Monisme - l'idée qu'il n'y a qu'une seule chose...

Preface

Deux Monistes et la "Hard Question (question difficile)" de la Conscience Humaine ... est-ce que tout est matière, tout est-il explicable par la matière, sans rien trouver de spirituel ? Ou est-ce que tout est spirituel, y compris la matière?

Méthode pour « penser avec » de Susan Blackmore et Rupert Spira

Qu’est-ce que je remarque dans la pensée de Susan et Rupert lorsqu’ils la présentent ? L'étymologie du mot remarquer  est « arrêter son regard, son attention sur quelque chose » (Est.); 2. 1585 « distinguer quelqu'un parmi d'autres », et le mot 'notice' en Anglais qui veut dire 'remarquer' vient de la racine gnosere, « apprendre à connaître, faire connaissance ». Comment puis-je faire connaissance et vraiment connaître Susan et Rupert à travers leur pensée, telle qu'ils la présentent ? Un peu comme dans toute relation, c'est une bonne idée si l'on veut nouer une relation et en tirer le meilleur, de commencer par la bienveillance et le respect, de s'intéresser suffisamment pour suivre leur réflexion jusqu'au bout, de l'observer et de permettre à notre pensée interagir avec le leur pendant qu'ils l'expriment. Je suis vraiment inspirée et reconnaissante du travail de Rupert et Susan, leur énergie, leur enthousiasme, leur dévouement à leur travail et la clarté avec laquelle ils expriment leurs idées. Ce sentiment d'émerveillement de pouvoir rencontrer deux personnes aussi intéressantes à travers leurs idées et leurs pensées et de pouvoir tester ma propre pensée avec la leur, fait partie intégrante de l'étude. J'écoute attentivement ce que chacun d'eux dit et comment ils le disent, je prends les idées et, dans ma conscience, je ralentis mon processus de penser, je laisse un temps et un espace calmes, je 'marche' avec elles dans leurs pensées.  J'attends, je vie, je fais le ménage avec elles dans mon esprit, je prends le temps necessaire pour comprendre, je note mes nouvelles pensées matinales, et je laisse la vie m'apporter du contenu pertinent (l'algorithme YouTube est particulièrement utile pour cela!).

Le monisme matériel du « cerveau physique » de Susan Blackmore

Susan Blackmore se décrit comme « psychologue, conférencière et écrivaine effectuant des recherches sur la conscience, les mèmes et les expériences anormales, et professeure à l'Université de Plymouth ». Pour Susan, il n'y a qu'une seule « chose » et elle est physique. Elle a été convaincue par « la science » qui est physiquement vérifiable, que notre conscience est physique et peut être expliquée par des lois physiques, du moins en principe, et qu'avec suffisamment de temps et de recherches, nous serons en mesure de observer et conclure scientifiquement que le cerveau crée notre conscience.

 

De cette manière, la conscience commence à être comprise comme le « phénomène émergent » du cerveau. Cela amène à son tour de nombreux philosophes, scientifiques et psychologues à formuler et à se poser une question très « difficile » ; Comment le cerveau crée-t-il notre expérience consciente ? Le cerveau physique, tout ce que nous voyons, mesurons et savons à son sujet grâce à l’étude physique, tout cela diffère profondément en qualité d’une expérience intérieure vécue. Il est si difficile de répondre à cette question, il est si difficile de trouver une réponse à cette question, qu’elle est connue sous le nom de « question difficile » à résoudre, ou 'hard question'.  

Le monisme spiritualist de « conscience » de Rupert Spira

En regardant de plus près la pensée de Susan Blackmore et en la remettant en question…

J'ai décrit le point de vue de base de Susan, je suis maintenant prête à approfondir et à réfléchir activement à ses côtés. Je me demande si je suis suffisamment intéressée par ce que dit Susan pour parler de ce qu'elle pense, et pas d'autre chose (ce qui, j'ai remarqué, est un phénomène courant dans les échanges humains) ? Je décide de faire moi-même une synthèse des 10 points qu'elle a évoqués, ce qui me rend actif et attentif à ce qu'elle dit réellement et je me crée une référence essentielle. Cette liste condensée est tirée principalement de sa vidéo YouTube (produite par Oxford Academic, anciennement Oxford University Press) dans laquelle elle fait une « très brève introduction » à sa compréhension des grandes questions de la conscience, intitulée :  Conscience : les dix principales choses que vous devez savoir à ce sujet ».  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSNg6dNw_7U

1. Mystère/problème (corps-esprit ou problème « dur »), également un problème de « dualisme ». Comment l'intérieur de moi, qui est une expérience personnelle/subjective (vécue/perçue de manière intérieure), est-il lié à l'expérience partagée d'un« monde objectif» qui est perçu par les organes des sens et tout notre être conscient (perception plus sentiments, impressions, réactions instinctives, etc.)?
2. La définition d’être conscient (par opposition à ne pas être conscient) est que vous pouvez vous poser la question : qu’est-ce que cela signifie pour vous ? Est-ce quelque chose ou rien ?  La reponse quelque chose indique conscience.
3. Qualité de l'expérience, par exemple ; l’expérience de la« rougeur du rouge », elle demande si nous pouvons appeler ces types d’expériences des « qualia », des particules d’expérience consciente de qualité ?

