# Consciousness Unbound  ## Metadata - Author: [[Kelly, Edward F., and Paul Marshall]] - Full Title: Consciousness Unbound - Category: #books ## Highlights - they intentionally avoided looking for any published evidence of accurate out-of-body perception (Greyson, Holden, & van Lommel, 2012). ([Location 946](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=946)) - Tantra is a comparative term used by scholars of Asian religions to describe any number of Asian philosophical, ritual, and practice systems that profess a bipolar but nondual vision of reality that consists of a transcendent form of Consciousness, Mind, or Godhead that emanates or expresses Itself, energetically and immanently, in and as the human body and the material universe. ([Location 8104](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=8104)) - the humanities are the practice of consciousness studying consciousness coded in culture. ([Location 8321](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=8321)) - Put in the starkest terms, the politics or hierarchy of knowledge in the university—the pecking order, as we say (on the farm), with the sciences and math on top and the humanities on the bottom—can fairly easily be explained with a single simple metaphysical principle: the more dead something is, the more real it is (and the more it can be manipulated) and, consequently, the more valued is its study (and manipulation). ([Location 8333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=8333)) - Most scholars, I suspect, would land somewhere in the middle today, in an inelegantly described “incomplete constructivism” that recognizes sameness but emphasizes difference. Sounds like “neutral” to me. Not very helpful. Who grows up wanting to be an “incomplete constructivist”? ([Location 8587](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=8587)) - Magic, after all, is all about making connections between things that are not mechanically connected. So, too, is comparison. To compare is to practice magic. To practice magic is to compare. ([Location 8673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=8673)) - If one reads long enough in the literature, this doctrinal core proclaimed by self-identified perennialists usually comes down to some kind of mystical union, identity, or nonduality between the human and the divine, be it framed in monotheistic or Buddhist or Hindu terms, depending on the specific author and his preferences. And, yes, it is always a “he,” with only a few rare exceptions, like Madame Blavatsky and her Secret Doctrine. ([Location 8699](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=8699)) - Traditional perennialist writers like the French convert to Islam Rene Guenon often display distinctly antimodern tendencies in that they place all real truth in some past revelation ([Location 8703](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=8703)) - Suddenly one flips and realizes, with Nisargadatta (2009), that “space and time are in you, not you in them” (p. 494). When these flipped individuals experience this shared sky of consciousness, they can and will make their local religious idioms work to express the sky’s spaciousness and shining nothingness.10 They ([Location 8784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=8784)) - Again, to stick to the world religions, just go read Shankara’s commentaries on the Upanishads. Or Meister Eckhart’s German sermons on the Gospels. Or Ibn al-Arabi in Bezels of Wisdom on becoming “a receptacle for the forms of all beliefs.” Or the kabbalistic hermeneutics of the Zohar. Or William Blake’s “The Everlasting Gospel.” Such texts look almost nothing like “normal Hinduism,” “normal Christianity,” “normal Islam,” or “normal Judaism.” ([Location 8791](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=8791)) - This is why I want to speak and write of an openly paradoxical, loosely fitting, messy accidental perennialism—not to affirm traditional perennialism but to subvert and move beyond both it and the reigning contextualism.11 Again, such an accidental perennialism is not what the historical religions have been about. Indeed, it is precisely what they have not been about. ([Location 8819](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=8819)) - Solaris the Metamorph, ([Location 8854](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=8854)) - On Solaris, as on Earth, physical objects and historical events can physically play out the intentions, dreams, desires, fears, and unconscious dynamics of human beings, as Nietzsche recognized in Thus Spoke Zarathustra ([Location 8861](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=8861)) ## New highlights added April 17, 2023 at 9:27 AM - In this volume, Velmans (Chapter 5) calls this the “inverse hard problem” and raises it several times. Similarly, Walach (2020), another advocate of dual-aspect monism, claims that both materialists and idealists share the problem of “making plausible how a categorically completely different entity, matter, or consciousness can be derived from the original substance” (pp. 7–8). Here the residual dualism of dual-aspect monism shows through, for Walach assumes that matter and consciousness are “categorically completely different,” just as dualists do. But the dualist separation of matter and mind into completely different categories is precisely the problematic assumption that monists should challenge. ([Location 9733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=9733)) - physicalism. However, idealisms very often do not deny the reality of things, such as people, trees, and rocks, or less evident things, such as atoms, molecules, space, time, and the universe as a whole. Rather, they reinterpret them in terms of experience, mind, and relations between subjects. ([Location 9786](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=9786)) - he makes universal consciousness fundamental: it is “a spatially unbound field of subjectivity whose particular patterns of excitation give rise to the myriad qualities of empirical experience.” Kastrup’s language of “excitation” has a physical feel, alluding as it does to elementary particles as patterns of excitation in a quantum field. ([Location 9853](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=9853)) - Or, as C. S. Peirce put it in his objective idealism, drawing on Schelling, “matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws” (Crabtree, 2015, pp. 428–429). ([Location 9976](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=9976)) - But even if James’s (1909a) hostile characterization of absolute idealism—that “unintelligible pantheistic monster”—were justified (pp. 46, 316), the possibility remains that some kind of idealist priority monism, respectful of the finite for its intrinsic value and receptive toward a broad empiricism, could be a strong candidate metaphysics. ([Location 10049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=10049)) - Monadology also better captures the plurality of cosmic mystical experiences and cosmic subjects (Marshall, 2019). ([Location 10089](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=10089)) - Alternatively, God could be identified with both the transcendent consciousness and the cosmic consciousness. The latter position can be considered a type of panentheism. ([Location 10210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=10210)) - I do express a preference for idealism, specifically a pluralistic, mo-nadological type, ([Location 10333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=10333)) - As summed up by Edward Kelly (2015b) toward the end of BP and reiterated in his epilogue to this volume, it is the conviction “that a tremendous conscious reality of some sort lies at the heart of the world, that we are intimately linked with that reality in the depths of our individual being, and that the universe as a whole is in some sense slowly waking up to itself, partly in conjunction with our conscious human choices and efforts” (p. 540). That is a vision of reality to inspire further exploration and a metaphysical compass to guide the way. ([Location 10342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08X19XS1V&location=10342))