Beyond Physicalism

I am very much drawn into this meditative exercise. In some ways it is akin to the Tibetan tulpa or an egregore; in other ways I am thinking of Philip Pullman’s daemons from the Dark Materials trilogy, defined as “the external physical manifestation of a person’s “inner-self” that takes the form of an animal.” These Daemon’s are akin to the Jungian anima/animus and held great interest to my child’s mind.
What you have developed is phenomenal (perhaps literally)! I like your use of metaphor, “an energy flow that feels much like tending to a garden” . . . this is what reminds me of Pullman’s daemons. These are perennial memory structures. And, though not a daemon present from birth and, though you can tend to these, they do take on a life of their own, move in directions unseen, produce subtle fruiting bodies that nourish your own subtle bodies and souls.


One aspect of Kastrup that works for me is his use of metaphor. He does this consciously and not just as a passing turn of casual language. The dashboard metaphor in the series John mentions above is useful but I think it is more of an appeal to the physicalist-materialist metaphorical baggage, that of seeing our personal “dashboard” as mechanical and part of a machine. The metaphor Kastrup often refers to that I am drawn to (and makes the most sense in light of his philosophical stance) is that of the whirlpool. A whirlpool in a stream is a metaphor for a brain in the medium of mind. He often brings in up in his books too.

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Thanks for your thoughts on the practice @Douggins! I have often made the association with egregores when contemplating these mental forms as well. If we move beyond our physicalist assumptions we can no longer posit that memories are stored in the brain; the hard problem of perception is just as much a problem for experiential memory. This brings up an interesting question, what is the status of the mental form or even memory in general when one dies? Maybe it is no longer accessible, but I’m not so sure of that. Im with Bergson here, that the past existence in its entirety along side the present, and to be careful not to confuse the past with our individual accessibility to it. For instance the memory of your 18th birthday somehow existed, prior to you recollection of it. I often consider the possibility that the 2 mental forms I hold in my accessible memory could have preceded me, what felt was a creation was maybe an uncovering.

I quite enjoy Kastrup’s metaphors as well. I commend his ability to warn and navigate us around the potential hazards of metaphor, especially the way in which metaphors are susceptible to spatializing thought, when that is what we are precisely trying to undo. In “Why Materialism is Baloney” which I’m currently enjoying, he addresses this hazard, which we should keep in mind is also a hazard of language. He is very close to Bergson here as well as in many other places. After laying out his whirlpool metaphor he gives the reader some excellent advice which extends to any metaphor: “…one should not underestimate how deeply ingrained in our thinking materialism has become. Therefor I invite you to think about the metaphors discussed in this chapter over the coming days. You will need to allow them to sink in, so you can take them for their essence, not their superficial appearance.” This is beautifully put, and something I echo throughout my “occult” series, albeit less elegantly.

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I think you are really onto something here. The risk of thought depending on writing (which Plato also remarked upon) is that without the writing, the thought cannot sustain itself in memory—independent of access to the actual (material) language that evokes and articulates the thought. That means, I believe, that we are not truly possessed of our thinking—we don’t know it by heart. Our thoughts are only superficially remembered or realized.

We remember where we have to go (to the book or notebook or website or wherever) to recall the information apparently “stored there.” But we don’t have direct access to the thoughts themselves. We are not mobile without our textual prostheses. We are not free to ride without our little squiggly marks! (Beloved as they are…)

It is not really about possession, though, but about access. That is the (metaphor) muscle which must be practiced, it seems to me. This strikes me as an antidote or counter-movement to the artificial virtuality created by our technological extensions, similar perhaps to a discipline of lucid dreaming while awake. To practice access to the field of memory is to direct attention in a certain way, work with the mind in a certain way; it is a subtle form of collaboration and co(i)llusion with oneself.

Engaging with the reality of the imaginal/virtual—in a creating/uncovering practice such as you describe, as well as in how we work with language (that we come to know by heart, I would testify)—seems to me to be going beyond physicalism in a directly tangible (yet still intangible sort of) way.

