Humanity's Reification Redemption Challenge

 You live in a deranged age—more deranged than usual—because despite 

great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea

of who he is or what he is doing. — Walker Percy

As a baby-boomer of post world war two conception this image reminds me of Pink Floyd’s song Another Brick in the Wall and contemplating how my beliefs were built up from infancy. Along with the memory of an old monk saying “words are not reality and only experience reveals the nature of being.” As well as Socrates’ “true knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.” And writing this paragraph I'm singing “we need education to thrive, not just survive,” in harmony with the remembered melody of Pink Floyd’s song.

The Walker Percy quote heads the list of quotations opening the epilogue of Iain McGilchrist’s challenging book with its apt subtitle; Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World. While this chapter/post title, Humanity’s Reification Redemption Challenge reflects the idea that human history will repeat itself until we all notice how our unmaking of the world is caused by a conscious reification-fallacy.

Suggesting we need a synthesis of knowledge to increase our depth of understanding and awareness of the unseen reality of our body and the cosmos we inhabit. While inside my skull Pink Floyd song-line “we don’t need no education” has become “we don’t need no reification.” As I build on the last chapter/post idea that humanity needs a perceptual wisdom revolution to face mounting global challenges and save itself from itself.

A Perceptual Wisdom Revolution

 

This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we
really believe in, and those we never think to question. ― Orson Scott Card

Orsan Scott Card’s comment sums up the way I began self-questioning beliefs about my reality while reading neuroscience accounts of nervous system function back in 2007. The calendar year concept of space-time that in hindsight, was the beginning of trying to understand my reality from the inside-out. The period of my life when I started to make sense of experiences of being the earth turning in space, as a visceral challenge to my consciousness.

A challenge that, in hindsight, has always been the need for a re-adaptation of my mind towards a more heart-felt  and embodied sense of reality. Which I now understand as the birth-right challenge expressed in the cryptic clues of ancient wisdom symbols and stories. Like the symbolic image of family life within the horizons of the Aten and Jesus upon a metaphorical cross of space-time.

I believe the intuition in Bob Marley’s revolution solution idea sums up the synchronous reality of human history. Just I believe in our innate capacity for developing a higher consciousness involving deeper insights and understandings of reality. As I continue to wrestle with two cryptic sayings of an old Buddhist monk in Thailand, “Words are not reality?” ― “Only experience reveals the nature of being?”

Our Twice Born Experience of Being & Belief

 

If I have ever seen magic, it has been in Africa. ― John Hemingway

This post looks at the evolutionary magic of how consciousness became twice born over thousands of years in Africa. Twice born through our need to communicate by using the symbolic nature of language to describe our experience of life. Creating a flow of attention + awareness towards the reality of the world that differs from any other creature on the planet, as we learned to overlay the momentary (millisecond) nature of perceptual events with names.

Creating thousands of names for our human experience and many names for the same experience. A pattern still replicated all over the planet as people grow into the experience of being human. The blog/book represents my decades long journey to develop a whole life perspective on the experience of being and belief.

Following an intuition that many ancient sayings and stories allude to a need for illusion transcending perceptual wisdom. After spending most of my life confusing my intellectual ability to master information with my intuitive sense of insight and understanding. An intuitive ability that inexplicably involves both my body and my mind in that way implied by the not-two meaning of non-duality.

The Sentient (feeling) Experience of Heaven

 

Without the aid 3d glasses and technology we can't perceive the reality captured within this 3d photo? And in the context of perceptual wisdom and realized being can any words define our 5-senses experience of that reality? Recall Socrates' "When you want wisdom and insight as badly as you want to breathe, it is then you shall have it." Advice that speaks to the sentient ― endowed with feeling consciousness ― spirit of a whole, body-mind experience. 

This post examines the subjects of self-deception and psycho-spiritual rebirth touched on in the previous post. As we continue to explore the role imagination, language, and memory plays in human consciousness. With the photos and videos below providing examples of the perceptual challenge involved in a truly sentient experience of heaven.  

The Affect of Information on Imagined Reality

 

Reason without affect would be impotent,
affect without reason would be blind. ― Silvan Tomkins

Still seeking the perceptual wisdom of cosmic integration this post continues with the idea that our conscious mind is an adaptation of imagination. Introducing this unfamiliar word ‘affect’ into our contemplation of the subconscious + conscious way we human beings function. Tomkins’ quote speaks to the subconscious nature of behavior and conscious nature of our perceptual paradox. 

And by way of analogy the grammar checking algorithms of artificial intelligence testify to our unfamiliarity with innate affect and its role in human consciousness. Try a search for 'affect' and see the programmed assumption you meant to type 'effect.' In a clear demonstration of how AI mimics our conscious sense of reality with its hard-wired memory system.

Here we explore innate affect’s role in the subconscious judgments involved in our perceptions based on Tomkins Affect Theory. With nine innate affects observed as a stimulus response system that manages the way reality affects our body-mind and its stimulated responses to experiences. 

