Is Materialism a Fantasy?| Bernardo Kastrup in conversation with Viryadeva

[Music] so hi my name is vyria daver and i'm here with bernardo castro dr bernardo castro and we're here as part of the nature of mind project and this is a project bringing together scientists neuroscientists physicists philosophers to think about what the mind is what the mind really is and i'm very delighted to be able to welcome dr castro bernardo if i may call you bernardo sure you should i'll just daunt your business okay okay i'll drop i'll drop the doctor um so bernardo has two phds one in philosophy particularly the philosophy of mind and also a phd in computer engineering particularly artificial intelligence and worked at the european organization for nuclear research which is cern and also at the philip the famous phillips research laboratory and he's now as i understand it mainly dedicated to bringing some of his big philosophical ideas out into the world particularly the idea the model of analytical idealism so i'm really really pleased you could join us today bernardo i've been i found it such a an exciting journey exploring your work these last few months in preparation for the interview pleasure to be here appreciate the opportunity thank you very much so i'm going to start with the big the big question which is what is idealism what is this big idea analytical idealism it's the notion that reality is essentially mental that it's made of mental processes now not your mental processes alone or my mental processes alone idealism recognizes that there is an objective world outside our individual minds but it infers that that objective world is itself made of transpersonal mental processes which present themselves to our observation in the form we call perception and of course perception is eminently qualitative it is mental it entails colors flavors smells and these are mental properties and the the notion of analytic idealism is that these qualities on the screen of perception are inner representations of mental processes that are out there natural mental processes out there which we have no access to from a first person perspective but which we get a representation of in the form of the physical world we see okay so the idea is that although we tend to think and we're brought up in our culture to think that somehow there's a world out there that's sort of propping up our perceptions that's kind of behind our ordinary perceptions actually that's a kind of mistake all there is is perception although maybe you could help me help clarify what's the difference between it's all in my head and idealism as you propose it so we idealism does acknowledge that there is a world out there what it denies is that such a world out there is essentially different from mentation that it is made of matter in the sense strictly defined under metaphysical materialism which is something that is fully described in terms of quantities alone and has no inherent qualities in other words under materialism the world out there is such that there is nothing it is like to be the world up there under idealism there is still a world out there but there is also something it is like to be the world out there and we perceive these mental processes out there in the form that we call the physical world but there is still an objective world out there it's just mental and not physical in the way that it is defined under physicalism or materialism okay okay so it's like usually we think that there's life and there are beings who are conscious and then there's us maybe who are the most conscious beings uh and all the life all the kind of subjectivity the emotions the love the hate and so on it just happens in here happens in within our nervous systems and everything else is just dead matter that's kind of and you're challenging that and saying that's that's not the case everything is made of the same kind of stuff it's all made of subjectivity but we have a particular viewpoint on that is that is that kind of what it's that's pretty easily that's precisely correct so essentially it is materialism as a metaphysics that says that the world you experience around you this world made of colors and flavors and sounds materialism says this world is actually inside your head alone because it's your brain that is supposed to somehow generate the colors and the melodies and the flavors and the the smells because these are qualities and under materialism qualities are epiphenomenal they are secondary they are byproducts of brain activity so under materialism the world of qualities that you experience around you is supposed to be inside your skull and the world that is really out there is purely abstract and you cannot visualize it because it's supposed to be devoid of qualities now under idealism uh the world that is really out there is also qualitative it is also made of mental processes but not individuated mental processes not personal mental processes just mental processes at large out there natural mental processes that unfold in the in the broader field of nature as a whole in which our perception has evolved to collect information about in the form that we call perception but the perceived world is just a representation and appearance of what is in and of itself transpersonal mental processes okay i think i'm going to try and ask you to unpack some of these ideas later um some of these ideas are going to be very new for for our uh viewers um but somehow what what it sounds like you're getting at is that we think that mind is just restricted to hear um but actually what's going on is that there are all kinds of processes that that they look like objectivity to us from our perspective but actually they're just different modes of uh of subjectivity they're just different modes of subjectivity and what looks like an external world that's completely different to us it's just a different kind of subjectivity operating in a different way correct and one way to think about it is the following from my subjective perspective your thoughts are entirely objective because i have no control over them and your thoughts don't care about my opinions my dispositions my wishes my fantasies so from my perspective what is essentially your subjectivity is objective to me another thing to keep in mind is that we are very used to the notion that there are mental processes out there which are not ours other people's mental processes um your cats or dogs mental processes they are out there from your point of view you do not have direct access to them from your point of view they are objective now what idealism does is to call for the same exercise when it comes to the inanimate world as well the inanimate world from your point of view is objective to you but it is subjective from its own point of view the thoughts of nature so to say are objective to you they don't care what you think feel wish or fantasize they are what they are because nature is what it is but from the point of view of nature itself they are subjective they are subjective mental processes which are probably instinctive or spontaneous since the behavior of nature is so predictable through the laws of physics so these mental processes out there are not human-like in the sense that they do not necessarily entail the the high-level mental functions that you and i have like self-awareness the ability to reflect the ability to introspect explicitly and examine our own mental contents which is called metacognition they are probably instinctive very spontaneous simple mental processes that unfold in very regular ways and which we then represent in our internal dashboard of sensors as the world of perception as the color sounds flavors and melodies around us so um maybe we can pause this thread here because i you know i've got lots of questions to ask you and i think people want to know about how how we can kind of relate to this how we can relate to these ideas which are so different to the way we're brought up to think but maybe i'd like to move on to something a bit more personal and just ask you know you you started out as a as a physicist as a computer scientist and then working physics and presumably you were brought up like all of us thinking that there's a material world really out there um and you've completely reversed your position how did that happen what what's the story there well as you said they started out in the interface between physics or high energy particle physics and computer engineering i specialized in computer science because i realized that to do experiments in physics you have to be a computer engineer and not a physicist i mean it's engineers that developed the atlas detector and the data acquisition system of the atlas detector this stuff that eventually found the famous higgs boson so i was in that interface from i don't know 19 to 24 years old or so and i was a materialist by default in the sense that i i was a materialist because everybody around me was a materialist not because i thought it through and arrived at an informed opinion i just sort of absorbed it by osmosis but still at cern i was working on artificial neuronal networks which back in the 90s were you know a lot more mysterious than they are today and i was developing an alternative to the data acquisition systems we were using an alternative based on artificial neuronal networks artificial intelligence eventually that was not used we used our classical approach because we didn't understand those neuronal networks very well so we didn't there but of course after you've done some of these ai systems you ask yourself well i made something in silicon that is intelligent what does it take to turn it into a conscious thing as well to have its intelligence be accompanied by experience and i struggled with that question for a couple of years until i realized that whatever i changed in the structure and function of a silicon computer it had no bearing on the question of experience it only changed structure and function it i had no reason to think that it increased or reduced my chances of having that structure and function be conscious um and and that was a hint that i was making some wrong assumptions because i was facing an internal contradiction of my way of thinking and when you face an internal contradiction when your thinking leads you to a dead end you ought to stop now take account of the situation retrace your steps back and realize where you took a wrong turn and i realized that my wrong turn was the assumption that consciousness is something that can be created out of structure and function in the first place and i realized that structure and function themselves exist only in consciousness as far as i can know and that everything else was pure theoretical abstraction and not grounded in any empirical experience and and not even grounded in theory because the theoretical underpinning of materialism is inexistent we do not have even a coherent hypothesis about how the brain could possibly generate the qualities of experience and can i check i've understood that just yeah is it that so you were doing these experiments with neural networks and you were changing their structure and function and you realize that according to our unders the kind of default understanding of the brain you had which is just somehow the structure and function of neurons the little firing bits that that make that supposedly make consciousness according to materialism um uh any changes in those weren't going to get you any closer to creating a conscious thing correct i had no reason to think that it would get me any closer i see so there's no reason to think that would get you any closer and that then challenged this idea that somehow the particular neural structure of our brains leads to consciousness yes because it shows you that at some point you took a wrong turn in your thinking because if you're facing an incommensurability it means that you've departed from reason at some point and and the way this has been technically framed the issue i was facing uh has been technically framed by philosopher david chalmers and he framed