I
Inside and outside
We think inside our heads. We
look out from behind our eyes.
We can identify a sound as
outside but when all is quiet we can hear our heart beat inside our chest
and ears.
We touch something we see as
outside but feel hunger inside our bodies.
In so many ways, we can identify
an inside and an outside and between them is a boundary -
our skin. We look out from our skin vehicles, riding on top of them, our
heads like cabins that our pilot-minds sit inside.
Memories, thoughts and feelings
- all these are inside the boundary of our skin . . . . . . . or are
they? Are all of them on the inside of our skin? I would like to
explore this a little.
Feelings, emotions, can be seen
as being two aspects of the same process, the sensations that are bodily
based and the emotions we are aware of mentally. These are the same
process, the same event; we say ‘I am angry’, we do not say, ‘my heart is
beating faster, my eyes are narrowed, my face is getting red and neck is
getting stiff . . . . . I feel angry’. We do not even say, there ‘is
anger in my body’. We say, ‘I am angry’. This convention is
perhaps hard-wired into our makeup and is obviously more convenient than
adding a fuller bodily description every time.
However, we loose something by
minimising the role of the body in our emotional life. The body and mind
are not separate things co-existing but each are intimately bound
together. We have an external boundary which is our skin but we also have
an internally held sense of that boundary as a perceptual marker. The
body-brain-mind system with its boundary seems entirely living behind the
skin and that commonsense view is the most prevalent - yet it may not be
the whole story.
Crossing the boundary :
from out to in
We experience ourselves as
inside our bodies, as being on one side of the boundary of our skin yet
that boundary is crossed repeatedly every second of our lives. Light
enters through our eyes, sound enters through our ears, sensations from
stimuli to our skin tell us much about the changing state of the
environment we are in.
We also know that our skin
boundaries have things that cross them we cannot directly experience. A
virus is too small to see but it can kill us. Some sound waves are too
low to hear but we can sense them. Neutrinos are subatomic particles that
pass through our bodies undetected (see
notes (i) ).
Our commonsense view sees
consciousness as being inside the boundary of our skin and this is a very
powerful perception. This allows us to manipulate our environment to our
advantage, we can judge where we are and where other things are.
Yet this very successful feature
overshadows something not so important from the point of view of survival
but nonetheless of great interest to many humans. Some of us have noticed
that some deeper feelings appear to originate from outside the
skin boundary.
Before going on to explore this
we need to frame these experiences and check them by looking at them from
different angles. It is a significant step to say that some of the deeper
feelings come from outside the body - perhaps the person experiencing
this has just made a mistake? The person might be deluded, insane or
being driven by needs that are too easily met by an implausible theory.
Perhaps there is a brain malfunction? We need to explore some more.
If you sit in a room at home and
close your eyes and just listen to any sound that arrives, what is
actually happening? You might hear some distant traffic noise. You have
identified that sound as coming from some distance away. You judge the
distance or may not know it exactly. The sound on which that judgement is
made has travelled from the sound source, (the traffic outside) to your
ear and then is transmitted to various places in your brain where
perception and recognition takes place. The source of the sound may be
outside your skin boundary but the perception takes place inside
it
The emergent discipline of
neurobiology is producing ever more complex maps and descriptions of the
brain. Much of this fascinating effort is framed by studying those who
have sustained brain damage of one kind of another. The impairments can
be complex and yet subtle, they can leave a person fully functional in
some ways and yet suffering bizarre gaps in their abilities, for example,
not being able to recognise their own arm. Some sufferers have become
very upset that the thing attached to them, their own arm, suddenly as a
result of a stroke, is now perceived as on the “outside” of their
boundary.
Clearly, the boundary that
separates the world “out there” from the self “in here”, is one maintained
by the brain and can be subtly changed or profoundly damaged. With these
sufferers the skin boundary may be intact but its mental equivalent is
not.
We also know that the mind can
generate a perception that is not derived from an outside source. People
who are mentally ill may report hearing things that are not audible to
anyone else or any recording equipment - an experience very real to the
perceiver but incomprehensible to anyone else.
The
brain/mind can deliver overwhelming certainty and maintain it even when no
one else agrees. I accept that I might be mad though I do not believe I
am. I have been as rigorous as I can in checking my perceptions and their
products; that is part of the discipline of Praxis.
I am aware that I am not the
only person to have experienced similar things, where feelings have
crossed the boundary. Although my perceptions cannot yet be “falsified”
in accordance with the classic scientific method, nonetheless, my
experiences are testable in one way, in that any can use the technique and
have similar experiences themselves, (and indeed, they have done).
Eventually, I seen no reason why
a brain/mind cannot be mapped as comprehensively as anything else and
perhaps we will then be able replicate experiences in real time from one
brain/mind to another. Perhaps at that stage others may experience the
feelings coming from ‘outside’ their skin boundary without the need for
years of rigorous Praxis or some other discipline or chance event.
