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Voices In Our Heads
Not Happy, But Smiling
I’ve been reading an incredible book called “Body of Myth” by J. Nigro Sansonese (recommended via). The book slices and dices its way through ancient mythology to show that most of it is actually descriptive of trance states and physiological practices to reach those trance states. It’s incredible and is transforming my thinking. There are a number of things I’d like to draw from in this book, but let’s start here, with a passage reminiscent of Julian Jaynes. This comes from page 34 and is a reference to ancient Greek mythic poetry:
In Homer, we are given a portrayal of men to whom all experiences come as from without, not just sights and sounds but thoughts, dreams, fear, courage, the gods. Homer would not say, for instance, that Hector (a Trojan prince) “was afraid,” but rather “his knees were loosened”; not “he was happy,” but “he smiled.” Hector is never “angry”; rather, “his heart burns within him.” He cannot even die: “His limbs were loosed and his soul departed to Hades.” …
[P]redicative-adjective constructions like “was happy” or “is angry” are wholly modern. They betray and integrative conception of human identity that was radically foreign to the ancients and largely absent from those texts that have come down to us …
[For further exploration of similar ideas but in another context, I also recommend my post from a few months ago: The Definition of the Word “Is”. And while you’re at it, check out “E-Prime” an effort to modify the English language to not use any form of the verb “To Be”]
Jaynes’ Bicameral Mind
Anyway, going back to Julian Jaynes for a moment. In 1976, he wrote a book which posited something simiar to what Sansonese is describing here, also based on evidence from ancient texts. The quick breakdown from Wikipedia:
According to Jaynes, ancient people in the bicameral state would function in a manner similar to that of a modern-day schizophrenic. Rather than making conscious evaluations in novel or unexpected situations, the person would hallucinate a voice or “god” giving admonitory advice or commands, and obey these voices without question. Others have argued that this state of mind is recreated in members of cults.
In his 1976 work The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes proposed that human brains existed in a bicameral state until as recently as 3000 years ago.
Command Hallucinations
The reference to schizophrenia above has to do with what are termed “command hallucinations” - more colloquially known as “hearing voices.” This is most commonly associated in the popular mind with murderers and violent sociopaths such as the Son of Sam killer, David Berkowitz.
Berkowitz claimed that Carr’s dog, Harvey, was possessed by an ancient demon, and that it issued commands to Berkowitz to kill. Berkowitz said he once tried to kill the dog, only to see his aim spoiled due to supernatural interference.
Psychiatrists seek to identify patients with command hallucinations in order to prevent violent episodes. And the same types of questions are often asked in suicide prevention training programs to try and identify whether voices may be compelling an individual to commit violent acts against themselves.
Thought Adjusters
The most interesting part of all this of course is that a variety of occult and spiritual traditions seem to actively try to re-acquire access to something which could be described as being quite similar to command hallucinations. A very simple and straightforward example comes from channeled text the Urantia Book. In several passages, as Wikipedia explains, they talk about something called “Thought Adjusters” which is supposed to be a neutral voice inside of you:
Though they possess volition, a Thought Adjuster dwelling in the mind of a human partner is said to be wholly subservient to the human’s will and personality decisions. Thought Adjusters are described as being “pre-personal”, pure spirit beings that have mind and volition, but not personality. They are likened to a compass or a pilot, whereas the human will is “captain”, with sole authority to choose to follow or ignore the guidance of the Adjuster. A person’s soul, with the potential to survive death, emerges as a new reality from the joint work of the Adjuster and the free will decisions of the human partner to accept its leadings. The Thought Adjuster is described as working in a person’s mind in ways that are not fully apparent to the individual.
[See also my podcast on “Inner Light“]
In Philip K. Dick’s Tractates, we also come across something rather similar:
We should be able to hear this information, or rather narrative, as a neutral voice inside us. But something has gone wrong. All creation is a language and nothing but a language, which for some inexplicable reason we can’t read outside and can’t hear inside. So I say, we have become idiots. Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangement of parts of the Brain is language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore we are language. Why, then, do we not know this? We do not even know what we are, let alone what the outer reality is of which we are parts. The origin of the word “idiot” is the word “private.” Each of us has become private, and no longer shares the common thought of the Brain, except at a subliminal level. Thus our real life and purpose are conducted below our threshold of consciousness.
The Holy Guardian Angel
A major thrust of Western Occultism, especially that associated with Aleister Crowley outlines detailed practices to get this voice back - to acquire the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. On the subject of the Guardian Angel in a variety of other religious traditions, from Zoroastrianism and elsewhere, please see an older post I did on the subject which contains extensive quotes and references for further reading. [Also see Jeremy Puma’s post on djinni which seem to occupy a similar place in Islam]
So this leaves us with an interesting conundrum on our hands. Ancient and occult traditions seem to be designed to get us into communion with our guardian angel, and it could be argued that the experience of which amounts to nothing less than what clinical psychiatry today calls a command hallucination and which it links almost exclusively with violent behavior. What are we to make of this?
