3/2 • What is Spirit? Religion, Spirituality, Transpersonal Psychology & Perennial Wisdom

Required Readings for class on March 2nd

1. Ken Wilber on the Perennial Wisdom

2. Stanislav Grof, "Science and Spirituality: Observations from Modern Consciousness Research"

3. The Voice of Alan Watts, powerful interpreter of the 'Perennial Wisdom' perspective on the Self and Reality.

Also, for your consideration:

1.  a collection of expressions from important religious religious and spiritual texts around the world which support the idea of a single shared truth behind many appearances. 

2. Father Thomas Keating's Guidelines for Interfaith Understanding.

1. The world religions bear witness to the experience of Ultimate Reality to which they give various names: Brahman, Allah, Absolute, God, Great Spirit.
2. Ultimate Reality cannot be limited by any name or concept.
3. Ultimate Reality is the ground of infinite potentiality and actualization.
4. Faith is opening, accepting and responding to Ultimate Reality. Faith in this sense precedes every belief system.
5. The potential for human wholeness (or in other frames of reference) — enlightenment, salvation, transformation, blessedness, “nirvana” — is present in every human person.
6. Ultimate Reality may be experienced not only through religious practices but also through nature, art, human relationships, and service of others.
7. As long as the human condition is experienced as separate from Ultimate Reality, it is subject to ignorance and illusion, weakness and suffering.
8. Disciplined practice is essential to the spiritual life; yet spiritual attainment is not the result of one’s own efforts, but the result of the experience of oneness with Ultimate Reality.

Blind Meditation Project

DUE: March 4th by midnight

REQUIREMENTS: 1) Blindness Experiment, 2) three page reflection

Please email your project to justin@oursanctuary.org 

AIM: This project is an experiment which aims to defamiliarize the student to the experience of sight in order to understand better its question-ability. In this experiment, you must blindfold yourself and then ask yourself certain questions about the experience.

Instructions: This project is has two parts.

1. Blindfold yourself for a min. 4 hours. The longer, the better response you’ll get. 6-8 hours is ideal. Locate your self in an environment that is very visually familiar to you, some place like your dorm room or living space that you know very well. If you work with a partner, then you can walk around and do some exploring.

2. Spend the first three hours of the experiment just trying to be receptive to your new condition. Think about the ways your other sense experiences change when you cannot see. Try to get into the strangeness of it.

3. After the time is up, take off your blindfold. Your experience is now data for your paper.

4. Your paper (3 pages min.) should do three things: 1) It should focus on one main question, 2) It should draw from your own personal experience, using whatever interesting things you experienced as data-points for what you say, and 3) It should bring in at least two references to ideas or arguments or questions we discussed in class. Here are some of the ideas related to our blindness discussion:

QUESTIONS: The student should consider the following questions before performing this experiment then choose ONE of these or your own main question to focus on for your report.

1. Does vision "objectify" other beings and the world?

2. What does it mean, to perceive reality?

3. What is the difference between your sense of place, location, and spatial layout when you can see as opposed to when you are blind? 

4. What things can blind people see/perceive/experience that ‘seeing’ people cannot? 

5. In what sense is Plato's Allegory of the Cave "true"?

6. In what sense does physical (ocular) vision contradict or compete with spiritual vision?

7. What is consciousness?

__________________________________________________

Ideas from our discussion of the philosophy of blindness

(a) ocular vision versus mental vision (faculty of mental imagery, or the “mind’s eye)

(b) Sensation (raw information) versus perception (meaningful, unified object), versus consciousness or conscious awareness (the awareness of the object perceived) 

(c) Perceptual bias - what a particular mode of perception highlights and what it is blind to

(d) Objectification - The visual bias focus on surfaces, tendency to “objectify” by perceiving an entity as a thing in space/time versus a person or thing with an inside or interior reality.

(e) Kinds of Blindness

• Ocular blindness - eyes don’t function

• Neurological blindnesses - e.g. facial agnosia, unable to recognize faces.

