The Kingdom of Heaven and the Poisoned Boffin

[Anthony Peake]

Hi MAC,

Thanks for the suggestion for me to read "Punk Science". As usual you are amazingly "on the ball" with these things to extent I sometimes feel taht you may be psychic. Thw author of Punk Science - Inside The Mind of God, Dr. Manjir Samanta-Laughton, contacted me in the Autumn having read ITLAD and she had her publisher ("O Books")send me a copy. I had first been introduced to Dr. Samanta-Laughton's work by long-time itladian Gary Plunkett ("Aloa Gary") about two years ago.

Now why this is a weird concidence is that literally today Manjir and I have agreed a date for me to be interviewed for her forthcoming movie project.......

Cheers

Tony

[MAC]

Hi MAC,

Thanks for the suggestion for me to read "Punk Science". As usual you are amazingly "on the ball" with these things to the extent I sometimes feel that you may be psychic. The author of Punk Science - Inside The Mind of God, Dr. Manjir Samanta-Laughton, contacted me in the Autumn having read ITLAD and she had her publisher ("O Books") send me a copy. I had first been introduced to Dr. Samanta-Laughton's work by long-time itladian Gary Plunkett ("Aloha Gary") about two years ago.

Now why this is a weird coincidence is that literally today Manjir and I have agreed on a date for me to be interviewed for her forthcoming movie project.......

Cheers

Tony

Tony: I've made a note to get my own copy of the book, which was really what I was noting in the earlier post (now clarified above ), i.e., another book to add to my own list of books to read.

I hadn't realized the full title included the reference to " ... Inside The Mind of God" ... so many thanks for that clarification.

It sounds like an interesting movie project.

All the best

Cam

[klaatu]

Tony:

Thanks for your response. I'm very pleased to hear that Dr. Samanta-Laughton is getting involved with this Forum. I found Punk Science a fascinating read, although the good Doctor appears to have branched off into some rather more wacky-sounding areas......however, I will reserve judgement until I have read her new book.

Cam:

I tend to agree with you that mystical experience should not be chased after......it appears to come unbidden at the most unlikely times to the most unlikely people (e.g. to a housewife in Tesco's car park!)

Going back to Jesus, didn't he say that "unless you become as little children you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven"? In other words, unless your mind is clear of concepts and open to percepts you will not "see" reality as it truly is. And going back to my original post, that quotation from the Gospel of Thomas is apposite:

His disciples said to him, "When will the kingdom come?" And Jesus said: "It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Look, here!' or 'Look, there!' Rather, the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it."

"The Kingdom will not come by watching for it" - in other words, you can't force yourself to see Ultimate Reality, it comes when you are ready to receive it.

Derkein:

And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." (LUKE 17:20-21)


Here is the crux of my post. Aldous Huxley, amongst other writers, spoke of the brain as a "reducing valve" - a filter which enables us to function in the material world but which also prevents us from experiencing reality as it truly is.

I also have absolutely no doubts whatsoever that the second above is not just true, but an undisputable scientific fact.

Your above comment - that "brain-as-reducing-valve" is scientific fact - interests me enormously. As a non-scientist I'm trying to get to grips with both sides of this argument. Some materialist physicists - Vic Stenger comes to mind - are adamant that such a viewpoint is baloney; mind is a product of matter. Yet other scientists - notably astrophysicist Richard Conn Henry - state that matter is absolutely a product of mind! (See his essay, The Mental Universe - published in Nature, no less!:http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/The.mental.universe.pdf)

Yet these scientists are using the same data on which to base their conclusions! What's going on? If the brain as a consciousness filter is indeed scientific fact, could you point me to some references? (Nothing with a lot of sums in it, please!)

[Derkein]

My reference was intended as I believe Huxley also intended, that the brain is a filter which discards the aspects of reality that is not important to it (or that it does not want to see) and is generally an inherited and learned response.
In that manner the senses and brain filter the view of reality which the mind receives, which is then further filtered and interpreted. In this way it creates its own reality, which is an illusion or limited and translated version of what actually is. Huxley believed that certain substances were a way of removing some of those filters.

