Final Musings
In this chapter I’d like to share some open thoughts with you about the worldview laid out in this work, the way it has been conveyed, and how it relates to the present state of our culture. There is a sense in which this chapter is a personal critique of the rest of the book. The points I will attempt to make are subtle and could be easily – as well as unfavorably – misinterpreted. The more intuitive tone of the chapter could also be misconstrued as loose and become detrimental to the book as a whole. Yet, I believe the potential benefits of doing this outweigh the risks. After all, I am not trying to win any beauty contest, but simply to convey ideas in as honest and open a way as possible. The judge, if there is any, is you alone.
Before we get to the more delicate and nuanced parts, let’s start easy.
Split-off complexes
A core idea of this book is the notion that localized segments of mind at large can become immersed in the illusion of being separate from the rest of the broader membrane. The illusion originates from the self-reflective amplification of certain mental contents to the detriment of others. The ego becomes blind to the broader membrane of mind, identifying itself solely with the amplified contents in its own field of self-reflection.
Yet, talking about this with friends, I’ve heard from some that they were uncomfortable with the whole idea. To them, it was counter-intuitive that different segments of the same mind could really become convinced that they were separate entities. After all, we experience our own psyches mostly as single, unified mental spaces. It is hard for most people to imagine that their psyches could be broken up into seemingly separate and independent identities. Thus, how could that happen to mind at large?
But we know empirically that the fragmentation of the human psyche into multiple and seemingly separate identities happens all the time. Indeed, psychology informs us of countless cases of the phenomenon of ‘Dissociative Identity Disorder,’ in which a single person can display multiple and seemingly disconnected identities and personalities.153 Each of these identities does not identify with the others, considering itself to be a separate entity, a separate center of consciousness. Yet, clearly they are all parts –split-off complexes – of a single, broader psyche. Somehow these complexes forget, through dissociation, what they are part of. And although they may ‘take turns’ manifesting themselves through the ego-body system, there is reason to believe that they exist concurrently in the psyche, at all times, living parallel lives.154When I say that each conscious being is a segment of a broader membrane of mind that somehow becomes dissociated from its true identity, I am appealing to the same underlying process as split-off psychic complexes. There is nothing fundamentally unprecedented about it. All I am doing is extrapolating that well-known phenomenon to a transpersonal and even trans-species level. I contend that each one of us is a split-off complex of the one medium of mind underlying all existence. The feasibility of this basic idea does not require anything that is not already known to happen in mental space.
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Substance dualism
Modern Western society seems to have converged to a highly polarized metaphysical dichotomy: while materialism is the dominant paradigm as far as its deep influence in society’s values and organization, substance dualism is seen as the only mainstream alternative in the form of religious or spiritual worldviews. As discussed earlier, substance dualism is the notion that, apart from matter, there is also an immortal soul that interacts with matter in mysterious ways. Matter and soul are seen to be different and separate types of ‘stuff,’ irreducible to one another.
This polarization of the metaphysical debate between materialism and substance dualism is a cultural victory for materialism. After all, what empirical evidence is there for the existence of a ghost-like soul floating in space-time? Is it the simplest explanation to postulate another type of ‘stuff’ that fundamentally transcends all empirical verification? Moreover, notice that substance dualism also entails realism, therefore causing a key flaw behind materialism to go unquestioned. Indeed, according to substance dualism, both soul and body supposedly exist objectively, outside mind. Therefore, precisely because substance dualism is perceived as the sole alternative, materialism becomes perpetuated as the only coherent metaphysics from the point-of-view of the intellectual elite; a tragic social situation that reflects a profound lack of metaphysical imagination.
So, does substance dualism have no value at all?
I actually believe it has, despite everything I said above. There is a sense in which substance dualism is closer to reality than naïve materialism: it correctly predicts that consciousness does not end upon physical death and even provides a metaphorical framework for understanding an enduring ‘personal unconscious’ in the form of an invisible ‘soul.’ Under materialism, there is room for neither of these things. Moreover – and I am quick to admit this – substance dualism is much more straightforward to grok than idealism. This is why, in Chapter 2, I used a dualist metaphor to introduce the ‘filter hypothesis.’ So there clearly is social value in substance dualism, given the lamentable state of our metaphysics today.
I will go even further: substance dualism can ‘run on top’ of idealism as an easier-to-digest metaphor for idealist truths. In other words, there is a way to interpret the key points of the idealist formulation of this book with dualist analogies. One of these analogies has already been mentioned in the previous paragraph: the soul is analogous to an enduring ‘personal unconscious.’ But we can systematize the analogy further because, in fact, there is a certain form of duality built right into the worldview developed in this book. Allow me to elaborate on this.
As we’ve seen, freewill is a property of mind at large. It is distributed uniformly throughout the membrane. However, because of self-reflective amplification, we identify ourselves only with a very small part of mind. Only the freewill at work within this small field of amplification is recognized by the ego as its own will. The force – the primary cause – that puts the rest of the membrane of mind in motion is seen by the ego as foreign and utterly outside its control. This way, all patterns of vibration that come from outside the field of self-reflective amplification are seen by the ego as external phenomena: the ‘world outside.’ And here is where a duality is born: I versus the world, inside versus outside, ‘little me’ versus the rest. This is not a fundamental duality, in the sense that it does not entail different kinds of ‘stuff,’ like matter and soul. But it is a duality of mental attitude. When mind does not identify with parts of itself, it creates the entire illusion of an external world, which lies at the heart of realism, materialism and even substance dualism.
