However, all is not lost. By its very definition, metaphysical free will is a function of that which we identify ourselves with. If we identify with our ego – a particular, dissociated set of ideas – we turn the universe at large, and even our own intrusive thoughts and unwanted feelings, into oppressive tyrants. They become external factors that constrain and coerce us. If, on the other hand, we identify not with particular dissociated ideas but with consciousness itself – with that whose excitations give rise to all thoughts and feelings – we attain unfathomable metaphysical free will. This arises not from the power of the ego to control the world, but from the realization that we are the world. How could we feel oppressed by that which we are? Our free will is limited within our nightly dreams only because we identify with a particular character in the dream. But when we become lucid without waking up, and realize that the entire dreamscape is us, we attain unlimited free will; even if nothing else changes as far as the further development of the dream’s storyline. Do you see the point?
To finally answer the question posed in the title of this essay, metaphysical free will is to be found everywhere under monistic idealism. At the level of mind-at-large, it is unbound. We, on the other hand, as dissociated complexes of mind-at-large, are immersed in, and at the mercy of, powerful transpersonal forces. As such, to the extent that we identify with our own dissociated thoughts and feelings, our metaphysical free will is limited. But insofar as we identify with consciousness itself, the matrix of all thoughts and feelings, we partake in the unlimited metaphysical free will of mind-at-large.
8. On practical applications
We’ve turned into a pragmatic bunch. Our cultural value system entails that nothing is really worth anything if it doesn’t have practical applications. A new insight or understanding is allegedly pointless if there’s nothing we can really do with it. This very notion is a symptom of our confusion. Nonetheless, it would be naïve to ignore it as I attempt to communicate alternative insights and understandings. This chapter, thus, represents not my surrender to a confused value system, but my attempt to work from within it in order to convey a different way to relate to life.
Essay 8.1 confronts the confusion head-on: it deconstructs the cultural notion that all value is derived from applications. Essay 8.2 bites the bullet and elaborates, in a fair level of detail, upon the practical differences that a transition from materialism to a more mature worldview would make in our lives and society as a whole. Essay 8.3 then zooms into one specific area where these differences would be particularly significant: healthcare. Essay 8.4 tackles a question that is often asked in connection with the philosophy of monistic idealism defended in this book: if all reality is in consciousness, can our thoughts and wishes directly influence reality? The correct answer is subtler than a mere ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Essay 8.5 closes the chapter with an unexpected twist on the question that started it.
8.1. Pragmatism and the meaning of life
When talking to people about my ideas and writings, be they friends, interviewers or event managers prior to a talk, I often hear the following question at the end of the conversation: ‘OK, but now, how can people apply all this in practice?’ In the early days, the question struck me as entirely legitimate, so I used to feel a little embarrassed for not having addressed it upfront. But as I stepped back to ponder the motivations behind it, a whole new avenue of insight regarding our culture opened up before me. To anticipate the conclusion of this essay, and without for a moment meaning to criticize anyone who has ever asked me this, I think the question reflects a generalized state of psychic imbalance in our culture; so generalized that it comes across not only as perfectly appropriate, but even smart.
Ultimately, all human reality is a phenomenon unfolding in consciousness. Even if there were indeed an outside world independent of consciousness, our only access to it would be through our inner experiences. Without consciousness, the whole universe might as well not exist. Therefore, any practical application of our inner insights to an ‘outside world’ only has meaning, ultimately, insofar as it translates back into something we experience within. For instance, if an engineer has a brilliant idea and applies it in practice to get better results for his clients, the results will have human reality only insofar as they are experienced by the engineer and his clients. At the end of the day, it all comes back to an internal phenomenon in consciousness. The ‘outside world’ is just an abstract, conceptual intermediary between idea and experienced result. Only the internal reality of consciousness can confer any meaning to human life.
Now, philosophy is an expedition into the land of conscious insight. And conscious insight is already an internal reality; a gestalt of experience unfolding in the human psyche. As such, philosophy requires no applications – though it may have many, as essays 8.2 to 8.4 illustrate – for it isn’t necessarily a means to an end. It already addresses the end-goal directly. It enriches life not in a roundabout way, but by nurturing the very matrix of life itself: the psyche. Asking about the applications of philosophy is akin to asking how to get the bus home when you are already at home.
Why did you get an education? To be able to work, I guess. Why do you work? To make money, of course. Why do you want to make money? To buy things. Why do you want to buy things? To be able to live and have rich experiences…what else? Yes, exactly! At the end of the day, it’s all about experience. And experience is what unfolds in consciousness. All practical applications are mere means to arriving at certain experiences. And since conscious insight is a primary experience that frames, shapes and colors most – if not all – other experiences, why wonder about its applications as far as people’s actions in the world ‘outside’? We are already dealing with the core issue, already sitting on the couch at home. Why ask about the bus?
