is a kind of transcendence in science in which a new concept, something that has never been dreamt or thought of before, which irrupts into the scientist’s imagination. Then it is gradually worked into a fully developed theory which can explain the previously known world in a new way. But it comes in that flash from nowhere. And that is the moment of transcendence within the transcending move to the greater totality that resolves the theoretical impasse. This concept of transcendence is very important. For transcendence is such a common and familiar feature in life. You can lose yourself in a walk, you lose yourself in identification with music. You become one with the music. This was of course the goal of the mystics, to become one with something higher than their normal self. Either with their essential self or with God in some form or another. But transcendental identification is common in everyday life. It is not something opposed to ordinary life, it is something which is necessary to keep life going.’ ~ Reflections on MetaReality, pg 42-43.

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The Rhythm of Being – Raimon Pannikar – Introduction

‘Becoming transparent’

‘To say that the solution lies inside is not to assert that it is not outside as well, or that it lies already coiled somewhere within. Indeed, the kundalini does not even exist before it stretches up, nor does the potency of Aristotle for that matter. The process is one of creation. If we know where we are going we are not really free, but rather tied to preconceived ideas and bound by a goal.

For the individual, all this may still make some sense and be possible. I can trust in Isvara, God, Reality…I can be vulnerable, allow things to happen, and attune myself to the spontaneous development of Being. Nonetheless, what does it mean for the collectivity, for the people, for sociological change and historical effectiveness?

My only point here is that we shall not discover the real situation we are in, collectively as well as individually, if our hearts are not pure, if our lives are not in harmony within ourselves, with our surroundings, and ultimately with the universe at large…The reason is not only moral, it is ontological. Only when the heart is pure are we in harmony with the real, in tune with reality, able to hear its voice, detect it’s dynamism, and truly ‘speak’ its truth, having become adequate to the movement of Being, the rhythm of Being….’

‘This implies, of course, that thinking is much more than just concocting thoughts. Thinking discovers the real, and by this uncovering we shape reality by participating in its rhythm, by ‘listening’ to it, and by being obedient to it. Creative thinking is a genuine creation, a contribution to the cosmogony, but in order that our contemplation have this resonance and power, we need to be free from both preconceived ideas (inertia of the mind) and egotistic will. A traditional name for this is sanctity; a more academic name, wisdom. The strongest formulation is perhaps that of the Beatitudes: the pure of heart shall see God, that is, the entire reality.’

pg 35, Introduction, ‘The Rhythm of Being’ by Raimon Pannikar

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Reflections on Meta-Reality – Spontaneity of Action

‘The third thing about action is the spontaneity of action. If you just think, think about what you are going to do, you will never do it. If I think about how to pick up this glass of water and I do not at some point do it then it will not be done. At some point action must be spontaneous and basic. No matter how intricate the chain of reasoning, at some point we just act. Aristotle was very correct when he said the conclusion of a practical syllogism, that is a practical chain of reasoning, is an action, it is not a thought. The most brilliant and most ordinary actions are spontaneous , are done without thought. They are done spontaneously…Scientific discoveries, good action, right action, great action are spontaneous action, done without thought. This is not an irrationalism. This is just to balance not only the claims of the discursive intellect with the intuitive intellect but to say there is perhaps a level of consciousness which is beyond thought itself [italics mine]. A level of consciousness within which they are intricately linked with the totality of being. A level of consciousness at which our deepest natures sit. A level of consciousness which connects us to the totality of our being, but from which our creativity, our loving kindness, our acts of solidarity and at the end of the day our own knowledge ultimately springs. So this level would be a level of consciousness which would be truly cosmic, a kind of envelope surrounding, binding, cohering and unifying the whole of being as a totality, one totality.’

~ pg 49: Beyond Modernism and Post-modernism

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Trish: JB SEM Chapter 6 Limits of Knowledge

‘Consciousness is the experience of this relation [between introspection, image, and exteroception, object]…In idealist philosophy, the physical world is known only through its representation in the mind, through images that are like the shadows in Plato’s cave…a description of the world is always a type of fable…The clinical material suggests that the transition from image to object is a transition from one mental space to another…The awareness of the image is part of the image’.

‘The object is preceded by the image and the image develops out of memory and the experiential store of the personality. The self is a stage in the unfolding prior to the image, arising early in the activation as a configuration in subconscious memory. The configuration of the self embraces all the potential images that the self can generate. The different aspects or expressions of the self are not isolated components but ideas the self pours out. The unity of the self derives from this position at a depth beneath analytic consciousness. Self, image and object are stages in a process of creative becoming.’

