I decided to take the understanding I have developed from working with 'Philosophy of Freedom' to meet contemporary thinking on human consciousness, in particular to the 'hard question' of human consciousness, and other unsolved riddles - to see if I would be able to see things and frame things differently in the light of this understanding. In this article I work on describing how I think and work as I go along, not just on the content. The issue of monism and dualism is treated from a particular viewpoint in Ch. 2, a good understanding of the problem of a dualism view and with polarised monistic views is key for working with the rest of the book.
Two Monists and the ‘Hard Question’ of Human consciousness
Is everything matter, is everything explainable by matter, with nothing spiritual to be found ? Or is everything spiritual, including matter?
As we have seen in the article Descartes and the Problem of Dualism we have a problem of ‘two things’, which are incompatible, the one cannot be explained by the other, the two cannot communicate – which create what philosophers call ‘the problem of dualism’. This dualism between spirit and matter is called the mind-body problem in the study of human consciousness. Can we solve this problem by simply giving up our idea of two things (dualism) and gathering the two things under one heading such as ‘spirit’, or ‘matter’, ‘mind’ or ‘body’, ‘consciousness’ or ‘material facts’? Can we let go of our idea of ‘two-things’? Can we in other words propose a monist, or ‘one-thing’ solution? Let’s take a closer look at monism with the help of two strong actors on the British monism scene today, Susan Blackmore and Rupert Spira.
Susan Blackmore, susanblackmore.uk Rupert Spira, rupertspira.com photo Adam Hart-Blackmore
Susan and Rupert devote their lives to understanding and teaching about human consciousness. They express their thinking clearly in their books, on their websites, and on their YouTube teaching videos. Susan Blackmore can be described as a ‘material monist, in that she understands there is only one ‘thing’, matter, and that the material brain is the only way to explain consciousness. Rupert Spira can be described as a ‘spiritualist monist’ in the sense that there is for him only one ‘thing’, ‘consciousness’ or ‘pure awareness’ which is our true identity, and all of our experiences including those of a shared physical world, are in reality manifestations of one thing, universal consciousness. You can check this with Steiner's characterisations of materialist and spiritualist monism in Ch.2.
Method for ‘thinking along’ with Susan Blackmore and Rupert Spira
What do I notice about Susan and Rupert’s thinking as they present it? The word ‘notice’ comes from the root gnosere, ‘come to know, get to know, get acquainted with’. How can I get acquainted with and really get to know Susan and Rupert through their thinking as they present it? Rather as in any relationship, it’s a good idea if you want to form a relationship and get the best out of it, to start with kindness and respect, to be interested enough to follow their thinking to the end, to observe it and allow our thinking to interact with theirs as they express it. I am truly inspired by and grateful for the work of Rupert and Susan, their energy, dedication and enthusiasm, their devotion to their work, and the clarity with which they express their ideas. This feeling of awe in being able to meet two such interesting people through their thinking, and to be able to test out my own thinking with theirs is very much part of the study. I listen carefully to what each of them says, and how they say it, I take the ideas and, in my consciousness, slow it down, leave some quiet time and space, walk with it, do the house-work with it in my mind, sleep on it and note my new morning thoughts, and let life bring me relevant content (the YouTube algorithm is particularly helpful with this)
The material ‘physical brain’ monism of Susan Blackmore
Susan Blackmore describes herself as ‘A psychologist, lecturer and writer researching consciousness, memes, and anomalous experiences, and Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth’. For Susan, there is only one ‘thing’ and it is physical. She has been convinced by physically-verifiable ‘Science’ (she often names it ‘the science’) that our consciousness is physical and can be explained by physical laws, at least in principle, and given enough time and research we will be able to observe and conclude scientifically that the brain creates our consciousness.
In coming to this view, Susan looks at studies of the brain and its function in relation to the reported conscious experience of an individual human subject. Since the invention and availability of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machines in the 1990s (and now other machines) it has become possible to image and measure brain function in relation to reported experience in real time. This is a non-invasive procedure, very different from observing ‘dead’ brains, and without the need to operate on a living subject. There is a very convincing correlation which can be clearly observed and measured between the related experience of an individual and his or her brain activity. The brain imaging and measurements correspond to reported conscious states intimately and accurately. Regions of functioning have been mapped out in the brain, and when stimulated artificially produce a correlating reported state of consciousness which can be predicted in terms of its general type. In addition, a strange phenomenon has been observed, which strikes Susan particularly: before a subject is conscious of an intention to act, brain activity corresponding to intention can be measured. The brain seems to ‘know’ and ‘intend’ before the human subject. Does this mean the ‘brain’ decides, that the brain is running the consciousness show?
This type of evidence can lead to the view that there is nothing related to our human consciousness other than brain functioning, - certainly nothing which is verifiable and measurable by scientific means, and is leading Susan, along with many neuroscientists, to conclude that the brain must be the sole ‘creator’ or in some way responsible for our human consciousness. This means there is no other ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’. Susan would conclude there is no physical evidence for anything other than brain and its function, no ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ hidden in the body, not ‘mind’ as a ‘thing’ which can be identified, there is no physical evidence for any of that, there is no ‘area’ within or aspect of the brain or body where anything soul or spiritual, anything non-physical could be or could happen. On the other hand, there is growing body of detailed physical evidence that the brain is thoroughly involved in all aspects of earthly human consciousness.
