Category: Consciousness

seeing upside down (with bonus experiment!)

Did you know that your eye is related to the pinhole camera?

Light enters through the pupil of the eye, and a tiny image of the outside world fans out across the back of the eye, on the retina. If you have an extremely dark room that has a window to the outside world, try this:

Get some pieces of thick card-stock paper, or even a piece of cardboard, that covers your window entirely. Make sure that your room is as dark as possible and that no light enters (this is much more difficult to achieve than you may think, but perfection is not required). Poke a small hole, about 3 millimeters in diameter, in the paper, so that light from outside your room can enter through the hole (this works best during bright daylight conditions outside). Now get a white towel or sheet, or even a white piece of paper, and hold it right on the hole. Now slowly move the piece of paper/sheet/whatever back from the hole… and be AMAZED! No really, you will be amazed, trust me!

For the truly inquisitive (that should be all of you reading this), try different sized holes, as well as holes of different shape, and see what effects this has on the resulting experience. Also pay close attention to what happens as you move your ‘screen’ closer or farther away from the hole. Now, for even MORE ridiculous fun, have someone go outside and move around in front of the window as you watch the screen on the inside…

But this was all just a little experimental tangent to my real topic, which is that, just as in the above pin-hole camera exercise, the image which falls upon your retina is inverted. Why, then do we experience the world ‘right side up’?

A ridiculously simplified picture of the inversion of images on the retina.

Our brains – and this is a mysterious process – re-inverts the image so that our experience of the retinal impulses fits with information we get from other senses. Equally fascinating, the process which the brain accomplishes is not restricted to any particular given orientation of the incoming retinal stimulus. What I mean is that the image of the world can be presented onto the retina with any arbitrary rotation, and given sufficient time, the brain will compensate in such a way as to perfectly cancel out the rotation so that we again experience the world ‘right side up’.

Even more interestingly (I know, can you stand it?) it isn’t just with orientation that this occurs. Check out this quote from a 1967 paper by J.J. Gibson:

“The altered ‘form’ of the sample-field produced by spectacles can be of many sorts: Stratton’s inversion, or Erisman’s reversal, or Kohler’s reversal, or tilt, or displacement (with wedge-prisms), and curvature, and compression, or ordinary telescopic magnification or minification, or single-meridian magnification or minification (Ogle), or for that manner, a non-geometrical bias of the sample-field such as the chromatic aberrations or color. The ‘invariance theory’ should still apply. We ordinarily don’t notice the forms of the visual field anyway, except in pictures: what we detect are invariants.”

Such phenomena are well known in the realm of optics (the first such experiments being performed by Stratton in 1896, and later by Ivo Kohler in the 1950’s) where research subjects (probably volunteer grad students) wore a prism that inverted the retinal image all day long for a period of at a few weeks. For many subjects, it took approximately a week or so for the image to switch.

Once they adapted the research subjects then experienced the world ‘normally’ with no strangeness – their brain simply found it more economical to re-integrate the incoming stimulus in a way that allowed it to mesh with other sensory stimuli; the system tended towards a relatively stable attractor.

Of course, when the subjects took the glasses off, the world re-inverted, and they experienced the world upside down, just like they did when the glasses first were put on, but the re-adaptation took much less time, and subjects could even become ‘practiced’ at switching between wearing the prism glasses and having them off.

Do you not find such a phenomenon both compelling and mysterious? Do you not sit in awe at the complex workings going on behind your eyes all the time?

Our sense of touch and proprioception play a large role here, but also hearing and other senses which include directionality in relation to our 3D physical space. Even more important, however, is the ability for the subject to actively move through space with the altered perception. If the subject is restricted from moving (some subjects were literally strapped into a wheelchair), no visual adaptation occurs, and the world continues to be experienced in an inverted fashion.

A lesson to be learned from this is that we are complex beings, WHOLE beings, in whom stream diverse sensory flows, which, like rivers in confluence, turbulently spin off vortices in a chaotic and ordered dance of becoming. Our senses, rather than objectively reporting pure sensory ‘data’ to a central computer, are continually involved in, reshaped by, and reciprocally influenced by the dynamic, pulsing whole that lies beheath and within conscious experience. This includes our emotions, our thoughts, our desires, as well as our other senses, our metabolism, our memory, and our will, to name just a few.

No sense is isolated from any other. Channels overlap. Information bleeds. The source is also the receiver. The created is also the creator.

Mmmmmmmm. chewy!

February 23, 2009
how do you know what knowledge is?

It’s quite a dilemma – not being able to directly check much of what we are exposed to and presented as ‘knowledge’. Unless we begin to discover our own ways of knowing (a very difficult proposition, but I think possible), then we likely remain wanderers in the fog of our own (and other’s) unconsciousness.

