The Non-dualogues share the conversations between slumberfogey and the pilgrim, in slumberfogey’s flat in London. Sometimes, the pilgrim brings friends, who join in the discussion.
​
slumberfogey: Pilgrim! At last. You're late!

pilgrim: Isn't 11am a good time for you?

s: No, I mean two months late. My biscuits ran out seven weeks ago.

p: slumberfogey, I told you I'd be away for two months. I've been on a building project in Central America.

s: Oh, I remember now. Still, no biscuits.

p: I've got biscuits with me. Shall I put on the tea? What are we discussing today?

s: Who are you?

p: You recognise me, don't you? I'm Gary, but you always call me pilgrim.

s: So "Gary" is your name or "pilgrim" labels you, but is either who you are?

p: Oh, I get it. We're diving straight in, then. So I'll skip the bits covering where I'm from, what I do for money, what party I vote for, my ethnicity and my religion, because knowing you, you're looking for something different...

s: So, you are...?

p: Well, just a bloke. A person. A human. (An Arsenal fan.)

s: Don't sell yourself short. You're not "just" anything. But let's take "person." Did you say you had biscuits?

​p: Yes! I'm bringing them out with the tea. Okay, so yeah, I'm a person.

s: And when you say you're a person, you mean you are... what? What is a person?

p: An individual. 

s: Interesting. Let's remember that word and come back to it. So an individual what? And don't say "person," because we don't want to go in circles. You've already said a person is an individual.

p: An individual body, I guess.

s: Anything special about the body? Would a cadaver count?

p: No. A living body.

s: Ah. So you are a living body. How are you aware you're living?

p: Being alive is obvious. I'm moving around and stuff.

s: To pick up on the line of questioning I'm taking you on, pause for a moment and hearken back to our discussion last time about "what is happening." Although two months have passed, I hope we don't need to replay the whole discovery.

*** Intermission ***

p: Right, so I'll try to keep my answers to what I can be certain of. My direct experience.

s: Excellent! So, according to your direct experience, what is the body?

p: Well. I see it when I look at my hands, chest, legs or feet. I see my face's reflection in the mirror. So an aspect of the body is images I experience.

s: Great. What else?

p: I feel it all the time. My hand can touch my belly or slap my thigh. I feel my teeth chatter. My stomach rumbles. (I hear that as well.) My heart beats. I sense my limbs' position. Body movement, warmth, cold, hunger. So I guess the body is also a bundle of sounds and sensations.

s: Super. Anything else?

p: I smell my breath, too. I taste my lip bleeding or sweat rolling into my mouth. I guess the body is a collection of the same types of perception that come from "out in the world" plus the internal sensations.

s: Interesting. "Internal." Internal to what?

p: Internal to my body.

s: But you say - as far as you can tell from your direct experience - your body is those things. So some of those things can't be "internal" to the body. That's saying bits of the body are internal to itself, while other bits aren't.

p: I'm not used to examining the body this way, so I get tied up in how to express myself.

s: You're doing great. Just consider more carefully within what those perceptions and "internal" sensations rest.

p: Wait! I've got it! They sit in my mind. I am my mind!

s: So you are not your body but your mind?

p: Well, perhaps it's not so simple, since the mind is dependent on the body.

s: How so?

p: The mind depends on the brain, which is part of the body.

s: How does your direct experience tell you this?

p:

s: How do you experience your mind's dependence on the brain?

p: I guess I don't. I base it on what others say and what I've read.

s: Okay. I'm not saying it's wrong. The mind may be dependent on the body, but let's stick with the things you can know, from your direct experience.

p: Yeah. So I'm sticking with saying I am my mind.

s: Do you, as a mind, include or contain anything else beyond the perceptions and sensations of the body?

p: Ah! Well, I have millions of ideas, memories, emotions, expectations, wishes and judgements in my mind. I guess my will sits in the same place.

s: Yes. Lot's more stuff, huh? When you say those things sit in the same place, what is that place?

p: My mind.

s: But if you are the mind, what is the "My" bit? If you are the mind, then saying "My mind" is equivalent to saying "My me."

p: But I'm distinguishing my mind from other minds.