Disclaimer
I’d like to offer my own interpretation of this, but I’d also like to invite you to view this communication above as a parable, the meaning of which you should contemplate and interpret on your own to find any meaning in your own experience of life. In my opinion, the content above is more important than any interpretation I myself may place on it. Because my understanding of these topics is both evolving and frequently inaccurate. [See also: The Futility of Interpreting Parables]
That said, here is my best guess at this point. Let’s say that the claim of Sansonese, with which I started this piece, is somehow meaningful: that ancient literature did not represent people as having internal experiences, emotional, intellectual or other. If that is indeed meaningful, then the meaning it may have is that ancient peoples did not in fact see themselves as having internal experiences at all, and thus the language used in their literature reflected that. But this may be a spurious interpretation and one which is unmeasurable in either case. So if we want to admit it as any kind of “truth,” we have to do so with that disclaimer.
The External Soul
If we are indeed prepared to move forward with that as being somehow axiomatic, then we could ask other follow-up questions related to it. If humans didn’t have an internalized understanding of their experience, does that mean they weren’t “conscious”? Julian Jaynes seemed to think that they were not. Although perhaps he could be more usefully interpreted as saying that their consciousness was substantially different from ours. And perhaps the way that it was different had to do with the degree to which they posited internal states as being causative or otherwise linked to their behavior (a question which has also come under revision in modern times - see: Do Internal States Cause Behavior?).
Another interesting tangent or possible “proof” we might try to explore in this subject matter is something which mythologist James Frazer called the “external soul.” In fairy tales, there exists the ability to “hide” one’s soul in an externalized location to protect ones own security. This is not seen as an oddity at all in these tales. Could this be further evidence that ancient (or simply pre-modern) people’s did not “internalize” experience?
If people in other times did not internalize experience, where and when and why did this practice start? Who is responsible for it? What cultural or other developments lead to its occurrence? This question is perhaps more difficult to unravel. One place to start though might be Jaynes’ estimate that it was only 3,000 years ago that more modern internalized consciousness (although recognize that that’s an intentional blurring of what Jaynes actually said or seems to have thought) arose. He uses physiological investigation to support his claims, yet as far as I understand it, humans nowadays are more or less genetically and physiologically the same as humans from that time period. So it seems unlikely that any difference between us and them would be a physiological one.
Become As Little Children
As I said, I am still unravelling this subject matter for myself though, and recognize a number of blocks in my thinking. That question I asked above is one. So let me switch gears into a direction which may be more profitable to our current exploration. This comes courtesy of Gary Van Warmerdam, whose work I recently profiled on my website. Gary has an excellent article on his website called “Voice In My Head” which looks at the endlessly chattering and usually intensely self-critical voice that each of us has in our heads. Gary offers his insight into the origins of this voice in each of us today:
The inner voice of self-judgment develops in a young mind with the merging of memory and logic. Before memory and logic developed, we stayed in the present moment where there is only the desire and action to express ourselves. Before memory and logic, if we wanted to go outside and play, but mom had told us to pick up our toys, we might just run out and play. But, as memory and logic developed, we could recall mom scolding us in the past for not cleaning up our toys.
With logic our mind would link the cause and with the painful effect of being punished. Then one time running outside to play we would see our toys and a little voice in our head would remind us, “I should pick those up.” The Voice was an echo from memory trying to tell us how to avoid the emotional pain of punishment.
Sometimes after being punished or feeling something unpleasant, an agreement like, “I should have picked up my toys,” gets stored in the memory also. The Voice was learning and reminding us what to do in order to be happy. Our memory was also storing all the suggestions from the Voice to be repeated back to us later when we needed. We learned to follow the Voice in order to avoid breaking other people’s rules that would get us punished. The Voice couldn’t know the future, but it echoed a rule from the past of what would cause us pain. In this way the voice in our head always lives in the past and projects assumptions of the future. It keeps us from experiencing the present moment.
Perhaps this links up with where Jesus admonishes in the Gospels that we need to “become as little children” in order to enter into the Kingdom of God.
Media Hallucinations
Thinking about Gary’s piece quoted above, we might also ask whether or not each and every one of us today doesn’t actually hear “command hallucinations” each and every day? The major difference between “us” and “schizophrenics” or course would be that we identify those voices as being ourselves and schizophrenics - perhaps rightly - recognize that those voices are actually not them at all and come from outside of them.
An excellent article on a website called “Dr. Sanity” offers the insightful interpetation that the command hallucinations each of us is subject to nowadays come from a common source, the mainstream media (MSM), and the endless cult of experts and authorities we are continually subjected to. Dr. Sanity writes:
We, the American people have come to have a similar trust in the voices of the MSM. Over the years, they have almost become an additional perceptual faculty that we rely on–simply because life has become too complicated and overwhelming, that the use of our ordinary senses is insufficient in the modern world.
In other words, we rely on the media in the same way we rely on our own senses to provide us with the information necessary to make decisions and judgements in the real world.
The MSM has become those evil voices inside our head.
But as Gary explains above, those voices don’t arise with the media, but with our early experiences of life and then are further and further entrenched through a lifetime of exposure to cultural patterns which continually reinforce the “myth” of internalized-introjected experience. And it may be that this is a relatively recent development in the history of human consciousness. Or it may be that this has been a perennially recurring problem among humanity for a very long time, and that sacred texts, prophecy and mythic poetry were - and still are - continually updated, adapted and “re-issued” to act as a corrective measure against this inbuilt flaw in the human processing mechanism of life.
