Created August 12, 2022
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
This came through at 3am, I got out of bed and am writing it down.
Materialistic Accidentalism is a story we made up to explain reality to ourselves. In their heart of hearts, most of the people in the world today assume that the universe is an accident and that it is principally made up of matter. Most of the rest believe their religious explanation, and navigate through a wicked materialistic world as best they can, keeping to their articles of faith and training regarding the guard rails on their own behavior as best they can.
Let’s play a game. I’ll make up a story that is at least equally plausible as the latter two stories, Materialistic Accidentalism and religious creation explanations. Frankly, it will be more consistent with the latter, but that is not because of prejudgment or bias on my part, it just comes out that way as a result of logic. Here is my story:
Consciousness is a real thing in itself. Consciousness is the substrate, the primal content of the universe. Consciousness projects matter which pushes back when we push on it, which is really the processing of signals at the subatomic level of matter. Consciousness invented the brain to use the way we use our personal computers, to do the boring work for us.
The brain was our first personal computer.
War Reflects a Wrong Idea About Reality
The story that we each are separate is easy to believe because it sure feels that way. The sense of self is what consciousness is. It’s composed of coherent energy.
It’s conceivable that all of us together are cells in a single consciousness which has a richer, more multifaceted sense of self. Like the multifaceted eye of a fly on a higher level.
Not having, in our everyday state of consciousness, any awareness of such a connected reality of consciousness, we are alienated, we act selfishly, self-protectively, competitively, and sit in judgment of everyone else. In the end this leads to war and could lead to the entire destruction of the planet and everything on it. Looking at it from the perspective of our species, we are on our way to committing mass suicide, justified by lots of blather and by motivations which are dark humor if my story about who we are happens to turn out to be the real explanation. Like a man punching himself in the face. If we are in fact all one Being.
We are not here to accumulate land and absorb whole other countries, nor to rack up toys/material objects, praise and worship, fame, sex partners, power or money.
We are here to evolve as a consciousness. The road ahead, in my story, is that we will live again and again, and the long trend is upward to greater sanity and perceptual scope. Ultimately to being self-aware in the totality consciousness, the Original Self.
In the internal logic of my story/explanation of reality, competing against Accidental Materialism and the religious creation stories, the One Original Consciousness is what is creating each of our individual consciousnesses by populating us from within, looking out our eyes, as what we sense as OUR self. We are all avatars in the original video game.
What We Call the Subconscious Is Actually the Superconscious
In our present state of normal everyday consciousness, we are confused by such statements, since “sub” means “below” and “super” means “above”, it seems like a meaningless statement, an oxymoron. This linear black and white thinking is part of the limitation inherent in what we call normal consciousness.
What I’m saying is that what we call our subconscious is our real self, submerged in ego. The ego – a function of the brain, our personal inbuilt computer, the neural net built into our brains by our assimilated and unassimilated experiences – has taken over the castle of our mind. We now identify with the ego sub-sentience that is street-smart to, and resonant with, our ego dominated materialistic selfish Acceleritis-riddled culture, taking ego as our true self, when actually it is not. We have repressed our true self (what Freud called the id) and over-ridden it with the “out for number one” persona that takes over in early childhood.
Every now and then our real self tries to say something and that registers as a hunch. Or a dream, if we happen to be sleeping. Or, as flashes of true insight we get as we are lucky enough to slip into the Observer state or the Flow state. I’m positing that those higher state experiences are our true self, the self was born, breaking through the clouds.
Extra Motorific Competency
Another name for the Flow state might be Extra Motorific Competency, in terms of our ability to perform flawlessly in action. This is a takeoff of Extra Sensory Perception – ESP and EMC. Making the point that they are both aspects of the same thing: the arising of a more intelligent, competent, balanced and ethical part of ourselves, with unsuspected powers operating.
Both types of experiences – ESP and EMC – when we have them feel otherworldly, like nothing else we have ever experienced. They are Maslovian “peak experiences”. Numinous. What Freud called the “oceanic” feeling.
Observer state is a more subtle experience, that does not seem in any way “supernatural”. It is simply metacognition: being able to objectively consider one’s thoughts and feelings. The importance of the Observer state is that it is the doorway to Flow state. I’m reporting solely from my own experiences in saying that.
At 3am, half-asleep, when I started taking this down in scribbled notes I was experiencing it as taking dictation. This has been going on since I was a child. I hear whole sentences which excite me and I have to write them down so I don’t have to worry about not remembering it in the morning. I associate taking dictation in this way with inspiration in the classical sense used by Plato and metaphorized as the Muses. In modern slang it’s “channeling”. But channeling whom? Our true selves, what we now call our subconscious. Except that it is more powerful than what we call our conscious mind which – until we are in Observer state – is actually the ego, our internalized personal biocomputer.
These “magical” (that’s the way they feel) experiences of Flow state, ESP, taking dictation, are as real to me as everything else I experience, like inventing a new type of optimizer, or meeting my wife for the first time, or taking a vacation, or boiling eggs.
That is not scientific proof. But since it is real to me, and works to make me more effective in my life, I take my story as being the one I’m betting on. It’s pragmatic for me to do that because it works. When I ignore my hunches, or am cowed by being painted as “weird” by the imposing size of the ego culture, I do not perform at Flow state level.
I do expect that science will come around to validating my story. It might not happen in our current lifetimes. Science is on its way there as a result of relativity, quantum physics, and information theory. Consciousness is the “observer” in relativity. Consciousness “freezes probability waves” in quantum physics. Consciousness itself is information processing. Physicists and psychologists are divided between stories but tenure and security are tied to sticking with Materialistic Accidentalism until there is unassailable scientific proof of a different story. The ego culture is totalitarian in that way.
Coming back to religion. Above I wrote that my story competes with the religious creation stories. That was an oversimplification. My story could actually be the scientific explanation for their stories. For example, there can be little doubt that Jesus and Buddha experienced Flow state. My scifi novel The First Son is a fictionalized demonstration of how Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and other religions could have come from Flow state inspiration and taking dictation. My story and the religious stories are unified in that book and in Pandemonium: Live To All Devices, my newest scifi novel, set about thirty years in the future from today.
“God does not play dice with the universe.” –Einstein, denying Accidentalism
I set this nighttime dictation as a note in a bottle here to float out across the history of time… until it is found and considered by those whose minds are open to all possibilities not yet verified or disconfirmed by science.
Love to all,
Bill