it in the falling way there is nothing about physical parameters parameters of structure and function in terms of which we could deduce the qualities of experience not even in principle in other words if i connected my neuro the neurals the neurons in my neural network in in according to plan a or connected my neuro networks network according to plan b i had no reason to think that plan a was the experience of heat and plan b the experience of code it could just as well be the other way around i had no way to deduce the qualities of experience from structure and function which tells us that okay something went wrong at some point and what went wrong is that physicality we created the notion of something physical based on physical parameters like weight mass charge spin momentum frequency amplitude and but in the beginning those numbers physical parameters they were descriptions of the world of qualities we see around us we use those numbers to describe qualities like a piece of luggage that weighs 50 kilos will feel heavier than a piece of luggage that weighs 5 kilos so 5 or 50 kilograms is a description of a certain perceptual quality how heavy it feels the same goes for the wavelength of light it's a description of the colors the qualities we perceive so numbers were descriptions but at some point something went very wrong in the chain of thinking of western thought and we decided that the description preceded the thing described it's like saying that the map precedes the territory that the map generates the territory as opposed to being a description of the territory and then we said what really exists is mass weight charge spin frequency amplitude and the qualities are somehow generated by our by our our brain in a mysterious way that nobody can even begin to articulate with any clarity explicitness or coherence that was a mistake we tried to replace the territory with the map we failed and then we called it a problem the heart problem of consciousness and now we promise ourselves that if we make a better map we will eventually be able to pull the territory out of the map of course it's never going to work it's an internal contradiction in the way we are thinking about reality and that was the question i was going to ask because you know some people watching might say you know at this point in your career you got to this place where you thought there's no way changing around these neural networks in any particular way is gonna i've got no reason to think that's gonna lead to consciousness me somehow generating consciousness um but people might say oh we just don't know enough about neural networks yet that's the problem if we knew enough about neural networks we'd be able to explain how this particular arrangement of cells leads to this magnificent multi-color emotional world that we live in and how did you know that wasn't the right path at that point this is such a a loose promissory excuse for someone who is just not emotionally ready to depart with one's metaphysical commitments um i could say that maybe one day if we understand the map very well we will be able to pull the netherlands out of the map of the netherlands uh because you know we don't know everything about the map yet right so who knows maybe one day we'll make a better map and we will pull the netherlands out of the map it's exactly the same that's going on right now so if you see things with clarity you understand that this promissory note that one day we will understand enough and create consciousness out of material structure and function it's silly it's a very silly move and it only reflects a arbitrary metaphysical commitment not an honest and rational approach to the problems at hand i mean you must have just thinking back to my days you know i mentioned to you my email i used to be a part of academic philosophy of science i was really in that world and there were these debate there were these debates in academic philosophy of science between realism and anti-realism about physical stuff and that hopefully we'll bring this towards buddhism at some point i'll see if i can do that but anyway let's stay in philosophy of science for now and um you know when i was studying there were these debates and there were anti-realists who who claim that all science is doing all science is doing is just um we're recording patterns that we we see in the world we're noticing patterns and then we're making predictions on the basis of these patterns it's as you say it's a map we're making maps of reality oh um but we don't know what the reality is it's just this incredible influx of phenomena that we're perceiving and then we we notice regularities and how did you know how what instinct drove you to say that there was no more than that we had no reason to think there's more than just maps here because so many people don't so many scientists don't have that instinct what do you think was different about you i paid attention to the history of science maybe that that's the difference look theoretical entities in physics are convenient fictions in the sense that they give us a way to think about the world but it what we think the way we think is not necessarily the world it's just an operationally useful way to think about the world and these convenient fictions they change over time they have always changed when newton proposed that there was this magical invisible force acting instantaneously at the distance to pull the apple down to the ground or to keep the moon in its orbit just gravity this instantaneous invisible force that acts at the distance it took the french 50 years to stop laughing of newton's convenient fiction because it was just magical back in the 17th century things that didn't contact couldn't causally interact interact with one another but that convenient fiction this invisible instantaneous force of gravity allowed us to put a man on the moon and and and land uh um a spaceship on a comet uh or an asteroid um but then einstein came along and he said no newton's convenient fiction is no longer convenient because it doesn't help us predict the orbit of mercury with accuracy and it doesn't help us understand why we can see stars that are actually behind the sun um so he came up with another convenient fiction which is that the very the very fabric of space-time twists and bends and is malleable and can be bent by mass that's also a convenience fiction and why is it a fiction because nature behaves as though [Music] the fabric of space-time could be twisted and bent so convenient fictions are stories um that capture nature's behavior in other words nature behaves as though those theoretical entities were true and that's all we need to predict nature's behavior and do science and technology successfully we only need convenient fictions and we will always replace convenient fictions when they are no longer convenient when we need another convenient fictions that's what we we have to keep in mind these are models that allow us to make predictions they are not necessarily reality they have never been literally true why would they be now they are just convenient fictions what reality really is is is not um accessible to us so even then you were kind of aware knowing your history of science as you did that there have been a series of maps for reality and they keep changing they keep on changing when we can't explain all the phenomena that we want to be able to explain new map that was one thing but there was another which is much closer to live the experience we have this naive notion called physical realism this naive notion that the world as we see that the forms of the objects and things we see around us they are the forms of the world as it is in itself in other words we think that perception is a transparent uh window into the world as it actually is but that's absolutely nonsensical that would basically mean that we cannot control our internal entropy in other words we would die just by looking at the world um it's certainly not what evolution would have favored evolution favors survival uh not the truth of what you see in the world as it actually is is almost certainly not at all like what is on the screen of perception in the same way that the sky outside an airplane doesn't look at all like the airplane's dashboard but the dashboard presents accurate information about the world outside so if a pilot didn't have a transparent window to see the sky outside you could still fly safely by instruments alone but the world doesn't look like an instrument panel the instrument panel is just a way to convey accurate information about the world that's what perception is perception is an instrument panel it displays information that comes from our sensors our retinas eardrums and so forth and we are like pilots who were born inside an airplane cockpit without windows all we have is the dashboard so what we do we think the dashboard is the world in other words we think the world is physical which is absolutely nonsensical it's absurd physicality is the dashboard representation of the world i remember that metaphor a really good metaphor in your book on materialism uh why materialism is baloney i meant to list all of the books you've written at the beginning i'll say something at the end they're very very good very exciting books um one of the metaphor you use was um of its like somewhat i think it's like you're in a house and there's a tiny of light through the window and you can see just a tiny sliver of the world and it's as if you're trying to count you're trying to come up with or you think that you know the whole of reality through this tiny little that's causality that's the notion of causality because in what is causality where does it come from it comes from the ordering ordering of events in nature as we observe them so if a happens and then b follows and that's all the time the way nature behaves first a happens and then b follows we say a is the cause b is the effect um but if you pretend that that metaphor is not mine i think it's alan watts metaphor if you're sitting in front of a fence and there is only a slit on the fence that allows you to see the other side and you see a cat passing on the other side you first see the cat's head and then you see the cat's tail after a little while and then the cat turns around comes again and then again first you see the head and then you see the tail so you would tell yourself the head causes the tail because the tail follows the head every time but you only say that because you're limited to a slit if you could see the whole pattern the cat there is no causality so that's a different argument that was an argument for causality not being fundamental causality is a category of our cognition like kant and schopenhauer already said over 200 years ago and we forgot since then causality is not inherent in nature causality is an artifact of our limited cognition because we see the world through a slit we call it time we fail to see the whole pattern if we saw the whole pattern we would never talk in terms of cause and effect i'd like to pick that up again if i can i want to somehow serious tools i'd really like at some point you to tell us about the egoic loop the metaphor of the egoic loop because i think it's a really powerful way of expressing your ideas and also i think there's some interesting overlaps with buddhist thought that we could talk about but before that just to pick up your personal story again i mean something i was wondering about was in in um more than allegory you talk very personally and in dreamed up reality two of your books you talk very personally about quite significant you could call them spiritual or transcendent experiences that you've had yourself and i just wondered if these also had a part to play or if if it was that you decided materialism had to be wrong first and then you explored the possibilities for transcendent experience yes the latter okay could you tell us a bit about how that happened well i i came at my fundamental conclusions purely from reasoning and evidence um evidence has been accumulating foundations of physics for over 