Even after reading the above, you may still feel that something is off with my argument; that everything should have some kind of concrete, practical application in order to have any value or meaning. There is a kind of uneasiness associated with embarking on an intellectual journey when the journey’s guide tells you, upfront, that he doesn’t care whether the journey will have any practical application. You aren’t alone in this feeling. It is shared by our entire Western culture; a culture that has now invaded the entire world, the East included.
The problem is that we project all meaning onto the ‘outside.’ We stopped living the inner life of human beings and began living the ‘outer life’ of things and mechanisms. In the words of Jung, ‘Swamped by the knowledge of external objects, the subject of all knowledge has been temporarily eclipsed to the point of seeming nonexistence.’179 All meaning must lie – we’ve come to assume – somewhere without and never within. I even dare to venture an explanation for how this came to pass: because of Western materialism, we believe that we are finite beings who will, unavoidably, eventually cease to exist. Only the ‘outside world’ will endure and have continuity. Although this is nothing but a fairytale – as argued in essays 2.1 and 2.2 – it causes us to project all the meaning of life onto the ‘outside world,’ for only things that endure can have any significance. The world within is seen as ephemeral and, therefore, meaningless. Such is the unsustainable imbalance of our way to relate to life. We emptied ourselves of all meaning and placed it all outside. Yet, even that ‘outside world’ is, ultimately, an abstraction of mind; an abstraction of the world within.
When people talk to me about my ideas and their own philosophical speculations, I sense that, deep inside, they know that life is a journey in consciousness and nowhere else. They know that what we are talking about is already it; it’s already all that matters. But towards the end of the conversation, when the enchantment of the discussion wanes and concedes ground to the analytical ego, they remember about the all-important practical applications. It is as though a failure to address them left the joke without a punch line; something akin to winning the bet but forgetting to cash in the chips. They compulsively need to tick that box. After all, if
the ego doesn’t get anything to do with the new insights, it has no role. Why have we lost our ability to just be with new insights?
Life is a laboratory for exploration along only two paths: feeling and understanding. All else exists only as connotative devices: ‘tricks’ to evoke feeling and understanding. All meaning resides in the emotions and insights unfolding within. While I, as a human being, also walk the path of feeling like the rest of us, my writing focuses on the path of understanding. Are there practical applications for my philosophy? Absolutely, as the remainder of this chapter discusses. But they are means to an end that previous chapters have already tackled directly.
The world can only advance from its currently dire state when we, human beings, make peace with and nurture our feelings, while advancing our understanding of self and reality. Can you conceive of a practical application with more significance than this?
8.2. What difference does it make if reality is in consciousness?
As discussed at length in essays 2.1 and 2.2, my metaphysical position is that all reality is in consciousness. There is no universe outside, or independent of, subjective experience. However, I also do not deny that reality exists independent of individual, personal psyches. When you look out and see the world, that world unfolds without caring about your individual, personal opinions, wishes or fantasies. Indeed, I maintain that empirical reality is the image of experiences in a transpersonal consciousness (see essay 2.6), which I call ‘mind-at-large’ in honor of Aldous Huxley. As such, empirical reality would still exist as a dream of mind-at-large even if there were no biology in the universe.
The misunderstanding that may arise from the above is to conclude that, since in both cases reality exists independent of personal psyches, there is no difference between this transpersonal mind-at-large and a material world fundamentally outside consciousness. Nothing could be further from the truth!
There are two lines of argument to clarify this. The first one is philosophical and rigorous: when we say that our personal psyches are merely segments of a broader mind-at-large, all we are doing is extrapolating a known and empirically undeniable ontological category – namely, consciousness itself – beyond its face-value space-time limits. But when we say that there is a whole universe outside consciousness, we are inferring a whole new ontological category; one that is unprovable. These two things aren’t equivalent by any stretch of the imagination. Here is a rather dramatic analogy to help you gain some intuition about this: in order to model the early universe, physicists extrapolate across space and time the validity of the laws of physics known on Earth today. Doing so is obviously different, and much more reasonable, than inferring an unprovable Flying Spaghetti Monster to be the causal agency behind all things!180
The second line of argument rests on the different implications and practical applications of these two alternatives:
• If all reality is in consciousness, then your consciousness is not generated by your body. Therefore, there is no reason to believe that your consciousness will end when your body dies. Your body is simply the outside image of a particular configuration of consciousness that you experience when you are alive. When you die, that configuration – or state – of consciousness will change, perhaps dramatically. Changes in your state of consciousness, however, happen all the time: when you wake up suddenly from an intense nightly dream, your consciousness changes its state rather dramatically as well. Now, would we live life differently – perhaps in a less anxious, more present and grounded manner – if we knew that death isn’t the end of consciousness? If the fear of death were no longer viable as an instrument of social control or economic gain, what would be the practical consequences for our culture, economy and society at large? And if you knew that your consciousness isn’t going to end when you die, wouldn’t you be interested in investing a bigger part of your life in preparing yourself for the transition – so it isn’t traumatic – and perhaps for what might come next?
