Program Notes
Guest speaker: Bernardo Kastrup
[NOTE: All quotations are by Bernardo Kastrup.]
“It is not the mind that is in the body. It is the other way around. It’s the body that is in the mind.”
“In the same way that there is nothing to a whirlpool but water, I claim there is nothing to a brain-body system but consciousness.”
“The psychedelic trance allows us to ‘see the stars at noon’ because it simply eclipses the sun of egoic-awareness. It reduces the obfuscation and allows us to see more.”
“I believe that the key insight from the psychedelic experience, the key metaphysical insight about it, is not what the nature of the psychedelic realm is. In fact, I think the key insight is about the nature of our everyday reality.”
Bernardo Kastrup’s Web Site
Why Materialism Is Baloney: How true skeptics know there is no death and fathom answers to life, the universe, and everything by Bernardo Kastrup
Bernardo Kastrup’s Youtube Channel
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
And if you are in the mood for some ideas
00:00:26 ►
that are going to stretch your mind a little bit, well, then you’re in the right place.
00:00:30 ►
At the close of my previous podcast, I recommended that you listen to a brief presentation that
00:00:36 ►
Bernardo Kastrup gave at one of Deepak Chopra’s conferences last year, because it tied directly
00:00:42 ►
to what Rak was saying in his Planque Norte talk.
00:00:50 ►
Now, today we get to listen to a presentation that Bernardo has done specifically for us here in the salon.
00:00:52 ►
As it turns out, he’s one of our fellow salonners, and after we exchanged a few emails, he offered
00:00:58 ►
to create a presentation specifically for the salon, and we’re about to listen to it
00:01:03 ►
now.
00:01:04 ►
But first, let me tell you a little something about Bernardo Kastrup.
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He has a Ph.D. in computer engineering and has worked as a scientist in some of the world’s
00:01:15 ►
foremost research laboratories, including the Phillips Research Laboratories and CERN.
00:01:20 ►
He has authored many scientific papers and four philosophy books titled Rationalist Spirituality, Dreamed-Up Reality, Meaning in Absurdity, and Why Materialism is Baloney, which is a grand synthesis of his metaphysical views and it’s the basis for the talk that we’re about to listen to.
00:01:42 ►
Bernardo has lived and worked in four different countries across continents,
00:01:46 ►
and he currently resides in the Netherlands.
00:01:49 ►
After previewing this talk, I began reading his latest book,
00:01:53 ►
Why Materialism is Bloney,
00:01:54 ►
and although I haven’t yet finished it, I can most definitely recommend it to you,
00:01:59 ►
particularly if you find his talk as intriguing as I have.
00:02:03 ►
Now, this doesn’t happen with me very often,
00:02:05 ►
but every once in a while, I come into contact with a person
00:02:08 ►
whom I think could have provided an exceptionally interesting exchange of ideas
00:02:12 ►
with Terrence McKenna.
00:02:14 ►
There were a few McKenna workshops that I attended,
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during which a very bright person in the audience would begin a riff with Terrence,
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and that conversation between the two of them would last an hour or more.
00:02:26 ►
And my hunch is that Bernardo would have been one of those people.
00:02:29 ►
So let’s join him now as he discusses the metaphysics of psychedelics for us.
00:02:37 ►
To me, one of the most striking aspects of the psychedelic experience
00:02:42 ►
is the sense of reality that one has
00:02:46 ►
when one is traveling through those alternative realms in the psychedelic trance.
00:02:52 ►
That is something that before my first journey I didn’t expect and I was not prepared for.
00:03:00 ►
I was very much aware that I would be lying on a couch with my eyes closed,
00:03:05 ►
and I was expecting to experience amazing things, images, cognitive associations that I was not used to.
00:03:14 ►
But I always assumed, deep inside me, that I would maintain the awareness
00:03:19 ►
that I was experiencing something purely subjective and not real in this physical, external sense
00:03:26 ►
that we tend to interpret our everyday consensus reality.
00:03:31 ►
But that was not so.
00:03:32 ►
I think many of you will share with me this experience that the psychedelic realms feel as palpable, as concrete, as continuous, as stand-alone as this consensus reality of ours,
00:03:50 ►
which is quite confusing. At least it was quite confusing to me, because I knew all along that
00:03:56 ►
my body was lying on a couch, that the experience was entirely in my mind, and yet it felt qualitatively exactly like our consensus reality
00:04:06 ►
in terms of its concreteness, of its sense of reality. I think a lot of people in the psychedelic
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community tend to interpret this as meaning that the psychedelic realms are as independent of mind,
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as independent of consciousness, as our ordinary realms,
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our ordinary consensus, everyday reality.
00:04:34 ►
After all, they feel as real.
00:04:36 ►
So what else could it mean, right?
00:04:38 ►
It’s a very tempting conclusion to imply that the psychedelic realms are physical in a way, perhaps not in the
00:04:47 ►
same way as this, not obeying the same laws of physics, not even the same laws of logic,
00:04:53 ►
not even the same rules of cognitive association that we take for granted in consensus reality,
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but physical in the sense of being external, of being independent of mind,
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realms that would still be going merrily on,
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whether we are there witnessing them or not,
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a world apart, a parallel reality, so to speak.
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The problem of this is that it raises all kinds of very difficult metaphysical questions.
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For one, it would imply that we are dual,
00:05:33 ►
that there is a duality to our being, that we have a body and that we have a psyche,
00:05:36 ►
the old Greek word for soul,
00:05:39 ►
and that our psyche could then travel to another parallel reality,
00:05:48 ►
independent of our body. After all, it is without question that the body stays behind. The body stays on the couch with the
00:05:54 ►
blindfolds on and the earplugs. Moreover, it would imply that our psyche has the ability to sense and perceive an external reality without the
00:06:08 ►
intermediation of our body. It would imply that the psyche can see and hear without eyes,
00:06:18 ►
without ears, because after all, the eyes and the ears stay behind in the body. They
00:06:23 ►
don’t travel along with the
00:06:25 ►
psyche to these supposed parallel realms that are independent of consciousness. And if that
00:06:32 ►
is so, if the psyche has this ability, then the body would seem to be entirely superfluous,
00:06:38 ►
redundant, useless in a sense. Why do we need our bodies to experience the world if the psyche can
00:06:45 ►
do that without it? Moreover, why do I stop seeing the world if I close my eyes? After
00:06:53 ►
all, my psyche apparently can perceive without my eyes. So why do I stop seeing if I close
00:06:59 ►
them? Why do I stop hearing the world if I cover my ears?