40 years now that physical entities do not have standalone existence and if they don't then then they are not the primary layer of reality then they are just an image a representation of something deeper that lies behind the physical so all of these things and my thinking about artificial intelligence and how could i turn that into artificial consciousness just reasoning my way out of the internal contradictions of our worldview is what brought me to idealism to this notion that everything is actually mental not my mind alone but mental in essence and that solves every problem resolves all the contradictions and accommodates all the evidence as well so that's how i came at it i didn't come at it at all from spiritual insight i'm i'm particularly i have a particularly hard head um i'm not good at the subtleties of spirituality if you know what i mean i was not born with that gift um which i've come to accept yes these are the cards that have been dealt and i'm okay with them um but of course once having arrived at this conclusion and being open to them and i'm talking about um dreamed up reality more than allegory i can make an observation later about what that actually represents but once i was already sort of you know very open to idealism it was then that i figured i i have to experiment with altered states of consciousness and the reason was the following under materialism if experience is generated by the brain then then it it's an enclosed system there isn't much to explore it's limited by the brain but under idealism the brain is just the image the appearance of a certain configuration of consciousness a dissociative configuration that makes us feel that we are separate from the rest of the world even though it's only one thing going on what happens then if that dissociation weakens no process in nature is perfect rain doesn't precipitate our air humidity um combustion or fire doesn't doesn't burn everything there is to burn so if we are dissociative processes in the mind of nature then that dissociation is not perfect either so what would it feel like if i try to induce an impairment of dissociation and that's what meditation probably does that's certainly what psychedelics do because we know now that psychedelics only reduce brain activity they don't increase brain activity anywhere in the brain and the reductions are massive it's the best model of death we have is psychedelic usage because your brains are half dies so i felt i needed to experiment with that it would be irresponsible if if i'm writing about consciousness to not experiment with that and i did and and and the results were consistent uh with my views even though they were so in a way that i could never have imagined before what you describe it particularly in dreamed up realities is really wild very exciting uh like some of the experiences buddhist masters have in in the depths of meditation maybe we can hear about some of those in there in a moment but um it's hard to know what avenue to explore i mean something i'm kind of concerned to make sure i do here is i'd really i think unlike people like me like people like me i had as i mentioned to you i had a big transcendental experience and then i changed my world view it wasn't it wasn't the same way around as you i didn't reason myself to idealism i studied philosophy i studied people like hume and i even wrote a lot about bishop barkley who was an idealist but i wasn't convinced by them i just thought these guys are kind of weird and interesting but obviously they're wrong but with you you were convinced rationally and i think that's so valuable for people to hear about um because mostly people's objections i think as you say materialism when you really look at it closely is not very intuitive it's actually really counterintuitive and strange that there's this whole kind of abstract world out there that we can never touch never see never taste but somehow it's definitely there and it's propping up all the stuff we can actually see it's very strange but i i think i'd like to hear a bit more maybe about some of the empirical reasons why materialism doesn't make sense you give a lot of evidence for why materials make sense in in why materialism is baloney particularly this area of psychedelic experience and near-death experience i wondered if you could tell us a little bit about that okay first just a quick disclaimer we don't even need to go to empirical evidence to dismiss materialism it's internally contradictory it defines matter as that which has nothing to do with qualities and then tries to reduce qualities to matter yeah doesn't work it tries to reduce mind to an abstraction of mind like a dog chasing its own tail that won't work it faces insoluble problems like the the heart problem of consciousness so we don't need empirical evidence to dismiss materialism because materialism is is the most incoherent and the worst option on the table today it's downright stupid if if i may use the word and it's not even difficult to see it the difficulty resides in the momentum and the manufactured plausibility that our culture has engendered for it if you can really contemplate materialism with a neutral mind and only apply logic logical reasoning it's absurd it's outright stupid now having said that because our culture has manufactured so much plausibility artificially for materialism and so many people are emotionally committed to it because of a number of hidden assumptions that they don't examine let's look at empirical evidence in foundations of physics there has been a series of experiments it's a complex series that has been going on for over 40 years but the basic is the following you have two entangled material particles the basic building blocks of nature according to materialism and the scientist a let's say alice is to make a measurement on particle a and scientist bob is to make a measurement on particle b now suppose one is in australia the other one is in europe opposite sides of the world now alice chooses what she wants to measure about particle a in europe and at the same time bob makes a measurement on particle b it turns out that what alice chooses to measure determines what bob sees when he measures particle b what this shows us is that the physical properties of the particles are not pre-existing things measurement doesn't just reveal the properties the particles already had hour long measurement somehow creates the physical properties of the particles that's what the experiment tells us in other words physical entities do not have standalone existence they are representations they are what happens when you make a measurement let's go to the dashboard representation the dashboard of an airplane the airplane has sensors measuring air humidity air speed all kinds of things are being measured on the world outside the airplane and those measurements the results of those measurements are displayed on the dials on the dashboard so the pilot can see them now if you are not measuring if the sensors are not measuring the dials show nothing of course that doesn't mean that there is no world outside it only means that you're not measuring it it means that the dashboard is not the world the dashboard is the result of measurement that's what the experiments are telling us what we call the physical world is not the world it's a representation thereof which arises when we measure it when we observe it it's what the dials show in the dashboard and then we get all confused with these experiments because we think well how come the physical properties are not there before we measure there has to be a world right yes of course there has to be a world and there is a world but it's not the dashboard the world is what is being measured if the dashboard shows nothing it doesn't mean that there is no world it only means that you aren't measuring and the world therefore is not physical physicality is the dashboard representation another other experiments have to do with the neuroscience of consciousness and psychedelics are only one example that show that certain impairments and reductions of brain function lead to vastly enriched and intenser experience which is very hard to reconcile with materialism because under materialism brain activity is experience or generates experience and there is supposed to be nothing to experience that cannot be traced back to brain activity so if your experience is exploding in richness and intensity and you're having one of the most significant experiences of your life that you will never forget and then you realize that actually your brain has gone to sleep it more than has gone to sleep a sleeping brain is more active than a brain on psychedelics um that's hard to reconcile but it's not only psychedelics there is this choking game teenagers play which can lead to death teenagers worldwide have found out that if you partly strangle yourself and you cut blood flow to the brain what looks like from the outside as you having passed out because you become unresponsive from the inside it's like a psychedelic trip so teenagers have figured out that if they partly strangle themselves they can have a trip without drugs they go to you know alternate realities alien worlds they experience not trips back to their childhoods and have enormous insights about the nature of what's going on because they cut blood flow to the head well it's the same kind of thing or in italy studying patients that were undergoing a brain surgery for the removal of tumors which always causes a little bit of collateral damaging surrounding tissue and they were evaluated for feelings of self-transcendence before and after surgery and after surgery after a little bit of brain damage their feelings of self-transcendence are significantly increased and vietnam wore veterans who had brain damage much more susceptible to religious experience than um average people i mean could go on and on a study of mediums in brazil on their brain scanner showing that during the trans state mediums are capable of generating a lot more complex text even though their brain activities far reduce even in the areas related to rational thinking and language processing which doesn't make any sense i mean there are many examples of this i i see yeah yeah we had actually a a little while ago we interviewed a researcher into near death experiences penny sartori who was telling similar stories about these incredibly complex experiences that patients had had when there was no measurable sign of neural activity at all and so i guess just like to clear of understood the reason that means that materialist interpretations of consciousness can't be right is that materialist interpretations of consciousness rely on the idea that experience is generated by the brain but if there can be all these complex experiences when the brain is basically not doing anything consciousness can't possibly be generated by the brain that's one reason why obviously materialism is wrong it's also wrong because it assumes that physical entities have standalone reality now we know that they don't it's also wrong because it's internally contradictory and and doesn't have explanatory power and other things but yeah this is this is a reason the reason i don't i usually don't mention in the ease is because there is always the question during the nde when did you actually have the experience was it when you didn't have a heartbeat or was it afterwards when you get what we call a metabolic rebound when your heart starts beating again and suddenly you know your brain kicks in again um so that question can always be be asked but in the example as i mentioned there is no such question because people reported psychedelic experiences in a time-stamped way while they were lying in a brain scanner so we know that the experience happened while brain activity was far reduced the same with the mediums in brazil and when you have brain damage you know that the damage is still there so whatever experiences are enhanced cognitive skills you have like people with acquired savant syndrome we know that there is no issue of timing here uh the brain