In this way, consciousness begins to be understood as the ‘emergent phenomenon’ of the brain. This in turn leads many human philosophers, scientists and psychologists to frame and ask themselves a very ‘hard’ question; how does the brain create our conscious experience? The physical brain and all the things we see, measure and know about it from physical study, all this differs profoundly in quality to a lived inner experience. This question is so hard to answer, it is so difficult to work out how this question could be answered, that it has become known as the ‘Hard Question’.
This ‘hard question’ is particularly hard because it is, if we look at it closely, another expression of the ‘problem of dualism’ brought to us first by Descartes; that there are two different things in our human conscious experience, an inner and an outer experience. I experience myself inside active as a thinking being, separate from the ‘world’ in all its forms. My inner experience of consciousness is different from my observing of brains and their activities and all the data and evidence that can be collected in the observed world. These two aspects, my inner thinking experience, and brain study in what appears to me as the outer world, are not at all experienced in the same way, so how do they relate, and how can they ever relate given that they are made of such different and mutually incompatible ‘stuff’, non-material inner experience, and the material world? We can see that the problem of dualism has been transferred to this 'place', the 'hard question', rather than being a ‘mind-body’ problem. Susan would say she is not a dualist because she does not accept mind is separate and different from body, she thinks we are all body; however, she comes up against the problem of dualism later in the process of investigating her belief that mind and body are the same ‘stuff’, at the very moment of asking the hard question. She has faith in human science that it will one day solve this problem.
The Spiritual ‘Consciousness’ Monism of Rupert Spira
Rupert Spira describes himself as a ‘non-dualist’ philosopher and spiritual teacher. He can be characterised as a proponent of a ‘consciousness monism’; all is consciousness, because that is the only way we can experience anything, whether it be matter, the physical world as we call it, or anything else, there is no separate thing which cannot be classed as a type of consciousness under the general heading of ‘consciousness’.
Rupert rejects and avoids dualism as a viable way of understanding consciousness. For him, ultimately all is one ‘thing’, consciousness, and this can be verified by looking into our consciousness and testing out and making specific observations on these empirical consciousness facts for ourselves, within our consciousness. For example, I can ask myself, ‘where do I experience the physical world’ and realize all I am aware of, all I know is ‘inside me’ - if I am not aware of the physical world in my aware consciousness, I have no way of knowing it, or even whether it exists, all we that we know and experience goes through consciousness – I can question this and ‘see’ this inside my consciousness at any given point in time.
For Rupert, it is deeply unscientific to speculate that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of the brain, as none of us has or can observe consciousness emerging from the physical in our inner experience, we don't, and necessarily we can't, as to do so we would have to be already conscious to observe consciousness emerging, so consciousness wouldn’t be emerging, it would be already there. You can’t see it emerging outside, in the brain, or in a scan of the brain either. Rupert would say that under the rules of science, the theory of material ‘physical brain’ monism should be withdrawn or modified as it has no observable basis, it cannot be tested and it has no meaning. For Rupert the hard problem is not a problem unless you believe beforehand, without evidence or hope of finding any because it’s a nonsensical quest, that matter creates consciousness. For him this ‘hard question’ is not a meaningful question and not one that we ever need to ask.
Rupert Spira introduces us to the idea of universal consciousness which is separate from and different from individual consciousness. Universal consciousness or ‘Consciousness’ with a capital ‘C’, can also be called the state of pure awareness, and can be developed as an idea and understood as ‘direct knowing’, (nb: not knowing the in the sense we understand it in our ordinary individual consciousness). Consciousness, pure awareness, is part of our human experience, and can be can be experienced directly through thinking-directed exercises and meditative practice. Universal consciousness is all there is according to Rupert, individual consciousness as separate from universal consciousness does not exist as such, it is as Rupert explains it an illusory state. Our separate consciousness can be conceived of and visualised as a ‘wrinkle’ or temporary wave in the great sea of all there is, which is Consciousness. So, Rupert argues, there are not in reality two things, but one real thing plus an illusion, there is one real thing a non-local Consciousness in the unfolding of the present moment, and this real thing appears in us temporarily and locally as an illusory state of ‘separateness’ and individual consciousness. How does the one-thing, Consciousness, become an illusion of ordinary or earthly separate self-consciousness? It is according to Rupert an experience we have, and exists as such, but it is not to be understood as in reality a ‘separate self’ with any ultimate reality in its own right. Rupert explains that universal consciousness, or pure, limitless awareness, ‘falls asleep’ and becomes what we call the ‘world’ and ourselves. It becomes us in the form of experiences of separate self, and it becomes also what appears before us as the world of matter. Universal consciousness falls asleep to varying degrees, heavily asleep as a rock for example, less so as a plant, animal, and least of all in the rich dreaming of human consciousness. Human consciousness is a wider cosmic limitless consciousness which has fallen asleep and is dreaming itself as a limited, localised individual self-consciousness. Matter is consciousness. We can according to Rupert experiment with this understanding in our lives, until our consciousness begins to wake up and we will experience our separate self-consciousness differently when we do, we change our understanding about the supposed reality of the consciousness of ourselves as individual human beings, and we can begin to experience it differently, we uncover our true and limitless and connected nature and experience it more and more, which leads to peace and joy, and makes having a material world experience easier and happier.
