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New Thinking Allowed Audio Podcast
The Illusion of Separation with Jonathan Bricklin
02:02:33
The Illusion of Separation with Jonathan Bricklin Jonathan Bricklin, former program director of the New York Open Center, is a scholar of William James. He has written numerous academic papers and two acclaimed books: The Illusion of Will, Self,
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And these waves of bliss just came over me. Just ecstatic feelings of love and connection with everything. They do a meditation, you know, on these meditation retreats where you're supposed to send love to people, relatives, people you don't like even. And I was like, with that meditation, I was like, well, yeah, I'll send it to them, but they've got to tweak this a little bit. Come on, come on. Right. But in this state now, you just feel love and connection with everything. You're just radiating it. So I'm in this sort of blissful state. And it just went on and on.
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Keep watching to learn more.
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Book 4 in the New Thinking Allowed dialogue series is Charles T. Tart 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon.
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New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit the their website@cihs.edu. you can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies go to newthinking allowed.org.
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Thinking allowed conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.
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Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we'll be exploring the illusion of separation. My guest is Jonathan Bricklin, former a former program director at the New York Open Center. He is the author of many academic papers based on the life and work of the great psychologist and philosopher William James. He is also the author of the Illusion of Will Self and William James Reluctant Guide to Enlightenment, as well as another book about William James philosophy of consciousness called Jonathan lives in New York City, but he's here with me today in Albuquerque. Welcome, Jonathan.
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Thank you, Jeffrey. It's just a joy to be in this enchanting home.
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B
Well, it's a real pleasure to have you here as a guest. It's been a special time, I think for the two of us together. We seem to have things in common that go well beyond the superficial existential realities of three dimensional life.
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A
Well, I would like to say at the outset that your book Roots of consciousness in its 50th year this year, was a lifeline to me when I had an intense experience that I did have that set everything off.
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B
Well, let's talk about that experience. As I recall, it was in 1989. You were 35 years old.
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Yes, true. Which Richard Buck, Cosmic Consciousness, says that's A typical year for a kind of mystical experience and awakening. So I wasn't aware of that at the time. So I had an Alexander teacher. You know, Alexander. And it's kind of like learning how to give a massage to yourself. But at some point, she thought, no, I needed more than that. And she sent me on a meditation.
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B
What kind of a person were you at that time? Prior to your experience? How would you define yourself?
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Confused. I had a very erratic trajectory. Didn't know where I was really going. I had been. I started at Northwestern as an acting major. I saw a play by Shaw, man and Superman. And, like, overnight, was more interested in what to say than how to say it. Shaw just totally rocked my world. I became a philosopher philosophy student when I got out of. When I graduated, then I had to earn a living. So I went back to acting. Did that for years. I found a temporary job, a weekend job in a law firm that allowed me to have five days to myself. But I didn't really know what to do with myself. But what I had a passion for was Greek. Maybe being first an acting major, then a philosophy major kind of brings Greek culture to mind, right, because that's vital to them both. But I was drifting, and I had aspirations besides acting. I started to do some screenwriting possibilities with somebody, and we started that. And by age 35, I was still not sure where I wanted to go with my life. So I had pretty much general confusion, I would say. So my Alexander teacher recommended that I go on a meditation retreat. And I'd never done meditation before. So I went to Insight Meditation Society in Bari. And they gave me a form that said, what do you expect to get from this retreat? I said, beginner's luck. So I guess that's what I got more. So the first night of the retreat, it was run by Christopher Titmus, an author and one of the organizers of IMS originally and Henrietta Rogel, now known as Sharda. And Christopher had a distinctive teaching. He would have us sit facing each other in the Dharma hall on either side of the hall. And if you had a problem, you just spoke it out. And then Christopher would guide you by inquiry until you said, thank you. Like, okay, that's all I can take, or whatever. So the first question was asked, and a person raised a problem. And Christopher, by inquiry, led her to see that, well, her problem was something she was holding on. That was no longer true. And I thought, wow, that was well done. That was impressive. Then the second person spoke and had a problem that was a little more. Was Deeper. And I thought, well, it's going to be harder for him to work his method with that. But sure enough, he did it. And I thought, wow. And by the third one, I thought, oh, I get it. All our problems are what we're holding on to something. Something isn't what we think is. And basically it's like 90% of what I've gotten out of Buddhism in meditation. I learned in like those 10 minutes. As for meditation itself, my teacher had given me bad. My Alexander teacher had given me bad advice. She said, if you're feeling pain, just move. Yeah, but that doesn't really work because if you're moving and fidgeting, you're not meditating. It won't. The stillness is really important. But by the third day, when I felt a pain in my knee, instead of moving out of it, I concentrated on it, on the pain itself. Now, concentration is not a word they use in meditation. They bring your. Bring your awareness to. It's a more passive thing. There's something too self and effortful about concentrating. But I did concentrate on the pain. And when I did, after a minute or two, I guess it anchored me by concentrating on the pain. It anchored the rest of me in the present moment. And these waves of bliss just came over me, just, just ecstatic feelings of love and connection with everything. They do a meta meditation, you know this right on. On these. Meditation where you're supposed to send love to people, relatives, people you don't like even. And I was like, with that meditation, I was like, well, yeah, I'll send it to them, but they've got to tweak this a little bit. Come on, come on. Right? But in this state, you just feel love and connection with everything. You're just radiating it. So I'm in this sort of blissful state. And it just went on and on that late afternoon I had every day. And it's not like you have to be silent every day because every other day you get to meet, you get to talk about what you're experiencing. So that was my day. I went with my group, I was the last one to speak. And I'm still feeling this blissful. And I don't know, maybe because I'm Jewish and we have a kind of ethical sense of how we're supposed to be in this world or something, the bliss was a problem for me. Here I am. Hey, what's going on? So I say to the teacher, I say, okay, I'm feeling all this bliss, but what do you do with it? What do you do with it. She looks me right in the eye and she says, well, maybe you just do nothing. And she leaves. And I sit there and I start shaking. Shaking like this. I think it's like, what a panic attack. I've had one in my life. I had one in my life before, and it felt like that. But because I've been doing three days of bare awareness training, I was, like, letting it be, like, not trying to shut it down, like, okay, let it go. And that was its own kind of ecstasy. That was. That was kind of cool. So. And then I noticed, I don't know if I can stand up here, but that when I. When I walked, because they also do a walking meditation instead of watching my foot so carefully come to the ground. Like, you know, like NASA watching the space shuttle land. It was like, boom. Foot there, attention there. It's like so, boom, boom, right there, right there, right there in the moment. So that was an experience. Later, there was a full eclipse of the moon, which I share, because maybe the yin, some of that light got into me. I don't know what. But what happened. This would be now. On the last night of the retreat, Henrietta gave a talk about opening up to pain. She said, often we hide what we're feeling. We're feeling something, but we don't express it. We just let things go by. Somehow that opened up again, something in me. It wasn't my night to talk, but I went up to her and I said, henrietta, I just started, blah, blah, blah, talking about something. And she said, what are you feeling? I said, I feel that. And she says, no, no, what are you feeling? I said, pain, right here, Right in this area. And as soon as I said that, I started shaking again. And again, he's kind of like this. And she said, okay, let's go take a walk. So she takes me 50 yards, sits me under a tree and says, I'll come back. There's three bizarre aspects of what I'm about to share. This is the first. I'm sitting there shaking a little bit, when suddenly sort of this finger meets this. This, like, I'm almost putting music to it, like. But it wasn't that. But the point is, I wasn't doing this and I did not know the word mudra. Okay, so finger touches finger like this. Like, I guess a closed circuit. And then this energy, cautious drumming. It's like I'm burning a hole in all through this connecting point like this. I don't know how long it went on. Minutes, for sure. She comes back. The first thing I Notice is I can look her right in the eye. I'd always been more kind of one of those kind of people, you know, not able to really just be there with somebody, take their eyes, like your incredible eyes in. But I did do that. And then, you know, just things calmed down. I was just went on that night, an ex dharma student had come back. And it's a strange thing. He was showing a slideshow. He showed a picture of like a burned out village in Central America by terrorists. I think there had been a Buddhist school or something. I share this because now comes to the most important part of the story or the most dramatic point. The next morning, I had missed my meditation for the first time. I've been very regular about it. And I'm sitting in bed, up in bed, and suddenly this energy, a ch. Energy comes over me, right? And my arms are out now. And it's like the ecstasy is so extreme, but the energy is so taking me over the shadow. Shh. I'm thinking to myself, okay, swing low, sweet chariot. I actually use that phrase like, I'm out of here. And what a way to go and all of that. When I had in my mind the thought of that burned out village, and I went suffering out loud. And then I'm like. It's almost like. I know this is a strange story. I'm almost like lifted up, back straight. And here's the weirdest part. In the window, out the window, in the clouds, huge, like a giant drive in a movie screen, I saw a scene of pain or confusion from my life, followed instantly by a scene that made sense of it, redeemed it showed me what I had learned from it. And when I say seen, I mean felt it, like, lived it again. And then the resolution, Boom. Another scene. Boom, boom, boom. Basically, my life was passing before my eyes cut in pairs. And I also. I can't remember a single one of them in detail. I do remember, though, they were all like black and white, which is strange because I dream in color. But that was it. My life review. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Everything I thought was trying to avoid at the time and was painful for me. Something I grew from. Now, we all know we learn from mistakes and that are all good, but to have your whole life pass through your eye, pass before yourself like that is, you know, wow. As someone once pointed out to me, usually in a life review, you see the pain you've caused others. This wasn't that. It was my own pain showing how I was redeemed. So my instant mood coming out of that, I always compare it to Alastair Sim and the Christmas Carol, where after his third dream, he's so excited and joyful, he's like, renewed. And get the turkey for Tiny Tim. And all of that. That was my mood. It was like, oh, my God. It was as if all my burdens were lifted all at once. Because it was like, wait a minute. I'm trying to steer myself in a certain way. This trying to avoid. All my life is about trying to avoid this pain, trying to avoid that pain. And here I am. It's like everything's just okay as it is. Everything I thought I needed to avoid brought me something. Wow.
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So.
