Category Archives: Metaphysics

The way out is up

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Can’t solve a problem on the level at which it were wrought.

So. Anyway. This is kind of cool. There’s a thing called Reverse Speech.

If human speech is recorded and played backwards, mixed amongst the gibberish at regular intervals can be heard very clear statements. These statements usually appear in short sentence form and are nearly always related to the forward speech. It appears constantly throughout language, so much so in fact, that it is believed to be a natural part of our speech processes.

The webpage has audio clips if you want to listen for yourself. Some are pretty amazing, especially the ones that aren’t taken from famous audio recordings (scroll down to the list at the bottom of this page). By which I mean, this isn’t muddled audio inkblot stuff — it really sounds like clearly spoken words.

Either a huge hoax or our subconscious minds are continuously encoding “secret” messages in our speech.

From the FAQ page, the phenomenon was discovered by one David Oates “after his tape deck became damaged and only played tapes backwards” and that we embed these sort of messages every 5-15 seconds as we talk.

Wild.

This sort of love, that sort of love

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A lot has been said about writing as an act of creation, so much so that we’ve probably become more jaded than we realize. Articulating experience via language is, after all, so simple a child can do it. And self-proclaimed Writers are ubiquitous. You’ve probably heard, as I have, that some 80 percent of Americans think they’ve got what it takes to be a writer. Those of us who take writing a bit more seriously are easily creeped out by such suggestions. “Keep it to yourself,” we mutter under our breath. “You’re turning my stomach. As is your prose.”

Yet even bad writing thrills the writer as it erupts. Why? Why? Why do so many of us feel a compulsion to articulate experience?

Perhaps because it represents an even more fundamental compulsion. Here’s from Jung’s memoir, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections — something he wrote after watching massive herds of animals grazing on a savanna in Africa:

. . . the cosmic meaning of consciousness became overwhelmingly clear to me. “What nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects,” say the alchemists. Man, I, in an invisible act of creation put the stamp of perfection on the world by giving it objective existence. This act we usually ascribe to the Creator alone, without considering that in so doing we view life as a machine calculated down to the last detail, which, along with the human psyche, runs on senselessly, obeying foreknown and predetermined rules. In such a cheerless clockwork fantasy there is no drama of man, world, and God; there is no “new day” leading to “new shores,” but only the dreariness of calculated processes . . . man is indispensable for the completion of creation . . . in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence — without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.

Writing, as an act, embodies the act of secondary creation. It objectifies existence, literally: all at once that which we know to have created is visible in three dimensions.

It doesn’t matter what kind of writing it is, whether it’s a blog post, or a novel, or an email to a friend, or a weepy entry in a private journal. It is a relief to do it. No matter how nonsensical the act itself make sense of our experience.

The mystery of words is that they are also, however, unruly creatures. You may think they are tools at your command, but they are also messengers. They dwell on the cusp between objective and unconscious reality; this is why they can have double meanings, or express sometimes things that we claim we didn’t intend them to express.

That same quality also makes them a delight, of course, which is why gaining a bit of skill as a writer makes the act even more pleasurable — the act of secondary creation, performed with some inkling of awareness, or rendered artfully enough that in partaking of it we begin to waken, even slightly — it’s a heady thing — it is why we recognize that some writing as Art.

Take love, for instance, plenty of examples here. A mystic will tell you that if you reach the leafy crown of the magical beanstalk ;-) you’ll discover all love is really The One Love. But down here in the world of foolishness and poverty and dirt and beans we have, instead, this sort of love and that sort of love. Then come along the secondary creators who play with the word. Ray Charles secularizes the gospel song “Jesus is All the World to Me” as “I Got A Woman,” and in so doing casts words of Christian love into the service of Romantic love. Sixty years later, Alison Krauss goes back the other way, recording a song about Christian love, only the object of her love is hidden, slyly, within the vernacular of romantic pop:

Am I a fool for hanging on?
Would I be a fool to be long gone?
When is daylight going to dawn
On my crazy faith?

The questions will not let me sleep
Answers buried way too deep
At the bottom of a lover’s leap
Made by crazy faith.

Lowell George’s fat man in the bathtub isn’t suffering (from Little Feat’s Dixie Chicken) unrequited love. He’s having trouble scoring drugs. That said, it’s no coincidence that being “in love” is a dopamine high — and ho ho ho, cocaine also happens to elevate the brain’s dopamine levels: even down here in the world of dirt and beans it’s easy to find overlaps, universality is also biological, the language overlaps, the poignancy of this sort of love overlaps the poignancy of that sort of love.

Spotcheck Billy got down on his hands and knees
He said “Hey momma, hey let me check your oil all right?”
She said “No, no honey, not tonight
Come back Monday, come back Tuesday, then I might.”

I said Juanita, my sweet Jaunita, what are you up to?
My Juanita
I said Jaunita, my sweet taquita, what are you up to?
My Juanita

An unanswerable question, of course. But there’s some relief to be had by putting it down on paper.

