When learning to ride the unicycle a year ago I became a lot more aware about how we learn things. People ask how hard it is to ride a unicycle and I often answer by saying it is no harder than walking. This is quite true if you take into account how long it takes a young child to learn how to walk. It is also true that once you can unicycle well it is actually no harder than walking. Once the ability to ride a unicycle is acquired by the unconscious mind there is really little thought or mental effort involved in riding. Physical effort is still more difficult than walking for me but I assume that if I rode as much as I walked my muscles would develop to a point where it would take no more effort than walking.
When learning to juggle the year before I became aware that the unconscious mind can react to stimuli a lot faster than the conscious mind. When you are first learning to juggle the balls seem to move faster than you can move your hands to catch them. When you look at people juggling five or more balls you find it amazing that someone could be consciously aware of all the balls under their control. You soon realise though that the majority of the awareness is unconscious. This becomes apparent when you can start to juggle while chatting to someone or focusing on something else. You learn fast that the unconscious can react much much faster than the conscious mind. When you start to think more about it, there is a vast amount of control by the brain that is originally slow and conscious but is now fast and unconscious. This includes things from running, eating and speaking to typing on a keyboard, brushing you teeth in the morning and even riding a unicycle.
What has interested me of late is the interaction between the conscious and unconscious when performing a task. I find it interesting that when I walk, I can bring to consciousness my method of walking and refine it even while most of the action remains unconscious. It was startling for me to realise that a great deal of our unconscious actions are in fact rather inefficient. When I stand I slouch, causing strain on muscles and burning energy. When I walk I don’t always remain in proper balance or the same pace and use up lots of energy re-balancing myself. The same goes for my mind. When I am thinking about things my mind brings up peripheral information and I go off on tangents using up lots of mental energy on things that aren’t important to what I was doing or thinking about. I have begun to get the impression that the unconscious mind, while very fast, can also be inefficient in comparison to the conscious mind.
From my experiences over the last few years it would appear to me that a major function of the conscious aspect of mind is to build and refine action patterns for the unconscious mind to use for everyday action. When juggling I learn patterns by consciously performing an action then slowly passing it off to my unconscious until it requires no conscious intervention anymore. Whenever I want to modify the pattern I bring it to my conscious mind again, refine it and watch it while I am passing it slowly back to the unconscious mind. It would appear though that the unconscious mind is a poor imitator and requires constant reenforcement to build an good match to the pattern the conscious mind is trying to lay down. I would venture a guess and say that the majority of our actions, even our most long term actions like walking, are only laid down in the unconscious mind as a ‘good enough’ match not the best match.
My goal at the moment is to bring to conscious reflection all my day to day actions and see how much I can improve the efficiency of them in my unconscious mind.
Religious experiences cover a large amount of experiences that followers of religious systems encounter. These range from ecstasies to possession and other mystical experiences. In some senses the establishment of religion can be seen as way of dealing with the problem of religious experience. Religion provides answers and belief frameworks from which individuals can interpret and find meaning for their experiences. They also provide the means to enhance, deepen and share the experiences with others. Religious experience predate religious systems though. Religious systems are dependent on these experiences to maintain their importance in individual lives and as a result their importance in our society.
Science by and large has not addressed religious experience. Also, as seen by the large and lively debates within our communities, science and religious systems are largely incompatible. As a result individuals within society for who these experiences are important have shunned science as their belief framework in favour of maintaining a framework which addresses fundamental experiences in their lives. It is these same individuals who have risen to power within the religious systems and fought the push of science as a holistic and social framework in our societies. So science and religion become enemies. This is an intractable problem at present.
So what options are open to the atheist who has religious experiences since atheists invariably hold to science as a framework for their lives. I am aware of three possible options. They can ignore their experiences and maintain their scientific framework and try to enjoy the experiences when they come but not let them hold any large significance. Alternatively they can abandon their scientific framework, acquire a religious framework and allow their experiences to become the center of importance in their lives. Lastly they can seek to forge a third path which attempts to integrate science with religious experience.