I would of course be delighted to hear other people’s interpretations, corrections and additions to this discussion, as I find it to be a particularly important and interesting one to me right now, which hooks into just about everything I’ve ever written on this website in some kind of cascading effect.
- Don’t Hide Yourself In the Chorus
- Papa Legba
- Without Fail
- Podcast 17: And I’ll Form The Head!
- No More Media
- Prev: In the Beginning Was Ford
- Next: Decoding the Trash Stratum
December 4th, 2006 at 3:38 am
Couple other items to hook into this conceptual menagerie:
Divination & Augury:
The universal practice of these techniques among all ancient cultures (that I have ever heard of anyway) seems to suggest that people believed that external signs could be used to understand internal states. More appropriately put: people may have determined what their emotional state was by reading it externally - instead of feeling it internally
Synchronicity:
The modern experience of synchronicity was described (I think) first by Jung, who believed that there was something called the “psychoid” level of reality in which matter and consciousness intersected. He believed this to account for the “acausal connecting principle” of sycnhronicity: when internal states seem to be mysteriously connected to coincidental occurrences externally.
What I take synchronicity to actually mean would be something like: you are beginning to dismantle the introjected false image you believe yourself to be. As a result, your natural classical experience of an externalized consciousness begins to reaffirm itself [see also: All-Encompassing Compassion]. Suddenly external phenomena begin to match up perfectly with what you considered to be exclusively “internal” states.
Synchronicity then is simply you becoming “in sync” again with the true externality of your experience.
Psychics
Viewed in this light, psychics may simply be people who have - through some quirk of circumstance or biology - not lost or else re-gained this ability to experience things externally that we think of as being internal…
December 4th, 2006 at 6:37 pm
hey tim
glad you picked this up, FYI Sansonese himself used to drop in on alt.religion.gnostic once in a while back inthe late 90s, i’ll poke around and see if I can’t find his email addy, he might make a good interviewee for ya.
Max
December 4th, 2006 at 6:51 pm
Couldn’t find an email except for a now defunct deja-news own, but here’s some interesting material nonetheless: here
December 4th, 2006 at 6:55 pm
“Blogging for Bolton”? Oh the Humanity of Dr. Insanity!
December 4th, 2006 at 7:19 pm
I reminded of Joan of Arc.
paraphrased:
Inquisitor “Don’t you know it is just your imagination speaking?”
Joan “Of course, how else would God talk to me, but through my imagination?”
December 4th, 2006 at 10:04 pm
Tim, do you know the work of Ken Wilber on “spectrums of consciousness”, and/or the Spiral Dynamics theory of Beck and Cowan and Graves which he incorporates? Seems these are very closely related to the idea that earlier cultures had radically different ways of perceiving themselves and reality.
Excellent blog, btw.
December 4th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
Yes but I find Ken Wilber’s regard for “primitive” modes of consciousness to be severely lacking. Like any good creation myth, it firmly places him and his friends at the top and the people the most distant to his understanding at the bottom.
December 5th, 2006 at 7:26 am
Nice post. I like where you’re heading with all this.
Brekin, your comment reminds me of something I read about John Nash:
December 5th, 2006 at 8:07 am
Interesting about Homer. I actually slogged through the Iliad once and still think it was worth doing. All that pouring libation… Yes, Homer writes in an odd way. Things like when a warrior is suddenly posessed of great strength and overpowers his foes, Homer says that (for example) the goddess Athena came and stood by him. And what about the whole epic simile thing? You see the way ants will swarm out of an anthill? That’s what epic simile is like. Famously sent up in the UK by ‘The Fast Show’ where every week these two old codgers would sit and exchange furious and strangely childish insults in epic simile:
- ‘You see those plastic wristbands that mental patients wear, saying “Property of Broadmoor Psychiatric Institution, On Medication, Please Return”?
- ‘Yes?’
- ‘That’s your watch, that is.’
In good modern writing the principle of how you describe feelings still applies, I think. So the protagonist can ‘feel happy’, but someone who is being observed from the protagonist’s point of view can only ’smile’. It’s all about point of view…
*
Voices in the head: I was once taught specifically on a workplace course that everybody hears them, just to different extents. Not as an auditory hallucination, but like a tape loop at the back of your mind. The teacher gave them names like ‘Please Others’, ‘Be Perfect’, ‘Try Hard’…
December 5th, 2006 at 8:10 am
A couple of thoughts:
There is no such thing as a neutral voice. A voice is always provoking a response.
It was some kind of trauma, of that much I am certain. As Gary says above:
Sounds like your typical mind control scenario. In the beginning was the Word…
December 5th, 2006 at 8:22 am
Do you think, then, there’s a link between the traditional Biblical date for the Creation and the beginnings of human consciousness?
December 5th, 2006 at 10:05 am
I see a lot of things around me now. I THINK they were there five minutes ago, but that could just be my head talking.
Something’s very wrong with a theory that limits exploration by drawing a line in the sand and saying that everything before that is imaginary, regardless of where the line is.
December 5th, 2006 at 10:47 am
Well none of your readers appear to have any problems with the ‘Theory of Mind.’