00:07:07 ►
So these are the difficulties we face.
00:07:16 ►
Notice, however, that the starting data of this entire discussion is not that the psychedelic realms should have the same attributes
00:07:22 ►
that we place onto consensus reality.
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In other words, the attributes of being independent of mind,
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autonomous, stand-alone, and self-contained.
00:07:33 ►
The primary datum here is that the sense of reality in the psychedelic realms
00:07:39 ►
are the same as in our ordinary consensus reality.
00:07:45 ►
So, in fact, there are two options to interpret this.
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The first option is that the psychedelic realms
00:07:53 ►
are as autonomous and independent of mind
00:07:57 ►
as consensus reality seems to be.
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But the second option, and the one I want to explore today,
00:08:03 ►
is that consensus reality is like the psychedelic realms
00:08:09 ►
in terms of being fundamentally subjective,
00:08:13 ►
fundamentally in mind, in consciousness,
00:08:16 ►
and in consciousness alone.
00:08:19 ►
Most scientists, even lots of philosophers,
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and most people on the streets, I think most ordinary people,
00:08:28 ►
they would claim that our everyday consensus world cannot be mental in nature for a number of reasons.
00:08:36 ►
I can mention a few of them.
00:08:39 ►
One reason is that we can’t change reality just by wishing it to be different.
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that we can’t change reality just by wishing it to be different.
00:08:50 ►
Reality seems to be totally independent of our will, our egoic will.
00:08:55 ►
We can’t change this, change the world, merely by thinking something,
00:08:59 ►
despite documentaries like The Secret and so on.
00:09:09 ►
Another argument would be that if our ordinary reality is mental, then it is a kind of dream.
00:09:14 ►
And if it is so, how come we are all dreaming the same dream, right?
00:09:19 ►
Because after all, we seem to share the same world, we seem to share the same reality.
00:09:21 ►
It’s a good point. Yet another point is that when we go to sleep at night and wake up the next day,
00:09:30 ►
we wake up to where the world has gone,
00:09:34 ►
apparently without our conscious awareness, since we last fell asleep.
00:09:40 ►
So the world seems to go on, whether we are observing it or not.
00:09:44 ►
But if it is really, truly mental and mental alone, without an externality aspect to it,
00:09:51 ►
how come it keeps going even when we fall allegedly unconscious?
00:09:57 ►
There are sound answers to all these questions, and we are going to explore all of this in detail.
00:10:06 ►
to all these questions, and we’re going to explore all of this in detail. But before we jump into it,
00:10:12 ►
notice that this notion that our consensus reality is fundamentally outside and independent of consciousness is an inference. It is not an empirical fact of existence, because we are
00:10:21 ►
fundamentally locked into our subjective inner lives.
00:10:26 ►
We are locked into experience.
00:10:31 ►
The existence of a world outside experience is a postulate.
00:10:38 ►
That entire postulated universe is the result of a rational thinking process.
00:10:42 ►
It is not primary datum of reality. And it’s a conclusion that has a very high cost in terms of parsimony,
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in terms of being economic in the entities it postulates, because it postulates an entire
00:10:58 ►
bloody universe that is fundamentally outside what we can know. Knowledge, after all,
00:11:02 ►
that is fundamentally outside what we can know.
00:11:06 ►
Knowledge, after all, exists in consciousness.
00:11:08 ►
Knowledge is an experience.
00:11:10 ►
It’s something that is fundamentally in mind.
00:11:14 ►
We cannot know something that is outside consciousness.
00:11:16 ►
We can only guess that it’s there.
00:11:18 ►
We can infer that it’s there. But it will always be an abstraction of mind,
00:11:22 ►
even if we believe in that abstraction. So, the explanatory power
00:11:28 ►
that we get from this metaphysics of a world outside consciousness comes at this very steep
00:11:35 ►
price in parsimony. In practice, what this means is that if we can find a way to explain our experience of everyday reality without having to postulate
00:11:49 ►
this entire universe outside consciousness, then by default, this alternative explanation
00:11:56 ►
is better because it postulates less.
00:12:02 ►
In the culture wars over the past few years, you have seen this same argument being
00:12:07 ►
played out in a completely different context. Neo-Darwinists, for instance, would argue
00:12:13 ►
that we do not need a deity, a divine entity to explain the origin of the species because
00:12:22 ►
it’s an unnecessary postulate. It postulates a lot of complex entities, or at least one very complex entity,
00:12:30 ►
that we can never prove, while we have a much more parsimonious and reasonable explanation
00:12:36 ►
in the form of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
00:12:40 ►
It is the very same discussion here.
00:12:43 ►
It is the very same discussion here.
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If we can make sense of things without postulating a universe outside of experience,
00:12:55 ►
experience being the only carrier of reality any one of us can ever know,
00:13:00 ►
then this more parsimonious explanation wins by default,
00:13:06 ►
and that is, I think anybody would accept that in philosophy of science, and in philosophy in general.
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The critique against this idea that ordinary reality is fundamentally mental is not that
00:13:17 ►
it can’t be proven or any of these things.
00:13:20 ►
The critique against it is that it does not have sufficient explanatory power.
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In other words, that without postulating this whole universe outside mind,
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we cannot make sense of things we experience every day,
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like the fact that we share the same reality,
00:13:36 ►
or that drugs affect our subjective experience,
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or that we wake up to where the world has gone without us
00:13:44 ►
after a good night’s sleep, and so on and so forth.
