Looking with a Different Eye (An AQAL Exercise)

The last couple of posts have been pretty out there, so lets step back and give some equal time to my inner skeptic. Putting my undoubtedly naive newbie zen eye away for a minute lets look at things from a hard-assed materialist right-hand point of view for a moment and see what we can see.

OK, well... In an open-minded mood I sat down to try a form of guided meditation with very little expectation of seeing much action without a fair bit of practice. I was rather surprised to find that I felt something my "first time out", as it were. Now one hears that such things happen, indeed they can even supposedly happen spontaneously, but I certainly wasn't expecting it. Indeed, as I said, I approached it with relatively little expectation, and maybe that very openness was why it worked. I am now fairly convinced that I did have a genuine peak experience of some sort, and indeed perhaps even an 'aftershock' the next morning.

Now of course the question becomes what did it mean? What exactly was it that I experienced? Buddhism seems to have one answer, but as I suggested in my last post, I suspect that Theism would have a somewhat different answer. Furthermore, I can also think of at least a third perspective which would be a Materialist/Athiest perspective. So lets sit with that one for a bit and examine it. (As I borrow phraseology from Genpo Roshi... Good grief, I am a bit of a slang sponge...)

The materialist perspective would probably go something like this: the Brain is a biological information processing system. My mind is running a sort of operating system, and as such it is capable of being hacked. Meditation, like psychotherapy, is a set of methods for doing just that. Some meditation might be the biological equivalent of "clock chipping", making your conscious mind just a bit sharper and more efficient. Other techniques might be the equivalent of a virus. (Go read Snow Crash). So transcendental meditation is a set of techniques for hacking into the human operating system and triggering interesting effects. Like cheat codes or easter eggs embedded in software. If you know the trick, exciting and fun things can happen.

But the theist would say that it's a direct apprehension of God and the Buddhist might say something about the formless unmanifest which what my own self before I was born, or some such. The hard-assed materialist would come back quoting Occam's razor and suggest that his answer is the simplest, because it doesn't rely on invoking something from outside the real known world of "stuffs and things and things and stuffs." (Darn it, now I have a hankering for Parliament, and I'm pretty sure our ripped Parliament got lost when our disk crashed this summer.)

And now here is where I start to get into squishy territory. There was a time when I would have fully bought the materialist argument, but now I'm not so sure. As alien as Wilber's "Integral Post-Metaphysics" is, I can't really think of a reason why it's wrong, nor can I think of a satisfactory way to avoid something very much like it. The problem with the materialist argument is that it is steeped in what postmodernism calls "the myth of the given." It is based on the assumption that the 'everyday world' has some sort of absolute reality. But the problem is that Descartes demolished this quite effectively ages ago, and never succeeded in putting the world back together, at least not that I'd ever heard. The first half of his Meditation on First Philosophy really quite exquisitely establishes the postmodern idea that you really can't trust most of what your senses tell you. Indeed, he demolishes God and the entire universe all the way down to his own consciousness, where he gets stopped by that ever so important truth, "I think therefore I am", which is fundamentally the only thing that we can really ever know with any certainty. Something must be thinking about this problem in the first place. I might be a brain in a jar or plugged into "The Matrix", but I must exist in some form or other to think about it in the first place.

Now, Descartes didn't stop there and through some daft-ass verbal trickery he tries to patch it all back together, but I've never really bought it. Usually I just sorta shrugged and moved on. It's all well and good to say that I don't really know the real world exists, but it's not a very practical or useful philosophy is it? And so I fall back on a less robust but more practical philosophy of generally believing what I see unless I have some reason to be suspicious. There has always been that nagging annoyance that Descartes destroyed the world 400 years before I was born, but I mostly just shrugged and decided that the only practical answer was to go ahead and be naive for lack of a better solution.

Wilber's answer is that there is no real world, or at least if there is then we have no access to it anyway, so we might as well just forget about it. What there are are perspectives. We experience the world through injunctions which bring forth experiences which depend, at least in part, on what viewpoint we have while performing the injunction.

When I look at the world with my eyes, I see the sorts of things that eyes can see. But if I look at the world with an electron microscope, or my theoretical eye of quantum physics, it looks very different. Why do we not yet have a grand unified theory? Because we don't yet have a perspective that can merge the 'truths' of quantum field theory and general relativity. But even if we did, it wouldn't necessarily tell us everything. Relativity tells us that matter and energy are the same stuff. Matter is somehow colossally compacted frozen energy. But what does that mean? We have no direct human experience of that, just like we have no direct human experience of quantum uncertainty, so we have difficulty saying what it 'means'. We can make predictions from it and these are borne out with experimental tests to high accuracy, but what does it mean? Fundamentally, despite our ability to predict it's behavior, we still have no idea what the universe actually is, and indeed an 'absolute' answer to that question is very probably out of our grasp.

So where does this leave us? We can predict the behavior of the physical universe, but we don't know what it is. But what about the interior universe? What about what goes on in the mind. The extreme materialist viewpoint is that it doesn't exist, but of course it does. In fact, after Descartes, it's the only thing that we really know does, in fact, exist. And indeed, given that we don't know what the exterior universe means or is, either, why should we bias toward it being somehow more real at all? Why should it be more real to probe with my eyes than to probe with my mind? The answer is, I think, that it probably isn't. So what does my peak experience mean? Well, absolutely? Nothing. It has no absolute meaning whatsoever, or at least none that I'm ever likely to have access to. Just as with the exterior universe, all I am left with is perspective, and there are many available. And somehow, it is up to me to try and stitch together what ever sort of integrated truth I can glean from the available perspectives. This is where Wilber's "Integral Methodological Pluralism" comes in, and the trick is, that most of the quadrant's haven't weighed in yet with their perspectives, because the transpersonal is generally not welcome in academia.

So here I am, left at the cutting edge of human understanding, with a mind full of materialist skepticism, a healthy respect for postmodern plurality, and a heart that seems to resonate in interesting and unexpected ways when the mind is probed with the right hacks. I've started performing the injunctions, and I've started bringing forth the experiences, but the meaning has still to materialize. I've got lots of perspectives to explore, but many, perhaps most, are steeped in the ugly rhetoric of the ancient world, as I have bemoaned before. As Wilber points out in Integral Spirituality, spirituality has tended to get stuck at the blue/amber level and so here I am looking for something like a turquoise meaning and finding that it's pretty sketchy out here on the bleeding edge. I seem to be beta-testing spirituality. Actually, it's more like alpha testing. I'm pretty sure the functionality could still change.

And with that, dear reader, I leave you reassured that my inner geek is still alive and well.