• Conceptual blindness - what is sensed cannot be “perceived” (cannot be grasped, identified)

• Epistemological blindness - not knowing what you don’t know

• Blindness of the Cave - not living in the light of Truth, being unable to see the true meaning of things, but only the constructed, political, ideological meaning

• Spiritual blindness - being blind to your true nature as a Self

• Blindness related to social conditioning - racism, sexism, classism

• Blindness related to trauma - PTSD, numbness, dissociation, zombie-ism.  

Some commentary on the Law of One

Notes on the Epistemology of Reincarnation and Non-Local Consciousness

J. Good Lecture Notes / Spring 2020

 1. What is good evidence? 

The skeptical musings of a famous philosopher on what good evidence for reincarnation would have to be like: “One such piece of evidence might be this. A Japanese woman might claim to remember living a life as a Celtic hunter and warrior in the Bronze Age. On the basis of her apparent memories she might make many predictions which could be checked by archaeologists. Thus she might claim to remember having a bronze bracelet, shaped like two fighting dragons. And she might claim that she remembers burying this bracelet beside some particular megalith, just before the battle in which she was killed. Archaeologists might now find just such a bracelet buried in this spot, and at least 2,000 years old. This Japanese woman might make many other such predictions, all of which are verified.” Actually, the evidence is much better than this!

2. The distinction between Evidence and Proof

Logically speaking, no scientific hypothesis can be proved due to the Problem of Induction, i.e. all predictions refer to the future which has yet to occur. Evidence can be found which supports or undermines an hypothesis, but never evidence which conclusively proves an hypothesis. E.g. there is much evidence but no ‘proof’ that cigarette smoking causes cancer. An hypothesis is considered ‘proved’ when all alternative hypotheses have been disproved (aka “critical realism”).

3. Epistemic objections to studying ‘paranormal’ phenomena

4. “This is not a rational or scientific phenomenon.” 

Ideological debunking versus real skepticism (being fair and open-minded, open to evidence, open to questioning background assumptions like materialism) - ideological debunking conflates (confuses together) the scientific method (a procedure for empirical/logically verifying beliefs) with scientism (the view of science as a metaphysical belief system not open to being questioned)

5. “Consciousness cannot exist separate from the physical brain so all of this is just impossible.”

1. This objection expresses the metaphysical postulate of materialism, sometimes called physicalism, which holds that to be real is to be measurable or empirically quantifiable - this is a methodological assumption made by scientists but not provable or valid unconditionally. Many scientists believe that the advent of quantum mechanics as already refuted the materialist postulate, e.g. Max Planck (co-founder of quantum mechanics) “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.” 

2. Easy vs Hard Problem of Consciousness (David Chalmers) holds that there is currently no scientific explanation for why or how or if the brain creates consciousness; neural correlates of consciousness only tell us what is going on in the brain during experience, not what is producing the experience. 

3. There is much positive evidence for non-local consciousness (awareness not linked to or limited by the sensory organs of a human body, e.g. the Sense of Being Stared At, Distance Healing, Telekinesis (e.g. test to affect random number generators), and psychic functioning generally, e.g. Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV), the CIA-developed program to weaponize psychic functioning.

6. Kinds of Evidence for the Continuance of Consciousness/Self/Soul outside of (separable from) and before/after death of body self. 

7. Near Death Experience (NDE) Witness testimony to Out-of-Body Experience (OBE), between life review process, encounters with spirit beings, choosing new lives, etc.

8. Interesting data-points: information received through NDE that was not previously known or could not have been known by witness; radical change in behavior and life attitude after NDE; third-party witnesses. 

9. Objections: merely ‘anecdotal’ information or violation of the postulate of materialism; ad hominem critique of the motives of someone who believes in the veracity of the NDE.

10. Regression Hypnosis Use of the officially sanctioned medical procedure of hypnosis to retrieve memories of past lives.

11. Interesting data-points: Emotionally-charged response to memories; therapeutic efficacy in retrieving the past life trauma, i.e. leading to real healing and behavior modifications; retrieval of information which should not be known by witness

12. Objections: Non-objective (suggestive) nature of hypnosis, non-quantifiable or ‘merely anecdotal’ nature of first-person reports. 