Rupert puts great emphasis on experimenting on ourselves to verify what he says, it is important for us to know/experience this directly, it is not a theory, in his work Rupert invites his students to do these kinds of experiments within their consciousness and ‘see’ it for themselves. He invites his students with carefully constructed conceptual paths of understanding and questions. Rupert also operates in his life as a separate self with the same needs for survival and the same responsibilities in the ‘physical’ world as everyone else, he has a website, a job, a home a family and money in the illusory material sleep-state existence he is currently experiencing. He meets his students where they are, operating as separate selves and thinking in a human way and communicates with carefully expressed human thoughts, in order to invite them out of the separate-self state and experience something wider, more expanded, and happier.
Looking more closely at the thinking of Susan Blackmore and questioning it…
Now I have described Susan’s basic thinking stance and viewpoint, I am ready to delve more deeply and to think alongside her actively. I ask myself, am I sufficiently interested in what Susan says to be talking about what she thinks, and not something else, (which I have noticed is a common occurrence in human exchange)? I decide to make myself an accessible bullet point summary of the 10 points she made, which makes me active and attentive to what she is actually saying and I create for myself an essential reference. This condensed list was taken mainly from her YouTube video (produced by Oxford Academic formerly Oxford University Press) where she makes a ‘very short introduction’ to her understanding of the great questions of consciousness, entitled: ‘Consciousness: The top ten things you should know about it’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSNg6dNw_7U
Mystery/problem (mind-body or ‘hard’ problem), also a problem of ‘dualism’ how does the inside me which is a personal/subjective experience (experienced/perceived in an inner way) relate to the experience of a shared objective ‘world’perceived with sense organs and our whole conscious being (perception plus feelings impressions instinctive reactions and so on…)
Definition of being conscious (as opposed to not beingconscious) is that you can ask the question of it, what is it like for you? Is it something or nothing?
Quality of experienc eg.; the experience of the ‘redness of red’, she asks can we call these kinds of experience, ‘qualia’, particles of conscious quality experience?
Outside appearance of a conscious being which is empty inside; imagine we see a perfect replica of a human being which is in reality a zombie or a robot, that is empty of consciousness, without any qualitative experience, not alive. We are fooled by the appearance until we take apart the body and find it to be empty or filled with robotic mechanisms…is this this physical deconstruction enough to know, or the only way to know if someone/something is conscious - how can we know something or someone else is conscious like us?
Outside Evidence/proofs of consciousness in others (without being able to enter into it and share it) we see a behaviour which would seem to imply consciousness, but we could be tricked, so this behaviour or appearance is not a solid proof, even if we suspect and guess that an animal with a similar anatomy to us will have a consciousness like us, we are not sure, what about alternative-anatomy beings, e.g.: fish, what do they feel? (painkiller experiment). We can observe behaviour which leads us to theorise that fish experience pain, we give them painkillers and observe behaviour indicating less or no pain, we accumulate repeatable evidence that fish experience something akin to human pain. Yet is this physical evidence enough to deduce the ‘different thing’, the qualitative nature of consciousness?
Altered states of Consciousness – they exist as experience, but how do we understand and measure them?
Neuroscience: study of brain states, and how they correlated with reported conscious quality experience. We start to ‘map’ areas of the brain related to reported or observed from the outside states of consciousness. Is the duck-rabbit picture ‘really’ a duck or really a rabbit? What is the subjective nature of consciousness which allows us to see one thing as two different things?
Is Consciousness an Illusion? ‘Consciousness Illusionists’ want to investigate how we think about our consciousness, stripping away everything we ‘believe’ and starting again. (‘In the hope that THIS time we might see through the mystery)’ …
Consciousness and Free Will; I have the conscious experience of doing what I want, is it real, can I act freely? Evidence to the contrary when we look at many brains, as we make a decision, we can see and map corresponding ‘decision making’ areas in the brain in action, and the consciousness of taking the decision comes after activity in the brain can be measured, does our ‘brain’ know before we do what we will decide? Does this mean ‘I’ cannot be the cause of my action? Is free will an illusion, and what would life look like without believing in it?
The self; I feel sense of self, inside looking out, but inside brain no self can be found, and is not needed in the physical brain for it to be functional, so is the self an illusion…who am I? Am I?
Consciousness, the mystery, the problem…
‘We seem to have subjective experiences which are private to ourselves and yet we believe there is an external world that we can all see and feel and hear and touch, how can these two things relate to one another? How can a physical brain give rise to, create, be responsible for subjective experience?’ writes Susan Blackmore.
What do I notice? ‘We seem to have subjective experiences. Is that right? Well, we do have conscious experiences of being a ‘subject’, that is our starting point and field of study when we study ‘consciousness’.
PAUSE to think: if our field of study is our inner conscious experience, what methods would we use to investigate it? Could the method of introspection, looking into our consciousness with our own thinking awareness be valid? Or would this be considered subjective speculation, not fitting the criteria of science that experiments must be observable and repeatable?
Susan describes herself as an ‘illusionist’ when it comes to human inner conscious experience, she is not denying it, but is proposing is that the experience we have is not what it might seem. She believes we are deluded into thinking something which is not true about our experience, our thinking about it is illusory.
PAUSE to think:illusory experiences are still human inner consciousness experiences, and therefore part of the field of study.
The ‘external world’ is also subjected to doubt by Susan, ‘we believe there is an external world’ she says, ‘one that we can all perceive with our senses’. Is that right? This seems true to me so far, if I observe ‘us’, we believe in a ‘real world’ enough to take it seriously and interact with it, the world appears to us as ‘outer’, as distinct from our sense of ‘inner consciousness’, from our inner experiences, and it appears as a shared rather than a private experience. I can check that out inside myself too, I can observe and notice my inner state with my eyes closed, and when I open them, of an ‘outside world’ confronting me.