s: What is your direct experience of other minds?

p: Ah, I get you. My experience is only through sights, sounds and other perceptions, which we've covered. I don't experience other minds. So are you saying they don't exist?

s: Well, that would be hard for me to say, since slumberfogey is one of them! No, they may well exist, but let's stick with what you can be sure of from your direct experience. We're taking empiricism seriously.

p: Okay, so I'll get rid of the "my." All those forms of thought and all perceptions of the body, plus all body sensations sit in me.

s: You say the perceptions of the body sit in you. Do the perceptions of the rest of the world (the images of the surrounding room, the sound of passing traffic, etc.) sit somewhere else?

p: No. Same place. 

s: So all perceptions, sensations and thoughts sit within you, yes? So who or what are you?

p: I am the mind.

s: What is the mind?

p: I'm getting tired. I dunno. The container of those things?

s: Seeing things in a whole new way can be taxing. Those "things," those perceptions, sensations and thoughts. Do you remember how we rolled them up in our last meeting?

p: Oh yeah. I worked out (with your help) that I don't ever experience those different categories. They all come in bundled, undivided experience.

s: Exactly! And my little term for undivided experience is "What Is Happening." So, who or what are you?

p: If the mind is What Is Happening and I am my mind, I guess I am What Is Happening. Right?

s: You sound uncertain. How can you be certain What Is Happening is happening?

p: Arrrrrggggggghhhhhhh! This is exhausting. I always feel stupid when you do this.

s: Sorry. Maybe The Trial of Socrates is inaccurate. Perhaps his students killed him out of frustration.

p: What? What are you on about?

s: A classical allusion, young man. You guys have lost touch with your roots. Not enough time. Back to my question...

​p: How do I know What Is Happening is happening? Because I'm experiencing it! It is my direct experience.

s: Right. You're not an inert container of those aspects of experience, of What Is Happening. You are its experiencer. So who are you?

p: I am the experiencer of What Is Happening.

s: Perfect! And What Is Happening is the flow of experience arising to awareness and receding to make way for the continuing flow "behind."

p: So I'm the experiencer, but I don't know what the experiencer is. I'm not the body - I experience the sensations and perceptions making up my direct experience of the body. Likewise, I'm not the mind - I experience the thoughts that are my direct experience of it. And, I'm not the external environment - I experience the perceptions composing my direct experience of the external world. So what am I?

s: That's what I asked you! And you've peeled away a lot of confusion. You've worked out that you are no thing (nothing). The things are aspects of What Is Happening. You are the experiencer of the things. If you still seek yourself as an object, as a thing, you'll come up empty. You - the experiencer - are not a thing.

p: I'm not sure how thrilled I am to be nothing. So my school teachers and ex-girlfriends were right.

s: Maybe it's not so bad. You used to believe you were a thing - a body or a mind or their union. You now see you are not a thing. Perhaps a further step awaits discovery. Are you willing to take on some homework?

p: Sure.

s: Okay. Between now and when we next meet, look for boundaries.

p: Huh?

s: I'd like you to investigate different boundaries on several "levels." I'll email this to you, but hear me out.

• Looking at any visual object relative to its surroundings, try to find the boundary between it and "not it." Can you find anything other than a difference in colour, shade, degree of transparency or texture. Is your visual experience made of separate "things" or a flow of difference?
• Listening to a specific sound relative to background noise, try to find the auditory equivalent of the visual boundary I described above. Does anything other than a difference in pitch, tone, timbre or amplitude distinguish one sound from the general sound field? Is your auditory experience made of separate "things" or a flow of difference?
• Back in the visual realm, try to find a boundary between the visual object and your seeing of it. Is there a place where the object "stops" and your seeing of it begins? With vision or any other perceptual sense, is the object of experience in any way separated from your seeing (or hearing, etc) it?
• Further comparing across senses, do you detect any boundary between your seeing something and your experiencing it? Between your hearing something and your experiencing it? In other words, are your senses separate from or additional to experiencing?
• The same for your thoughts and your sensations. Do you detect a boundary between a thought and your thinking it? Between a feeling and your feeling it? Thinking something and experiencing the thought? Feeling something and experiencing it? Is your experience of What Is Happening broken in separate streams or locations at all?
• Finally, do you detect any boundary between the action of experiencing  and you, yourself, as the experiencer? Is there a place where experiencing stops and you begin?