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And then here's the third most unusual part of it. I started to be squeezed into the exact arising moment. And by this I mean I lost the landscape of the past and the future. The I reverberates as, and I literally mean this. There was no vision of not a single image related to the past, nothing related to the future, nowhere to go. Just this moment, gap, this moment. So like each moment arrived as if between a gap. You know, Basho, who, you know, he spent two years in his end monastery, he tried to explain what that experience was like. And he kind of created haiku, old pond, frog jumps in, sound of the water. The gap in between each moment. That's what I was living. And it was a tremendous ecstasy, moment by moment. The energy in my forehead, and there's a picture, actually you can see me like a week after, but there's an energy in my forehead. I had no energy in my forehead. It like had relaxed into folds. I had no energy in my genitals and I was on fire everywhere else. And when I went to sleep at night, I guess I had nothing to process of the day because there was just each moment, right? So. And then instant by instant, I seemed to have nothing to process because I slept. It felt like total sleep, except I was aware I was awake for it. Are aware of it. It's like just black, black, black, black. So. And I knew I had something to teach from this. There's something to share. But the only thing I could come up with was whatever is is the bliss of when you don't have the I to reverberate as, right? Which I mean, the I is that reverberation between past and future. When you don't have that, then like, where are these thoughts coming from? I mean, I had a friend who had died of AIDS a few months earlier. I was calling out to him. It's like Arthur Are you sending me these thoughts? It's like, where are these thoughts coming from? You know, people, God, different people have different sense of who God is. And they'll say that or whatever. I'm just saying all of us are unified in the sense that it doesn't feel like it's coming from inside just me. Right? And there's a Taoist. We're wearing our Taoist pins, the Book of Balance and Harmony that says you should concentrate 24 hours a day throughout all your activity on inwardly searching for this. What is it that speaks, is silent, looks and listens. Now, I think that question is not expected to get an answer anytime soon. Like, well, in the 12th hour, I'll come up with, no, that's pointing to this. So that became absolutely central to me, this idea of this gap between thoughts, because you can play that out. As you know, we've been talking through different mystical traditions and eventually, of course, through James. That's why I came to James. I needed to understand consciousness from the root bottom up. And I began with him. And it was like falling down a rabbit hole because James was open to so much psychical research and everything else. So I basically never left the James world.
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You've become a William James scholar, essentially as a result of this Kundalini, mystical, meditative experience.
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My friend Peter Kingsley, who you've spoken about, right. He said to me, they told me, you can't be a mystic and an academic both. His reply was, he was an academic because he was a mystic, because he, too, had profound experiences that hopefully he will share with you one day.
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Yeah, I hope so.
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Yeah. So it's funny to think of myself as a James scholar. What I am is somebody who emphasizes a side of James that James on and off, would emphasize. I mean, his sister said, his wonderful, brilliant sister Alice said, he's like a blob of mercury. You know, you put your finger down and he changes somewhere else. And he had a very strong sense of religion. He keeps writing about the one and the many, the one and the many. And he tried to write the many and the one. That's for a whole other reason that he was. There were things he liked about the one and the many. He got it. He got it. Supreme peace. But as you know, he had. And we've talked about it, he had very special reason for making it known. It's got to be the many and the one. We'll get the one in there. But don't take away my many. It's like a lifeline for me. I need to know there's a pluralistic universe. It kind of rescued him from a deep depression that he was his.
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Now, he was a product of the 19th century, and the 19th century was known for Newtonian determinism up until the advent of quantum physics.
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Exactly. And he was caught up in this. Let's remember that he's born in 1842. The word scientist didn't come out until, I believe it was 1833 or 7. In the 1830s, the word comes out. So this whole idea of what it is to be a scientist, you know, not now just a chemist. If you're studying chemistry or physics or geology even, you're all now one thing. You're now all scientists now that becomes its own cult and religion. Right. In its way. So one of these, a real Darwin exponent, Chauncey Wright, got James into the monism of, you know, material scientific determinism. You know, it's like Darwin, it's. Everything is materially determined. James bought into that when he was a young man. He's in his late 20s.
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And it made him sick.
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Made him sick. It got him like, just. He spent a summer just on a hammock swinging to this tune. I'm just Not a wiggle of my will is free. So he really bought into that sense of material scientific materialism. And then he was a medical student. He did get an md, but he never practiced.
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Let's step back a little bit. Scientific materialism in the 19th century meant that every action had a cause, a scientific cause that could be determined. So there was no room whatsoever for free will.
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That's right.
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And James bought into that. Although, of course, in normal, everyday conscious intuitions, we all believed that we have a measure of free will.
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We feel like we do. Yeah, right. But James so was running that thought through his head. Not a wiggle of my will is free Not a wiggle of mine. And then he's working as sort of like an intern. Not exactly, but, you know, like, he had to. To get his md, he had to do certain service in a hospital, in a mental hospital. And there was a patient who was. Had epilepsy, but he was in a catatonic state on a shelf. And James used two images for him, like a Peruvian mummy, which they're like, you know, with their knees bent up, or an Egyptian cat. He was thinking of those Egyptian sculptures, right? That stiffness and stillness. And he thought, that shape. Am I. So that really put him in this deep depression. But then he was reading this French philosopher, Ranouvier, who sort of made it seem to him that, well, you know, you can. You're first reading him freedom up to say this. My first act of free will will be to believe in free will. Renuvier led him to that and it kind of worked for him. You know, from from now on, he's going to just believe in it. And that belief sustained him. But it's important to know how much he needed to keep refueling that idea, because even at the end of his life, when he published posthumously a book called Some Problems in Philosophy, he dedicated it to Remoubier for rescuing him from the monism that had so oppressed him as a youth. So he really took this very seriously, that you've got to have a sense of free will to be active in life. And he's considered a champion of free will, there's no question about that. And it was vitally important to him. So any other belief system that's about another kind of monism and absolute monism, and they were all around Stein Bradley and his colleague Royce, and they're all kind of influenced by Hegel, and Hegel himself is influenced by Parmenides. So this sense that everything that ever was or will be is now one and we're just walking through them, we're just all part of something that's already complete, was total anathema to him.
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B
Your book on the illusion of self, will and time suggests that William James had mystical insights into these things and that throughout his life he struggled because he thought of himself as a pragmatic person, as a philosopher and as a scientist. As such, he couldn't let go of free will. He didn't want to let go of free will. But at a deeper level, you suggest that he understood that free will and time are both illusions and even the idea of the self, that there is such a thing as me. That's right, is an illusion.
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So to begin with, Will, because the first paper I published out of this experience that I had five years later with the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology was a variety of religious experience, William James and the non reality of free Will. Because what James found when he tried to come up with the psychology, what he called the psychology of volition, right, the whole data of the psychology of volition, he could be felt in this. Well, call it a thought experiment, but no, this actual experience, he said, I'm lying in bed, he says, this is the example he uses. And oh, I gotta get up, there's work to do. Or oh, oh, but the bed feels so comfortable because, I mean, there's no Feeling of free will without choice. I mean, we do lots of actions and moving around, but free will feels like I have made this choice. So that's what he focused on. He focused on, what is it to get out of bed. How do I make that choice? So there's the thought, oh, I'm so comfortable. But, oh, no, no, there's things to be done. I'm so comfortable. And then what happens? He says, there's like a gap that got my attention. And suddenly we're just, oh, and we just get up. And he feels like. You talk about, oh, the effort to get up. But he says, for whatever reason that you can't identify, you can't. He'll say, the energy of one just left and you had the energy of the other. It wasn't competing. You weren't like, you know, one wasn't balancing, the other, one's gone. For a mysterious reason. No reason you can say, you just suddenly find that you have got up. So there's that and there's. And the whole point of. We say, well, what about effort? But effort. He said, this is so key. When he was younger, his first question. When he was a professor of psychology, but in his early days of it, his exam question. His first exam question was, what is the difference between afferent and efferent, which is so key to the feeling of what will is. And both of them are impersonal. Efferent is like E with an E like exit going out. Right. Afferent is like attraction pulled toward. Same word as tractor pulled toward. So one's going out, one's going in. So we want to. I will try to lift that. Well, of course, I can't lift myself in the chair. But you try to pull on something and you feel that, ah, see, I'm making an effort. But thoughts are immediately impulsive. You can't trace the thought to the actual thing. It just. You have the thought. It happens. Unless another thought blocks it, right? So if the thought arises and it's there, then you. You lift up. But if, depending on what you think, the amount of effort would be required, you'll feel resistance or you'll feel. And that's afferent. That's a feeling of incoming information. And we confuse efferent with afferent. We say and we think, oh, look, I'm struggling. No, no, no. Your thoughts going out have an immediate effect. The registering of it is the afferent. And so it's like a contradiction of assessment that makes it feel like effort. You know, if I. If you have a small, little like a cup here. And I didn't know and I didn't see what was in it. And I just was going to pick it up, but it was filled with like lead or something or something heavy. It would all suddenly feel like an effort. But if I saw the lead in it, it wouldn't because I would know exactly the amount of, you know, physical thing to pick it up with. Right. So effort, as he said, there will. No experiment will ever be found, has been found, no experiment will be found to show that effort, that effort produces energy for the result.
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B
That effort produces energy for the result.
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It's like an original force of effort. Okay. Because effort, he's saying, is ultimately the feeling of effort is ultimately that sense of afferent. You have a thought, thoughts have an immediate effect on. And you know, you want to raise your arm, think to raise your arm. It raises your arm. You're not tracing effort down to it. So also with that is his idea that thoughts. The fundamental fact of consciousness, he says, is not. I think, but it thinks. He says if we could say it thinks the way we say it rains, we'd be speaking with the minimum of assumption.
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B
This is where you pick up on the title of your book, Schismus.
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A
Yes, yes, yes.
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B
It's Consciousness without the Khan.
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A
That's right, exactly that, exactly that. And he introduces shiftness in the principles of psychology.
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B
Some of our viewers may not realize we haven't said it so far. William James is regarded as the father of American psychology.
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The father of American psychology. And you could say the father of transpersonal psychology, I guess too, and many other things.
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One of the fathers of pragmatic philosophy. The father of religious studies.
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Yeah. I think his book the Varieties of Religious Experience is his best read book.