PAUSE to think: if the world of the senses and perception is only a ‘belief’ then it is a belief which our current science relies on to create repeatable and ‘objectively’ observable results which can be transformed into data, from which we draw our scientific conclusions and gain knowledge.
As I look at Susan’s thinking more closely and start to think about it, what am I doing here? I am ‘linking through thinking’, I’m linking myself to Susan’s views using thinking as a tool, drawing on my own treasure chest of concepts and experience, observing Susan’s thoughts, and observing what goes on in me when I think her thoughts as I observe them, and testing continually with my thinking.
PAUSE to think:Testing with thinking - Is that a subjective experience, of no value? Perhaps there are elements in the way I link myself to the thinking of Susan which are purely subjective, but is my thinking, when observed and experienced clearly, itself subjective?
Thinking is missing from the list
I’m beginning to notice something that is not there in Susan’s thinking – I notice is that Susan hasn’t mentioned our thinking as one of the top ten things we should know about consciousness. She sometimes says ‘I think’ but she hasn’t placed thinking in her picture, it doesn’t appear on her map of consciousness study and she isn’t going to visit it. Obviously, she is thinking, and thinking very intensely, as she questions the nature and existence of our ‘selves’, free will, and consciousness. Why would she omit this pre-existing and essential fact-checking, verification tool from her top ten things we should know about our consciousness? Thinking is certainly a part of our consciousness (PAUSE to think, check, yes, I’m thinking).
Why has Susan failed to mention thinking as a part of our consciousness, and that is has a vital in testing for truth and reality? Does Susan think that thinking is not part of our subjective, inner private experience? (or given that she does not address thinking, perhaps I should say ‘believe’). Does she believe it to take place then, in the ‘outer’ world? Or then again, does she believe that thinking is, as a private experience of each one of us, necessarily subjectiveand not worthy of consideration in a scientific approach searching for objective knowledge? Thinking finds itself between a rock and a hard place:
If thinking is subjective, then it is not valid objectively in the scientific sense,
If thinking is objective, then how is it that it can’t be seen or observed as an ‘object’ in the objective world?
If thinking were to be dismissed as subjective, then what can Susan be using when she is curious about the world and develops theories, how would she be able to come up with her scientific propositions, and design experiments to test it, or write up and communicate her conclusions, how can she do all ‘the science’ without thinking, and without trusting thinking as an objective tool and necessary starting point of science? She is using thinking when she questions the reality of consciousness, free will and ourselves. She uses thinking to designate thinking as a ‘feeling’.
As she tries out being an ‘Illusionist’ she wants to strip away everything we accept as given and everything we experience and have thought about consciousness so far, in order to ‘start again’ with a clean slate, in the ‘hope’ that, as she puts it, ‘THIS time we might see through the mystery’. Rather as Descartes did, when he discovered thinking to be the foundation and starting point of human knowledge. In Susan’s case, however, what is she basing her hope on? How would we know, for example, Susan’s list of the ‘top ten things you should know about consciousness’? If we do ‘start again with a slate cleaned of previous ideas such as soul, spirit, self, then how will we know what is true this time, if not with thinking? Who are ‘we’ as Susan puts it, and how would we ‘see’ through the mystery?
Susan then turns to the relationship between the inner and outer world, in a very particular way, she asks:
“How can a physical brain (out there in the shared observable physical world) give rise to, create, be responsible for subjective experience (private inner experience)?”
I notice that she starts by looking at our inner experience (in whatever form that may take, perceptions, feelings, sensations, thinking and thoughts…) and then, somehow (?) puts it ‘out there’ in the perceived shared world, as a kind of ‘object of observation’ in the form of the brain and observations and measurements of the brain, she is no longer examining it for what it is, an inner experience, accessible from the inside without physical senses, yet that is its nature, that is how it appears, its nature is not ‘brain’, holdindg a physical brain, looking at its photos album is quite a different experience of a different nature. In examining the brain, she is examining something else, she has left the field of study, which is inner human conscious experience.
PAUSE– is that right? Are conscious experiences and the brain the same thing? Could I imagine, for example, that the conscious experience is contained, somehow, within the brain, it is there in the brain, just hidden or masquerading as a different thing from the brain? No, they are not at all the same, one is an inner experience, the other is a physical organ which is observed and thought about in the outer world. Are they perhaps perceived as different things in our consciousness, even though they are in reality one and the same thing? Maybe, but even if they are different facets of the same thing, saying they are the same ‘thing’ does not explain the difference between the facets, or what they would be facets of, if brought together and connected up as one whole. Our inner conscious experience is very different from the experience of observing a brain, or understanding data from neuroscience.
Susan wants to look at the physical brain, the thing surgeons get at when they perform an operation, the activity of which is measured in MRIs and other tests, and all the data and information we have gathered on it, our understanding and knowledge of the physical thing, ‘brain’ and its functions. There has been a kind of ‘leap’ from inner world to outer world. And when that happens, we are no longer talking about the inner thing, we are no longer talking about the quality of our experience of redness for example, we are talking about a picture of neurological activity in relation to the stated experience of redness. Seen this way, the problem becomes ‘hard’ to solve, how do these two very different experiences and states of being relate, the inner conscious experience, and the conscious experience of an ‘outer’ world which is totally different in quality? And then, having jumped out of the field of study, of inner human conscious experience, how can we jump back into it, how does the ‘brain’, which we are understanding more and more, ‘create’ the inner experience?