‘Two oppositions are set up in the object development: between viewer and external objects and between viewer and internal representations, the latter anticipating the former….Introspection is attenuated exteroception, mind looking at its own preliminary object representations…This leads to the paradoxical conclusion that introspection is a precursor to object awareness even though object awareness is a more primitive function. There is a difference, however, between an awareness of objects and an awareness in which a self apprehends an object field.’

‘In the withdrawal from the object the image rises into prominence and the feeling of self in relation to the object is heightened.  There is still an object, otherwise the individual would be dreaming, but the focus is on the preliminary content. This content has an image-like quality. The richness of the content is a sign of how early or unresolved the stage is. The play of ideas and the images of introspection, the rising up of novel and creative forms, and the knowledge brought to bear on object experience are phenomena that emerge in the recurrence of the perception when stages bypassed in the earlier traversal are reclaimed…This helps to explain the nature of reflection, the impression that the contemplation of an object leads to the revival of prior events through a linkage of memories. ..One can say that access to knowledge is the depletion in a concept of those potential objects out of which the final object developed. ‘

‘The contents of introspection –imagery and the self – comprise a segment within the complete unfolding that accounts for conscious experience. The segment is an outpouring of the subconscious. The self receives subconscious content so there is a sense in which the subconscious can be knowne, but passively and transformed in the derivation to consciousness. However, the selection of contents into awareness from below and the concurrence of contents within the awareness segment restrict knowledge to what is offered into awareness, not what is actively sought after. Awareness depends on the unfolding….what enters awareness, creates awareness.’ pg 88

‘Even the past is not something to be seized and brought into awareness. The past is revivied in the mental state of the present, the past becoming the present in the momentary now. There is nothing certain beyond this point: the now of a past within the present, self and world, reinvented each moment in the overlapping of mental states. The solipsistic conclusion is not that the world does not exist, nor that the mind alone exists, but that one cannot access any event beyond its momentary mental representation.

This is not the only way to think about this problem. There is another perspective that has to do with the enlargement of the mind to include the world of perception….the realisation that the observer participates in the objects he perceives. The world is literally part of the self, the objects in it extensions of the life of the observer.’ pg 89

‘Logic is not a means of discovery but an outcome. Logic is one form of knowledge. Logic seems to be an operation of introspection, yet like introspection it is a product of the process through which contents are generated. The world that language models is itself a model….Logic is a description of the relations between elements in the proposition…The correspondence between facts and propositions does not come about because language seeks to describe the world but because world and language are shaped by the same generative process. Intuition is the direct apprehension of deeper contents in this process and requires a passiveness and a receptivity to whatever content surfaces.’ pg 90

‘The naming  of an object is a kind of minimal proposition….The word struggles to the surface over layers of meaning and sound representation…An incomplete development of the word may give an error of substitution. An incomplete development of the object may give an hallucination…The reality obtains in the cross-mapping, in mutual reinforcement, each content derives from the other.’ pg 90

‘The problem of meaning is usually taken to be the problem of logical form or linguistic meaning, the content of propositions and the way that words are combined…motivated by the power of logic..Certainly, there is a clarity in such accounts not found when the description comprehends the contextual background of language content. This clarity gives the impression something important has been decided, when, in truth, the clarity is a sign that there is not as much confusion about the problem as there ought to be.

Microgenesis takes a different approach. Logic is not the core of the problem of meaning but a creation of subsurface constructs that follow the laws of paralogical or dreamwork mentation. Meaning is not bound to language but penetrates language from outside….the greater part of the meaning remains unexpressed even after the proposition has been explained.’ pg 91

‘ The meaning of a word is the context in which it develops. Since the context is always changing there is no fixed meaning. From a psychological point of view, every recurrence of a word is a novel event…Different names for the same object do not have the same meaning…The name is a perspective. It is an object perceived from a certain point of view..The name chair and the object chair are arbitrary sets of relations, the set constituting the object and its name….The context or configuration in which the word is situated contains the meaning that is transferred to the word. The meaning includes the obkect for which the word-to-be is striving and the mind from which it is emerging. The meaning depends on the momentary history of the word and its structural relations.’ pg 92

‘[The] levels of meaning – life experience, word category and word or object are stages in the realisation of the word and the object. They are also fractionations of duration, as history and timelessness emerge, through introspection, into the concrete reality of the now of the present moment. …The word is the full set of changing configurations, not the outcome of the configuring process. Without these stages, there is no meaning.’ pg 92

‘Wittgenstein asked, if I write in the air where I am writing, in the mind or in the air?…when I speak to someone are the words in my mind or in public space?…What is the difference between my perception of an action such as my speaking, and my perception of any other object?