00:13:47 ►
So what I would try to do now is to suggest to you that we can make sense of all aspects of reality
00:14:00 ►
without postulating anything beyond mind.
00:14:04 ►
without postulating anything beyond mind.
00:14:14 ►
So the first point we have to address is the independence of reality with respect to our own will. We cannot change reality just by thinking something, just by wishing it to be different.
00:14:21 ►
Now, is this a reason to conclude that reality is fundamentally outside mind?
00:14:27 ►
Let’s give this some consideration.
00:14:30 ►
Are all of our subjective experiences under the control of our volition, of our will?
00:14:38 ►
Can you choose all of your thoughts?
00:14:41 ►
Better yet, can you choose what thoughts not to have? Is that under the control of your volition?
00:14:48 ►
Can you control your dreams, your ordinary dreams? I’m not talking about lucid dreams here, but the ordinary nightly dreams.
00:14:56 ►
Can you control them? Can you control your nightmares?
00:15:00 ►
You see, if your nightmares were under the control of your volition, you would never have them to begin with.
00:15:08 ►
Can a schizophrenic control his or her hallucinations?
00:15:13 ►
These are hallucinations that can play out in a very self-consistent manner, unfolding along a very coherent storyline over years, like anyone who has seen, for instance, that movie A Beautiful Mind will
00:15:26 ►
notice. No, a schizophrenic cannot control his hallucinations, and his hallucinations will feel
00:15:33 ►
very real to him or her. They will unfold with an autonomy, with a continuity, with a solidity
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and concreteness that feels extremely real to the schizophrenic,
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that being exactly the point of that pathology.
00:15:49 ►
A schizophrenic cannot tell his hallucinations from the so-called consensus reality.
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So the conclusion here is that the fact that the world,
00:16:01 ►
our experience of the empirical world,
00:16:04 ►
seems to fall outside the scope of our
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volition does not imply that it is fundamentally outside consciousness itself, fundamentally
00:16:14 ►
outside mind. It doesn’t imply that. That’s a pretty easy conclusion to arrive at.
00:16:29 ►
arrive at. So let’s go to the second point now. The second point is that if reality were a kind of dream, then how come we are all sharing the same dream, right? That doesn’t
00:16:36 ►
seem to add up. But let’s look at where this conclusion comes from. This conclusion comes from the idea that
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because our bodies are separate in the fabric of space-time,
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then our minds, our psyches, must also necessarily be separate.
00:16:59 ►
And if they are separate, then we couldn’t be having the same dream,
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because there would be no way to exchange information and synchronize on this common dream.
00:17:10 ►
But notice that this begs the question entirely.
00:17:14 ►
This is a conclusion arrived at from circular reasoning.
00:17:19 ►
The only reason to believe that our psyches, our minds, are separate because our bodies are separate is
00:17:27 ►
to assume that it is the body that generates the mind in the first place, this being exactly
00:17:33 ►
the point in contention. The hypothesis I want to raise here is that it is not the mind
00:17:41 ►
that is in the body. It is the other way around. It’s the body that is in the body. It is the other way around.
00:17:45 ►
It’s the body that is in the mind.
00:17:49 ►
If you give this some consideration and bring it back to your immediate personal experience of reality,
00:17:56 ►
you will see how reasonable this is.
00:17:59 ►
There is nothing to your body that hasn’t been or is an experience in your mind. The image of your body in the mirror
00:18:08 ►
is a subjective mental perception. If you raise your hands and palpate your torso right now,
00:18:15 ►
that feeling of concreteness is a subjective impression in your mind. Everything you know,
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has ever known, or will ever know about your body is a subjective impression in mind.
00:18:30 ►
Clearly, it must be your body that is in your mind.
00:18:35 ►
You may raise now the point that it also seems that the body modulates our subjective experiences.
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We seem to look out to the world from that platform of the
00:18:46 ►
body, from the perspective of the body. I can only see behind me if I turn my head around. I can only
00:18:52 ►
see around the corner if I bring my body to walk around the corner and have a look. And that seems
00:18:58 ►
to imply somehow that the mind is in the body, because its perspective is associated to the movements
00:19:05 ►
and perspective of the body. But just think about your nightly dreams. When you dream at night,
00:19:13 ►
you have a dreamed-up body. It is either explicit or it is implied. You always experience the dream
00:19:22 ►
out of a certain perspective within the dream,
00:19:26 ►
which implies the existence of a dreamed-up body.
00:19:29 ►
Does that imply that your mind is inside your dreamed-up body?
00:19:34 ►
It doesn’t.
00:19:36 ►
Clearly, when you wake up, you realize that it was the entire dream that was in your mind.
00:19:42 ►
The dreamscape, the dream scenarios, the other people in the dream,
00:19:47 ►
and your dreamed-up body. I submit to you that the exact same thing might be happening right now.
00:19:56 ►
So, to conclude on this point, the fact that our bodies are separate in the fabric of space-time
00:20:02 ►
does not imply that our psyches themselves are also
00:20:05 ►
fundamentally separate from one another. They might be connected at a deep so-called unconscious,
00:20:13 ►
which is a word I don’t like, I will shortly explain why, at a deep, quote, unconscious level,
00:20:18 ►
our psyches might be, and probably are, united. And it is from that deeper, unified, shared part of mind that the dream of consensus reality springs,
00:20:30 ►
that being the reason why we all seem to share this same self-consistent, coherent reality from slightly different points of view.
00:20:39 ►
One thing we cannot ignore, however, are the correlations between brain activity and our subjective states.
00:20:49 ►
These are undeniable. They are very well established.
00:20:54 ►
We know that from neuroscience, and we know that from personal experience as well.
00:20:59 ►
If you drink alcohol, which is a material substance that interferes with your brain, a material organ,
00:21:06 ►
your subjective experience of reality changes. So whatever theory of reality we have,
00:21:15 ►
we have to bite the full bullet and acknowledge that these correlations exist. And our explanation,
00:21:21 ►
our theory of reality should make sense of this as well. So here’s what I would propose to you.