My reference to the quote of 'Jesus is also intended literally.

[mgcardin]

Just now discovered this thread and found it chock-full of engaging stuff. I first heard of John Wren-Lewis while delving into the work of Douglas Harding in the 1990s. (Not tangentially, I think many of you here at the Tony's forum would find much of interest in Harding's philosophy/discipline/spiritual teaching-of "headlessness," if in fact you're not already familiar with it. It has become foundational to my own worldview and experience, as I've mentioned at my blog and talked about more fully in an essay.) Wren-Lewis's account of his enlightenment-by-poison experience in "The Dazzling Dark" proliferated throughout the online community of neo-advaita/nondual spiritual seekers back then, and touched a lot of us deeply.

Regarding the relation of the whole thing to the "brain-as-filter" idea, I heartily recommend a recent episode of the Skeptiko podcast in which Bernardo Kastrup talks about the significance of the recent U.K.-based psilocybin research involving fMRI scans that revealed, startlingly, that the substance's psychedelic effects are due to a damping down of activity in key areas of the brain. The research itself is getting a huge amount of mainstream media coverage because of its counter-intuitive, and also counter-mainstream scientific opinion, nature. See, for example, Time magazine ("Magic Mushrooms Expand the Mind by Dampening Brain Activity," January 24), The Wall Street Journal ("What Goes On in the Hallucinating Brain," January 27), and The Scientist ("Scanning the Psychedelic Brain," January 23).

Kastrup, whom I hadn't heard of until his Skeptiko appearance, does a marvelous job of bringing out the really profound philosophical, psychological, metaphysical, and ontological implications of the whole thing. The episode is titled "Bernardo Kastrup's Controversial View of Consciousness Research." Here's a transcripted excerpt:

Alex Tsakiris (host): You make some interesting connections between the “fainting game”, erotic asphyxiation and some new research with psychedelic mushrooms. You suggest that when we really look at what’s going on in the brain we actually see a dampening down of brain areas – the opposite of what we would expect. So what are the implications of this in terms of this idea of filtering of consciousness?

Bernardo Kastrup: The current paradigm says that conscious experience is an epiphenomenon, a by-product, of brain activity. So you should always be able to find a tight correlation between conscious states as reported by the subject and measurable brain states as measured, for instance, with an FMRI scanner. Usually this correlation is there, but there are instances, like this study you mentioned, where this correlation is not there in a very spectacular and repeatable way. What it suggests is that we have to find another model of reality, if you will, to accommodate this. A model that accommodates both the fact that normally, ordinarily, conscious experience is modulated by brain states, but also sometimes there is a lack of correlation in a spectacular way.

Alex Tsakiris: So these anomalies you’re talking about, for example, with psilocybin and reduced brain functioning, or brain injuries that lead to increased consciousness, these have to be explained. We can’t just sweep them off the table and say, “well, materialism seems to work pretty well in the general sense,” right?

Bernardo Kastrup: These anomalies are major anomalies. They are gigantic anomalies. The only way we can get away with them and still honestly believe in the materialistic paradigm as many of us do is because that paradigm embodies an approach of looking upon the world that is a third-person perspective. In other words, it’s not through personal experience but through reports and measurements.

This is all portending really revolutionary advances and developments in our understanding of these matters, I think. For years I've seen Huxley's idea about the brain as a filtering mechanism, and of psychedelics as substances that reduce the filtering activity and thus allow a more expansive and direct view or experience of reality as it truly is, roundly criticized and dismissed by people involved and/or versed in modern-day consciousness research of the brain-based/physicalist/biologist sort, because, so they say, all current findings from the latest brain-imaging technologies uniformly contradict it. Now we see that this isn't true at all. The whole developing revelation might be characterized as "Huxley's revenge."

Seriously, check out the Kastrup interview. It's necessary listening.

[Derkein]

I think that to anyone who spends time studiously examining what they see/hear and then look again and focus on just one (any one) small aspect of their environment cannot dispute this.

The further step which is less obvious and less documented is that it is not just what is seen, it is also the 'emotional' framework of these situations. These emotional filters also affect all perspectives.

