This is a blog about living an adventurous life. It is about the tricks and secrets that can help you do it. It is about taking sovereignty, and deciding to surpass our limits.
Before we can get onto the tricks and secrets, however, it’s a good idea to get a framework that makes all of this stuff useful, and that serves as a philosophical foundation for how I proceed with hypnosis, and all kinds of other amazing technologies.
Fellow hypnotist David Snyder often makes an observation that everything we do, we do because of a feeling : a feeling we want more of, or a feeling we want less of.
Our strategies for getting that feeling — the behaviors we exhibit or suppress — determine the outcome, but the desire and direction are set by the imagination. Every decision we make, it’s been said, is a prediction about the world we think we’ll be in when the results materialize.
The philosophical foundations of everything that follows begins with doubt, and questioning. So, in a sense, this begins not so much with establishing foundations, but more of a “clearing out” of things that might get in the way of those foundations. As the title of this post suggests, we start in a place that is pretty bleak and barren. Be encouraged: this bleak and barren place leads to Treasure.
So, it begins with doubt — and specifically with rattling the illusory sense of certainty we project on the world around us. When we know that we do not know everything, we’re free to change our strategy. Freedom begets possibility.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”
-Shunryu Suzuki
Let’s start with the dominant operating system in the west. Science is the measuring stick by which much of society decides what is real, true, etc., and it has dramatically shaped our approach to the world in general, and also dramatically shaped the world, itself.
We have this idea, as Rupert Sheldrake puts it, “that science already understands the nature of reality in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in.” Sheldrake contests this idea, in his book Science Set Free (US title. Also published elsewhere as The Science Delusion), where he lists assumptions that are somewhat the “dogma” of current science. I imagine we’ll return to his assessment in future posts, but for now, let’s just deal with the essentials.
The common story of current science tells a tale of a world outside of our skin, captured by our sense organs, and finally rendered into coherent experience in our minds. This story rests upon some core assumptions — that there is a “truth” out there, that it is a “know-able” thing, and that the sense organs — combined with human reason — reveal that truth. Truth, in a sense, is considered to be the “product” of science.
And yet what does it mean to truly know? In the way we commonly use it, we mean that we are incapable of being mistaken about a given thing. I know I am sitting in this chair — I cannot be wrong. I have reasons for believing it — the sensory experience I am currently having, and the story I tell myself about what things “mean” when they emerge into that experience — these things tell me that this is real.
The world is a very strange place. The same science we use to map the limits of reality tells us another interesting story — that what we experience in our consciousness is barely a percentage of what our sense organs take in. (We’ll leave any discussion of the observer effect and quantum physics aside — They’re a bit outside of my wheelhouse, so to speak.)
To further complicate things, research has shown that eyewitness testimony is actually a very unreliable record of reality, and that memory is incredibly malleable — in fact, that any time we recall a thing, we often make minor (or major) alterations to it before “re-consolidating” it.
This can be an unsettling idea for some of us, and yet I assure you that good news is coming. Memory expert and researcher Elizabeth Loftus has a TED talk dealing with mistaken and false memories in greater detail, for those that would like to explore it further. Be aware that this video begins with the very brief non-graphic mention of a particular sexual assault case, for those who wish to avoid the topic.
Human perception is malleable, and yet we don’t tend to think it is. While eyewitness testimony has been repeatedly shown to be relatively unreliable, as mentioned above, it is among the most convincing for the jury.
So if we can’t be certain about the past, what about our present experience?
And so, right now, I seem to be in this chair. And at some points in the past, I’ve seemed to be in a chair, and it turns out I wasn’t — experiencing a dream, hypnagogia, or some other hallucination. Can you truly know a thing if you can also doubt it? What is the difference between knowledge and a belief?
Now, to many of us, this is an old story. Rene Descartes opened this can of worms in the early 1600s, but the seeds of this questioning are present even in the pre-Socratics. Likewise, the question of how much of this reality we can truly know has been played with even in our popular culture, being a central concepts in movies like Total Recall, The Truman Show, Inception, and The Matrix.