function is impaired while they are having a tremendously intense transcendent experience okay so there's no way for materialist to wriggle out so i just want to ask a question which might seem very obvious to you to me it's in a way the answer seems obvious but it certainly i've found recently in talking to people we've been running a series of events here in my local buddhist center at the croydon buddhist centre and uh the thing that people keep asking is well so maybe i do believe in this material world that it's not that plausible to believe in but so what why is that why is that a problem is that hurting anyone what's wrong with that and what would you say to that what would you say to those people it changes everything if you understand what is probably actually going on um for instance it changes your perspective about death and that may not be a good change for me it's not a good one i was very comfortable with the materialist notion that at some point you stop suffering because you there's no subject anymore there is nobody there to suffer so there is no suffering you have to keep in mind that when materialism became mainstream in the late 19th century this was the greatest psychological appeal because throughout human history for 99 of human history our greatest fear our most overwhelming fear more of overwhelming any other anxiety was the fear of the experiential state after death in christian language am i going to go to hell or am i going to go to heaven and in in different forms this has always been our greatest fear it's the fear that has been used throughout history to control entire populations to rule entire countries entire civilizations and in the late 19th century we took it off the table it wasn't there anymore the psychological payoff of this is tremendous under idealism your personal self is a temporary configuration of your consciousness it's probably not going to be there i mean if your brain activity reducing leads to a totally changed state of consciousness like a psychedelic trip imagine when the brain isn't there at all anymore so so you stand to to have a very different experience of things after death but there will still be a subject there will still be experiencing and you don't know what that's going to be like the bad news might be bad or might be great we don't know but we no longer have the reason to think that the insights we have accumulated through life at great cost because of great suffering that those insights are for nothing because they come to an end the moment your consciousness comes to an end so that is also off the table whatever insights you have accumulated at great cost are a eternal contribution to nature they're never going to disappear because consciousness is not disappearing its configuration changes its state changes but whatever insights you have at the moment of death you're seeing nature with those insights you're cashing in you're banking those insights they will never be lost and that reinvests life with meaning even in the face of great suffering it it highlights our kinship with fellow humans and animals we are all part of one great field of subjectivity we don't even exist really as independent agents so the suffering of the pig is my suffering the suffering of the ukrainians is my suffering everybody's suffering is my suffering i am invested in humanity throughout history and the whole of it in the whole of life in the in the universe i am invested in it and if this conceptual understanding sinks in it really changes you it has changed me uh i i have great difficulty right now with the conflict in ukraine and i feel ashamed even to say that because you know my psychological suffering is nothing compared to people who are sleeping in metro stations and having bombs fall on their heads but um i i i cannot isolate myself from that emotionally i'm entirely linked into that it's not something i can shake off anymore so that changes as well our understanding of health changes because now the body doesn't generate the mind the body is the image of a particular configuration of mind so bodily health is essentially mental health even if it's that part of your meditation that you repress and you have no introspective access to you don't know what's going on but it is your mental health so that means that next to surgery and and pills we can also have psychological practice meditation prayer talk therapy as means to improve our very very physical biological health um life is reinvested with meaning because the world now the physical world we see it's a superficial appearance it it it's it's a hint into something that lies behind it a hint to the represented as opposed to the representation itself the world around us is a book to be read a riddle to be deciphered what do these images mean they are pointing at something beyond themselves and so now life is invested with this extra dimension of mystery and meaning and living life is no longer banal uh it's no longer superficial it's it's a great adventure it's the great adventure of deciphering the book of life the book of the world changes everything so i mean what you're saying kind of implies something about the way most people are currently living you know with we're living in this world where the only meanings to be had kind of within our own skulls and all that will end when we die that could be for the best because who knows what happens next might be bad but also it means that there's no possibility of our life meaning anything before um beyond physical death and i guess it's all you're also kind of suggesting that the world we're interacting with our view of the world is very very impoverished it's like deep it's deeply impoverished because we think that we're getting the whole picture and actually we're just staring at the map we've got the map right in front of our faces and we think that's all there is and we can't see we can't see the sky we can't see the landscape is that kind of what you're getting at absolutely and the psychological movement behind it is understandable and you need to understand it to understand why materialism has become mainstream because on the basis of reason and evidence alone it's absurd it's downright stupid so how come something that is so obviously wrong come to dominate yeah how come so so maybe we can get into that why is well i want to know why that is and i also want to kind of see what you think because buddhism has a kind of theory about why that is you know has its own kind of as philosophers it has its own error theory for materialism um but i just wondered like you know you said it sunk in with you i think some people might be hearing this and thinking okay maybe i'm missing something here but it's not sinking in how do you get this to sink in it's a very personal process for for everyone i i can describe to you my own theory of how this whole thing happened and maybe it helps people sort of reconcile themselves with it and allow it to sink in materialism started materialism as a metaphysics it started together with science around the late 16th early 17th century and in the beginning it was very clear to practitioners the scholars of the time the the proto-scientists that the numbers of physics were descriptions not the thing in itself but mere descriptions kilograms was a description of the feeling of weight not a property of a standalone physical world that was pretty clear because it was obvious everybody's understanding um before and during the renaissance was that the world as it is in itself is of the same kind as we are because we are just part of the world so if from within we are mental beings so is the world and the world presents itself as the matter of the physical universe just as my inner sorrow presents itself as the matter of my tears and my contorted facial muscles so the world was of the same kind as us this was not even something discussed because it it was obvious who the hell would think anything else but then science began and some scientists were burned at the stake giordano bruno was burned in the year 1600 so scientists realized that carving out a space for them separate from the church was a matter of survival so they created this notion that the description actually had real standalone existence they called it matter and they told the church well the church has the psyche in other words the soul the mind the whole world and we we get to have matter so you don't burn at this at the stake and the church probably thought these guys are nuts okay have your abstract nonsensical fantasy of matter and you leave us with the real world it's fine scientists weren't burned at the stake anymore and they knew that this was happening uh denis did a whole one of the two authors of lyon ciclopedi the founding document of the enlightenment he's on record saying materialism doesn't quite work but we need it in order to combat the church they knew that but at some point after the mid 19th century is what psychologists call fluid compensation took place fluid compensation is we all need a source of meaning usually that's a transcendent source of meaning that comes from religion it has been the case throughout our history if you lose that you need to fluidly compensate and find another source of meaning and the alternative can be a very high self-image can be closure like the world is crap but at least i understand why it is crap it's closure it's it's the it's the very reason why we have the ritual of burying our dead they are gone can't have them back but we get closure if we bury them so that's another source of meaning contributing to something bigger than yourself like the great universal project of the scientific endeavor that's another source of meaning so intellectual elites have fluidly compensated for the loss of religious uh sources of meaning transcendent source of meaning by distinguishing themselves from the populace the populace so they consider themselves this special more intelligent human beings who stared the the facts in the face and you know had the courage to avoid gullibility and fantasy and contribute to this great pro project of science that was bigger than themselves but of course that came at our cost because they tell us we don't have a source of meaning because we are just normal people and and that has been going on now for almost 200 years and maybe all the meaning we get to have is to be really courageous in the face of this meaninglessness that's that's all we get it's about reason ultimately it's about reason and evidence uh and and and not about all these psychological dynamics that led people to one adopt materialism to get rid of the fear of you know the experience after the death state single-handedly getting rid of the biggest fear of humanity throughout history and then fluidly compensating for the concomitant loss of meaning so they got rid of a fear oh they lost meaning together with that the transcendent meaning of your soul continuing forever and therefore nothing being for nothing they lost that too but they fluidly compensate by distinguishing themselves and thinking that they they found closure but they they left the rest of us without the source of meaning and at the end it's not about the psychological dynamics at the end it's about what do we have objective reasons to think is is going on and it has nothing to do with all this craziness that happened in the 19th century it's interesting you saying that and i was thinking about this when i was reading your book when i was reading the tip why materialism is baloney because you know maybe this is a kind of contemporary western interpretation but i've laid onto buddhism we've laid onto buddhism but buddhism seems to say a lot of all very ancient buddhist texts seem to say that this tendency to split off the self and the world and to think there's a real world out there that's separate from a real self in here is is very deeply part of human psychology at least has been since then uh if not if not uh longer since longer ago and um maybe we can get into i'd be interested in getting into discussion about the dynamics of that