Chris Ott considers our current philosophical problems to be the tragic result of psychological fallacies as old as Plato. He offers a new explanation for the universe that relies simply on an evolution of perception. His theory succeeds at accounting for the physical as well as the psychological--including mathematics, natural law, concrete objects, language, thought, and culture. A spellbinding journey to the roots of our assumptions.

Other books by Chris Ott

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Epistemology is one of my favorite subjects because it is central to my own theory of the evolution of perception. It will be clear how it relates as we go on.

Textbooks often define epistemology as “the theory of knowledge.” This is ridiculous, because there is no theory of knowledge. Plato once defined knowledge as “true justified belief,” and that was for a long time called the theory of knowledge. But to say knowledge is justified true belief only describes what knowledge would be if we had it, but it tells us nothing about when we know a belief is absolutely justified. What would justify our saying a belief was certain? I should be clear that we are talking about absolute certainty here when referring to something being “knowledge.” A guess or a hunch or a probable claim are not what we mean here by knowledge. Here we are referring to certainty, or what we could call “proven” beyond all possible doubt. That is the kind of “knowledge” a theory of knowledge is looking for.

Philosophers today agree that there is no current theory of knowledge.

Epistemology is the study of the question, how do we know if something is true, and is certainty even possible? So we could call it the study of knowledge.

In this essay we are going to cover the many ways that people seek to justify belief and talk about the problem of obtaining certainty.

In our daily lives we are constantly doing epistemology. Anytime we ask how we know something, evaluate the reliability of a source, or separate fact from fiction, we are engaging in epistemology. When someone tells us something or when we read something online, we frequently find ourselves wondering who to believe.

People often get into arguments over who to believe when they are faced with conflicting narratives. One source tries to convince us of X. Another insists just as strongly that X is absolutely false.

And this is made more complicated by the fact that the world is full of various types of liars. Some people are literally paid to lie to promote some belief to create a certain outcome, such as getting people to purchase a product or vote for a certain candidate. And there are also pathological liars who believe their own lies and even pass lie detector tests.

Lying and coping with liars is such a common part of the human experience that “Thou shalt not bear false witness” is one of the Ten Commandments. This is why we have a person place his hand on a Bible before testifying in court or taking an oath of office. And yet they still lie.

And there are certain people who confabulate. This means they don’t intend to lie, but fabricate imaginary experiences as compensation for loss of memory.

Courts

This problem makes separating fact from fiction a major part of the legal procedure. There is an art of cross examination. And there are many sorts of evidence that can be entered to “build a case.” What we call “best evidence,” a term used in law, is that evidence which convinces the greatest number. And so a jury is selected to hear and consider all the testimony and evidence and render their “opinion.” So, for all the effort of our justice system, which is honest effort at least in principle, at the end of the day what is “true” is a subjective judgment.

Historians

Historians also develop best practices for determining what actually took place in the past, and separate truth from legend. These include careful methods of reasoning to consider evidence carefully and divide fact from fiction. And yet, even among the finest scholars differences of opinion do exist, and new evidence or a new interpretation of evidence frequently can incite revision of belief. Again, even a consensus view among historians amounts to an opinion.

Science

People today are often conditioned to think the “scientific method” can determine any truth, and establish absolute certainty. This view about science has a name. It’s called “scientism.” However, such a view of science does not conform to the reality about how science actually works. The actual scientific method goes roughly like this:

• A new observation is made.

• A question is asked, usually dealing with its cause, about that observation.

• A hypothesis is proposed.

• An experiment is conceived and carried out to test the hypothesis.

• If the hypothesis appears to be corroborated by the results of the experiment, and this is repeated many times by other scientists, the status of the hypothesis is elevated to theory.

Science, conducted using the scientific method, never assigns a status of “fact.”

Why not?

The reason is that someone at any time in the future may come along with a new proposed explanation for the same observation, and a new experiment to test it. Science is then confronted with the problem of choosing between multiple theories for the same phenomenon.

Science in general does not want to make the same mistake that religions made in the past, of holding dogmatically to a belief, even when competing views arise. Aristotle’s geocentric theory (the theory that the sun and planets orbit the Earth) was the accepted cosmological model for nearly 2,000 years. Even when Nicolaus Copernicus introduced the heliocentric model in 1543, placing the sun at the center of the solar system, the Catholic Church resisted the change for another hundred years.

And today, numerous theories taught in physics classes get challenged. If you hear a person say any of the following, know there is some agenda behind it, for such statements do not comport with real science.

• “It’s settled science.” The fact that science is never “settled” is what separates it from religion.

• “99% of scientists agree.” Consensus of opinion is not proof something is true, and citing it as proof is a well established fallacy in informal logic called the “bandwagon fallacy.”

Therefore, real science is always satisfied with a degree of uncertainty.

Logic in Science

Many people assume science uses logic. They do, but not the way people think. It’s important to know the kind of logic science uses, how it uses it, and why it cannot be used to claim certainty.

There are four kinds of logic. Two are considered formal logic. We’ll discuss the other two briefly as well.

Deduction.

Deductive logic is always valid, meaning a properly formulated deductive argument can never be faulted for its reasoning. And yet, its conclusion can be 100% false. Let me explain.

If all men are mortal

And, if Socrates is a man

Then, it follows that Socrates is mortal

This is true as far as it goes. If the first premise is true, and the second premise is also true, then the conclusion has to be true. But this is solely by virtue of the arrangement of the words. That the conclusion is valid so long as the premises are true doesn’t tell you if the premises are true. The conclusion is only as true as the premises. But is it known for sure Socrates was a man? He might have been made up by Plato, and some people have proposed he was.

Deductive logic can’t tell you anything you didn’t already think, and it can’t tell you if something you think is true. So, deductive logic is useless in science, except to speak clearly. It amounts to ‘garbage in; garbage out.’ If you arrive thinking X and you use deductive logic you’ll leave thinking X.

Induction

Induction is the principle that if something tended to happen in the past, it is likely to repeat in the future. So, that things fall at a certain speed from a particular height above the Earth can be assumed to continue in the future, for it has always been observed to occur in the past. Therefore, we call it a “law.” Science definitely does use inductive logic all the time. In fact, science is based primarily on induction. Although as we will see it also uses a form called abduction, explained below.

The problem is, induction can never tell us what causes any law to recur. For this we are left only with theories. We can show that such and such regularly occurs as it does, but not why.

Informal Logic

There are also two forms of logic besides formal logic. The first of these are the informal fallacies, collectively called informal logic. These are simply determined by common sense. An example is the fallacy of saying something is untrue simply because the person who said it was flawed in some irrelevant way. This is called “ad hominem.” Obviously, reasonable scientists try to be aware of and avoid informal fallacies as much as possible.

Abduction

The final form of logic is abduction. Abduction is a form of reasoning that starts with an observation or incomplete set of facts and then seeks the simplest, most likely explanation for them. This is a fancy way of saying that one makes an “educated guess.” Scientists heavily rely on abduction to form hypotheses. The problem is that abduction is only guessing, however educated, and there is room for future alternative guesses. The problem then again becomes choosing between alternative guesses, and this is rarely as simple as it would first seem.

Didn’t Get the Memo

So, summarizing what we’ve covered, the problem of determining what is true is one for which there is no known solution. We simply cannot know things for certain, given the methods we have. There is always room for uncertainty, even in law, scholarly fields like history, and in science.

But now, let’s leave aside professional fields of inquiry, where even the most concerted efforts to find reliable ways to discern fact from fiction are fallible. Consider how hard it is for ordinary people in everyday life to discern between competing narratives they hear concerning products, theories in medicine, politicians, and advocates for all manner of things. Many people can’t even site the forms of logic described above. They are often forced to choose what to believe on the basis of fitting in with certain social groups, or following what is most momentarily fashionable to believe. Most think science is more infallible than it is, or, even worse, realizing it is fallible fall for some new pseudoscience with just as much zeal.

And what is surprising is that in spite of this difficulty in determining truth, most feel sure their own beliefs are “known” and “proven.” So much so, that someone who tells them an alternative they aren’t familiar with may seem crazy. Didn’t they get the “fact” memo that we all did?

So, then when I come to people with a short book about an alternative explanation for how we came to experience the things we do around us — The Evolution of Perception — what are they to make of that? Most assume that whatever it is I’m talking about, the “scientists” or the “professional philosophers” at the “ivy league colleges,” or the “governmental agencies” must know all this, and have solved it long ago. They must think, “Poor Mr. Ott. He didn’t get the memo.”

Best Evidence vs. No Evidence

So, now it should be clear that no evidence is proof. There is only “best evidence,” and what that is is determined by the number convinced by it. So a talented charismatic conman can prove his case more easily than an honest man.

Now we have talked about cases where there is at least evidence. And in many cases there is even good strong evidence.

But, what are we to make of cases where there is zero evidence? The theory of the evolution of perception is deeply concerned with these. That is why I spent these pages covering the limitation of good evidence. To adduce a fact is to cite it as evidence of something else being true. If no facts are solid proof of what even professional academics and scientists think, then what are we to make of dogmatically held beliefs for which absolutely no evidence of any kind is adduced?

And if it can be shown that none of the four kinds of logic can prove any fact to be true, what are we to make of beliefs for which no logical argument of any kind is offered?

The theory of the evolution of perception is concerned with just such a belief. It begins by pointing out that there is one assumption people have for which there is zero evidence and zero logic for believing it, yet prejudice is so old and ingrained in people that no amount of pointing this out threatens it.

And this is not just ordinary peasants, but distinguished gentry in ivory towers of learning where anyone who questions it is sidelined as an eccentric and a novelty.

That is “matter,” or more properly “the outer world.”

The Outer World is Not an Intuition People Have, They are Just Not Encouraged to Think About It

Every individual lives in the world he experiences. We could call this the ‘phenomenal world,” meaning the world of phenomenal experience. “Phenomenal” simply means pertaining to that which is experienced. I certainly don’t live in a world that I don’t experience.

And yet this is precisely what the educated gentry in the ivory towers of learning have insisted for 2,500 years. There is an “outer world,” meaning “outside” of our experiential world, and it is the real world — even though we do not directly perceive it, have zero evidence for it, and lack any logical argument that it exists.

So, the theory of the evolution of perception, which could also be called “the evolution of experience,” is not an alternative to some existing theory. A theory is a proposed explanation of something. But the “outer world” we cannot see explains absolutely nothing. In fact great amounts of intellectual energy is spent even trying to know what we are talking about.

More energy is spent avoiding the problem and gas-lighting students than solving it, as past efforts at proving its existence have been so fruitless.

The belief in this “outer world” has been called “common sense metaphysics.” Yet there is nothing “common” about the claim that we don’t see the real world.

People have been so confused by objections to the existence of the outer world, that they have taken to kicking rocks and waving their hands in the air to prove its existence.1

There’s nothing intuitive about the idea that we can’t see the real world.

There’s no empirical evidence that we can’t see the real world.

There’s no deductive, inductive, or abductive argument that we can’t see the real world.

Kicking a rock does not establish the existence of a second unseen outer world.

Waving one’s hand in the air in front of others does not prove the existence of an external world.

The concept of an evolution of perception simply begins on the premise that our shared experience of things around us is those objects — and proceeds to posit an evolutionary process involving experience to explain it.

Now this current paper is titled “Evidence.” What evidence do you have that you are experiencing things? You don’t need any evidence, because the very fact that you are experiencing this essay right now stands as proof that you are experiencing it — and hence that experience occurs. In fact, the fact that we are experiencing is the only truly self-evident fact we have, as its very factuality is its own infallible evidence. The proof of X is X. X. Therefore, X.

That things in a complex state evolved from things in a simpler state is the best explanation for current conditions is born out by virtually every field of contemporary science which has adopted this approach to explanation. So the fruitfulness of this new approach to explaining things in the sciences is evidence that it might be true of experience as well.

So, beginning with the premise that the idea of an evolution of perception is a plausible explanation for our current experience, I then use abduction, taking the dynamics of our current perception that we know about, especially from gestalt psychology, and propose a best explanation. I then test that explanation for its logical consistency, explanatory power, and parsimony, which are the three main qualities science looks for to choose best explanations.

If you have read this far, found this interesting, and would like to read further, all my books, papers, and videos are linked to from my website Chris Ott Hub, which you can link to here.

That may seem like a strange thing to say for a person whose main endeavor has been proposing a theory for the last 25 years, namely the theory of the evolution of perception. Let me explain what I mean when I say ‘beware of theories,’ and I think it will become more clear why that’s not such a contradiction.

Whenever I hear a new theory, my first reaction is to be skeptical. I’m much more interested in hearing facts. The facts I’m interested in learning are those derived from testimony, experience by experts, logical reasoning, or methods of science such as observation and testing. In those sources where you find facts there are often some theories that attempt to tie certain facts together. However, such sources state when they are delving into theory, supply alternative views where they exist, and theory itself plays a minor role.

But there are other sources that are heavy on theory and light on facts. That’s when I become suspicious. Where facts become subordinate to theory.

There have always been such theories. Such progenitors begin with some concern about nature and proceed to dive into their imaginations for answers. The connection between facts and reason snaps and the theories become more and more imaginable and evocative. Readers become so seduced by the evocative imagined images that they lose sight of how reason ties these to reality.

René Descartes proposed some of these, not just his mind-body imaginings, but also on gravity. Proposing how gravity was the result of vortices in the Earth without explaining how such vortices cause anything or what evidence he had that they existed.

Such thinking has been called ‘what if’ thinking. Such imagination-driven thinking continues today. Consider this quote by Albert Einstein from his book The World as I See It that perfectly captures the sentiment behind this method of inquiry.

Here’s the problem with such open-ended imagination as a source of inspiration in science. The images produced in the imagination are based on images perceived through the senses. Yet what we perceive with our senses ought to be what we are trying to explain! And not only ‘how is that there in our experience’ but also ‘how is it that we perceive it that way?’

That may sound like it’s getting off the topic and into psychology, but it’s not. It’s a real logical conundrum in the study of perception. How things are in themselves is not the same as how they are perceived through our senses. So, if we aren’t interested in how it is we perceive things as we do, then all our imaginary causes, no matter how evocative they may be, miss the topic and tell us nothing. And if we make the dreadful mistake of reifying those imagined images, we only add to the sum of things we have left to explain. For we have our invented entities, along with the perceived events they were invented to explain.

If I were to name some of these imagined entities that became popularized in the 20th century, I would get a lot of people commenting angrily and putting me down for ‘not getting’ the science. Such predictable over-reaction only demonstrates how emotionally seductive such images can become. To dismiss my point and fight instead for the sacrosanctity of these now wildly popular metaphors is what some call ideological possession, not real scientific reasoning.

So, when I say to beware of theories, I am referring to theories that rely on entities made up in imagination which are neither observed nor logically supported by facts. Materialism is one such theory. So was British idealism. So are modern String Theory, Multiverses, etc.

What makes the theory of an evolution of perception sui generis is that its entire logical framework is based on impugning such invented theoretical entities not supported by observation or reason. In fact the evolution of perception concept only works effectively when we eliminate every theoretical entity.

Some will say perception itself is theoretical. This absurdity has become popularized by the very people who have insisted the hardest on faith in their own theoretical entities. In fact, perception is neither an entity nor theoretical. Its occurrence is the only self-evident fact, and the starting point of all inquiry. What evidence do we have that conscious perception is occurring presently? The fact that it is occurring presently.

Perception occurs. All else is theory.

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For about 200 years, spanning most of the 18th and 19th centuries and a little beyond, Western philosophy was dominated by work on theories dealing in consciousness studies. Idealist schools — such as Subjective Idealism, Transcendental Idealism, Objective Idealism, Absolute Idealism, Transcendentalism, Phenomenology, and Hegelianism — were in favor.

At the start of the 20th century, there was a radical shift toward Materialism, starting at Cambridge and led by G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. By the middle of the 20th century, materialism fully dominated, replacing idealism as the only respectable path for academic philosophers.

This hundred year diversion, which included Radical Behaviorism and Machine Functionalism, which literally denied consciousness even existed, is finally passing into the dustbin of history. Hardly anyone in the world outside academia still believes it.

Materialism was never a true metaphysical theory. It was merely a placeholder for one that people sought — and the main method of seeking it was linguistic, ignoring the problems of materialism by pretending not to understand what words like “consciousness” even meant. This was the first time in the history of philosophy where gaslighting became a respectable form of teaching by discouraging students from looking in a certain direction.

A book discussing this trend toward gaslighting as a form of teaching in the 20th century is Words and Things: An Examination of, and an Attack on, Linguistic Philosophy by Ernest Gellner (1959).

Many, many books began coming out in about 2012 attacking Quantum physics as fake science. Nagel at NYU wrote a book whose title says it all: Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (2012). And the following year German physicist Alexander Unzicker wrote The Higgs Fake: How Particle Physicists Fooled the Nobel Committee.

I especially recommend the Substack article a friend recently forwarded to me, Letters for a Post-Material Future, subtitled Essays about the future of science, consciousness studies, evolution, spirituality, and the meaning of Life.

Letters for a Post-Material Future

Jeffrey Epstein and His Ties to Radical Scientific Materialism

Until recently, the big question was: “Who is in the Epstein files?” Increasingly, the more fitting question seems to be, “Who does not…

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7 months ago · 78 likes · 51 comments · Marco Masi

We’re definitely well into a swing back to emphasizing consciousness as the core principle underlying metaphysical reality.

So, what is real? I don’t mean this in a silly or frivolous way, but in a serious and philosophical sense. I’m not asking a rhetorical question with the New Age notion that ‘we all have our own truth’ in mind. I definitely do not believe that. We all have our opinions about reality, but they’re opinions about the same reality. Yet the question is a valid one. What exactly do we mean when we say the objects around us that we perceive are real?

No professional physicist would claim that the atoms and laws that supervene to produce the objects we experience, such as tables and chairs, behave like those objects. They are different. One set of qualities are sensible, the other quantifiable at best, and behave strangely.

The philosopher George Berkeley, who believed matter was a myth, still insisted that the objects we perceive, which he called ‘ideas,’ were real. What did he mean by that? He said they were real because they were solid, obeyed the laws of physics, were permanent, were experienced communally, and were made by God. What else do we mean by real?

Immanuel Kant believed space and time were not real, but merely mental constructs we use to organize sense data in an intelligible way. Yet from a sensible perspective, we meet with these objects as if they were in space and time. Still he believed emphatically that they were real. Only that in themselves they are not actually as we perceive them.

The idea that the world is, at its core, exactly as it appears to our senses, is called naive realism. It’s the opinion people have who don’t understand neurology.

But the fact that things in reality are not as they appear to us brings up problems. For instance, if several people enter a room and perceive the same furniture, feel it, touch it, and report all the same qualities — what other thing could one insist on before calling those things ‘real?’

In The Matrix, Cyber betrays his companions and rats on them in exchange for being rich in the matrix. In the scene where he negotiates his compensation he tastes a morsel of illusory steak, satisfied with the taste.

Is there something that Cyber is missing that we in ‘reality’ enjoy? If you think there is, you have to ask yourself what that is exactly.

Now besides making us wonder about what we mean by calling things ‘real,’ The Matrix also brings up another issue in philosophy called the mind-body problem.

As said, the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed that the world as it is in itself is different from how it appears to our senses. Today, physicists have come to agree with this assessment. How things are in themselves is nothing like how they appear to our senses.

This fact raises the following question. If the real world is not as it appears to us, what can we say with certainty about it? What exactly do we even mean by referring to a ‘real world.’ If we picture it we are projecting our experience onto it.

Of course, in the movie The Matrix there is a clear difference between what we would call the ‘actual world’ (largely decimated by an unexplained cataclysm in the distant past) and the simulation of that original world created by The Architect to keep people trapped in a prison of illusion. For those who don’t know, in the plot of The Matrix ‘the Architect’ is a specialized sentient computer program and primary creator of the Matrix. He serves as the superintendent of the system. He describes himself as the “father” of the simulation, tasked with creating a controlled environment to keep the human population docile.

Here what we would mean by calling one world ‘real’ and the other ‘not real’ is obvious.

One is the original world used as a model to create the simulation. In other words, one is original and the other is a copy.

But, if you understand neurology, in either case (whether we’re talking about the real world or the simulation) Neo is only experiencing sensations generated by his brain to represent a world he could never directly experience. Therefore, Neo has no real way to compare his experience to it. This diagram illustrates the problem.

And if you grasp this you see there is no actual coherent meaning to taking a red or blue pill as offered to Neo by Morpheus in The Matrix.

For Orpheus is offering Neo a choice that is not possible in real life. It only works in the fantasy world of the movie.

But this isn’t even the biggest part of the problem that faces us philosophically when we go to think about reality. Science has scenarios about the ‘outside world’ we don’t directly perceive (the one causing our experience that we cannot experience). The problem is that all the facts that science assumes about the outside world are based on projections of things we find in our sense experience. In other words, we are projecting effects onto causes.