13. Scientific Studies of Children with spontaneous memories of seeming past lives

Components of the “Complete” Case of the reincarnation type

1. Prediction by a dying or elderly person about parents and/or circumstances desired for the next reincarnation

2. Announcing dream

3. Birthmarks or birth defects corresponding to wounds of the deceased person.

4. Statements by the subject about persons, places and events of the previous life - unexamined knowledge.

5. Unusual behavior corresponding to behavior shown by the presumed previous personality, phobias, philias, aversions, intense longings for prior relationships.

6. Vengefulness and Inclinations to Crime related to features of a previous life.

7. Play in childhood corresponding to vocation of a previous life.

14. Alternative Hypotheses of the phenomenon 

A) Normal Interpretations

1. Fraud

2. Fantasy

3. Cyptonesia (source getting information then forgetting how)

4. Paramnesia (source being influenced by witnesses, e.g. family)

5. Genetic memory

B) Interpretations that include paranormal/non-physical? processes

6. Extrasensory perception + dev of secondary personality

7. Possession / imposition of false memories into subject

8. Accessing genetic memory via non-local consciousness

9. Reincarnation

C) Requirements for a Case to be considered Strong Evidence

1. The subject’s statements correctly correspond to events in the life of only one 

deceased person.

2. The two previous families had no previous knowledge of each other

3. The subject’s statements were recorded before verification

4. The case was investigated with a few weeks or months of its development.

15. A Modern Day Revelation about Reincarnation: The RA Contact and the Law of One

A highly-technical and systematic, yet intuitively compelling, account of the reincarnation process as articulated by an advanced non-human intelligence millions of years ahead of us in terms of understanding and moral progress.

“I wonder if the journey we take through time when we are born is really the center of life? Perhaps our more real existence is a steady state that exists outside of time - being fed by the experiences we collect during these temporal lives. We are fishermen along the riverbank of time. The part of us that is cast into the physical state no longer knows the future and the past, and so acts out of our deepest innocence, our truth. We, the anglers on the riverbank, cast this poignant bait that is ourselves into the flow of life in order to use experience to discover by the way we react to life’s novelties and temptations who we truly are. If life does not end with the body, then it would seem wise to attend more carefully to the consequences of our actions.” From Whitley Strieber, The Supernatural: Why the Unexplained is Real

Links on the Science of Reincarnation

Texts for this class

1. Article on Jim Tucker’s research into past-life memories of children

2. Jim Tucker on possible explanations of “past-life memories”

2. Andreas Sommer, "Anomalies and the 'Scientific Community': What Research on Alleged Reincarnation Cases can Teach us about Myths of Scientific Practice." 

3. Ian Stevenson on the Evidence for Reincarnation

J. Good Lecture Notes / Spring 2020

 1. What is good evidence? 

The skeptical musings of a famous philosopher on what good evidence for reincarnation would have to be like: “One such piece of evidence might be this. A Japanese woman might claim to remember living a life as a Celtic hunter and warrior in the Bronze Age. On the basis of her apparent memories she might make many predictions which could be checked by archaeologists. Thus she might claim to remember having a bronze bracelet, shaped like two fighting dragons. And she might claim that she remembers burying this bracelet beside some particular megalith, just before the battle in which she was killed. Archaeologists might now find just such a bracelet buried in this spot, and at least 2,000 years old. This Japanese woman might make many other such predictions, all of which are verified.” Actually, the evidence is much better than this!

2. The distinction between Evidence and Proof

Logically speaking, no scientific hypothesis can be proved due to the Problem of Induction, i.e. all predictions refer to the future which has yet to occur. Evidence can be found which supports or undermines an hypothesis, but never evidence which conclusively proves an hypothesis. E.g. there is much evidence but no ‘proof’ that cigarette smoking causes cancer. An hypothesis is considered ‘proved’ when all alternative hypotheses have been disproved (aka “critical realism”).

3. Epistemic objections to studying ‘paranormal’ phenomena

4. “This is not a rational or scientific phenomenon.” 

Ideological debunking versus real skepticism (being fair and open-minded, open to evidence, open to questioning background assumptions like materialism) - ideological debunking conflates (confuses together) the scientific method (a procedure for empirical/logically verifying beliefs) with scientism (the view of science as a metaphysical belief system not open to being questioned)

5. “Consciousness cannot exist separate from the physical brain so all of this is just impossible.”