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It’s funny how this works isn’t it? I am reading a book at the moment as I often do and in a sense it feels familiar, but at points many sentences seem brand new to my awareness, and in turn this awareness of my forgetfulness makes me realize that I can not fully retain the previous pages as fine articulations, rather I have an essence of the general motion. In some ways it feels that writing thoughts down allows us to move between these ‘planes’ of thought, language can act as a resolution holder for more fluid movements of thought to reciprocate off of in a process of co-definition. As I write this paragraph, it becomes apparent in my extremely non-linear process that less articulated movements of thought seek form in referencing my articulated place holders (previous sentences), this then shapes the movement and its articulation, the whole thing transforms as I go! I do not move from a-b-c on one plane, nor do I bounce across planes in a a-a’ - b-b’ - c-c’ in a zigzagged but forward progression, rather the entire process is a co-evolving reciprocal swarm. Obviously this opens up many possibilities, but like we’ve acknowledge; it has many risks and these risks become all the more dangerous when they go unnoticed.

This speaks very much to me, in my “Bergson and the Occult” series I even contemplate the idea that, despite the way it appears, personal memory is not truly an ‘interior’ but rather something more along the lines of relationship or resonancewith the past that is modulated by the ‘call- to-action’ in a co-defining process of identification and differentiation. This sense of an ‘interior’ or ‘ownership’ of our memories has everything to do with ‘reflective’ access. At the risk of confusing not only you but also myself ; It becomes apparent that we do not really ‘own’ our memories, for it is our memories that constitute the ’ egoic sense of I’ that thinks it ‘owns’ them.

This is wonderful to hear, to create something “tangible yet still intangible” was the aim of this exercise. Thank you and everyone else for sharing their thoughts on this practice. I have only planted the seeds and undergone the 7day incubation period for two mental structures, but the practice itself persists, it is continuous, a steady stream of soft engagement for over 2 years now. These conversations have very much enriched and deepened this process.

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Yes, just as when we do Clean Space, co-creating a dance between semantics and somatics.

Thought is not a language. The Analytical, which invades our thinking about thought, dominates our culture and treats words as if they are things. We can take them apart and this is what we are prone to do. But this is wrong. We chain thought to a one to one correspondence with something that comes from the world " out there". This is false. The mind is interactive with the world but is not in an objective, one to one, orientation.

And what you say about Bernardo’s warnings is correct. All metaphors reveal and conceal. And so, can we go beyond the dashboard? I think we can. I did so last night in a semi-lucid dream.
My sense of agency is widely shared within a consortium of intelligences. I am at a conference around a table in a well lit room with wide windows and a clear sky. I intervene in a talk between two researchers who are concerned about Covid policy. I interupt their discourse and tell them about my biography upon the earth, that I worked at Gay Men’s Health Crisis during the 90s and that the same tensions that were operating then are amplified in the Covid pandemic, as humanity is currently being medicalized by a small cohort, who derive power through fear.( I was aware of personal and collective memories as well as the dreamtime.)

I asked for a desired outcome," And when Covid, what do you want to have happen?“They listen to me with keen concentration. I answer my own question as a bit of self-modeling,” I want to feel safe." I touch with both palms a wave shape that is carved along the border of rectangular conference table where the participants sit. I time the word " safe" with the touch of the wave shape with the palms of my dreaming hands. I connect the gesture and the word " safe" with the tone of my voice which is clear and relaxed. My words were not things that could be picked apart and put back together again. My words were prompts for certain states of mind, which were beyond language but that could use language/gesture to create a polyrelational circuit within a complex field. I performed this deliberately. I am through the dream awareness at the dissociative boundary, re-imprinting within an innovative seeking reality. We triangulate between the boundaries, breaking frames and creating new frames.