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B
And one of the founders of the field of psychical research, which is now popularly known as parapsychology.
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That's right, that's right. He was one of the. He co founded the American Society for.
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Psychology and was a president of the British Society.
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Right, so think about that. All the phenomena that are associated with psychical research that go beyond our common sense way we're operating in the world. But I would. My whole point was there's a lot of that you can find in the principles of Psychology late in life. A colleague of his, Dickinson, Miller, Sergeant Miller, yeah, he was taught at Bryn Mawr. Younger colleague, he wrote up this wonderful write up of James, you know, extolling it like this is like in James's, like the last year of his life or Just before and extolling him as a psychologist. And James said to him, you know, I don't care. I never cared much for psychology. I don't care for psychology so much now. I didn't care for so much then. He cared about philosophy and metaphysics and I would say religion, which he got from his father, who I think consciously set him on a path to reconcile science and religion.
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B
James father was Henry James Sr. Who was regarded as a lay Swedenborgian preacher.
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A
Right, right, right. But, boy, what a. I mean, he's the father of Henry James the writer and the novelist. The great novelist. And William, of course, and her journal became quite well known and popular and well read.
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B
One of the most famous families of the 19th century in America. And as I recall somewhere, probably Time magazine regarded William James as one of the hundred most influential Americans of all time.
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A
Yeah, for sure. And he was hugely popular in his time. Most of his talks, they were lectures, which I think is part of the reason that the language is so vivid. He wanted to be an artist early in life. That was going to be his passion. But he writes, like, with an artist's eye for detail and things like that.
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B
People often say that Henry James the novelist wrote novels like a psychologist. And William James the psychologist wrote psychology books as if he were a novelist.
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A
Dead on. True. Absolutely right. They had quite a rivalry. James, Henry James is very, you know, well known for sort of very introspective and internalizations and all that. And James would write. Why can't you write something with more action in it? Action. Henry wrote back, I would rather go to a dishonorable grave than write the kind of book you want me to. But they were very close.
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B
Yeah. So, of course I'm fascinated by William James. He's one of my intellectual heroes. And people have suggested maybe there's even more to it than that. I think of it as an archetypal connection, a synchronistic connection. He's had a deep impact on my life and I gather, on your life as well.
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For sure. I definitely see the connection with you. I mean, he was. James went out of his way at a time when travel was not so easy, to be with other philosophers and talk to them directly, not just through letters, Although. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my God, 12 volumes this wide of writing from him. But no, he wanted to be face to face with them. And like your roots of consciousness, he was generous in quoting pages and pages. If it was good stuff, get it in there, let people share it. Varieties of religious experience, which wasn't his Own research. It was. The Sky Star book would be a very small book without the long quotes of people's experiences.
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B
So what you've suggested, though, is that he struggled between his mystical self and his scientific self, the mystical self. I think your point is understood that that self itself is an illusion.
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A
Yeah. Right. Well, what I found was Jane so needed to believe in free will that there was one phenomenon that comes up in psychical research that he couldn't relate to, and that's precognition. Because if anything is going to threaten free will as an actuality, it's precognition. Right. I know people have ways of trying to negotiate that, but you would agree with me. Yes. That it's one of the. It's a challenge.
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B
It's a challenge. I think some of the ways of negotiating it, as you said, are pretty successful. But people say, you know, if the future is fixed, which some of these extraordinarily accurate precognitions would suggest, then maybe we don't have free will.
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Maybe we don't. Right. And I think James, who knew his own phrase was divination is broadcast over the surface of history. He knew very well. And his radical empiricism says nothing experienced left out, nothing not experienced put in. And just what made him different than his scientist colleague was that he allowed all of this paranormal. Not that. Right. That wasn't his phrase at the time. There's all this psychical research to come into play. And talked about scientists using all their authority to try to close the door that psychical research is trying to burst wide open.
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B
And he argued fiercely against the people who. He didn't mind that they would oppose his ideas, but he objected to the callous and flimsy way in which they did it.
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A
Totally, totally betraying their own creed of what to be a real scientist is. Right. It's a method, he said, not a belief system. Not this materialism. Anyway. You want a scientific materialism, you want to use it as a method to try to, you know, you can run experiments. Yeah. He. God, what was one of his friends. Yeah. He called psychical research a dog with so few friends at court that any stick is good enough to shake at it. And he talked about Herbert Spencer, who was a big philosopher at the time, working in the realm of Darwin and all this, and a very, you know, scientific materialist guy. Right. He says about any of this psychical research that. Let me get the phrase exactly. Yeah. That Spencer would politely lead it out the door and he would never allow to have access to the Temple.
- [40:36]
B
And there's still that attitude.
- [40:39]
A
Nothing's changed. Nothing's changed. A lot of. James really particularly pressed the point that scientists who have no. Absolutely no research done in the area just try to just claim that they know what's going on. How is that scientific? They're totally out of their field. It's not like, I mean, it would happen all the time. They didn't spend any time investigating it. And boy, is that still true today.
- [41:11]
B
It's very true. And many people feel quite entitled to call it a pseudoscience, that is paranormal investigations. A pseudoscience. There's nothing there. And the reason they're so confident is because they imagine that all their colleagues believe the same thing. It's like, we all know, but when you talk to their colleagues privately, in private, most of them will admit they've had this experience or that experience. They've gone off to the Insight Meditation Center.
- [41:46]
A
Right. Absolutely right. Yeah. So, yeah, that's some of the best, I think, most relevant passages of James to be revived today. Because, boy, if something could be said. Well, I mean, he could say things better than anyone. He was, you know, because he read all the time. He read all of Shakespeare, you know. He talked about one summer reading him chronologically from beginning, all the plays. So he's filled with this vivid, vivid language. But I wanted to say, so psychical research, that one phenomenon of precognition, he kept avoiding dealing with it until the end of his life, the last year of his life, he finally had to talk about it. And it was really. It was like you're suppressing it so long comes out in a pretty powerful form how he addresses it and what he was dealing with was a correspondent of his, Frederick hall, who had a experience with ether coming out of ether. And he said everything the doctors were about to say, he knew what they were going to say. So he had this precognitive experience. James relates it, and then finally, finally it comes out. James is going to try to negotiate with this, he says. And he negotiates it with a question. And a very powerful question. Is the consciousness that hall is experiencing, is it already there waiting to be uncovered? And is it a veridical revelation of reality? Veridical, right. True, Truly true. So he asks the question. And so potent is that question for him, he doesn't try to answer it. He says, this question will not be resolved in this generation or the next. Which I think puts us you on track for being eligible to acknowledge it. He says, yeah, it won't be known for this generation. Or the next. But he asks the question, I go back and I take the principles of psychology. I mean I now read backwards through James to say, okay, what. What has James himself discovered that's in support of that question? To answer it in the affirmative. And yes, as you mentioned, well, you know, thoughts arise. I mean it thinks, right? If we could say it thinks the way we say it, right? The passing thought is itself the thinker, right? Look at these are all of this impersonal process means that we may be sourcing something beyond what we are just contained in our skin encased egos, right? So something bigger is being accessed. I'll enter the anesthetic rebel. The anesthetic revelation, which was huge to James, he did have like a mystical coach. The last essay he wrote was about this guy Benjamin Paul Blood, who was known for the anesthetic revelation. And what that was was people coming out of ether would have this kind of mystical experience, but they couldn't really account for it because it was like they were leaving one world and coming into another world. They were leaving a kind of undifferentiated mass of a world and coming into the differentiated world of subject and object. Talking about this being about separation. Here it is. And because of that they couldn't get back. They were just. But they knew there was an immensity that was existing that was so essential to what their whole being was. And that's where shisness comes in. And then Flournoy, who mentored Jung talks about that. Theodore Florida, Theodore Flournoy, he talks about, you know, mystics and people coming out of ether have this experience. It's this notion of interpolating objects, right, that we come out and we're coming out of a non dual state into subject object, state. James talks about this himself. He had his own experience with Ethernet and nitrous oxide we can get to in a moment. But his experience with eth going into or chloroform, they have the same kinds of reactions going into it. He saw objects recede, he said. And coming out of it, he says there's a sense of existence in general and then the sense of self as something additional thereto. So he's accessing, I mean, you know, you could call it Paul Tillich's the God above God, the ground of being. So now shiftness for James was again conscious about consciousness of self without subject object. It's a simple that before it's doubled into one, a state of mind and two, a reality intended thereby. Right, because that's where you don't have a subject without an object, but there's a state. It's not like the subject, object is being distilled from the experience. No, the framework of a subject and object is being added on.
- [47:32]
B
The phrase that comes to mind for me is, you're no longer the dancer, you're the dance.
- [47:38]
A
Exactly, exactly. Or the moment of the sunset before you say, how beautiful. But Blood was very. His mystical. I call him his mystical coach was very, very clear about this, that it's prior to form and manifestation. Prior to form and manifestation. So. And this is in the Varieties of Religious Experience, although back in 1902, James is not ready yet to face the full implications of what this is. He had to wait until, you know, he let it out with a little question and then pushed it into the future. But there's a long footnote in the Varieties, which is a commentary on. He's actually sharing directly these anesthetic revelationists, Blood and his. Another one, Xenos Clark and I should add, because people say, well, why are you emphasizing a footnote so much? But Christopher Nelson in Streams of William James says, it's the culmination. Varieties of Religious Experience leads to what this experience is. And their language is amazing about it. One thing, they say, two aspects of it. One is succession is the thing. Succession is the thing. One point following another. James's gold mine of insight. He called him Shadow Hodgson. He told James, and it's put in the principles of Psychology that the minimum of assumption, a very key notion. What's the minimum of assumption about things, about consciousness, is that it is a sequence of difference. E, N, T, S. Okay, so when you have sequencing, you have gaps. And Krishna, you go back now to my experience, because that really has always stayed with me as some profound moment by moment by moment. Krishnamurti says, if you watch thoughts happen so quickly, you don't notice there's a gap, but there is a gap between thoughts. It's also what the Bardo is. It's another name for. It's not just the afterlife, it's the gap between thoughts. So pausing here.
- [49:59]
B
Well, let's go back to your mystical experience, your Kundalini experience. I don't think when you described it to me a little few minutes ago, you didn't talk about the gap between thoughts then, but I gather from the conversation now that you had that experience yourself.