Some see uncertainty as a bad thing. I don’t. I find it incredibly liberating. Every thing or experience you want, that you have not yet had, is acquired or achieved by stepping into an uncertain future. What you pursue lies outside of the boundaries of your comfort zone — a comfort zone that is based on the foundations of past experience. And yet, to borrow a question from Richard Bandler, “Do you want your future to be squarely pointed at your past?”
It reminds me of a line I heard from author Scott Grossberg, that went something like this : Magicians don’t walk through the walls they see. They walk through the walls YOU see.
How do we know the boundaries of our cages, especially if we never test them?
When a person is asked how they know something, there really are only two justifications that are ever offered: (1) Because somebody else told them, and, presumably, that person provides truth; (2) They know it from there own experience.
There is a third accounting that is sometimes offered as well, although not really a justification per se — “I just know.”
So where does all of this leave us? What is to be taken from it?
I don’t have the perfect answer for that, but I have an idea I’d like to share. It starts with a brief summary: The quest for an objective truth — what can be known with certainty — is problematic. It has also been largely unsuccessful. (As I’ll extrapolate on later in our exploration, I humbly suggest that we’ve been picking the wrong target. First, let’s finish nailing this coffin.)
A philosophy professor of mine once shared an observation — That the philosopher Immanuel Kant made a last, valiant attempt to establish (rescue?) certainty from the dustbins in three works: Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of the Power of Judgment — Dealing with Metaphysics, Aesthetics, and Ethics, respectively. The works are amazing intellectual accomplishments, but they do not resolve the core of the problem, which is one of Epistemology – how we claim to know things.
And without going down the path of “a priori” knowledge or a “categorical imperative” — let’s just say that Kant’s exploration of metaphysics in Critique of Pure reasons leaves us in a quandary: there is the Noumena, or world “as it is” and there is the Phenomena, or world “as it appears” to the observer. This is similarly problematic, dividing things into appearances vs. reality. Kant’s approach does not suggest way to close this chasm, or otherwise determine what is “true” beyond the appearances we perceive.
Okay — so enough of this for now. What’s needed now is a “real” experience, that you can have, of seeing just how much our minds are shaping the so-called realities around us. In this case, it presents itself in an undeniable display — the McGurk Effect.
Check this out:
This demonstrates how a piece of visual information (the shape of a mouth) changes the way we perceive sound. Given that the sound is constant in the experiment, and one can alternate at will between the two visual representations, it’s a real-time example of our minds distorting our perception to match other models, at the expense of accuracy.
So, it’s important to pause here and mention this : I’m not against science. I think it does wonderful things. It’s just that the product of science is not “truth” — it is technology. It is “stuff” we use to alter the world around us, in the pursuit of that thing we mentioned all the way at the top : a feeling.
The world we experience is not reality itself — but a map of the reality that deletes, distorts, and generalizes information to maximize the function of the organism. Some of the most intriguing research out there suggests that, not only do we NOT experience the “real world” — seemingly, it is to our evolutionary advantage that we do not!! Donald Hoffman does a remarkable job at demonstrating this in his book, “The Case Against Reality,” as well as in several long-format interviews available on YouTube.
Reality Shmeality? What the heck is left?
Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Sure, I’m stealing a Matrix line and using it out of context, and yet — it’s fitting. If we can’t separate our “perceptions” from “reality” then it seems we’re left with perception. What we call “reality” is largely populated by the offspring of Imagination. And our greatest destiny is made largely possible by the stuff of Dream. The stories we tell ourselves, the maps we make — they are the Dream Things that inspire us to do mighty deeds.
In the absence of hard, undeniable certainties, there is comfort to be taken in the words from the wild mind of Robert Anton Wilson.
Even the title of his talk hints at it — The Universe contains a maybe — and the talk itself brings some much-needed levity to our predicament.
“I would like to propose the world would might go stark, staring, sane, if people used the word ‘maybe’ more often.”
-Robert Anton Wilson
If you’d like to watch the full talk, it is located here. Some people find some of Bob’s rants to contain offensive elements — he occupies a space somewhere between philosopher and a comedian.
Okay — It’s time to breathe. We have reached an oasis.
The good news is coming — Our next little piece begins with a monkey in a lecture hall.