00:21:28 ►
I think the biggest error our culture and our civilization has ever made
00:21:35 ►
in the name of reason, in the name of science, in the name of rationality, philosophy, and so on,
00:21:42 ►
has been to mistake the image of a process for the cause of that process.
00:21:50 ►
That is the key underlying mistake behind materialism, behind our whole way of relating
00:21:58 ►
to ourselves, to other people in the world today. Let me get into this. I submit to you that the brain and brain activity, firing networks of
00:22:09 ►
neurons, the neural correlates of consciousness as they are technically known, are not the cause
00:22:16 ►
of consciousness. They aren’t generating subjective experience. They are the image of particular processes in consciousness.
00:22:30 ►
I see the world, the world at large, the universe at large, all the rest, the entirety of existence,
00:22:37 ►
as a flow of subjective experiences in a transpersonal form of mind, a transpersonal form of consciousness.
00:22:47 ►
And I like to use the words of Aldous Huxley, mind at large. I like to see mind at large,
00:22:54 ►
this transpersonal framework of subjectivity, as the ground of all existence, as the primary
00:23:03 ►
entity of reality,
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that which does not need to be explained, but in terms of which we should explain everything else.
00:23:12 ►
Our bodies and our brains, in that sense, would be the images of processes of localization
00:23:20 ►
in that transpersonal stream of experiences.
00:23:23 ►
in that transpersonal stream of experiences.
00:23:27 ►
This is analogous to how a whirlpool is the image of a process of localization in a stream of water.
00:23:32 ►
There is nothing to a whirlpool but water.
00:23:36 ►
Yet you can point at it, you can delineate its boundaries very precisely,
00:23:40 ►
and you can say there is a whirlpool.
00:23:47 ►
very precisely, and you can say there is a whirlpool. It’s a very easily identifiable concrete object between quotes. In the same way, our brains, our bodies, are very concrete.
00:23:56 ►
We can delineate their boundaries. We can say here is a human body. And yet, in the same way that there is nothing to a whirlpool but water,
00:24:09 ►
I claim there is nothing to a brain-body system but consciousness.
00:24:15 ►
A body is something you see.
00:24:18 ►
It’s something you experience in some form.
00:24:21 ►
A body fundamentally outside the experience might as well not exist as
00:24:25 ►
far as you or anyone else is concerned.
00:24:28 ►
The body is the image of a particular mental process in this transpersonal framework of
00:24:35 ►
mind at large.
00:24:37 ►
This process happens to be a process of localization of experience, in exactly the same way that the whirlpool is a process of
00:24:46 ►
localization in the flow of water in a broader stream.
00:24:52 ►
Now, clearly, the image of a process carries valid information about the process.
00:25:01 ►
The colors of flames carry information about the microscopic invisible details of the process. The colors of flames carry information about the microscopic invisible details of
00:25:07 ►
the process of combustion. The patterns of lightning carry valid information about the
00:25:14 ►
configurations of electric discharge in the atmosphere. The image of the process carries
00:25:21 ►
information about it. Therefore, an active brain, as the image of a process of
00:25:27 ►
localization in consciousness, carries valid information about the inside view of that
00:25:34 ►
localized flow of experiences. That’s why brain activity correlates so well with first-person subjective experience. Firing neurons are not the cause of consciousness.
00:25:48 ►
They are what localized conscious experience looks like from the outside. They are the image
00:25:55 ►
of the process, not the cause of the process. To say that the brain generates consciousness is as absurd as to say that a whirlpool generates
00:26:06 ►
water, or that lightning generates atmospheric electric discharge. Lightning is simply the
00:26:13 ►
way atmospheric electric discharge looks from the outside, not the cause of atmospheric
00:26:20 ►
electric discharge. Now, and since there is nothing to whirlpools but the stream in which
00:26:29 ►
they form, there’s nothing to whirlpools but water, in the same way there is nothing to our
00:26:35 ►
localized personal psyches but this transpersonal mind at large. The whirlpools are connected to
00:26:44 ►
each other at a very fundamental level
00:26:46 ►
because there is nothing to them but the stream. In the same way, our psyches are fundamentally
00:26:51 ►
connected to each other because there is nothing to them but mind at large. They are merely
00:26:56 ►
processes of localization in mind at large. And this brings us to the next important point in this journey.
00:27:06 ►
And it is this.
00:27:08 ►
We have to make sense, if this theory I’m putting forward is correct,
00:27:14 ►
we have to make sense of the fact that I am not consciously or self-reflectively aware of your inner life.
00:27:26 ►
consciously or self-reflectively aware of your inner life. I do not have direct conscious access to your feelings, to your perceptions, to your dreams, your fears, and so on and so forth.
00:27:32 ►
Neither am I aware right now of what’s happening in China. I am in Europe, by the way.
00:27:39 ►
We seem to become, as whirlpools, we seem to become unconscious of what else is happening
00:27:47 ►
in the broader stream, in mind at large.
00:27:51 ►
And that’s a difficult point in principle, on first sight, because if the whirlpools
00:27:58 ►
are just processes of localization in this one mind, we should all be aware of everything going on in the universe and in
00:28:06 ►
each other’s psyches through some kind of extrasensory perceptual means.
00:28:13 ►
But we aren’t.
00:28:15 ►
Moreover, we don’t seem to be even aware of things going on in our own minds, what analytical
00:28:23 ►
psychology has come to call the personal unconscious.
00:28:26 ►
We are not aware of mental processes that are beating our hearts, that are breathing
00:28:31 ►
for us when we are not paying attention to our breathing.
00:28:34 ►
We are not even aware sometimes of driving back home when we are mulling over our problems.
00:28:39 ►
We seem to drive in autopilot.
00:28:43 ►
How can this be?
00:28:50 ►
in autopilot. How can this be? How can an apparent unconscious aspect of mind arise out of what is in principle pure consciousness? Well, it can’t. There is no unconscious. There
00:29:00 ►
is only the illusion of the unconscious, and that illusion takes place within consciousness itself.
