Mind, It's Insideout

     The “perennial philosophy” — a favorite with those inclined to vagueness — is actually a name for recurrent intuition of a field-type reality, supported by the use of introspective experiment. It is perennial because, like the optical mode which generates realisms (including, as a historical specimen, Thomas Reid’s commonsensism, which is realism in caricature), it represents an experienceable cerebral mode, which tends to surface in successive philosophical systems. Those who have experienced it, like those who experience middle-order, optical reality, comprehend one another because the perceptions involved are roughly the same for all. There is nothing supernatural about this; it is simply one way of perceiving structure — inclusively. It could very well be simply an exaggeration of ordinary Gestalt perception induced by turning off linguistic logic. The perennial philosophy has a discrete logic which contradicts that of ordinary, everyday experience, and is extraordinarily difficult to set out, either mathematically or in plain. But it can be perceived rather easily by empathy and in this it resembles the skill one acquires in reading primary-process thinking in psychiatry. This is comprehensible enough, but will not really do for science; one can read and understand Joyce’s Finnegan without working out every oblique allusion, but if one wants a world model or a brain process model, one has to buckle down and reduce patterned intuition to words or to mathematics, so that it can be checked. An unconventional vision, however compelling, is no better evidence than common optical perception. Sometimes this can be short-circuited when unformulated intuition leads directly to experiment; otherwise, hard work is required. One can form an intuitive world view by floating about on empathy, but the result is going to be solipsistic and — to maintain the metaphor — wet. So the acausal, inclusivist logic of oceanic modes has to be reduced to mathematical form, simply to see if it makes heuristic sense, and what kind of sense it does make.
     One need no more be a Hindu to treat objects as events or loci in an independent field than one needs to be Jewish to like rye bread. Interestingly enough, Indian physicists have been too close to their tradition to draw directly to it as a source of ideas in this area. The germs of field theory in Western thought may well have arrived by way of Buddhist influences on Stocism (Comfort 1979A), but Indian scientists are probably just as scared as most Westerners of the influence of religion on science. However, if a religion is a world view defining the relations of the experience of I-ness to a hypothetical That, then scientific objectivism qualifies as religion no less than Hinduism or Buddhism.
     We do not accordingly start from, or need, any soft generalizations about brain-as-microcosm; the brain-as-perceiving system model will do nicely and is more in line with critical analysis. Our brain need not be universe-shaped (though it may be) because our universe is bound to be brain-shaped. At the same time, once we start looking critically at the preconceptions generated by our experience of positional identity, we have to re-examine the instrument we are using. In the case of particles, we have to stop attributing transcendental identity to these hypothetical objects (Post 1963). There is no way around the closed loop implicit in the cogito, awkward as it is — slap-happy excursions into pure mentalism which take the line that “mind is the only reality” will always run into the fact that if we are using a nervous system to think, that too is part of middle-order reality; they also risk the conventional fate of objects which fly in ever decreasing circles. There is still going to be a system break at the point where we have to explain how matter sets about thinking itself if it is in fact virtual and a construct of our (material) sensorium.
     This is something on which people like Sankara and Nagarjuna (the first Hindu, the second Buddhist) are either deliberately obscure, or led to take refuge in a kind of cosmic engram which stands behind illusory I-ness and is the true “dwarf in the middle” (Hindu), or the reflection of Buddha-nature (Mahayana Buddhist). Labeling this as Brahman, for example, and then translating Brahman and maya as God and illusion rather than as field and phenomenal reality add further to the confusion, and fuel edifying rather than illuminating interpretations based on what we have traditionally attributed to God. Spinoza brought a similar problem down on himself by doing this, and had to do penance for it; I risk doing so by treating objective science as a religion, which anthropologically it is. Nor are naïve Hindus and Buddhists necessarily more consistent than we are if they talk traditionally about reincarnation (in linear time) and the unreality of time and self in the same doctrinal breath, though philosophers like Nagarjuna saw the point….
— Alex Comfort, Reality and Comfort, pp. 30-31.