Best wishes
December 5th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
Re: command hallucinations. I have those all the time. Seriously. Except that they are generally much more practical and innocuous than directions to kill people, e.g. “you should email so-and-so and ask them to do such-and-such because the deadline for thingamabooby is coming up” .
December 5th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
My previous post was not in jest, but it was written before I finished reading Tim’s post where at the end he pretty much describes what I was hinting at in my pithy response.
I definitely believe there was a change in consciousness that occurred about 3000 years ago, at the dawn of civilization. See some of anthropologist Sorenson’s work and you may be convinced of the same thing. [However, I would caution against over-interpreting the literature of bygone eras; it would be similar to evaluating modern consciouness completely on the basis of our pop music and film.] Much of our modern dysfunction is related to the internal panopticon that we build in our heads, in the service of civilization. I see much of the goal of modern meditation and consciousness work as deconstructing this inner mental constable and replacing him with a spirit guide/guardian angel/cognitive process that is more loving and willing to engage in relationshiop.
December 5th, 2006 at 4:22 pm
Maybe. I don’t know why I included that last sentence. Just popped up so I typed it up. I would think this phenomenon would be more like the Fall than Creation. Or better yet the Temptation of Eve by the Voice of Satan. Knowledge of good and evil and all that. Don’t know about the Big Cheese, the the word of the Demiurge is all blah blah blah.
Slomo, nicely said. Shit, I have a voice now saying, “Dude, you’re late for work.”
December 5th, 2006 at 4:25 pm
A good reference for this discussion is the book “The Law of Psychic Phenomena” by Thompson Jay Hudson. Although published in 1892 is probably the best work to describe the nature of such “inner voices”. If anybody is interested, search for the author on Gallica, the on-line document repository for the “Bibliothèque nationale de France”, using the author or title as criteria and you can download a pdf versions (in English, mind you) of some old prints of his works. Basically, he uses the well known dichotomy of the human mind, conscious and sub-conscious, and clearly denotes that both have a role to play in the body-mind-soul trichotomy. The correct synergy of these parts is a very important element of mental sanity and not the “fusion” of them. The whole book, in the end, is a treaty about hypnosis and its therapeutic or harmful powers, which again, adds to the discussion about mass media and inner voice substitution.
A most excellent topic and incredibly transcendental since its successful resolution could give us clues about the dormant powers of human psyche and how modern day technology is being used to create a pseudo-reality
December 5th, 2006 at 5:17 pm
RD Laing’s the Politics of Experience is an excellent book on this phenomenon and how it gets us into all kinds of trouble, because we only experience other people’s behavior, and they only experience our behavior - and never the twain shall meet.
December 5th, 2006 at 5:18 pm
What kind of workplace and course was thus?
December 5th, 2006 at 5:20 pm
Very interesting point!
Also very interestingly put. There is some interesting (if not particularly verifiable) writing out there about occult ritual abuse, linking it to the intentional creation of fragmentary personalities, etc.
December 5th, 2006 at 5:21 pm
I don’t know but its an excellent question. I have thought in the past that the Bible - especially the creation - tells the story of the dawning of the human mind moreso than the creation of the physical world. But then, the two are ultimately the same when you get down to it.
December 5th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
Well, it could very well be that time began when civilization did.
December 5th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
What do you mean by that? Are you talking about how the “theory of mind” says that we even have a mind to begin with and that we may in fact have no such thing?
December 5th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
I disagree. We can experience others’ internal states if we are on an intimate basis with them (i.e. “love” them) and are listening carefully with all faculties. I’ve experienced it. Indeed, I think that this capacity could serve as an operational definition for the word love. Read the Sorenson material I linked to above for a similar though slightly different perspective.
However, one needs to go beyond language (both verbal and nonverbal). “There is no language without deceit” (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities)
December 5th, 2006 at 5:26 pm
No, he’s subtly insulting your blog and readers by suggesting that you (we) are autistic. Find “Theory of Mind” on Wikipedia.
December 5th, 2006 at 5:27 pm
Isn’t this a useful exercise in itself though? Why is it inaccurate?
I think I grasp what you’re saying here: that the artifacts which we create or are created for us culturally cause us to erect certain measures in our minds to relate to and understand those artifacts. But neither the artifacts or the measures we erect to relate to them are us. Then what are they? What are we?
December 5th, 2006 at 5:29 pm
Wow, yes. Awesome. You are right all around. And I probably misspoke when I said that Laing concluded the two were irreconcilable. That’s not what he’s saying at all. Hyperbole on my part. This is sort of where I was going with this piece, although it was too stupidly technical to be accurate:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/10/27/yours-mine-ours/
December 5th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
If it is indeed an insult, good for him. Congratulations on insulting people you don’t know for no reason other than to gratify your own weird desire to be better than everyone else. I’m sure this type of thinking leads one to a very fruitful relationship with others.
December 5th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
It’s a useful exercise, but it would not produce a complete picture of consciousness in everyday life.
I agree with what you’re saying, but it’s not exactly what I meant. I was actually making a slightly more pointed political statement about how civilization, structured panoptically as it is, distorts certain cognitive structures that would naturally occur as supportive, helpful, cooperative inner voices and turns them into voices that sabotage and betray us at every opportunity. It may be a similar idea, but with different emphasis.
December 5th, 2006 at 5:55 pm
Okay, then what *would* produce a complete picture of consciousness in every day life?