00:29:07 ►
Let me elaborate on the idea here. Our ordinary state of awareness, I would claim,
00:29:17 ►
is a particular quality, a particular state of consciousness. It is not all that consciousness can be. It’s one mode of
00:29:26 ►
consciousness, a mode that happens to be amplified through self-reflection. In other words, we human
00:29:36 ►
beings are not only capable of consciously thinking, we can consciously think about our thoughts, and we can think about what
00:29:47 ►
we think about our thoughts, and so on and so forth. We are not only capable of consciously
00:29:54 ►
perceiving, we can perceive that we are perceiving, and so on and so forth. We can think about our emotions.
00:30:05 ►
We can trigger emotions from thoughts.
00:30:07 ►
We can turn our contents of consciousness
00:30:10 ►
into objects of reflection.
00:30:13 ►
This is what I would call self-reflection.
00:30:17 ►
And it works like two mirrors facing each other
00:30:21 ►
and an image in the middle bouncing off each mirror and then
00:30:25 ►
off the other and off the other, creating that infinity of reflections that significantly
00:30:30 ►
amplifies the mental experiential footprint of those particular contents of consciousness.
00:30:39 ►
Neuroscience, in fact, has found significant evidence for this process of self-reflection, what they call mental reverberation.
00:30:48 ►
There are many studies on this.
00:30:50 ►
They have discovered that our ordinary state of consciousness correlates with back-and-forth communication between different brain areas.
00:31:00 ►
Back-and-forth, in this case, sounds very evocative of this idea of two mirrors facing each other
00:31:06 ►
in which an image bounces back and forth between them.
00:31:10 ►
And we know that reverberation leads to amplification.
00:31:15 ►
If your voice reverberates in a room, it gets amplified.
00:31:18 ►
That’s why people like to sing in the bathroom.
00:31:20 ►
There is reverberation of our voices in the bathroom.
00:31:26 ►
Now, once particular contents of consciousness become amplified because they reverberate,
00:31:35 ►
they obfuscate everything else going on in mind at large,
00:31:40 ►
for exactly the same reason that the sun obfuscates the stars at noon.
00:31:48 ►
The stars are still there up in the sky.
00:31:53 ►
Their photons are still hitting your retina if you look up to the sky at noon.
00:31:57 ►
Technically, you are still even seeing the stars,
00:31:59 ►
because their photons are hitting your retina, but you are not conscious that you are seeing the stars,
00:32:04 ►
because they become obfuscated by the much stronger glare of the sun.
00:32:09 ►
So my proposal is that once a whirlpool forms in the fabric of mind at large,
00:32:16 ►
in the center of that whirlpool, so to say, to use a metaphor,
00:32:21 ►
you get this reverberation of self-reflectiveness, this back and forth traffic
00:32:28 ►
of mental contents that reverberate and get amplified. And then the effect is like the sun
00:32:34 ►
obfuscating the stars at noon. You become seemingly unconscious of everything else going on in the
00:32:42 ►
whirlpool itself, in the periphery of the whirlpool, and in the stream, or mind at large. That is the reason why you can’t see the world
00:32:50 ►
when you close your eyes, because these impressions from mind at large that normally
00:32:56 ►
would penetrate the rim of the whirlpool, in other words, your sense organs, your eyes,
00:33:01 ►
the skin, and so forth, and then get amplified inside through reverberation,
00:33:06 ►
you block the flow of that information, and it becomes then obfuscated by whatever else is
00:33:13 ►
reverberating, like, in the worst case, your own thoughts, your own inner life, your own emotions,
00:33:19 ►
even if all of your five senses are inactive. So my argument is that there is only consciousness.
00:33:28 ►
There isn’t even this funny mental category that we like to refer to as the unconscious,
00:33:34 ►
which is a very dubious mental category.
00:33:37 ►
How can something be mental and be unconscious?
00:33:40 ►
Consciousness seems to be the sine qua non of mentality, and I claim it is.
00:33:45 ►
What we have, instead of this duality of consciousness and unconsciousness,
00:33:50 ►
is a spectrum of amplification, a spectrum of reinforcement through degrees of self-reflection.
00:33:58 ►
And the mental contents that do get amplified obfuscate those that don’t.
00:34:05 ►
And it so happens that very few mental contents get amplified.
00:34:09 ►
The majority doesn’t.
00:34:11 ►
That is the reason I am not aware of your inner life.
00:34:14 ►
That is the reason I can’t see around corners.
00:34:17 ►
To see around a corner, I have to allow information out of this process,
00:34:22 ►
outside my whirlpool, to penetrate my whirlpool and get
00:34:26 ►
amplified inside it. In other words, I have to allow photons to hit my retina and become amplified
00:34:32 ►
in the center of my whirlpool, my brain, the neural correlates of consciousness being the
00:34:38 ►
image of that reverberation, before I can know that I know them.
00:34:48 ►
We are aware, or better spoken,
00:34:53 ►
we are conscious of everything going on in the universe at any moment in time.
00:34:58 ►
We just aren’t aware that we are conscious of those.
00:35:00 ►
You see, for us human beings,
00:35:04 ►
it is incredibly important not only that we know something,
00:35:11 ►
but that we know that we know. Because if you don’t know that you know, for all practical purposes,
00:35:18 ►
it is as if you didn’t know really. That’s what we call the unconscious. It’s a misnomer.
00:35:25 ►
These are all things we actually know. We are actually conscious of them, but we are not aware that we know them. I would submit to you that the psychedelic trance, what it does, what it represents,
00:35:36 ►
is a loosening of this whirlpool. It relaxes the constraint of the whirlpool. The whirlpool
00:35:43 ►
becomes bigger, it rotates less fast.
00:35:45 ►
It opens its boundaries to the broader mind at large.
00:35:50 ►
It releases the center of our personal consciousness into the broader stream by reducing obfuscation.
