The Ocean and the Womb

June 10th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Many individuals report certain moments in their lives during which they experience a feeling of unbounded unity with all creation and an egoless merging with ‘the divine’. This is typically experienced during moments of highly novel and extreme stimulation (free diving, mountain climbing, etc), or moments of spiritual epiphany. Often this feeling is incorporated into cultural practice, either as part of religious or artistic observance, or less formally within the context of extreme sports, recreational drug use, etc.

This paper will suggest that the prototypical experience for this ‘oneness’ is that of floating in the amniotic sac prior to the partition moment of birth. At that literally pre-conceptual point in our ontogenic history there is no effective separation or ‘individuation’ between oneself and the environment in which that self is lodged. Floating in amniotic fluid we are literally ‘one with everything’. We are reminded of this experience non-conciously during moments of peak experience or religious epiphany when similar feelings of connected ‘oneness’ occur. It will be suggested that this is one of the reasons we tend to conceptualise and articulate these moments metaphorically using liquid metaphors, particularly those invoking the ‘oceanic’.

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Love and Proximity

August 31st, 2006 Fred McVittie

There are many forms of love; of one’s country, one’s God, ones’s partner, child, team, and love of oneself. The behaviour and structure of these loves is obviously different but some features of all these loves are inevitably the same (otherwise they would not all be referred to by the same name). One of these underlying similarities is the use of the metaphor of proximity to describe the strength of the emotional bond. We associate the emotion of love with a sense of ‘closeness’ to the object of that love, and of the loss of love with an increasing distance. When we cease to love someone we say that we have ‘grown apart’, or we may act ‘distant’. An ultimate extent of proximity may be that the loved one is so close that the psychological and ego-based boundaries which usually separate us, the subject, from the object of our affection cease to exist. It is a cliche that lovers ‘become one’, but a cliche which refers to a metaphorical fact. This proximal fusion is also writ large in the logic of religious devotion; the ‘divine union’ of Christianity, the ‘advaita’ of the Upanishads, etc.

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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.

Posted in Enlightenment, Huxley, Aldous, Kant, Immanuel, Light, Newberg, Andrew, Persinger, Michael, Space, Unity | No Comments »