Obviously our ordinary daily sense experience of the world around us is the result of a process. By projecting aspects of that experience back into the unknown and unknowable causal process, we are committing a fallacy known in philosophy as the historical fallacy. The historical fallacy is committed when we read something into a process that is responsible for bringing that thing about.

A set of considerations, which hold good only because of a completed process, is read into the content of the process which conditions this completed result. A state of things characterizing an outcome is regarded as a true description of the events which led up to this outcome; when, as a matter of fact, if this outcome had already been in existence, there would have been no necessity for the process.1

The nature of our experience is the result of a process we can’t observe. We must refrain from reading an outcome of that process back into that process, but this is exactly what science has always done.

First is the central subject I constantly refer to as the evolution of perception idea, or sometimes simply EOP. I’ve summarized the idea many times in other papers. But I feel I can do so even more clearly and simply. I want to show what questions EOP answers and why its answer is fundamentally different from answers we’ve heard before.

At its core EOP represents a very different way of approaching the problem of causation. What is the cause of phenomena we perceive around ourselves? This new approach is not only applied to cases of individual phenomena, but even to the macrocosm of the Universe itself.

The way questions of cause have always been approached in the past is to posit a theoretical thing as the cause. Our answers came down to answering the “What” question. In EOP, the question is changed to “How” that phenomenon came about.

This is the difference between positing a thing to explain something we perceive and positing a process.

Let me give a few examples of the first approach, the thing approach. Ancient people explained phenomena by positing the existence of spirits — often conceived as hidden people or animal creatures.

In time such spirits evolved into pantheons of gods.

As the notion of hidden gods came to be seen as primitive and a bit silly, a group of philosophers Aristotle called ‘natural philosophers’ (what we might now call scientists) revised their method of explanation by theorizing the existence of causally responsible hidden substances. Anaximander postulated the presence of an imperceptible substance he called apeiron to explain virtually everything. Leucippus posited imperceptible atoms.

Much later, in the 20th century, material scientists were still doing the same thing. Multiverses, portals, bent space, dark matter, strange energy, and superstrings are just a few examples of occult entities in our modern times. I use the word ‘occult’ in its philosophical sense as hidden from our senses.

EOP proposes that these answers are all part of a single pattern of approaching causation by asking what caused a thing to occur rather than how it came to occur. In my book Evolution of Perception Re-Explained I give examples from recent science where scientists are seeking for explanatory processes. While there are many examples one could give, I emphasize developments in plate tectonics in the 1970s.

Using this same principle of process, we seek for ongoing processes we can observe in our perceptual dynamics. Using developments in gestalt psychology we can isolate what I call perceptual schemas. We can easily discover such schemas in our own acts of perceiving. A huge part of my writing is dedicated to clarifying what I mean by such schemas and pointing out their constant operation.

By positing such a causally responsible process of evolving perceptual schemas to explain many things we perceive, many previously considered obligatory theoretical entities are found to be unnecessary. The new system of an evolution of perception obviates the need for countless things no one could prove exist — because they don’t.

Meher Baba

Another thing I wish to clarify is the constant reference after my first book to Meher Baba. I have explained this connection many times but I want to explain it again. If I read a paper on cosmology in which the author referred to an Eastern master I didn’t know much about, I would be turned off. I would assume this author had a secondary motive of converting people to some weird cult.

In my case, nothing could be further from the truth. I am not a member of any organization related to Meher Baba. I do not have a card. I do not make donations. I live around many Baba followers and I grew up around them and like some of them. But my views on EOP are not from his writing. However, over the years I grew more and more cognizant of the fact that knowing about his books had a big influence on me in developing EOP, and I’ve felt morally obligated to acknowledge that fact and give credit where it’s due.

I couldn’t care less what religion anyone else is, and even respect and admire people of all kinds of faiths, and have also admired many atheists. One of my favorite atheists was Bertrand Russell.

But, I also mention Meher Baba because there is no other source for many of the things I speculate about. Whether one considers Meher Baba a fraud or a mad man, it makes no difference to me. But there are many aspects to his teaching that flesh out EOP and give it a larger dimension, especially his teachings on sanskaras and his Ten Principal States of God, which approaches the subject of God in a way that no other writer ever has.

In short, if I hadn’t read the works of Meher Baba in my youth I never would have been able to conceive of the evolution of perception. And for that I’m very grateful. But the evolution of perception idea stands up by itself, on its own merits, even if you never looked up a word Meher Baba wrote. So I ask people to have an open mind, and understand why I quote Meher Baba from his many books. My connection to his writings is mostly intellectual and my spiritual aspirations do not follow any rituals or prayers his followers might practice.

“The very foundation of all my explanations is sanskaras, which no religion has explained.” – Meher Baba1

‘Sanskara’ is a Sanskrit word that means the impressions left on the mind by past experiences. These in turn color future experiences and thus affect our reactions. Meher Baba uses the words “sanskaras” and “impressions” interchangeably. We will do likewise here.

Virtually all of Baba’s teachings relate in some way to the acquisition and termination of sanskaras (impressions on the mind). They are basic to his explanations of evolution, reincarnation, and God realization. These three phases make up what Baba calls the spiritual journey that each soul must make. So the concept of sanskaras is literally intertwined with Baba’s theme of Creation.2

There are two main sources for Baba’s teaching about sanskaras. The first is his book Discourses.3 The topic is covered in the chapters:

THE FORMATION AND FUNCTION OF SANSKARAS ……………… 32

THE REMOVAL OF SANSKARAS ………………………….. 40

The second is God Speaks.4 See especially Parts 1 & 2.

STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS ……………… 1

THE INITIAL URGE AND THE JOURNEY OF EVOLVING CONSCIOUSNESS ……………… 95

The page numbers above are from the 7th edition of Discourses and the 1973 2nd edition of God Speaks. Links to free copies of both are provided in the footnotes. So if I don’t do a good job explaining these points the reader has the original sources they can refer to.

Here we’ll be discussing three important implications of sanskaras. The first is how our bodies form in evolution, as well as how they form from one lifetime to the next in reincarnation. The second is how Baba encourages people self-regulate their behavior in terms of an understanding of sanskaras, rather than simply laying down a new set of precepts. And finally why it is that if we understand how sanskaras work we see it is impossible to be ‘trapped in the wrong body,’ a fear that is a symptom of a psychological condition known as ‘dysphoria.’

EVOLUTION

Before we begin to discuss Baba’s teaching on evolution we need to understand something about Baba’s teaching in general. Meher Baba’s teaching describes life in terms of experience. A thing like a cup or a spoon is most truly and fundamentally only an experience of a cup or a spoon. The evolution of the Universe is really an evolution of experience of that Universe. So when Baba refers to the evolving Universe he is referring to our evolving shared experience of it. For Baba there is no underlying substance to things perceived other than their being perceived.

This is a very important thing to grasp when studying Baba’s writing. I originally did not understand it myself. Experience makes the object; the object does not make experience. So when Baba speaks of evolving “forms,” which means “shapes,” he is really speaking about a state of consciousness or Umwelt6 of a particular species or individual creature. Each new state in that evolution is a new type of experience, which Baba calls a “State of Consciousness.”

What causes these changes in the “State of Consciousness” are sanskaras.

So in the formation of the Universe, it was the sanskaras (impressions) gathered over a lifespan as a particular form that then forged the next media (form) suitable for the expression and exhaustion of those impressions. In other words it is the sanskaras that forge each new form in evolution.

“But this next medium or form is always created and moulded of the consolidated impressions of the last species of form with which the soul associated and identified itself and which (impressions) were retained by the consciousness of the soul even when dissociated from the form.”7

Notice something very important that will come up later. A soul cannot be “in the wrong body.” This is because the body is the result of the impressions, not the other way around. The consolidated impressions gathered by a soul at any particular time make up what we normally mean by who they are. And since the impressions produce the body, the body is always perfectly suitable for each individual.

Baba teaches that the purpose of this evolutionary process is to develop consciousness. Hence the sense of individuality of the soul actually emerges out of this process. With each new experience comes sanskaras that require expression through more and more complex media, and in turn causes greater awareness or consciousness. Once the human form is reached the evolution of consciousness (which was the purpose of evolution) is complete, and thus evolution ends.

REINCARNATION

Once a soul has reached the human state, physical evolution stops because its purpose has been achieved. From that point forward it begins what Baba calls “reincarnation.”8

Baba does not teach reincarnation as it has historically been taught in other philosophical and religious traditions such as in ancient Greek metempsychosis9 (passing of the soul at death into another body, human or animal) or ‘transmigration of the soul’ as taught in Indic religions and Western theosophy.10 Such teachings envision the soul as a thing in space that moves about and leaves and invades the body. As Baba’s official biographer C.B. Purdom wrote, “Reincarnation is not ‘the transmigration of souls’, which in its crude form is fantasy.”11

So if Baba did not teach reincarnation as transmigration of the soul, how did he explain it? In Baba’s teaching it is the sanskaras acquired in the previous life that forge the new body. And the only connection between the soul and the body is one of identification. Thus what we call ‘birth’ is really the soul identifying with the body or associating with the body, and what we call ‘death’ is really the soul simply disassociating from it. Nothing comes or goes.

This identification of God in tum gives rise to an apparently unending chain of associations and dissociations, or the so-called births and deaths, of forms and beings which continue to form and assert and then dwindle away in the Nothingness, leaving behind the legacy of impressions which in tum again lead the evolving consciousness of God to identify Himself with yet another form moulded of the very impressions left behind by the form that dwindled away.

Note that such a psychic connection between the soul and body completely eliminates the Cartesian mind-body problem in philosophy.

So both in an evolutionary and reincarnational context, it is the impressions that forge new media. In reincarnation sanskaras gathered from past experience also color and shape how we look upon future experiences and because of this they strongly determine how we react to new experience and hence they are the cause of karma.12

ETHICS

This finally brings us to how sanskaras are intertwined with Baba’s approach to teaching how to make wise moral judgments about right and wrong action. In other words, his approach to ethics.

To understand Baba’s ethics one needs to first understand what Baba teaches is the purpose of life and how one can achieve it. That goal he calls “God-realization” and it is the realization eventually achieved by every soul that it is in fact God. This is not simply an intellectual idea one gets, but is an actual experience that occurs when all of the sanskaras acquired over the course of evolution and reincarnation are wiped out. Baba teaches that all souls reach this goal eventually. There is no eternal damnation in Baba’s teaching. Today’s sinner is tomorrow’s saint.

So what stands as good and bad action? According to Baba, if we understand what the purpose of life is, we are best weighing our actions in terms of how swiftly and straightforwardly they lead to the spiritual goal. And what we might call bad is what retards that progress and leads to more suffering.

As just said, for Baba the goal is God-realization. God-realization means the eternal emancipation of the soul from all sanskaras and therefore all limitation and suffering to exist in eternal bliss. This occurs only when all of the sanskaras acquired through one’s lengthy evolution and reincarnation process are finally completely expunged, exhausted, or wiped out. This wiping out of the final traces of mental conditioning caused by the sanskaras can be achieved in many ways and by many methods called yogas. But even without effort, it is a foregone conclusion that every soul will eventually achieve this sublime state because it is the very purpose of Creation.

“The happiness of God-realization is self-sustained, eternally fresh and unfailing, boundless and indescribable; and it is for this happiness that the world has sprung into existence.”13

Notice that Baba’s method to prescribing the best behavior is very different from how religions have usually done so in the past. In the past religious leaders attempted to moral behavior by laying down precepts. Precepts are a general rules intended to regulate behavior and thought. To see an example one need look no further than the Ten Commandments.

• Thou shalt honor thy father and mother.

• Thou shalt not kill.

• Thou shalt not commit adultery.

• Thou shalt not steal.

These are excellent precepts. But people often do not understand why they are doing them, except out of religious duty. Baba commented on this very point. According to him, it had to do with the limitation of people’s intellectual capacity in the past. Speaking of the ancient Indian Rishis14 he said:

“Looking at the average mentality of the masses of their time, the Rishis could do no better than issue cut and dried instructions as to prayers, penance and austerities, investing the whole affair with a religious importance rather than give a rational and spiritual elucidation.”15

But times have changed. Today, people are more educated than in the past and thus more capable of grasping difficult concepts such as sanskaras and their formation and effect.16 Ideas like psychology, processes, and evolution, which would have made no sense to people of the past, are now par for the course.

Therefore, Baba goes beyond the simple practice of laying down new precepts for people to follow. He delves into why we have the propensities we do, and what the spiritual consequences of certain actions are.

Some actions add binding, meaning they produce more complex sanskaras that are hard to unwind later. Other actions leave light sanskaras, easy to remove, or even help to unwind previous sanskaras. So good and bad are determined by how well they move us toward the real goal. Bad actions are things like murder, promiscuity, dishonesty, etc. which Baba says are very binding. Good actions are things like forgiveness, charity, kindness, and so forth, that help to unbind us.

Now, Baba teaches that all actions create some sanskaras. But sanskaras that result from good actions are easier to unravel oneself from than the sanskaras made from bad actions such as cruelty, stealing, and promiscuity. Baba gives the analogy of having one’s hands and feet bound vs. having only one’s feet bound. If one’s feet alone are bound one still has one’s hands to untie them.So this is, in essence, the ethical approach of Baba. Actions are best guided by an understanding of sanskaras in light of the underlying purpose of life to become free of all binding impressions. But I should add a few caveats to this.

Naturally, Baba’s discourses on good and evil are not simply limited to a consideration of sanskaras. It would be hard to be inspired to higher actions simply by such a technical concept. Therefore Baba also sometimes says to be good simply for the sake of goodness — which is even higher than just consideration of one’s own consequences. Another way Baba tried to inspire higher actions was to suggest that if one loved his master, he should try to do only those actions he would do in the presence of his master.

Another way Baba inspires goodness is to constantly emphasize love. For instance he suggests that people try to love everyone the way one loves the one they love the most. This is interesting, because even tyrants love someone. So he comes to where people live.

And there is also loving him as a master. For those who love Baba, he said, “If you have the love for me that Saint Francis had for Jesus, then not only will you realize me, but you will please me.”17 Such love for the master in India is called Bhakti yoga.

See also Baba’s Twelve Ways of Realising Me18 and How to Love God messages.19

All these are techniques that Baba gave for keeping one’s focus on doing good or higher actions and avoiding lower ones. But underlying all of them remains the principle of emancipation from sanskaras in pursuit of the spiritual goal.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” – William Blake20

DYSPHORIA

In psychiatry dysphoria refers to a feeling of being ill at ease. The sensation is often accompanied by a feeling of being uncomfortable in one’s body or of being in the wrong body. In recent decades the term ‘gender dysphoria’ has been popularized to describe the feeling that one is a female trapped in a male body or visa versa. It increasingly afflicts young people. There are significant upticks in diagnoses and individuals seeking treatment for gender dysphoria in recent years. While actual incidence may be rising, the increased visibility and acceptance of transgender identities and a greater societal openness to diverse gender expressions likely also contribute to the higher numbers of people identifying and seeking help for gender dysphoria.

Although they are not aware of it, the idea that it is possible to be stuck in the wrong body is actually a byproduct of Cartesian dualism, an old but still popular superstition about the connection between the soul and the body. In such dualism, the soul is imagined to be a kind of invisible thing that enters the body at birth and departs it after death

.In this conception, the soul sits somewhere inside the body and sort of drives it about. The conception is famously the cause of the so-called ‘mind-body problem.’

In Meher Baba’s teaching there is no such thing as thins mind-body connection or soul-like thing inside the body. I’ve described description of the association between the soul and the body. The soul is omnipresent and eternal and it merely associates itself with the body and experiences itself as its body when alive. Death is merely the disassociation with the body when the body fails. It is not the departure of a thing.

Secondly, the body one with dysphoria imagines he or she is “in” is not some random body. The sanskaras (which include one’s attitudes and sense of identity) left behind at the end of the previous life serve as the mould for the new body. In other words it is the closest we could ever come to the ‘authentic personal self’ that creates the body. For that reason no one could ever be in the ‘wrong’ body.

Because our culture remains fixated on outmoded notions of mind-body dualism, instead of giving these young people suffering from dysphoria the counseling they need to come to terms with reality and accept their bodies, many in the psychiatric community actually encourage the young people to pursue the idea — normalizing dysphoria. In fact, gender dysphoria has become so normalized that the term ‘gender incongruence’ is becoming preferred over dysphoria in the view that dysphoria connotes a judgment. ‘Incongruent’ simply means incompatible. Thus the new wording sends the message that the feeling one is in the ‘wrong body’ might actually reflect a metaphysical fact, implying the adolescent suffering from the condition might actually be misplaced in his or her body.

As a result of this absurd normalization of an epidemic of dread based purely on a superstition, young people are increasingly being advised to seek ‘gender reassignment’ procedures.

Baba would explain that all of this is nonsense. From the point of view of sanskaras a person cannot be in the “wrong body” because one’s body is the product of one’s own sanskaras. And it is thus the perfect instrument for you to work out what you need to in your present life.

Baba actually referred to gender dysphoria, calling it a delusion.

“It is a self-delusion for any being in male form to imagine itself as a female, and vice versa.”21

This well-known image is of an etching rendered by the famous Italian engraver Luigi Schiavonetti for Robert Blair’s poem The Grave, published around 1808-1813. The design for the etching was based on a drawing originally done by English artist and poet William Blake. It is titled “The Soul hovering over the Body reluctantly parting with Life.” I thought this image would serve as a good launching-off point for an essay on some of the minor though more complex details about Meher Baba’s teaching on the soul and its connection to the physical body. Notice that the title of this etching implies it is meant to portray a soul reluctantly leaving the body.

As I already explained in my previous essay, The Soul vs. the Subtle Body, Meher Baba gives a very unique teaching about the soul. It is nothing like the Christian conception of it, as something that leaves the body at death. Although there is something called “the subtle body” that does.

For reference, Baba’s teaching has much in common with the Hindu school known as Vedantism and the Sufi school of Wujudiyyah. Both of these traditions teach the concept that every soul is in fact the One Over-Soul. These are not hard to look up. But Baba goes much further in explaining how exactly all this works.

As I’ve explained many times, for Baba the connection between the soul and the physical body is not one of location, as in the picture above, but one of association and identification. The soul is not a finite thing located in space as it is depicted in the etching, which actually depicts a person’s subtle body leaving his or her body.

This is because the soul is really God and is therefore infinite and transcends space. In Baba’s teaching there is only One Soul and that Soul is God. You are that soul reading this paper. Your sense of being an individual soul demarcated from other souls is a mirage caused by impressions gathered from experiences over the course of experiencing yourself as countless forms in evolution followed by many human lifetimes. These gathered impressions form a kind of psychic partition — with a sense of yourself as finite with finite mind and sense of ego.

All sub-humans, such as plants and animals, along with all humans, are in fact this One infinite Soul. These impressions form the many senses of individuality.

“In truth, there is only one cosmic soul which gathers experience through all the different forms. . .”1

And in the Intelligence Notebooks, Meher Baba makes this even more clear.

“That One is the only One who hears through all ears, smells through all noses, speaks through all tongues, and thinks through all minds. That same One - God - meaning the same One Self, the same One Paramatma, exists in all minds and all bodies. Just as there are different minds and different bodies, so accordingly the experiences of the universe are different. But the One who experiences the Illusion, the Imagination, the universe, through the mediums of these different minds and different bodies is that same One Self alone.”2

So, the above depiction based on a drawing by William Blake could never be an accurate depiction of a soul departing from a human body, at least not in Meher Baba’s teaching. It is, however, how souls have generally been traditionally imagined by religious people throughout history, as is testified by the etching’s own caption, “The Soul hovering over the Body reluctantly parting with Life. How wishfully she looks On all she’s leaving, now no longer her’s!”

However, it could be seen as a reasonable depiction of what Baba calls a subtle body. Refer to page 4 of my essay The Soul vs. the Subtle Body. I want to add a few more facts about the subtle body that Baba says we have. The subtle body appears to be a second etherial body that occupies the same space as your physical one and retains the form of the physical body when a person dies. In light of all that the depiction above might be a somewhat accurate depiction of it. Between lifetimes, the impressions left over from a person’s previous life reshape the subtle body into that which it will take in the next life. Also, the subtle body begins to evolve immediately with the evolution of consciousness of the soul and Baba calls it an abiding body.

The subtle body has a different set of senses from the physical body. The physical world is experienced first through the medium of the subtle body, then the physical body. Experience of the subtle world can only be experienced through the subtle body.

We are not our subtle body any more than we are our physical one. Also, the soul is no more in the subtle body than it is in the physical one. The soul is omnipresent and One with God and cannot be confined in space. The connection between the soul and the body is one of identification, not location. When it is said we “leave” our physical body, it is inaccurate. Rather, at the time of death, we cease to identify with the physical body, leaving us to identify solely with our subtle body. The picture illustrates this change in identification to the subtle body.

