Is Mind At Large full of baloney, or is it Shakespeare?

[Don Salmon]

Imagine you could step inside of Shakespeare’s mind, as he is working on Hamlet.  What does he do first?  Well, suppose he begins by setting the stage.  You do not know you are in Shakespeare’s mind, all you know is that at first, there is Nothing, then suddenly, apparently arising by pure chance, a stage appears.  Perhaps you are alert enough to notice, prior to the stage appearing, but after “nothing”, there is a kind of vague, chaos, a wild concatenation of images, and then slowly, the stage begins to take shape (actually, this “taking shape’ may have taken place with unimaginable speed, but your powers o observation may not be up to speed and may perceive this as occurring gradually).

 

Now, the stage set begins to become gradually more complex.  Since you’ve observed many stages being set, you are pretty much able to predict how this takes place – it seems to take place by some sort of set of immutable “laws.”   What do you conclude?  Well, if you’ve been told that this is all taking place within Shakespeare’s mind, but you have no direct experiential knowledge of it, you may think that somehow, his mind is simply carrying this process out somehow in a wholly non-reflective way. 

In fact, perhaps he populates the stage first with an assortment of plants and animals, all non self-reflective.  Finally, Hamlet and other characters appear on the “stage” of Shakespeare’s mind.

What do you conclude? 

Do you conclude that self-reflection only appears late into his process of the evolution of Shakespeare’s play?  Well, perhaps that would be a logical conclusion if you have no direct access to Shakespeare’s consciousness.

But if you did, you’d realize that something far far beyond the self-reflective capacity of Hamlet or any of the fictional characters in the play has been present all along – the greater consciousness of Shakespeare himself.

 

Similarly, it may actually be what poet Owen Barfield calls a “residue of unresolved positivism” (left over materialist thought, if you prefer) that leads you to think that Mind At Large begins in some kind of semi-conscious, non reflective state at the ”beginning’ of the cosmic process, 14 billion years ago, and “Only” gains the power of self awareness some 13.99999 billion years later.

 

****** 

I realize that Bernardo’s aim is to “change the culture” and in order to do this, he wants to offer the path of least resistance. But at some point, “inner empirical knowledge” is necessary.  However, if he feels it is too early to do this, pure logic requires, I think, that we look more carefully at materialistic assumptions regarding time, space and consciousness that we may unwittingly be holding on to regarding the nature of the consciousness in which all “this” inheres.  The idea of a non self-reflective mind giving rise to the astonishing order and beauty of the cosmos seems so far from simple logic that it seems likely such irrationality is a sign that the influence of materialistic thought is still there.

 

 

[Ben Iscatus]

Nice.

A point a positivist might make about this (acting here as devil's advocate):

That there is no evidence for our kind of life anywhere else in the vast universe we observe. 

Self-reflective consciousness appears on a flimsy soap bubble of anthropic coincidences (including our large Moon keeping the climate systems comparatively stable), only to evaporate after a few thousand years (no time at all, really) after we have finished fouling our own nest, thus returning the universe to its "normal" pre-reflective and mostly azoic state.  Shakespeare's mind is a one-off;  one chance in a million billion trillion octillion. Almost infinitely improbable, but in a vast universe after 14 billion years, he happens. Once. 

[Don Salmon]

One of the greatest things about this forum is the chance to speak to different mind sets and from different perspectives.  You're absolutely right that a positivist would say that - though how something arises from nothing and somehow by chance forms patterns is so obviously absurd, it isn't worth listening to - not to mention the absurdity of cooking up a shadow, abstract universe which is in principle unknowable - not that most people who are committed materialists are interested in thinking clearly enough to see this.

So, yes, again, you're right. But I wasn't speaking here to the materialist. In fact, I'm speaking quite directly to Bernardo and maybe to Rick Stuart also - who I think turned Bernardo on to Jung, who seems to have this strange idea that Mind At Large was somehow semi-conscious or not self aware at all and some time (well, not really in time, outside of time) gave birth to this time-space continuum and then somehow billions of years later became self aware.  

The assumption here is that at this point, human consciousness is the superior consciousness - I would think, even superior to Mind At Large.  Rick, Bernardo, what am I missing about this?  I remember reading Jung back in the early 70s, and it didn't make sense to me then (this was before any exposure to any kind of mystic or contemplative writings, East or West) and it still doesn't make sense.  

One last thought - for Bernardo's purpose of speaking to the larger culture and setting in motion a shift, this issue may not be important at all, or at least, at first. But somewhere not far down the road, I think it's going to create problems. You're going to find theologians and philosophers who are familiar with all this and who will easily point out the flaws in it.  That's why so many turned (unfortunately, I think) to Whitehead.  In India there's a completely different approach to the reconciliation of science and consciousness (and I'm not talking now about Sri Aurobindo, lest anyone think i'm just pushing my own "cult":>))   But more on that later.

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[Don Salmon]

Now, here is a way - extraordinarily simple and logical - of understanding the laws of physics that goes way beyond "mind" of any kind.  It has been explored and refined for thousands of years.  Alan Wallace has been writing books for 25 years which explore various details, though Ulrich has a unique position.

how much time and energy could be saved by studying these and then getting everyone together (Avery Solomon from the Paul Brunton group; Tom McFarlane from the Franklin Merrell Wolff group; people from Emory, Brown, U Mass at Amherst, UCLA, University of California at Santa Barbara - and I've only mentioned people in the US - I'm sure there are a few dozen around the world who are all working on similar things.  No single person has "the" answer but putting everyone's heads together - the revolution might arrive before you know it.

http://thisquantumworld.com/PDF/Indian-psychology-rescue.pdf 

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