maybe when we get into the egoic loop but roughly it's that um we when the certain things that we don't like we push them away when there's things that we do like we we grab them to ourselves and gradually that way we construct a sense of separate me i'm gonna protect this me in here that feels like it's my stuff and to keep safe i'm gonna push out other stuff and then we impute we make an inference that the stuff we label as out there has a separate independent existence um and that's very close to you know it's in a way modern materialism seems could look like just a kind of really hyped up version of that not a completely new tendency i wonder what you what you think of that i think there are two issues even under idealism you can separate yourself from the world even if you are convinced in the very fiber of your being that the world out there is mental it's still not your mentation it's still not your feelings and you may still separate yourself from it um and i think that separation independence of metaphysical position that separation is indeed deeply ingrained in the human psyche and we tend to separate ourselves from the world even if we grant that the world is mental because it's not monumentation it's somebody else's meditation it's something else's mentation and therefore i don't care because i'm not that so that's one thing and it's deeply ingrained materialism goes a step further what materialism does is the following suppose you you're standing on on a mountain and you can see until the horizon and you know that until the horizon is the earth and you can't see beyond the horizon but beyond the horizon you know it's just more earth it's not earth that you can see that you can be acquainted with but it's more of the same kind now in our mentation this we do the same thing or we we used to do the same thing before materialism until the horizon it's my mental processes my feelings my thoughts i can see them until the horizon of my personal mind beyond that the horizon just like it's more earth it's more mind it's not my mind but it's more mind just as beyond the horizon it's more earth it's not earth i can see but it's more earth it's more of the same kind this is all very normal we all do that and we always did that but materialism makes a peculiar very strange next step materialism does the following until the horizon it's earth in other words my mental life it's all i can be directly acquainted with so my mental inner life fits into the horizon beyond the horizon it's not only not my mental inner life it's not mental anymore it's something of a different kind and this is a very very peculiar step in materialism because you see it's very reasonable to say that the world is not my mental processes because fantasize as i will for the world to be different it doesn't change just because i fantasized it to be different the world does what it does regardless of my wishes fantasies fears it doesn't care so it's not me that's that's understood the world is not your mind it's very clear and reasonable but materialism says that not only is it not my mind it's not mind and that is one completely unnecessary not justifiable and leads to all kinds of inner contradictions i i think i understand and it's really interesting puts a different take on uh you know the hit on his on religious history because you know it's tended to be traditional in buddhism in the buddhist tradition there's a very strong tradition of of with michael animism of assuming that the natural world is kind of animated with spirits uh the deep meditative states are often freely talked about as realms rather than they're not talked about as mental experiences you know for example the states of high meditative concentration called the dianas they're they're thought of as realms places you can go and you're saying it's because the reason they could make that free movement between categories that we think of is very different it's like no you have a mental state in here or you have the world out there that free movement was possible because they just didn't make that distinction between stuff that was mined and not liked why would they make that distinction there is absolutely no good reason to make that distinction it's an entirely arbitrary one now that doesn't mean that a rock is conscious in and of itself that's not what i'm saying and what i'm saying is that the inanimate universe as a whole is mentally in nature that doesn't mean that subsets of it parts of it have their own private in their life i don't think my mouse has its own private conscious in their life why because i don't think my mouse even exists as separate from the rest of the inanimate universe we carve out the inanimate universe into separate objects out of convenience it's a purely nominal separation it's linguistic it's arbitrary there is only one thing going on and that's the inanimate universe as a whole and it presents itself as an image full of pixels and it's us that choose some subsets of those pixels and you trace a boundary around them and you say this is a mouse that's a that's a car that's a building that's entirely nominal it's an arbitrary subset of pixels of the one thing going on so i think there is something it is like to be the inanimate universe as a whole but there is nothing it's like to be a individual rock in and of itself i understand what you mean because i've read your book but i think that's gonna take some explaining for people watching so i'm gonna let's see if we can get there because i think this is a good time to talk about how um reflexive awareness emerges according to according to your version of idealism because i think that will maybe help people understand because at the moment it sounds okay so there's all this stuff let's say there's just this one sea of consciousness um if i'm conscious then presumably everything else is i mean that seems a kind of logical inference so why is that a mistake so maybe maybe this is a time you could talk about some of these you know these metaphors you use in in your book about materialism you've got the mess of the whirlpools of the quicksilver whirlpools of the vibrating membrane which i found extremely helpful for understanding this um so yeah how do in this if everything's just one sea of consciousness why is it that we're different to the mouse why is the mouse not conscious i think the mouse is conscious okay i think every living being has private conscious in their life obviously no sorry the computer the computer mouse not the um oh the computer mouse because there is no computer mouse okay okay so let's see if we can let's see if we can get to understanding why that is okay so so what how do how does consciousness emerge out of this let's say everything's one c of mine how does consciousness emerge from that consciousness doesn't emerge it's that within which everything else emerges okay but consciousness can have different configurations some of those states of mind think of it that way you don't cease to be a mind because your mind can be in different states you can be in a distressed state you can be in a dissociative state you can be in a in a happy state there are many states of mind states of consciousness but those states are configurations of consciousness in the same way that a wave is a configuration of the ocean there is no wave separate from the ocean you can't lift the wave out of the ocean the wave is a doing of the ocean not the thing um there is only the ocean um in the same sense the configurations of consciousness are just doings of consciousness there's nothing to them to that to them but consciousness the question is when you ask whether a rock is conscious you're asking more than whether the rock is an appearance within consciousness you are asking whether it has separate conscience in their life of its own yes separate being the key word okay so you use the word reflexive awareness to distinguish that uh that no that's yes that's the next that's the step that's the next step okay okay i'll slow down i'll let you carry on um there is something it is like to be your nervous system as a whole that's you right right so you are as far as nervous systems are images you are that image what you are is represented by that image there is something it is like to be your nervous system as a whole but insofar as you can introspect there is nothing it's like to be one individual neuron in your brain right there is only what it is like to be you as a whole not what it is like to be a small part of you that's the most exactly you don't have any reason to think that an individual neuron has an inner life of its own separate from yours and the same applies to the inanimate universe as a whole we have every reason to think the inanimate universe as a whole has a conscience in their life of its own there is something it is like to be the inanimate universe as a whole but there's nothing it's like to be the moon in and of itself for the same reason that there is nothing it's like to be one neuron in your head in and of itself now the reason why that's the case it's because there is no moon and there is no neuron both are arbitrary carvings out of what is a holistic image give you an example imagine someone paints a piece of canvas with shades of grey and an abstract painting is just fluid changing shades of grey there is no discernible object because it's just an abstract fluid painting of shades of gray now imagine that somebody would come and say this pixel plus that pixel and plus this pixel i will determine i will pronounce that they constitute an object separate from the rest of the painting and go like that's completely arbitrary now it's an arbitrary carving out of that painting and saying that it has this part it doesn't have those parts now that's exactly what we do we carve out the the inanimate universe into parts that are not there there is that we have no reason to separate the inanimate universe into those parts other than convenience for instance what we call car is because we need a word when we want to buy that thing that moves around but if you think about it if you define the car as what you need in order to move around then you could say well then the spark plugs are inherent to the car because if i remove them the car doesn't move right so now now you follow through that line of thinking if i remove the tires that contact the road the car doesn't move so the tires are part of the car but wait a moment if there is no road for the tires to contact the car also doesn't move okay so there is the road yeah but we need the rest of the planet to keep the road in place otherwise the car and the road would just sink into a hole so you okay the rest of the planet but wait a moment if there isn't gravity to pull the car against the road the car wouldn't move if there isn't air to to enable combustion and cool the engine the car doesn't move and if you go down this line you need in the entire universe to have a car that moves so it's completely arbitrary to define that boundary and say the car is a proper part of the universe it isn't it's a nominal partitioning of the universe so why is the car not conscious because there is no car the car exists in consciousness but the car is not conscious doesn't doesn't that i mean i'm i'm playing devils of advocate here because i'm actually completely convinced by your arguments but doesn't the same argument apply to us i mean no why are we not just arbitrary bits that we're we're just cutting off from the rest of the world what's different about us because if i prick your arm with a needle you feel but if i prick the chair you're sitting on with a needle you don't feel if a photon hits your retina you see if a photon hits the wall you don't there is a very empirical way to define the boundaries of you and and that's determined on this on the basis of what you feel and what you don't feel um if somebody detonates a grenade in ukraine night right now i will not feel it but if somebody stuffs a grenade inside me and detonates it something is going to happen so the boundaries of our individual selves are very empirically