The Deeper Feelings
There is a reason why I call
them feelings or emotions and not just signals or stimuli, because that is
what they feel like, they present like an emotion. With the Deeper
feelings there may be a trigger but I am having a feeling that I
experience as arriving from “outside”. I use a capital “D” here to
indicate a special group. I detected them first as a result of the Praxis
discipline, where the practice called Constancy (see notes
(ii) ) shows that emotions are layered.
I noticed
that with complex feelings, the layers were initially related in an
obvious way but the “deeper” you looked, the stranger and less obvious the
feelings became. I used to laugh at my description that some feelings
were “underneath” other feelings but that is exactly what it felt like.
I realised
that my memories, thoughts and feelings happen in a place – my body – but
this place is also a mental creation. There is sensory data going to my
brain/mind that maintains this body place and it has depth to it. Depth
and distance perception must frame my experience of the Deeper feelings in
a similar way to how my toes feel further away than my nose.
In a
very similar way to sound being identified as outside my skin boundary and
sight involving identifying an object clearly outside my skin boundary, so
the Deeper feelings were ‘perceived’ to come from outside my skin
boundary. This
body/brain/mind therefore creates a mental sense of the body that is
informed by that body but not necessarily coterminous with it. This is
called the Sensorium, (see notes
(iii) ).
Things
cross this boundary and I was surprised to sense that Deep feelings do. A
feeling requires an 'experiencer', in this case, “me”. How is it
possible for “me” to experience a feeling coming from outside of the
sensorium boundary, with qualities of “distance”, just like hearing a
sound form far away? (See notes
(iv) ).
I might
hear my heart beat and identify that as “inside”. I might hear distant
thunder and identify that as “outside” and far away. I might hear the
clock ticking in my room and identify that as “outside” but near. So I
eventually came to recognise that some Deeper Feelings were arriving from
“outside” my sensorium. Processing the experience still happens inside,
in a similar way that a sound comes from outside but is processed
“inside”.
The Deeper
feelings presented as emotions but not any I could name easily. I thought
that this was because they were more primal, up-welling unconscious forces
like a substrate of emotions that underpins other emotion and some of the
Deeper feelings seemed to fit this description. But others did not.
My
experiences would indicate that, after sufficient practice, it is possible
to identify something that enters the Sensorium from outside of its
boundary. I have defined that “something” as a Deeper feeling. Proof of
this in the scientific sense is probably a long way away, when we can
literally map and “read minds”. Till then, there is always the chance
that this is not Deeper feelings crossing the Sensorium boundary but
illness or malfunction. I do not experience this to be the case and my
“findings” can be replicated by any who want to try. We are our own
laboratories.
Meaningful
comparisons can be made with disciplines other than Praxis and this would
be a fruitful line of enquiry though limited by cross cultural and
linguistic difficulties. My own readings of mystical states and altered
states of consciousness in many western and eastern traditions, indicates
that my experiences are far from unique. Proofs notwithstanding and
giving me the benefit of the doubt for now, what does it mean that
“something” - Deeper feelings - cross the Sensorium boundary?
Beyond the
Sensorium :
where is the
“me” boundary ?
What does it mean, that Deeper
feelings are not localised inside the body? This is the crucial
distinction because if my experiences were just a signal, from
outside, crossing the boundary to inside, then what is inside (“me”) might
remain all there is.
A signal, like a sound or a beam
of light, comes from outside, crosses the skin boundary, is perceived and
accessed by the brain/mind - but my experiences show (as long as I am
not mad or malfunctioning) that the experiencer is not just inside the
skin boundary, that aspects of me are “outside”.
I experienced Deeper feelings
crossing the sensorium boundary, and they are not signals, because I am
feeling them. The feeling itself was mobile and crossed the boundary. A
feeling requires a person to experience the feeling. It was not just that
the feeling was mobile and crossed over “into me”, the boundary of “me”
was not as I previously believed it to be.
Patterns and Nodes – experience into words
If we
start from the place that the Deeper feelings do come from outside, cross
the Sensorium boundary and then are perceived by the brain/mind in some
way, it means that consciousness is not solely restricted to the
body/brain/mind, or at least some aspects are not entirely localised
“inside”.
Another
assumption is, that the act of reasoning itself, thought, is
localised inside. I have not experienced thinking as arriving from
outside, only particular types of emotions. Thoughts certainly happen
spontaneously, some not generated consciously by me but they are still
“inside”. So rational thought and its components are a product of the
brain/mind, ordinary feelings are a product of the body/brain/mind system
but some Deeper feelings arrive from outside.
The Deeper
feelings are only experienced by accident or by by-passing the normal
perceptual routes; (accident here would include medical malfunction).
Prolonged spiritual practice and things like meditation, side-line the
usual perceptions. Sometimes (but not always) this side-lining allows the
Deeper feelings to surface, or rather, we “see” them in-situ in ways not
possible when the normal perceptual processes are dominant, filtering and
controlling all experience.