This leads to the view that the meaning of a word or any mental content can never be adequately described. Words can empty a concept but the meaning is approached only through a total impression. In fact the attempt to describe the meaning only enlarges the unexpressed content..When this content is derived into consciousness..it loses its original character, leaving behind..the real meaning that was the initial goal of the description. ‘ pg 93

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Trish: JB SEM Chapter 5 Consciousness and the Self

Note: Please forgive the lack of page numbers in the below – as my book has arrived in Australia amid my absence, I’ve been reading the files on my Kindle DX, which leaves little love-space for including page numbers (the Kindle uses locations).

Jason Brown’s world of consciousness strikes me as so very first-person, a view mostly drawn from within, looking out, even as he describes his patients. As I read his words, I yearn to understand how one consciousness might approach, encounter and harmonise with another consciousness, as he reveals the structures of-one, I can’t help but enquire into the where of-two. As he draws his theories together from the clinical perspective, we are drawn into an environment of particularly this making, with gradual boundaries of this presenced too, even as he writes, his-self-in-the-world meeting our selves-in-the-world.

‘A mental state is defined in relation to its conscious quality but this is not the same as to define what it means to be conscious. The definition of consciousness is elusive, partly because there is more than one form. Consciousness is often restricted to consciousness of an object or an idea. If we define consciousness in this way, however, we exclude the formative stages out of which it develops. Since the formative stages comprise the substructure of the state, there is no hope of understanding the nature of human or any form of consciousness if these stages are ignored. This is not only because we neglect the deep structure of consciousness and the context in which it appears, but because the inclusion of a formative or microgenetic segment entails that self-consciousness is a product of subsurface mentation, the terminus of a momentary process, not the locus of a decision-making self.’

‘The self  is conscious in the context of a perception. A relation is established between the self and other objects. Consciousness arises in the context of this relation. …Consciousnes taks as its object an external percept or an internal image. Introspection (awareness of images) and exteroception (awareness of objects)are different aspects of the same process.’

‘Consciousness of the self is the end result of a historical process of conscious development, but the prominence of the self as an inner event, and the fact that inner events are stages on the way to exteriorised objects, implies that self-consciousness is not a ‘higher’ phase in human mentation but a retreat from external objects to preparatory (internal) phases in the object formation.’

JB proposes that four planes of consciousness can be distinguished as states:

-          Pure wakefulness

Vigilance unfocused on specific objects, at the most extreme is the coma state, limited to lower brain stem activity. Brown proposes this as the earliest stage in the elaboration of consciousness.

-          Dream consciousness

Where sensation at the upper brain stem is transformed to limbic and temporal lobe activity, dream consciousness incorporates personal memory and affective charge. Inner and outer here are indistinctly divided, spatial distortion, egotistical view, and meaning of objects (rather than their form) predominate the image-scape.

-          Object awareness

Three dimensional space perception mediated by the parietal cortex give agency where the perceiver becomes aware of the relation between objects and extrapersonal space.

-          Analytic perception and separation of self and world

Independence of objects becomes established, and the relations between can now be manipulated in the perceivers mind. Here the world has to be sought after and extracted from the mind – the self becoming a ‘kind of deposition bypassed in the object formation marvelling at a world of its creation’.

Thus the distinction between self and the world can be marked by gradual transition. ‘At each level the image undergoes increasing clarification. There is a progressive loss of affect and narrowing or specification of object meaning’.

‘The origins of the self can be traced to an early segment of the microgeny in which the intrinsic configuration arising in the upper brain stem is transformed by incoming sensations to the limbic structures. At this point..the configuration traverses a system of personal (long-term) memory and is selected to represent whatever is to emerge from memory at that moment….In the course of the traversal, the content that is selected activates many potential configurations. Latent or unevoked configurations, or those transiently activated that have fallen by the way, persist as a surround of context and tacit knowledge within which the final representation actualises.’