In Kasturp’s view I have moved from representation to re-representation ( meta-cognition) and did this with the awareness of something outside of the windows, the others, the light, and sleep/wake cycles. And I know that I know. But Phenomenal consciousness, which operates 24/7, is not confined by the interplay between representations and re-representations. There is much that does not map across. Bernardo to a great extent is aware of this and tries to disentangle the world-knot. Private and public have levels within and beyond the polarized roles played during a physicalist chess game between humans and microbes. The stakes are high.

Are we beyond Kastrup’s dashboard metaphor? I would suggest that we already are. Kastrup said artists, dreamers, shamans and other wierdos go to the other side of the dissociative boundary and return. This is their function in our culture and it can be hazardous. Some don’t return or can’t find the language to communicate adequately to the culture their experience. I hold the tensions through and beyond the social body/mind ensembles I participate with and the vaster Earth/Mind. This is an art form. Holding the tensions between dimensions and learning to conduct foward adjacent possiblities can be dangerous for your health. A risk some of us have taken on. We have become active agents with immaterial intelligences of immense scope.

This is correct, Doug. Bernardo’s Analytic Idealism is an orthogonal move. He’s trying to help get the fly out of the fly bottle. But most analytic philosophers and their AI cohorts are like flies stuck in glue. They consider metaphor illogical and yet they use metaphorical constructs all the time ( just like everyone else).

Thought as mathematical calculation. Let’s summarize, give an account, see how this adds up.

Thought as mind machine. It’s an automated process. My mind feels rusty. His wheels are turning. She had a mental breakdown.

Poetic metaphor is a re-combination of metaphors that are widely used in the public domain. Language is not thought. Language is phonological expression.

For more on these topics I recommend George Lakoff’s pioneering research. In this lecture below he offers metaphors of time and a whole lot more. He explicates how primary metaphors fit into larger symbolic landscapes. I have drawn upon his research in many of my social dreaming experiements here on this site working with “Clean Language”. These social experiments have been conducted to bring forth that which is within us. As Rilke says," We must give birth to our images." And according to St. Thomas " if you don’t bring forth that which is within you it will destroy you."

And does anyone really know where symbols come from? This is I believe where angels fear to tread. Lakoff gives us some clues. Bernardo offers a meta- model which he delivers with great precision in his lectures. His project may overap with Lakoff’s and to some extent Langer’s attempt to break out of Carnap’s left- brained contraptions. I’m glad that our cadre is attempting to soar with the eagels around the elliptical orbit of an emergent Integral Poetics.

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Thank you John for opening up the seas of discussion (again and again), steering our thought-forms through ineffable whirlpools (your dashboard mechanics are quite impressive!). I am now working through Lakoff and Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By (again) and am naturally inclined to weave their thought with the intellectual fabric woven by the threads of Kastrup, Langer, Bergson. A quote from the book: "We have seen that metaphor pervades our normal conceptual system. Because so many of the concepts that are important to us are either abstract or not clearly delineated in our experience (the emotions, ideas, time, etc.), we need to get a grasp on them by means of other concepts that we understand in clearer terms (spatial orientations, objects, etc.). This need leads to metaphorical definition in our conceptual system. We have tried with examples to give some indication of just how extensive a role metaphor plays in the way we function, the way we conceptualize our experience, and the way we speak.

Lakoff, in the book and in the recording, speaks about the various metaphors of TIME. TIME is a kind of (abstract) substance; can be quantified fairly precisely; can be assigned a value per unit
serves a purposeful end; is used up progressively as it serves its purpose. Take note that these metaphors of time take the abstract concept (time) and place them into space, give them an objective quality. Lakoff states that we have utilized this objective formation of time for thousands of years. I believe this is one of many reasons why Bergson’s temporal explorations are quite difficult to ‘grasp’. In the afterword to Metaphors they write “Yet they (fallacies of metaphor) are wrong, that is, they are at odds with the empirical evidence. The fact that they are wrong is no small matter. It has implications for all aspects of our lives, including war and peace, the environment, health, and other political and social issues. It bears directly on how we understand our own personal lives, and it bears directly on intellectual disciplines like philosophy, mathematics, and literary studies, all of which ultimately have important cultural effects.” This is, in part, what Langer concludes and in part what Bob Rosenburg (mentioned above) means when he says we need a new concept of time. It might be another 2,000 years before we can imagine time without space.