The God Speaks Chart

Another series of points I want to clarify are about a chart in God Speaks that is easy to misunderstand if you are new to Baba’s teaching. In the second edition of Baba’s main book God Speaks is a chart by the American artist and close disciple of Baba’s Rano Gayley. It is numbered Chart VIIIA and is titled Creation, Evolution, Reincarnation, Involution and Realization, according to Meher Baba.

I want to point out several interesting things about this chart that are rarely noticed. It is my favorite chart and hangs framed over my couch. The story of its addition to the second edition is described in my paper How God Speaks was Written, p. 10.3

First, Baba gave Rano the words that appear around the chart. They are intended to read, “Formless and colorless, God’s creative and impulsive imagination to know himself as Omnipresent, Infinite and Eternal.” That is Baba’s whole theme in a nutshell.

The next thing to notice is that there is a winding black ribbon or string that goes counter-clockwise around the chart

.This represents sanskaras that wind over time, becoming denser and denser until they reach their peak density in the human form, and then slowly fade away over the course of the planes depicted on the right. This winding and unwinding is represented by the string becoming thicker and darker before it becomes fainter and fainter and finally fades away. This is consistent with the book’s theme of sanskaras.

Next, the gross, subtle, and mental “spheres” described in the book are depicted as literal spheres in the chart. For instance, this image shows the “subtle sphere” of the first four planes, the fourth depicted as a doorway to the mental.

And finally, there is one point that can easily be unrecognized as there was no way to depict it.

The figures in the chart such as of various gasses, stones, plants, animals, gross plane people, and people on the planes, are not actually meant to be depictions of forms — though they are portrayed as such. In actuality, if you read the book, you see that these represent states of consciousness. For instance this image of a horse is not so-much a picture of a horse as it is an image that represents horse consciousness.

Remember, for Baba the forms in evolution are really just a by-product of a kind of consciousness factory.

“Directly and indirectly, these associations and dissociations of the consciousness of the soul are absolutely essential to keep the wheel of evolution of consciousness revolving. The evolution of gross forms is but a by-product in the universal factory of evolution of consciousness.” (God Speaks)4

This is equally true of the picture of a person approaching the path. The picture clearly represents the state of consciousness of such a person who begins to seek a higher truth, not the body of a particular person

.However, I have always thought the figure used in the chart to represent this state of consciousness may have been a self-portrait of the artist herself.

A person new to this chart in God Speaks could come to the conclusion that each of these forms depicted might represent a class of forms that have souls. And this might in turn arouse in them the question, “Does a rock have a soul?” After all, the chart does begin by depicting some rocks. This will take some explaining.

To begin, I have already explained that in Meher Baba’s parlance, it is not quite right to say a thing “has” a soul. Such an expression conveys the pagan idea of soul, which I explained in The Soul vs. the Subtle Body. While individual forms in evolution have a subtle body, the expression that someone or something “has a soul” comes from the outmoded conception of a soul as something inside a person or animal or thing that they possess. In Baba’s parlance it is truer to say a soul has a body than to say a body has a soul, in so much as Soul in a particular state of consciousness, which we can call “a soul,” identifies with that body.

And when it comes to earlier states of evolution, such as stone, the problem is exponentially more complicated. This is because the individuality we associate with animals and humans has not yet fully formed. To read a discussion by Baba on this point see Beams from Meher Baba on the Spiritual Panorama, 1968, p. 44.

. . . one soul can get linked up with many bodies. This can occur at the earlier

stages of evolution. There are group-souls. Each group-soul gets linked up with

numberless physical forms as in the case of blades of grass. When the group-soul gets more advanced in consciousness then it can get connected with one form instead of with numerous forms. Group-souls are an exception to the one-body-one-soul equation.

Some Baba followers may feel I am out of bounds to say that I feel this is better explained by my own analogy of lenses in EOP. But I am out of no bounds. When I write I write as a philosopher attempting to articulate to other philosophers what Baba may be saying, not a as a Baba lover pretending to be a philosopher.

EOP uses a different metaphor to explain much of what Baba says, but it is not inconsistent with it. In fact in many cases EOP provides understanding at a glance, with charts, that words alone cannot help but muddle. I think the concept of “group-souls” is one of those cases.

The way we would explain the rising consciousness associated with stone and metal in EOP is to avoid bothering with depictions of stones and pieces of metal.

Instead we focus on the underlying causal evolution that, much later and seen through the advanced nervous systems and sense organs of human beings, can be experienced as rocks and pieces of metal. And in my first two books I referred to this period of evolution as inorganic evolution, which means before life evolves. When we speak of this evolution, we speak of the evolving perceptual schemas that give rise (mathematically) to various species of gas, stone, and metal. This obviates the need to “picture” individual clumps of these inorganic substances. My books are dedicated to explaining the evolution of such substances, and do not attempt to imagine these materials existing as such in the earliest phases of the evolution of perception.

It is only in Baba, though, that we read that as early as these primordial species of inert materials there is already a glimmer of consciousness. This is hardly surprising since Baba is clear in all his works that:

“. . . the beginning is a beginning in consciousness, the evolution is an evolution in consciousness, the end, if there be an end, is an end in consciousness.”5

So what amount of consciousness is stone consciousness? Baba says it is almost nil, but it exists.

“In stone form the mind has no desire, no feeling, and also has the least possible sanskaras (most finite, almost nil) and so the most finite experience of the universe (almost no experience) almost does not think (realize) the Imagination (universe).”6

So, I hope this makes things clearer.

Do these gold coins have souls in them? Certainly not, no more than a person has a soul inside of him. At least not in Baba’s teaching. In Baba’s teaching there is only One Soul, which experiences variously through different media in conformity with varying congeries of impressions.

There is a state and stage of consciousness associated with the state and stage of the evolution of inorganic forms in their mathematical form.

In New Age thought some crystals have crystal devas and the Earth has a soul named Gaia. In Baba, such talk is superstition. Some people will be displeased with my saying this, but future philosophers should be delighted.

I wanted to say a little about how Meher Baba weighs in on this topic, because it is quite unique, and to me at least it is Baba’s clarification of what he means by ‘God’ that makes his description of the Universe so appealing. If there were no Meher Baba and only the traditional conceptions of God as described in the above mentioned Wikipedia article, I think I would be an agnostic. As it stands I am quite happy to champion Baba’s teachings as making the most sense. Incidentally, for whatever reason, many followers of Baba continue to believe in past traditional views about God and do not understand what he taught. However, Baba made sure his teachings are clear, public, and accessible. The AMB Trust in India goes so far as to make all of his books and messages freely downloadable as PDF files online.2

Before I go into what Baba uniquely taught on the subject of a personal God, I’d like to first take a moment to talk about these more ancient conceptions generally. The subject of how people view and have viewed the concept of God is of interest to me.

While we do not have firsthand knowledge of how Paleolithic (stone age) men viewed God, anthropologists surmise from their art and artifacts that they appear to have believed in animal spirits and were animistic. Animism is the view that a supernatural power organizes and animates the material universe. It seems likely that these views gave ready explanations of phenomena that otherwise might have been frightening, thus helping to assuage anxiety. We can add that these beliefs probably also gave meaning to life and helped small groups to achieve social cohesion.

From what I can see the next most common way to approach the spiritual was through the veneration of the dead. The earliest form of this appears to have been ancestor worship. Anthropologists know more about ancestor worship because it is still present in many cultures today.

I once asked a South Korean woman whether people in her country who perform rituals associated with ancestor worship also ask their deceased ancestors to intervene in human affairs on their behalf, and she conceded that though it was generally frowned upon by the society, they frequently did anyway. Her answer was meaningful to me, because it confirms a suspicion I have — that modern views of the personal God (God is heaven) have their true roots in this desire for magical boons in life that people don’t know how to procure on their own - such as having sons or healing from complex diseases.

The next kind of worship, which is also prevalent still today, is the worship of dead saints or sages. This is common in ascended master teachings such as those found in Theosophy. The Count of St. Germain is a good example of a commonly imagined ascended master.3

The next kind of worship, which is also prevalent still today, is the worship of dead saints or sages. This is common in ascended master teachings such as those found in Theosophy. The Count of St. Germain is a good example of a commonly imagined ascended master.

The idea of masters ascended into heaven from where they govern the world has several sources. One is it was borrowed from Buddhist sources in the 1800s. I copied this from the internet. Buddhists believe the future Buddha, Maitreya, currently resides in Tushita Heaven, a heavenly realm where he waits to be reborn on Earth to teach the Dharma to humanity. While in Tushita, he is a bodhisattva, a being on the path to full enlightenment, where he teaches other bodhisattvas.

This is not so different from the Christian view that an anthropomorphic God governs the world from his thrown in heaven — a view that in turn is lifted from Greek conceptions of a pantheon of gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus.

Now I should not leave out that not all religions teach the idea of a personal God or anthropomorphic deities living in a conceived heaven. Jewish and Muslim people, for instance, conceive of God as formless and transcendent only.

So, now that we’ve briefly reviewed some of the past and present imaginings of God, both personal and impersonal, we can turn to Baba’s unique teaching on the topic. As far as I know there is nothing quite like it.

Baba does not teach the notion that there is “a God” at all, at least in those words. The indefinite article “a” in “a God” implies that God is a discrete something among other discrete existences. A way such a conception is often imagined is that “God” is someone who lives in heaven or some other “dimension,” while we mortals live on Earth. This is not Baba’s teaching — not even close!

Baba teaches that there is only God, and that God is in ten states. The most common way to explain what people mean by a “state” is to allude to three states of water. Water is water (H2O) whether it is in a state of steam, liquid, or ice. This is only an analogy to get across how the word “state” is used here. The primary states of God that Baba refers to are all psychic states or what Baba sometimes calls “states of consciousness.”4

Now, Baba literally says that God alone is real. There is nothing but God. All else (everything we perceive by sense or in our thoughts) is an illusion. God in a particular state is the witness of that illusion. Baba never deviated from this point that God alone is real and all else is a “vacant dream” that God is having.

While this view is new and unprecedented, it solves a lot of problems. For instance many of the heavens that are spoken of in other religions Baba equates with certain states of God. For instance the Tushita Heaven that Maitreya Buddha is in that is mentioned in certain ancient Buddhist scriptures Baba would equate with State II substate B. See his 10 State of God to read about this particular state.

Another implication of this teaching is that all of the various theological positions of all the various past religions are in a sense right, if only partially. While Judaism and Islam teach that God is abstract and transcendent, Baba would say they are merely emphasizing God in State I. Christians who conceive of a Trinity of only Three States of God (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) are in fact speaking of States I, III, and X. Thus Baba fulfills his promise of bringing the great religions of the past “together like beads on one string.”

I intend to bring together all religions and cults like beads on one string and revitalize them for individual and collective needs. – Meher Baba, Paramount Newsreel, London, 1932.

And in 1932, speaking of one of his books Baba said:

“I have explained it all in detail in my book. Even scientists will be astonished to learn the secrets I have explained there. For these will not be vague talks but facts that are substantiated and supported by scientific arguments. It will be the future Bible, not in the literal sense, but a book of understanding for people of all religions.” – Meher Baba5

Instead of creating a new religion, he brings new meaning to the old ones.

So, I promised to say what Baba had to say about what is meant by the “Personal God.” While Baba lists Ten Principal States of God in his cosmology, the only personal God, in every sense of a personal God, is State X. This is God in the form of a God-Realized human being living on Earth. Such a person (man or woman) is literally both God and Man and is in a normal physical body. He lives and passes away on the Earth, and is literally someone you can go and meet while present.6 For Baba the notion of ascended masters, like Saint Germaine, is a false teaching. Such a person is called a “Perfect Master” or a “Sadguru” (Sanskrit meaning “true teacher”). Baba says there are five Perfect Masters living on Earth at all times, except in rare cases when the Avatar is alive on Earth in which case there are six. All this is explained in detail in Baba’s main books Discourses and God Speaks. So, in short, for Baba the only personal God is literally a person.

Finally, I want to comment on a question many are likely to ask. If Baba is right and all this is true, why do we not have any record of any previous master saying all this? Why, for instance, didn’t Jesus say all this to his disciples? The answer is that he likely did, but only in parables that they could not understand. Yet, I point to this quote in the Bible:

“These things have I spoken unto you in proverbs: but the time cometh, when I shall no more speak unto you in proverbs, but I shall shew you plainly of the Father.” – John 16:25

Likewise the Buddhists await the Maitreya who is prophesied by Buddha to one day appear on Earth and teach the pure Dharma.

One needn’t agree with me, but I believe that day, twice prophesied, may have come.

Why did it come now? In my opinion it is because the world did not yet have the conceptual framework to understand it, and barely does now.

The human imagination is a wonderful thing. It is the primary tool we use to produce amazing theater, literature, music, cinema and so forth. It even plays a role when entrepreneurs dream up inventions that physicists and engineers apply their knowledge and skills to actualize in the real world. So imagination is useful and important.

But when imagination is misapplied, it can also mislead. When instead of being used for conceiving of something original, people try to use their imagination to determine hidden facts about reality, they risk concocting illusions. Making matters worse, people tend to love the things they invent, especially when belief in such imagined things invokes images in their mind that they find evocative, or even emotionally satisfying, perhaps because they feel brilliant for thinking them up. Examples of such things that had their source in imagination that were later challenged by mainstream science include phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, and caloric. There are still people who insist on these things. Attachment has grown so strong that a few refuse to question them even when evidence is presented that they do not exist and are part of a superseded scientific theory.

But dreaming up imaginary things is not the only thing the imagination does that can hamper progress. There is also psychological projection, where people don’t realize they are imagining. It is entirely subconscious. And this makes it all the harder to dispel.

I want to discuss this power of imagination and make it clear, so that I can show how it effects philosophy to its detriment.

Today, most people are aware of the ‘ancient astronaut theory.’ It was first popularized by a Swiss hotel manager and ex-con Erich von Däniken in his 1968 book Chariots of the Gods. In it Däniken presents the idea that humans were visited by aliens in their ancient past. The idea continues to be promoted on the History Channel show Ancient Aliens, which frequently hosts Däniken himself, with many proponents who call themselves ‘ancient astronaut theorists.’

What is striking about the show is that the commentators believe they see ‘evidence’ of ancient astronauts wherever they look, even when the true intention and origin of these artifacts are understood by real archeologists. There are simply too many examples of this form of projection to cover in this paper. However, I’ll cover a couple examples to make the point I want to make about projection itself. You can see a full documentary on the subject here.

In a wall carving the Hathor temple at Dendera in Egypt is a picture of what ‘ancient astronaut theorists’ say is clearly a lightbulb. It has come to be famously known as the Dendera Lightbulb. However, the actual meaning of the wall image is explained here.

This is a form of projection known in psychology as apophenia, which is the tendency to perceive familiar patterns in random or ambiguous stimuli. The commentators are projecting very familiar items like lightbulbs onto images where they were never intended.

As I said, there are too many examples of the same form of projection to mention. To the left, airplanes and helicopters are ‘seen.’

Below, a UFO can be ‘seen’ in the background in a Byzantine painting. In the documentary clip here the real meaning of the image is explained.

Such projection of familiar objects onto unfamiliar and ambiguous images is not a perceptual dysfunction in itself. It is actually an ability that serves an important function in healthy perception as well. Gestalt psychology understands such perception as a natural inclination to organize the data we experience into familiar items and as a natural part of seeing. Consider the few lines below.

Most normal people can easily conceptually organize it into the gestalt of a fox. Without such an ability people would have difficulty recognizing faces and all sorts of things.

But as natural and healthy as this ability is when used in the right context, it can lead a person to absurd delusion if he isn’t aware of this dynamic in himself and doesn’t take it into account when he analyses his observations. The ‘ancient astronaut theorists’ seem to be unaware of this gestalt process.

And this does not just apply to ancient astronaut ideas. We must constantly distinguish between what we might feel at first we are seeing and what we actually are.

To rush to imagine we are observing something familiar to us has to be tempered with reason.

One of the principles that can be applied to distinguishing between what we believe we are observing and what we really are is whether or not the necessary conditions for something were present at the time of its creation. We must beware of this ‘logical anachronism.’ This is the fallacy of imagining something existing before the conditions necessary for its existence exist. A simple example is imagining fish in a world before there was any water. It’s a logical anachronism. It imagines what could not yet be.

Let me give an example of imagining something when its necessary conditions are not there. Many people today believe Atlantis was a real place. They sit and watch Discovery Channel and History Channel episodes where ‘scientists’ speculate about where it was. I put ‘scientists’ in quotes because this isn’t a scientific subject. The topic of Atlantis belongs squarely to philosophy, and specifically is the true domain of Plato scholars. And Plato scholars are entirely aware that Plato made it up and why.

The belief that Atlantis was a real place, rather than the myth Plato intended it to be, is a projection. For it projects an interest in history onto a person who believed the world that we perceive is unreal and by extension any claim of its history a lie.

Why are we tempted to project an interest in history into a situation where no such interest was present? Because we find this fascination with facts all around us today, so we project it onto a person who did not share that interest.

So we see another form of projection. One of logical anachronism.

This does not only apply to things you see and hear. It also applies to concepts. When we consider what we read we often read into it our own preconceived ideas. For example a protestant Christian raised on a diet of 19th century dispensationalism will interpret the odd descriptions in the Book of Revelations in the Christian Bible extremely differently than an Orthodox Christian would. Each projects his own beliefs on what he reads. This is thus another form of projection.

Nearly all conspiracy theories rely on copious amounts of projection by their progenitors, where nearly everything related to the topic is viewed as evidence of the nefarious plan.

Projecting where there is no evidence to project

Finally, we come to a special kind of projection – one that has traditionally affected philosophy and is the main reason I wrote this paper. This is where a person projects something familiar to himself, often a substance or dynamic he observes every day in the natural world onto an unknown. This is the form of projection responsible for theorists coming up with phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, and caloric. They came purely from imaginative speculation.

Obviously speculation is a necessary part of science, and it is not speculation that is the problem. Scientists can often infer the presence of something they can’t first see from empirical evidence. For example, the dwarf planet Pluto was theorized before its discovery in 1930, based on anomalies in known planetary motions. But this form of imagination becomes a problem when there is no evidence at all, and no way to acquire evidence. I am thinking here mainly of the ‘external world,’ or as some contemporary philosophers refer to it, ‘the causally responsible external world.’

This concept, proposed by most other philosophers but disputed by me, is explained in quite a lot of detail in my 2021 book Evolution of Perception Re-Explained. You can download a free PDF of it here. See especially the chapter titled “The Two-World Problem” beginning on page 33. If interested you can also see the Wikipedia article titled “Mind-body problem” (its more customary name) here.

However, for the sake of this paper being self-contained I will briefly explain the concept again here. I will explain it in two ways. The first will be direct, and the second way is a bit indirect using the analogy of the 1999 film The Matrix.

You only experience your own experience. People often are amazed or even mystified to hear this for the first time, as it is not something we usually really think about. So I will clarify what I mean. First of all, it is obvious to everyone that we don’t experience other people’s experience. We can perceive what they perceive, but not their actual personal perception of it. Experience is something we all do privately. Second, let us consider this example.

Let us say for a moment that I see a fire engine putting out a fire across the street from me. The actual physical fire engine is clearly outside of my body. But where does this experience I am having occur. Neurology tells us it occurs in our brain. Obviously the fire engine and all its water does not enter through my eyes, ears, and nose to enter my brain. Rather, physics tells us that electromagnetic radiation strikes the corneas of our eyes. A signal reaches our brain through the optic nerve and there a particular vibrational cycle is interpreted as red. Another is interpreted by our brain as white, and so forth. So now the reader may have a better idea what philosophers mean by saying we only have contact with our own experience, which occurs in our brain. So in a sense our experiential world is internal.

The problem arises when we ask ourselves about the ‘external world’ that is responsible for these experiences we’re having.

Here philosophers are confronted with a problem. For we cannot observe this so-called external world. Speculation about it is entirely dependent on untempered imagination.

Naive realism is the way of thinking of things outside ourselves by people who are uninformed about the mind-body problem explained above. They imagine that the world must be simply a reflection of the world as we experience it.

The problem with such naive realism is that it amounts to a form of projection. It imagines the cause just like what it is causing. It imagines that cause of our experience just like the experience it is causing. It reads effect in a circular way right back into its cause, and ignores any consideration of the process by which that experience came about.

Incidentally, when we say ‘read into’ we are using an English language idiom that means imagining something where it isn’t.

The result of the act of projection just described and illustrated above is that thinking this way inadvertently creates two worlds. One is the internal world of our experience, and one that is purely theoretical — and has no empirical or logical basis.

This problem is not that hard to fix, and most of what I’ve written over the last 25 years describes how that is easily done. But before I review what that method is, I promised to explain this a second way –– using the events in the move The Matrix as an illustration.

