The Deep feelings are
intimate. They can be strange and unsettling but they are not alien.
You do not have to uncritically accept them but once you are open to the
experience of them, they lead to more and more intense experiences, some
of which eventually manifest as truth.
The word truth here is of
course my “label” but one chosen with care to imply the importance of
these experiences. There is an old English expression, “the proof of
the pudding, is in the eating”. Having experienced the Deeper feelings
you are no longer dealing with a pudding spoken of or longed for but of
real food, tasted and savoured.
The following Praxis summary
comes from those experiences but is of course a theoretical map; the
essence remains, to practice Constancy (or something like it) and have
the experiences directly your self.
Praxis theory map
(1) Waking up:
We wake up and
find we want the truth.
Finding out
about ourselves and finding truth are the same thing.
In presenting
ourselves to others we put ourselves on the journey of finding out
everything else.
( Praxis
'Wholething' statement )
(2) Having
woken up, how do we find truth ?
If looking at
the truth was easy, there would be no spiritual problems at all. As it
is, this seems to be one of the most difficult things for a human being
to do. With any difficult task, a tool or a technique is advisable.
Praxis, with its principle technique Constancy, helps with the looking.
(3) Constancy
has three important orientations
(i) Inner –
the you inside your head
(ii)
Location – where the “you inside your head” and all the other “inners”
live. This includes our collective histories and dreams for the future
(iii)
Journey – relearning about the Frame and the Field as experience not
just description. This is the difference between, “I hope and need this
to be true” to “I will see with my own eyes, no matter how long it
takes”.
The first 2
influence each other in many ways but how the 3rd influences
the others is not clear at all.
(4)
Expectations are dangerous
Although
Constancy’s 3 orientations are presented here separately as a list, they
happen jumbled up together with one dominating more at certain times,
but broadly speaking, when the direct experience of truth happens often
enough the following can be expected:
(i) Inner :
you find out who you are, not as some final definitive description you
make of yourself to yourself, but seeing the on-going you as a process –
this can be seen and known directly and then can be expressed to
others. You are still a mystery, but a visible one and not a latent
alienated one.
(ii)
Location : knowing yourself, you can see how others struggle, compassion
becomes a direct experience rather than an imposed ethical stance. You
can see your place, you can see that you are “of your time”, you are
located. Enemies and friends are easily seen and the basics of
decision making become transparent.
(iii)
Journey : the process of who you are and where you are located
facilitate the further and deeper experiences of the mystical
substrate. There is more to you than meets the eye. Suffering is just
suffering, not cosmic punishment. A whole new attitude blossoms as you
turn your face into the wind.
(5) What
kind of world do we want?
Praxis has a
political and cultural dimension. Primarily, it is a truth finding tool
for individual use and as a such, could be used by opposing forces in a
conflict - as Christianity or Islam are so used. However, the
nine-holes-in-the-boat teachings specifically state that Praxis is
designed to be left behind once the “boat” of teaching has surpassed its
practical usefulness (and sunk).
The Deeper
experiences we group under Journey indicate a wonderful fact - hate
is an earth bound emotion associated with the frame but love, which is
also a frame based emotion, has a counterpart, a resonance, in the
field. There is a love outside our individual sensoriums. As we
explore consciousness in the years to come, this will become more
apparent and will form the basis of a new ethics.
Feelings are
real and physical - so are the Deep ones, the ones that come from
outside our individual sensoriums. As such, we will be able to map and
record all of them, one day. In the short term, my Praxis has specific
aims. I encourage all who ask, to use Praxis. Help is needed with
this, as Praxis is very difficult and there are correct and incorrect
practices that need persistent differentiation. I seek to encourage
steps that will lead to the new ethics. These aims arose from the
practice itself and whilst I chose them from the point of view of my
fully accepting responsibility for them, it would be more accurate to
say I found them, for some of them are Deeper feelings.
(6)
The
Experiencer
The classic
models of consciousness involve two different kinds of dualism. The
oldest, sees a shell (body-brain-mind) being a vehicle or receptacle,
that experiences thoughts, memories and feelings and has a divine or
non-physical soul implanted in it by God or the process of karma-driven
reincarnation.
The newest
model, the current dominant model in science, sees a body-brain-mind
system emerging
over time
as the result of evolutionary processes. Consciousness in this model is
seen as the useful survival tool arising from complex neurological
processes honed by natural selection and social forces, the relative
importance of each, varies from theory to theory. This latter model
implies that parts of the brain’s neurological processes are “aware” of
the activities of other parts of the brain’s neurological processes, one
bit ‘watching’ another. So one of these bits is an 'experiencer'.
The output from the 'experiencer' is also seen by the same 'experiencer'
- we make a thought and watch it at the same time, (or so close in
time we cannot see the difference).
Whether we
label the experiencer as a soul, or a
neural net,
we still impose a structure whereby a “something” has thoughts feelings
and memories happening “to it”.