• If all reality is in consciousness, then your physical body is also in consciousness, not the other way around. As such, your body is the outside image of psychic processes unfolding in what analytical psychology has come to call your ‘personal unconscious.’ I consider the word ‘unconscious’ a misnomer, as I discuss in essay 2.1, preferring to call it ‘personal obfuscated psyche’ instead. Be it as it may, the implication is clear: your physical health isn’t merely ‘connected’ to your psychic state; it is your obfuscated psychic state! I discuss this in greater detail in essay 8.3, but the gist is that it opens up an entirely new avenue for treating physical illness through forms of suggestion, clinical psychology and many other treatments currently considered alternative or even fringe. Indeed, the implication is that medicine could advance beyond currently acknowledged boundaries by adopting a holistic mind-body approach, whose impact on our health and well-being are hard to overestimate.
• If our personal psyches are merely dissociated complexes – alters – of mind-at-large, then, at bottom, our psyches are fundamentally one and the same consciousness. This validates the possibility of so-called psi phenomena, like clairvoyance and telepathy. If the a priori bias against parapsychology were to disappear, so that critical resources and people could be committed to it in scales much greater than ever before, what could science discover in this field? What practical applications could emerge from more widespread and better-funded parapsychological research? In what variety of very practical and pragmatic ways could that impact our personal lives and those of our loved ones?
• If subjective experience is primary in nature – not merely a secondary phenomenon of the mechanical behavior of matter – then our feelings and emotions carry much more weight and relevance than otherwise. They are much more significant to our sense of who or what we are, what reality is, as well as to the meaning and purpose of our lives. If love is actually primary – material chemicals suffusing your brain being just an outside image of love, not its cause – wouldn’t that make a difference as far as how you look upon your relationships? If your subjective sense of calling or purpose is primary – not merely a chemical trick to keep you motivated to survive and reproduce – wouldn’t that make a difference as far as the decisions and risks you take in your life to try to make your dreams come true? Wouldn’t we, as a culture, have to take another look at current psychiatric best-practices if we acknowledged our feelings to be primary, not merely the outcome of chemical imbalances to be corrected with drugs?
Notice that none of the implications and practical applications listed above would hold under a materialist metaphysics; that is, under the notion that reality exists fundamentally outside and independent of consciousness. It makes a huge difference whether reality is entirely mental.
8.3. The case for integrative mind-body medicine
Integrative medicine encompasses a variety of approaches to healthcare focusing on mind-body interaction. Unlike mainstream materialist medicine, which treats a patient’s body as a biological mechanism, integrative medicine seeks to heal the whole being, including – and often starting from – one’s psychic, emotional functions. It is a more holistic approach to healing that, because of the metaphysical bias carried by our culture’s mainstream materialist worldview, has largely been neglected over the past several decades. In this essay, I want to elaborate on how a sane and parsimonious understanding of reality provides credibility and strong rational foundations to the integrative approach. The time has come for our culture to overcome the narrow and artificial materialist boundaries that for so long have impaired healthcare. We have suffered long enough.
Let me begin by summarizing the worldview discussed at length in essays 2.1 and 2.2. I maintain that all reality is in consciousness, though not in your personal consciousness alone. This way, it is your body-brain system that is in consciousness, not consciousness in your body-brain system. Think of reality as a collective dream: in a dream, it is your dream character that is in your consciousness, not your consciousness
in your dream character. This becomes obvious when you wake up, but isn’t at all obvious while you are dreaming. Furthermore, I maintain that the body-brain system is an outside image of a process of localization in the stream of consciousness, like a whirlpool is the image of a process of localization in a stream of water. It is this localization that leads to the illusion of personal identity and separateness. For exactly the same reason that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water, your brain doesn’t generate consciousness. Yet, because an outside image of a process correlates tightly with the inner dynamics of the process – like the way the colors of flames correlate tightly with the microscopic details of the process of combustion – brain activity correlates with subjective experience. Motivated by this correlation, materialists naively mistake an image of the process for the cause of the process.
While particular types of brain activity are the outside image of egoic processes in consciousness, the rest of the physical body is an outside image of our personal obfuscated psyche; that is, an image of our repressed, forgotten or otherwise unacknowledged psychic activity. I maintain that the ego corresponds to self-reflective processes in consciousness – that is, processes that you are aware that you are aware of – while the obfuscated psyche corresponds to non-self-reflective processes also in consciousness. As such, there is no true unconscious, but simply processes in consciousness that become obfuscated by the ‘glare’ of self-reflective awareness, in the same way that the stars become obfuscated by the glare of the Sun at noon. Now, as the body is an outside image of our personal obfuscated psyche, the universe at large is an outside image of a collective obfuscated psyche, which I call mind-at-large (see essay 2.6). The collective aspect of this deeper part of the psyche is the reason we all seem to share the same reality. In summary:
Brief Peeks Beyond Page 20