All of these build to a final question. Does any evidence in direct experience reveal a boundary between What Is Happening (as a whole) and you (as the experiencer of it)? Does experiencing require something experienced (What Is Happening) and something that experiences it (you)? Or might experiencing, the action or process of experiencing, be all there is?

What would this imply for what you are???

Let's discuss what you find.

Until next week, pilgrim.

The Non-dualogues share the conversations between slumberfogey and the pilgrim, in slumberfogey’s flat in London. Occasionally, the pilgrim brings friends, who join in the discussion.
​
slumberfogey: Ah. You’ve come back! Excellent. Did you pass the Sainsburys on your way here? It’s just a few doors down.

pilgrim: Don’t worry. I have biscuits.

s: Biscuits. What a wonderful idea! Thank you.

p:    While I make the tea, can you tell me how we’ll get started?

s: You are a quick study, aren’t you? Okay, why don’t you start by telling me what is happening?

p:    Let’s see… Arsenal lost to Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup this week, which has put my knickers in a twist. My mum’s boiler’s on the blink, so I have to find someone to sort that. I got a pay rise, which brings me almost up to minimum wage…

s: Slow down. Everything you’ve said (except perhaps the knicker thing) is about the past or the future. I mean what is happening, now? Let’s even capitalize it - What Is Happening?

p:    Right now, I’d say, Prime Minister’s Questions are happening, for what it’s worth. Polar bears are starving. Tottenham fans are having a giggle.

s: Pilgrim. Are you in a grumpy mood? Have a biscuit, and let’s be more precise.

p:    I’m not sure exactly how many polar bears are starving.

s: I mean, none of those things is in your direct experience right now. Ideas about them are, granted. But tell me What, in your direct, indisputable experience, Is Happening. Now.

p:    I’m sipping tea, chewing a biscuit, and trying to speak at the same time.

s: That’s an excellent start! How do you know you’re sipping tea?

p:    What do you mean, how do I know? I’m right here, sipping. And this, (slurp) is tea!

s: You’re handling this moment with the precision of a World War II bombardier. Imagine yourself more like a laser eye surgeon. What Is Happening?

p:    I’m imagining myself as a laser eye surgeon.

s: Are you taking the piss? Okay. How are you certain you’re imagining yourself as a laser eye surgeon?

p:    I feel like I’m missing something here. Or maybe you are.

s: How are you sure you’re not dreaming of picturing yourself as a laser eye surgeon?

p:    Because I’m sitting here, awake, and a bit annoyed.

s: If you were dreaming, wouldn’t it also seem like you were awake?

p:    Okay. I think I see what you are getting at.

s: Good. Let’s try again. See this photo? What Is Happening?

p:    Light is reflecting off of a photo in your hand. Some of it is entering my pupils and striking my retinas, sending signals up my optical nerves to my brain, which creates a disturbing mental image of you wearing a mankini and stroking a llama.

s: Ah. A scientific explanation. First, that’s my mate, Phil in the llama suit. I had a beige leotard on under the mankini, so relax. It was a fancy dress party. Outrageous! Second, I love science. Can’t get enough of it. But the scientific answer gets updated. Newton updated the theory of light. Maxwell updated that. Quantum mechanics updated that. What description would have been accurate in any of those eras, would survive science’s future advances, and would be accurate whether or not you were dreaming?

p:    I am seeing an image of you stroking a man in a llama suit.

s: Better! Now, can there be any doubt you are seeing it?

p:    Well, I’m not smelling it, am I? Thank God.

s: What if you were in a terrible car crash a year ago? What if the doctors could only save your brain and keep it alive in a vat? What if they could stimulate the visual cortex with electrodes to produce images of me in a mankini?

p:    Then I’d say science got its priorities terribly wrong at some point.

s: (Sigh.)

p:    (Sip.)

s: What description would be accurate in that scenario and all the others we’ve mentioned?

p:    I have an image of you in a mankini, stroking a man in a llama suit.

