# Beyond Physicalism  ## Metadata - Author: - Full Title: Beyond Physicalism - Category: #books ## Highlights - passing, and still on the theme of fasting (an idea inherently hateful to a consumer society), we should note that the Greek Eleusinian mystery rites were a two-thousand-year-old repeatable experiment that, with the help of a nine-day fast plus a psychoactive kukeōn (brew), induced experiences in celebrants that convinced them of the reality of another world and of their own immortality (Wasson, Hofmann, & Ruck, 1978). It is possible to imagine experimental procedures that in ways yet to be devised will be the psychospiritual equivalent of the Eleusinian mysteries. We have the entheogenic technology; what’s missing is a living mythology and viable protocols. ([Location 2246](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=2246)) - beyond the lower stages of ordinary prayer Teresa identifies three higher stages termed the prayer of quiet, prayer of full union, and ecstasy proper, ([Location 6196](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=6196)) - Perhaps most significant in this context is sūtra III.18, which states that memory of past lives can be obtained by performance of saṃyama directly upon the impressions or saṃskāras pertaining to those lives, which are thought to be carried within the subtle body as the vehicle of transmigration but normally inaccessible. ([Location 6326](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=6326)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - For example, along with mastery of higher stages of samādhi comes the “dawning” of prātibha, a faculty of instantaneous direct perception or insight without the aid of physical senses or the lower mind (manas). ([Location 6370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=6370)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - real meaning of “intuition” (as contrasted with the relatively superficial phenomena discussed under the heading of “unconscious cerebration” ([Location 6376](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=6376)) - “cessation” is understood instead as cessation of misidentification with the modifications of the mind, freeing the yogin for more effective action in the world. ([Location 6541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=6541)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - when the elimination of egoity that accompanies ecstasy becomes a permanent trait, rather than a temporary state, one has entered the “mystical marriage,” the fourth and last of St. Teresa’s higher stages of orison, and there can be no doubt that the rare persons who have risen to that level, such as St. John of the Cross and St. Ignatius Loyola, as well as Teresa herself, have been powerful engines of practical worldly accomplishment. ([Location 6543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=6543)) - Abhinavagupta’s solution to the problem of consciousness, that is, how to link consciousness with the physical body, also draws on the bifurcation of the mental and the material (though keep in mind, as I mentioned earlier, that a more accurate labeling for his and indeed all of Indian philosophy would be the bifurcation between the conscious/sentient and the material, since “mind” proper (manas) is classified as mere matter). ([Location 7012](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=7012)) - is in principle accessible to all sentient beings but is usually not accessed by us because we have learned to identify ourselves as stained by three notions: (1) an identification with repercussions of former deeds known as karma mala, the stain of karma, (2) an identification with an essential sense of otherness, duality, māyīya mala, the stain of māyā, and (3) an essential and usually unarticulated conception of the self as inherently limited, aṇava mala, the stain of smallness. ([Location 7080](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=7080)) - Additionally, Atmanspacher and Fach’s model compares to Śaṅkara’s in that both hinge upon a category differential, a shift between levels of organizational principle in the distinctions they make—which is precisely how they both can accommodate an underlying monism in relation to a plural everyday world. The underlying monism is ontological and the everyday appearance is epistemological, thus encapsulating both in a way that avoids contradiction. Advaita Vedānta, with its emphasis on duality as a function of a shift in perception, operates similarly with an ontological monism and an epistemic dualism. ([Location 7203](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=7203)) - The claim of mokṣa, nirvāṇa, enlightenment and knowledge, if it is not mere book knowledge, is precisely a direct access to the ontic state of reality.[25] ([Location 7226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=7226)) - “We may as well acknowledge it, [scientific men] are, as such, mere specialists. . . .We are blind to our own blindness; but the world seems to declare us simply incapable of rising from narrowness and specialism to take broad view of any facts whatsoever” (CP 6.560). ([Location 8349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=8349)) - “Matter” is the most habituated thing we know of. Although it is “hide-bound with habit,” it never comes to the point of being totally habituated and totally predictable. There is always at least some very small degree of chance or freedom at work everywhere. This picture derives from Peirce’s notion that “natural laws [of physics]” are simply habits—fallible and subject to irregularities. ([Location 8435](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=8435)) - Agape is “the ardent impulse to fulfill another’s highest impulse” (CP 6.289), the desire that the love object flourish in its evolution and develop itself to the utmost. ([Location 8504](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=8504)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - All that can be said about it is that the guiding and inspiring energy of this process is God as the summum bonum, and that the final shape of things will be the ultimate manifestation of the summum bonum that is possible in this world. In this process the evolutionary love showered on the evolving being is not coercion, but supportive inspiration. ([Location 8513](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=8513)) - “infrared” extension of the spectrum of everyday conscious experience. But there is also an “ultraviolet” extension—the more interesting but less studied part of “the more”—consisting of levels of psychic organization characterized by increasing scope, precision, speed, and complexity of mental operations, and by capacities for supernormal phenomena such as psi and mystical experience that outstrip the explanatory resources of physicalism.