My own answer to this would be - for the moment - nothing. Because if you are looking for a complete “picture” you will never find one. For no representation of it can ever be successful or complete. You may however have a complete “experience” of it simply by being alive and aware. That seems to be the only reliable method…
December 5th, 2006 at 6:06 pm
I agree completely. But my original comment addressed what one can reasonably infer about the consciousness of ancients by reading only their poetry and drama. These are works of art, and are not necessarily representative of anything other than art. Any good writer of modern fiction will tell you that characters are never afraid; rather, their knees weaken. I am prepared to accept that ancients had better access to less distorted personal daemons than do moderns, but I do not accept that they had no perceptions of an internal self. (I’m open to being convinced, and I concede that their sense of internal sense of egoic self might have been less pronounced.)
December 5th, 2006 at 6:08 pm
what? are you fuckin daft? did you actually read his linked blog? however incomprehensible and possibly insulting the dude was being, i very highly doubt that was his meaning.
December 5th, 2006 at 6:20 pm
Why don’t you accept it? Simply because art does not equal proof of experience of consciousness? I agree that it does not. Or rather, I agree that in our experience of life today, it does not *necessarily.*
But again, what does art reflect if not our experience of life? And part of the situation we are in today is that there are a multitude of different experiences of life, and different cultures smashing together. So it becomes tricky (although not impossible) to discern from someone’s artistic expressions the state of their experience of consciousness.
Further, if we can’t use art to infer someone’s experience of consciousness, than neither can we use language (since all art is constructed out of some type of language, whether visual, written, spoken or otherwise). Hence, for me, that becomes a dead-end of thought.
Switching gears though: what do anthropologists do? They enter a culture and study their cultural expressions, and from this are able to understand (in a sense) their experience of life and of consciousness. A lot of anthropology is quite distorted and blind to its own problems, but the basic idea is I think a good one. It is something each of us does on a daily basis in interacting with others. We look at what they say and what they do and how they dress (their “Art” essentially) and then we infer information about their internal states.
The problem you touched on above, of course, has to do with allowing these inferences to dictate our interactions. Because inferences and representations of “the other” will always be incomplete. The only fool-proof way to feel someone from the inside out - so to speak - is through love. And this threatens us because it causes us to lose hold of the image we have of ourselves as well…
(PS. Thanks for helping me sort through these ideas!)
December 5th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
Here’s a thought I’ve been circling around for awhile after first being exposed to Sorenson’s work. Sorenson describes a kind of group-consciousness that he observed in primitive (”pre-conquest”) peoples not yet exposed to civilization, one that is radically different from our own pronounced ego consciousness. Upon exposure to civilization, the group consciousness breaks apart and seems to release a certain amount of psychic energy that manifests as behavior that we would call “savage” in the negative sense of the word.
This feels to me very much like the description of what happens when an atomic nucleus undergoes fission. The state of a heavy atom, with its superposed matter waves combining to form something much more complex than a single proton, dissolves and the atom shatters into multiple smaller units that are less complex, thereby releasing energy.
One can apply this analogy at the electrochemical level with the same themes: shattering a large molecule results in smaller molecules, with a release in energy (usually). Alternatively, one can chain together small molecules and form very large and very complex molecules, or even larger structures (cells, multicellular organisms). To what extent is the consciousness of a civiliation, compared with an individual, not unlike a cell compared with a water molecule or a hydrogen atom?
This is not exactly a new idea around these parts, but what I’m suggesting is that units of consciousness behave exactly the same way atoms and molecules do. Not only is matter consciousness, but consciousness is also matter. That is, we are used to thinking of consciousness as being some indivisible unit, but in fact, like atoms and molecules, the putative units behave very differently when bound in some way to other similar units.
December 5th, 2006 at 6:23 pm
Yes, which is why I came to the conclusion I did. I could be wrong of course, but that is the most transparent interpretation of his comment.
December 5th, 2006 at 6:23 pm
PMP:
No need for the swearing or insults. I guess we will just have to let the gentleman speak for himself about what his meaning was, rather than try to read too much into it
(I should review my own notes on the dangers of relating to an image you have constructed as opposed to the actual person behind them - It’s a difficult thing to stay consistent with)
December 5th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
Lots of interesting things in what you said regarding units of consciousness. This in particular makes me wonder about why so many tribal groups after they are “broken” end up with such high incidences of alcoholism.
December 5th, 2006 at 6:28 pm
This is also swirling around in my head:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism
Also wrote about this here:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/05/10/no-mind-says-who/
For people who believe in this, I always wonder what they think of themselves. Where does their own experience come from? Where do their ideas come from? Do they love their wives?
December 5th, 2006 at 6:29 pm
Because I still subscribe to Occam’s Razor, which has served me well (and has led me to many conclusions with which you agree and with which the general public would disagree). Assuming that our fundamental consciousness has not changed much is a simpler conclusion than its radical alternative, and therefore the alternative would require a greater weight of evidence. If one is going to make general statements about the consciousness experience of every day life in the ancient world, one needs to survey a larger body of expression. Art is necessarily hyperbolic and poetic, so coming to a conclusion based only on artwork would produce a bias in a certain direction.