   

4. Apparition extérieure d'un être conscient qui est vide à l'intérieur ;  imaginez que nous voyons une réplique parfaite d'un être humain qui est en réalité un zombie ou un robot, vide de conscience, sans aucune expérience qualitative, non vivant. Nous sommes trompés par l'apparence jusqu'à ce que nous démontions le corps (regarde physique a l'interieure d'un corps par le fait de casser ou deconstruire le corps) et découvrions qu'il est vide ou rempli de mécanismes robotiques… est-ce que cette déconstruction physique est suffisante pour savoir, ou est-ce le seul moyen de savoir si quelqu'un/quelque chose est conscient - comment pouvons-nous le savoir, que quelque chose ou quelqu'un d'autre est conscient comme nous?
5. En dehors des preuves/preuves de conscience chez les autres (sans pouvoir y entrer et les partager), nous voyons un comportement qui semblerait impliquer la conscience, mais nous pourrions être trompés, donc ce comportement ou cette apparence n'est pas une preuve solide, même si nous soupçonnons et devinons qu'un animal avec une anatomie similaire à la nôtre aura une conscience comme la nôtre, nous n'en sommes pas sûrs, qu'en est-il des êtres d'anatomie alternative, par exemple : les poissons, que ressentent-ils ? (expérience antidouleur). Nous pouvons observer un comportement qui nous amène à théoriser que les poissons ressentent de la douleur, nous leur donnons des analgésiques et observons un comportement indiquant moins ou pas de douleur, nous accumulons des preuves reproductibles selon lesquelles les poissons ressentent quelque chose qui s'apparente à la douleur humaine. Pourtant, cette preuve physique est-elle suffisante pour déduire la « chose différente », la nature qualitative de la conscience ?
6. États modifiés de conscience – ils existent en tant qu’expérience, mais comment les comprendre et les mesurer ?
7. Neurosciences : étude des états cérébraux et de leur corrélation avec l'expérience de qualité consciente rapportée. Nous commençons à « cartographier » les zones du cerveau liées aux états de conscience rapportés ou observés depuis

   

   l’extérieur. L’image canard-lapin est-elle « vraiment » un canard ou vraiment un lapin ? Quelle est la nature subjective de la conscience qui nous permet de voir une chose comme deux choses différentes ?
8. La conscience est-elle une illusion ? Les « illusionnistes de conscience » veulent étudier la façon dont nous pensons à notre conscience, en supprimant tout ce en quoi nous « croyons » et en recommençant. (« Dans l’espoir que CETTE fois nous puissions percer le mystère) »…
9. Conscience et libre arbitre ; J’ai l’expérience consciente de faire ce que je veux, est-ce réel, puis-je agir librement ? Preuve du contraire - lorsque nous observons de nombreux cerveaux, lorsque nous prenons une décision, nous pouvons voir et cartographier les zones de « prise de décision » correspondantes dans le cerveau en action, et la conscience de prendre la décision survient après que l'activité dans le cerveau ait pu être mesurée. , notre « cerveau » sait-il avant que nous fassions ce que nous allons décider ? Cela signifie-t-il que « je » ne peut pas être la cause de mon action ? Le libre arbitre est-il une illusion, et à quoi ressemblerait la vie sans y croire ?
10. Le soi; Je ressens un sens de moi, je regarde à l'intérieur, mais à l'intérieur du cerveau, aucun moi ne peut être trouvé et n'est pas nécessaire dans le cerveau physique pour qu'il soit fonctionnel, donc le moi est-il une illusion… qui suis-je ? Suis-je?
     

Pourquoi Susan a-t-elle omis de mentionner la pensée comme faisant partie de notre conscience, et qui joue un rôle vital dans la vérification de la vérité et de la réalité ? Susan pense-t-elle que la pensée ne fait pas partie de notre expérience subjective et intérieure privée ? (ou étant donné qu’elle n’aborde pas la réflexion, je devrais peut-être dire « croire » plutôt que «pense»). Croit-elle que le pensée se produira alors, dans le monde « extérieur » ? Ou alors, estime-t-elle que la pensée est, en tant qu'expérience privée pour chacun d'entre nous, nécessairement subjective et indigne d'être prise en compte dans une démarche scientifique en quête de connaissances objectives ? La pensée se trouve entre le marteau et l’enclume.

Si la pensée est subjective, alors elle n’est pas valable objectivement au sens scientifique. Si la pensée est objective, alors comment se fait-il qu’elle ne puisse pas être vue ou observée comme un « objet » dans le monde objectif ?

As Susan 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?  (PAUSE I 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?  (PAUSE I 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?