definable but the boundaries of a chair are not suppose the chair is conscious now i pulled one of the legs of the chair out did the leg now become conscious in and of itself separate from the chair yes okay now i put the leg back so do the two conscious in their lives now merge what happens if i pull the painting from the wall did the painting now just become conscious in and of itself it's completely arbitrary because there are no paintings there are no chairs there are no legs there is only the inanimate universe with living beings in it now living beings are proper parts we are dissociated from the rest so let's hit i mean i think this would be a good chance to hear people to hear about some of your metaphors for explaining how this dissociation happens um um would you be willing to tell people about about the whirlpools and the the egoic loop yeah okay so i just made the case for living beings being proper parts of the universe so now i'm going to make the case for this separation being just illusory and not fundamental okay so the separation exists but it exists as an illusion an illusion is not nothing something has to happen for an illusion to happen so the illusion of separation does exist but it is not fundamental it's just an illusion why for the same reason that a whirlpool is not separate from the stream we are not separate from the field of subjectivity that constitutes the entire universe we are whirlpools in in the flow of universal mentation the flow of universal consciousness in their life localized eddies in that flow of experiences and just as you can delineate the boundaries of a whirlpool in a stream you can you can point at it and say there is a whirlpool it's here and not there in that other place and you can even determine what the boundaries of the whirlpool are you can clearly identify the whirlpool as a thing but of course there is nothing to the whirlpool but the stream the whirlpool is just a local pattern of behavior of the water in the stream you cannot take the whirlpool out of the stream and say that's a separate thing from the stream no there is nothing to the whirlpool but the stream in the same sense that there is nothing to us but universal consciousness we are just localized eddies whirlpools in the stream of experiences in your universal consciousness and we think we are separate because that eddie is a dissociative one dissociation is a well-known dynamics in mind it's well known and recognized in psychiatry we are just extreme forms of dissociative processes in the mind of nature and as everything in nature as every phenomenon in nature there is something dissociation looks like and it looks like what we call biology that's what life is life is the image of dissociative processes in the mind of nature that's what life is it's what dissociation looks like when observed from the outside okay so you're what you're saying what you're what you seem to be saying is that anything that looks like life anything any of these complex systems which seem to have a kind of autonomy which grow and develop some of them um strongly seem to have very strong dissociation which means they they're kind of these loops which these loops or these enclosures which are aware of themselves even um some aren't but but but all of them are kind of splitting off from the overall medium or of mind um mind at large you call it sometimes in your work i think all of them all of them are kind of splitting off from it and kind of forming these sort of enclosed loops is that is that kind of what you're getting at a bit like little whirlpool splitting off from the river yes and i think we have good reason to think that that's the case for every living being and the reason is the following i know i have conscious in their life of my own and i know i can't read your thoughts now the appearance of my conscious in their life is my body you happen to have a body entirely analogous to mine so i have good reasons to think that you have private conscience in your life just like me now how far can we take this reasoning by similarity there is one thing that unifies all life life can be very different i mean a crab looks very different from from a person a paramecium looks very different from a tree but all life shares the properties of metabolism uh you know transcription protein folding mitosis all these things atp burning this is what unifies our life so all life is extremely similar when you look close enough when you look beyond the superficial anatomical differences deeply within at its most intimate level life is very similar almost identical at the level of metabolism and these are not trivial similarities because metabolism is something very specific very complex the fact that it's shared by all life suggests to us that all life is an instance of the same basic natural phenomenon and if that natural phenomenon is dissociation for us because i know my inner life is dissociated from the rest otherwise i would know what's happening china right now i would know what's happening in the galaxy of andromeda i would know what your audience is thinking of me right now but i don't so i am dissociated and since i am a metabolizing being just like the paramecium i grant the paramecium private conscious in their life like i have in other words the paramecium 2 is a whirlpool a dissociated whirlpool in the conscious stream of nature but things that do not metabolize i do not think we have any reason to attribute conscious in their life to them we just don't have any reason to make that inference and we don't even have a reason to consider them proper parts of the universe let alone having private conscience in their lives and i it seems like you're saying that the reason we should conceive of living beings as proper parts of the universe is because they seem to have qualities that other things don't have um the of of subjectivity effectively of one kind or another well beings that we can deduce subjectivity by looking at their behavior have these properties like my cat i'm absolutely sure my cat has a conscious in their life of his own i see that in his behavior because i know that when i express behavior similar to his i do that because i'm expressing my conscious in her life so i think he does it for the same reason but beyond that even organisms for which we do not get that impression like a tree a tree is not moving around not crying uh why is a tree conscious no because if you look close enough the tree too is metabolizing and that similarity between a tree and us is not trivial it's a very very complex non-trivial sophisticated similarity so i think a tree too has a conscious in their life of its own but i don't see any reason to drag this line of inference any any further than metabolism to say that a rock is conscious in and of itself i don't think that is a case this is what people have always understood the nature to be life is special in that sense they're so interesting because metabolism is such a specific process and that's as far as where we can legitimately take argument from from similarity argument for analogy okay that's very clear and they never i'll be able to answer that question now someone in the class once asked me why aren't rocks conscious and uh i wasn't there are no rocks i wasn't able to cut with nearly as good an answer as that um so i must remember what the question i was going to ask next it was so it was to do with you know let's say so following this idea that we're kind of vortex these vortices in a whirlpool we've kind of got split off from the main medium of mind the main kind of ocean of mind of the river of mind we seem to be able to make decisions about what we do with our minds we can have intentions we can to a certain extent change what's happening in our own minds we can kind of work directly on the mind and that's what meditation does we can work work directly on changing our own minds and what we pay attention to really affects if you spend loads of time watching horrible violent films your mind will become more full of violent images and so on so what stops us just breaking out of the whirlpool completely let's you know it seems like it's not that great being stuck in whirlpool we kind of got this limited perspective we're kind of closed off i don't know what's happening in ukraine and neither do you right now um wouldn't it be great if we could expand beyond the whirlpool expand beyond this little limited self why can't we just do that of course you can you can do that anytime you want kill yourself when it's done but it's going to happen anyway so why kill yourself now you might as well just stay in the right for as long as it lasts and see if you learn a thing or two from it because it's going to happen whether you want it or not there is no reason to hurry up but presumably if you killed yourself that wouldn't be quite the same as expanding beyond the whirlpool because the whirlpool would dissolve and so your ability to be aware what was going on would dissolve as well ah you don't want to get rid of the whirlpool you want a bigger whirlpool that's why hey okay maybe that's my question why can't we make the whirlpool bigger what's stopping us making the whirlpool bigger or somehow connecting the whirlpools with the whole of the river part of it is just biological the whirlpool for it to sustain itself needs to function within certain boundary conditions the same happens in a real world point a stream if it grows too big it dissolves it cannot maintain its structural and dynamical integrity so nature because it is whatever it is and not something else it has certain regularities that we call the laws of nature and those laws imply that the whirlpools cannot be sustained beyond a certain size it's very difficult to maintain a cap on our internal entropy if if we grow too big you know the dinosaurs grew very big in body but not immunization so we are what we are because that's what could evolve in this particular planetary ecosystem it doesn't seem to be sustainable in nature for us to have a mind much broader in scope than the one we happen to have that's too bad now part of it is also self-inflicted it's inflicted by culture and and unhelpful uh patterns of thinking that uh have a lot to do with um patterns of addiction we think we are addicted to drugs only we are addicted to everything we are addicted to certain patterns of reasoning patterns of thinking patterns of feeling our whole life is governed by forms of addiction in the west and we make ourselves smaller than we can be because of those patterns of addiction those attempts to defend and protect the ego from disappointment from trauma from danger from all kinds of things and and attempt to soothe the ego as well because life is hard and it's very hard to take it and we try to soothe ourselves through distractions and other addictive patterns so that is self-inflicted and we can reduce that through meditation through psychological discipline uh through psychological integration so for some people it's the opposite that you need you don't need discipline what you what you need is precisely the opposite what you need is to just let go let go let nature be through you instead of trying to be you um so that we can influence but i think there are some very hard limits you can go just as far as a certain point and beyond that if you want to go further you have to dissolve the whirlpool and yeah you kill yourself i don't think that's a good idea because it's going to happen anyway so why are you why would anybody be in a hurry might as well know if you don't understand yet what's going on you might as well just stay alive a little longer because maybe you will and death's coming anyway but yes you can dissolve the whirlpool anytime you want whirlpools are very fragile now in the stream you stick your finger in one it poop it dissolves it disappears it's a very very fragile dynamic equilibrium that is required there you put a bullet in your head it's over the whirlpool will dissolve so yeah no no you can do that i wouldn't maybe you might guess already i've got a kind of vested interest