Of course, at least in any near future, it doesn’t seem like subconscious situational effects can be avoided – nor do I think they should be. Much of what we enjoy as part of our everyday capacities for thinking, feeling, and willing are rooted deeply and complexly in unconscious processes. Indeed, what is normally conscious for us is perhaps one of the tiniest slices out of what can be potentially conscious, and perhaps the potentially conscious is just the tiniest slice out of the full depth and breadth of the universe as a whole – or not (because, in accord with what I just said, this is an impossible determination, requiring consciousness to take place).

In any case, pretty much EVERY modern study that follows the basic scientific practices is a study in obfuscation, requiring for its potential success a decided ignorance of as many ‘attenuating’, ‘circumstantial’, ‘probabilistic’, or ‘random’ factors as possible. The more willfully ignorant a study becomes, the more exact are its pronouncements, and the more its knowledge is sequestered from the whole. This is why all studies require additional work to be re-connected to the complex actualities of the world, necessitating interpretation, reframing, and recontextualization.

This suggests a different way of performing ‘studies’, discovered long ago by Goethe and others, in which the situatedness, the contingency, the circumstantial, are all necessarily included aspects of any attempt to work with and understand a phenomenon.

February 21, 2009
distinguishing between the ego and “I”

Our experience of ourselves is in many ways completely mediated by aspects which are located beyond the normal boundary of the “I”. I’d like to offer one possible way of looking at the issue.

I approach this question concerning the boudaries of the “I” by taking into account the transformations of the “I” as it works through and within the physical body and the soul body on its path from death to life to death to life. To do so requires distinction between the ideas we have about our “I” and our unmediated, direct experience of our “I”, and more importantly between our “I” and what we can call our ego, on the basis of the usage of this term in the Western traditions (particularly psychology, which deals almost exclusively with the ego).

When incarnating, the human “I” experiences a period of darkness, which only gradually lifts throughout life, until (perhaps around the age of 21 or so) the first glimmerings of what I am referring to as the “I” become available to the experience of the ego, which is a structure that is present much earlier on, and is built up through a variety of relations between the burgeoning activities of the physical/soul bodies and the ‘outer’ worlds.

The incarnation of the “I” takes place not at birth, but much later, and sometimes not at all; this despite the fact that we each have the constructed ego that is constantly built up as a semi-permanent dialog between the inner activities of the body/soul and the various bodily and ensouled elements of our environment. This ego includes the remnants of the activity which is rightfully regarded as the spiritual activity of the “I” – thinking. Thus the ego becomes filled with thoughts but lacks the awareness of whence these thoughts originate. In the meantime (in accord with all the social, cultural, historical, familial, etc. ‘forces’ at work around all the activities of the aspects of the human being which are not the “I”) the ego maintains the false impression that it is the one doing the thinking.

This then leads us to the question about how we draw the boundary around what we consider to be our “I”, which turns out more often than not to be a question to the ego about the ego. There are no boundaries to the “I” in the normal sense, the “I” is a spiritual activity, a process. It is a wonderful aspect of the spiritual world that “I’s” are capable of penetrating and moving with each other; their activities can merge, coincide, and diverge. The idea of boundaries of the “I” only arises when we take our experience of the rules at work in the realm of physical bodies and our sense life and apply them to an arena in which no physical bodies or physical sense organs exist. In other words, it is like asking about the flavor of a trapezoid.

We can have ideas, thoughts about the boundaries of our ego, but the activity upon which such ideas are based rests only in the “I”. We can have the thought “My physical body only works because it includes trillions of bacteria and other organisms which I do not directly experience, but which science tells me are required for my process of digestion; if these microorganisms did not permeate my gut, I would be incapable of digesting my food.” This leads us to the thought that perhaps I’d better take a look at what I consider to be my ‘self’ – shouldn’t it include all the aspects necessary to maintain the activities of my physical body, which support then my capacity to think and experience?

We can thus, in our thought-life (not our thinking-life) come to the idea that the normal drawing of the boundary between ‘self’ and ‘other’ is in some ways quite spurious. There is then an attempt to fill the gap thus created (in thought) with other thoughts, which try to reorganize the connections made in thinking. So we say things, perhaps, like “Well, yes, ‘I’ really must include the bacteria in my gut” and so forth.

But all the while we are missing the very activity that is the source of all of these reconfigurations of our thought-life; our thinking. It is when we turn our attention to the thinking process itself that we start to come directly into contact with the “I” itself. This experience, the recognition of the “I” by the “I”, is not a thought, but is what can occur when thinking takes itself as its own object. In such a case, a completely different set of experiences become possible with respect to the question of the ‘boundaries’ of the self.

Moreover, what our ego keeps hidden from consciousness directly affects our perceptions and assumptions. It seems that the ego, in a sense, precisely constitutes its boundaries by this very omission. What I feel coming from my ego changes dramatically from situation to situation, not on the basis of what is included so much as on the basis of what is left out, and what’s more, on how it is left out.

The ‘mood’ around the process of the ego’s self-entrainment says more about my deeper nature than its explicit self-identifications ever could.