Moreover, Susan wants to ‘shake off’ ideas of self, soul, spirit and so on, to be ‘free’ of such ideas so she can experience life for herself, but she believes unfailingly in the physical measurements and ‘the science’ - does she have any more basis for believing that than believing the ideas of spirit, soul, selfhood and thinking? The reality of scientific testing also has to be ‘believed’ as part of our belief in a shared, perceived world.
Now I turn to the evidence that the ‘brain’ measurably ‘fires up’ for an action before the human person is aware of it, does this mean the brain is running the show, does this mean the person is being ‘caused’ without realising it, even though she has the impression she is choosing?
PAUSE to check with thinking,it is right that if two different things correlate or appear at the same time, we need to understand the relationship between them, if any – it does not necessarily mean they are linked in any way other than coincidence. Is it right to assume one creates the other, even if it is the first thing to happen in time, followed by a second report of conscious experience? For example, I can imagine a painter painting a red streak. I start with the result, a red streak, looking further back in time, I see a brush, dipped in red paint, I assume the paint laden brush created the red streak. Did the brush dipped in red pain create the streak? Yes, in one sense, but no in another, if the brush had not been taken up by the painter, if the painter had not had the intention to paint a red streak, the red streak would not appear. If the brain can be measured ‘firing’ before the person is aware of making and carrying out a decision, it does not necessarily mean the brain is creating the decision, it is too soon to draw that conclusion. The question is already framed in a biased way and made ‘hard’ to answer.
In an attempt to understand this hard problem blockage that Susan and other consciousness scientists have got into, I look for the ‘tool’ that Susan uses to verify her questions in her ‘very short introduction’, Her approach, her way of testing, looking for evidence and proof, is what we can call ‘scientific’, she takes a scientific approach. Susan is a psychologist, and a scientist. What do we mean by scientific? We explore something we currently don’t know, or have a theory about but we are not sure, we make this into an experiment of some sort, or we look at collected data, we collect or make something that can be tested and proved or disproved ‘objectively’. By ‘objectively’ we mean an ‘object’ out there, in that shared world we believe in, and specifically not in our inner private life of conscious experience, which we call ‘subjective’, and is open to all possible doubts of limited perspective, hallucinations, misinterpretations and so on. In our scientific endeavours we want objective results, that can be seen out there in the shared world, by any of us, at any time, which can be repeated. As scientists we are not satisfied with accepting private subjective individual experience and opinions, which might be unique to one of us, or an example of a mistake, or be partial, or warped by our personal perspective, and not have any objective reality or value for humanity as a whole about the world as a whole. So, we look for proof, for further knowledge, for learning, in the observed world, the one we access through our senses, because essentially this can be shared by other people with the same sense organs, AND our thinking about the sense-data can be trained to be as clear and unbiased as possible.
What about thinking itself, can it be accessed through the senses? Does it appear as an object in our shared ‘outer’ world, does it have a form, texture, colour, taste, scent or sound? (PAUSEI check the observed world, looking out from where I am now as an example, I check with my thinking, and no, I cannot see or sense a thought roaming around out there in the world that can be sensed.) Can I ever imagine finding ‘thinking’ or even a thought, and putting it through tests and proofs by looking out into the world? Does that mean thinking is not objective? Does it mean it does not exist? PAUSE to think:can I say ‘I do not exist? Can I think ‘I do not think’? No, these are logically contradictory, if I am saying I am not, then I exist to say it – or if I think I do not think, I am wrong because I am thinking it.
Does that mean that world-sensed objects are only ‘true’ or ‘real’ when thinking has been stripped away from them? What might that world stripped of thinking look like? Would it mean that observable world objects are the only reality? (PAUSEI check this with my thinking, can that be true? If I observe an object in the world, the glass of water in front of me for example, I can notice that all my sense observations are moulded by thinking, by actively weaving my thinking with the perception sensation, using the knowledge I have already gained through thinking. I employ concepts like circle, reflection, half-full, transparent and so on - It is difficult for me to imagine or experience the ‘sense world’ without it being moulded by thinking. It would have to be, I try imagine with my thinking perception without thinking – would it be a kind of blob, a flowing of every changing sensations?)
Let’s look at the concepts ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’, how did they get here? (PAUSE to think; they are not running round in the outside world; they are the result of thinking. If they are the result of thinking, then thinking transcends objective and subjective, it is not subjective. It is at the root, method and conclusion of all our scientific endeavours. The realization dawns, I think and feel myself as a ‘thinking subject, thinking my experiences’ in front of the world ‘out there’ which I experience. The sense of selfhood, the sense of being separate from and facing a world, happens within my consciousness and way of being, I literally think myself into being a thinking subject.)
I look at the world of science as it is happening. The true starting point is ‘scientists think’ – about the world, about themselves, they get curious, they want to know more, knowing involves thinking, learning involves thinking, things are observed and thought about. Scientists in particular do much more than go along with the flow of observing, they think a lot about the world, or at least the one part of it they are interested in, they want to get to know the world. So thinking now becomes a foundation, a necessary starting point for science, for all human endeavour to ‘understand’. Our thinking consciousness is the foundation for the argument that consciousness does not exist. How conscious we are of our thinking, of how it arrives, of how it connects the world of observations? This is what we are led to observe in Chapter 3, that we simply do not think about our thinking, we don’t observe it, we don’t notice it, we don’t get to know it at all. This is the beginning of the journey to connect with our thinking selves, the moment we realize we never observe it in ordinary consciousness, the moment we want to get to know ourselves as thinkers, through thinking.