00:35:58 ►
In fact, the latest scientific studies indicate that the effect of psychedelics in the brain is precisely to reduce brain activity in key areas of the brain,
00:36:09 ►
in areas associated with the ego, the so-called default mode network.
00:36:15 ►
By doing that, it works like a kind of solar eclipse.
00:36:19 ►
The sun, which is obfuscating the stars, gets itself hidden from view, the obfuscation is reduced,
00:36:29 ►
and suddenly you can see the stars at noon. You can see what has been going on all along
00:36:35 ►
in your consciousness. All of those parallel realms are parallel dreams in the broader stream
00:36:43 ►
of mind at large. They are all playing right under your nose at all times.
00:36:48 ►
And the psychedelic trance allows us to see the stars at noon
00:36:52 ►
because it simply eclipses the sun of egoic awareness.
00:36:57 ►
It reduces the obfuscation and allows us to see more.
00:37:02 ►
At the same time, it also reduces self-reflection. This reduction of
00:37:08 ►
self-reflection is a clue, I think, and that’s my personal myth, if you will, my personal worldview.
00:37:15 ►
It is a clue to the meaning of ordinary life. We pay a huge price for living the lives of regular human beings. We’ve become apparently,
00:37:29 ►
seemingly unconscious of the enormous, inconceivable breadth and depth of what’s
00:37:36 ►
really going on, of the broader reality. And we pay that price in order to attain self-reflection,
00:37:44 ►
And we pay that price in order to attain self-reflection,
00:37:48 ►
in order to be able to think about our thoughts, in order to be able to evaluate our own mentation critically as an object of mentation.
00:37:56 ►
Only under this state of self-reflection are we able to ask the key critical questions about existence? Questions like,
00:38:09 ►
who or what am I? What am I trying to do? Where should I go? What is the meaning of it all?
00:38:16 ►
What does this all mean? These are questions that you can’t ask when you are operating in an instinctive dream state.
00:38:27 ►
Again, just think about your nightly dreams. You’re not asking critical questions in your
00:38:32 ►
dream. You find yourself in a room with some strange people and you never stop to ask,
00:38:36 ►
how did I end up here? What am I doing here? Who are these people? Where am I supposed to go next?
00:38:43 ►
You don’t ask those questions because you’re
00:38:45 ►
not in a self-reflective state. I don’t think our self-reflective state can produce answers.
00:38:54 ►
The answers arise from the broader mind, from mind at large, the processes that we experience,
00:39:01 ►
for instance, during incursions into our intuitive mental spheres or even during dreams.
00:39:07 ►
But our self-reflective, ordinary, egoic state allows us to ask the right questions.
00:39:15 ►
And asking questions is key.
00:39:17 ►
It triggers mind to produce its own answers, to transform its potentials into actualities.
00:39:25 ►
It realizes the potentials of mind.
00:39:29 ►
This transformation of potential into actuality is triggered by asking the right questions.
00:39:35 ►
And I think that is the key point of what we are doing here.
00:39:39 ►
Another point that we often confront in our psychedelic reveries is the nature of divinity. I mean,
00:39:51 ►
I think most of us have had experiences of a divine order, at least something that we
00:39:57 ►
cognize as a divine order during our journeys. And what I’m suggesting to you at the same time
00:40:08 ►
is that at the very foundational level,
00:40:13 ►
it’s all us.
00:40:14 ►
It’s all you.
00:40:15 ►
It’s all mind at large.
00:40:17 ►
And what is mind at large?
00:40:19 ►
It is you.
00:40:20 ►
That sense of I-ness that you experience right now
00:40:24 ►
is the same sense of I-ness of mind at
00:40:28 ►
large. It’s the same sense of I-ness that you had when you were a five-year-old kid. And although
00:40:34 ►
nothing remains in you from that time when you’re five years old, I mean, every molecule in your
00:40:40 ►
body has changed, your thoughts have changed, your memories have changed. Everything has changed, but you still have that same intrinsic sense of I.
00:40:50 ►
My point is that it’s that sense of I that you feel deep inside you right now,
00:40:56 ►
that is mind at large.
00:40:58 ►
It is you. It’s nothing else.
00:41:00 ►
How can we then reconcile that with the idea of a divinity, right?
00:41:07 ►
If it’s you, you know you aren’t divine.
00:41:10 ►
At least I know that.
00:41:13 ►
I think the key insight here
00:41:16 ►
is that once whirlpools form
00:41:20 ►
in the broader stream of mind at large,
00:41:24 ►
and because whirlpools have this reverberation
00:41:27 ►
process within them that obfuscate everything going on outside the whirlpools and even in
00:41:33 ►
the periphery of the whirlpool, what you have is a process of dissociation.
00:41:40 ►
You know, people with dissociative identity disorder, they have multiple personalities,
00:41:45 ►
multiple alters, as psychiatrists call the different personalities.
00:41:50 ►
Each personality has its own stream of perceptions, thoughts, opinions, personal characteristics,
00:41:57 ►
and so forth, and they are often not aware of the other personalities.
00:42:02 ►
So in one single mind, a personal psyche, you can have multiple
00:42:06 ►
alters, multiple dissociated complexities of that psyche. So what I’m suggesting is that mind at
00:42:15 ►
large, God, if you will, has dissociative identity disorder, and we are its alters. We are its dissociated complexes.
00:42:27 ►
So, the I is the same. That inner sense of I is the same.
00:42:34 ►
But the particular stream of thoughts, emotions, opinions, things you identify yourself with is different. So from the point of view of an author, a particularly
00:42:46 ►
associated complex, which is the point of view we hold 99.9% of the time in our lives,
00:42:52 ►
the rest of mind at large is other. It’s the other. It’s something else from that limited, localized, whirlpool perspective. And how does the other appear to us during consensus reality,
00:43:12 ►
in our ordinary states, not during a psychedelic trance,
00:43:16 ►
in our ordinary reality?
00:43:17 ►
What evidence is there for the rest of mind at large?
00:43:22 ►
Well, think with me.