- [50:19]
A
Well, this is what it is. If you don't have. I mean, James talks about the specious presence, right? That we're sort of one part, you know, something's Receding and something's coming in, right. And so that's what kind of makes the stream of consciousness. Right. But if you don't have the past and you don't have the future and you just have this moment, and then you just have this moment, it's not like choppy in that way, but it was like the connection, it felt like a gap because I wasn't. That streaming wasn't there. That usually connects and it happens.
- [51:05]
B
We often identify consciousness with thinking, with our thoughts.
- [51:09]
A
That's right.
- [51:10]
B
And what I think you're getting at is the idea of pure consciousness.
- [51:14]
A
Yes. Yeah. I mean, John Dewey, right, A great American philosopher, read his 1200 page book. James's book was a big deal, writes him and says the most important part is your part about shiftness as he saw it. And it's the idea right there, there. It's right in that the idea that what's primary is not the organizer, the self or the organized thing, matter. Right. Because James wrote, it's like consciousness swings between subject and object like that. But what Dewey was emphasizing that James was doing was the self is an organization. The sense of self is an organization of consciousness. Right? And matter is an organization of consciousness. But they themselves don't have some independent reality from which consciousness is emerging and stuff. So the idea though, of succession being a thing, and we know light pulses, right? Photons and all pulsed, but that allows one to consider consciousness already there, waiting to be uncovered. And he says later, as in a field that stood there, always to be known, even as that at some point, think about this. If that ground of being that the ether experience gives, and we'll talk about James on nitrous oxide. But that ground of being, right? But can that be uncovered moment by moment? I mean, how do you access it? We're no longer talking about the stream of consciousness, we're talking about, you know, you can think of like a flip book, right? It's possible to access. James at some point says maybe. And this is toward near the end too, in pluralistic universe, maybe. And again, this speculation was hard for him to make because of his belief in free will. So it just appears a little bit and then he doesn't elaborate it much until a couple essays later. I'm connecting consciousness already there with this. That he says, in the pluralistic universe, which is perhaps we are the margin of some more merely central self, like a wind rose in a compass. So if you think of this was like a whole circle of a compass. Every moment is connected to the moment next to it by its relation to the center point. Right. Because there are no lines on a circle. No facets. Right.
- [53:58]
B
All the lines are tangential to the perimeter of the circle.
- [54:04]
A
Yeah. You can't explain things by going here to here. This is all James has a phrase, the continuity of adjacence. Right? Now, McTaggart, the time guy, this is where time comes in a little bit. You know, who has his A series, right. Of past, present, future, his B series of before and after. They don't go together because they can contradict each other. But he has a C series, the Alphabet, you know, A, B, C, D, E. Not A, C, D. Whatever. It has. Right. It has a direction.
- [54:38]
B
Permanent sequence.
- [54:39]
A
That's right, A permanent sequence. Exactly that. But no, you know, it has. It's not dynamic. It's just. So that's the sequence. So everything is in sequence, organized in situ, you could say, in place, next to each other. But the relationship is the center.
- [54:57]
B
You have to get to the center to go from one to the other. And now we began this discussion by saying that James was hesitant to explore the implications of precognition. So let's bring it back to precognition.
- [55:21]
A
And retrocognition. So for me, what that means, if there is precognition, if there is retrocognition.
- [55:31]
B
And there certainly is.
- [55:32]
A
And there certainly is. Well, one way to give that a foundation is to look at Parmenides, right? Now, the thing about Parmenides, See, this is the thing about James. There were absolutists in his time saying it's all one, and it's all, you know, time isn't real, like MacTaggart and others. But James thought they were using, like, logical arguments, you know, and the worst would be, like, Parmenides. It's like they all come from him because he's considered to logically make the case that it all has to be one. But Peter Kingsley, others had before, but Peter Kingsley most persuasively. And the latest, you know, has shown us that Parmenides was a shaman. He led incubations in caves, like. And people would. Healings would come to them, like Edgar Cayce could think of. Right. Just somehow in stillness in all of this. So maybe, you know, you could, if you think of him as a shaman, maybe he too was accessing precognitive experiences and all of that. So it's a little. James called the logical thinner, as opposed to a thicker evidence. It's the thicker evidence we could probably go with as his own psychical research was the thicker evidence. And he even, he even said, the scientists, why don't they look at, why aren't these absolutists using this information, this psychical research? It should be a good fit. He called it the wild deserts of philosophic research. You know, it's banned to that. He said they should be using it. But Peter Kingsley now allows us to take logic instead of looking at Parmenides as one of the first logicians, which we consider to look at him as a shaman who was offering, you know, what does it mean if people see the future, let's say. And so what does he say? Ude pode nunestai apenum esten hamupan hensuna kes. Nor was it ever, nor will it be, since now it is altogether one. And he said, what is, is like a well rounded sphere from a center point equally matched. Now you go back to James's compass, compass windrows, right? Because you could say, you know, a sphere is just all made of circles. You could say a circle too. There's a saying God is a circle whose center is everywhere, circumference nowhere. James introducing that compass image, you know, really kind of essential because so everything that relates to that center point, we don't know where the circumference is, but we know whatever it is, it's related to the center point. And that gives a great comfort to know that no matter what you do, because you have to think of what that center point means. Think of it in a sphere, what does it mean for everything from it to be equally matched distance wise, so that everything is equal to God wherever in that center point, let's say you could think of it as God, although it's like the circumference defines the center point as much as the center point defines the circumference, which goes well with God as the all in all and all of that. So if God is the center point, wherever he looks, it's the same, it's the same, it has the same value. Everything is coming together to create this sphere. And from that center point, the inside of that center point is a place for God. There's, you know, the Bindu talks about this as a center point. This is a very common. Everywhere you look, all through this house, as we've shown, you've got rosettes, you've got this whole notion. The Greeks were obsessed with the one of the many. And I don't know a better way to think of the one and the many than as that center point radiating out to the circumference. The Circumference defined by the center point, the center point defined by the circumference. And I believe James has given us all the tools to construct the cosmos, the Greek word for order, in that way.
- [59:32]
B
So if I can summarize what you've just said, I think what you're saying is that we humans and all other sentient creatures are all joined at the center point. This source, you could say it's the singularity of the Big Bang, perhaps when we were all united in an infinitesimally small point. And quantum physics would probably agree. As a result of that, we're all entangled with each other in the quantum sense. And that's our deepest reality. That's who we are most ultimately. And it is a level outside of time, outside of space, way beyond any notion of self or personal will.
- [60:20]
A
Exactly.
- [60:21]
B
And that is who we are at the deepest level.
- [60:25]
A
Absolutely, yes. I mean, James, in the Varieties of Experience, says, at one, the Absolute is, you know, at one with the absolute and aware of the oneness. He says this tat. Famasi. He quotes that. He uses that phrase, and he says, this idea is not changed by creed or climb. You'll find it. Climb, meaning climb it. You'll find it all over. It's universal, this notion of, you know, of ultimate attainment. Even in Whitmanism, he used the word. He loved. Whitman played with him, but he loved him absolutely.
- [61:02]
B
But James also struggled with that very insight, that it went against his scientific nature. And he wrote the book the Pluralistic Universe. He wanted to celebrate the diversity, the differences.
- [61:18]
A
Absolutely right. I mean, you know what he said? He said about the Absolute? It says it sanctions everything and determines nothing. It just allows anything to be. And he says, and he'll list all of these horrors, all of these things in the world. I says, well, how can that be? So it's true. You would have to bring in the notion of Leela, of play, that things are. If you go back to my experience, my initial mystical experience, I have sort of a problem thinking that ultimately there is anything bad. I think there's maybe play at work. And if we have reincarnational continuity, you know, because, you know, if a little child has all this suffering, they're not going to have all. They're not going to have my sequence.
- [62:09]
B
Yeah. I mean, it doesn't help to come to a person who is suffering and tell them, well, don't worry. It's all going to be okay in the end, and we're all going to die anyway and then be reborn. It doesn't help a suffering person to.
- [62:23]
A
Hear that it doesn't. And James thought, you know, he knew the great value of the absolute, much more than pluralism, was that it did, though, offer solace to six souls. He did say that, you know, Vivekananda, who? They were friends.
- [62:41]
B
They were good friends.
- [62:42]
A
They met. Yeah. And he was going to write the introduction to the Jnana Book of Vivekananda. I forget what exact circumstances prevented that, but, you know, there were letters from Vivekananda saying, hey, has that come in yet? We can't wait anymore. Let's just publish. So you're called Vivekananda, the paragon of monism. But Vivekananda is very interesting. He's an advent and of course, non dualist. But it was like a challenge for James because he's like a heroic non dualist. Right. There's nothing passive about Vivekananda. So. But, you know, again, James, that need which he expressed to the end of his life about needing free will kept him from. He would talk about the virtues of the absolute. He knew what, you know, the tatvamasi. How soothing and stuff.
- [63:34]
B
Let's define that for our viewers who may not know the Sanskrit term.
- [63:38]
A
Oh, that thou art. That thou art. You're not. And again, think of this. That thou art. The experience I had. I'm calling out to Arthur now. Arthur isn't sending me my thoughts or whatever. You should concentrate 24 hours a day. You know, who. What is it that speak, that Dhammasi says? Well, it's. You're part of an absolute. The anesthetic revelation is you're coming out of something much larger. The sense of self is something additional thereto. It's not what's creating everything, it's what's getting added into the mix. Right? You're interpolating a subject and an object. It's being doubled into a state of mind and a reality intended thereby.
- [64:22]
B
I mean, we live in a world of duality where we take subject and object for granted. The world universe is me and everything that is not me.
- [64:32]
A
That's right. That's right. And there was, you know, I think Blood even called it the sanity of that. James even talked about that. The genius of common sense that allows for that. Knowing it wasn't his neutral monism, knowing that it wasn't the ultimate understanding, but the genius of common sense. Otherwise everything gets all mixed up.
- [64:55]
B
And by and large, from a common sense point of view, mystics who would say things like, all is one and the self is unreal. And times exist. They're thought of as dreamers, they're not pragmatic, they're not going to hold down a job, for example. Although I think we know that that's a myth as well, that some of the most brilliant creative people on the planet have also been mystics.