February 19, 2009
on destruction

The role of destruction, and of the working out of polarities, is a subject that has been dealt with an the alchemical tradition for a very long time. Alchemically, it is understood that the issue you are dealing with, in which you find yourself (the prima materia) MUST go through a process of putrefaction, of fermentation… the individual elements cannot by themselves produce a work of lasting value (a Great Work), but must be destroyed in order to be refined. The refined elements then have the capacity to ‘marry’ the other elements to form a higher, more integrated, more complex and simple unity which ennobles and embodies the transformation of the worst parts of ‘the matter’.

All diagnoses are misdiagnoses because they stay at the level of the overt fact, and do not take into account the necessary inclusion of relationship, reversal, and the whole. The image of the fireweed and the pinecone are examples in nature of the aspect of the Fire element in which destruction is required for new life. In this sense, the destruction is viewed not as a negative process but as a transformative one, in which the potentials of the lower state are realizable only through their passing away, and indeed, it is their very passing away which creates the space (Air element) into which the potential new state can flow, because room is made for it.

The same pattern occurs in the human being all the time – we do not transform without the heat of the Fire, also known as the Will – but not a will directed towards a specific absolute (an Earth), but what is known as an ‘open will’, which is just the part which maintains itself by transforming itself through its own death into a new state…

February 13, 2009
unknowing and the creative moment

There are some things about creativity that have been on my mind. I have been trying to hone in on the qualitative experience of the creative moment… what does it feel like to be creative? What kinds of qualities distinguish the feeling of being creative from other types of feelings, like the feeling of ‘producing’, ‘innovating’, and so forth? What makes a creative moment creative?

It seems to me that in the experience of the creative moment, there is always a place where knowing runs out… where consciousness finds itself in a state of openness, as if surrounded by space. In particular this feeling seems to be accompanied by the sense that the normal boundaries of the ego are loosened, expanded/expended, but not yet replaced or filled with anything. This is specifically true with respect to the actual genesis of the creative activity, while during the activity this sense can be replaced with a feeling which Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called ‘flow’.

In every case that I can think of (for myself, that is), creative moments are states of being characterizable by a sense of potential, of a sort of future-coming-into-the-present — but notably always without knowledge or specific anticipation. It is a very hard state to even think about because it seems that thinking itself — at least in the normal, ego-centered thinking of much of daily life — is suspended, as if in the air. And even in thinking ‘about’ the creative moment, there is almost a lacuna of consciousness around the creative moment itself, as if consciousness met a border that it could not cross with its normal configuration… so I have the feeling that it is as if some part of consciousness travels ‘underground’ or perhaps ‘above’, into the ‘sense of awaiting’ that permeates the surrounding ‘space’.

You can see that the normal tendencies of speech have a hard time when applied to a moment which seems to transcend encapsulation. One usage of languge serves to delineate, define, demarcate, depict, circumscribe, form, or otherwise pinpoint (alchemically this would be representative of the Earth element). My initial questions are, in a sense, Earth questions, with language leading towards and assuming this Earthy aspect. Yet by its very nature the object of the inquiry is perhaps unable to be Earthed – so I find a contradiction even in the asking of the question. Thus a paradox: if it were possible to actually describe in words the qualitative essence of a creative moment, the creative moment itself would necessarily remain undescribed, even de-described.

Therefore some questions:

Is language as evocative rather than descriptive enough of a tool to allow thinking about creativity to proceed?

Do all creative moments share some specific qualities, perhaps at a meta or meta-meta-level? Or is it impossible for creative moments to be bound at all by any possibile prescription?

With respect to the individual experiencing a creative moment, what kinds of processes occur qua the experienced sense of self/other? That is, what happens to the sense of self in such a moment?

Related: Are creative moments ever something that can be ‘mine’ in the same way that I can speak about (a perhaps naive) experience of ‘my’ pain, ‘my’ thoughts, and so forth?

Also related: To what extent do ‘others’ play a role in creative moments that ‘I’ experience?

Lastly: If we were seers, able to perceive the activities of the spiritual worlds, how would we describe what is experienced by a single human being in a creative moment?

February 11, 2009
coincident(al)

Knowing is essential, so that we can unknow.
Finding a way is essential to losing the path.
Adding brick to brick is essential to knock the wall down.

Knocking down walls is essential to create materials for new walls.
Losing the path is essential to find a new way.
Unknowing is essential to find new knowing.

This is not circularity
it is iterativity on themes of becoming
the way and the unway are coincident(al)
the new blossoms through death

February 7, 2009
tension

We must be capable BOTH of forming models AND of dissolving them. We shouldn’t either become model-less, nor bound by any model, including the one you are proposing.

Tensions must be maintained. Tensions must collapse. Tensions must be created.
Tensions are maintained. Tensions collapse. Tensions create.
Maintain tension. Collapse tension. Create tension.

February 5, 2009