1. This objection expresses the metaphysical postulate of materialism, sometimes called physicalism, which holds that to be real is to be measurable or empirically quantifiable - this is a methodological assumption made by scientists but not provable or valid unconditionally. Many scientists believe that the advent of quantum mechanics as already refuted the materialist postulate, e.g. Max Planck (co-founder of quantum mechanics) “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.” 

2. Easy vs Hard Problem of Consciousness (David Chalmers) holds that there is currently no scientific explanation for why or how or if the brain creates consciousness; neural correlates of consciousness only tell us what is going on in the brain during experience, not what is producing the experience. 

3. There is much positive evidence for non-local consciousness (awareness not linked to or limited by the sensory organs of a human body, e.g. the Sense of Being Stared At, Distance Healing, Telekinesis (e.g. test to affect random number generators), and psychic functioning generally, e.g. Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV), the CIA-developed program to weaponize psychic functioning.

6. Kinds of Evidence for the Continuance of Consciousness/Self/Soul outside of (separable from) and before/after death of body self. 

7. Near Death Experience (NDE) Witness testimony to Out-of-Body Experience (OBE), between life review process, encounters with spirit beings, choosing new lives, etc.

8. Interesting data-points: information received through NDE that was not previously known or could not have been known by witness; radical change in behavior and life attitude after NDE; third-party witnesses. 

9. Objections: merely ‘anecdotal’ information or violation of the postulate of materialism; ad hominem critique of the motives of someone who believes in the veracity of the NDE.

10. Regression Hypnosis Use of the officially sanctioned medical procedure of hypnosis to retrieve memories of past lives.

11. Interesting data-points: Emotionally-charged response to memories; therapeutic efficacy in retrieving the past life trauma, i.e. leading to real healing and behavior modifications; retrieval of information which should not be known by witness

12. Objections: Non-objective (suggestive) nature of hypnosis, non-quantifiable or ‘merely anecdotal’ nature of first-person reports. 

13. Scientific Studies of Children with spontaneous memories of seeming past lives

Components of the “Complete” Case of the reincarnation type

1. Prediction by a dying or elderly person about parents and/or circumstances desired for the next reincarnation

2. Announcing dream

3. Birthmarks or birth defects corresponding to wounds of the deceased person.

4. Statements by the subject about persons, places and events of the previous life - unexamined knowledge.

5. Unusual behavior corresponding to behavior shown by the presumed previous personality, phobias, philias, aversions, intense longings for prior relationships.

6. Vengefulness and Inclinations to Crime related to features of a previous life.

7. Play in childhood corresponding to vocation of a previous life.

14. Alternative Hypotheses of the phenomenon 

A) Normal Interpretations

1. Fraud

2. Fantasy

3. Cyptonesia (source getting information then forgetting how)

4. Paramnesia (source being influenced by witnesses, e.g. family)

5. Genetic memory

B) Interpretations that include paranormal/non-physical? processes

6. Extrasensory perception + dev of secondary personality

7. Possession / imposition of false memories into subject

8. Accessing genetic memory via non-local consciousness

9. Reincarnation

C) Requirements for a Case to be considered Strong Evidence

1. The subject’s statements correctly correspond to events in the life of only one 

deceased person.

2. The two previous families had no previous knowledge of each other

3. The subject’s statements were recorded before verification

4. The case was investigated with a few weeks or months of its development.

15. A Modern Day Revelation about Reincarnation: The RA Contact and the Law of One

A highly-technical and systematic, yet intuitively compelling, account of the reincarnation process as articulated by an advanced non-human intelligence millions of years ahead of us in terms of understanding and moral progress.