The body image, of course, compounds the illusion. The body is simply an image in mind of a process of localization of mind, just like a whirlpool is an image in water of a process of localization of water. The body doesn’t imply anything other than mind and its movements, in exactly the same way that a whirlpool doesn’t imply anything other than water and its movements. But we can look down and see our own bodies. Although the ego, corresponding to closed-cycle processes of information flow in the brain, does not identify itself with the whole body – we even say ‘I have a body’ instead of ‘I am a body’ – it does recognize the body as the vantage point and platform of its interactions with the world. So, in effect, everything happens as if the ego, like a soul, inhabited the body. A whirlpool that could look at itself and recognize its own boundaries would also fall prey to the same illusion of duality: it would see itself as separate from the rest of the stream, including other whirlpools seen at a distance but which clearly did not constitute its own platform and vantage point. Illusion as it may be, there is a strong sense in which this duality is true, even though not ultimately true. It is true in the sense that, on many levels, it provides an accurate metaphor for what is going on. Many things do happen as if we were conscious souls inhabiting physical bodies.
We can, thus, lay out the following correspondences between substance dualism and the idealist formulation of this book: the soul corresponds to the segment of the psychic structure that may remain differentiated after the egoic loop unravels at physical death; that is, the underlying protrusion of the membrane of mind from which the egoic loop arises. The freewill of the soul corresponds to the operation of the primary cause within the psychic structure. The ‘external world’ corresponds to the vibrations of the membrane of mind that are originally set in motion, by the primary cause, outside the human psychic structure and then penetrate it through resonance. The physical body is the partial image of the topological reconfiguration process by means of which the soul becomes (more) self-reflective.
With these correspondences in mind, I consider it fair to use dualist metaphors when one talks about the fundamental nature of reality and of human identity. As a matter of fact, my first book, Rationalist Spirituality, despite establishing my idealist position early on, goes on to use dualist metaphors to convey most of its ideas. In a strong sense, things work as though people had souls, separate from the body and the rest of the world, which survived physical death.
What is it that survives?
A question that is then immediately raised is this: fine, my consciousness will survive my physical death. But my ego won’t. And I identify with my ego, not with the ‘unconscious’ segments of my psyche. Therefore, that which survives is not really me. For all practical purposes, I really will die. Isn’t it so?
The key point here is to separate the ego from the sense of ‘I’ that underlies all of our experiences. Indeed, experience intrinsically entails this sense of ‘I’: a subject that experiences. Therefore, the sense of ‘I’ is inherent to all points of the membrane of mind, regardless of topography or topology, since experiences can unfold anywhere in the membrane. The ego, on the other hand, corresponds to a narrative – a story – consisting of memories, projected self-images, values, attachments, conceptual constructs, explanatory models, etc. It corresponds to the particular set of vibratory modes that gets amplified within the egoic loop. But the witness of this story, who ends up mistakenly believing itself to be the story, is not the ego. It is that sense of ‘I,’ which is distributed throughout the membrane and is inherent to experience. We might call it the ‘amorphous I,’ because it exists even in the absence of all narratives from which form arises. It is a witness without identity, like a newborn.
There is a traditional thought exercise that illustrates this powerfully. It consists of asking yourself who you are and then systematically eliminating every answer you come up with. Am I my name? No, for I could legally change my name tomorrow and still have the same sense of identity. Am I my profession? No, for I could have studied something else, or get another job, and still be me. Am I my body? Well, if I lost a limb or had a heart transplant tomorrow I would still have the same sense of identity, so this can’t be it either. Am I my genetic code? No, for I could have an identical twin with the same genetic code and I wouldn’t be him. Am I my particular life history, as encoded in my brain? Well, wouldn’t I still have the same sense of ‘I’ if I had made different choices or had had different experiences in the past? And so on. It is possible to eliminate every answer conceivable. The conclusion of this exercise is that our inner sense of ‘I’ is fundamentally independent of any story we could dress it up with. As such, it is entirely undifferentiated and identical in every person. It is formless. This undressed, naked, ‘amorphous I’ is inherent to the membrane of mind at large, the sole subject of existence. Not only does every person have the same inner sense of ‘I,’ I contend that every conscious being has it: cats, dogs, fish, etc. At the deepest, narrative-free levels, they must all feel exactly like us.
Another way to see this is to consider that you have always had the same sense of ‘I’ throughout your life, even though everything else has changed: your body has changed, your thoughts and opinions have changed, your memories have changed, your self-image has changed, the world around you has changed, etc. Even though very few – if any – atoms in your body today are the same as when you were a child, you still believe yourself to be that same person. This happens because there has been a continuity of the sense of ‘I’ from the time you were a child up until now. The formless witness has remained the same. It is this continuity of the ‘amorphous I’ that makes you think to be the same person, even though everything about you has become different.
And here is the key point: the metaphysics developed in this book implies that there is an uninterrupted preservation of the ‘amorphous I’ throughout the process we call death. After all, if this inner sense of ‘I’ is inherent to the membrane of mind, there is just no reason to believe that a change in the topography or topology of the membrane would eliminate or interrupt it. There must be a continuity of your most fundamental sense of ‘I’ even as your ego is dismantled and the ‘story of you’ is no longer identified with. Although you will realize, as physical death unfolds, that you aren’t and have never truly been the narratives of your ego, you will never lose touch with the naked sense of ‘I’ that you feel right now. Therefore, for exactly the same reason that you believe yourself to be the same person you were when you were a child, you will feel unambiguously that it is really you that survives physical death. Moreover, because I speculate that the topography of mind corresponding to the ‘personal unconscious’ may be largely preserved, you will likely still remember your egoic narratives and personal history. You will know exactly who you thought yourself to be. In a sense, you will just wake up at ‘home’ without forgetting the dream you are having right now.
From: WHY MATERIALISM IS BALONEY
Bernardo Kastrup’s book
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