I want to invite others on this thread to join in a Monday conversation with Matt and me. We have had a couple of casual/serious conversations around Bergson, this thread, and the implications of recent explorations. Both of us are interested in continuing to explore time metaphors. @johnnydavis54: Wondering if you would like to become acquainted with Matt and possibly lead a Clean Language session Monday (or at a later time) in relation to time (we did something similar in 2017 Cosmos Café: Synchronicity and Modeling Time [11/28/17]). I am available between 10am-3pm EST Monday and propose reserving 11-1 as our timeslot. Thank you for considering joining us.

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Yes, this is a very big shift and is perhaps underway already. I have to add Marshall Mcluhan to the mix of thinkers you have mentioned. The visual system has dominated us for a long time and our current tech explosion is creating new conceptual blends, arousing a sensitivity to third eye and third ear synesthesias. Bob Rosenberg is another source as is Gebser. I would like to expand on all of this. You have brought my attention to Wargo’s new book which I’m reading now.

That’s a great idea. Monday 11-1 would be perfect. That will give me a chance to study Matt’s videos. I’m happy to co-host the event with you, Doug, I’ll bring some clean questions with me. I am hoping we are creating conditions for a poly-phasic society, where reporting your most recent para-normal experience is perfectly normal.Maybe we can start with a Clean Start?

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So much richness to respond to in all these previous posts. For now I will share that this is synchronizing well with my experience today as I was listening to the new Weird Studies Podcast episode that discusses Mcluhan in this context. I’ve overlooked Mcluhan, but now feel an overwhelming urge to read him. In this (put the wrong one the first time) Weird Studies Episode 112: Readings from the 'Book of Probes': The Mysticism of Marshall McLuhan makes the statement that “Sounds are closer to thought than images”, which profoundly excited me and also ties back into what we were discussing earlier; language is not thought. Sound is also not thought, but maybe its closer. I’ve often felt thought to be a movement (not a transposition in homogenous space, but a qualitative progressive transformation). And just like movement, thought is not composed of units or immobilities. I feel the indivisibility of thought, movement, and time is always at risk of being compartmentalized and thus obfuscated. Bergson, a thinker so aware of our reflex tendency to spatialize, often used music as a way to illustrate the idea of pure time, or non-spatial multiplicity. Maybe if we were less visually dominate we would have an easier time with ‘time’, maybe we could play with it lightly rather than franticly grasping at it until we feel something solid, forgetting it was solidity we where trying to escape in the first place.

I hope to respond to more of what was said later, there is so much to what is being said. I mainly wanted to say that I can attend the conversation on Monday from 11-1 and that I am very much looking forward to it, and to meeting whoever attends!

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I recommend Laws of Media. The first chapters are all about the human sensorium and how we share mental spaces. Mcluhan was highly attentive to interior spaces but was not able to deal too much with that as he was working with a hugely reductive, scientistic audience. Maybe our generation can pick up the slack? Every tech innovation changes our sensoriums. As we leave the Electric Age and enter the Digital Age, our use of the Internet is sending some of us into a nervous breakdown. Even our immune systems are affected. I have suffered terrible symtoms from the use of the internet and have had to take precautions. This forum has helped me re-center and ground and learn how to use the tech sensibly but not to be used by it . I avoid social media nor do I tweet. Mcluhan was hyper aware of our vulnerablity and our infinite possibilty. I have been playing with Clean Language and the Tetrads with my friend, Seth, who is also a friend of our group. When we practice the Tetrads we have discovered that the future is already here in alternate ways of knowing. Nature wastes nothing, time, death, resurrection, memory, it all gets recycled. How much or little we are aware of this depends to a great extent upon metaphorical constructs we imbibe through our mother tongue. Mcluhan was a Christian mystic. He was modeling Aristotle and Formal Cause. These occult, ancient forms (which may have Egyptian roots) have been suppressed through wide spread scientisms installed by dominant culture but there may be a retrieval , according to Mcluhan, of the scriba/medieval mind. We have never been modern, we live within a poly-phasic consciousness, that includes trance and dream, dancing and drawing. Our 24/7 society has no sense of this, induging in a sleep deprived “out there” stupor, running on treadmills, going faster and faster. I hope we can cut through cultural amnesia and conduct forward experientially some of the benefits of our ongoing creation research. We are standing on the toes of giants! I have proposed that we do a Mcluhan reading next year and I would nominate this short volume which packs a powerful punch. JF Martell ( who is also a friend of ours) and Phil Ford do a great job in this podcast that you have linked to us. Thanks for yoursharing your enthusiasm!
McLuhan_Marshall_McLuhan_Eric_Laws_of_Media_The_New_Science.pdf (3.9 MB)