s: Better. Better! But, you have it? What, are you inert? Like a bowl?

p:    I am experiencing an image of you in a mankini, stroking a man in a llama suit!

s: Even better! But does the image, in itself, convey that it is me stroking a man in a llama suit?

p:    Is this ever going to end? Okay. I am experiencing an image of you holding an image. I am also experiencing a belief that the image you hold is of you stroking a man in a llama suit.

s: Super! Terrific! Laser surgery standard. What was different about that final description?

p:    I only appealed to my direct, mental experience.

s: That’s right. All of your older descriptions might have been accurate, but you can’t be sure they were. That last one, you could know. It was only imperfect in that you had to use words to render it for me. But now, it’s just a memory that may or may not be accurate. You see. What Is Happening is your complete, instantaneous, experience. Nothing more and nothing less. Shall we look at it more closely?

p:    Closer than we already have? Are you kidding? Can we move on from the mankini?

s: You’ve sharpened your attention, but you’ve narrowed your focus to do it. Let’s see if we can maintain the attention but with a broad, open awareness. Are you up for it?

p:    Let’s go.

s: Okay. Close your eyes.

p:    Please promise me you won’t take off your clothes.

s: Of course I won’t! Please!
For the next few minutes, don’t reply by speaking. Just think to yourself.
Do you notice the sound of my voice? Its pitch? Its volume? What other sounds are you aware of, now—between the words or beside them?
Do you sense the pressure of your bottom on the seat? Of your feet on the floor? The feeling of your clothes against your skin? Of the air on your face? What other touch are you aware of?
Do you notice any tastes? Does the breath moving through your mouth have a taste?
Are you experiencing any smells? From your bath or your meal? What other smells are you aware of?
Now open your eyes. Experience the surrounding light. The array of colors. The shadows. Do you notice my image? Images of other objects? Which images are clear and which blurred? Do the images change, move? What other sights are you aware of?
Eyes closed again, notice the position of your arms, neck and head. Which muscles are taut and which relaxed? Do you feel warm or cool? Hungry?
Is there any sense of fear, comfort, impatience, or peace? Feelings of love or anger?
Do you notice thoughts? A succession, each arises and dissolves as the next replaces it. Memories. Anticipations. Questions. Decisions. Are you aware of a sense of will?
All these components of experience—these phenomena—in ever-changing, varied combinations, make up What Is Happening in every second of life.
How was that?

p:    Wild! In a way, I know all that is always going on, but it has never struck me so clearly.

s: See how comprehensive, how complete, What Is Happening is? How everything—including any thoughts or feelings of approval or dissatisfaction with What Is Happening, any wishes it were different—is an aspect of What Is Happening, within experience itself?

p:    A lot of it is thought, especially if you include memories, anticipations and judgments. I guess a lot is emotions as well.

s: Your experience can be conceptually broken into sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, thoughts and sensations (where sensations include emotions and other bodily sensations). But do you realize that all those categories are just concepts? Do you experience things in those separate categories?

p:    I guess not. It’s all just one big multimedia wave, isn’t it?

s: That’s right. There are no boundaries within your experience. Those categories, when they occur to you, are just thoughts. We’ll talk more about boundaries next week, and about where you fit into all this.

p:    Where I fit in? I’m right here!

s: Perhaps. Let’s see next week. Until then! Mind your step.

​

Originally posted 29 Nov 2003. Back then, I took away some interesting practical points and identified some common ground. I didn't accept the metaphysics. I didn't really get the metaphysics.  I sort of do get them now. Although the nature of metaphysics is that we can never know whether they are right (hence the meta), these days Tolle's picture is one that makes intuitive sense to me and is not inconsistent with any evidence.

Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now - A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment signposts a journey toward inner peace. I took much from it when I read it a year or so ago. I don't happen to agree with Tolle's metaphysics (time is an illusion, the role of the unmanifested), but I think he makes some good points.

I am no interpreter of Tolle's work, so I do not seek to set forth his argument here. Instead, I would like to highlight a number of the parallels and tangencies between his points and the way I think about Being, Life, Sentience and Consciousness and about the relation between the objective and subjective perspectives.