In fact, I think the evidence shows a gradual shift in consciousness away from the type described by Sorenson in pre-conquest cultures and towards a very self-conscious egoic state. But in that regard, I think the ancient world was much more like our modern world than the pre-conquest hunter/gatherer cultures.
December 5th, 2006 at 6:33 pm
Another tangent on the eliminative materialism bit. From my link above but also from Wikipedia:
I think in ancient times they called this “Fate” but I think they are wrong somehow in saying that we have no choice. But I don’t think our choice lies in action so much as it has to do with the idea of “witness” which I wrote about here
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/11/15/the-metaphysics-of-media/
December 5th, 2006 at 6:39 pm
But Occam’s Razor doesn’t give us a reliable tool to decipher which of two theories is actually “simpler”. It just says that the simpler one is preferable, all else being equal. But that doesn’t make it “right” nor does it give us criteria to judge which theory is actually truly simpler.
Ideas that are “simpler” are only ideas with which we are more familiar and hence have to spend less time and energy understanding. I think the best way to think about this is materialism versus spiritism. Materialists say that spiritism is wrong because it doesn’t follow Occam’s Razor, and it requires a number of supporting premises in order for it to be accurate. Whereas, they say that materialism is right because it doesn’t require those supporting premises.
But it *does* require a number of other inherently invisible supporting premises which when you drill them down are not simpler or better than those supporting spiritism. They are simply *different*.
But alternative explanations or systems of doing things are always going to seem more complex (needlessly so) when you are first beginning to learn them. That doesn’t make them wrong however. It simply indicates a learning curve. Think of calculus versus algebra. Or algebra versus simple arithmetic. Each is profoundly more complex, but that doesn’t invalidate their utility.
December 5th, 2006 at 6:44 pm
Re: eliminative materialism and behaviorism. I recently had a conversation with somebody where I proposed the following analogy. Humanity, human nature, and human behavior can be thought of as a giant, complicated partial differential equation. In that way, we are all identical, i.e. we have a single common “soul”. But the behavior of a PDE depends on its initial conditions and its boundary conditions. You begin life in a definite state (rich or poor, caring parents or abusive parents or neglectful parents, etc.) As you move through life you bump up against situations that affect future behavior, etc. Since the combinatorial possibilities are infinite, our initial and boundary conditions make us unique.
In fact, this is not so different from the speculative interpretations of quantum mechanics, which state that all matter is a form consciousness. In fact, in QM, the core equation (Shroedinger equation) is a PDE, and it is the initial and boundary conditions that determine the state of a system. So the analogy is apt.
So, yes, in some ways we are not responsible for our lives. But the problem with materialist philosophy is that it completely inverts what I view as the correct priorities. We should honor the dignity of the one human soul, which flows from the Deity from which all things flow, rather than denigrating everything in the world as only so many particles of dust.
December 5th, 2006 at 6:50 pm
Occam’s Razor states that the simplest explanation that fits the data is most likely the correct one. Materialsts ignore the data they don’t like. (So do many spiritualists). When I experience a very concrete synchronicity that is extremely statistically improbable (and I do experience these from time to time, in waves with an event profile that suggests strong inhomogeneity with respect to time) I am forced to conclude that the universe has an integral intelligence that is larger than that commonly assumed in the general modern population.
However, if your data selection process is biased, then you’re likely to get a biased explanation.
December 5th, 2006 at 6:51 pm
Right, its like that Joss Whedon quote: “If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.” I like that stuff about the initial and boundary states, etc
December 5th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
Well all data selection processes are biased, as are all explanations. Which is why, for the sake of integrity, at some point you simply have to drop all of them and disengage.
Sorry to go round and round in circles with regard to this, but I am hashing something out here. So you’re saying your data - your experience of synchronicity - leads you to a certain conclusion. And that this conclusion is the simplest which fits the data you are experiencing (which is of course biased based on your selection processes)
And your conclusion is that the universe has an integral intelligence. What does that mean, first off? My emerging hypothesis is rather different but could be drilled down by saying: synchronicities can be considered as “proof” (at least to the person experiencing them) that at least a part of their mind exists outside of them. Or rather, that they themselves exist within a larger mind (the universe)
December 5th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
I’m also trying to reconcile this with all of this discussion:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/11/16/explaining-the-23-phenomenon/
Namely, that we can adopt conceptual filters - such as the number “23″ - which then cause us to select sets of data out of the possible field of experience which match our filters (we usually call them “beliefs”). And as I wrote in the comments to that post:
If I am only recognizing information from the world which matches the conceptual filters I am applying, then I can change those filters and recognize new patterns of information. Further, if my conceptual filters cause me to select only certain sub-sets of the whole available data, then it follows that my senses are acting in the same way: filtering down to one specific sub-set of available data. Can I begin to modulate my sense perception in the same way which I modulated my conceptual recognition filters?
December 5th, 2006 at 7:07 pm
Yes. I agree that all data selection is biased, so our conclusions often tell us more about our axioms and what data we will accept. [As a side note, I can share with you privately a very shocking and disturbing recent synchronicity that is difficult for me to ignore].