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This description of your writing process stood out for me, Matthew—like a “coevolving reciprocal swarm” is often how my mind feels whenever I feel like there is something truly to say. I am still surprised whenever some sense of shape emerges from the chaotic, at times precarious, play.

Also, I think it’s true what you say (as I understand it) that writing enables a kind of interplay between precise articulation and general motion. Once I have written something down clearly enough, it feels I can move on to other phases in the story, idea, or image, or evocation I am working on or that’s working through me. I am free to semi-forget the preceding content, which recedes into the background allowing a new aspect of the scene to come into focus. Background gives foreground resonance and depth. Meaning remains a moving target.

I am also questioning the perceived value of the textual artifact as a holder of thought. (If I recall correctly, Lakoff & Johnson identify the CONTAINER as one of the key metaphors that shape our thinking—thus we get the notion that words hold thoughts.) I do not deny that this is functionally true, in the sense that information (in-form-ation) is literally embedded in a text. However, it is also true, and perhaps more deeply true, that before language does that it also conjures the field of encounter. It’s not just what I’m saying now but what I (and we have) said before, what is not yet said, and what will remain unspoken that unravels the knot of memory. Moreover, how we say things can matter as much as what is said for what might be meant.

I think that is related to what I’m saying above: language as a kind of improv performance that transmits states of mind—language as a way of creating coherence (or decoherence) between minds, which a skillful speaker/listener can use to generate desired outcomes and shared meaningful experiences. Perhaps this is where symbols come from?

Thanks for the open invitation, Doug. I won’t be at the meeting on Monday, but would be interested in watching / listening to your conversation and offering a response when I have more felt-free time, later in the week. I am especially curious to learn how TIME enters into flow of your conversation, in what new guises or metaphors, and with what intensities. All the best wishes for an enjoyable session!

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A delightful session @PureMemory and @johnnydavis54!

I took a few notes as we spoke, arrows connecting other arrows.

The love of thought and desire to share thinking;
Clean language, metaphor and the lone wolf;
Kastrup, his approach and learning like fire on dry kindling;
Wargo, block universe, Bergson-Einstein, and free will - constrained will; →
open/closed; 1st and 3rd person; open and closed to whom?
<—sedentary return, nomadic return, similar return, habitual return, and the novelty in dimensions of newness →
McLuhan, retrieval, human artifacts, tetrad →
What is enhanced; what is retrieved; what is reversed; what is obsolesced
Honoring experiences, agency, freedom, expression, →
→ what happens next?

I believe this (background/foreground) adds to the strand of the video discussion around → sedentary return, nomadic return, similar return, habitual return, and the novelty in dimensions of newness → I brought up habit as “second nature”, that which was once present in the fore and is now present in the given (the formation of the body; learning to walk; writing letters of the alphabet). We could imagine a continuum of habitual formation; “fossilized” habits, in a sense, are physical (in the eternal return, our biology remains); in between are the fixed yet flexible psychological habits (I must have coffee before I can discuss philosophy, write my poetry). As we pry deeper into our psychology and spirituality, habits can be more readily altered.