The fallacy of the two-world view is actually in The Matrix. In the movie, when Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) presents Neo (Keanu Reeves) with the chance to take the now famous ‘red pill,’ and to thereby see how far the rabbit hole goes, Neo receives a vision of the abandoned ‘real world.’That world is depicted exactly like the matrix, the illusory representation of it fed into people’s brains by a computer. The only ostensible difference is that the real one has been devastated by some unknown global apocalypse where everyone died who was not hooked up to the matrix.

Clearly, if you followed this paper you recognize that this second mirror world is nothing but a projection. It was the best the writer-director duo, the Wachowski brothers, could come up with. It winds up being a perfect depiction of the two-world dilemma –– the internal experiential world we perceive and the so-called real external one we don’t.

So now, how does one solve this two-world problem, aka the mind-body problem? The solution begins by first noticing that the problem is the result of a form of psychological projection. Projecting is the habit of imagining something in a situation where it isn’t or could never be. One must realize, however, that projection was only discovered in the 19th century by Sigmund Freud. So the concept was simply not available to philosophers like Aristotle or Descartes.1

Second, one must recognize that the habit of imagining a cause mirroring what it causes was also abandoned in the 19th century in deference to the more modern method of theorizing processes over things. I give several examples of this change in methodology in Evolution of Perception Re-Explained.

And finally we avoid the problem called the historical fallacy — that of reading effects back into their causes, which is what causes the problematic mirroring in the two-world problem.

What we are left with is a process, a psychic emergence where our shared world of experience is the result of an evolution of perception, by which we mean an evolution of perceptual schemas that I liken to lenses or perceptual algorithms.

Thus concludes yet another attempt of mine to find a clearer way to convey the concept of an evolution of perception.

But I’d like to clarify something. I am not saying that there is no world, or that the real world is in your head or brain. This notion agrees entirely with common sense, that your head and brain are in the world, and not the other way around. Furthermore the implications of this view are fully in accord with common sense that the word you perceive all around you and that you find yourself in is the actual physical world. All that changes in this view is how these circumstances that conform to common sense came to be. Nor am I saying that there is no substance, but rather I’m only trying to point out how such substance we find around ourselves, and our bodies constituted, came to be in our experience. Hence the subtitle of my original book is The Cosmology of Substance. This is not meant as a denial of substance, but rather as an explanation of it.

• insight:

  psychology

  c. an understanding of the motivational forces behind one’s actions, thoughts, or behavior; self-knowledge.

Ordinarily the human mind never considers its own functions and can’t be made to.

False appearances of inquiry

Freud’s psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on sexuality, while intended to be directed at the Mental Operations, was in fact dictated by those operations and thus could not find them. Modern behaviorism makes no claim to be focused on the Mental Operations and is quite outspoken that it is not. The rhetorical gymnastics that are collectively known as functionalism do not go near the mental activity either.

While such sciences may seem like they are looking into causes for actions, they are not investigations into the Operations of the Mind, nor do they touch on or parallel them. All these invented schools of thinking are in fact mere applications of Mental Operations that remain hidden to the practitioner. Such imagined schools, like other manifestations of the intellect, are the outcome of Operations occurring in the dark. Even if the true Operations these men were using were pointed out to them, they would be as men in a haze - bewildered.

Classic psychological processes such as repression, projection, compensation, transference, denial and so forth are indeed theoretical psychological mechanics. But they do not deal with the Operations because such theories ignore the question of why such coping mechanisms are used in the first place - beyond the need to cope. What is the root of the urge to cope?

Even if we say the mechanisms are used because the ego has a need to avoid anxiety, these practitioners fail to explain what this primal anxiety is caused by. In addition, the reason why one person will feel anxiety and choose a coping mechanism while another will not is not sought. What is inevitably given instead is a causal incident or condition. Then when a counter example is given, such as the example of a person who had the same experience or condition but did not respond in the same way, another causal incident or condition is given, on and on ad infinitum. This habit commits the fallacy of post hoc ergo proctor hoc (after the fact, because of) and suffers from an infinite regress of causal incidents without ever reaching a causal mechanics. Why is a particular experience causing a particular response?

In short the practitioners fail to recognize that they are offering events as causes, without explaining the causation. And even if some primal desire is proposed that if frustrated causes anxiety, such as Freud’s posited desire for conquest of the mother, Adler’s posited desire for love, or Frankl’s posited desire for meaning, nothing is given to explain why such desires are present. What causes those desires?

By asking only shallow questions, students of the mind inevitably wind up with shallow answers. The result is that inquiry into the Mental Operations never begins. All academic human inquiry into the activity of the mind is inquiry into its effects, not its causes. Practitioners of the mental sciences have no way to uncover the cause because such considerations are quite frankly outside the scope of their awareness.

Sanskaras

What prevents us from grasping the Operations is that we see the world inverted. If we even believe in a mind at all we believe that the body has a mind. What people do not realize is that the body does not have a mind. Rather the mind has a body. The body does not give rise to Mental Operations. Mental operations give rise to the body.

Likewise, the world does not have a Universal Mind. Rather the Universal Mind has a world. The world does not give rise to God’s Mental Operations. God’s Mental Operations give rise to the world.

If the first cause of everything is an event in consciousness, and evolution is an evolution of consciousness, and even the end is an end in consciousness, then it is consistent to say that the world arises from psychic events. And if the world arises from psychic events, including our physical Universe, then we should be looking for psychic events, not physical events, if we are to discover the Operations responsible for our thinking.

Meher Baba explains that the most rudimentary psychic event of the mind is the sanskara. Sanskaras are impressions left on the mind by previous experiences that then condition future actions. The operations of the sanskaras cause the whole Universe to come into their apparent being. The mechanics by which this occurs is explained in great detail in God Speaks and Discourses by Meher Baba. But for our purpose here of understanding how people think we are only concerned with the Mental Operations as they occur in an individual.

On the level of an individual human being, in general, sanskaras produce complex compound lenses, which promote judgments, that organize the world. However, we will need to be far more detailed than this about how people think if we are to account for the strange thinking habits of people. What accounts for the seeming inability of human beings to be reasonable even when it is in their best interest, their seemingly limitless ability to come to the conclusions they preferred to come to even before they went seeking, and the fact that people are bicapable of being either the cruelest and blindest beings or the most wonderful and creative in nature? What are the mental drives and tools people use to come to their exceedingly false conclusions?

Imitation, imagination, and desire

Most people go about their days performing various tasks, both physical and mental ones. These are usually done as a routine, mostly determined by conventions, to obtain the things they need for their survival and to promote their social existence.

• People talk to one another.

• People eat, drink, move their bowels, urinate, move about, and fornicate.

• People do various activities to support the above functions (get their car fixed, buy groceries or plant a garden, buy toiletries, remain clean to attract a mate, etc.)

• People seek entertainment (watch movies, read, write, perform or listen to music, gather in groups).

• People do escapist things (sleep, take intoxicants, fantasize, pursue the opposite sex, etc.)

• People kill, rob, rape, lie, and so forth.

• People do acts of charity, kindness, and even unexpected acts of self-sacrifice.

• People sit down and try to figure out solutions to things, usually having to do with how to obtain something or be rid of something.

• People combine all these of course. There are numerous combinations.

Now, what Mental Operations determine which one of these actions people do and when? Most simply put they are as follows:

1. Desire. People do what they feel themselves prompted to do. They are prompted by urges they don’t understand or care to understand.

2. Imitation. People imitate each other in thought, speech, and action. Most of what we say we ‘think’ or ‘believe’ are learned thoughts. Even most so-called ‘rebellion’ is learned behavior. People are prompted by an urge to imitate and generally don’t ask why or care.

3. Imagination. People are endowed with abundant imagination - the ability to reorganize components of memory into new and even often delightful configurations. The components that are organized can be linguistic or sensory. Generally speaking, people use their imagination as an automatic reaction to facing a problem that requires a solution when there is no known model to imitate. Thus the expression, ‘necessity is the mother of invention.’ On a day to day level most acts of imagination occur quickly and without people even being aware they are imagining. What is referred to as ‘quick thinking’ is in fact quick imagination. Even most famous thinkers generally rely on their imagination without realizing it, even when they make a lot of fuss about appealing to logic and reason.

Unlike imagination that is applied to thinking, which usually goes unrecognized for what it is, acts of imagination that are applied to the performance of the arts are conscious and intentional. In the arts imagination is utilized in the full light of awareness of what one is doing and why. Thus art is in a sense higher than ordinary thinking, because it is done with greater awareness of its own Operation.

These are then the three basic Operations that determine what people think and thus do.

But of these three the most fundamental is desire. For desire determines which of the other two Operations will be used and how. Therefore, for sake of even greater clarity, we can organize the three Operations as follows.

1. Desires are the motivation.

2. Imitation and imagination are the strategies people use to fulfill their desires.

Of the two strategies, imitation is the default position. Imagination is the standby strategy that is used when imitation fails to produce a desired outcome. If imitation is sufficient to get people what they want they will be happy to continue imitating. If it fails and there is no one available to tell them what to do, they will resort to imagination. Also, which things people will choose to imitate and what they will imagine are determined by desires. So desire is the cause. And imitation and imagination are merely the strategies people use to satisfy their desires.

This scheme of the Operations of thought should not be seen as a human failing. On the contrary, both on an individual level and for a society as a whole imitation and imagination are indispensable. Imitation is responsible for consistency, cooperation, and continuation (and many other good things), while imagination is responsible for invention, change, and social reform (and other good things).

People who imitate a lot are usually called sane. People who fail to imitate at all and resort exclusively to imagination are called insane. Most people do a bit of both, with an emphasis on imitation, which is not in itself a bad thing.

Precritical intellect vs. critical thinking

What is generally called intellect and critical thinking are two different things. Most of what is called intellect is generally nothing more than a simple operation of imagination functioning under the dictates of subconscious desires. Critical thinking is the opposite. It is systematic and slow and seeks to root out causal influences like sanskaras and desire to get at the untarnished truth of any matter. Intellect is basically imagination and tends to be productive of divisions and original abstractions, while critical thinking is the gradual and systematic eradication of imagination and its invented divisions. One rearranges and adds. The other examines arrangements with an eye to removing them if possible, and attempts to subtract what is unessential or in doubt from the mind in order for it to see clearly and without conditions.

The intellect that is precritical works by combining its two techniques: imitative parrotry and imaginative invention. For example, an intellectual reads and remembers what he reads or sees. He then regurgitates this uncritically. Then when the intellectual wants something new, to make life conform with his subconscious desires, he rearranges portions of his memories into a new configuration. This occurs in the imagination. Most theories in the sciences are little more than this. The basis of such thinking is desire. Its operations are imitation and invention. Its outcome is the cultural world we find ourselves in, which is mainly arranged imposed intellectual inventions.

Critical thinking also often begins with reading or observation. But in critical thinking the person neither parrots nor invents. Instead when he is alone he attempts to question the validity of what he has heard, by comparing it to his immediate observations. Very often the critical thinker discovers that what was said of the phenomenon is not true, or is merely one manner of interpretation among many. As he does this he begins to see past the veil of imposed invention toward the real condition. This process is much slower than the first, more systematic, and aims toward a more ultimate goal of singular and absolute truth, while intellect has no aim beyond its limited ephemeral desires.

Critical thinking is also directed by desire, but a higher form of it. Reason is not the goal (Meher Baba always emphasizes) but a stage on the path to it. In reason the desire that motivates thought is for truth. When the truth about a matter is wanted more than any other desire, then true reason is taking place. In such a case the thinker seeks a rationale for holding each belief he once had. In other words he questions each of his own beliefs. If he finds the rationale to be either missing or fraudulent, then he discards the belief, even if this means thwarting other desires besides truth. This is a path of effacement and unlearning. When reason is done in this truest sense the thinker is left believing very little. When he has reached this state then the roll of reason is complete and he continues on to the next stage of the path where there is neither intellect nor reason.

What about observation? People who are precritical (prior to reason) see very little of the world as it really is. Rather what they see is distorted by beliefs and projections. They see the world as though through a glass darkly, or a prism. They make divisions that are not there, see what is absent, etc. Thus most of what passes as observation is a projection of people’s own minds. Only a small bit of what such people see is actually in front of them. Most is read into it. Thus most of observation is useless to the intellect as it only confirms what it supposes, though it is indispensable to reason which seeks to check and be sure of what he realizes is absent really is.

The driving force of desire

We have all heard the expression that people are led by their emotions. Emotions are really nothing more than the visceral way we experience our desires. We usually desire things that we associate with a memory of pleasure. We call it “fear” when we desire to avoid something we associate with a memory of pain. So fear is also a kind of desire. Desire manifests as many emotions including fear, hatred, anger, lust, and so forth. When one desires to hurt someone it is called anger. When one desires to have sexual pleasure with someone it is called lust. Hunger is a desire for food. The desire to make someone happy we call love. When we want what another has we call that jealousy. So desire subsumes nearly all emotions and thus all motives - even most spiritual ones.

Imitation is largely instinctual. It is at least partly a leftover from evolution which is rife with imitation. It serves various survival functions. But if there is a psychological motive for human imitation it is the desire to mold oneself comfortably with the group in which one finds himself. So its motive, if anything, is desire.

Imagination is the creative act of rearranging one’s thoughts (whether music, images or words). But what causes one to arrange one’s thoughts one way rather than another? The answer is that the person is looking for a particular outcome. What determines which outcome will satisfy him? The answer is judgments. The choice of outcome that the person will seek is the result of judgments that the person makes, generally without realizing it, about what is of value to it. So the outcome they desire, and so use their imagination to help bring about, is determined by the value judgments they make of things.

If what is desired is the result of one’s judgments, then what causes one to make such judgments?

The answer to this last question is sanskaras. Sanskaras are the cause of Judgments and judgments determine what one desires.

Sanskaras — Judgments — Desire

So a person’s sanskaras cause one to make judgments that determine which outcome the person desires. And of course what one desires will determine what one will think and do. So human intellect and thus behavior is not actually governed by prudence, love, or reason or even fundamentally positive or negative forces. It is governed by sanskaras.

If imitation is sufficient to produce the desired outcome (judged good or desirable), nothing more needs be done by the person. He or she will be satisfied with going along with the flow almost entirely unconscious of what he’s doing. If imitation fails to be sufficient to produce the desired result, however, imagination will be resorted to.

“Where there are no facts, sentiment rules.”    (Oswald Spengler, DOTW, Vol I. Alfred A. Kampf, Inc. 1926. p. 39)

Note that thinking is not geared toward truth or justice or love or even loyalty, as people most often like others to believe of them. Rather human thinking is geared toward attaining outcomes deemed desirable by the person thinking. And even what outcome is judged to be desirable is not tied to any principle, as people like to imagine of themselves, but only sanskaras that live beneath the veil of awareness. This means that people are not first-most living in a truth oriented world. They are living in a desire oriented world.

Three kinds of desire

Meher Baba teaches that there are three kinds of sanskaras: gross, subtle, and mental.

Each type of sanskara causes a different kind of desire.

Gross: Most people have the kind of sanskaras that cause them to judge physical things like food and sex to be the highest good. These people have what Meher Baba calls gross sanskaras.

Subtle: Some people have the kind of sanskaras that cause them to judge occult powers and experiences as more worthwhile than physical attainments, and even demonstrate a willingness to forgo physical pleasures to attain them. These people have what Meher Baba calls subtle sanskaras.

Mental: A few people have the kind of sanskaras that cause them to judge truth or knowledge as more worthwhile than either physical objects or powers and occult experiences. Those people have what Meher Baba calls mental sanskaras.

A very few people have no sanskaras at all and thus have no desires. Baba calls these jivan muktas.

In short, the desires are according to the sanskaras.

Note: Many people want power in order to attain or control material things. This would not be a subtle desire. Likewise some want information or the ability to control minds in order to attain or control material things. This again would again be a material desire. Subtle desires are such that the occult experience is wanted for its own sake and mental desire is where knowledge or truth is wanted for its own sake. For example, a person who wishes to know enough to secure his job, even if that knowledge is philosophical knowledge, is an ordinary gross plane person.

The downside of misapplied imagination

Imagination takes memories (sensory and verbal), breaks these into parts, and then reassembles them into new shapes and conclusions. Imagination is experienced both as pictures (formed from memories) and self-talk. It is a place of invention. It takes experience, forms something new out of it, and tries to apply this back to future experience.

The problem with using imagination is that whatever it forms is the outcome of sanskaras (conditioned mind) and is almost never oriented toward truth. The obvious exception to this is its application to the arts which, when honestly motivated, can be a means of expressing great inner truth. However imagination is a poor guide to the objective sciences. Scientists who rely upon imagination generally add more confusion than they resolve, though they have the feeling of doing the opposite.

Great science is not imaginative, but revealing. A good example of revealing is the discovery of gravity by Isaac Newton. Newton was inspired by his work of translating the Bible into the belief that God’s world is replete with balance and symmetry. This belief prompted him to examine with a clear mind where people had only enforced theories. This act of seeking with a clear mind, purified by celibacy and study of the Bible, revealed to him the law of gravity and its implications. He did not really invent something with his imagination.

Rationalization is the act of using the imagination to organize thoughts into a convincing justification of one’s beliefs or actions to alleviate doubt, guilt, or suspicion. The objective in rationalization is obviously not the truth. It is the desire to convince. If the rationalization successfully convinces oneself or others that what one is doing or believing is right, then thinking stops at that point. If it fails to convince, rationalization continues to seek relief from doubt and suspicion. Like all forms of imagination, rationalization uses intellect to fulfill desire.

Imagination is at its best when it is applied consciously as imagination. Great works of art are created using the imagination. What is interesting is that many of these works actually convey deep indwelling truths that the artist discovers via    inspiration. Fiction, music, painting, sculpture, dance, acting, poetry, photography, and film making, are all examples of arts through which inspiring truths and unseen beauty are revealed every day. It is when the person thinks he is discovering objective truth via imagination that the trouble arises in the sciences, in history, etc. Conspiracy theories, pseudo sciences, superstition, pseudo spirituality are all results of imagination applied outside of its scope.

Picturing a situation

Now for sake of demonstration let’s examine one particular event in a person’s life (we’ll call him JOHN DOE) and see how it leads to a thought and then to an action. Imagine the following situation.

1. JOHN DOE sees a dog. This is the event.

2. JOHN DOE sees the dog through his complex compound lenses (his sanskaras) left by his past experiences with dogs. Through his past sanskaras JOHN DOE organizes or frames his experience of the event. This is the sanskaras.

3. The way the event is framed (due to the sanskaras) causes in JOHN DOE a particular psychic appraisal of the new dog experience. This is the judgment.

4. The judgment determines what JOHN DOE will desire. If the judgment is strong (due to strong sanskaras) JOHN DOE will experience an emotion. This is the desire.

5. Desire (or emotion) will prompt a reaction, (karma)

6. John’s reaction (internal or external) will leave an impression (new sanskaras) on JOHN DOE.

In short, all internal thoughts and external actions are determined by desires. And the desires are determined by sanskaras + event.

• Sanskaras + event {Meaning event seen through sanskaras}

• (causes)

• judgment

• (causes)

• desires/fears

• (causes)

• emotional response

• (causes)

• imitation of learned behavior - or - invention of new behavior

• (causes)

• Action

• (causes)

• New sanskaras

Note that by “event” this can be a mental event. For instance a drunk pictures a bottle of his favorite kind of alcohol through the influence of his past sanskaras of pleasure he associates with alcohol. This then causes the positive judgment of getting some, followed by the desire, followed by the rationalization in his imagination or simply imitation of his past behavior, followed by the action of taking another drink.

The Operations of the Mind are the same for great or advanced souls, with two exceptions. Because the older soul is never entirely unaware of his own Mental Operations, having become more honest and introspective, he is more likely to be able to correct himself or at least observe his own ignorance at work. Secondly, as already explained, as the sanskaras are so are the desires they give rise to. So as sanskaras become less dense, so do the kinds of desires. Desires change from objects and possessions to more lasting and intrinsic things such as Truth, Love, Virtue, Beauty, etc.

Listening to tapes

The Operation of imitation has its sensory and verbal sides. We learn to dress a certain way and speak in a certain accent using sensory imitation. What we learn to say or think verbally we learn using the verbal side of our Operation of imitation.

Use of imitation in forming responses to perceptual stimulus can be likened to playing prerecorded sound tapes. Here is how the use of such tapes (prerecorded responses) works. We begin with a verbal type of tape. If you say to a person, “Hello, how do you do?” the person generally does not stop to think about how he is actually doing. Rather his brain recognizes the tape you just played, then turns to an automated program that determines which tape to play back in response. “Fine, and you?” These recorded automatic responses generally go on beneath the level of awareness so long as they lead to acceptable outcomes. In general it is only when they fail to bring about wanted results that people consider resorting to other methods.