Tolle believes that we let our rational, conscious mind get in the way of real life. It is a useful tool, but we let it run out of control. How does this manifest itself? We spend too much of our lives planning and fretting about the future or reliving and regretting the past. Our memory and our capacity to form intentions and plan their execution keep us from opening to the raw experiences of life's moment - the here and now.

Tolle goes on to say that there is actually nothing else but the Now. I disagree with this, instead seeing time as one dimension of space-time, just as real as the others, but different from them. Whereas we can move freely among the three spatial dimensions, we are dictated to by the time dimension. We have to move at its speed.

Our access to that dimension is only through the narrow slit that at any moment is now. Our memory gives us imperfect access to the past, as if looking through a rear-view mirror. Our scientific understanding allow a very limited and narrow predictive look at the future. But we can only ever experience now - this moment. This differs hugely from what an objective observer, sitting outside space-time (a-la Flatland fashion) would see. He would see the stretch of all time just as easily as he sees the extension of space. To use a film analogy, he would see the whole reel unwound at once, rather than be restricted (like us) to seeing one frame at a time in quick succession.

Metaphysics aside, I think that Tolle makes a good practical point. If we let our self-conscious powers run amok, dwelling on the past, reliving it, resenting it; scheming about the future, preparing for every eventuality, plotting moves, then we lose out on the wonders that our senses are trying to present to our (animal) sentient awareness. In over-exercising that which sets us apart from other animals (perhaps in the vain hope of convincing ourselves that we're not animals) we miss the simple pleasures of qualia - warmth, melody, beauty. Our unique subjective worlds become cluttered with 'noise'.

Tolle also emphasises that we are not our minds. For him, each person has an eternal presence, an essence part of yet identical with the great unmanifested. I agree that we are more than our minds, though I see it differently from him. Rather than appeal to a supernatural 'unmanifested', I find a foundation in the natural world - the stuff of which we are made, the recipe by which we are made, the chain of actions of which we play a part - basically the eternal web, or flux, of everything. Our roots reach endlessly to the past and our legacy stretches ceaselessly into the future - two opposing cones with us at their common meeting point.

Anyway, to re-iterate the common ground, don't confuse your self with your mind, especially your self-conscious, rational mind. It is a special, important part of you, but it is rooted in more fundamental stuff.

First posted 29 March 2005 - Bohm's eastern influence was primarily Indian / Hindu, but I see strong parallels now with Taoism as well. An amazing man trying to unite worlds that we too easily assume are distinct, incommensurate and irreconcilable.

At the end of my post on Tim Palmer, I related his model to that of David Bohm.  There's a lot more to say about Bohm, and this post will be my attempt to pull it together.

David Bohm's name is associated with many things these days - his communist ideology (which cost him his academic post and nearly his freedom during the McCarthy witch hunts), his turn to Indian mysticism and close relationship with an Indian guru, his development of a new technique of dialogue for reaching more creative group solutions to problems and his call for a new scientific order.  He did ground-breaking work in plasma physics and made important contributions to quantum theory (proposing the first EPR experiment, for instance), yet most of his work in quantum physics is viewed as outside the canon, ignored or embarrassingly dismissed by the physics community.

Bohm always wanted to understand EVERYTHING, and not just in its details but also in its WHOLENESS.  His scientific, mystic and social views were inextricably linked.

The most useful metaphor for his model of the universe is that of the hologram.  A hologram is sort of like a photograph, in that it is a visual representation of reality.  But while a photograph captures only two dimensions, a hologram captures all three.  When light is shone through a holographic plate, a three dimensional image is projected into the space before it.  As you move around the image, you capture it from a different perspective, just as if it were the original object it represents.  If the holographic image is of a person, you stand in front of it to see the face and chest; from the side you get a profile view; from the rear you see the back.

Yet there is something I think is even more interesting: if you drop the holographic plate and break it, EACH resulting piece of the former plate still can serve to project the entire image.  Shine light through a small piece, and you'll still get the full three-dimensional image, just at a lower resolution.  The smaller the piece of plate, the less well-defined the projected image.  Contrast this with what happens when you rip a photograph in half: each half only shows you half of the image.