Responses like the subconsciously orchestrated motions of our eyes, lungs and limbs at birth. Like the subconsciously orchestrated responses to the words our parents used to convey reality defining information and create the ideas of our mind. Our conscious mind's imagined sense of reality?

Practicing Perceptual Wisdom & Realized Being

 

When you want wisdom and insight as badly as you want to breathe,
it is then you shall have it. ― Socrates

Do we read Socrates’ comment on the visceral nature of insight and the personal experience of wisdom with a false sense of history and automatically ignore it? And is that because our consensus-reality thoughts are out-of-touch with the embodied nature of our mind and the 4-dimensional nature of reality? This post examines a via-negative way to the perceptual wisdom of realized being and why not knowing is more important than knowing.

Exploring the dialectic way a negative self-questioning undermines the spirit of logical positivism and creates an experience of psycho-spiritual rebirth. Because when we accept our subconsciously orchestrated behaviors and recognize the spiritual truth of the ancient wisdom saying; Know Thyself. We find ourselves on a realized-being journey of ascension and rediscovering the cosmic reality of divinity.

Spiritual Flow-States of Consciousness

 

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand 
about life, ourselves, and the world around us. — Socrates

In this post we explore flow state experiences in the context of a cocoon-like form of consciousness we can transcend. Examining the way we automatically name experience and how that behavior separates us from reality. As we continue to question our own consciousness within the inescapable context of our subconsciously orchestrated behaviors.

And to get a spiritual feeling of flow-state experience you might write a response to the paragraph above and explore that process. Did you think about what to write and find yourself looking at your thoughts as you wrote them down? And are you contemplating how any thought appears in your mind as we explore the non-conscious nature of human spirituality? 

Our Reading & Reification Fallacy

 

The delusion is extraordinary by which we exalt language above nature:-
making language the expositor of nature,
instead of making nature the expositor of language. ― Alexander B Johnson

Since l stumbled upon a perception shifting book in 2007, this quote has been a guiding mantra. While a visceral grasp of Johnson's aphoristic ― short pithy comment full of meaning ― has involved a struggle with my human nature. As I wrestled with how language creates a perennial problem of experiential blindness, and why reading compounds a reification-fallacy inherent in language.

Right up to February this year, it felt like l was banging my head against the wall of what reification actually means, a bit like an orthodox Jew reading a famous book before a wall in Jerusalem. Which Freud and Jung may have described as the word formulations of a belief system providing hope in the present and for the future.

The Seen & Unseen Nature of Our Own Reality

 

Beneath our surface impressions of our face

This image of the seen and unseen reality of a face conveys a sense of meaning beyond the words we normally use to describe what we see of our face. One of those “a picture is worth a thousand words” images that transcends our sense of knowing our reality, with its layered depiction of facial anatomy. An image exemplifying the multi-layered nature of reality and the superficial nature of language, demonstrated in the surface impression of a word like face. 

The image is meant to convey a sense of mirage-like illusions caused by memory. As we continue to examine the illusory nature of our perceptions. Using this context of a seen and unseen nature to our own reality to question how much we really know ourselves. By asking, “is it possible to form a visceral and cognitive awareness of the seen and unseen reality of your face and begin changing your sense of reality?”

A possibility I practice with the same duality of awareness that honors ancient wisdom's advise to know thyself. With my cognitive awareness of the word face balanced by a sensation awareness of its multi-layered composition. A sensation awareness of all those facial muscles depicted in this image, for example. With a practice of inner sensation awareness that finds a parallel with feeling the sun’s warmth on the surface of my skin, through the warmth produced by the microvascular blood flow beneath the surface of my face.

Reified Optical Illusions of Self & Nature

 

How Ideas Create Optical Illusions of Oneself and Nature

This post examines how ideas and language combine to create subtle optical illusions within our mind’s imagined sense of reality. Examining how we build on the ideas learned in early childhood to create conscious illusions of knowing. Explaining how looking into oneself is as difficult as looking into the sun. For just as l adopt a reified sense of the sun by conflating my idea of the sun with the reality of the sun, l am guilty of reifying my own and nature’s reality.

Guilty of unwittingly mistaking my mind's learned ideas about reality for what is truly real. With my thought processes reifying my reality with the ideas l use to describe my facial anatomy, for example. Effectively creating a reified conscious illusion because just as my eyes can’t see the elemental reality of the sun, I cannot consciously know the elemental reality of my eyes. 

So using the philosophical frame “a map is not the territory” while looking at this photo of my face, I feel for a visceral awareness of Einstein’s “reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” Trying to understand the how reification underpins the reality mapping purpose of our abstract ideas. Becoming viscerally aware of ideas and words as surface impressions lacking a true depth of comprehension.

Lacking a depth of insight and understanding, as an illusion of knowing, conceptually reduces my face to something like a two-dimensional drawing. And although I can’t remember being taught the idea I speak as the word David. l imagine this was how l began to conflate abstract ideas about reality with reality.