We also have sensory tapes. When we jump in a car to go somewhere in response to some event, we most often are playing a tape. Our habits such as smoking are tapes we play again and again. These responses are learned through imitation and then repeated over and over. They generally will continue until some unpleasant experience causes us to examine them.

Note that imitation is value-neutral. There is usually not much consideration of good or bad, beautiful or ugly, true or false in our most automatic learned activities. They operate in us a lot like a machine. By far, most human thinking and thus most human behavior is the product of imitation. Relatively little is the product of imagination. Because of this automation most people never judge their own thoughts or behavior or consider what it is they are imitating. If they do, they are generally imitating complaints and praises about such thoughts and actions that they learned from conversation or television. Thus even most of what appears like imagination is imitation.

The point is that imitation is not connected to individual value judgments. The only judgment that is made is whether it is in one’s interest to imitate. Because imitation is value-neutral in this sense, simply because it is too mechanical for value judgments to arise, it can be a good or a bad thing depending on the situation. Adolf Hitler, who recognized the potential for controlling people by taking advantage of their penchant for machine-like imitation, led his countrymen like sheep to ruin. But one should never assume that imitation itself is bad. It is generally good in fact. For a great society is held together and kept great by people following positive examples just as much as a crazy society is led to destruction by poor examples. Imitation accounts for great schools of music, the careful progression of philosophies and natural sciences, cohesive styles of architecture, and infrastructure such as clean running water, well-graded streets, and electricity. Many of the things we enjoy and that make our lives better are due to people carefully imitating rolls and procedures that promote health and general well-being. Polite or civil behavior is another example of beneficial imitation. Few would quarrel with the fact that they prefer to walk about without worrying they will be slapped by a stranger.

Even renegades generally owe their success to imitation. A rogue independent filmmaker owes his craft to people making cameras and film by established guidelines. A maverick politician owes his freedom to affect change for the good to a well ordered democracy. Only God’s masts can be truly themselves independent of all cohesion.

The point is that tapes are not always bad.

So imitation is not something to be fought against as if it is an evil in itself. What is more important to recognize is that there is always a need for high-minded people to step up from time to time and affect change in the world, with full faith that good examples and habits will be followed as diligently and cooperatively as bad ones. In such knowledge good people should create good things to imitate. Imitation can be the glue that makes wonderful societies stick together and last and not decay too quickly back into chaos.

The same principle can be applied to imagination, emotion, and desire. Through the arts the emotions can be awakened through the imagination for good or bad. Both the highest and the lowest desires in people can be excited through plays and images that stir the best or the worst potentials in our psyches. People whose imaginations are steered by unawake artists toward the lower aspects of their natures become bestial and selfish. But when more awakened artists labor to lift people’s imaginations toward the highest ideals, men’s hearts can be reached in ways that surpass even the best intentions of reason and logic. When people are inspired they are stirred to the loftiest states, for such is always the potential in man, and even life on Earth can become temporarily like the divine.

If people did not have a lot of potential for feeling and emotion then they could not be moved to great or small. Thus knowledge of the nature of men ought to be an inspiring boon for artists and thinkers as much as a point of some discouragement.

So understanding how people tick is useful in making the world better (or worse).

I have often wondered why people seem to arrive at such irrational conclusions and why they take actions that are so ultimately destructive even for themselves and those they love. The reason is that people are not really rational animals. They are dream and desire driven beings. Thus, while people can almost never be persuaded by good rational arguments, they can be lifted up by positive modeling, inspired imagination, and lofty desire.

Right now people are imitating bad things- mostly lust and greed. Right now advertising (including political advertising and entertainment offering social advertising and product advertising and lifestyle advertising) aims at the lower nature of people to inflame childish passions and spark imagination in people to get them to buy products that make money for the seller who cares nothing for the real well-being of those people or even themselves or even know what is in their own interest. All values are at their lowest point.

But consider what happens when the opposite occurs. What if the highest nature of people is sought and awakened, the highest emotions ignited, to do good in the world. Then what was bad becomes good. The same emotion and imagination that brought forward bad things is turned around to bring forward good things. Then when people are doing good and notice that things are getting better for themselves and the ones they love, the same instinct to imitate that kept things bad so long will keep things good for a long long while.

Thinking fast

As a general rule human beings pride themselves in thinking fast. To describe someone as “a slow thinker” or “a bit slow” is almost never a compliment. When intelligence tests are administered, they are inevitably timed tests. Speed is equated with high intelligence. However, nothing could be farther from reality.

There are two ways to get an answer quickly. First is to state some memorized answer, or follow a memorized procedure such as a math procedure. This is mere imitation. The second is to make up an answer on the spot out of your own head. This is imagination. Have you ever noticed that there are two kinds of know-it-alls. Those that recite facts turn out to be right when you look them up, and those that spit off facts that turn out to be wrong. The first kind is using imitation. The second uses imagination.  Neither is critical thinking.

The chances are that if you are in the room with a critical thinker you will never know it, because he will not have time to think of the right answer. Memorizers and imaginers are never at a loss for answers.

Observation and reason

Anyone who believes that logic alone can be used to answer a question with even relative certainty (other than to answer a question about what constitutes the rules of logic), is not a critical thinker. All valid answers in logic are only as true as the premises that were used to derive them. To determine the truth of premises is impossible since such questions result in an infinite regress of questions. Logic can determine validity, but never truth.

The same is true of observation. No amount of observation can tell you whether your observation is a credible reflection of reality or a hallucination.

Most of what we call ‘reason’ is merely a combination of laws of reason (deductive and inductive logic) and observation, neither of which has solid justification. There is no way, even in principle, to objectively determine the reliability of either observation or reason except in the most superficial sense.

It is these kinds of concerns that constitute the beginning of critical thinking. While reason and observation are a far cry from pure parrotry and making things up, which are the hallmarks of ordinary worldly thinking, they are still a world apart from critical inquiry. Reason and observation attempt to take the input they receive through lenses without considering the influence of their lenses. Critical thinking attempts to peel back the lenses through which we see to see things as they really are.

Philosophers who are precritical in their application of observation and reason tend to refer to their lenses in flattering and uncritical terms such as common sense intuitions and proper functions. They also like to appeal to what we all just know, what we all just feel, and what we all just assume. Reason assumes its manner of seeing. Critical thinking questions its manner of seeing. Reason is stuck. Critical thinking seeks release.

Root cause

Where do the sanskaras that drive us come from? For instance, why is there a sanskara that produces the desire to survive or procreate? Actually this is explained in God Speaks. Sanskaras produce actions that leave further sanskaras. Tracing these backward, we find that most gross human impulses are left over from evolution and these were largely instrumental and instinctual when they arose. In humans, instinct has evolved into reason, Baba says. Thus what we find as a thought such as “I am my body and this body is most important to survive” is actually the linguistic form of a residue of impressions left over from evolution. These are merely left over instincts in linguistic form.

For the original or first cause of all psychic events you must trace the sanskaras all the way back to what Baba calls “The Original Whim.” See God Speaks by Meher Baba.

Intelligent compassion

This whole piece helps me to have more than tolerance for the things others do that previously would have made no sense to me, but to have some real understanding and forgiveness.

An analogy came to my mind recently about understanding and forgiveness. I think you can understand and forgive and still do what’s necessary. The analogy that came to mind was of a train on a track. Knowing that trains are heavy and tied to tracks we understand that there is no stopping them. But it does not follow that we should leave an old lady wandering down a rail road track as a steam whistle blows. That the woman can’t hear it and the train can’t stop does not mean that I can do nothing. I can escort the old lady from the track. That, I think, is a little like understanding. We grasp how trains are and act accordingly without too much passion.

Improved insight

But perhaps the most important benefit of all of knowing about the Operations of human thinking is using them to see my own ignorance at work in my own mind. Affording me a little self-forgiveness too.

There are three kinds of cosmology: scriptural, scientific, and esoteric. All three are told as a story, in chronological time.

Scriptural

Scriptural cosmologies are mythological or symbolic stories. Such cosmologies exist in all religious traditions. Genesis is an example. Some scriptural cosmological stories tell about particular aspects of Creation, rather than its formation. Examples of these include the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis and The Two Kings in The Nothing and The Everything by Bhau Kalchuri. Such stories use symbols to convey not so much how the world was made, as to emphasize the theme and purpose of Creation to instruct people in who they are, where they come from, what they are doing here, and where they are going.

Consider the story of Genesis itself. The dividing of the night from the day represents the formation of the schema of duality (opposites), which expresses itself outwardly in the dimensions of time and space. The seven days of the world’s formation represent the seven stages of descent through involution that is manifested into the world as the seven kingdoms of evolution: stone, vegetable, worm, fish, bird, animal, and man. The taking of the rib from Adam to create Eve represents the arrival of full consciousness, which manifests in experience as the subject/object distinction. The eating of the apple represents the question man consciously asks himself, “Who am I?” Note that the question was already in the garden from the beginning (planted there by God), but it had not been tasted (conceived of in the full light of consciousness). Finally, the expulsion from the garden is the onset of the quest for the answer to the question in the world of opposites (which includes pain and pleasure), and the shame felt by Adam and Eve is the onset of the sense of separation produced by the yearning latent in the question. Of course Adam and Eve return in each of us upon Union.

So these are the kinds of concerns that scriptural cosmologies deal with symbolically.

Stories like this do not pretend to represent historical events. They are symbolic of the underlying happenings in consciousness that occur behind the external events. They are about the theme and purpose of Creation, not about Creation itself.

Scientific

The second kind of cosmology is the scientific. Scientific cosmology is very good. But it is only half a cosmology. For looking at life from the outside in as science tries, one can’t possibly account for the formation of:

• Time

• Space

• Duality

• Mass

• Energy

• The atom

• Natural laws

• Mathematics

• Experience (observation, thought, reason, color experience, sound experience, etc.)

Science must necessarily leave the formation of aspects like these unaccounted for, because it is in terms of such things that their story must necessarily be told. Since everything in a scientific cosmology is reducible to the operations of the first eight of these, and is predicated upon the last (observation, thought, and reason), and since these unaccounted for dynamics amount to everything that is ever actually happening in the physical Universe, it is quite a small half that scientific cosmologies do explain. However, they are of value.

Esoteric

The third kind of cosmology is the esoteric cosmology. These stories have always been with us, but are least known of the three. God Speaks by Meher Baba is one such esoteric cosmology. Such stories attempt to convey to the hearer both the inner and the outer - the theme and purpose, as well as its outward manifestation.

They use analogies and even metaphor to explain the theme of creation, but are not symbolic in the sense that scriptural cosmologies are.

They tell of evolution, but deal with the evolution of the Platonic forms that manifests as the relics we observe - unlike science that is solely concerned with the relics. Science builds a history to account for relics. Esoteric cosmology explains history.

Unlike scientific cosmology, esoteric cosmology is complete in its scope. It leaves no aspect of experience unaccounted for. Implied in all esoteric cosmologies is the account not only of what is taking place, but the formation out of consciousness of the components named above, e.g. time, space, motion, etc. So it is in the truest sense a complete cosmology.

Esoteric Cosmologies are very good. They satisfy the mind like scientific cosmologies do, though more completely, and give direction to the individual by showing the theme and purpose of Creation that the scriptural cosmologies do, though directly rather than symbolically.

Time out of the Eternal

All esoteric cosmologies tell their account of Creation in the form of a story with a temporal chronology just like all other cosmologies. Yet all esoteric cosmologies predicate that time does not exist. They hold that time and space are only apparent, mere ways of seeing, in terms of which all appearances emanate (as imagination) from a timeless absolute Reality.

The question thus arises, how can we account for an evolution of consciousness if there is no actual time in which this Creation event could have ever taken place?

There are several forms of response to this question.

First we need to realize that we cannot possibly imagine the state of reality that precedes the condition of time (the standpoint from which this time-arising event takes place). We cannot conceive that which precedes or transcends time because our imagination is conditioned by time, and its operations are not possible divorced from time. It is precisely for this reason that Creation is described in esoteric cosmologies in terms of a fictitious time, since no other form of exposition would be conceivable to the mind. Creation is thus, in a sense, dumbed down to a level that is conceivable to our temporal intuitions.[1]

Next, consider the fact that if the phenomenal world that is conditioned by time has come about from a state of Eternity, then that original timeless state must precede the apparently temporal one only in a logical sense. By logical we mean by some necessary order. In other words, something about state A must necessarily condition state B. And what we experience as the temporal Universe is merely the logical consequence of A, and does not actually manifest temporally outside of appearances. This seems to be what Meher Baba is saying in certain places.

“Everything is happening in the unending NOW, if there is anything happening at all; because all that has apparently happened, all that is apparently happening and all that will ever apparently happen in the illusory cosmic universe is all that which God has already dreamt the moment His own original infinite whim surged as ‘WHO AM I?’ So, really speaking, nothing has happened and nothing will ever happen.” (Meher Baba, God Speaks, 1973 2nd ed., p. 91)

Baba describes ten “states” of God’s eternal existence. These seem to unfold not one after the other, as in time, but one as a necessary consequence of the other.[2] In the first, or most fundamental, state, the Beyond Beyond State, God does not experience the temporal illusion, but neither does He experience his own existence. In several intermediate states (IV-VIII) God dreams divinely, from his eternal state, a dream that appears to occur in time but does not. Finally, in God’s highest and final state, He is fully awake and experiences his wakefulness, but is no longer cognizant of his temporal dream.

Below are the Ten State of God from God Speaks, based on a chart by Meher Baba (God Speaks, 1973 2nd ed., p. 158)

• State I God in Beyond-Beyond

• State II God in Beyond Sub-States A, B, C

• State III God as Emanator, Sustainer and Dissolver

• State IV God as Embodied Soul

• State V God as Soul in the State of Evolution

• State VI God as Human Soul in the State of Reincarnation

• State VII God in The State of Spiritually Advanced Souls

• State VIII God as The Divinely Absorbed

• State IX God as Liberated Incarnate Soul

• State X God as Man-God and God-Man

These are ten states of one Eternal Being or God. Each atma (individual soul) is also, in one sense, a state of God. As God ever remains Eternal in all his states, time never truly manifests except in appearance.

Perspectival Analysis

But none of this gives us any real sense of how this works. To get a feel for how time emanates from Eternity it is helpful to consider a rather new way of thinking, whereby we take perspective into account when we think about something. We call this perspectival analysis.

We all know the paradox where one person’s right is another person’s left when they face each other. This is because the answer to the question of which direction is right depends on the angle of perspective. Sometimes we have to take perspective into account to answer questions, especially those questions that have to do with things with any sort of relative component.

This applies in spiritual matters as well. Something that is true from God’s point of view may not be from our own until we achieve that state of Christ-consciousness from which it was stated.

To give an example, it may have been entirely true from Meher Baba’s point of perspective when he said to my parents when they were parting from his company, “Time never existed at all.” However, it would not have been a truthful statement had one of them replied, “Yes Baba, I have always seen it that way too.” Certain statements are made from the point of view of transcendence and others, such as the ones we make, are merely honest statements of conditions as they appear to us in our phenomenal experience. This is why words by masters spoken as our own, and not attributed, are false statements. Even though they are true when said by them.

Analytic philosophers are taught only to consider words divorced from experience. They examine syntax of language much as we do a mathematical problem. They do not use their innate faculty of considering perspective, because perception is not considerable within the framework of logical syntax. And when they do they wind up becoming confused, dissatisfied, and gradually become cynical about the attainability of truth itself, returning to their words with a new found cynicism about the possibility of an Absolute Reality.[3]

What these philosophers are missing is that all these seemingly disparate perspectives are emanations of a single perspective. Being egocentric, they are rudderless in a sea of their own impressions. They have grown confused and disheartened.

So how might we think if not with mere words? For an answer we turn to another kind of thinker we might not immediately guess has some wisdom to share on this subject: the motion picture filmmaker. A great film director (like Orson Welles depicted left and below) intuitively feels this hidden truth about perspective. He grasps the seer behind the many seeings - and interprets its presence as story, as mood, as evocation of deep emotion and spiritual aspiration.[4]

Consider the craft of a film director. Like no other art form, the fabric and pigment that a film director molds into his canvas is the vantage point. When he composes a scene, he does not simply compose his scene from a single point of view like a painter or stage director, but has necessarily to conceive his story from many points of view called camera angles. Point of view is the language of cinema.

Thus the film director’s thinking is never limited like the philosopher’s to the singular point of view of his own ego. To be a great artist the film director has to conceive from within his characters, as if assuming the perspective of their soul to have a look around.

So now try to think like a film director. Take a walk in your imagination from paradigm to paradigm. Try to unshackle the bounded scope from your own finite point of view. See from the inside of things. Rather than look upon life like so many windowless boxes, enter in and cut a window into the world of boundless perspective, look out, and see what there is to see. Take note of seeing.

“I am going to... lead the world to real happiness and peace by making mankind more introspective, and see more to the inside of things than what they have hitherto been accustomed to.” (Meher Baba) [5]

That is what perspectival analysis is, and it is the key to compassionate intuition. It is also the key to getting some idea of how time emanates from the Eternal.

So now let’s return to the subject of time and eternity, and see if such a way of thinking is of any help.

Finding Your Point

When we try with our minds to conceive of that which existed before the beginning of Creation, we inevitably make an odd sort of logical error.

For we try to look backward upon an event, as we do upon a memory, that we assume lies across a span in the distant past. But what we don’t realize is that we are conceiving this way through minds that are conditioned by the perceptual schema of time.

We must try to conceive of Creation from the point of view of Eternity. Remember, Eternity does not conceive the world in hindsight, but emanating out of Itself, out of unconditioned eyes. God does not conceive the Creation as we attempt to, from the finite toward the theoretical infinite, but rather from the limitless and eternal toward the limited and finite. So we must invert our point of view.

To picture seeing from the point of view of the Eternal, look around the room you are in. Note the external objects. For the moment don’t analyze them or break them into things. Don’t even give those impressions names. Simply note your sensations, a kind of kaleidoscope of disconnected impressions and events. Next close your eyes and take note of internal feelings, emotions, memories, and thoughts.

What is in common between these two categories of experience - the internal and the external? It is your self. But what can we say about this self? It is not the things in the room that seem to be outside of you. Nor is it the sensations that appear to radiate from it within you. Rather this common self appears to take on the character of a point that exists between your eyes in the forehead. Take a moment, if you haven’t, to locate in yourself this axis of sensation. Don’t worry about characterizing it metaphysically. Simply note that this is how it seems.

Now take note of how things appear from the vantage of this point from which you see. When you move through a room, from that point of view (which you experience from), things appear to be moving as you are standing still. From the point of view of the point, the point does not move. Only if we consider the point from the vantage of the room (which is, interestingly enough, not our point of view at all) do “we” appear to be moving through the room. Odd how we are taught to consider ourselves from the point of view of the objects of experience, rather than the objects from the point of ourselves as would be more in keeping with our immediate experience.

The same is true when you look within. Consider your past. It seems to recede from you. From the point of view of the present moment that you currently find yourself in, from which you observe your inner states, the past seems to continually recede from you who are ever in the present. And the future toward you. Like a steady stream, the future seems to rush toward you and the past from you, but you never find yourself anywhere but in the present moment. Nisargadatta Maharaj asks the question, what is in the present that is not in the past or future? The answer is you. You yourself can never be found anywhere but in the present moment. So from its own point of view, the self does not move through time, but rather the future seems forever and continuously to wash toward it and the past to forever recede from it.[6]

This point is evidently not in the flow of time with its percept, but is eternally and necessarily in the present. Only the appearance (its percept) gives to it its sense of being in time, for the witness reasons that his expectations derive from some theoretical future and his memories from some theoretical past, when in fact such concepts derive from his current and present point.

“It is only because of the present that both the past and the future find their point of fusion everlastingly in the present. In the eternity of existence there is no time.” (Meher Baba, God Speaks, 1973 ed. p. 91)

Baba can be understood to mean that the way it seems (that we are an Eternal point watching the projected impression of the passing of events) is as it actually is.

Having taken notice of this present point of view in our own experience, we can apply this to grasping a bit of the original state of God that not only was in the true present but remains so eternally, in spite of the appearance of time.

God is eternally in the present, even as He emanates into appearances the appearance of time. Eternal God (in states I-III) emanates the illusion of time, and in us (God States IV-VIII) experiences that illusory appearance.

Emanation of Nothing through the Creation Point

As we have said, a point is what we seem to ourselves to be if anything. Or at least that point of view is all we can find of ourselves. But let’s look closer at the point as a concept.

Recall that a point is nothing more than an intersection of two theoretical lines in space. It takes up no space, has no length, and has no shape or form of its own. It is literally a vanishing point, and its location only has meaning in relative relation to other geometries in its environment. This relative location, then, is derived solely from the appearances. The point, in itself, does not have any location.

Now it gets strange.

From Baba we learn that the point through which we see is actually the OM point, the Creation point, from which our world emanates before us.

It has long been noted (most notably by the 17th century British empiricist David Hume) that when we go searching in our experience for ourselves, we find nothing.