[3] ([Location 9241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=9241)) - The conceptual frameworks presented in Part II, deriving from areas as diverse as modern physics (both quantum theory and relativity), mystically informed religious philosophies, and Western psychology and metaphysics, variously describe aspects of this hidden background of the everyday consciousness and/or its experienced world in terms of a Myers–James Subliminal Self; the quantum state of the universe and responses on the part of nature to our human questioning; the Pauli–Jung conception of an underlying ontic reality, the unus mundus, which amounts to a metaphysical interpretation of Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious in its later “psychoid” form; higher-dimensional subspaces or actuality planes in a “bulk” vs. “brane”; the Plotinian hypostases of the One, the Intellect (Nous) and its Intelligible World, and the World Soul; the primordial matter (prakṛti) and/or consciousness (Śiva, Brahman) of Indian philosophical traditions; the depths of inverted Leibnizian monads; Peirce’s synechism with its continuum of mind; or transphysical worlds built upon Whiteheadian process metaphysics. All involve in some form Bergson’s (1913) basic notion of “a consciousness overflowing the organism,” and all in their varying but complementary ways represent possible pathways toward reconciliation of science and spirituality. ([Location 9246](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=9246)) - “good” scientific theories, such as predictive power, testability, empirical fecundity, aesthetic appeal, pragmatic utility, conceptual clarity, consistency, and economy, and so forth as described for example by Chalmers (1976/1994), ([Location 9278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=9278)) - “True ecstasy I regard as a condition where the centre of consciousness changes from the supraliminal to the subliminal self, and realises the transcendental environment in place of the material” (pp. 567–568). ([Location 9641](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=9641)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir. ([Location 9715](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=9715)) - Sprigge himself ends up siding mostly with Bradley, and in his 1983 defense of absolute idealism he specifically points out its close kinship with what he considers to be the idealist monism of Advaita Vedānta, a philosophy touched upon in Chapter 10 above.[23] ([Location 9765](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=9765)) - Here we call upon a landmark work by Hartshorne and Reese (1953/2000), which systematically samples the history of serious and disciplined thought about the central religious questions as to the existence and character of God. Drawing upon selections from some fifty major thinkers, both Eastern and Western and from ancient to modern times, they construct what amounts to a systematic exposition and defense of panentheism—a third point of view, or tertium quid—which attempts to overcome the historical polarization between classical theism and pantheism, and which for them represents the culmination of millennia of philosophical theology. ([Location 9883](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=9883)) - He sees the universe as progressively unfolding in accordance with a principle of evolutionary love, cooperatively shaped by us and a necessary highest being of some unfathomable sort that is somehow simultaneously eternal and unchangeable yet engaged in a process of becoming, expressing itself temporally in the profusion of manifest forms in nature. He would surely endorse the opinion of Hartshorne and Reese (1953/2000, pp. 258–269), who classify him explicitly as a modern panentheist. ([Location 9940](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=9940)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Note: Pierce - To recapitulate: some form of idealistic evolutionary panentheism has emerged as our central theoretical tendency, driven both by advances in philosophical theology and by the expanded empiricism advocated in IM and throughout this book. ([Location 10002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=10002)) - humanly urgent and potentially consequential task of the present era. We agree with physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who spoke of the attempt to achieve an expanded worldview that embraces both “rational understanding and the mystical experience of unity” as the central “mythos” of our present age (Heisenberg, 1974, p. 38). ([Location 10059](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=10059)) - What we also need, of course, is something like a division of the National Institutes of Health specifically devoted to research on mystical and transpersonal experiences, complete with its own fund-raising postage stamp like that of the National Cancer Institute. It provides a sad commentary on the state of modern civilization that the entire worldwide history of psychical research has been funded by something like the cost of one or two trailing-edge military jet fighters. ([Location 10320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=10320)) - Some four hundred years later, Jacob Boehme developed a similar vision. A native of Görlitz on the borders of Bohemia, he was a shoemaker who in 1600 had a vision of the world’s fundamental essence: “The gate was opened unto me, so that in one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at a University. . . . For I saw and knew the Being of all beings . . . the birth or eternal generation of the Holy Trinity; the descent and origin of this world” (cited in Magee, 2001, p. 36). ([Location 10468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=10468)) - Hegel, for example, like Boehme and Oetinger, viewed human life as a progressive embodiment of God, but added a rich history of its emergence by identifying successive forms of consciousness (Gestalten des Bewusstseins) that transcend and integrate (aufheben) the ones that precede them. ([Location 10491](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=10491)) - that evolution is a fact (although its discovery has given rise to various theories about it); second, that our universe arises from and is constituted by a world-transcending supernature, call it the One, God, Brahman, the Absolute, Buddha-Nature, Allah, Geist, or the Dao; and third, that humans have a fundamental affinity or identity with that supernature, which can be known through immediate experience either spontaneously or by means of transformative practice. ([Location 10502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=10502)) - Henri Bergson (1935), who was awarded a Nobel Prize in literature for his philosophic writing, famously called the universe “a machine for the making of gods” and deemed mystics to be at evolution’s cutting edge (p. 275). ([Location 10621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=10621)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - To quote playwright Christopher Fry (1951), “Affairs are now soul size. The enterprise is exploration into God, where no nation’s foot has ever trodden yet” (p. 48). ([Location 10703](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00TW3ILMK&location=10703))