- [65:26]
A
That's right. Oh my goodness, yes. James was quite well aware of that. I mean, the writers is really quite a book for showcasing some. And of course it was always. It's like, know them by their fruits. That's a very Jamesian kind of notion. Right. With pragmatism, what's the result you get from this? That's what's the validity of the experience.
- [65:51]
B
But we should also mention that James insight, his mystical insight of the timelessness of consciousness, that it's the deepest level, was shared by quantum physicists. It's not so different from Einstein's view of time, for example, or Planck's view of consciousness as being fundamental, that there's a lot of resonance with that mystical idea coming from within the most brilliant thinkers of the scientific world.
- [66:27]
A
Yes. I think what's so striking about James breakout statement, his way of adding up Frederick Hall's experience is that he said consciousness already there, waiting to be uncovered. He could have said all kinds of things, is the world somehow already there? Or whatever, but he knew it would be consciousness, which as Planck and others have said is ultimate. Everything is an aspect of that. I find that comforting. I find that comforting if you can put it within a context. I mean, here's the thing. It's like, you know, people get, you know, they don't want to be on a. On a circum. They don't be confined to a circle either. Right. But there's. Change involves movement and stasis one way or another. You have to negotiate those two. So why not? I mean, I say why not? I'm offering as a spiritual, I don't know, call it a context, if you will, to think. Because belief in God or belief in. Notice no, belief in God doesn't go away for even these non dualists. Vivekananda is always talking, says the Lord all the time. His guru Ramakrishna, all the time. Lord, Lord, Lord.
- [67:52]
B
Well, the idea is that everything is God at that point.
- [67:55]
A
Everything is God. But it's like, okay, if we're all just circumferable points, where's this God? Well, okay, the center point there.
- [68:03]
B
But the center is everywhere.
- [68:04]
A
The center is everywhere, but everything comes and relates to the center point, which is, you know, I mean, if you When I think of, like, Whitman and again, Henry, Jane, his brother was enthralled with Whitman. And James. James quotes him a lot, loves him. His. He had a kind of pushback, saying, oh, it's too much optimism. He says, that's what. That's what Absolut offers people. Just this ultimate optimism that everything's going to be okay, you know, but. And they're not looking enough at the real bad stuff in the world. Like you mentioned in Pragmatism, you know, he lists whole pages of newspaper accounts of really tragic situations. Father whose kids were starving, and he got a job. This is in practices. He's getting a job shoveling and snow, and he's just too weak. And he can't. He can only do it for an hour. He ends up killing himself with carbolic acid. And James saying, what? The absolute, you know, which sanctions everything is. This is. This is okay for the absolutes, you know, and he says, and that's like Whitman. He's too much of an optimist. But that's a real misread of Whitman. Whitman was a civil war, like a nurse, a medic. Right. He knew all about, you know, the worst of. Of what can happen to you. Talk about his brother Wilkie at some point, who experienced the worst with. But James.
- [69:39]
B
Brother.
- [69:39]
A
James's brother. Sorry. He had two younger brothers who he got. Well, you only have really two super successful and then you have three, like, problems pretty much. But yeah. So, no, Whitman was. No, just optimistic. Just. Just. Well, I mean, he was a positive person, but it's not like he ignored the suffering of life within his whole formula of how to be. But still he was able to say, and this works very well with the circle of being. A circumferable point. The universe is duly in order. What has arrived is in its place. And what waits will be in its place to have that serenity of whatever is is. Because when I had that mystical experience, that was the only teaching I had. Whatever is is. But really. And that's actually a longer version, the short version is what is is.
- [70:31]
B
Yeah, but. Well, you also had the sequence of reliving your whole life and seeing all of the painful, traumatic moments of your life ended up with a positive lesson.
- [70:44]
A
Right, right, right. So that gives me that trust that. I mean, I guess I'm going to say this. What is is? Which is kind of what my first lesson in Buddhism was. Right. Remember that inquiry I talked about? That's kind of the most important thing to keep in play and to keep mindful of because if you go against that, that's where all suffering is. I mean, the Buddha's moment of enlightenment, he said, was neither welcoming nor opposing. So you don't want to mess with what is, and what belief system allows that the most. Back to Whitman. The universe is duly in order, what is arrived. So you're not fighting it. It is what it is. You can change it in the next moment, but you can't. Well, you can. You can try to change it without realizing what it is, but by being fully with what it is, then you can change it more effectively. You'd say that would be the next thought, that you've been kind of illusory.
- [71:45]
B
Isn't this point of view also very similar to the philosophy of Spinoza, who. Maybe I'm misunderstanding it, but I think Spinoza said something to the effect that he was a determinist, and he felt that God was the ultimate determiner. And so it's like, let go and let God. As long as you understand God's in charge of everything, you don't have to. To worry about a thing.
- [72:11]
A
Yeah, either God or nature. He'd call it either one. Yeah. And look, Frederick Myers, right, one of the leading psychical researchers, perhaps the leading psycho researcher, communicated in the afterlife a whole book, as, you know, the Road to Immortality.
- [72:27]
B
Yes, indeed.
- [72:28]
A
And he talks about the master spinner, you know, and he also talks about the master spinner. And we're all merging. Going to merge with mind of God, which has past, present and future all in it. Yeah, Spinoza, that's right. Where he was a determinist, so was Einstein. So I like to say, okay, the two most prominent, by far, the two most prominent Jewish thinkers, Spinoza and Einstein, did not believe in free will. Now, Thomas Cahill wrote a wonderful book, the Gift of the Jews. He wrote the Gift of the Greeks, the Gift of the Romans, the gift, I think the Irish. So he said, what did the Jews bring to the world? Free will and novelty. Right? Like, new beer wouldn't have sold way back when, but the Jews introduced the idea that novelty is a good thing. Abraham went forth, and now we're getting out of this wheel thing, this Babylonian, they broke us out of that. So he says, the gift of the Jews is free will. And my line back is, never mind that. The two most prominent Jewish thinkers gave it back, tried to give it back.
- [73:36]
B
Well, this has been a fascinating conversation, Jonathan. It's like, do we have free will or don't we?
- [73:45]
A
We feel like we have free will, and that's probably enough. And I heard the one guru say, treat every moment as it comes as if you have free will, and every moment as it passes as if you don't.
- [73:56]
B
Nice way to look at it. My point of view, incidentally, is that we have a measure of free will and a large measure of, of habits and robotic like behaviors, conditioned responses that are not a reflection of free will at all. And that we're something of a balance.
- [74:16]
A
Well, what I would say there again, it's. Look, James didn't like the absolute because he wanted zest. Don't take away my zest. He uses that word, you know, there's a supreme peace to the absolute in that sense. And you know, and Whitman further, what does he say? He says the simple, compact, well formed scheme, myself disintegrated. Everyone disintegrated. Yet part of the scheme. So I think it's a matter for me, how much of that supreme, ultimate, supreme piece do you value? And are you, Jeff, are you measuring? Well, I'm not James, and you may be James, there's a lot about you that says, yeah, you're pretty plausible reincarnation to me. But, you know, how much are you, you know, you don't want to. Would you give up a little more zest for a little more security? I think it's really gonna have to be an all or nothing. It's very hard to mix unless you're gonna do. I mean, James ultimately argued for a God in the world, you know, fighting with us, not outside, not involved, you know. Yeah. I mean, and that's. Is that what you.
- [75:27]
B
Well, there is of course, the Jewish idea of wrestling with God. That seems to be who we are as a people. And even though I'm completely secular and I'm not a religious Jew at all, I consider myself very Jewish.
- [75:44]
A
Right. Oh, you're telling me. I mean, I'm like, you know, I can't say it enough. I'm not living this, you know, this is a belief system you could almost say I am aspire to. But I do have as a background, like, you know, God in the foreground's a little tricky. You want God in the background. God in the foreground is like a terrorist blowing up buildings in some way, it seems to me. But, you know, what can you, you know, in times of suffering or times of what can you. Can you, can you refer to what supports you?
- [76:15]
B
You know, I have my own way of dealing with it. I mentioned many times to the viewers my personal motto, love everyone and every all the time, which is an expression of the idea of the one, you.
- [76:30]
A
Know, Jeffrey, you actually live that. I've been with you now for a couple days, and, you know, there's like, you know, how many years of podcasts were you.
- [76:40]
B
Well, I've started doing interviews over a half century ago.
- [76:46]
A
It's just been amazing to be in your presence, I have to say. I think you really do live that well.
- [76:52]
B
That's very generous of you. I would say it's something I aspire towards, but certainly to me, as an interviewer, I would say the very best interviews going back right to the beginning are the ones where we touch on the one. The idea that we're all interconnected. We're all one, we're all. My friend Lance Mungea would say, I'm a different version of you.
- [77:23]
A
I like that. I like that a lot. Well, I mean, look, James knew. When we talk about, okay, you absolute people, how can you talk about with all the suffering and this and that, what if everything really is like a dream of Brahman? Yeah, right. I mean, James talks about this. He says, if I dream of a gold mountain, I. Obviously, a gold mountain isn't real, but in the dream it appears as real. And that's really. There was a period where I was having dreams which just seemed to be about verifying how real matter was. I remember. Remember those gray staples, staplers that were kind of tall. I remember very vividly picking up one and feeling its whole heft in the dream. This is a really important thing to try to. I think it's the key to everything and frankly, the key to overcoming James's objection about. Come on. There's a whole pluralistic universe. What is this kind of oneness kind of just washes all that out? No, if everything's the dream of Brahman, then you have as pluralistic a universe on one level. Experientially, it's experienced as a pluralistic without it actually being in reality a pluralistic. And he says, you know, matter is something behind phenomena is a postulate of thought. Anyway, so I think it's important to talk about how dreams we could be. The dream of Brahman we could be. Because, you know, in your dream at night, you go through everything's real, as real as what we're having right now, and then you wake up, oh, it's all on the pillow. So it's just, you know, what is it that's dream? You know, what is it that speaks, is silent, looks and listens? Well, it's the source. Like, our head on the pillow is the source of all of our dreams. Now scientists, science minded people really want to push against. Back against that. I'll mention Alvin Noe, I forget the book, but he talks about, he has a special note about now let's people think dreams can be as real as reality. But now that's not true because he talks about. And these are true. He's right to mention like you can look at something and if it has words on it and then look back again, the words will change. In other words, it changes a little bit the world and you can't really think through thoughts as deeply or something. He'll say, but Andrew Holochek, who is a Tibetan practitioner, he used to be a dentist, but then he studied for years and now is, I think one of our leading teachers. He wrote dream yoga. He wrote Visions of Light. Fantastic guy. He says, look, in my dreams he's also a concert pianist, kind of an amazing guy. But anyway, in my dreams I can play a movement of a Beethoven sonata as well as I can play it with Al. And I can give lectures in my dreams as good as ones I can give with Al. So he's pushing against this idea that you can't have anything like reality, that a dreamlike sense where of course everything is connected. There it is where we're all one, we're all unified in a dream. He says, yeah, but that unification cannot give you ultimate reality. You can't have that kind of unity because you don't even experience what we experience in this world. This world has an extra reality to it that that world can never have. But I think the Tibetans, especially with all of their dream yoga practices are here to tell us otherwise. And I think that may be a very important thing. I think it is for understanding this Eastern notion of the dream of Brahman.