How can we think ourselves, think into our nature, and truly experience and ‘see’ the mystery, the problem of consciousness, as defined by Susan? Where do we start?
A modern starting point would be something like this: we feel ourselves to be an individual who can choose (or at least has some choices if not stopped by outside factors). We can feel ourselves to be alive. We can feel ourselves to be a ‘self’ and more than a collection of material bits and pieces. We begin to question that feeling – are we in fact a living, free self? If it is true, and we are, then how can that work, because if I am here in a physical body, which appears in the ‘outer’ shared world, then that body along with the world it inhabits is subject to physical laws. If I were only my body, then I would be as the sceptic philosopher Daniel Dennett says, ‘a flesh computer’, a kind of machine, arriving here from a long chain of mechanical physical causality. Yet, if I am ‘more’ than my body, more than physical, if I have a non-physical aspect which I could call mind, soul or spirit, or all three, then what is this aspect of ourselves which is not physical, and how does it relate to the body? How can the non-physical relate to the physical? How can the non-physical have any effect on it, cause it to move or react, it would have to remain where it is, in some separate sphere. Pause to think…until I ‘see’ it. If there are indeed two ‘things’, two separate spheres, one physical and one ‘not’, how do they relate or have any effect on each other? How can I claim to have any part of me which can overcome the physical laws my bodily existence is subject to, from gravity to finance to illness to instinctive drives, all the ‘physical realities’ we live by, which allows me to operate as a free being here in earth? Because if I did have a ‘soul’ (reference ‘soul’ lexicon) then how could it ‘speak’ to me if I can’t sense it, how can I ‘see’ it if it is invisible’, how can I test for its existence if I can’t make a sense experiment to test it?
Looking more closely at the thinking of Rupert Spira and questioning it…
For Rupert Spira, the individual earthly self, our sense of being this self, is also discovered to be not real, not existing in reality as a separate individuality, but rather, it only seems to exist separately. In reality, as Rupert sees it, this sense and illusion of self is a manifestation of a universal consciousness, which is currently taking on a sleeping or partially sleeping state in which is appears to itself as a separate self. ‘Someone’ looks closely into his or her individual consciousness, to try and see the ‘self’ in order to discover it does not exist, rather as Susan Blackmore discovered. Who is the one who is looking at the separate self to see it is not there? ‘There isn’t a thinker, a feeler a doer’ says Rupert. Who then is there, looking? Rupert says universal ‘Awareness’ or ‘knowing’ s always there, that which cannot be born or die, or be subject to fear, that which is a non-objective oneness and whole state of love. He is calling for discernment about which ‘I’ is operating in me. Is it an illusory and self-defensive separate self, or the true I AM of eternally existing indivisible being-ness? This latter would be for Rupert our ‘true nature’…that which knows directly, through direct awareness, every experience we have. It is for Rupert something which can be experienced and not a theory. He says, ‘If this ultimate awareness were not present there would be no experience’. Rupert would say to his students, ‘you are undoubtedly present you cannot deny your existence, I can’t find myself as an objective experience, as an object or separate self, but I undoubtedly am and yet what I am cannot be found as an object, what I am has no objective qualities but that does not mean it is not present’. Rupert would conclude then that the true nature of the separate self is indivisible Presence, the earthly sense of separate self is not a reality, but a temporary and temporal state of limited or sleeping reality. The shared experience of a ‘world’ which can be perceived and measured and which imposes its laws on the physical part of us, he explains as being, essentially, a shared projection of the same matter-shaped consciousness.
PAUSE to think:I can’t help wondering, why would Consciousness put all this effort into creating a limited version of itself, in a body which is created and maintained throughout human life? At least, created and maintained in the ‘physical’ illusion limited, sleeping state of universal consciousness which has become localised in time and space. What would be the point of all that, if we were to retreat into wider consciousness, love and peace, and denying the reality of the separate self and any gifts that experience of separate earthly ‘self’ had to bring?
And if our embodied state were not intentional, but a kind of ‘dream accident’ then we come again to the same problem, how does something of one nature, Consciousness, come to be, or be responsible for something of another nature, our experience of ourselves and the material world with all its shared perceptions and laws? How can one thing become another, whether by accident or design?
How can can these ‘two things’ be created, if everything is ‘Consciousness’? How can ‘Consciousness’ fall asleep, when asleep is not being conscious. Rupert would argue that sleeping is still consciousness, of another type, or to another degree – a limited experience of a dream of ‘Consciousness’, a localised time-limited experience of the Universal Consciousness. Rupert relies on empirical evidence and verification, and claims the material monists can’t do this, they can’t ‘see’ the brain creating consciousness, or how our inner state arises from the outer object of ‘brain’, but in the case of Rupert’s philosophy, how can we verify that Consciousness falls asleep, we would have to be conscious to ‘see’ consciousness falling asleep, and then we would have to be ‘outside’ consciousness, which is not possible if everything is consciousness. How can consciousness just drift off to itself and manage to create the entire world and inner experience of all humanity and the other residents of the earth? How can one thing (universal consciousness) create quite another thing, earthly self and earthly world experience?