The Deeper
feelings could be called a mystical substrate . I would speculate that
this mystical substrate is the basis of all religious experience and that
it is like a field - (please see
notes (v) for more on Fields).
Science is
showing us that electricity, magnetism, light and gravity are expressions
of the same thing. This understanding has been slowly established over
the last 200 years or so and the barriers of that understanding are being
stretched all the time. There is a lurking principle in all this which
has a strong resonance for me, that being, the consciousness in our
heads is a localised intensification of but not separate from, a widely
dispersed field.
This field
behaves differently in differing circumstances. One part of the field is
intensified and corresponds to what I feel my identity is, this is located
within and is clearly shaped in an on-going way by the body/brain/mind
system. The other part of the field is a “weaker” dispersed system
that nonetheless feels things.
In the
right circumstances the field feelings surface in the frame, the intense
node of being that temporarily buzzes inside the sensorium. Deep feelings
appear to propagate across the field in a similar way that feelings can
flood across the body; they move through the body and are detected by the
node.
We cannot
see what happens outside our mind and beyond death because of the
intensity of the local skin-bound consciousness. Through the application
of techniques, like Praxis, it is possible to experience non-localised
consciousness, that is, to become aware of something always there but lost
in the glare of our own heads.
There is an
associated danger. The field of consciousness that exists outside our
skin-bound selves is hard to see for a reason. Evolution produced the
kind of attention we have to increase our chances of survival. In
tampering with it, we potentially undo some of that protection. Yet this
dynamic hints at another perspective we might speculate about. Perhaps we
are evolving into different kinds of human beings that require more
knowledge of the mystical substrate.
The
emerging model informed by my experiences is of a dispersed field of
consciousness, that is localised and intensified “inside” our skin-bound
selves and shaped by the biological and cultural circumstances of this
node. The demands on how the node is structured put limits on
interaction. We get only glimpses of the field and often do not recognise
what we see. In a similar way that a wave passes through water, the
Deeper feelings exhibit movement, they are wave-like,
(see notes
(vi) for more on waves).
If we say
that consciousness is a field with waves passing through it , through the
medium of the body/brain/mind, the waves are then disturbances of
component parts. Whilst that holds true easily for the body-frame with
its biochemical transmission along nerves and synapses what happens to
this model if we extend it to Deeper-field feelings?
This model
makes sense if the proposed dispersed field of consciousness is one of
the fundamental structures of the universe, like light, magnetism and
gravity - these being all different aspects of the
same 'unified thing'. This difference between the aspects is therefore in perception; how we perceive
large underlying structures -
like the fish at the start of
this piece, we cannot see things so easily (the ocean) because we "swim"
in it all day. We
cannot see the 'unified thing' so easily precisely because we "swim" in it
all day, our perceptions are not geared up to it.. Yet the 'unified
thing', the field, is there in the Deeper feelings. The 'Deeper' the
feeling, the stronger the sense of the field. Our frame's first
reaction to this 'sense of field', is fear because out instinctive
survival mechanisms are triggered. Constancy lets us leave those
survival mechanisms in place to do their protective work but lets us see
past them.
Page 1
so far summing up
The
significance of the sensorium boundary is, that common sense would
indicate our consciousness is found on only one side (the “inside”) and
apparently not on the other, (the “outside”).
There are
experiences that point to consciousness or a form of it, being outside the
body and although some of these are clearly the result of malfunction,
(that being mental illness and/or brain damage) we should hesitate before
assuming that all such experiences are of this kind. Eventually,
science should progress in mapping brains and minds far enough to be able
to “read” an experience from one person, then “load” it into another so
they have the same or near enough experience.
The
experience should go on to be replicable in real scientific terms; until
then we must share as best we can and build helpful theories and models to
aid research design. We must also offer help and advice to those who
choose to explore their own consciousness.
Many of us
do not experience the Deeper feelings as an intrusion precisely because
they are “our” feelings, but that part of our selves is not focussed on
anything we can easily recognise. This brings a strange state where the
Deeper feelings are at once intimate and yet unknown. We can recognise
how the Deeper feelings behave without always recognising what they are.
Rational
logic, based on our bodily bound experience must hold the position that we
cannot be both a discrete individual (frame) and a dispersed collection
(field) - we cannot be both the pilot flying through the air and the
air itself at the same time. Whilst conceptually we can see ourselves as
an individual that is simultaneously part of a crowd our identity remains
individual - we see the crowd, we do not become the crowd.
Yet the Deeper feelings inform us that we are simultaneously both
crowd and individual.
How can we
be both things at the same time? The dead do not talk to us because
individual identities do not survive bodily death. When the individual
‘node in the pattern’ (frame) winds down (dies) the structure that
temporarily held it together dissipates - the frame goes. We believe
ourselves to be the frame but we are the feelings that the frame
contained, both local and Deeper. Those feelings continue as waves in the
field. The dead do not talk to us because the field does not need to
communicate. Communication is a skin-bound frame activity based upon the
frame’s needs. The field may have no needs . . . . .