I think your interpretation (mind existing “outside”) is a good one and consistent with mine. But, once again paying a visit to Occam’s barber shop, the simplest non-solipsistic mechanism I can think of for our minds to exist partially outside is that we are all part of a greater mind that is an integral whole. I’m avoiding the word G_d but you can see where I’m going with this I think. This last chain of reasoning is open to question I admit, but your immediate conclusion is not, in the face of a concrete personal experience of synchronicity.
December 5th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
Yes. It all boils down to this: why would you want to adopt a conceptual filter that admits a drab boring world filled with abuse of every perverse sort?
December 5th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
Yes, that is really the essence of what I am trying to say. It is a matter of fumbling for words to describe it in a way that will be somehow real to people and will open them up more effectively to that reality of experience
December 5th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
They misconceive spirit. Spirit, intellect, nous is suprasimple, unitive beyond any description that we could assemble out of gross material. Simpler than positing the simplest conceivable explanation is to not posit, to spiritually apprehend the situation, which is automatically one with spirit. Sounds like gibberish to materialists, but they have not experimentally (experientially) explored the supersimple alternative.
December 5th, 2006 at 7:55 pm
Yes! You have a way with words.
I also like here when you said, “The things we call “literally true” are _less_ real than the things we call mythologically true.” Which I found after I’d left almost an identical comment on that site more recently, in which I said: “I’m starting to think its the other way around. That Scripture is reality and we are the representation. We are taking OURSELVES too literally and scripture not literally enough.”
December 5th, 2006 at 9:43 pm
I tend to agree, but since most of us start out trapped in a prison made of language and rational thought, it’s useful to have some tools to operate in that sphere and tunnel through to the outside.
December 6th, 2006 at 1:00 am
Yes, I agree which is why I have spent such a great deal of time constructing language trails and clues for other people who come after me to hopefully follow.
December 6th, 2006 at 6:54 am
> What kind of workplace and course was thus?
Strange, I know! At my last job, in an engineering firm suffering somewhat from post-industrial stagnation and decline, the new boss sent a fair cross-section of the workforce on this 3-day residential course he’d been on himself. I guess it was just the right time for me, cos it really ‘clicked’, and I think I got a lot out of it.
The theme of the course was a field of psychology called ‘transactional analysis’. You can Google that, but decent references are hard to find, and it comes across as rather opaque - typical management BS. Anyway, the course tutor was a real live trained qualified psychologist and he did a pretty good job of explaining the concept.
The idea is that /effective/ communication between people can occur in only a small number of ways. You can either discuss objective facts and what people think about them quite dispassionately, or you can talk about internal stuff: feelings and hunches and intuition. Any attempt to control other people, to criticize or to talk about what they ’should’ be doing, is always counter-productive.
So this guy was as happy to talk about the science behind his theories as he was to discuss the drug-induced hallucinations he had had as a young man. And one of the threads of his presentation was voices-in-the head (’What? You hear them too?’) as a perfectly normal phenomenon - he called them ‘drivers’. No drivers and you sit on your behind all day. Too much shouting in the head and you don’t get anything productive done. Being aware of them is half the challenge.
I recalled an incident from my University days. I was stressed-out and having panic attacks. I went to the doctor’s; he reached in his desk and pulled out two little red pills called Diazepam (I think) and said ‘Take these and go to bed’. I went home and took them and went to dinner. When I felt strange during dinner I went to bed and slept for half a day. When I woke up… the voices had gone. The tape loop was broken. This was a /good thing/. Still haunts me now and then though.
Crazy? Maybe. But it’s a good kind of crazy
December 6th, 2006 at 4:53 pm
Speedbird, I would like to share a similar personal experience. Sing a n early age my sleeping cycle was different. It was O.K. when young, but when I reached 34 and given the every day stress in my life, it became really annoying. Being a person that do not trust sleeping pills and sleep inducing medications, I went to see a Doctor who also happened to be licensed to perform acupuncture and provide traditional chinese medicine treatments.
I had to pour 5 drops of 5 different containers (25) in a glass of water with every meal. The first day something stroke me as unbelievable: my inner voice was quit or “under control”. All my life I’ve had this constant internal dialog which has served me well, but shutting it down for a while to rest was impossible: once I’d finished with one idea, project or worry, a new one was waiting to take me for a ride. The best thing about the drops was the lack of drowsiness or funny sensations. I was simply calmed and more alerts of what seemed to be important. My internal dialog only kicked in when it was necessary. All the containers had a name written both in Chinese and Spanish. The one that seem to quiet my mind (this I noticed by sometimes using some of the substances by themselves) said that its purpose was to “ease the mind”. I have not used them since I fished the treatment a few years ago, but I will never forget the sensation of a “calmed inner voice”.
December 6th, 2006 at 6:44 pm
Alejandro - was the effect permanent? Is the inner voice still gone?
December 6th, 2006 at 6:58 pm
That would be really interesting if you had listed the contents of those containers. I’m endlessly astounded that people actually take things without knowing what they are.
I use a homemade tincture of Voacanga Africana and Tabernaemontana Sananho for sensory enhancement and magical purposes. One of the beneficial side effects is providing a volume control for the internal dialogue.
December 6th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
Wow, this is really interesting. For whatever reason I have never heard people talk about taking chemical mixtures for the express purpose of manipulating the inner voice. Only makes sense though I guess
December 6th, 2006 at 11:15 pm
Here are a few useful citations:
FWIW, based on my own experiences, it is not possible to enter altered states of consciousness through natural trance (that is, without the aid of substances) until there has been a total cessation of the inner voice.