“I wonder if the journey we take through time when we are born is really the center of life? Perhaps our more real existence is a steady state that exists outside of time - being fed by the experiences we collect during these temporal lives. We are fishermen along the riverbank of time. The part of us that is cast into the physical state no longer knows the future and the past, and so acts out of our deepest innocence, our truth. We, the anglers on the riverbank, cast this poignant bait that is ourselves into the flow of life in order to use experience to discover by the way we react to life’s novelties and temptations who we truly are. If life does not end with the body, then it would seem wise to attend more carefully to the consequences of our actions.” From Whitley Strieber, The Supernatural: Why the Unexplained is Real

2/24 Anomalies in the Philosophy of Consciousness and Cognition

Texts for Monday 2/24:

1. Scientific Evidence of Psychic Functioning: The Military's Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) Program

Russell Targ and Jane Katra, "The Scientific and Spiritual Implications of Psychic Abilities"

2. Near Death Experience: Evidence that consciousness is separable from the brain?

Interview with neuroscientist Eben Alexander about the Near Death Experience (NDE) he had which changed his view of the soul.

3. The Extended Mind Hypothesis: Rupert Sheldrake and the Sense of Being Stared At

4. Cleve Backster's lie detector and the Rododendron: Can plants feel and sense the life around them?

 Interview with Cleve Backster

Presentation on New Paradigms of Mind

What is 'paradigm'?
What you believe about something before you even start to think about it.
A model of how something works, how it is to be explained.
A paradigm cannot itself be proved to be true or false, it is what defines what counts as evidence.

2/19 • The Hard and Easy Problems of Consciousness

Reading for class on Feb. 19th
Oliver Burkman, "Why can't the world's greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness?





Other recommended texts
1. David Chalmer's seminal 1995 paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness"
2. And Chalmer's TED talk on the same issue.

2/12 Philosophy & Psychology of Seeing and Blindness

Assignment for class on 2/12

Dear philosophers, we will be reviewing your logic homework during this class and then turning to discuss perception and blindness. Make sure your read the article below called "The Mind's Eye" by Oliver Sacks for our discussion.

1. Oliver Sacks, "The Mind's Eye"

2. Oliver Sacks, "To See and not to See" (Note: This second paper is a bit longer. If you don't have time, just read the first couple of pages.)

Recommended: Talk by John Hull, the theologist from Oliver Sack's essay "The Mind's Eye" who speaks of "whole-body perception."

Recommended: 
If you want more information from Oliver Sacks about the diversity of ways we can perceive reality.

First Writing Assignment: Probe, Question & Paper idea

First Writing Assignment

DUE: Friday, Feb. 14th by midnight
SUBMIT: Please email your project to justin@oursanctuary.org
REQUIRED: 2-PAGE (MIN). Your writing assignment is not a finished paper, but just a first study for a philosophy paper. There are 3 necessary parts.

1. Relevancy probe: I want you to reflect on some occasion when some idea from this class became relevant in your ordinary life. What was that connection? Search your mind/heart for one of the ways that ideas we discussed in class seemed to be relevant to something you were experiencing or deciding or facing in your everyday, non-academic life. Write about this.

2. Key Question: The second element is this: What’s your question? We’ve tackled a number of different questions so far. I want you to review everything we’ve covered so far, and to locate your curiosity. What is it that you most want to understand, to know, to grasp? Try to formulate your question as sharply as possible.

3. Textual support: Identify a text from class that relates to your question. It could be simply a statement - a sentence or assertion - from one of the readings, or a whole paragraph, that addresses your question in an interesting way.

2/5 • BEING JUSTIFIED: Introduction to Logic

Texts for class on 2/5

1. Read this short primer on basic logic terms
2. Watch this TED talk on Logic
3. Homework: You are looking up definitions for the terms in and writing them down in your journal.

1. argument
2. conclusion
3. premise
4. validity
5. soundness
6. justified true belief 
7. logical fallacy
8. confirmation bias
9. deductive reasoning 
10. inductive reasoning 

Notes on Plato's Allegory of the Cave

Themes from the Allegory of the Cave  

1. The Original Conspiracy Theory: What is reality?

From Naive Realism - the default belief that how things appear is exactly how things are in themselves - to Platonic Idealism / Transpersonalism / Multidimensionality / Simulation Theory 

2. What is mental slavery?

Prisoners: Not Free (physically, mentally, spiritually, cognitively, politically)

Puppet - a hollow, artificial copy of something that is controlled remotely

Human Society as a locus of domination, coercion and repression.