- [81:07]
B
Well, we certainly have only just begun to tap into the potential of not just dreams, but all altered states of consciousness.
- [81:17]
A
So. And as we do, do we want to be like James saying, okay, I got to kind of keep this one away because it affects my free will? Because look, Jeff, I've been in this. I was program director at the Open center, as you mentioned and stuff. We brought a lot of people that you brought here and it keeps coming back to free will. They want free will no matter what. And I get that. I get that. Because frankly, why not have free will? Think of God as playing chess with himself. It's a more fun game if the other is really other. So why not as part of the. Let us think we have free will.
- [81:54]
B
Why not or let us really have free will.
- [81:58]
A
Well, who's the us that separates? That's the thing. If you keep it like this may all be a dream, then that love that you so beautifully, I'm saying more inspired because you really do do it, but it's something you feel is a doing for you. That love just exists. Like in my freedom when I had the knee thing. And just that feeling of connection to absolutely everything is real. The reality of that, of what that feeling is, would be more like I'm living in a dream, right? With the ontology of what dreaming is, when everything is an aspect of consciousness, wouldn't that be what a dream is? And everything in a dream is an aspect of consciousness. We don't have trouble saying it.
- [82:43]
B
And love is like that as well. I can't force myself to love anybody, but I can relax into it and discover that it's already there anyway.
- [82:54]
A
You can. But you know, to come back to Peter Kingsley, Empedocles says, strife is higher than love, which confuses a lot, confused a lot of people. Kingsley puts some real effort in trying to explain this. People, they try to, oh, he must have made a mistake there. No, Peter Kingsley says, no, that's right. That Aphrodite is a trickster goddess pulling us toward thinking our ultimate is going to have to merge with somebody else or be pulled towards somebody else, when actually we're already there where we want to be. We're already part of God. We're already.
- [83:31]
B
So now how does that make strife?
- [83:34]
A
Because when you're pulled to somebody, now you're with them and loving them and numbing. But strife is what pulls you away back. It's like coming together, pulling apart. And people think, well, it has to be the coming together that's the ultimate. But actually it's realizing that we're all already there. This mystic, Godfrey John, says, reality isn't what is. Reality is what is already, always already is. And if you feel of love as being, it's not that you won't feel the kind of love, I guess, in that state. In fact, you'll feel the bliss being part of God. But there's a kind of love that brings you away from your sense of being. If we're all part of God, right, We don't need somebody else to make us even more part of God. If we fully realize every moment, because every moment in a dream is a dream. We're all connected, no matter what we do.
- [84:32]
B
Well, at the same time, we're in a paradoxical reality because we're Individuals, we're learning, we're growing. You and your mystical experience. It was trauma lesson. Trauma lesson. Trauma lesson.
- [84:48]
A
Absolutely.
- [84:49]
B
So we're here to learn, we're here to grow.
- [84:51]
A
I couldn't agree more. And I've probably had past lives. I'll have future lives. You can follow a narrative of me just like we can follow a narrative of you. We all have individual narratives with reincarnational continuity. We're just the actors, though. We're not the playwrights. We're just. That's what a moment of reality is, is me this, me that, whatever. All the story goes together. I mean, what is so hard about seeing the whole preceding the parts? You know, James tried to write the many and the one. He was so still desperate to keep pluralism in play. Right. But isn't it much easier to start and believe that there is a one and then talk about how we can be fooled by the many? It's really hard to assemble the many into the one, I think. Don't you?
- [85:42]
B
Well, I think it's a mystery, and I think that it was a failed.
- [85:47]
A
Attempt on his part to do it.
- [85:49]
B
It's good to be open to whatever lessons the mystery has to offer us. I'm not ready to say absolutely there is no self, absolutely there is no time, Absolutely I have no free will. I'm not there yet.
- [86:06]
A
Well, you know, living with you this last day or two in this magnificent home, I don't want to stop you. I don't need you changing your direction because it's so amazing to be here. But, you know, the one and the many. James talks about Mozart, how he composed. Right. There's some controversy about this, but it's been fairly well verified that it was like he said, pieces come together. This is in the Principles of Psychology. Again. I kept going back to the principles as a basic. He says pieces of thought come together until all of the great thing is hearing it all at once. Nabokov talks about his novels come to him all at once. I know a Daoist writer, teacher, brilliant woman, Livia Cohn. She just talks and she's written like 30 books. How do you do that? And she farms and she does a lot of dancing. She has all these singing. She sings at Carnegie hall with a choir. This woman is so active, and yet she says they're downloads. She actually says this. So if you accept that. That Bachoff isn't lying, and he said it doesn't matter where he wrote, he could write on little cards or this or that. If a novel can come whole why can't this whole world be considered as a whole?
- [87:33]
B
Well, I think it can be, but.
- [87:35]
A
If it's a whole. What I mean is. Now let's double down on this.
- [87:40]
B
Dear beloved, it's the doubling down about.
- [87:45]
A
Okay, let's double down on this. If Nabokov sees it as whole. Yeah. No parts, no sentences are being generated. This is, this is really important because, you know, James was really into Bergson because he thought Bergson was about, you know, insisting on kind of duration, creative, ongoing.
- [88:08]
B
The philosopher Henri Bergson.
- [88:10]
A
That's right. And James just loved him and thought he had solved the problem. Like he's going to use James against the logical absolutists, you know, the ones who said it's a logical argument, it's a complicated argument.
- [88:24]
B
You mean he's going to use Bergson?
- [88:26]
A
Bergson, he says, yeah, he says, yeah, that's right. That ordinary experience as it comes to us with individuated objects and stuff is hard to explain unless you have an absolute. This was the, you know, Bradley and others just, I guess, to give a moment about what they're about. It's like, you know, a sugar cube. Right. A sugar cube is. It's white and it's sweet and it's hard. These are all qualities. So what is that? You don't really have. You can't really talk about, like just an independent object. It's all about relations. How do they hang together or what? So he, you know, and from that they developed this whole notion of there's an absolute that accounts without the absolute accounting for it. You can't really talk about reality. You need the absolute.
- [89:15]
B
But Bergson, Aristotle said much the same, I think.
- [89:20]
A
Yeah.
- [89:20]
B
Actually, the unmoved mover.
- [89:23]
A
Well, that's a beautiful thing, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, but Bergson, yeah, the unmoved mover, I think, really works. I mean, xenophanes, before Aristotle said, God is whole, he hears whole, he thinks whole, he sees whole, and he doesn't move because it would be unseemly to move from place to place. But what about movement that we see? How do you account for that? And Bergson thought there was real duration.
- [89:53]
B
Duration and time.
- [89:55]
A
Right. Unfortunately, he had a debate with. With Einstein, generally considered that Einstein won that debate. And also as William Barnard, who wrote the last really important work on Berkson, he says it. He says, look, if precognition is real, Berkson can't account for it.
- [90:14]
B
Well, we need to introduce the concept of the block universe which comes out of Einstein's Work. Which is another way of saying what you've been saying all along.
- [90:25]
A
Right. I mean, Karl Popper's nickname for Einstein was Parmenides. Right. I mean it's the same thing. You know, the most quoted Einstein from, I guess mostly non scientists like me is, you know, for us believing physicists, the separation between past, present and future is an illusion, however stubborn. And so yeah, that's a very parmenidean thing. Nor was it ever. Nor will it be since now it is altogether one. And Einstein did believe in free will.
- [90:57]
B
The black universe idea is from God's eye, you see all of history from the beginning of the universe to the very end of the universe at once.
- [91:08]
A
That's right. Think again. Don't think of a block, think of James circle, you know, and Parmenides sphere from a center point equally matched everywhere.
- [91:20]
B
I like the torus incident.
- [91:22]
A
I know you do.
- [91:24]
B
Which is another long discussion we don't need to get. But it meets the same requirements as the circle or the sphere.
- [91:31]
A
Yeah, and you should, as we talked about earlier, it can go with the Greek monad, which is that center point, and then around it it kind of looks like a version of a torus.
- [91:42]
B
So torus with an infinitely small hole at the center.
- [91:46]
A
Right, Right.
- [91:48]
B
A wonderful image for how we're all connected.
- [91:54]
A
I think so. I really think the word Leela needs more prominence.
- [92:06]
B
Let's talk about Leela because I don't think we've defined it.
- [92:11]
A
Basically it's play, it's cosmic play. So that, you know, I mean, I don't mind doubling down on this because.
- [92:24]
B
Because it's who you are.
- [92:29]
A
Look, I live pretty close to the World Trade center, right. So. And I heard that plane fly over when it crashed. Now I. And I lost friends in it and all that, but I afterwards, for months and still going on, I saw that plane crash into that building a hundred times because, you know, it kept coming up in stories and stuff. All right, These people on the plane experienced confusion, whatever. Maybe somebody just had to look up, you know, and then they're out of it, they're into a whole nother realm. And we know increasingly this age and maybe we're being prepared for some big suffering. We know that like near death experience means you're lifted out of whatever painful situation is. And so the question is.