“Whatever she could lay her hands on”

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I’m fascinated by the idea of transformation: the idea that a person might be born one thing, and then through intention, will, perhaps practice, become something else.

If it happens at all, true transformation is exceedingly rare, although to appreciate how rare you need to look past appearances. Consider the picture painted by this review of a biography of Ava Gardner (“Ava Gardner: ‘Love is Nothing’,” by Lee Server), online at the Literary Review. Reviewer Frank McLynn writes that Gardner

exemplified the classic rags-to-riches fable. The seventh child of a North Carolina sharecropping tobacco farmer, she was what the unkind describe as poor white trailer trash, with accent and ambitions to match. The height of her aspirations was to be a secretary in New York, but she was ‘discovered’ from a chance snapshot in a photographer’s window and whisked away to Hollywood for the big star build-up, purely on the basis of her looks.

Her physical circumstances were radically altered. Yet if you read on in the article, you learn that Gardner lived the sort of chaotic, alcohol-sodden life that you can glimpse by flicking on an episode of Cops. The changes to her life were purely superficial.

A contemporary with a somewhat similar experience is Archie Leach — aka Cary Grant. Like Gardner, Grant was born into near-poverty, went to Hollywood, and assumed a life of wealth and glamour. As part of his apparent transformation, Grant changed his name as well as his accent. But was he really transformed? I don’t know. But he seems to have had doubts himself; he’s quoted as saying, “I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant, unsure of each, suspecting each.”

McLynn concludes his piece on Gardner:

As she herself often admitted, she was at root a simple country girl, with a country girl’s values and attitudes, pitchforked into a world of unreality simply because of her beauty. She grabbed whatever she could lay her hands on, and after all who could blame her?

I can’t blame anyone for grabbing what is handed them. But I also can’t give up the idea that there should be more — that as self-aware beings we should be doing more than reacting to what happens to us.

Assuming, of course, that the alternative is even possible.

Rousseau’s Dog

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That post title is a book title, so of course I had to blog about it ;-)

The book is by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, it’s about Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume, and it’s been reviewed by Darrin McMahon in the New York Times (registration required).

The “dog” refers to Rousseau’s delusional tendencies, but he also owned a dog named Sultan, who, McMahon writes, was “the only being with whom he could find the peace of true friendship in England.”

“Secular sermons”

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In the New Statesman, John Gray critiques both Wolpert (Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast–I blogged about that book yesterday) and Daniel C Dennett, Breaking the Spell: religion as a natural phenomenon.

From ape to . . . theologist

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At the London Times, John Carey reviews Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief, by Lewis Wolpert.

Given the growing muscularity of both neuroscience and evolutionary biology, it’s no surprise that some would reduce spirituality to a product of biological evolution. From the article:

Surveys suggest that religious people are happier, more optimistic, less prone to strokes and high blood pressure, more able to cope with life’s problems and less fearful of death than the irreligious. It follows that belief in the supernatural is an evolutionary advantage, and our ability to have such beliefs must, Wolpert deduces, have been partly determined by our genes.

Carey writes that the book has a chicken/egg conundrum; Wolpert fails to clarify which came first: the “causal thinking” that allowed us to become sophisticated tool-makers, or was it tool-making that led to our forebears selecting for causal thinking? Says Carey, “He can be found saying both things in different places . . .”

But there’s a parallel difficulty that Carey doesn’t call out, but is implied in the sentences that follow the excerpt above:

Religious people might rejoice at that, concluding that God has wired us up to believe in him. But for Wolpert, the wiring is no more divine than our guts or toenails, or any other part of our evolved anatomy.

No more divine — or no less?

Regarding Bodies

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Many intellectuals turned their physical backs on Descartes during the 20th century — no, wait, they actually turned their mental backs on Descartes in the 20th century, but since they were all materialists, it amounted to the same thing ;-)

I’m guessing the arguments for & against dualism will be explored in IB Perfect’s new University of No Where; if you’re feeling impatient, they’re also laid out in Wikipedia.

Philosophical arguments are a pleasure; they are the Cirque Du Soleil of the intellect. Then afterwards you go home and lie in bed, waiting for sleep, listening to the ticking of time, and the formerly convincing seems less so.

For instance, while I cannot prove to the satisfaction of any diehard materialist that my mind exists independently of my body, I can assert the following: I do not identify my self as my body.

I’m willing to bet this is fairly universal; it is so obviously the source of near-universal discomfort and angst: we view ourselves as subject to our physical bodies. They foist pain and illness upon us, their misshapen-ness (because who among us can claim to have a “perfect” physical body?) (and even if a minuscule minority can claim it, for how long? Five years? Ten, before age begins to degrade it?) causes frustration or despair. We may ignore it part of the time, but in our most private moments, our physical bodies again lay their claim on us, their enslavement of us; we are forced to serve them, to feed, to rest, to dress, to bathe them, to nurse their aches and pains.

Our bodies enable us to experience physical life, too, with its varied pleasures, but the arrangement is an uneasy one; whatever role a Lord may take in our minds (heh heh), it is our physical bodies that do the real taketh away-ing. It is the death of our physical bodies that shunts us aside, renders us only a memory in the minds of people who will themselves one day be dead, and on until every trace of us is extinguished, a callous regression we can do nothing to stop.