Born Free but everywhere in Chains

Fixed attention = mind control

3. Why does enlightenment take so long?

Resistance to Healing, to Truth

Awakening as a Process, Not All At Once

True Happiness - Being Awake to the Knowledge of Self and Reality

4. Why is human society a joke and not a tragedy?

Escaping from Idolatry (the idols of the Cave - honors, riches, material abundance, physical pleasures) - why Philosophers don’t like to ‘mind other people’s business’ All conflict as a “fight over shadows”, over nothing, a form of psychopathology.

5. Why can philosophy make you even more confused?

Two Kinds of Blindness - (a) going from ignorance to truth and (b) from truth to ignorance.

A healthy or just soul will experience ‘cognitive dissonance’ living in an unhealthy society.

6. Does conventional schooling really help you to think?

Two Kinds of Education - (a) “The Banking Model” (depositing information in the student’s mind to be withdrawn at a later date, vs. (b) Socratic aka Spiritual Midwifery, or “the turning of the soul away from Becoming and towards Being. (Discipline as the Art of Self-Remembering.)

7. Why would you leave paradise to deal with other people’s bullshit issues?

Compelling the Philosophers to ‘mind everyone else’s business’ - persuade them to leave Elysium to rule the city - the best regime as the one where the rulers rule reluctantly.

8. The Method of Truth for Philosophers

Dialectic as the proper method of education for philosophers

Rubbing two sticks (opinions) together to start a fire (illumination)

How dialectic can turn porto-philosophers into sophists - nihilistic, narcissistic, materialistic, slaves of conventional wisdom.

Interpretations of the Allegory

9. Social Conditioning Interpretation - The Cave represents standard social and political programming which all societies use to control their populations. Would a just society avoid the need for programming? Not if it is Plato’s kallipolis.

10. Epistemological/Psychological Interpretation - The Human Mind itself projects the holographic simulation which is material reality; quantitaive/scientific inquiry can free us from the naive realism of our senses and common sense to see the strange reality of objective truth.

11. Metaphysical Interpretation - The cave world of Becoming (space/time matrix of physical entities) versus true reality (Being - timeless realm of Absolute Truth. The human mind/soul as timeless/changeless entity remembering its true nature.

12. Modern variant: Computer simulation Model - The Matrix: the physical universe as a computer simulation (e.g. error correcting computer code discovered in the equations describing super string theory) Support for the Simulation Hypothesis:

A. Nick Bostrom’s statistical argument

At least one of three possibilities is true: 1) All human-like civilizations in the universe go extinct before they develop the technological capacity to create simulated realities; 2) if any civilizations do reach this phase of technological maturity, none of them will bother to run simulations; or 3) advanced civilizations would have the ability to create many, many simulations, and that means there are far more simulated worlds than non-simulated ones.

B. James Gates discovery of Computer Code in String Theory Equations

Dr. S. James Gates, Jr., a theoretical physicist, the John S. Toll Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland, and the Director of The Center for String & Particle Theory, is reporting that certain string theory, super-symmetrical  equations, which describe the fundamental nature of the Universe and reality, contain embedded computer codes. These codes are digital data in the form of 1's and 0's. Not only that, these codes are the same as what make web browsers work and are error-correction codes! Gates says, "We have no idea what these 'things' are doing there".

13. Spiritual/Transpersonal Interpretation - The Perennial Wisdom Perennial Wisdom/Transpersonal Psychology (Aldous Huxley)

• 1. All that exists is dependent upon the divine ground.

• 2. Human beings can realize the existence of the divine

ground by transrationally uniting with it.

• 3. Humanity possesses a double nature, both an egoic

contracted self and a timeless spirit.

• 4. The purpose of life on earth is to identify with one’s

spiritual nature and achieve liberative unity with the

divine ground.

14. Nondualistic Interpretation - The Cave is an illusion created inside our Transpersonal Mind, and so doesn’t exist. We are free beings dreaming that we are prisoners in a cave, in order to hide from / detach from our own guilty thoughts. Enlightenment comes through the release of Judgment.