- [93:22]
B
I think.
- [93:22]
A
You can say, well, how could God do this? But what if it, I mean, what is, is the suffering really what we think it is? There's a wonderful video, if I may offer, from Alan Watts. He talks about Suppose your God, or suppose you could dream every night, whatever you want, you know, anything you wanted to do. And you'd have these fantastic adventures. You'd see these landscapes. You'd hear the most. The most beautiful music, you know, and it could go on and everything would be wonderful, and love affairs and all. It could be for a night, it could be for a week, it could be for a thousand years. Let's just say that was. That was your life, he says. He says, and then, you know, you wake up and then just go back and have that dream. He says, but then maybe after a while, you'd say, let's spice this up a little bit, you know, let's, you know, rescue a damsel and a dragon or something, you know, and then maybe suffer a little bit, you know, what's that like? Because you're going to wake up out of it. It's not going to be permanent or something. Right. And so, you know, finally you get to more and more suffering, more and more, you know, oh, I've tested myself at this level. Now I'll go to this level. Now I'll go to this level. And he says, well, maybe that's what is right now.
- [94:43]
B
Well, every good play, every good novel has an element of tension, of conflict in it.
- [94:49]
A
Right? No, exactly right. And that would be part of what the play is. Now I'll go here. It's like the Holocaust was created to counter anything that's, like, you know, optimistic about a universe that can sanction anything. Yes. Like, come on. Sanctioning the Holocaust. And I'm coming from just having read Elie Wiesel. I read a lot of primo Levi men coming from Auschwitz. I did visit it. And that makes the reality, you know.
- [95:21]
B
Well, I think most people of our generation, growing up Jewish, have. Have witnessed the tears of our elders crying over their lost families.
- [95:32]
A
Right, that's right. That's right. I mean, oh, my goodness, the history of Jewish history. Oh, my goodness. Well, don't go into, oh, now we're creating our own disaster, it seems, in Israel right now. But the Holocaust, is there some way, the absolute, that's part of the whole. Something as devastating as that amount of.
- [95:57]
B
Horror can be, or the nuclear bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which also may.
- [96:02]
A
Be coming to us via Russia, for all we know.
- [96:06]
B
For all we know. I mean, you're right to bring these things up, because facing what seems like evil, what seems like tragedy is necessary from a philosophical point of view, from a poetic point of view, from a spiritual point of view, these things have to be faced.
- [96:29]
A
Yeah. Now if we can verify one near death or experience that and they all do seem to have the same trajectory of like bliss. There's not as Elizabeth Kubler Ross, I asked her this question. I knew her way back when, what about like bad spirits or bad. And she says she didn't encounter any of those. Like it's all the near death experiences that she experienced.
- [96:57]
B
Well, researchers today will say 5 to 8% of people have a negative experience, a hellish near death experience that is known. And of course, the recovery even, even from a positive near death experience can be very difficult.
- [97:15]
A
Yes, yes, no, I'm aware that's right. That there's a minority of cases that can be like that. But if, I mean, and again, it's almost impossible not to keep rerunning those Holocaust images by people stepping on babies skulls to get to a little inch of air in the door to live what, another 20 seconds or something?
- [97:40]
B
It's human misery at its utmost.
- [97:44]
A
Right, but and this is where I risk, you know, having tomatoes thrown at me from the crowd there. I mean, I think I recently saw an interview you did with the magnificent Bernardo Castro talks about, I think it was kids in Brazil who choke each other as, you know, as a kind of thing to bring on a high.
- [98:02]
B
Oh yeah.
- [98:03]
A
At the loss of oxygen. Imagine that. Imagine that. Now you'd say, well, strangling of cutting off breath. Is it not possible that this horror that we're seeing on our side was turning into bliss from their side? I mean, again, it's a terrible thought even, you know, because if people say, what are you doing? You're trivializing the Holocaust, for goodness sake. Houston Smith said there is a way to fit it in, but he had to whisper it. Even he, he, the most distinguished religious scholar, one of them anyway, of our time, couldn't just come out and really talk about and fit this in. Although he knew it did fit in, but that was his phrase. Now you have to whisper. He couldn't talk about it. Well, here I am with Jeff Mishlove talking about it. But it has to be Leila. And it's all a dream. You can't just, you can't say, well, that was the exception, the absolute just.
- [99:03]
B
No, you can't say that. And you can't expect everybody is going to believe you when you're discussing it. Today we'll hear from our viewers who will say this is worse than nonsense from their point of view. And that is how they see it. There's no doubt.
- [99:23]
A
Yeah, I mean it's important. I keep using this phrase of Whitman's again, Whitman was so important to James and Henry 11 too. I keep using that phrase, right? The universe is duly. That's the first phrase. The universe is duly in order. What has arrived is in place, and what waits will be in place, right? That sense of everything's going to be what it is, what is is. But then he goes on and what does he talk about? He starts listing, you know, Whitman. He's a great lister, right? And he talks about children of venereal disease and all wounds. And he describes a specific. Because he knew about wounds, wounds. And he lists a whole bunch of just terrible things. He's fully aware that when he says everything is duly in place, he's not leaving out. And that was part of the problem. I mean, mistake I think James made is to try to keep him out of there. Interestingly, I should. You know, his father, who believed all is God. He's worth talking about in this relationship, in this context we're talking about. About. He once tried to give that message to Wilkie, who was at one time, he was the most famous James Wilkie was the youngest son and like his older brother Robertson, right, went off to war, right? Civil War. The other James brothers stayed back. Not, by the way, James very good friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who became, right, you know, Supreme Court Justice. He kept in his closet, his uniform with the holes. And his whole judicial life was about, you know, what will create more or less conflict because he knew it and the consequences of it. And so did Wilkie. So he comes back, he's wounded. He limped the rest of his life. He had a real bad foot wound. James has a beautiful sketch he made of him. Henry the father. And this Henry relates this Henry James Senior. Henry James Senior tries to relate to Wilke a kind of absolutist position in the sense that God is coming from a Presbyterian background, somewhat Swedenborgian comes into it. But the sense of God is everything was really important to Henry Sr. And he says, God loves all people equally. Says. And before you could say something more, you know, like, that's like God taking care of you, Wilkie said, dad, when I was lying there, when I was wounded, right, they put me on a stretcher and the. One of the piece who was carrying me had his head blown off by a cannon. And then he's lying there and some other soldier came and this has to be Henry's word, I think deluged. His blood on me from his jaw had been blown off and deluged his blood on me. And Henry said, yeah, I think he was trying to tell me, you know, just don't be too glib with that. And Henry, it's worth. Because this is. If you go back to my experience, right. Of something bad led to something good. Something led. Nothing good. The James family has the archetypal instance of that. And that would be Henry, who lost.
- [102:48]
B
The use of a leg.
- [102:49]
A
That's right. When he was a boy, I don't know, 10 or 11. He was. He was part of a group that was with a scientist whose name I don't remember, who became somewhat famous as an American scientist. But they were. He was showing them how to make rockets, go up with paper rockets. And they'd light, you know, they'd put some fuel, some heat under it, right. And they'd rise up and all this, and one. And then they. They, you know, there would be a fire, but it would, you know, sprinkle and. And disperse. But one went into a barn and lit some hay and started a fire. So Henry ran over to try to put it out, and the fire went up his pant leg. So he had to have his leg first sawed off below the knee. And there's no anesthesia in this time, no nitrous oxide, and others haven't been around. So he first had a saw. And then even later, I don't know whether it was weeks or months above the knee with a saw. I mean, it's hard to think of a more horrific event to happen to one. I mean, there's plenty, but that's up there. Right, Right.
- [103:59]
B
And this. He's a child.
- [104:00]
A
He's a child.
- [104:01]
B
This colored the rest of his life.
- [104:04]
A
Well, he was a child who lived for outdoor play. And now, of course, he's so bedridden and he's got alcohol to keep him going. And you have to deal with that. He dealt with that later in his life. He was not an alcoholic in his life later. But anyway, you're going from a boy who went from outdoor play to having a very deeply introspective nature. And without that, you don't get William James. You don't get Henry James. And I should give you. I mean, they were Presbyterians, The Presbyterians. They're like, all is God. Everything is God. They're coming from Calvinism and stuff. So Henry Sr's father, right, who had come over penniless from Ireland and became very wealthy, the third wealthiest man in America, I believe I've heard that said of him. Yeah, he was. He was working in a Hard like a dry goods store and then bought a little real estate then bought a little more and more along what was the Erie Canal. So it was. And he had 13 children and all that he was as you imagine any father would was was really like broken up by this. I mean it was so hard for him to be and had tremendous sympathy for his son. The mother I guess being a more strict Presbyterian I don't know but yes she was but she shooed the father out of the room didn't want him trying to comfort that way. It was because it's like the Lord's judgment that really stuck with Henry. He said later I didn't blame the flame. The flame was just being obedient. So but to to make a point about further about Henry James is he. I mean free will was a little you know that's not the free will for Henry James was left it up to will to love God. Like are you. You got that choice. That's the only choice you have. He was very close with Emerson. They had a good relationship back and forth. Right.
- [106:20]
B
Emerson, who became the godfather of William.
- [106:23]
A
That's right. He became the godfather.
- [106:25]
B
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
- [106:26]
A
Right. One of our and famous for what's his most famous essay is self Reliance.
- [106:30]
B
Self reliance.
- [106:31]
A
Yeah. But at the end of his life I mean toward the end of his life you know he said you know I would duly keep meats and bounds and you know support free will but I have to say I realize there isn't any you know not a sparrow falls. It's everything is an expression of God. He said and there's no you know he has that poem is not just an exotic poem about Brahman. If the red slayer thinks he slays or if the slain thinks he is slain they know not the subtle ways I keep and pass and turn again. I would love America to really keep reading that poem. We're talking Emerson's poem Brahman. Brahman. Brahman. You have to remember about these guys like Emerson and Thoreau. Emerson had the largest oriental library in America. And that's what Thoreau was. You know he wasn't just their handyman. He was hanging out in the library all the time. Think there were some Japanese scholars said translate Thoreau back into Japanese. You wouldn't know. It's. It's really remarkable how how much eastern thought was going on back then. How much non dual and all and James is to me is so part of it religion really mattered to him. I mean you can you know that's what his wife said and she Was probably important for keeping religion going, keeping it active with him, not letting him slouch. Because she really was very religious. Henry James Sr. Is the one who introduced. She was a Swedenborgian and he helped introduce. He came home from a meeting with her when she was at.
