Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence.
- Frank Zappa
I realised today that I have had no conscious belief in anything relating to the human condition. I have been the constant and persistent skeptic since I grew out of my christian faith. While liberating in one sense it has also been self annihilating in another. The eternal skeptic has no foundation for anything, not even skepticism.
I have known over the last few years that I need something to believe in to support my further development. I guess I had thought I would build a belief from something rationally somewhere along the way one of these years but hope had been waning. It further occurred to me today that experience precedes all rationality and belief does not have a solid foundation in rationality in itself but in experience.
So I analysed my experience. What can I say about the human condition that I have experienced and can build on? What do I have experiential knowledge of that I can genuinely say that I believe without a shadow of doubt?
Here is what I believe. This is not rational, this is experiential. Rational argument will not take this away. These are my fundamentals.
- The self is a construct and can deconstruct without us loosing our raw consciousness.
- Once the self deconstructs there is no differentiation of subject and object. Consciousness encompassess everything flowing through the senses. Subject and object, the self and the world conflate into one. To raw consciousness everything is in me and I am in everything.
- Access to memory is tied to self. Once self deconstructs consciousness of memories and retrieval of memory is gone.
- Without subject/object consciousness time ceases to flow. Change exists but consciousness is a series of moments. The conscious experience of the flow of time is a construct which once deconstructed results in the consciousness experiencing successive moments.
- When the self is deconstructed all action is directed by the nonconscious mind. To act consciously is to have a self construct, a subject and object.
The most recent New Scientist has a list of the top 5 science fiction films of all time according to a reader poll. Of all of them the only one I hadn’t seen was Forbidden Planet, a classic film from 1956. Being a big sci-fi fan I immediately went out and gained a copy.
Everyone I mention the film to seems to only remember ‘Robby the Robot’. I’m sure at the time of the film the robot was the big draw for the crowds. Unfortunately, I found the robot one of the weakest points of the film. Apart from the obvious man-in-the-suit appearance its behaviour was directly pulled from Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. I also found it rather incongruous that while it had been created by an incredibly intelligent scientist it was so flawed that it would short circuit and have mechanical failure any time it had a conflict in its programming.
After getting over the dated look, feel and general cultural anachronisms I found the essence of the film quite intellectually stimulating. At its core the film is about the heavy cost of scientific progress without the appropriate understanding of basic drives and unconscious self. This is demonstrated through two main plot threads. The first is the story of an ancient race that has achieved scientific progress millennia in advance of humans. This race self destructs when they try to become gods through technology enabling them to create directly matter from thought. The suppressed destructive side of their minds create uncontrollable rampaging beasts that destroy their civilisation.
The second thread is that of an aging human scientist who naively taps into this same technology to boost his IQ and unknowingly creates an alter ego based on his id that walks destructively across the planet. In the end his shadow side destroys him and his dreams.
Though most refer to the Tempest as the major influence for the plot I would argue that a society coming out of the aftershock from the two world wars and especially the destruction of the atom bomb only a decade before was another major influence. Personally I’d like the film to be seen as championing the idea that understanding our own minds should be placed before pursuing all other scientific endeavours. One thing is for certain, if a remake ever if done I will be at the front in line to watch it.
When Con discovered a book today by Ken Wilber, No Boundary, and excitedly showed it to me I recoiled with an ‘eugh!’. She looked surpised, so surprised in fact that I questioned myself and couldn’t pin point why I felt so uncomfortable about the author. So we took the book home and I read it. I again remembered Ken Wilber and the works I had come across before.
The book itself is about consciousness. My favorite topic! Unfortunately, unlike Susan Blackmore’s very good works that I have been reading of late (Consciousness, An Introduction and Conversations on Consciousness) there is little to no real hard thought, just enthusiastic and unreflective exposition.
The problem with Ken Wilber is the problem I have with the Human Potential Movement (aka New Age Movement) as a whole. There is no deep analytical thought or independant assessment, just conflation of subjective experience and millenia long religious ideas into a stinking sticky morass.
The initial approach is admirable. The foundations set by William James and Aldous Huxley are important in the history of comparative religious studies. They hint at a core human experience behind the faith that we can investigate to further understand the human condition. Unfortunately rather than build on that with precision of mind and independant experimental studies they resort to sloppy and shallow thinking and build frameworks with no good verifiable justifications.
This is sad for the followers, for they resort to faith again. Faith is the hope that things are not as they seem. The trust in anothers words and ideas when you have nothing to hold to yourself. People dont need faith, they need revelation, experience. If we can understand the reality behind human mind then maybe we can move away from foggy moors of spiritual movements and truly let individuals move clearly towards the peak of human expression.
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