A point seems to be nothing or nearly nothing. This is because a point takes up no space. It is natural then that, in a world of space, that which takes up no space would seem like nothing. A point is also invisible, formless, temperatureless, colorless, silent, odorless, and tasteless. It is equally natural that in a world composed of such qualities a point would seem like nothing.

So a point appears to the mind, as near as anything that is conceivable to the mind immersed in illusion, to be nothing at all. In short this is because a point is the most finite thing we can possibly conceive of in the world of finiteness (illusion).

So also it is only natural that when we go to consider our own point of view, our vantage point from which we experience the world around us, we seem to find nothing there.

And yet this is only as the vantage point seems to itself when comparing itself to the illusory appearances that surround it, that it seems to find itself as a point in. Compared to all those appearances apparently surrounding it, it’s no-thing.

But Baba tells us that what we are actually looking at when we look at the world around us is The Nothing.[7] And this perception point, that seems like nothing, is The Everything. It is merely the sanskaras through which it sees, attained through its experience of its imagined evolution, that give to The Everything the illusion that it is the other way around. The sanskaras give to this substanceless Nothing its appearance of being substantive and everything. And the focus on the world as everything gives to the Self its feeling of being nothing.

Thus you, who appear as nothing and a mere point to yourself, are really The Everything. And The Universe around you, that appears as if everything, is really the most finite point of nothing.[8]

So the you that feels itself to be a point is really everything, everywhere, infinite, and eternal, and is the real substance (Existence, Reality) and the world you see is nothing and void.

So what produces this point in the Everything through which the Nothing is projected? Or what makes the latent nothing into the Om Point? It is the concentration of the Everything in the asking of the Eternal question, “who am I?” that produces it.

God, concentrating on what He is not (in order to know what He is), produces a point of concentration, produces the point of Nothing in the Everything.

And through this point of concentration (Creation point) the Cosmos oozes out before him in the imagined space of his imagination and over vast quantities of imagined time.

But all the while, God (or your real Self) never really goes anywhere of course. And nothing is really created of course. It is merely imagined. After all, being everywhere, where is there for God to go? How can the Infinite and Eternal pass through a tiny point of Nothing? How can the concentrator pass through the point of his concentration? How can an observer pass into and through and onto the other side of his point of view?

Infinite God (everywhere, real, substance, reality, existence) looks at an infinitely finite point (Nothing) in himself in order to concentrate on something other than himself, which, since He is all, just necessarily is nothing. Since there is nothing that He is not to look upon, He looks upon nothing. And then it is as if he projects his imagination out through this infinitely finite hole in the Everything (The Creation Point).[9]

And this act of (as if) projecting the imagination (as if) through The Creation Point is referred to by some esoteric philosophers as The Emanation. And it is likened to God’s eye seeing through a keyhole and projecting himself into the nothing of his point of concentration.

But being imagination only, this light (which is actually God’s imagination compared metaphorically to physical light since it “lights up” ((illuminates with images)) the world that is really dark and void for it is nothing) is artificial light - false, bhaas, imagined light - but God’s false light nonetheless. Meaning it is imagination but God’s imagination.

These terms are not merely metaphors, but are attempts to describe with analogies from our experience that which is actually taking place truly - although largely unseen and entirely unrecognized.

So the tiny point that you appear to be when compared to the room you are in is actually infinite, boundless, eternal, and everywhere. And the room and world are really an infinitely finite point. You are seeing your point of concentration as the vast Universe - by way of projecting the imagination (as if) outside and beyond and in front of and around yourself.

So you are seeing the Nothing as Everything. And you are the Real Everything.

References to the bindu point in Infinite Intelligence by Meher Baba

This Infinite thinking’s producing point is ahur bindu, Om point, Maheshwar, etc. from which everything, i.e. the whole subtle and gross creation, has come out. [PDF # 3]

Thus the Infinite thinking is the creator of the whole universe, through its atom point. [PDF # 4]

In short, the universe exists as the most finite point in Paramatma, i.e. in the ocean of Light, darkness (universe) exists as one drop (point, bindu [point], aaNkhni putli [pupil of eye]) [PDF # 26]

Thus, the whole subtle and gross universe which is experienced as light, as Intelligence, as knowledge, as everything, as Infinite, as Paramatma, is nothing but the outcome of the fine nirakar (formless), most finite universe, i.e. of the fine nirakar, darkness, imagination, ignorance, nothing, which is originally and really most finite as a point, as an atom of the Infinite Soul. [PDF # 26]

So, in fact, the universe is nothing but the subtle and gross pratibimb [reflection] or shadow of the Paramatma, of the Over-soul produced from the most finite point (putli) in It; nothing but the pratibimb or shadow of the Light produced from the most finite darkness point in It; nothing but the pratibimb of the Intelligence produced from the bindu [drop] point of imagination existing in the Intelligence; nothing but the shadow of the knowledge produced from the most finite point of ignorance existing in It; nothing but the shadow of Everything, the Infinite, produced from the bindu point of the nothing, most finite, existing in the Everything, the Infinite. [PDF # 26-27]

The suns, moons, stars, planets, worlds (which constitute the gross, material, external universe) and heavens, planes, etc. (which constitute the subtle, spiritual, internal universe) in short, the ((entire gross and subtle)) universe is nothing but the outcome, expansion and manifestation of the most finite dark point of nothingness, imagination, ignorance, existing as an atom in the Infinite Ocean of Knowledge, Light, Intelligence, everything. The Over-soul (i.e. Light, Intelligence, Knowledge, Everything, Infinite, Paramatma) sees through that most finite dark point (pupil of the eye, atom), Its own most finite dark ignorant imaginary shadow (which really and originally exists in the atom state as the most finite universe or Imagination), produced as Infinite subtle and gross universe or Imagination, as Light, Intelligence, Knowledge, everything, Infinite. In short, the Infinite subtle and gross pratibimb [reflection] is produced from the most finite dark bindu [point]. [PDF # 27]

From this atom point (ahur bindu [creation point]) the Infinite Intelligence produces the Infinite subtle and gross universe with Its thinking. [PDF # 34]

Now, formless being quite the opposite to form and Infinite being quite the opposite to most finite, hence the Infinite subtle and gross form is given to the formless Imagination by the Infinite thinking, i.e. Infinite Mind, through Its most finite point (bindu, atom). [PDF # 34]

So the atom (bindu, point) from which the subtle and gross universe are produced, is the atom of the Infinite Intelligence projected on to the plane of Infinite thinking which is the Infinite Mind or the Infinite Intelligence thinking. [PDF # 34]

So the limit of Infinite Intelligence that binds It comes through Its most finite point. [34]

Therefore, the most finite fine universe that comes out or is created becomes the limit of the Infinite Intelligence when produced in infinite subtle and gross form through Its most finite point (atom). So the subtle and gross universe is created from an atom of the Infinite Intelligence through Its thinking. [PDF # 35]

Thus in realizing the universe, the Infinite Mind is realizing Its own manifestations. [PDF # 36]

The subtle and gross universe is produced from the most finite point, or atom, of the Infinite Intelligence, i.e. the Infinite Intelligence produces the subtle and gross universe from It‘s most finite point. Whilst producing the universe It is the Creator or Ahuramazda or Brahma or Ishwar, and the point is Om, Ahur bindu [creation point], Maheshwar point. [PDF # 54-55]

It is one and the same Infinite Intelligence doing the triple (kriya) duty of creating, preserving and destroying the universe, from one and the same point W. With the beginning of thinking, It produces forth the universe from W, preserves the universe through W, {and when preserving it, realizes it through p} and swallows it up in W. W is the Maheshwar or Om point; oNkul bindu [umbilicus], ahur point. [PDF # 60]

So Jamshed’s eye, i.e. Infinite Intelligence’s Infinite thinking, by opening does the work of creating, by remaining open does the work of preserving and by closing does the work of dissolving his sakar Infinite shadow, which, when his eye was closed, was in nirakar, most finite form. The eye produces, preserves and dissolves the sakar Infinite shadow from, through and into its putli [pupil], i.e. Om point. [PDF # 66]

The point through which maya expresses itself always exists like your shadow. From this point, comes out the universe, and into this same point goes in the universe. [PDF # 153]

Making a Whole Lot Out of Nothing

The Nothing is necessarily contained in (not apart from) The Everything. For where else could it be? And surely The Everything could never be contained in The Nothing. Baba says this.

The Nothing is the one infinitely finite (thus non-existent) point in the Everything where God is not. And that is both necessarily nothing at all, and also an infinitely finite point by necessity, the singular vanishing point of nothingness in the midst of The Everything.

Where is this zero point? As explained it is in The Everything. Where in The Everything? The question is vacuous, for within the omnipresent there is no marker against which to locate the point of The Nothing. The Nothing is where The Everything is not, which is of course nowhere. Thus it is categorized as a point in The Everything without substance or location.

We might ask then, in what sense is there a point of nothing, most finite though it may be, against the backdrop of the infinite? The answer is that it is a point of focus, a focal point, a point of concentration. At the moment of the apparent (though never happening) beginning, that happens eternally in the dream of the eternal, it is this focus or concentration of the seeing that manifests the point as a point, which prior to the focus is only what Baba calls in

God Speaks “the latency.” The one nothing in its latency is of course ‘the latency’ (singular) for there is nothing else that could possibly be latent in The Everything besides The Nothing, since everything but The Nothing simply is and is of course therefore never merely latent.

If one stares vacuously into the the emptiness of void, one sees not even the vacuity of that emptiness. For looking, but looking inattentively, one does not take notice even of the emptiness of the emptiness. For one is looking too vacuously or inattentively to take notice of it. In such a state of looking vacuously it would not be true either to say of the looker that he is seeing or that he isn’t seeing. For one does not notice oneself (here likened to The Everything), nor does one notice the emptiness (here likened to The Nothing). For this reason, I suspect, Meher Baba says that of the beginningless beginning (the state that precedes the condition of time so is without beginning) one can only say that God is. For in that state there is not only no experience of everything (God), but also no experience of nothing. Thus we say it was and ever is eternally beyond consciousness and unconsciousness, or, as has been said sometimes, beyond the categories of being and non-being, although this really means beyond consciousness and unconsciousness.[10]

If one can imagine staring vacuously into a vacuum (nothingness), one can imagine not even being aware of its vacuity. I think this is like the original state, the original condition.

Now imagine being in such a tranquil state of isness. If this tranquility is stirred by an urge to take sight of something, one would become aware of the emptiness, even if one did not recognize the fact that it was empty - not having that concept.

Thus Baba seems to say that when consciousness stirs, by which I take him to mean that attention is directed or focus as if to a point, the Everything becomes aware of the Nothing, is stirred, is spurned by its urge to know something, which is the initial urge. And spurned by this urge to know something, attention is drawn to the Nothing which we could say then takes on the character of a point (since it has no extension, i.e. assumes no part of The Everything although it is in The Everything).

Why does the attention of The Everything go to a point of Nothing when it itself is everything? Why not to itself? Because The Everything is too all-pervasive to take hold of its own attention, just as a fish can’t possibly pay attention to water before it has been removed from water and its gills starved of water. So the attention is drawn first to the infinitely finite point of The Nothing instead. The act of attention then produces the point, i.e. it manifests the latent Nothing in the Everything. Just as switching on a light causes a shadow, the switching on of consciousness causes the nothing to be made manifest.

In the state of God where this stirring takes place (not at a point in time, but eternally), all sorts of things potentially come forward before the faculty of seeing. Or we could say, “become imaginable” to The Everything. What appears is really nothing more than the imagination of The Everything appearing to itself to emanate from itself (spontaneously) into the imagination -- appearing in the midst of the Nothing at all to be exploding forthward (the Big Bang).

Baba calls the original state that The Nothing took on “a most finite point.” This point becomes the first atom point, ansh, and it is this point that becomes somehow both the first medium for experience and also its first object.[11]

To get a picture of the outfolding dream that begins to emerge (in appearance) before God through this first most finite point of The Nothing, first atom, imagine staring at a tiny spot on a piece of paper. The smaller the spot on the paper, the more focused we would say your attention is. And, since there is nothing on the paper but paper, this spot on the paper that is your point of focus (or focal point) on the paper will become replaced by imaginings, gradually expanding for you into an expanding dream, though all the while you are only looking at a tiny spot. This is like a daydreaming student who, while staring at a fixed point in space, begins to dream a big dream.

But what might that be that could originally come forward from oneself into the imagination? Thoughts could certainly not? With what words could thoughts arise at first?

Colors would not? Upon what experience might one postulate a color? Number would not?

Upon what basis could the indivisible conceive divisibility?

And there isn’t even time, so no time to look even.

This is what I guess. While there is no time, there is a question, or more truly an urge to know or see. Baba calls this initial urge (which does not happen in time) “the cause.”

Where would this question arise from beyond time? It need not since it is entailed by reality.

What might the everything have an urge to know or see? There is only itself to know, by which we mean truly know, for in truth there is nothing else to know? And God wants to know the truth, ultimately, since the truth is the only thing that can truly be said to be knowable. This is because, if we know what is false this is said to be not knowing or false knowing, or a mere false sense of knowing, so is not truly known. Knowledge is not knowledge that is of that which is false. So to seek real knowledge it can only be himself (the only truth) that He seeks. Though this was not known to him in the beginning.

But this urge by the seeker (God) to know the the identity of the seeker (God) never came about. For how could it? There cannot be any moment beyond the ever present now (the

Eternal present) in which time might appear as a mode of seeing, even in imagination. For there is no time in which to imagine.

The question or urge to know in the midst of being the only thing to know didn’t really come along the way things happen in life where there is a time before, a time during, and a time afterward. For Meher Baba says that time never existed at all.

The only real question and its only real answer simply are! Eternally. Just as - in His eternal state, God simply is and is Eternally.

So, so long as there is the absence of the answer latent in the ignorance that is the vacuity of the nothing that is God’s nonexistent absence, the question exists. The question needn’t come into being for it is the only possible question to ask, “I?” And its answer needn’t ever come about for it is the only possible answer, “I!” Thus they don’t come about because they cannot not be, since they are the only true question and answer, thus cannot be in the infinite knowing.

Who am I? I am I. What am I? I am all. Where am I? I am here. When was I? I am eternal.

How great am I? I am. What? Who? Where? Why? Who in the heck am I?

Out of the All that was, the only logically possible question - that is a substantive true question - as one gazes into the infinitely finite point of isn’t, which is the only place where God is not, is “I?” And the only answer that is logically possible to give to that question - that is substantive and true - is “I.” And what is between these two only truths that are a single truth, true question and true answer? That which is all that Isn’t, which is The Nothing.

So now out of the state of Everything is the state of Nothing logically strung between I and I. And it appears to God as an initial first instance of time for an instant - yet it is only in the appearance (which is nothing) that this happens.

Thus the appearance of time isn’t really a contradiction with the Eternal, because it never really happens. It only happens in appearance from the vantage point of God. For the initial urge is not really initial. It is the latency in the Everything.

The question of identity (and its answer being one with the question), being the only possible question, never really needed to come about because there is no condition where it could not exist. Being of eternity there is no time where it can be absent. Being of existence there is no condition where it cannot be. Being of omnipresence there is no space where it can be missing. Where it is left unanswered, the only question (I?) simply is. It is eternal, not conditioned by the categories of time and space, being or not being. It is the eternal question.

Only when answered does it cease to be. This world is the question itself (the seeking of its answer).

If you are all that is, and all that could ever be, and you looked into the vacuum of the infinite void of the Absolutely Nothing (that is All there is besides yourself to look upon), and you are not thinking since there is no language out of which to form thoughts and no time in which to conceive any, then what would you possibly have to ask yourself? What urge is possible for the One and Only to have? If one wants what exists one wants oneself, necessarily. Words such as “Who am I?” were unnecessary, for, being All, there was nothing else to ponder about, to ponder with, or to ponder in terms of. You were pondering itself, and, being all that was, you had only your pondering to ponder.

The question was wordless like hunger in the infant who has no conception of itself, of the concept of hunger, of the absence of food, or waiting, and certainly no words. Thus it hungers in silence and its hunger is its only word (which we hear as crying).

There always was and always is the one original, unspoken, wordless, timeless, formless, question. So the Original question or urge is eternal and did not happen and will never happen, for it is eternally asked and the question eternally produces the dream out of the most finite limited point of itself - not, as we imagine it, once upon a time.

This world is the question all around us asking itself. And this eternal question is “the cause.” But this question is not in time, and from the vantage point of reality this never really happened, because this (that might have happened) was Nothing but the Nothing.

Out of that Nothing Mind came.

Out of Mind came this everything.

This everything is also Nothing coming out of That Everything

This nothing has come out of That Nothing

That Nothing came out of That Everything

This nothing has taken the form of everything which is not Everything. Out of formless Nothing formful nothing has come.

(Meher Baba, Stay with God, 1991, quoted by Francis Brabazon, p. 13)

Emanation through the lenses

This original and eternal first and last question (or urge to know Self) issues forth from God not as smoke or gas or color or space or time or number or sound or vibration (all incoherent before the beginning), but it issued out and issues out eternally in the only form it possibly can, as concentration or consciousness. What truly arises is not form but the first glimmer of the rising of awareness, which gives rise to the dimensions of form. What arises first is most finite, then less finite, and so forth until what emerges is God’s infinite shadow composed of infinitely imagined varieties of form.

Staring, searching, scanning, concentrating, straining to see -- see what?

Anything.

Not in a burst (as in a moment of time where there is a before and after) but in the eternal now. The now you conceive of is not the eternal now, for your conception is predicated upon the past and future. Yet you live in every instant in the eternal now.

The world rushes over you like a cascade over rocks. What is constant is the you -- which is the now, the percipient, the point of view that is stable and unmoving. The past and future washes over you. You do not flow through time. You are not in time. You are that witness which watches illusory past fade into memory and anticipates the illusory future.

You are there now. You experience it. You just don’t experience it as such.

And latent in this eternal, focusing, straining to see -- anything, something, when in fact there is nothing to see for there is nothing beyond the Self -- this straining to see logically entails time. For if I am waiting for something I am necessarily separating myself in imagination from what I am anticipating. This sense of separation thus entails time. Time does not entail the sense of separation.

And time entails space. This is so because space is conceivable in terms of time, but time is not conceivable in terms of space. For we think, “Here, and then there” (thus conceive space in terms of the dimension of time), but there is no inverse idea. For we can’t coherently think, “Now, and over there a little then.”

And motion is conceivable in terms time and space. For motion is nothing more than a relation between space and time. For we think, “Such and such span of space is crossed in such and such amount of time.” And that (amazingly enough) is actually what we mean by motion.

And the natural laws are laws of motion (all of them) and so forth out and out, one aspect of Creation entailing its logical consequent, producing the world in appearance in the False Thinking of Infinite Intelligence.

The enigma of how time came about when there is no time in which to come about is solved. For the condition of the Eternal Question reverberating is eternal, and produces the appearance of separation (by way of innumerable intermediate imagined false answers).

From the Point of View of you, lost in these appearances, taking yourself to be a player in them, a subject as well as someone’s else’s object, the Creation (as an event that happened over time) really does appear to have happened as an event in the past!

End Notes

[1] One could see this as a good reason not to bother to consider this particularly deep and difficult subject any further. However, a problem this ancient and intriguing leaves some with the opposite reaction; it intrigues them more because of its futility. They find themselves hungry to explore it even if such exploration is a lost cause. They find themselves energized by the challenge to fathom fathomless things, if only as a meditation on a divine subject for the sake of meditation.

[2] Something can be a necessary logical consequence of something else without following it in temporal sequence. For instance, if you push down on one end of a seesaw, the opposite end of the seesaw will go up. The rising does not happen after the lowering, but happens simply as a necessary consequence of the other. This is due to a larger logical schema that transcends and includes both parts of the event, and that larger schema conditions the response.

[3] After first siding with the logical positivists that all philosophical problems could be solved through proper syntax, Ludwig Wittgenstein later lost faith in the ability of logic to produce more than what he called “language games.” Much of what Wittgenstein believed to be the problem of considering “context” in logical formulations was actually the problem of perceptual schemata and point of view. Likewise, what John Rawls referred to as “a fair position,” Thomas Khun called “scientific paradigms,” and Jacob von Uexkull “umwelt,” was perceptual point of view, although not fully recognized as such.

What many analytic philosophers have recently come to refer to as “common sense” or “intuition” (considered respectable epistemological concerns since Russell’s philosophers at Cambridge failed to justify belief in matter with reason), such terms are merely a backlash from the scary helplessness such philosophers feel when faced with the obstacle of perspective. What they mean by “intuition” is not the transcendental experience of the mystic, which is actually a precursor to divine inspiration, nor the pure intuitions of time and space proposed by Immanuel Kant, but simply a reference to their habit of checking their imaginations to see if a premise is possible or impossible. Upon examination of the content of their conditioned imaginations they return to say, “I didn’t see it there, so it’s impossible,” or “Yup! I checked my imagination and it’s true.” This makes the ego of the philosopher the Qutb (Arabic for axis or pivot point and a Sufi word for a perfect master) of their Universe, and it is hardly philosophical. Interestingly it is in this spirit that materialism, the theory that one day human experience will be explainable in terms of material substance, has come to be referred to as “common sense metaphysics.”