You add “meaning is a moving target” . . . by opening up our habitual elements to new aspects is to shoot arrow after arrow towards meaning. Sometimes shots in the dark; sometimes a skilled focus with the intent to center on a specific meaning or complete a poetic passage. I would like to think that there is a certain need for developing habits and even go so far as to connect this with Susanne Langer’s need for symbolic expression. She might say something like “if man (at his best) really has a reasoning faculty which is different from that of the highest non-human animals, this faculty is his ability to find meanings deliberately, rather than to acquire them with passive unconsciousness.” Symbolic need is our need for meaning and more meaningful meaning, displayed in our artistic expression.

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Thanks, Doug, for your excellent notes and for making this creative exchange happen. And thanks to Matt for sharing his timely research. I look forward to future developments as we find patterns that connect across different kinds of time. Here is the recent video from Segall that I mentioned in our conversation. What are we retrieving? what are we reversing? What are we obsolescing? What are we enhancing? I did a rough rehearsal of Mcluhan’s Tetrads and hope to do it better next time. We have miles to go before we sleep…

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Thanks for the wonderful conversation @Douggins and @johnnydavis54 , and thank you for taking those useful notes as well. Im looking forward to having more conversations in the future.

This is exactly how it feels for me, even as I write this. A capacity to semi-forget, not only allows for a movement forward but also a reassessment or what has already been solidified. When I write, I feel more like a crowd than an individual. Although directional thinking is certainly a metaphor with its limits, it feels as though ‘writing’ or ‘mapping’ out one’s thoughts allows for a more multi-directional and multi-perspectival approach. Things are free to change as they do not have to be held ‘internally’. While language is certainly not thought, and we get into all kinds of trouble when we confuse the two unknowingly, I think it is important to remember that it also allows us to think differently. I can think things I could not have by writing, I can enter into a transpersonal synthesis of thought by conversing, and I can think things that I know can not be represented when contemplating.

I very much resonate with this idea of words as ‘prompts’, this is how they feel to me, especially in the domain of ‘writing and thinking’ we have been discussing. I was listening to Mcluhan the other day and he was saying that the word ‘read’ comes from the German word ‘raten’ which means ‘guess’. I found that quite interesting in regards to what we have been discussing.

I of course am no expert on this matter as its probably easy to tell, I am merely sharing how these things ‘feel’ in hopes to understand how these different modes or contexts of thinking function.

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Well put to my ears—

And these words semi-forgotten, semi-recalled:

Multi-modal, polyphasic, relational…
Complex, subtle, synthesizing…
Conversation, crowd, transpersonal prompt…

Now: I can no longer truthfully say, “I contain multitudes”
as if they are inside of me; but I am of multitudes—
of multitudes am I; multitudes resonating with this little body

Such multitudes as crowd my throat and choke
my chakras

Big Daddy’s got the Big Data to prove his perspectival
point—

Fuck space; lover space; out of space
yet into time; backatcha space—

A few impressionistic
notes and holes…

I loved the love of thinking thoughtfully expressed
in the talk, like the dance of a triad with an invisible
tetrad of self

Movement influencing
block universe debunking
agency allowing

Generational interference pattern
amplifying, echoing, cancelling
the return of the same

Reprogramming the resurrection of the similar
the retrieval of the scribal
the inscription of pure thought

In a metaphorical landscape
neither confusing the metaphor with the map
nor the background with the matter in hand

And/and/and: what do we want to have happen?
what wants to happen? what’s happening
whether we like it or not?—let’s make it happen!

I would drive a hearse in reverse out of my left
inner ear; I would take a deep breath dive off
an outlandish outwardly facing pier

And I would make it last—hear it, see it, feel it, taste
all the world in a wet dream—in the small bones of my skull
and the ambiguities of my gut

To be medicalized and radicalized, generally bespoke
yet fluent enough to seem highly specialized, external costs
internalized, enjoyed and endured—and with all that,

What would happen next?

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