in this this question because you know buddhists think you know the buddhists think that the buddha was able to kind of as it will have both at once to completely dissolve uh the limits of consciousness and open to everything that is whilst at the same time kind of keeping uh reflexive awareness keeping the whirlpool of awareness going um and i guess i was thinking about i don't know if i'm going to be able to even ex one of the really exciting things about your work one of the challenges of this interview is it's very intricate you create very intricate layered metaphors which allow for a lot of precision in articulating these ideas i think you know these ideas can sound very vague in general i think you're really good at articulating them precisely but i'm going to see if i can explain my question in a way that will make sense given what people have heard so far um so one of the ways you you explain how um how egos are individuated from the whole medium of mind is that they form these kind of looped membranes looped membranes that are vibrating in sympathy with the vibrations across the larger membrane of consciousness that you explain consciousness this is another metaphor you use as as a kind of series of vibrations across a multi-dimensional membrane that sounds very complicated but a really simple way maybe of explaining i hope it's okay i'm trying to explain your ideas please just tell me if i'm getting it i know what you mean you know so there's it's like you have a kind of an ego is a kind of loop which is vibrating and the vibrations are triggering off other vibrations within the loop and that's why we have this kind of you could say that's why we have this like sense of a closed me because mainly what we're getting is reflected vibrations from our own little loop of mind yeah and this is yeah sorry go on this is above and beyond the fundamental level of dissociation in other words it's above and beyond the fact that i don't know what's happening in china right now the latter is biologically imposed on me but we go beyond that we dissociate ourselves even more in an almost voluntary way we make ourselves smaller than the boundaries of the dissociation itself and the reason we do this is the following humans and perhaps some higher animals like pachyderms or cetaceans maybe they too can have some degree of that but humans for sure have the ability that psychologists call metacognition we can re-represent our own experiences internally and tell ourselves i am having that experience and for us to be able to tell ourselves what we are experiencing we need one to have the experience but then two in addition to one we need to know that we have the experience and the knowing of the experience is itself another experience that mirrors the first it's technically called a re-representation of our own internal representations metacognition is the way it's referred to in psychology and you can do this in multiple levels because after you know that you are experiencing you can know that you know that you are experiencing and you can know that you know that you know that you are experiencing many levels you can think of it as two mirrors facing each other an infinite mirror in which they reflect each other's reflection and again and again and again adding an item so we have the ability to do that now notice that this is the birth of the ego the ego is the inner narrative of the self this ability to re-represent or internally internally reflect our own experiences is the birth of that it's what enables that let me give you an example that you can really feel in the core of your being if you have a bellyache suppose you're hungry then you feel that in your stomach i am hungry me too and i'm feeling that in my stomach right now as well and then we tell ourselves oh i am hungry that statement we make to ourselves i am hungry i need to go eat that's what is enabled by this internal reflection this internal re-representation because without it the statement would be i am hunger you see what i mean the reason you say i have hunger as opposed to i am hunger is that you are eternally re-representing the experience of hunger in a higher level of cognition so from that higher level you observe your hunger and you say i have hunger but if there is only the hunger then then there is no i that has the hunger there is only hunger you are the hunger now um i am sure the paramedic the paramecium is his hunger the paraneet paramecium doesn't make a distinction between the hunger and the subject that experiences the hunger we do because we can reflect we can re-represent our mental states and that is the birth of the individual eye i have hunger as opposed to i am the hunger i am the sunshine i am the wind i am the planet i am the stars i am the supernovae no no now i am the one observing the stars in the supernovae i am the one experiencing the hunger and and the show begins right there it's the birth of the subject that experienced experiences the world as opposed to just being the world dissociated as the case may be and how does that map on to the whirlpool metaphor yeah i try to use this visual metaphor in the book if the whirlpool is turning very fast the center of the whirlpool sinks into the water like a cone and if you imagine that cone is having reflective surfaces like a mirror that's where self-reflection begins that internal reflection in an infinite mirror of the individual eye i am the one experiencing the hunger i am the one who knows that he is experiencing the anger i am the one who knows that he knows that he is experiencing the hunger suddenly your mental landscape becomes dominated by the eye ideas idea ideas and the rest of the universe disappears it's only the eye the individual eye or the me as some people prefer to call it the me not the eye of the subjectivity my cat has an eye in the sense that experience entails a subject who experiences you cannot have an experience without a subject so let's that's the primordial undifferentiated eye it's not the eye of the ego it's the eye of what schopenhauer described as the eye that looks out through every creature and he plays with the words uh in english at least in the original german and this doesn't work um but in the english translation there is this nice ambiguity and the way the words are pronounced so the eye the one eye of nature that looks out through the eyes of every creature that's fundamental it doesn't it's not the ego it's the subject the one subject of nature but the eye of the ego is that thing that arises from hierarchies of self-reflection in which we say i am the one who knows that i'm hungry oh my god to be hungry is not fine i am suffering because i'm hungry i need to stop the hunger and we do this in other things you know like i regret the past i am the one that regrets the past i cannot live with the past but i cannot change the past so what do i have to do and then you're lost you're lost in that in that web of self-reflection in which the eye dominates from the rest of nature and then your world becomes very tiny very very very small because it's dominated by this abstract eye that is created by your ability to reflect so it seems like you know i think that's a really vivid metaphor i'm not going to try and kind of reframe it but i i wonder the question i wanted to get at which i don't i don't know if i'm going to be able to get to us because maybe it's it's it's too it's another metaphorical layer on top of this but it something you you seem to suggest in your book about materialism is that it's only possible for us to make a certain amount of changes to this situation maybe maybe we can reduce some of that endless mirroring of research selectivity so we're not quite caught up in our own nonsense so much we're not living in such a tiny little tube um but there's a there's a limit to how much we can change that structure in your section on origamis of consciousness i can't exactly remember what it's called you talk about you know the possibility that the that little funnel is only one possible structure for consciousness um but we've kind of got the one we've got and i guess my question my questions are buddhist which is all about changing the structure of consciousness and why is there a limit to how much we can change is how do you know there's a limit to how much you can change the structure there is no limit but if you want to be alive then the limit is determined by the configuration of consciousness whose appearance is what we call life if you want to change beyond that of course you can but that means you are no longer alive you are conscious in some other form that doesn't have the appearance of life and and metabolism okay okay and so in a way that really fits with things that are you know in various religious traditions you know i think of rumi's idea that you should die before you die um or in in the buddhist tradition the buddha wasn't really liberated until after death is it that you know maybe there's only so far we can transform ourselves given our physical parameters that might be quite a long way it might be further than we think but there's a limit to that and if we want to transform consciousness more it has to go we have to go beyond the physical body completely yeah i don't think there is a limit but life is a certain state of consciousness if you want to change that then you're no longer alive so even life is not the limit you know we can pull the plug anytime we want i don't think it's a good idea but because it will happen anyway but it will happen eventually as well so there is no limit but if you want to change your state of consciousness while being alive then of course there is a limit be impose by yourself the moment you say i want to do that while staying alive up then you are decreeing what the limit is you're making that choice which is entirely valid choice is the choice i made i have a physical condition that drives many people to suicide and i've thought of suicide twice but i made now i make every day the conscious choice that i will not kill myself because eventually it will happen it's a physical condition that drives you nuts but doesn't kill you so i have a normal life expectancy uh but in the netherlands it's a condition that is legally considered valid for you to have assisted suicide gosh it's it's an extreme form of tinnitus it's a ringing in the years that's very loud and it's there day and night and you can't escape from it and it's it's it's a form of torture that the body does but i can change the state of consciousness that induces tinnitus any time and i know how to do that in about five minutes without any pain but i choose not to do that because it's going to happen anyway at some point so i choose to be in this state of consciences but even within the state of consciousness we call life there is a lot of room for maneuver including states in which you are still alive but your suffering is produced dramatically and that happens when you stop fighting with yourself that's one big thing another big thing is to understand what the nature of the ego is because if you really understand it you can let go of it with relative ease look i was saying earlier if you are not self-reflective then you are not the one having hunger you are the hunger by the same token the exactly same token you are the world you see around you you are not the one seeing the world you are not the one having the hunger you are the hunger you are the world now the world you see is determined by a certain dissociative process that's why you perceive the world as opposed to being the world but even in perceiving the world in a dissociated state you can still be that perception instead of the one who experiences that perception you see so there is a sort of way to trace back our evolutionary steps and going back to that primary dissociated consciousness that is the hunger and is the world because if you are the world you are no longer in a claustrophobic place um there is a negative to this as well if you are the world you are the ukrainians and i am the ukrainians and it's not nice i have