[4] What is God-like about a director is not his power to command others, but his ability to see through the eyes of others while taking in the whole.

Socrates surrounded himself with mathematicians and philosophers, Jesus with the sick and the poor. But Meher Baba, who spoke of a coming age of intuition, surrounded himself with artists, especially among his western disciples. This seems to be a clue as to the new mode of spontaneous understanding that may soon come.

At the time of Plato the full body of instruments that would become the analogy of life as a projection of consciousness dancing on a cinema screen had not yet arrived. So he portrayed it in a cave. Meher Baba made great use of these newer metaphors, the projector, the film strip, the colored lenses, in “Infinite Intelligence” which he most likely wrote down in 1926.

[5] Answers to questions by Rom Landau, sent him in a letter, May 1932, London, The Answer, edited by Naosherwan Anzar, p37-40

[6] At any given moment, yesterday has passed, tomorrow hasn’t happened yet, but the present is forever occurring. Baba says, “Live more and more in the Present, which is ever beautiful and stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future” (LM 5809). We usually think of the present as being over in an instant, but introspection shows that it is always the present at every single moment of your life, and never yesterday or tomorrow. So the present lasts forever, literally, while the past and future are limited to their expected or forgotten moment. In this way, the past and future are in fact limited, but the present is without limit — as it is always and forever the present. Thus it “stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future.”

It is only because of the present that both the past and the future find their point of fusion everlastingly in the present. In the eternity of existence there is no time.* There is no past and no future, only the everlasting present. Therefore, in eternity nothing has ever happened and nothing will ever happen. Everything is happening in the unending NOW, if there is anything happening at all; because all that has apparently happened, all that is apparently happening and all that will ever apparently happen in the illusory cosmic universe is all that which God has already dreamt the moment His own original infinite whim surged as “WHO AM I?” So, really speaking, nothing has happened and nothing will ever happen. [Meher Baba, GS 91]

* A dream is nothing more than an experience of gross things by means of the subtle organs, and we have all been told how a long and intricate dream may take place in an impossibly brief moment in that imaginary time which is measured by the movements of the hands on our wrist watch. [editor’s footnote from the same page]

[7] Why does Baba refer to nothing as “The Nothing”? Why doesn’t he simply say “nothing”? Baba explains that just as there can only be one everything, there can also only be one nothing. If you add together a thousand zeros, you still wind up with only one zero. Thus there is only one nothing, which he calls “The Nothing.” The whole Universe is the emanation into imagination of this one Nothing point, or Zero point in The Everything. Baba gives the analogy often of a shadow. One man castes a single shadow where he blocks the sun from his own experience. Similarly God, being one, castes a single shadow. Baba thus refers to a clear dichotomy of The Everything and The Nothing. See The Everything and the Nothing by Meher Baba and The Nothing and the Everything by Bhau Kalchuri.

[8] Generally speaking, all that is of the finite is only relatively finite. Thus in general the finite is always marked by degrees. But when we speak of the shadow of the Infinite (The Everything), this finite must be equally infinite (or it could never be the shadow of The Everything). This infinitely finite point, which is the direct shadow (or opposite or negation) of the infinite Everything, is therefore most finite.

[9] Our birth experience that we can’t remember of ourselves is a kind of physically expressed recapitulation of this oozing out of the Om point.

[10] Plotinus taught that there is a supreme, totally transcendent “One”, containing no division, multiplicity or distinction; likewise it is beyond all categories of being and non-being. According to Plotinus the concept of “being” is derived by us from the objects of human experience called the dyad, and is an attribute of such objects, but the infinite, transcendent One is beyond all such objects, and therefore is beyond the concepts that we derive from them. Yet Baba seems to say that God is, even in its most transcendent state. For the moment (I may have missed something) I attribute this apparent contradiction to the fact that the transcendent state of Existence is beyond the categories of consciousness and unconsciousness, and perhaps the Neo-platonists such as Plotinus mistook this to be beyond being and not being. It is more true, it would seem, that this state is describable as neither knowing nor not knowing, but knowledge itself, or neither aware nor unaware, but pure Awareness. Or, neither perceiving nor not perceiving, but only perception itself.

[11] Note that you only ever experience your own body (medium). It is the illusion of the nervous system that gives the appearance of being in contact with an external world. You do not experience the world directly, but experience your nerves, and by the media of your nerves the world. Or so the theory of physicality by scientists goes. It may be that the world never truly manifests outside the medium. For the world is nothing but the sum of such media.

The reason I’ve started over trying to explain this idea so many times is that people generally have a hard time understanding me. While admittedly the concept involves a series of complex mental steps mostly due to the need to educate people who are not familiar with these ideas, it is essentially very simple. To keep myself cheerful about this I’ve often joked to myself silently, “Just because you don’t understand me doesn’t mean I don’t make sense.” To see the sense of it, and have the ‘aha’ experience, you just have to pay very close attention and give it the effort it deserves.

Why do I say that getting this idea deserves the effort? It’s because it changes everything we thought we knew fundamentally. If universally understood, this one idea would be the biggest game-changer of all time. Here we’re going to go over the idea one more time.

Now, I never would have thought of this idea had it not been for the fact that I was intimately familiar with the teachings of Meher Baba before I studied the problems of philosophy. And yet it was not as simple as simply lifting an idea straight out of his books. Realizing this idea required an immense amount of interpretation. A teaching like Baba’s can be understood in more than one way. Yet I am now dead certain that in March 20201 I got that interpretation right. I believe that all previous interpretations of Baba were simply wrong. And in a short appendix I’ll explain why I think that is.2

Here we will refer to this idea as the psychic emergent universe.

The idea dovetails perfectly with Baba’s teaching. Meher Baba had a rational and coherent system of sanskaras. Sanskaras are at the heart of all his explanations — creational, moral, teleological, etc. But Baba emphasized the place of sanskaras in the life of the individual. But if you read Baba’s works thoroughly you will see that sanskaras are responsible for absolutely everything — for the entire formation of the illusion from start to finish.

Now, Baba didn’t emphasize logical arguments for his explanation. But he did say that they exist.

“For these will not be vague talks but facts that are substantiated and supported by scientific arguments.” (Lord Meher, 1986 print edition, p. 1607)

I believe Baba left that work to philosophers who would come later.

“Seventy years after I drop my body, this place will turn into a place of pilgrimage, where lovers of God, philosophers and celebrities will come to pay homage.” (Lord Meher, 1986 print edition, p. 5296)

There are two main things my books and papers contribute. They apply the concept of sanskaras to the formation of time, space, and natural laws, and they provide the deductive argument for why psychic emergence has to be true.3

So now I want to start over explaining both the terminology and logic of psychic emergence.

_________

After 25 years of trying to explain this concept to people, I have learned that there are simply certain concepts that almost all philosophers understand, but that make no initial sense to most laymen. I say ‘initial sense’ because if you work at it you will get it.

Generally when I’m starting out explaining this idea to a person I point to an object we can both perceive with our eyes and I ask, where is your experience of that thing occurring? Not only can most people not answer the question at first blush, most can’t even understand the question. They get nervous and don’t know what to say.

If I persist in asking where their experience of the object is occurring, they point to the object I’m asking about. This shows they misunderstand the question. I am asking where their experience is, not where in their experience the object is. Their finger they’re using to answer with is just part of the experience I’m asking about.

If you’ve read this far, I hope you can pause a moment and recognize that the experience I’m asking about is happening in the perceiver. This has been understood by philosophers throughout the ages. The interpretation of “in the perceiver” has changed slightly over time, but for the most part every philosopher has referred to our experience as something “internal.” Some would say it occurs in a person’s mind. Today it is more common to say it occurs in a person’s brain. However it is said what remains the same is the notion that it is somehow inside you.4 This idea that experience is in some way ‘within you’ goes all the way back to ancient Greek philosophy.5

The view that your experience is inside you is the source of a giant philosophical problem that no philosopher or scientist has ever been able to solve. It would not be hyperbole to say that this problem caused by the notion experience is inside of you is the biggest problem still facing philosophers. I’ve seen more than one professor of philosophy draw it out on a piece of paper and then stare at it dumbfounded. This ancient, seemingly intractable problem is called “the mind-body problem,” and it is famous.

It’s too bad people are not taught about it in school. But don’t worry; I’m about to explain it.

The mind body problem has three aspects. All three come from the notion that experience occurs in your body. The first is known as the interaction problem. Throughout history people have thought of the soul or mind as an invisible thing inside your body. The idea was that it was doing the experiencing. Eventually it was pointed out that this hardly made sense, for how could a non-physical thing like a mind or soul influence a physical thing like a body? How could a mind push, pull, tug, or in any way influence a corporeal body?

The second aspect of the mind-body problem regards a problem with the ‘external world’ or ‘outer world.’ If your experience is in you, and my experience is in me, what can we say about the “external world?” How can we even know it exists?

We must face it that for any one particular individual, his experience is his whole world. Even if such an individual heard someone else tell him something about their experience, that testimony would be encountered in his experience. In short, an individual can’t escape his own experience. By definition a person only experiences his own experience. We are all confined to our personal experience.

This raises the problem of what a person can know about the world that is not in his experience.

Technically, logically, you can’t say anything! Even if you imagined something as being in the external world, whatever you imagined would be occurring in your internal one.

This raises the profound question of what it is outside our experience that is causing our internal experience. We can’t even begin to look for an answer because we are limited to our experience.6

Now, the fact that we can’t give any logical or rational or scientific reason for saying anything about the external world, or even that there is one, has not prevented some people from doing so.

The problem arises when such people go about trying to give evidence for their claims about the external world. Obviously they can’t appeal to observation. Testimony can’t help either as testimony is also encountered only in our experience. Logic can’t help either. To understand why see Evolution of Perception Re-Explained, p. 90. Inductive logic relies on observation, which is found in our experience. And deductive logic only proves if one’s propositions are consistent, not if they are true. In short, logic can’t help us to know about the external world.

Now I hardly need to point out that it is no small matter that no one can provide any kind of empirical or logical evidence for his basic claims about reality. For such claims are the very definition of “superstition.” Beliefs that we say are rational are those for which we can provide a rationale – meaning we can give a reason for holding those beliefs. No person has even given a genuine scientific argument7 for the existence of an external world — or even articulated what such a world would entail. At most people have projected objects found in their experience onto a theoretical second unseen world. I discuss the illogic of such psychological mirroring in Evolution of Perception Re-Explained, p. 30.

There is a third aspect to the mind-body problem and we will just touch on it. This is the problem science has in explaining what consciousness is and how and why it arises at all. Being conscious is a necessary condition for having experience. So if we’re going to explain experience, we have to explain consciousness as well. And science does not even have a working hypothesis.8

That sums up the mind-body problem. So now, how is it resolved in the concept of psychic emergence?

I hope the reader has noticed that all three aspects mind-body problem are the result of the notion that one’s experience is something occurring in one’s body. Luckily this is not the only way to frame the issue of experience.

I wish the reader to ask himself what this notion solves?

Hold your nose. Cover your eyes. Or plug your ears. What happens? We curtail smell, sight, and sound. Obviously something that normally enters our head through its orifices is being stopped. But what?

Today we say that certain molecules enter the nose, electromagnetic radiation enters the eyes, and vibrational waves enter the ears. Your brain interprets the first as scent, the second as color, and the third as sound.

There are a couple of problems with this. How did we learn this? By studying experiments set up within our experience. But remember, we are looking for the cause of our experience. These processes are found within our experience. So they are the effect of what we are looking for.

Another way to describe this problem is as follows. How can our experience be in our head when our head is in our experience? We are looking for the cause in its effect. We are assuming the cause of our experience is something in experience. Remember that these sense organs, nerves, and electrical modulations we assume have something to do with the cause of experience are in fact themselves found in our experience.

What is at the heart of the error is elsewhere, however. We are looking for things and happening located in space (like the things and events we experience) to be the cause of our experience.

Luckily the idea that our experience is happening is in our heads is not the only way of addressing the problem of experience. There’s a clear alternative to this thinking.

The alternative to imagining that experience is a thing or event in our heads (analogous to things we discover in our experience) is to see for clues of an evolutionary process — an evolution of experience itself. What we are looking for is a process that has occurred in the past and is ongoing that logically accounts for the experience we find ourselves in.

In other words, the mind-body problem was the result of trying to explain something (experience) as something inside another thing. The alternative is to this primitive thinking with the much more modern concept of a formative and transformational process — an evolution.9

One of the reasons that no one ever thought of this as a solution is that the idea of evolutionary processes, such as we see today in biology, geology, chemistry, and astrophysics, is a very recent development in the history of science. And no philosopher has thought of applying it to the mind-body problem at all. Even I would not have thought of it had I not known about Meher Baba’s extremely unique cosmology.10

They were so busy fighting off belief in theoretical unseen souls that they wound up inventing their own theoretical unseen ‘second Universe,’ inadvertently perpetuating the mind-body problem right into the 21st century. I believe that very soon they will begin to catch up.11

So the idea of psychic emergence is simply that this whole entire infinitely varied kaleidoscope of experience we enjoy and call ‘The Universe’ is in fact the result of a long evolution of perception.

The word “psychic” refers to experience and comes from the Greek word psykhikos, meaning “of the soul, spirit, or mind.” And “emergent” literally means in the process of coming into being.

The title of this article implies I would speak about vocabulary.

A process is broadly defined as a series of actions or events performed to make something or achieve a particular result. But when I speak of process, I’m referring to processes of a particular type. We must distinguish between ‘events’ and ‘formative or transformational processes.’ It will help to give examples.

A walk to the store is, in a way, a process. To achieve the result of reaching the store I have to take certain actions such as find my keys, lock the door, take several hundred steps and arrive at the store. But nothing transformational happened. Nothing that was not already present came into being because of it.

But now let’s take the example of baking a loaf of bread. I begin with ingredients, one of which is yeast. By mixing the ingredients, adding the yeast, and applying heat, the ingredients go through a chemical reaction. Because of the heat, gas is released by the yeast, resulting in the bread rising. When I open the oven something very different from a pan full of soft wet ingredients is found. A fluffy risen loaf of bread. It is the result of a process.

The universe came about as the result of a process. Yet it was not a chemical process as with the loaf of bread. Rather it was a psychic process, an evolution of experience itself from a primordial latent state to its fully manifested current presentation.

My books explain that process in some detail.12 Meher Baba explains much more of it.13 His works were, after all, the source of my idea.

Appendix

Here is the reason I think many among the first generations of Meher Baba’s followers misunderstood him. This applies both to those first ones in the 1930s as well his later ones in the 60s and 70s. And I’m speaking of Western followers.

Prior to the 19th century Westerners deferred to the Bible for the formation of the world. They believed God was a powerful and benevolent incorporeal “person” who created the world out of matter. When he created man he implanted a soul into him and breathed life into it.

This kind of faith began to come apart at the end of the European Enlightenment as people began to question traditional views. And this corresponded with a new influx of ideas from the East.

The Bhagavad Gita was first translated into English in 1785 and published under the authority of the East India Company. The earliest widely recognized English translation of a work by the Buddha was Daniel Gogerly’s partial translation of the Dhammapada in 1840, with a more complete English translation following by Max Muller in 1870.

Such books were highly popular amongst the avant guard and occultists, especially in England and the United States, and many rushed to develop ideas either based on such Eastern ideas or at least written to sound like them.

The same period coincided with the rise of spiritualism in the West. At the time the word “spiritual” was literally correlated with an interest in “spirits.” And channeling and seances became widespread.

In 1875 the Theosophical Society formed in Greenwich Village with the stated purpose of attempting to gain ancient secret knowledge by communicating with invisible spirits.

One of the side-effects of this movement was a growing belief in so-called “ascended masters.”

When Meher Baba appeared on the Western spiritual scene in England in 1931 he immediately attracted occultists who were eager to project these new Theosophical spiritualist ideas onto whatever he said. Baba himself tried to distance himself from groups such as the Theosophists, saying they hadn’t even a smell of the truth.14 However, this didn’t stop many from continuing to try to syncretize things he said with these so-called secret doctrines.

The same thing repeated in the 1960s and 70s as, even as Baba was passing away, hippies and social misfits began to flock to Baba groups and Centers. By this time books such as those published by the Theosophists and more recent occultists like them had a huge resurgence.

The result was that when Baba died, many began to claim to be in communication with him through visions and channeling. Baba was, after all, believed by them to be an ascended master.

Because of this belief in Baba as an incorporeal ascended master who governs the world from afar and visits his followers in visions and dreams to advise them on worldly affairs, Baba’s own much more subtle teaching of Creation as the mere formation of an illusion due to sanskaras is ignored. Baba, they insist, is still alive does everything personally, a theological view known as occasionalism. For such followers, Baba is believed to have literally created the world out of matter, energy, and mind which oozed out of a point in space 13 billion years ago. And they have returned to old ideas of people having souls inside their bodies that can leave the body and travel around in astral projection.15

Today it seems like the entire Baba faith is geared around channeling and astrology.

When it comes to the relationship between God and the Universe, there are several views. One view called pantheism is that God and the Universe are one and the same. Another called panentheism is the view that God, as the supreme reality, is both immanent and transcendent. This means God is both in the things we see and beyond them.

My concept of an evolution of perception was originally inspired by my study of Meher Baba’s system of sanskaras, and was further shaped by consideration of the persisting problems of philosophy. Anyone can read about this system of sanskaras in Baba’s major books God Speaks, Discourses, and the Intelligence Notebooks, downloaded here.

The charts in EOP1 are helpful in that they give a quick way to conceive of what Meher Baba said, using commonly understood contemporary analogies such as lenses.

I propose that the writers of the ancient Vedas, upon which Hindu theology is based, may have actually meant to convey the same idea as Baba, but lacked certain analogies and concepts that we have today. So their intention was not understood as well as it could have been.

Analogies like lenses didn’t exist when the Vedic religious texts were written. They were written from about 1,500 BC to 500 BC. Cameras, projectors, and lenses were not invented until the 18th and 19th centuries. Clearly the Vedic writers wouldn’t have had them to convey certain concepts. Not only were these inventions not there to provide analogies, but additional concepts we have today had not been discovered, such as psychology and evolution. These ideas only developed in the late 19th century.2

I propose that even if the Rishis who wrote the Vedas wanted to convey an idea similar to Meher Baba’s or that conveyed by EOP, they would have had no way to do so at the time. For they didn’t have the analogies and relevant concepts to get it across easily. Let’s look at what these modern analogies and concepts allow us to better conceptualize, and the kinds of analogies that were available to the ancients that did not convey such ideas nearly as clearly.

Consider the chart below. The closest thing to God in charts like this is the eye symbol on the left-hand side.

This eye symbol is meant to represent perception (or the single continuous creative witness). In my view this roughly symbolizes Brahman. The lenses in front of the eye represent sanskaras, or what I call perceptual schemas. They are formative of what they see.

The smaller eyes in the middle represent individual atmas or souls that emerge out of the process depicted as unfolding from left-to-right. The sense of individuality experienced by the atmas develops over time as they form individual consciousness as a result of the process. Yet the only real witness behind all apparently individual witnesses is the eye on the left. This corresponds nicely with words by Baba.

“The only Real Existence is that of the One and only God, who is the Infinite Self in every finite self.”3

It is my understanding that in Hinduism, Brahman is not only the witness, as in EOP, but is the universe too. The seer and the seen. I copied the following paragraph from Google.

“In Hinduism, Brahman is the ultimate reality and supreme being, the impersonal, all-encompassing essence of the universe. It is the source of all existence, eternal, and unchanging, both the universe itself and the divine consciousness within all things.”

This is a little different in the case of EOP, and I believe this difference reflects a difference in what Meher Baba teaches. I’ll explain.

In EOP the world of thoughts, emotions, sensations, and laws of nature is purely a perceptual illusion. It is perceptual only. It is appearance only. It has no actual substance or existence. You can liken such an illusion to a movie that is projected on a movie screen. In a way that is similar to how a movie projector works, what we perceive (thoughts and solid objects we call the phenomenal world) is nothing more than the experiential result of a projection through impressions, which in turn we can liken to movie frames.

Perhaps surprisingly to some, Meher Baba himself used all of these analogies, including the eye, movie frames, film projector, and even tinted eye-glasses in his Intelligence Notebooks.4 In other words, Baba used this perceptual approach to communicating his theme much like EOP.

Using this analogy of perceptual projection through stored imagination (lenses), it becomes understandable how the Universe is literally nothing, a zero as Baba repeatedly says.

