[MysticalPhysicalism] A bit of physicalist mysticism

[Guest guest]

P: Excellent stuff! You truly have a gift for explaining how

the physical and the spiritual are not two. Give the URL

to your blog, George!. Do you have to be so bloody humble?

 

NNB

 

On Oct 8, 2006, at 2:26 PM, P. George Stewart wrote:

 

> Just wrote this in my blog today, thought it might be relevant here,

> FWIW:-

>

> You are the model of your world (or rather, the ongoing modelling of

> your world). Your experience, what you really, truly are, is the

> flashing into and out of existence, of an ongoing construction of a

> model of the world, and your place in it, in the neurological

> machinery of the brain. What it's like to be you is what it's like to

> be your " grey matter " as it is in itself, or rather, that particular

> delicate resonance in your grey matter that is most intimately

> involved in the modelling.

>

> But the model is part of the world, that is to say, its substance is

> spun out from world stuff (that subset of world stuff which is brain

> stuff) and it builds its models based on samples taken from its

> surroundings - the model isn't baseless, but is in fact an attempt to

> explain the spacings and timings of those very impingements of the

> external world on the skin, on the sensory receptors. The distinction

> between " inside " and " outside " is functional with regard to the

> multifaceted sensory interface and the skin bag that contains it (and

> which is itself one of the senses). This drive to preserve what's

> inside, what's " me " , to maintain its equilibrium, is the normal ego.

> The experiential flame is carried through the world by this motivation

> of the bodily machinery to keep stoking the biological furnace that

> keeps that flame alive - i.e. in the course of furthering evolution's

> directive to reproduce, the organism is driven to maintain its normal

> processes of life, and these normal processes include, as the merest

> gnat of a rider, the little flame of consciousness, with its shapes

> and patterns delicately, evanescently, mimicking the world outside,

> used and abused (as a model of the world) by all the whims, habits,

> directives, impulses, reasoned courses of action, etc., that are

> programmed by biology and inculcated by society and biography. (And

> when all this stuff gets too much, that's the unhealthy ego - it can

> drive the organism so much, and so ineptly, that it actually becomes

> sick.)

>

> But in fact the model is world too, through and through. The image is

> made of world-stuff.

>

> So the little flame of consciousness (almost literally, a sort of

> chemical flame), is world-stuff waking up. The consciousness doesn't

> " belong " just to the little body that happens to give it birth and

> carries it through life, it " belongs " to the Universe at large, it is

> the Universe's consciousness just as much as it is the body's.

>

> So Awakening is just letting the body's programming and drive ease off

> just enough so that the flame can relax into being the Universe's

> consciousness of Itself - into being a purely impersonal,

> non-judgemental model of the world, at the behest of no drive, no

> project to protect anything, merely the impartial observing and

> acknowlegement by the Universe of what It hath wrought. This can be a

> tremendous release of the bodily drives too, a total relaxation,

> unbinding, as the body is no longer gripped so tightly by the various

> drives and habits and decisions of life, as that little flame of

> consciousness, stricken with the wonderfulness of creation, groks the

> Universe as Itself.

>

>

>