- [108:19]
B
And said, I've got a girl for you.
- [108:21]
A
I've got a girl for you. Exactly.
- [108:24]
B
But what we're talking about here is the heart of the American Transcendental movement, which was hugely influential in literature.
- [108:35]
A
Yes. Yeah.
- [108:40]
B
And Henry James was, along with Thoreau, were right at the center of that movement.
- [108:46]
A
And of course, Emerson and Whitman was also right. He was a big part of it.
- [108:52]
B
And William James was sort of on the periphery.
- [108:55]
A
Right. You know, an important thing about Whitman because now I've quoted him how many times in our time together here, you know, a simple, compact, well joined scheme. Myself disintegrated. Everyone disintegrated. Yet part of the scheme. But as you know, you know, I sing the song of myself. I sing myself what I sing. You know, he had tremendous kind of ego. And not just for that poem. There's a. Thoreau visited Whitman in New Jersey. Visit him at his home. And he says all women wanted to know was, how am I doing out there? What's my. Like, how am I. Are they reading me? What's going. That was what he was obsessed with. So I can't say this enough. Of course we have a sense. We have the feeling of self. Look, I'm Jewish. We keep coming back to this. I'm in my shoulders all the time, you know, So I kind of practice Tai Chi, you know, because Tai Chi instantly get you out of your shoulders. You know, if you kind of point your finger and like an embrace, like you want to feel like. Oh, you know, you. This is. Tai Chi is not. Nobody hugs like this. Right. You want to just, you know, just like embrace. An embrace feels good. A loving embrace feels good before you even move because you're moving out of. Out of this. But the sense of self is pretty much a sense of contraction. Yeah. Right. James and Watts use the same word for the sense of self. A reverberation, you know, a second beat. There's. In other words, Alan Watts. Yes. As if I'm just talking to boomers out there. I saw him once live. I'm sure you know him too. He looked pretty hollowed out. I mean, there's a man who. I don't know a better writer, a better, you know, just brilliant thinker. Right. Was an alcoholic. Yeah. And what his niece Asked him, why do you drink? He said, I'm lonely or something. I mean, I, I, I embrace the game, Leela. I, you know, it's not like I'm longing to get back into that state where I was just, you know, this moment, this moment, total bliss, total, you know, I'm happy to be back without, in that world. But, like, I could say, like, oh, I'm a bodhisattva. You know, the Bodhisattva thing, right? About. But think about what that means. It's like, oh, you mean you have the choice. Like, you could go away from everybody else, but no, you're staying there, right. To help them out somehow. You vanish into some, I don't know, Nirvana resort or something. I don't know quite what they, what they mean by that. I like better. Nirvana is samsara, that you realize, oh, every moment is part of the. I'm already there. Right. The anesthetic revelation. One of the points was, as Kazanus Clark said, we start on a journey that's ended before it's ended before we begin.
- [111:55]
B
You know, so we started on a journey that's ended before we begin. It sounds like T.S. eliot.
- [112:03]
A
Well, T.S. eliot. He was a student of Bradley, one.
- [112:09]
B
Of James's philosophical compatriots.
- [112:13]
A
That's right. Compatriot's a great word and of course, a big promoter of the absolute. And if you think about Eliot's poetry, he talks about eternal recurrence.
- [112:25]
B
At the end of our journeys, we discover that we've arrived at the place we've always been.
- [112:32]
A
That's right. That's right. So there. And the anesthetic. Bradley as sprigg. Thomas Sprig has the book. TL Sprig has, you know, let's get this right. American truth, British reality. He has, he says if he had stayed around for Einstein, he would have been able to, to also embrace this notion of a block universe. Who, Bradley.
- [113:02]
B
If Bradley had stayed around.
- [113:04]
A
If Bradley, you know, if he had, if, you know, he was a little tentative to talk in those terms of, like, it's all completed. But he, but he did think that way. And as you say, Elliot was, you know, Elliot's poem reflects. Yeah, because that is the thing with the sphere, right? We're talking about eternal recurrence, which, you know, what do you got? Pythagoras, Nietzsche. A lot of people before Christianity rose. That's what people, you know, sometimes don't realize that Augustine came along and said, hey, no more of this eternal recurrence. The Lord God died once for our sins. And we're not going to keep re. Crucifying him. You know, it's just a cartoonish version. Because if everything is part of the dream and if the passing thought is the thinker, there's no individual, whether Jesus or whatever, there are no individual people to be cycling again and again. It's just a moment in the sphere. There's no collecting point even. There is a way, I think, to make that work.
- [114:08]
B
Well, you're bringing in a new topic now, eternal recurrence. I know it's part of your thinking, but why is it necessary?
- [114:17]
A
Well, I think it is because otherwise, if you hear a block universe. James, by the way, was the first person to put block and universe together. And then he thought, well, I got to do more work than this. He characterized it as an iron block. He put that word block on there to keep people from. He didn't want to make it attractive for people, the idea. But what he didn't understand was there is the reason why I was asked to write this essay for iai. TD called, and they came up with a title, the Metaphysics of Laughing Gas. Right. Which is, you know, nitrous oxide and stuff. So the anesthetic revelation is that. Right. And they're comfortable, very comfortable with the idea that this thing that you're coming out of is this sort of permanent thing that exists. It doesn't change, doesn't move. Aristotle's unbover, whatever you want. It's that larger, vaster consciousness in general before it becomes consciousness in specific. Right. So. But they knew succession is the thing, and the succession is the thing, because in that, you can. It's not you doing the succeeding, it's.
- [115:41]
B
Just moment after moment.
- [115:44]
A
So it's not a block in that. And then when James added the term iron block to say, okay, in case block is not enough to keep you away from it, I'm going to put the word iron in there, too. This is all James. The block universe is James. It's just this phrase.
- [116:01]
B
And he meant it the same way physicists today mean it.
- [116:05]
A
Well, he. Yes. In terms of everything that ever was will be his noun. Yes, but that sense of banning, even succession from it. Right, because it has that sense of block. It's just solid and nothing's moving.
- [116:21]
B
So where does eternal recurrence fit in?
- [116:24]
A
Well, let's do two things. One, let's. When you think of a block, nobody thinks of a sphere. So that's the other thing. Right. It's like that word has been one way to keep us. We didn't have to add iron. People just don't. Once that word block got in there, we're all ready.
- [116:42]
B
Well, the block universe, normally I would conceive of it as having a beginning and an end. Starts at the Big Bang and it will end at the Big Crush, and that's that.
- [116:53]
A
You wouldn't think it goes back to, I mean, you know how they talk about the Big Bounce or whatever.
- [116:59]
B
Yeah, sure, you could do that too, right?
- [117:03]
A
But all of it is just appearance of stuff being generated and all of that. So I say first make it a sphere. It's still the idea of, you know, everything's contained within it. And the beauty of a sphere or a circle is it has no beginning or end. The beginning is the end. Look, what are we wearing here? You know, the rainbow yin. Y. Is my button gone?
- [117:29]
B
No, it's there. We can see it.
- [117:31]
A
Oh, you can see it. Okay. So notice this yin and yang and the opposites. And you know, when I talk about God as a sphere, who centers everywhere, Circumference conference nowhere, no identifiable somewhere. You know, Nicholas Acousa picked up on that. It's the conjunction of opposites, you know, just like this yin yang. And Heraclitus talks about the hidden harmony, right? So all of this yin and yang are, you know, you can't have yin without yang. The Taoists like to say it's Yin Yang. You can't just say Yang by itself or yin by itself. It's all these kind of a yin yang. So all of this dynamic movement is going on. However, it's all happening in a circle.
- [118:12]
B
And I have an animated version in which indeed it does repeat itself.
- [118:17]
A
It repeats itself in a circle. But what is actually it's all governed by. So that feels like the reality, right? Except you've got the circle suggesting at least that everything's connected to a center point. Because you can't have a circle unless every point out there is connected to a center point. And you cannot again go from the surface one to the other. You know, there's this phrase James has of the continuity of adjacence. It's a key phrase of his. He says, I can't stress how important this is. He actually puts a lot of emphasis on it. That doesn't need self transcendence to come around. And neither does this. This can be impersonal. It thinks, right? It rains again and again. I have to say, it's a fundamental of consciousness. James thought that was that impersonal thing. And then, by the way, at the end of Principles of psychology. The briefer course, the abridged edition called the Billy, I think I used to call it. Unlike the last page, he talks about shistness as prime reality. Leaving who the knower is wide open. No, leaving who the knower really, the ultimate knower. Right, who the knower really is wide open. Remember, like you should concentrate 24 hours a day, you know, inwardly searching for this. Who is it? What is it that speaks, his silent looks and listens. Look at Ramana Maharshi. All he said was just keep asking, who am I? Who am I? Who is that? And you get, you get this shishness guiding us to who the knower is wide open. Well, wide open in one sense to me because I'm making an inference, you know, it's not, you know, James was very clear about this. We're like cats and dogs in the library when we're trying to think of these big issues. We don't. We're not going to know. And I'm not pretending this has to be what it is, but I am making this inference that this is the cosmos, the Greek word for order.
- [120:17]
B
Jonathan Bricklin, what a joyful conversation.
- [120:23]
A
It's always such a delight to be with you, Jeff.
- [120:25]
B
It's a great pleasure. I feel like we've known each other a long time.
- [120:29]
A
Well, maybe I was Benjamin Paul Blood in a past life and I'm catching up with you in this life.
- [120:35]
B
That could be the topic of another conversation. Thank you so much for being with me today. And for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here.
- [121:15]
A
Book four in the New Thinking Allowed dialogue series is Charles T. Tart, 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology. Now available on Amazon.
- [121:29]
B
New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degree that focus on mind, body and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs. Edu. You can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies go to newthinkingallowed.org.