“Everything but God is zero.” 5

But compare this with the notion of panentheism, where God is beyond the universe and simultaneously is the universe. This assumes (or at least implies to a reader) that there is a universe that God can be — rather than it being an actual hallucination and nothing. A total zero.

This notion of the Universe being truly absolutely nothing is very hard to convey without psychology, evolution (the concept of processes), and the analogy of lenses which color a person’s experience. Without these, the ancient Rishis were forced to draw upon analogies available to them at the time. This included magicians. A magician creates the illusion of producing something out of thin air — like a rabbit out of a hat or a dove that flies from one’s hand. Maya literally means a magician’s illusion in Sanskrit, the language of the ancient Rishis.6

This implies that the universe was created, albeit by some unknown trickery and is in some mysterious way only an illusion. But this analogy doesn’t communicate an ontology of true nonexistence — at least in any way we can understand. For the world appears to be present before us, just as the rabbit that the magician conjures is apparently there. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying the Rishis were confused. I believe they may have been trying to communicate what Baba is saying. But they lacked the analogies and concepts we have available today to convey it.

Again, today Hinduism is interpreted as holding the view that God is both transcendent and immanent, both beyond the world and the world itself.

In the supplement of God Speaks the author of the supplement actually reacts to this notion of transcendence and immanence by referring the writing of Ibn Arabi, the founder of Wahdat al-Wujud, the school of Sufi philosophy that Baba is said to have endorsed without equivocation.

“Ibn Arabi denies transcendence and immanence, which imply duality. He maintains that God is one and it is He alone Who exists. All else that appear to exist are His manifestations or tajalliyat.”7

That comports with EOP, which is unsurprising considering that EOP was inspired by Baba’s writing. Now let me give some analogies that might help gain an intuitive understanding of this difference.

When a man is dreaming, his dream has no existence apart from him, away from him, separate from him. So we would say the dream is none other than him. But that does not make him and the dream the same thing, only non-different. To say the man having the dream is not only the dreamer of the dream, but is the dream, isn’t true.

It would not even be true that he is in the dream, even if he dreams of his own presence in the dream.

One way to say this is that the dream is him but he is not the dream.

Let me give another analogy, that of a movie projected on a movie screen.

The actor Gary Cooper was in the movie High Noon. Gary Cooper was in High Noon but he also lived his life outside of High Noon. While no one can deny that Gary Cooper is in High Noon, it hardly makes sense to say he is the movie High Noon or that he interpenetrates it. Without Gary Cooper there would be no such movie, but Gary Cooper could easily have existed without the movie. Gary Cooper was a substantive man. But the shadows in the movie theater that bear his image are substanceless. They are an illusion, because High Noon is just a movie and doesn’t exist except in appearance when it is playing on the screen.

The point is that for Baba, the Universe is an illusion, as substanceless as a flickering movie show in a movie theater. And EOP conveys this point well.

The Nothing and the Everything

The following additional principle may make all this even more clear.

While Meher Baba taught a form of non-dualism, it may seem strange that his teaching also contains a form of dualism also. It is not a mind-body dualism like that of René Descartes, or a good-and-evil dualism like that of the Manichaeans. It is a dualism between what he called The Nothing and The Everything. See the chapter “Existence is Substance and Life is Shadow” in God Speaks.8

In this duality, The Everything is Existence, Reality, Substance, God. The Nothing is the Universe, phenomena, life. He compares this duality to one between light and shadow. Shadow has no independent existence, but light is only discoverable in contrast to shadow. I suspect that it was this duality that Zoroaster originally meant when he taught of Asha and Druj. Asha represents truth, while its opposite, Druj, signifies falsehood and deception. Compare to Baba’s words contrasting life with Existence in God Speaks.9

Next, compare this to a movie in a movie theater, where the image is literally shadow.

My point of my mentioning this duality Baba describes between the Everything and the Nothing is that Baba says that the Nothing has to be included in the Everything or the Everything could never be called Everything. Yet the Everything could never be included in the Nothing.

“EVERYTHING by virtue of being everything embodies even “NOTHING,” or else Everything can never mean everything. This Nothing is latent in the Everything. But Nothing, being literally nothing, the very being of being nothing is nothing at all.”10

Parvardigar is a Persian name for the sustainer aspect of God. Some may argue that in Baba’s Parvardigar Prayer,11 it names things that Parvardigar is “in” and also is “beyond,” implying immanence. Examples from the prayer are:

“You are in the firmament and in the depths. You are manifest and unmanifest on all planes and beyond all planes; You are in the three worlds and also beyond the three worlds.”

Some Baba lovers go so far as to say that Baba had to be a pantheist. However Baba literally denied this.

“From all this, you should not take it that I am a pantheist.”12

The way I understand this apparent paradox is again with the analogy I gave of Gary Cooper. Gary Cooper was in High Noon, Sergeant York, and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. But this does not make these shadow plays real. Gary Cooper is in these films, but they are not in Gary Cooper. And they are certainly not the same thing. For, as Baba said, Nothing, being literally nothing, the very being of being nothing is nothing at all.

In Conclusion, I suspect that the Rishis of the Vedas and Zoroaster who composed the Gathas may have meant the same as Baba, but being in the time in which they lived this was difficult to express, especially due to lacking the analogy of movies and concepts like evolution and psychology.

Endnotes

The essential idea of this system is easy to summarize, and it will be helpful to go ahead and do so before describing it at length. The idea is that the perceptual schemata (distinctions like the duck-rabbit example) can account for every single attribute of our experience, from the mathematical to the physical, to thought, language, identity, and culture. No other entities are required. Taken together as a whole, the evolution of perception and its perceptual schemata (seeing and ways of seeing) can account for these things with a single mechanism, making it simpler than any previous theory of reality.

The process of the evolution of perception accounts for the metaphysical components of life such as time, space, natural laws, substance, and thought. It is not intended as a substitute for other well-established processes, such as plate tectonics, biological evolution, or psychology. It is the process that created the raw material that these other processes manipulate. It is the underlying process.

What begins as a story, a telling of chronological events over the course of time, is in fact most fundamentally a description of a process, rather than a temporal chronology. It is best to understand those events that are described as occurring prior to the schema of time as being events that occur in purely logical sequence. Events described as occurring after the rise of the schema of time can be understood as events occurring in time or in temporal sequence.¹

Finally, the precise order of events in this account of the evolution of perception is ad hoc.² The point of giving it is not to convince the reader of every detail, but in a more general way to convince the reader of the increased elegance and simplicity of relying on a single device, the perceptual schema, rather than multiple metaphysical entities or substances, to account for the aspects of human experience.

IN THE BEGINNING, before time and space, before language and thought, before logic and number, and before distinction of any kind, there was perception. There was no one doing this perceiving, nor was there anything to perceive, for such a distinction was not yet conceived.^{3 4 5} There was only that which we ordinarily conceptualize as occurring between seer and seen—the activity of perceiving.⁶

The world began to evolve in the moment that there was a small change in the manner of perception.⁷ In other words, the first perceptual schema evolved. The world was, and remains, nothing but a subjective after-effect of a congeries of perceptual schemata. A perceptual schema is a way of perceiving, a way of organizing an image. It brings content to the image of experience by means of perceptual organization. A perceptual schema is not a linguistic thought, nor is it a picture, but rather it is what begins to make such impressions possible. When a new perceptual schema emerges in perception,⁸ it brings a new dimension to the image and a new overall image is formed called a gestalt.⁹ However, when the very first schema evolved in perception there was no image to be schematized.^{10 11}

This first perceptual schema to evolve was the schema of distinction.¹² We could just as well use the word “separation,” “duality,” “two-ness,” “opposition,” or “polarity.” We can verify that the schema of distinction survives in our perceptual faculties to this day. Look at the room you are in. Can you distinguish the floor from the ceiling, the furniture from yourself? How can we explain this conceptual ability that we so take for granted?¹³ If you could not make these distinctions, but had no ability to distinguish between things whatsoever (due to a cognitive dysfunction), you would be in a waking coma. One must make distinctions to pull things into conscious awareness.¹⁴

Many people do not realize that distinction, or polarity, automatically gives rise to all of mathematics. Polarity entails all of mathematic. Mathematics falls out of two-ness. This is actually confirmed in modern set theory, i.e. all of mathematics is reducible to polarization into so-called “sets.”¹⁵ Of course we are talking about pure theoretical mathematics in this case. Thus, infinite mathematical potential existed automatically with the rise of the first schema of distinction alone. But this mathematical potential could not manifest in the image for it had no medium to which it could be applied.^{16 17} Such medium required a second perceptual schema.

The Quantum Era: The second perceptual schema that evolved was time. Time, like distinction, is nothing more than a way of organizing an image. We don’t see time per se. Rather, we see things temporally. Because there was no dimension of time prior to the evolution of the schema of time, time followed distinction only in logical succession. Reflecting upon the rise of time through the organizational power of time, we would say that time came into being contemporaneous with distinction.

Now stop and think about time. Like its predecessor distinction, it survives in our perceptual faculties. Can you distinguish today from yesterday or this moment from that which has not yet occurred? How do you do this if not through the schema of time? Think of two plus one. You are able to separate these numbers in sequence.¹⁸ What kind of sequence? A temporal sequence. With the emergence of these two perceptual schemata, distinction and time, distinction could be applied to the sequence of time. Perception of the endless potential of mathematics that was made possible by the evolution of distinction, through the newly evolved schema of time, made the rise of complex mathematical formulas possible.

The rise of the distinction of time marked the onset of the first major era in the evolution of the universe—a universe that was nothing but a mathematical image. This era, which took place billions of years ago, was the era in which subatomic laws evolved, the pure mathematical formulas that govern subatomic structures.¹⁹ We can call this the quantum²⁰ era. Subatomic particles such as quarks and electrons existed in this era only in their most abstract mathematical condition. The subatomic quantum image is what materialists call the “material substratum,” i.e. that which we are seeing at its most fundamental level. This quantum world, or stratum of the perceived image, arose prior to the evolution of the perceptual schema of space. Therefore, it does not conform to our spatial intuitions. In the subatomic quantum world, things disappear and reappear, etc. Subatomic events do not conform to our common sense notions of finite²¹ location and motion.

The Rise of Natural Laws: The third perceptual schema to evolve was space. The schema of space brought still more organizational content to the original mathematical quantum image.²² The dimension of space was thus added to the overall gestalt. Motion was now an abstract possibility. The schema of space made finite mathematical formulas possible, formulas that apply to the dimensions of space and time. We find the result of this evolution of finite mathematical formulas all around us in the form of natural laws such as gravity, electromagnetic fields, and the constant speed of light.²³ These laws are, in fact, inherent attributes of our perception. This is why we can find no external cause for them. We can see that these formulas survive in our perceptual faculties today. Pick up an object and drop it. Watch it fall to the floor in accord with an exact formula, whether or not you are aware of that formula. This is the perceptual schema of gravity operating in experience.

Thus, the emergence of the schema of space marked the beginning of the second era in the evolution of the image (world), i.e., the evolution of its mathematical natural laws. Natural laws, when applied to the quantum substratum, eventually, and over the course of time, gave rise to molecules, planets and suns. Note that this world, like that of the quantum era, was still a purely mathematical world entirely devoid of any substantive concrete impression. The evolving mathematical image was the object of perception—in a sense a purely conceptual image.²⁴

During this era, mathematical laws evolved prior to the objects they would later govern, gradually giving rise to those very objects. This is the opposite of what our intuitions tell us should have occurred. Objects, it seems, should have evolved before the laws that govern them.²⁵ But introspection will reveal that this second scenario is logically impossible. It is the strong forces (such as electromagnetic forces) that pull subatomic particles together to form molecules. And it is the weak forces (such as gravity) that pull molecules together to form planets. Therefore, it is impossible that molecules or planets evolved prior to those forces.

Inorganic Evolution. In this primal²⁶ mathematical world (image), inorganic compounds (albeit mathematical) began to evolve. Things like minerals (coagulating and degrading by natural laws) and water (forming into lakes, rivers, and streams by natural laws) manifested without sensorial qualities such as color, sound or texture—qualities that would eventually give them their appearance of solidity or tangibility. Gases, suns, planets, and moons, evolved in this pure mathematical era. Barren²⁷ galaxies evolved without color or sound. If one could see the world today in this present moment only through the perceptual schemata of the era of its origin, one would see a world replete with plants, animals, and sentient human beings moving about, all composed of nothing but mathematical laws and quantum probabilities. On one level, the world remains that way. The only difference is that today our perception is evolved to the point where we have added qualitative schemata such color and sound, connecting quantitative and qualitative qualities the way colors are connected to numbers in a paint-by-number set—only we do so through our perceptual organization.

Organic Evolution and The Rise of Substance: In the third era in the evolution of perception, organic life forms began to evolve such as plants, worms, etc. Simultaneous with the emergence of such organic life forms a new class of perceptual schemata also arose. We can call these sensorial schemata. Over time sensorial schemata came to include touch, smell, taste, sound, and eventually color—the five senses.²⁸ The sensorial schemata are important, for out of them arise our sense of substance that we currently enjoy,²⁹ i.e. the sense of physicality that we feel with our hands and see with our eyes. Color is an example of a sensorial schema. The color spectrum arose in perception as a new and more interesting way of perceiving an otherwise colorless mathematical image, i.e., the mathematical wavelength of the light spectrum. Similarly, the evolution of the schema of sound brought the dimension of sound to an otherwise silent mathematical image, i.e. vibratory frequencies.

Once again, we can test whether these sensorial schemata survive in our perceptual faculties. Look at an object in the room you are in. You see it has a color. This color corresponds with a purely mathematical frequency of light. Feel it. It is either cool or warm. This sensation corresponds with a molecular frequency.

The rise of sensorial schemata gave the image its substance or its substantive quality. This is opposite from the way we traditionally think about substance. Normally we think of substance existing from the beginning, even before evolution began.³⁰ Here substance arises out of a process of evolution. It is the result of an evolution of perception that gradually adds perceptual qualities, such as weight, color, thickness, and mass, to the image. These schemata create the gestalt of solidity and form. Objects seen through sensorial schemata are stable and reliable because they are schematizing stable and reliable natural laws. Objects that one experiences in terms of them are tangible because one can touch them. They are empirical because one can see them. In every conceivable sense, the otherwise non-substantive mathematical image, when seen through the sensorial schemata, is entirely substantive.³¹

Footnotes

¹ This is because the schema of time gives rise to the impression of things being in time. Thus time does not exist prior to the rise of the schema of time.

² Ad hoc: done or set up solely in response to a particular situation or problem (Encarta World English Dictionary).

³ It was inconceivable because the conceptual devices for conceiving of such a distinction as seer and seen, such as the device of distinction itself, had not yet occurred in perception.

⁴ Perception precedes the conceived distinction of subject (seer) and object (seen). Some will argue that it is not possible that perception could take place without someone doing the perceiving. From a purely logical point of view it is possible. Consider Descartes’ cogito, “I think; therefore I am.” Descartes is not deriving his existence as he claims to be. Rather he assumes his existence in his premise, in the word “I” in “I think.” Strictly speaking, the only logical conclusion Descartes could have derived from his immediate experience would have been, “Experience is occurring; therefore experience is occurring.” Descartes did not guess that perception might be occurring independently of its subject and object, forming the impression of both through the power of complex evolved schemata. Descartes could never have guessed that an evolution of perception gave rise to subject and object, for concepts such as process theory and evolution were not available to him.

⁵ Isn’t an image a necessary part of what we call perception? Can we see without seeing something? There are several ways to demonstrate that it is indeed possible. Imagine you are asked to enter an isolation tank to determine if there are any light leaks or sound leaks. You enter the tank, look, listen, and then exit to report that there are none. How could you make this determination without perceiving this absence of stimuli? Aristotle made an analogy that may be helpful. He said, “If the eye had a soul, it would be sight, not seeing” (Aristotle, On the Soul 2:1:20). Consider what Aristotle is saying about the difference between sight and seeing. If you blow out a candle in a dark room, you stop seeing anything, but you retain your faculty of sight. On the other hand, if your eye becomes blinded in an accident, more than seeing is lost—your sight (the essence of your eye, its life) is lost. We are saying that in the beginning there was sight, but no seeing. It is an axiom of this system that perception is a process that is independent of any image.

⁶ There is nothing illogical about this paragraph. It is a first premise or axiom of a system that builds upon it. That an invisible substance called matter existed before the things that it conspired to produce is also a first premise or axiom. Neither can be derived logically or verified. Both are mere metaphysical starting points that originate in human imagination. They must be guessed because experience itself entails no metaphysical conclusions about its origin. Axiom: a basic proposition of a system that, although unproven, is used to prove the other propositions in the system (Encarta World English Dictionary).

⁷ The epiphany of the first perceptual schema corresponds with the moment of the Big Bang. However, this moment is only a moment in hindsight, when it is reflected upon through the evolved schema of time. It also corresponds with the location of the Big Bang, which is a location only in hindsight, imagined through the evolved schema of space.

⁸ Original schemata emerge suddenly, much like epiphanies (sudden intuitive leaps of understanding).

⁹ Gestalt: a set of elements such as a person’s thoughts and experiences considered as a whole and regarded as amounting to more than the sum of its parts (Encarta World English Dictionary).

¹⁰ Someone might ask why all this happened. Materialism cannot account for why the universe began. While such teleological concerns are part of this theory, they fall outside of the scope of this book. Here we are merely comparing its simplicity and explanatory power with that of materialism.

¹¹ It seems strange to talk of a way of perceiving, such as perceiving distinctively, arising prior to any image to perceive through that schema. However, there is nothing logically inconsistent about this conception.

¹² Properties seen through the intuition of distinction tend to be polarized, understandable in terms of a set of opposites. For instance, up is understood in contrast to down. Good is understood in contrast to bad. No property is conceivable in isolation from some contrast, either its opposite or its negation.

¹³ Most people would say it is simply obvious. This is a given. It is obvious. But the question is why is it obvious?

¹⁴ When you abstract any distinction from the image you perceive, you are, according to this theory, exposing a property of your own perception. Without the ability to make distinctions of any kind, the human being would not be able to separate himself from his environment, thus would not be aware of his own existence.

¹⁵ Later, the application of the schema of mathematics to language gives rise to logic.

¹⁶ Before the first schema there was no image. Therefore, the first way of perceiving (the first schema) preceded anything that would be perceived in terms of it. This entails an entirely new way of looking at metaphysics, a complete inversion of thinking.

¹⁷ Without any dimensions (like time), mathematics is too abstract to manifest in the image. Time brings the first variable to mathematics. This is probably too subtle to conceive. But this is how this system works, beginning with subtlest impressions and developing toward the substantive and definite. It is this sense of progression and not the details presented, which probably are inaccurate, that I am trying to convey.

¹⁸ Sequence: n a number of things arranged in a particular order or connected in some way, or a number of actions or events that happen one after another. v to arrange things or perform actions in a definite order (Encarta World English Dictionary).

¹⁹ The first strata of our perceptions.

²⁰ The quantum world is the world of very small objects such as subatomic particles. Subatomic particles behave oddly and do not conform to our common sense ideas of definite location and motion.

²¹ Finite: subject to measurable limitations (Encarta World English Dictionary).

²² The mathematical quantum image forms a matrix upon which all else is constructed simply by adding properties, i.e. imagining new qualities in the matrix. Matrix: a situation or set of circumstances that allows or encourages the origin, development, or growth of something (Encarta® World English).

²³ In all of these laws, mathematics is applied to the dimensions of space and time.

²⁴ Remember that the word “image” in this system includes concepts. In this case mathematical concepts are perceived. They are the image of perception, the object of experience at the beginning of time.

²⁵ This theory questions the assumption that substance is fundamental, and posits the notion of a substance that arises as the result of a process. (See the chapter, The Psychological Fallacy)

²⁶ Primal: first or earliest, and often basic (Encarta World English)

²⁷ Barren: with no trees or other plants growing (Encarta World English Dictionary).

²⁸ The schema of induction also evolved in this era as a way of organizing stimuli. The roots of a plant will grow in the direction they have previously encountered water. The plant has begun to presuppose that the future will be like the past. Amazingly, the plant is beginning to evolve a sense of induction.

²⁹ Substance: physical reality that can be touched and felt (Encarta® World English Dictionary).

³⁰ Materialism includes the belief that matter (substance) is basic, and thus always existed. In the new theory, perception is basic and is always occurring.

³¹ Some would argue that the word “substance” denotes something to do with being real. Yet, these same people would have a difficult time saying exactly what they mean by the word “real” if not tangible, solid, consistent for everyone, and visible. In this system, objects are real. The only change is that they evolved into reality. That something has evolved as the result of a process does not entail that it is not real. Since perception is real, and since substance evolved out of a process of perception, it follows logically that substance is supported by a real substratum (underlying base, layer, or element), albeit perception. On the other hand, some define reality as that which is independent of perception. By this definition, absolutely nothing in this system, including perception, is real.