I stood at this intersection 15 years ago when I experienced my first religious ecstasies. I didn’t realise these options at the time. I didn’t even really understand what had happened to me the first time. I stumbled down each path tentatively and found no consolation in any. The experiences were of far to much importance to me for me just to give up and ignore them. They provided glimpses of a possibly much deeper understanding of the human condition. I tried many religious paths but just couldn’t accept blind belief. Also since I was already knowledgeable in comparative religion it seemed hypocritical to blindly accept one faith and to accept them all would just lead to nonsense (yes new-age, looking at you). I ended up starting a philosophy course at university in the hope that I could find some answers to integrate my experiences. Unfortunately, I did this without an good understanding of what I was trying to achieve. As a result when the course started becoming disappointing and when I saw no other promising options I opted out.
In the intervening years I have done a lot but little to progress my understanding of my experiences. I guess in a way I did finally go down the first path of lessening the importance of my experiences and just living in a scientific world view. I continued to have religious experiences but until recently not anywhere near the intensity of the first few years. I suppose I can blame it on an indulgent lifestyle and my abandonment of hope that I would find answers. I think I can match my recent experiences to a deep depression in the first half of the year and to me finally giving up some of my vices. In the past 6 months I have slowly moved my life back to a lifestyle I had during my first years of religious experiences.
So here I stand at the intersection again. With the freshness of my experiences, I can’t just abandon the importance of them. I keep falling to elaborations on religious experiences in religious texts for consolation and get frustrated when dogma, myth and illusion spring up during my readings. I need a way to integrate the roots of religion with a scientific world view. I need a third path.
A couple of days have passed since my recent post about the altered consciousness experience I had. During that time I have thought back a lot to the precursors for the experience and while experimenting those precursors have had lessor experiences as a result as well. I’m still not sure if I have become completely ‘grounded’ and may have experienced some permanent shifts. These experiences though hard to describe in words can be alluded to. The closest analogy I can find to an experience like this is when one wakes up from a daydream. There is a very noticeable shift and though essentially nothing has changed the awareness of yourself and your environments is quite distinctly different. Some interesting thoughts that have come from the experiences follow below.
It seems that many types of symbols or thought constructions can be used to build a scaffold for the mind to raise it’s awareness. As long as the scaffold is not permanent and it can be discarded then the consciousness will be left in an altered open state. My experience on Tuesday was through a major revelatory experience which collapsed my perception of things and left my consciousness in an open space. Subsequent meditation revealed the same actions achieved the same results, abeit to a lesser degree. When meditating on minor unstable constructions it allowed my consciousness to be raised again and then left open. I found that if I could maintain focus and keep buiilding new constructs then I could raise it further. My only limit at the moment if my lack of concentration expertise. I intend to spend more time with concentration exercises to see how far I can push in this direction. I suspect this may be a life goal.
I find it interesting that ‘truth’ is not necessary in constructs used during meditation. It seems that as long as the thought construct is internally consistent then it suffices for the the purpose of raising consciousness. Thoughts on this led me to comparisons with religious faith. In discussions with deeply religious people I never understand why faith is important and reason not. If one places primary importance on the experience though maybe it makes sense. Religious people don’t throw out reason. Internally their belief systems are complete, they just apply faith at the boundaries of their religious teachings. It’s also at the boundaries that they have their religious experiences. So in essence their belief systems are constructs that collapse at the edges and allow them to experience the ineffable.
It seems another key precursor for the shift is concentration on an object of thought that is both intense and effortless. This often happens when the mind is captivated by something and experiences a sense of awe. This is very hard to do deliberately. I’m finding that my regular exercises in concentration meditation are helping to increase the possibilities for this to happen but they in themselves are not enough to act as a catalyst for a shift. I have been wondering if meditation on powerful emotional experiences could possibly bring out this state and it is something I intend to experiment with more.
A large outcome from this experience has been my appreciation of meditation practice. I’m not sure if meditation in itself leads to these altered states but it certainly increases the frequency, makes the transition clearer and easier and allows the states to be sustained for much longer periods of time.
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