‘…consciousness evolved for a reason even if its constituents do not have causal properties. I believe this reason is to be found not in the enhancement of certain behaviours that consciousness entails, but the different worlds elaborated in the unfolding of consciousness and the self. A self of some sort is a necessary condition for objects to develop…The feeling of agency and the belief in the autonomy of a self set against objects – the elements of conscious experience – are necessary for survival in a perilous environment. The idea of a self that is real and substantial, a self that can be wounded or destroyed, a self that lives and dies, is an illusion needed for survival. ‘

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Trish – JB: Prologue to end of Chapter 1

In the encounter with Brown, there is a sense of wanting to engage debate with him, perhaps all maroon-robe clad, with monks surrounding, and hand claps to mark the end of the diatribe, complete. A sign that I have much to learn, here. There’s also a call to bring forth some insights from the fields of cognitive science, neuroscience and neurophilosophy that can be appreciated as having become available since the time that Brown wrote the book, and also a sense of seeking to work a personal ‘edge’ , bringing the sacred, as present and encountered here, more fully to the fore of consciousness.

‘Like the objects it describes, a theory has a life. It is not an attempt to gather up and explain the data from outside but an expansion from within, like growth. A theory arrived at, in this way, through the developmental track – the dynamic  - of the object, is closer to nature than one pieced together by logic’ ~ Preface, xi

This passage above brought to mind the work of Alison Gopnick, in Theory-Theory. This is a developmental theory that accounts for how children come to know things and form a theory of mind of other humans – through a direct association, with what is going on inside them, for them. The theory rules they are using are not observable by us, and aren’t reportable by the kids, but Gopnick offers that the theory-theory account may offer an alternative or addendum to Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis. Also she speaks to the formation of theory in a social space in the philosophy of science, in a way that seems to render Brown a little solipsistic, in comparison for my read so far, her paper is here: http://www.alisongopnik.com/Papers_Alison/ChomskyFinal.pdf

‘A thread of relatedness binds the thing to it’s source, as it binds all things to each other’…’words emerge from potential to actual through successive domains of meaning and word-sound relations; that an utterance or a perception is realised over phases which inhere in the final object, and that the transition to the final object emplys, first, dream-work mechanisms, and then graded fields of conceptual and lexical-semantic relations, phases that constitute the meaning of the word or object….Memory is a way of characterising perception, action etc at successive moments in realisation’ ~ Prologue, pg xxviii – xxix

Interdependent origination, particularly accounted for in the Buddhist Yogacharin ‘mind-only’ schools, seems well-written through much of Brown’s writing – I’m left a little bereft in wanting to feeeel into relationality, in his accounts of cognition and neuropsychology, but the sense of interconnectedness he calls out, particularly from a time where cognitive science approached understanding the mind in such modular and disconnected ways, must be understood as revolutionary. In his writing, he begins to articulate an understanding of neural action which is being hotly pursued in the cognitive neurosciences and in neurophilosophy now – that there is something to the oscillatory nature of neural firing, and subsequent brain activity, which may birth not only consciousness itself (in a reductive account) but also the ego. In the account of consciousness, a not-so-reductive cognitive neuroscientist is Bill Bechtel, working in chronobiology, to understand how the environment impacts upon the organism;s consciousness, in the setting of circadian rhythms. Metzinger has written a book called ‘The Ego Tunnel’, a lay reader account of the possibility that the ego may be precisely accounted for in the oscillations of the brain – he uses rubber hand experiments, lucid dreaming data and near death experiences, to further develop the sense that it’s the relationship of the firings of neurons in the brain, not localised activity, not neurotransmitters, and not merely ‘symptoms’, that may account for conscienced selfhood.

Brown in Chapter One describes something similar to these oscillation theories, incorporating a sense of the permeability of boundaries between interior and exterior, in the shaping of the mind – where time becomes determined by process breaching interior-exterior relations, and not so much mere imposition of exterior causality.

‘…there is a question as to the agentive status of awareness; that is, awareness does not search out a content but is produced by the content that it is looking for. Microgenesis obligates that awareness is created by surfacing contents with an inability to know submerged (transformed) phases fro which the surface is elaborated’ ~ Chaper 1, pg 12

This quote actually brought Ken Wilber to mind, speaking in one of the “Deeper Cut” recordings for Integral Spirituality, where he described the possibility for an evolved consciousness as one that would not necessarily deeply engage and know the theory, ground and underlying structure of each of the methodologies attributable to the eight Zones he describes in Integral Spirituality, but would be able to reference the knowledge that was available by virtue of the methodology in a surface way, to know how it informed a dimension on a certain perspective. The ‘cognitive load’ of Integral Methodological Pluralism both deepens and lightens, in that moment of submerging full awareness – calling forth a real grounding in transdiciplinary trust and truth (in truthfulness) and also freeing up cognition for new encounter and new engagement.

Which is a wonderful space to sense into, as I prepare my Kindle to encounter Chapter 2….