December 6th, 2006 at 11:58 pm
Wow! Excellent citations! Thank you so much!
Part of what I am thinking now is that the “inner voice” is not actually inner at all. And that the way to dismantle it begins by recognizing it as a thing which is actually alien to “you”
December 7th, 2006 at 12:57 am
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bree7/32058008/
my interpretation is a bit messier
December 7th, 2006 at 4:38 am
Hi Tim,
Thankfully no, my inner voice is still as chatty and active as usual (I couldn’t function without it). The only change is that I can now go to sleep early and staying up late (like right now) is difficult. I feel sleepy around 11:00 p.m. whereas in the past I felt sleepy until 2 or 3 in the morning
December 7th, 2006 at 5:07 am
Hi pmp,
The doctor told me that the Chinese names in the containers were some sort of “standard” formula so, in case I needed more, out of the city, and able to find a traditional Chinese medicine store, I had just to show the container with the characters to receive exactly what I was initially given. I am very demanding when dealing with modern medicine, but since I have spent the last 25 years reading about comparative religion, mysticism, alchemy and other topics, I have learned that being too analytical when it comes to tradition, something breaks and the experience becomes dull to say the least.
I know one of the elements of this formula though: cinnabar. This is something you probably could not get in the U.S. since mercury components are strictly regulated. The amount is minimal and there is no danger of poisoning, but a simple name in a container can create havoc in a country famous for its lawsuits.
Now that you mention herbs for magic and trance, I’ve used Salvia Divinorum and found I experience exactly the same sensations that makes me feel someone is hugging me or sitting in my bed during sleep, a phenomenon easily explained these days.
December 7th, 2006 at 7:12 am
You know, I was never aware of the inner voice as a voice. It was like when the air-conditioning in the office suddenly stops - all of a sudden you’re aware that it was there, and is no longer, and this feeling of peace steals over you. Perhaps awareness is the important thing. Some sort of cycle needed to be broken.
What struck me as the oddest thing was the manner of prescription: this old guy reaching into his desk for his special stash of happy pills. A one shot fix with minimal risk of dependency. He could probably have been struck off for it, but obviously he knew there was something in it.
December 7th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
Wow! Hot topic … hot I say! This is exactly the “back to basics” stuff I’ve returned to after years of tangential studies. What makes this so timely and crucial is re-integrating and seeing what fits back in.
Where this is going is to solve the riddle of whether we exist solidly within this one dimension, with varied degrees of gross matter and wavelengths of light, or if indeed this whole kit’n kaboodle rests upon a different find of dimensional existence altogether.
It’s not hard to imagine the bi-cameral right brain so taking over the cave artists of Lasceux that they could capture the sublime animal forms they did. At the same time I wonder what legacy millenia of physical drudgery has had on the left brain, repressed by care and labor until the practical aims of survival eliminates hopes and dreams?
Maybe there are other reasons humanity developed left brain pragmatism: a buffer defense against the capricious faerie lands which the right brain opens the doorway to?
I also wonder how the goal of Christianity, operating under the supposed Fall and all the “sweat of the brow,” might not be the simple message it so claims. An easy formula to pull us all back to the increasingly distant other spiritual/psychic dimension, behind the sense world? Salvation with a twist.
Then explain Charismatic efforts by well -intended believers to engage in estatic practices like prophecy, glossolalia, speaking words of wisdom and/or understanding to people in need? In my experience, these all aren’t coming from the Holy Spirit … no how … are they forcing it, or just under false assumptions?
December 7th, 2006 at 5:45 pm
Really? You couldn’t function without it? Why not?
Wow! Very well put!
December 8th, 2006 at 11:36 am
Because of the way I usually make decisions. I’ve always had, since childhood, this inner voice awareness. I like to think of it as the subconscious mind acting as a co-pilot whereas the conscious mind acts ad the pilot. The conscious mind is to busy with all the stimuli coming through the senses. So, since I’ve always make decisions first by analyzing the information I consciously gather, once I get to a conclusion I ask the co pilot: “Is this O.K.?” or “Am I missing something?” Many times I am surprised by the answers I get. Now, what I call the conscious mind also has an inner voice, but I can distinguish it because I always start it, whereas what I call the subconscious mind suddenly starts for no apparent reason. If this sounds weird to you, I have to say, for the sake of appearing sane, that these voices sound like me and not like a different person
December 8th, 2006 at 11:40 am
By the way, Tim, there is also a weird phenomenon that I know others experience: the conscious inner voice comes from my head while the subconscious voice feels like coming from behind and a little above my head. I’ve read somewhere this is the reason some psychologist sit behind the patient in the couch so they can take the same position as the mentioned subconscious voice.
December 8th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
Wow thats interesting about the location of the voices. I wrote recently about how I feel the location differently in my head when I phrase a statement using “I” versus using “You”, versus “We”. You have to say it out loud and with force and seriousness behind it.
December 13th, 2006 at 11:44 pm
[…] My obsessions seem to run in weekly cycles. This one is about a week old and is one of the pieces of the greater puzzle I have been trying to wrap my mind around lately. […]