The Extended Space of the Illuminated Mind

September 7th, 2006 Fred McVittie

One of the most common experiences of the mind is that it is an object, like other objects in the real world, located in space, and existing at, or centred on a particular point. We routinely intuit our consciousness and cognition to be located in this single place, exactly here, precisely now. This point is also usually felt to be located at the centre of lived experience; we are the centre of our little worlds. However, there is another conceptual understanding of the mind which uses a very different spatial metaphor, this understanding relating to a correspondingly different form of consciousness to that of the little world and the central point. This formulation does not imagine the mind located within space, or even as somehow expanding, contracting, or moving through space, but rather that space and mind are, in some way, co-terminous. Space, in this model, is not an inert, unstructured void in which the mind occupies a distinct bounded region, but space is mind. Most commonly found in developed metaphysical systems, this metaphor reverses the Kantian proposition that space is a function of mind. The notion of an identification of mind with space as opposed to mind existing at a singular point in space correlates with states of consciousness often referred to as ‘enlightenment’ (which is itself a metaphor for the existence of a brightly lit space in which knowledge is visible). This enlightened space/mind features in a range of metaphysical practices and religious traditions including ‘divine union’, ‘advaita’, and which Newberg (1999) generalised as a sense of ‘Absolute Unitary Being’ (AUB). It may be said to be part of the perennial philosophy indicated by Huxley and others. Neurological evidence for this relationship between space, mind, and a sense of AUB comes from the work carried out by Michael Persinger who used ‘Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation’ (TCS) to affect part of the brain which contribute to our sense of physical location in space. When subjects were affected in this way their subjective experience was of feeling a sense of unity with the world.

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Objective Subjective Enlightenment

September 17th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Kant’s Was ist Aufklarung was a call for an enlightenment in which knowledge is separated from power and superstition. It is knowledge which is democratically available and publically verifiable. This contrasts with the subjective forms of knowledge typically offered by the modern enlightenment industries, as exemplified between the pages of the unintentionally ironic What is Enlightenment magazine. This ‘knowledge’ is often re-united with superstition (and occasionally with power in cultic situations), and in which the techniques for objective validation, exemplified in the scientific method, are ignored or derided. This enlightnment often substitutes the feeling of knowing for knowing itself. Objective and subjective knowing probably feels the same - the extended eureka which accompanies the finding of a new unity in the world, but feelings aren’t facts. Some scientists (seem to) have tried to combine both elements, honouring the feelings of subjective enlightenment whilst also striving for objective scientific validity; David Bohm and David Peat may be examples; but for the most part this attempt at combining Auflarung with New Age Enlightenment is a diminution of the illuminated space of knowledge, not an expansion.

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