This
‘happening to’ may be an illusion, in the sense that the image in a
mirror is a real thing (involving light and glass) but is not a
replication of the person
looking into it. When you stand in front of a mirror and you touch your
head, you can feel the contact of your hand on your head but what you
see is not you but an image of you, a representation. What we believe
our consciousness
to be,
what we feel our identity to be, is similarly a representation, likely
to be a by-product of iterative neural events.
Consciousness then, could be defined by continuity, (a very clever
structural continuity, that can span long periods of unconsciousness). My direct
experiences would indicate that thoughts, memories and feelings
happening “to” me, create an illusion of the mirror kind. My
consciousness is
a representation of me arising out of
my perceptual processes and the "wetware" that processes them
- consciousness,
when it is working well, is continually seeing yourself and recognizing yourself. However,
my direct experiences indicate something else too . . . . .
The frame and
field mentioned previously show that the local “frame” is an
intensification of a much wider “field”.
The frame, the ‘continually
seeing and recognizing myself and the wetware that carries it’, is not all that is happening.
The Deeper feelings
are not about continually
seeing and recognizing yourself and do not originate inside the sensorium,
they come from the field outside. Inside
your sensorium you have thoughts, memories and feelings and your
awareness of them is a reflection but using Praxis or a method like it,
you can be open to experiencing the Deeper feelings directly and they
are not just a
reflection. That the Deeper feelings are not of internal origin,
points to a startling fact - the Deeper feelings are not dependent on
the frame to exist.
At first glance,
this can be seen as another kind of dualism, the thoughts, memories and
feelings inside the sensorium frame and the Deeper feelings coming from
the field outside the sensorium frame.
Yet this is one
of the profound mysteries. Deeper feelings may seem different when
described in this conceptual way, but when they are experienced
directly, they do not seem different.
Because these
Deeper feelings are personal they point to a very big mystery about who
we are and we can explore this mystery as we can explore any other area
of life. Exploring the Deeper feelings is as real and as practical as
building a bridge. All we have to do, is look. How do
we do that? It is best to use a truth finding tool, an exploratory
aid. Praxis is the best one I know.
As mentioned before, I
could be mad, deluded or just plain ordinary wrong; the Deeper feelings
might be just as "inside" me as any other mental phenomena and do not
come from "outside". For
now, let us assume I am not deluded, and that my experiences, like that of many others
over the centuries, are valid and hopefully repeatable
not just in other minds as now but
in laboratory conditions one day.
If I am right, then there are, (at first sight) basically two types of
feelings, those generated inside the body-brain-mind sensorium and those
I call Deeper feelings that come from “outside”. My body-brain-mind
sensorium is a localized frame containing what I think of as “me” but it
is also aware of other feelings not internally generated, that are not a
representation of internal processes. I state above “at first sight”, because although these seem to
be two different kinds of feelings, they are connected. The field and
the frame are not separate different things; the frame is part of the
field but
cannot see it, as stated in
the previous page, because it swims around in it all day. Even so, the
field can be felt . . . . . . .
As mentioned
above, the Deeper feelings are not alien, they are personal and feel
like the
direct experience of truth - the most profound Deep feelings, point to
how we are simultaneously
frame and field. This means that even though the frame and field
feelings seems
different, they are connected. The likely explanation therefore being,
that the frame is part of the field and only seems to be separate from
it. Deeper feelings become part of the localised field and once
experienced - like everything else, they become a memory and
we can think about them.
Memories and thoughts about the Deep feelings are not the same as the
feelings themselves. The reporting after they have gone is always
a pale reflection that cannot capture the power of the direct
experience. This is why (for now, until science catches up) the
study of mystical states has to be one of direct experience rather than
scholarly comprehension alone.
So, what are
the Deeper feelings? They point to a conclusion that is in keeping with
the experiences of thousands of people over recorded history – that the
universe is in some way, alive. The universe does not seem to be conscious in the
same way that all our individual ‘frames’ are conscious but the Deeper
feelings show that it is not
unconscious either. The distinction between conscious and unconscious
is a convenient label our busy map-making minds impose on the fluid and
deeply mysterious place where we live.
There are
many, who experiencing the field, rush outside and paint their needs in
the sky and call it God. But if you carry on watching, something even
more mysterious happens, these needs fall away. Is it our
unconscious mind that watches what we do? We know we have an
unconscious mind, it makes us buy things and starts relationships with
people we might not like. The bit of us that can watch the act of
thinking, is itself, silent - why? Why does it not speak? Our
internal voice is a series of thoughts. The watcher within, is not. Try it
yourself. Create a thought by talking to yourself in your head. Then,
don’t create a thought and watch the ‘quiet’ . . . . . Some form of
thinking is still going on - but it does not matter what kind of
thinking you are doing, something still watches
all of that
thinking. During deep meditation, sometimes just staring at the TV, or
just after some great shock, even that watcher can disappear for a
while. Yet some form of awareness starts again and continues anyway.