So, each piece of a holographic plate contains information about the ENTIRE three-dimensional image.  How does this relate to the universe as a whole?  Bohm believed that each particle in the universe contained information about the universe as a whole.  I've put this sloppily, so let's look in greater detail at what he said.

One of the greatest (perhaps the greatest) mystery in science is demonstrated by the double slit experiment.  I've explained the experiment elsewhere, so I won't go further into it here.  Suffice it to say that the experiment suggests that particles fired individually through the test apparatus 'know' how they would have interacted (interfered) with one another had they been sent through together.

Physics has twisted itself into some amusing contortions (including the well-known ostrich head-in-the-sand trick) to account for this.  Bohm believed that the particles themselves only 'knew' this because they were guided by a new field that he introduced, called the quantum potential.  This quantum potential was holographic in its effects in that at any point in the universe, it contained information about the entire universe.  Unlike other forces and fields in physics, its effects did not diminish with distance, so even very remote particles were in a sense linked by it. (Those steeped in quantum theory will recognise the link to the phenomenon of entanglement.)  This potential was essentially a source of active information, intricately and infinitely enfolded (per chaotic non-linear dynamic systems) into scales below our ability to detect it.

This enfolded order that lay under the seemingly random behaviour of sub-atomic particles, Bohm called the implicate order, which he differentiated from our observable universe, the explicate order.  The implicate order was deeper and more fundamental than the explicate one, but only bits of it could ever be unfolded at one time (hence Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle).

In a later, quantum field theoretical version of the same basic thinking, Bohm added another, yet deeper order, the super implicate order.  In this model, the particle was replaced by the quantum potential as the fundamental building block of nature.  Particles were just focused knots within the quantum potential itself, and the evolution of the quantum potential over time was guided by the super-quantum potential.  In fact, Bohm reckoned there could be (and probably were) an infinite number of these levels.  Since the super-quantum potential was sensitive to pseudo-particle-level phenomena, a feedback loop arose, and this calls for another metaphor.

If you think of a video game, the screen images themselves are the explicate order (the particles, etc that we see in our world), the computer programme that dictates how the screen image alters as the game is played is the implicate order (the quantum potential) and the person playing the game and sending signals to the computer programme is the super-implicate order (the super-quantum potential).  The loop is completed as the player adjusts his actions based on his perceptions on the screen.  This super-implicate order is now the home of active information (but please don't see it, because of its analogy with the human player above, as an actual conscious thing).

Bohm was able to express all of this mathematically and to relate it to the more conventional mathematical formulae of quantum mechanics.  His theory predicts observed behaviour just as well as the conventional methods.  Yet it never caught on.

There are aesthetic grounds for this rejection, in that Bohm's interpretation gave a certain prominence to a particle's position (as opposed to its momentum).  Penrose has said that Bohm's model essentially assumes that every measurement is a measurement of position.  But the simplest explanation is that since the conventional view was already operationalised in the scientific community, and since Bohm's model made no different predictions than the conventional view, they should just stick with what they had.  More cynically, you could say that physicists no longer cared about the ontological implications of the theories that provided their predictions.

One thing that strikes me as odd is that Bohm himself did NOT view his system as mechanical (deterministic).  He felt that the feedback loops (per the video game metaphor) opened room for contingency.  I just cannot square this.  Feedback loop or not, the dynamics are deterministic, even if non-computable.  Palmer's approach, which arrives at much the same place (active, holograph-like information enfolded minutely and hidden from view) albeit with a bit less metaphysical baggage, does not shirk from this.

What IS attractive about both - and let's remember that they are entirely consistent with experimental results - is the holism they bring to the universe.  This holism brings nearly common-sensical answers to most of quantum theory's mysteries, and it does so in a way that does not violate the spirit of Einstein's relativity.

Everything is connected, not in some new-age way but ACTUALLY inter-related.  Doesn't this just seem to FIT well with the notion of everything having started with the Big Bang?  If the entire universe started in a quivering instability the size of a dime, it would be hard to imagine bits that were NOT related to the rest.  We are all connected - to one another, to all living things, to everything that exists.  A universe undivided.