Sometimes it isn't the 'physical' filters which are reset or turned off, its the emotional perspective and all of a sudden what had been certain is seen in a completely new light (or more correctly a different perspective) despite no real difference in the physical viewing or filtering function.

[klaatu]

Derkein:

Thanks for your comment; I think I misunderstood your meaning - you're talking about the brain filtering input from the material world, rather than the brain and material world emerging from the ground of consciousness.

And of course I can see that this is indisputable scientifically - some animals can see in the infrared or ultraviolet; bats can echo-locate; my dog can smell a sausage from the other side of the road! And our perceptions are indeed coloured by all sorts of emotional overlay.

Still, if this was also Jesus' meaning - that the "kingdom of heaven" (material reality in all its fullness, or maybe emotional openness to this reality) lies just beyond our senses, and that expanding our awareness of this reality is desirable because it enables us to have a better life (this was indeed Wren-Lewis' experience) - then there's a paradox: Why should Nature have arranged things that we filter so much out, when allowing it in would make us function more effectively? Surely this would have had survival advantages, so why has the human brain evolved with "shutters down"?

Matt:

Thanks for your input. Peake's Forum seems to be "coincidence central" for me, because like you I've just come across the work of Bernardo Kastrup and have his book Meaning in Absurdity on my next order from Amazon!

His comment that:

These anomalies are major anomalies. They are gigantic anomalies. The only way we can get away with them and still honestly believe in the materialistic paradigm as many of us do is because that paradigm embodies an approach of looking upon the world that is a third-person perspective. In other words, it’s not through personal experience but through reports and measurements.

is interesting because it is contrasting the "scientific" and "mystical" approaches to reality - and suggesting that we are able to retain materialism only by sticking to science and ignoring mysticism! (I'm not entirely convinced of this, because maybe there is a materialist explanation which could explain the anomalous fMRI results - though I can't think of one offhand!)

Thanks for your links to Douglas Harding and your own blog; I will check these out ASAP!

[Derkein]

Thanks for your comment; I think I misunderstood your meaning - you're talking about the brain filtering input from the material world, rather than the brain and material world emerging from the ground of consciousness.

And of course I can see that this is indisputable scientifically - some animals can see in the infrared or ultraviolet; bats can echo-locate; my dog can smell a sausage from the other side of the road! And our perceptions are indeed coloured by all sorts of emotional overlay.

Yes. (perhaps expansion on that - real is real, spirit is spirit - its at the joining point, and when consciousness/self awareness/life crosses the boundary (either way) that things get most interesting)

Still, if this was also Jesus' meaning - that the "kingdom of heaven" (material reality in all its fullness, or maybe emotional openness to this reality) lies just beyond our senses, and that expanding our awareness of this reality is desirable because it enables us to have a better life (this was indeed Wren-Lewis' experience)

No. Take it as Gospel.
Jesus was saying that the Kingdom of God was within, and that people should listen to 'God' themselves, not listen to those claiming to give the word of God. He even tells his disciples to listen within, not to his (Jesus) words.
Tony would perhaps say listen to your Daemon. Spiritualists would say listen to your spirit guide. Others might say seek oneness with your overself.
Others might say seek union with your totem although many might think this quite different.

- then there's a paradox: Why should Nature have arranged things that we filter so much out, when allowing it in would make us function more effectively? Surely this would have had survival advantages, so why has the human brain evolved with "shutters down"?

Try and see that tiger coming to eat you while your attention is grabbed by all the x-rays, gamma rays and neutrino streams filling your unlimited eyes.

[klaatu]

klaatu wrote:
- then there's a paradox: Why should Nature have arranged things that we filter so much out, when allowing it in would make us function more effectively? Surely this would have had survival advantages, so why has the human brain evolved with "shutters down"?


Try and see that tiger coming to eat you while your attention is grabbed by all the x-rays, gamma rays and neutrino streams filling your unlimited eyes.

Good 'un!

[Derkein]

But it does beggar a slightly different question.
Why has nature given us senses that presumably in order to survive, we need to filter ?

(slightly restructured sentence)