00:43:24 ►
Bear along with me. If I put a person in a brain
00:43:29 ►
scanner and I measure the neuronal activity in that person, I have an outside picture of the
00:43:39 ►
person’s direct experience. Suppose the person is watching erotic material and feels aroused.
00:43:47 ►
Then I scan the person’s brain and I have an image of that arousal in the form of a pattern
00:43:54 ►
of activity in the person’s neurons. Obviously, that image isn’t arousal. I wouldn’t feel aroused
00:44:02 ►
from watching neurons fire in somebody’s head.
00:44:06 ►
But it is the outside image of the experience of arousal that the person has.
00:44:13 ►
I suggest to you that the world at large, nature, the planets, the stars, the moons, the galaxies, the nebula, everything, is the outside image of non-localized processes,
00:44:30 ►
mental processes, in mind at large. In other words, for exactly the same reason that a brain scan
00:44:39 ►
is the outside image of a person’s experiences, the world, the universe, is the outside image of a person’s experiences, the world, the universe,
00:44:46 ►
is the outside image of God’s first-person experiences.
00:44:53 ►
As a matter of fact,
00:44:56 ►
there has been a study done a couple of years ago
00:44:58 ►
in which researchers concluded
00:45:02 ►
that the pattern of connectivity
00:45:04 ►
at the highest level in the universe,
00:45:07 ►
across galaxy clusters, the distribution of dark energy,
00:45:11 ►
how the whole thing is distributed and interconnected,
00:45:15 ►
at a very technical level,
00:45:17 ►
it is very similar to the pattern of connectivity and distribution in brains.
00:45:22 ►
In other words, the universe at the highest level looks
00:45:26 ►
like a brain. To me, this isn’t surprising at all. The universe is the image of God’s
00:45:33 ►
mentation, of God’s cognitive processes, the processes of mind at large that are not
00:45:41 ►
localized in the form of a whirlpool. The processes that are localized in the form of a whirlpool look like biology.
00:45:50 ►
They look like life.
00:45:51 ►
They look like people, dogs, cats, bacteria, and so on and so forth.
00:45:57 ►
So I think what we ordinarily perceive as the world out there,
00:46:04 ►
What we ordinarily perceive as the world out there,
00:46:11 ►
as this external, apparently autonomous, stand-alone reality that we perceive around us in our everyday lives,
00:46:15 ►
is the brain scan of God, if you will.
00:46:19 ►
It’s the outside image of the processes unfolding in mind at large.
00:46:29 ►
image of the processes unfolding in mind at large. And from that perspective, it is the second person view of the experiences of God, the outside view of the experiences of God, in the same way
00:46:37 ►
that a neuroscientist has an outside view of the experience of arousal by looking at a brain scan.
00:46:43 ►
of the experience of arousal by looking at a brain scan. I think the mystery of death, which comes back to us during a psychedelic trance,
00:46:51 ►
the mystery of death is this transition from a second-person perspective of the world
00:46:59 ►
back into the first-person perspective of the world.
00:47:04 ►
back into the first-person perspective of the world.
00:47:12 ►
This transition from looking at a brain scan back into feeling arousal directly.
00:47:17 ►
That transition is fundamentally the mystery of death.
00:47:28 ►
The outside image of that transition is a physical body decomposing and merging back into the ground of the earth.
00:47:34 ►
It’s like the whirlpool dissolving back into the stream. The water goes nowhere. It doesn’t disappear. It just becomes delocalized and merges with the rest of the stream in a way that you
00:47:40 ►
can’t identify it anymore as a separate entity. The same way the molecules of our body,
00:47:47 ►
they lose their coherence and they dissolve back into the earth.
00:47:52 ►
That’s the outside view of it,
00:47:54 ►
a body decomposing and merging back into the earth.
00:47:58 ►
The inside view, the first-person perspective of that experience,
00:48:04 ►
there lies the great mystery.
00:48:08 ►
And because I believe that the psychedelic trance
00:48:12 ►
corresponds to a loosening of this whirlpool,
00:48:15 ►
to an eclipse of the egoic state,
00:48:18 ►
I think it does give us some insight
00:48:23 ►
into the mystery of that transition.
00:48:25 ►
It brings us down that path up to a certain point, and then we return.
00:48:30 ►
We don’t go all the way into it.
00:48:33 ►
Our brain activity reduces, but our brain doesn’t decompose.
00:48:36 ►
It’s not something permanent, but it offers us a glimpse of what it feels like to turn our perspective from a second-person one,
00:48:48 ►
observing the world from the outside, looking at the brain scan, back into a first-person
00:48:54 ►
one, back into feeling arousal directly, not the brain scan of a person with arousal.
00:49:02 ►
And that first-person perspective of mind at large
00:49:06 ►
ought to be mind-boggling
00:49:09 ►
from the perspective of a limited little whirlpool.
00:49:13 ►
And I think that is the source of the astonishment
00:49:17 ►
that so characterizes the psychedelic trance.
00:49:21 ►
It is something so beyond us
00:49:24 ►
as dissociated alters of mind at large.
00:49:30 ►
And yet, it is fundamentally us, because we are the stream.
00:49:36 ►
So to bring it back to where we started this journey of ours. I believe that the key insight
00:49:46 ►
from the psychedelic experience,
00:49:49 ►
the key metaphysical insight about it,
00:49:53 ►
is not what the nature
00:49:55 ►
of the psychedelic realms is.
00:49:59 ►
In fact, I think the key insight
00:50:01 ►
is about the nature of our everyday reality.
00:50:04 ►
The experience of the psychedelic realms give us enormous, significant clues
00:50:10 ►
about what is actually going on right here, right now, as you listen to this.
00:50:15 ►
And I think most people miss that, and it is unfortunate.
00:50:21 ►
It is a pity.
00:50:22 ►
It is unfortunate. It is a pity.
00:50:32 ►
We tend to isolate the psychedelic experience as a peculiarity that is separate from life and to some extent irrelevant to life.
