It’s the neuropsychology equivalent of what we observe in meditation: how we create internally 100% of our experience of the ‘external’ world.
This has implications for AI, learning and memory, for trauma, and some health conditions.
In AI, it should be clear that consciousness cannot be reduced to computer hardware or software. Learning algorithms, however fast, however powerful for chess, poker, and predicting buying behavior, are not consciousness.
In health, the body produces a symptom when it has already compensated as much as possible, & cures a symptom when it doesn’t need it any longer.
In meditation, we’d all love gamma frequency in the anterior cingulate cortex and parietal system of our brains. So what is the brain / body trying to accomplish in tinnitus when it produces gamma frequencies in the auditory cortex?
One immediate consequence for older folk, is how we seem to get clumsier. The way we used to move, placed objects, cleared (daily life) hurdles, doesn’t work as well. When you’re walking down a hallway, you use the same maths as a bird coming in to land, the Tau-ratio, to avoid smacking into a door at the end. Our ability to work the Tau-ratio seems to change, irrespective of physical aging or joint stiffness, so we have to do it differently. Suggestions to be ‘more mindful’ don’t quite work, they almost have the moral overtone of “You should pay more attention”.
The Tau-ratio in action, happening faster than the eye can register. © Malcolm Fraser 2024. All rights reserved.
The workaround seems to be to enjoy the physical, sensuous exp erience with all our sense-perception as fully as possible. Of course this takes more time, but so often we’re just doing one thing so that something else can happen, so that something else can happen in turn, instead of fully experiencing each step. Having bodies, we can have the total immersion experience.
Another inference is that psi perception precedes sensory experience, as the outermost ‘ripple’ of the PPW, see James C. Carpenter: First Sight.
Our idea of self is an illusion; more accurately, the technical Sanskrit term means ‘no-self as thing’. And yet, perception occurs, understanding occurs, conditioning occurs – even when there’s “no-one home”. How does this happen? When a perception-processing wave (PPW) interacts with the cosmic information field (CIF).
These insights enable us to experience ‘interdependent origination’ in a fuller and more compelling way.
At its simplest, interdependent origination recognizes:
1. That when you take compound things apart, they lose their identity as a ‘thing’ – where is the ‘car-ness’ of a car when it’s all in pieces?
2. That a thing really only has its identity relative to its function and activity in the world – a car only takes on ‘car-ness’ when it’s being driven, automatically involving everything else in the world which allows it to function: drivers, rubber trees, roads, traffic lights, gas stations or electricity charging, oil refineries or electricity generation, etc. etc.
Nothing exists separately from everything else, and when we talk about how a perception-processing wave (PPW) interacts with the cosmic information field (CIF), even the localization of wave and field is illusory.
Without localization or duality, we have the mutual conditionality between consciousness and phenomena that Buddha described, in an interdependently originating cosmos (MCIO).
“Volitional formations” (sankhara) are the habits and impulses generated by mental activity; and they, in turn, modify our cognitions, loading them with the freight of past experiences and associations. The series of causal factors used in the teaching of paticca samuppada shows how the sankhara shape cognition and how, in turn, perceptions and feelings arise. With feelings of attraction or aversion, ego consciousness arises. There is the sense of something to defend or enhance. And the imagined needs of the ego proceed to impose fabrications on the external world.
“Perception, then, is a highly interpretive process. We create our worlds, but we do not do so unilaterally, for consciousness is colored by that on which it feeds; subject and object are interdependent. The Buddha denied neither the “there-ness” of the sense objects nor the projected tendencies of the mind, he simply saw the process as a two-way street. The conditioning is mutual.” Joanna Macy: World As Lover, World As Self & Mutual Causality in Buddhism & General Systems Theory
It also happens to be evolving – MCEIO. Our whole planet bears witness to the processes of evolution, and today we watch viruses evolve. In this interdependent cosmos, if one thing is evolving, everything is, the whole cosmos is both conscious and evolving – but without needing to specify any kind of start point, plan or end goal. Everything is evolving and contributing to the outcome. However, since the true nature of all sentient beings is Awake Awareness, there’s an in-built tendency in that direction.
Our experience of all this is actually non-dual. We way we imagine ourselves as sitting somewhere behind our eyes (subject) and looking out at the world (object) is completely illusory.
We also need a new definition of consciousness, to get away from the simplistic “what switches on when we wake up in the morning”, and the obvious subject-object dualism. Consciousness is not a thing, but a process, it is generated through receiving by the ‘perception-processing wave’. It has an energy aspect, so can also be transferred, through the open-system constant energy-information exchange with our environments.
In meditation, as well as in daily life, we recognize what is actually another process, which we refer to for convenience as presence, awake awareness, self-cognizing wakefulness. It seems to be everywhere, unchanging, and self-aware. It’s all too easy to to assume this is an eternal monist source of everything. Instead, it can be defined as the information-generation and energy-transference of the ‘ocean’, the cosmic information field.
Cosmologist Laura Mersini-Houghton says ‘Our universe is one tiny grain of dust in a beautiful cosmos’, the Multiverse. That cosmos is unimaginably vast, in any number of dimensions. For us to believe that our thoughts and ideas can formulate an adequate explanation for all this in religion, metaphysics or philosophy, manages to be both arrogant and naive at the same time. And yet we get to experience its awe-inspiring wonder just by being truly present with it.
© Malcolm Fraser 2022. All rights reserved.