If there is no ‘thinker’ and no ‘separate self’, who is thinking that there is no thinker and no separate self, is that even possible? We can’t ‘think’ there is no thinker, and would we believe someone who says we none of us think? Rupert would say ‘experience is miraculous’, from his own experience – the quality of experience is living, and therefore must be made of living ‘stuff’, yet there is no separate self, only the stuff of universal Self, a self of awareness and direct knowing. Yet if there is no self to experience, and the Self cannot be localised, who or what is experiencing down here on earth in this ‘incarnated’ embodied, limited state? Who is mediating between the dream-experience of earthly selfhood and the greater non-local ‘Self’? How can the oneness of universal stuff become myriad experiential forms – surely only through me, as a separate self? Who is thinking that there is only one ‘stuff’ Consciousness, and communicating it to the earthly self? The extraordinary fact is, only through thinking can we define, name and become aware of something called ‘Consciousness’, a name which points to a concept, a separate ‘thing’, ‘Consciousness’.
What can I condense, in essence, from this thinking process?
What emerges from the preceding arduous thinking along with Susan Blackmore and Rupert Spira's thinking?
The dualism lurking within the professed monism…
No matter how much we try to take refuge and comfort in one monism or another, it seems at some point in our world conception there is a ‘mind the gap’ moment when we are confronted once again with the dualism of two incompatible things:
For the Material Monist (Susan): The moment when physical brain (one type of thing) creates inner conscious experience (another, incompatible type of thing)
For the Spiritual Monist (Rupert): The moment when Consciousness (one type of thing) creates the measurable material world we experience, including in our own physical body (another incompatible type of thing)
Denying the self and forgetting about thinking…
Both with her material brain monism, Rupert Spira, with his spiritual consciousness monism, deny the reality of the separate self.
Susan denies it because she cannot identify it in the brain as an observable object, and because when she ‘looks’ inside her own consciousness for the ‘object’ of the self, she does not find it, from introspective observation she can only identify an ever-changing state from one moment to the next. The ‘feeling’ of being a self is therefore not backed up by evidence – although it persists and is acted out in the world, where she operates as a self, earns her living, cares for her family etc.
Rupert denies it as a ‘reality’, if we think of it as real we are mistaken. By accepting this mistake, we can access our true identity which is unified, non-local Consciousness, and as we progress though the illusion of our emobodied local self-life and all its laws, we allow more of our non-local Consciousness to shine through as observable experience and within our thinking about it.
Although both Rupert and Susan operate in the world as highly individualised and successful people, even though they both speak to us as individual selves through the language of thinking, they both deny the reality of the ‘self’ and forget about thinking itself. They operate as selves and choose at the same time to work at relieving themselves of individual selfhood. In Susan’s case, she takes the ‘idea’ of personal self-hood in order to experiment, as in individual self, living without it, and in Rupert’s case he invents a new idea, that our experience of separate selfhood is not ‘real’ which is the starting point for improving our peace and happiness and connecting to a wider, universal Self of consciousness – however, the experience of separate selfhood is real, how do we explain that?
In Susan’s case, she chooses to let go of the ‘self’ an idea. For her, in reality the ‘self’ is not an idea, it is a ‘feeling’, and the feeling gives rise to the illusion of self. The ‘feeling’ of being a self, having free will, having a soul and a spirit, is taken as just that, a feeling. When she examines what her ‘self’ is within her, to gather empirical information about our ‘self’ and what it is, she looks inside herself, and at herself, and realizes she does not experience and cannot point to any ‘self’. As she puts it ‘who we are at any moment, what we do, it changes with every moment…I am not the one I was even one minute ago.’ There is no firm, continuous, continuing ‘self’ we can point to if we examine the flowing becoming of our consciousness, and our exploration of the brain mirrors this, there is not ‘self’ centre, there is no command post, neural activity continually happens throughout the brain. The reality of our consciousness experience is that in the coming and going of everything we perceive and observe, including all the ever-changing forms of our perceived, observed experiences, we have a sense of continuing self, and if we did not, we would not be able to make sense of what we sensed, everything would just ‘be’ in a state of ever-changing becoming, nothing would be understood, and nothing known. Is the feeling and sense of self just that, a mere feeling or sense, or is it the perceived hint of something real, which we could investigate, meet, and become aware of and get to know?
