V. Some Philosophical Musings

The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.

Robert Anton Wilson

Let us presume, for the sake of speculation and amusement, that the model of perception and cognition I’ve advanced here is a useful one. Does it offer any insight into phenomena usually considered ‘paranormal’ or ‘meta-sensorial’? A useful phenomenon for consideration is intuition. Many persons, myself included, have noticed a tendency for random thoughts or feelings of something to surface in their minds before it actually happens. Whether it be a police officer around the next corner, a phone call from a friend or simply an instinct of which turn to take on a walk around an unknown city; I often feel like an ‘unconscious’ intelligence finds its way to the forefront of my mind. While this used to leave me rather perplexed I’ve found that the ideas presented above gave me a way to understand such experiences. If our mind is able to process even a small amount of the “World at Large,” most likely with that 90+% of our brain that isn’t actively used in conscious thought, then perhaps there is a part of me that has the ‘sense’ to know what is about to happen. Perhaps this ‘storage heap’ of information provides clues and insights for my thoughts in some indirect way. It does not surprise me that the requisite clues for a bit of foreknowledge are present in the immediate sensory field, unconscious but nonetheless noted, and processed by our incredibly powerful human brains.

An intuition of a police car ahead on the highway is a good example. While I may never consciously ‘know’ that it’s there, clues too subtle to be noticed consciously, such as slowing traffic in the distance or even a slight nervousness ‘in the air,’ could trigger a kind of intuition. This is a simple example, of course, but the same influence of unconscious awareness may very well function in more powerful ways which are difficult to explain but operating transparently nonetheless. Armed with the concepts of “sensory gating” and mental ‘storage heaps’ I am more easily able to think of intuition as a process where the conscious and unconscious parts of my mind work in tandem.

Hallucination, likewise, can be more easily understood with these same principles. While hallucination has been a difficult occurrence for scientists and theorists to pin down, it can be more easily grasped by simply thinking of it as an alternatively functioning mental filter; hallucination as a different interpretation of “mind at large.” It’s important to note that I do not draw the conclusion that everything one might hallucinate actually exists. One of the epistemological implications of such thinking is that nothing can really be said to exist in any absolute sense at all. We must resort to explanations such as “My mind has interpreted the landscape around me as a forest.” Or, “My brain has categorized the sensations in front of me as a delicious meal.” While this kind of language is awkward and inefficient in day-to-day communication it is essential to understanding just how language, culture and perception effect our experience of the world around us. Basically since Aristotle there has been a philosophical assumption running through ‘Western’ thinking which reinforces the idea that the world at large is made up of things which we all perceive in the same way. But much of the research and thinking of the 20th century, from cognitive science and philosophy to theoretical physics, has brought this assumption into serious doubt. From this perspective hallucination should not be seen as a ‘meta-sensorial’ phenomenon at all, but simply a more radically personal interpretation of one’s surroundings. Considering the conditions that often accompany hallucination, such as extreme fever, shock or prolonged ascetic practice such as fasting, this radical interpretation may be simply a result of a brain who’s “filter” is no longer functioning in a typical fashion.

Huxley was able to gain access to the “mind at large” by taking large quantities of mescaline. According to his stories the drug weakened his brain’s ability to filter out sensations and the result was an increased spectrum of light and colors along with new ways of experiencing time and space. These experiences are not unique to the drug user, in fact they have been recorded for centuries, by religious adepts and mystics as often as by those in altered chemical states — chemicals and mystics are, after all, historical bedfellows.

Alan Watts alludes to similar ideas in his work on the history of Christianity. According to Watts’ mental scheme, the historical Jesus most likely had a deeply profound cosmic or mystical experience in which he ‘saw’ or ‘felt’ the wholeness of the universe. Since this was likely too profound a vision to explain in the language of ancient Judea, Watts speculates that Jesus interpreted his experience in terms of the Jewish religious traditions of the time. While I do not wish to carry this discussion into theories about the roots of religion, I do consider this interpretation an excellent example of how alternative mental concepts, and cultural limits to interpretation, can profoundly effect our understanding of history and spirituality in the same way they effect our more immediate sensory experience.