If we accept
that there is a watcher within mentioned above and add the fact that the
Deeper feelings come from outside our sensoriums, outside the boundary
of “me”, then an interesting possibility arises. The watcher is
“inside” but it is also partly outside as well. We are both watcher and
watched. This is impossible of course. And yet this is a direct
experience or similar that many have had and is utterly impossible to describe
logically without reference to some structural features like the
frame and the field.
We are not a
singular identity. We are composites of 'things', loosely connected,
and, we are both field and frame. This is either true or,
my own perceptions are tricking me. At the end of the day, we have only
our own direct experiences to help us see the truth, if indeed, truth
seeing is possible. If it is not possible, then I will die a deluded
man, (or perhaps one who at least confronted the conundrum). If my feelings are
true - and of course they feel true - then the whole universe is
alive and when we die, we “rejoin”
that which we never left. The
personalities we become used to being in life, are dependent on the
perceptual continuity and body - both perish shortly after
death but the Deeper feelings
and the parts of us that are both field and frame, do not all perish
with the body. Perhaps the memories of the body are
encoded in some way in the larger consciousness; this outcome is suggested by many mystical experiences and
might explain the persistence of reincarnation as a belief. That
part of the composite of ourselves that is "outside" the sensorium might
also explain why people feel the need for a God; there might be more
than simple comfort or lingering dependency on parental support
happening here.
Coming up, there is a page on the works of Antonio Damasio,
a respected scientist and academic, who has proved that intellectual and
rational brain functions are dependent on emotions, that emotions
are not a vestigial left over from animal origins but necessary components
for full human functioning. To help myself think about
these things, I made a diagram, (below this text) . It is only a sketch and
cannot say everything but the logic steps it is shorthand for, go like
this.
- Throughout history, there are
mystics who report quite similar experiences, many of which underpin
our various religions.
- These experiences could
be reduced to psychological and biological structures and events that
are entirely generated within our brain/mind/body complex. This is
a perfectly rational explanation and though we do not know all the
exact mechanics of it, it does not need much more development. In
a nutshell, it is advantageous for an organism to feel connected to
the world it is in and to all the other organisms in its
tribe/group/species. Some organisms have more of these events
for whatever bio-chemical reason and whilst they are a disadvantage
out "in the wild" (eg, "what a beautiful sabre-tooth tiger, come and
give me a hug"), in social settings these events help bind the
group/tribe. End of . . . . .
- Trouble is, that does not
"feel" right, or enough. So, major assumption comes in
here - if these mystic feelings are what they seem and
they come from outside my defined brain/mind/body complex (and they do
present that way, very powerfully), then what is the mechanism that is
operating here? Whatever it is (2nd assumption comes in here) it
probably involves a part of the brain "translating" the experience and
presenting it to another part of the brain - this in the
same way any other psycho-neurological event happens. (Why
should it be different? We need to put dualism to rest in
all its guises). Damasio has shown that
feelings/emotions are a composite functioning happening and connecting
in different parts of the brain.
- So, if the mystic feelings come
from outside the brain/mind/body complex, and, they slot into the
existing psycho-neurological structures of the brain, it follows that
somewhere in that brain, there is a structure to receive them. A
structure that acts like a receptor. So my thought experiment
concludes with the simple idea that, these Deep feelings, these mystic
"waves" that propagate from some vast "field" in which the
skin-encapsulated brain/mind/body complex is immersed may be
undetectable at present, but, could we find the receptor? We
have barely scratched the surface of how the brain works but we are on
the road that takes us to mapping the psycho-neurological basis of
consciousness. While we are on that road, perhaps we can look
out for something that seems to be acting like a receptor to
external
influences, (even if we cannot yet detect fully what those influences
are). I further suggest that, this receptor would be not be part
of the main sensory aparatus (sight, hearing, touch) but
nonetheless linked to all the emotion/feeling structures.
Mystics have "visions", they see some things directly but I further
suggest that this is the brain trying to make sense of some massive
input and automatic internal response, perhaps using the same
mechanism that happens when we dream, whereby a dream is modified by
the brain and leant a sense of reality. Dreams feel real becuase
our brains make them so. I suspect that our connection to the
wider field in which we are immersed is not a visual or auditory one;
this would explain why it is so hard to "see". However, light is
a key aspect of almost every spiritiual tradition on Earth. It
is hugely tempting to go a bit further and say, light and
consciousness may be made of the same "stuff". However, the connection to the wider field is an
emotional one, primarily.
Finally, of those who wish to
pursue such mysteries, I end with my constant caution. All this
theory is fun to play with but it is the actual practice that delivers
whatever truth may be for you. Practice, practice, practice then
(with a little theory thrown in).