Susan has come up with the creative idea of living without the idea of a self, just going into the flow of becoming, and understanding herself as just that, and not more. For Susan, letting go of any preconceived ideas of spirit, soul, free will and self, gives her a certain freedom to ‘be’, naturally, unencumbered with old ideas. She offers us a creative invitation to ‘surf’ the constant ‘dying and becoming ‘of our existence, to practice seeing and experiencing ‘redness’ differently for (redness for example). Susan practices a kind of Zen meditation which allows her to develop a rich inner life, at the same time maintaining a materialist standpoint. It is true that she is living as if she were a self when it comes to taking care of her material needs; she has a website, a job, a home, family, needs and money. As a self she has a point of view on the ‘self’, that it is not a thing in her life, that she is experimenting with living without one. I notice that although she seeks freedom from the prison of old ideas, she is totally attached to the idea that current science is the only way to find truth about consciousness and our inner being, so only ‘matter’ and world observable data can hold the key to our understanding and explaining of our human consciousness. Susan had an out-of-body experience when she was a student and for a time dedicated her research life to understanding this and other as yet unexplained experiences, by studying ‘paranormal psychology’. From this she eventually concluded there was no material evidence for the existence of the non-material, and that her experience must have been an illusion explainable by physical phenomena. She became the most hard-line of material monists, a ‘scientific sceptic’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skeptics_Society
For Rupert, the individual earthly self, our sense of being this self, is also discovered to be not real, not existing in reality as a separate individuality, but rather, it only seems to exist separately. This statement is the result of a complex thinking operation - the ‘idea’ that something can appear real but not be real, the idea of illusion, the idea of ‘reality’. In reality, as Rupert sees it, this sense and illusion of self is a manifestation of a universal consciousness, which is currently taking on a sleeping or partially sleeping state in which is appears to itself as a separate self. ‘Someone’ looks closely into his or her individual consciousness, to try and see the ‘self’ in order to discover it does not exist, rather as Susan Blackmore discovered. Who is the one who is looking at the separate self to see it is not there? ‘There isn’t a thinker, a feeler a doer’ says Rupert, who then is there, looking? Rupert says universal ‘Awareness’ is always there, that which cannot be born or die, or be subject to fear, that which is a non-objective oneness and whole state of love. He is calling for discernment about which ‘I’ is operating in me. Is it an illusory and self-defensive separate self, or the true I AM of eternally existing indivisible being-ness? This latter would be for Rupert our ‘true nature’…that which knows directly, through direct awareness, every experience we have. It is for Rupert something which can be experienced and not a theory. He says, ‘If this ultimate awareness were not present there would be no experience’. Rupert would say to his students, ‘you are undoubtedly present you cannot deny your existence, I can’t find myself as an objective experience, as an object or separate self, but I undoubtedly am and yet what I am cannot be found as an object, what I am has no objective qualities but that does not mean it is not present’. Rupert would conclude then that the true nature of the separate self is indivisible Presence, the earthly sense of separate self is not a reality, but a temporary and temporal state of limited or sleeping reality. The shared experience of a ‘world’ which can be perceived and measured and which imposes its laws on the physical part of us, he explains as being, essentially, a shared projection of the same matter-shaped consciousness.
When you ask Rupert, how is it that individual experience and shared experience is ‘created’ from indivisible universal awareness, he would say, someone existed, we will call her Mary, Mary falls asleep and dreams she is Jane in another time or place, ‘Jane’ (who is in reality Mary) believes she is real and her surrounding world and all the people in it sharing her reality are real. The dream is explained by a reality ‘Mary’, which we can’t explain, and we are left hanging, not knowing the nature of ‘Mary’, not knowing how formless Consciousness can be a ‘Mary’ capable of individualising as Jane and everything else in such a complex and diverse way. How can falling asleep create such complexity? Is it intentional on the part of ‘Mary’, no, because falling asleep means falling out of intentional consciousness, she ‘dreams’ or becomes less conscious, and this ‘somehow’ creates all we know and experience as humans on earth.
The place of thinking
I have been visibly thinking throughout this article, now let’s turn our attention to thinking, to what is really going on with us human beings right here and now, and not according to ‘theories’ of one-ness, be it material or spiritual.
What we call the outer world, or at least our experience of the outer world involves a world which adheres to natural laws which humanity has discovered, and which allows us to measure, predict, understand, survive and manipulate it.
Our individual experience of an inner world reveals elements of our conscious being, which we can round up under the titles
Thinking
Feeling
Willing
Both our inner experience as a separate self, and our experience of the ‘world’ before us are in a certain sense at least, experiences. However indirectly information reaches about the word, however far into space or deep into microcosm, at some point it has to reach us, or we would not know about it. We have to experience the world, and in that sense what we know of the world is experience. Through science it is carefully ordered and theoretically very well-known experience. Does that mean that the observed ‘world’ we live in does not have any ‘reality’, is it Maya, all an illusion, a kind of Cosmic cinema projection which we are all taking part in? How should we relate to our world experience and our inner experience?
Duality is our dual experience, the duality is within us as earthly human beings…
What happens if we approach the problem from a different angle, what happens when look closely at how we actually operate as conscious human beings. With careful thinking guidance we can explore the empirical fact of our conscious nature, and begin to see and understand that the dual experience is within us, and that we ‘move’ between the two states, our bodily and world state, and our inner mental state and the feelings aroused in us. How do things look if we start our investigation of dualism there, where it actually is, rather than projecting dualism ‘out there’, and trying to solve it with an ultimate monist explanation, such as ‘everything IS matter or everything IS consciousness?
Under this new model, we have an inner and an outer experience, and somewhere between those two experiences is a ‘centre’, a mediator, a means of connection between the two. To form an illustration of this, we can imagine a lemniscate in movement:
How do we, as observing and thinking beings, ‘move’ between these two states? Now imagine the point between the two types of experiences of very differing quality, one is perception and observation, one an inner self, thinking, feeling, willing. Now imagine the point is an ‘I’ who thinks. Can the thinking turn and reach into both worlds? The hard questions would be in this case:
How can I get to know myself, collect empirical evidence for what I’m doing and what kind of being I am? Or as Socrates would put it, ‘know thyself’.
As an individual separate-feeling conscious human, I move between these two states quite unconsciously. How could I get an ‘overview’, how could I catch a glimpse of myself thinking the world I observe, observing it into thinking, thinking it into clear consciousness? Wouldn’t I have to find a way of contacting a ‘higher’ and wider and more complete version of ‘myself’, who would become conscious the localised in space-time individual self? Perhaps the Self that Jung witnessed?
Our current science denies the inner being, and has no means of seeing or measuring it directly. Isn’t it time we put our thinking selves back into the equation, and consciously trust in thinking to reveal ourselves to ourselves?