a lot of difficulty with it and it's just that i don't know how to go back to that state where i used to not be the ukrainians i don't know how to get back there um but i would if i could i have no romanticism about this stuff i'm very pragmatic about it i guess the idea would be to be able to move between both you know that would be great i don't know how to do that yeah yeah it would be great wouldn't it but but if you can understand that the i is a creation is a story you are telling yourself a lot of your suffering will go away regret goes away regret is a what you did that you regret is a natural phenomenon just like a volcano that erupts or a storm that comes lightning that strikes it's just stuff that happens it's absurd to regret and anxiety is absurd because whatever happens in the future and that you're afraid of is just like a storm that happens a volcano that erupts it's that happens in nature and when it's not bad and it's not good it just happens so you don't need to obsess about it either way so a lot of suffering goes away that's so interesting because i think oh i've oh no my camera's just oh it's a kiss back i think i think something that you know my response to that as a buddhist is think i know regret can be useful sometimes it's like regret is telling us something about our existential situation it's telling us maybe that this is going back to maybe your idea about we're being given messages to interpret it's telling me that maybe i was maybe i was clinging at that point maybe i was holding on too tight and usually when i act badly or i do something i regret because i'm oh no my video okay of course you're right but what i mean is to dwell in regret which is what we do and it's what leads to suffering is to dwell in the regret um when i got to this tinnitus is much worse than it used to be um are you there can you hear me okay okay so my teammates became much worse because i made i did something very stupid i had my alarm system in my home changed but one of the sirens was left behind by the guy who came here to install and remove the old one and i figured i will remove that one myself and i knew that those things have safety mechanisms if you pull them from the wall they they they go off and they are extremely loud their ear piercing and i knew that and yet in the spur of the moment i just went to the wall and i yanked this out and it went off and it took me like 10 seconds to pull out the batteries and by that time my ears were damaged and i had horrendous tinnitus i spent a good year regretting that tremendously indwelling that regret i ruined my life for no reason for something stupid like 10 seconds that did not need to be and now ruined the next 45 years of my life i dwelled in that for a long time until i realized that [Music] that thing and my tinnitus was precisely what weakened me made me vulnerable to a point whereas where i became open to doing things that i otherwise otherwise wouldn't be open to i quit my job to be the executive director of a foundation stuff that i wouldn't have done before i wouldn't have voluntarily taken a salary cut of 50 minus bonus and future prospects uh in the safety net of a company where everybody knew me and i didn't need to prove myself i became so fragile because of tinnitus that i figured i don't have anything else to lose i was ready to put an end to my life last week so what do i have to lose i was ready to lose everything so what is this fear of losing so and and having done that it's been two years since i realized now that what i'm doing now is what nature wants to to do through me and it took a tremendous severe weakening of my ego for me to be willing to allow nature to flow through me according to its plan and not my ego's plan and and once you see that you start wondering what else you regret about your past that if you hadn't done it or if it hadn't happened to you you wouldn't be in the places where you would give your life to be uh to be back in uh if you were not in that place today so yeah i it's not dwelling in regret learning from the past of course you know we have to learn from it i think that's a really great answer to one of the questions i wanted to begin to close with which is um you know what why why would becoming an idealist changing to an idealist worldview benefit you and you know it's clear none of these perspectives are available if you think that all there is is mind in here and then materiality i mean i think that that seems clear to me and do you have anything else to say about that to people who think okay i'm i'm kind of sold on this idea maybe i'm mistaken maybe my materialist assumptions aren't right um what would be in it for me my commitment is to truly change views even if the truth is horrible um idealism is not horrible but it requires it demands that we become adults we live in in an adolescent society our way to deal with our suffering is to stay adolescent for as long as possible stay playing the same games the same distractions playing back the same self-assuring narratives in the face of all evidence to the contrary so ideally it has improved my life in the sense that it has brought meaning back to every single aspect of my life it has brought that the extra dimension of mystery and meaning back to everything but uh i'm not romantic about it because it has brought a whole lot of bad things as well um anxiety about the experiential state after death the buddhists would call it the bardos and buddhist literature is very clear that the bardos are not fun um yeah yeah you you better brace for impact it's not like you're landing on a cloud playing an ark in the glory of god um so that anxiety has returned um empathy is it cuts both ways um actually it doesn't empathy only makes you suffer more because you empathize with everything and everybody that is suffering and and if i could turn that tap off again i would turn it in a blink but i can't i have become idealism has become so internalized in me it has become such a lived experience as opposed to just a conceptual narrative in my head it has become so obvious so evident so in my face that i it has become impossible for me to turn off the tap of empathy and and excuse my english but that's a that's tap if i could man i would turn off that tap in a blink i have no romanticism about this stuff perhaps because i didn't come at it from a spiritual perspective i came at it from a hard-nosed rational perspective and i got into a territory that i didn't expect i landed in a place i was not expecting i would land i didn't bargain for this i didn't ask for this i was not a seeker i was not trying to land where i landed and i don't like it if you know what i mean um so i'm not romantic about it at all if you really want to buy into this and and see it not only understand it but see it become acquainted with the truth of it not only become intellectually convinced of it because that's a very different thing it's the first step you need to become intellectually open to it in order to allow the rest to happen because the intellect is the bouncer of the heart but after you buy into it intellectually it's a slippery slope be careful you may land in a place you didn't want to i didn't want want to land where i am right now and i don't know how to go back uh i don't know how to climb that that that slipper is love again out of this and there are times i love where i am because i don't suffer from a meaningless existence anymore not at all every day is meaningful i wake up every day open to what nature wants to do through me in full certainty it's not even certainty because certainty looks like something you need to engender in full knowledge that whatever happens it is pregnant with meaning every single second of my existence is pregnant with meaning so i am very thankful for that i do not suffer from nihilism i do not suffer from depression the reason i once thought of killing myself was because of tremendous suffering not because i thought life was meaningless and then i am thankful to that but i'm not thankful for everything else that came with it and which i hadn't bargained for and which is not fun to have in the kind of world where we live today especially now with the ukraine story which has and continues to unsettle me tremendously and i find myself now in the situation of an addict i try to find something to distract me because otherwise i just i just sink into that flow of despair and darkness that bottomless pit of evil that i didn't bargain for this man i didn't want to be here they um there's a saying in in the buddhist tradition when it comes to to practicing buddhism it's better if that's the destination yeah if that's the destination think three times yeah that's the greatest thing very carefully think about but i guess i mean it's making you think i mean we should start we should probably stop in a minute but it just it's making me think you know one of the way the arc of buddhist practice goes is you spend a lot of time to start with building up emotional positivity and emotional resilience you build it up and you build up you do these loving kindness meditations you spend time you actually kind of create this big glow of emotional warmth and then you let let the gates of consciousness open you do it that way around because it's hard to cope with yeah i don't want to discourage anybody because i have a friend rupert and he is the living embodiment of the next steps in this process it doesn't end where i am i hope and i believe that because i see it in him you can go further and you get to a place where although all of this is streaming through you it it doesn't affect you that much anymore i i i don't know how to describe it because i'm not there but rupert is the embodiment of conscious presence in peace he he just exudes peace then just being around him it sort of you know it rubs off on you um so there there's probably a place beyond where i am i'm by no means enlightened i have a very hardened head i'm i'm not spiritual material by any stretch of the imagination but i i found myself landing in a place that that it seems to be related to what spiritual people describe is a place where they can be and based on this experience i would say if this is representative of the spiritual journey what i would say is think a lot carefully uh very carefully about this because you may succeed that's maybe a really good place to start i i don't completely believe that you're not good spiritual material from reading some of your books and the experiences you've had i think they took you know a few things a bit like that have happened to me but if two but for me they are not they're not a buy sounds like you got there pretty quickly there are places i've been to but i didn't bring them back with me it's not where i where i live yeah where you live i see me yeah anyway maybe that's for another time hope there'll be another time i've really really enjoyed talking to you i had lots of questions that i i couldn't ask um but i just want to give you a huge huge thank you from from us at croydon buddhist center from the nature of mind project we're going to be running um as part of the nature of rhyme project we're going to be running a seminar um focusing on bernardo's work on the 25th of march at 7 pm that's going to be online via zoom and they'll be with me and we'll be talking about some of the ideas bernard has been talking about and some of his books i really hope you'll join us because i it's it's been an incredibly exciting intellectual adventure for me coming getting to know your work so i hope that others will join that adventure too if you if you really want to because it's like bernardo was saying maybe there's danger there maybe it's maybe it's a risk so i think really carefully and if you're willing to take the plunge then then join us on the twenty pleasure and uh

Channel: Adhisthana Triratna

Views: 13,181

Keywords: materialism, idealism, metaphysics, psychology, mind, neuroscience, philosophy, meditation, buddhism

Id: Ibjnyo4JX5g

Length: 112min 17sec (6737 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 18 2022