00:50:35 ►
It’s a separate thing that we visit occasionally to improve our psychic health or for fun
00:50:42 ►
or as an exploration, a study, an exploration of some faraway country that is irrelevant to our lives in our own country.
00:50:51 ►
I think that is unfortunate.
00:50:55 ►
I think what psychedelic explorations allow us to achieve is an insight about the here and now, about this egoic state of consciousness,
00:51:05 ►
about our consensus reality and the mistaken assumptions
00:51:09 ►
and unnecessary postulates we make about this,
00:51:14 ►
about what’s going on here in this world.
00:51:18 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:51:21 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:51:25 ►
I seldom wish that I was young once again and back in college,
00:51:30 ►
but if I was to indulge in that fantasy,
00:51:32 ►
then for sure I would include some all-night discussion sessions
00:51:36 ►
about the topics that Bernardo just raised.
00:51:38 ►
And, of course, I’d also include enough cannabis to last the night.
00:51:43 ►
The truth is that when I was a student at a small Catholic boys’ university in the Midwest,
00:51:49 ►
back during the years 1960 through 64,
00:51:52 ►
well, we talked about girls, football, and how to keep from being drafted.
00:51:57 ►
But in my crowd, we never got deep enough to discuss metaphysics,
00:52:01 ►
and for sure, we didn’t have any cannabis.
00:52:04 ►
From what I know about students
00:52:05 ►
today, however, they are much more introspective than we were, and my guess is that there’ll be
00:52:10 ►
quite a few dorm room discussions about the talk that we just listened to. One of the things that
00:52:16 ►
Bernardo just mentioned is the importance of asking questions. I don’t think that I’ve ever
00:52:21 ►
mentioned it in this way before, mainly because I’ve always felt that everyone also did this,
00:52:26 ►
but whenever I use psychedelics in a non-recreational situation,
00:52:31 ►
I’ve always found my way through these experiences by asking questions.
00:52:35 ►
Whether it was mushrooms, ayahuasca, or LSD,
00:52:38 ►
I’ve always begun the experience by asking the essence of the plant or chemical
00:52:42 ►
to answer some specific question that was bothering me.
00:52:46 ►
And that is what I’ve always meant by having an intent at the beginning of each experience.
00:52:51 ►
Of course, it isn’t unusual for whatever question I’d asked in the beginning
00:52:55 ►
to be brushed aside by some new and unexpected topic that the plant decided to bring up on its own.
00:53:02 ►
So I’m assuming that you also form your intentions in the form of questions.
00:53:07 ►
And if not, you may want to give it a try and see what happens.
00:53:11 ►
Now, before I go, I’d like to see if we can somehow reconcile the metaphors from last week’s podcast
00:53:16 ►
with the ones that Bernardo just gave us.
00:53:20 ►
If you recall, last week, Rack Razam also spoke about consciousness.
00:53:24 ►
If you recall, last week, Rack Razam also spoke about consciousness.
00:53:30 ►
And one of the metaphors that he used was the concept of a black hole at the center of our galaxy essentially spewing out what I think of as raw consciousness, or perhaps cosmic consciousness.
00:53:37 ►
But I do remember him also saying that he, too, thinks that consciousness is actually the basis of all that is.
00:53:44 ►
And I apologize to Rack if I’m misinterpreting him here.
00:53:48 ►
However, today we also heard Bernardo say that in his opinion, everything is consciousness.
00:53:53 ►
Everything else simply exists within it.
00:53:56 ►
And for a long time now, that’s been the conclusion that I’ve also come to.
00:54:00 ►
The main difference between my concepts and Bernardo’s is that Bernardo speaks of a river of
00:54:05 ►
consciousness, and I prefer to think of it as an ocean. Minor detail. But my reason being that a
00:54:12 ►
river implies riverbanks, you know, dirt, stuff. Whereas when you’re in the middle of an ocean,
00:54:17 ►
the ocean is all that there is. No matter what direction you look in, all you see is water and
00:54:23 ►
the horizon. Except, of course, for the vessel that has been carrying you over this ocean.
00:54:28 ►
But we both begin with the supposition that all is consciousness.
00:54:33 ►
Which I should point out is an opinion and, not as far as I know, a provable fact.
00:54:38 ►
But it’s an interesting opinion and one that I find quite useful as a starting point
00:54:42 ►
whenever I’m trying to figure out who I am, where I came from, and where I’m going.
00:54:47 ►
And don’t worry, I still haven’t come up with satisfactory answers to those questions,
00:54:52 ►
so I’ll spare you my speculations.
00:54:55 ►
But what Bernardo brought to the table for us today
00:54:58 ►
is his concept of whirlpools of energy, or life, or whatever we want to call it.
00:55:04 ►
I call it me, for a lack of a better description.
00:55:07 ►
You see, in the realm of metaphysical concepts, our primary tools are words.
00:55:12 ►
And, as has been mentioned here many times, there are a lot of instances where we don’t yet have all of the words necessary to move our discussions a little further along.
00:55:22 ►
move our discussions a little further along.
00:55:26 ►
Today, thanks to Bernardo, I now have a new tool to use,
00:55:30 ►
and it’s the concept of my being a whirlpool in an ocean of consciousness.
00:55:34 ►
I’m going to have to re-listen to both Rack’s talk and Bernardo’s once again to complete the picture that is now beginning to form in my mind.
00:55:38 ►
But at first glance, it seems that Rack’s focus is on the interactions of our whirlpools
00:55:44 ►
within the material universe,
00:55:46 ►
and Bernardo has raised the discussion to the next level
00:55:49 ►
and is looking at an even larger picture,
00:55:52 ►
namely, what exactly is this universe in,
00:55:56 ►
for lack of a better word?
00:55:58 ►
Personally, I like his answer.
00:56:00 ►
It’s all consciousness, all the way down,
00:56:03 ►
as is also said about turtles.
00:56:05 ►
I’ll leave you to figure that one out.
00:56:08 ►
For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
00:56:12 ►
Be careful out there, my friends.