Yet we also cannot stop bargaining. And that, to my mind, is the knot that ties us to dualism even if dualism makes no sense — a knot tighter even than faith. We can chuckle at the scientologist’s theology, Xenu-damned thetans trapped in the decendents of cavemen indeed, yet even our diehard materialist is so trapped; his firmest argument must always be an argument against. A bargain. “This is how it is, so I must try not to care.” And with that thought, he drags his physical body out of bed to begin another of his numbered days.

I am trying, as an experiment, to love my body unconditionally. Even this is an act of dualism, of course: I/my body; my mind directing conversation at my body, only now I’m saying “let’s be friends” instead of “honestly, must you sprout cellulite there?”

Yet it is, at least, something of a reconciliation — no, more than that. I hold out a slim hope that it may be a step toward something even richer. For suppose the division between the mind and body is predicated on mistrust?

Here’s what I mean — you have to bear with me in a slight dualism for a moment (call it self-consciousness as a byproduct of the brain’s evolution, if you wish): our physical bodies are conceived and nine months later dropped from our mothers’ wombs; we then commence the excruciatingly slow process of learning to manipulate them. And with every every tumble, every skinned knee, every bout of stomach upset (what an astonishing thing it is, to be so sick one must vomit, to be possessed by the act of vomiting!) we learn that our bodies betray us.

Is this not the formative experience that shapes the way we regard our bodies?

So suppose we could unlearn it? Suppose as we hit our stride, in middle age, perhaps, we strike a new deal, and pledge trust instead? For no logical reason, of course, but simply because we can?

Is it possible that a new bond might form, and as it strengthens, is it possible that the self and the body might fuse, somehow? Perhaps even in terms of perception, but in any case in terms of self-identification?

And if so, what would that be like?

Neuroplasticity strikes again

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A couple of weeks ago, I posted about research that suggests the brains of some Buddhist monks generate more gamma waves than the brains of ordinary folks.

Science and Consciousness Review now has posted an interview with Dr. Sara Lazar. She and other researchers at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital have been comparing brain scans of meditators and non-meditators. The scans suggest

that longterm meditation may increase the thickness of the gray outer layer of cortex, where cortical cell bodies are located . . . An increase in the gray matter thickness could mean an increase in the number of neurons, but also, as the author points out, an increase in dendrites, glial cells or in the cerebral vasculature. Indeed, the finding may reflect a combination of these factors, all of which may contribute to a high-functioning cortex.

The article touches on mainstream implications of the research — might meditating help us stay sharper as we age, etc. But what intrigues me most is a theoretical question that I’ve not seen posed, as yet: might some sort of meditative practice enhance our ability to access different “states of consciousness” more readily? Mystics, like the Christian mystic/metaphysician Neville Goddard, seem to have an inherent ability to switch their attention to non-physical phenomena. Is this a skill that can be learned? And if so, what are the implications for Western spirituality?

Advertising on your mind?

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Marco Iacoboni, at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, used brain imaging to figure out which Super Bowl ads fired up the areas of the brain concerned with “reward and empathy.”

Iacoboni is the scientist who discovered “mirror neurons.” I blogged about him once before, here, speculating wildly that he’s discovered the biological basis for the metaphysician’s “one mind.”

(I emailed him after putting up that first post but he didn’t email back. Maybe I should send him a box of heart-shaped truffles?)

Can meditating change your brain?

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In a Wired article titled Buddha on the Brain, John Geirland writes about some research that I’d read about before (in a Sharon Begley science column in the Wall Street Journal):

In June 2002, [University of Wisconsin researcher Richard] Davidson’s associate Antoine Lutz positioned 128 electrodes on the head of Mattieu Ricard. A French-born monk from the Shechen Monastery in Katmandu, Ricard had racked up more than of 10,000 hours of meditation.

Lutz asked Ricard to meditate on “unconditional loving-kindness and compassion.” He immediately noticed powerful gamma activity – brain waves oscillating at roughly 40 cycles per second – indicating intensely focused thought. Gamma waves are usually weak and difficult to see. Those emanating from Ricard were easily visible, even in the raw EEG output. Moreover, oscillations from various parts of the cortex were synchronized – a phenomenon that sometimes occurs in patients under anesthesia.

The researchers had never seen anything like it. Worried that something might be wrong with their equipment or methods, they brought in more monks, as well as a control group of college students inexperienced in meditation. The monks produced gamma waves that were 30 times as strong as the students’. In addition, larger areas of the meditators’ brains were active, particularly in the left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for positive emotions.

This brings to mind something else I came across this weekend — an aside in a Weekly Standard article by Ralph Peters, quoted on Belmont Club:

What if Darwin was right conceptually, but failed to grasp that homo sapiens’ most powerful evolutionary strategy is faith?

In light of the fanaticism and violence that “faith” hath begot in some circles, it’s good to bear in mind that the malleability of the self can be harnessed for good, too.