The future of thinking and knowing

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Thinking, Knowing, & memory 1

This is a big topic and much more can be said, of course. This article is a short summary to collect my own ideas about these topics and to outline a different approach to the mainstream, and it incorporates notions of energy and spirit. Materialists might find this article incomprehensible! But they’ll get over it.

A view of the future of human knowing

There is a new way of ‘knowing’ appearing rapidly, and it is superseding the previous ‘intellectual’ way, a way which has had a monopoly for centuries, since the ‘Enlightenment’ or the rise of rational scientific thinking. This old model is not to be scorned, but its main use was to sharpen our intellectual faculties in an evolutionary sense, so that the intellect could be used in combination with an advanced ‘intuitive’ sense (as described by Rudolf Steiner to mean a ‘strengthened thinking’), or what I call the ‘new knowing’. This job of prepping the intellectual capabilities of the race has largely been done, and the time has come for our conception of ‘knowing’ to be significantly widened.

People who have been the precursors to this widened understanding include Rudolf Steiner and Ken Wilber above all, but also various artists, clairvoyants and mystics – William Blake, Swedenborg, Mellon Thomas, etc. In fact many revered scientists, particularly in modern physics, are also good examples of the development of this new knowing. Ken Wilber’s book on Bohr, Einstein and 11 other scientific luminaries of the 20^th century makes it clear that these thinkers often first had a deep ‘knowing’ or insight (e.g., Einstein’s relativity or Kekule’s benzene rings) which they then worked hard to ‘step down’ or translate into an organized series of thoughts, or an intellectual proof, which others could follow rationally. Having received the information rationally, the more advanced of these followers would then be able to ‘step up’ to the knowing which inspired the original thinker. And the more that managed that, the easier it was for others to do.

The whole topic however is confused by many mis- and pre-conceptions, wayward terminology, and downright prejudice, etc. I’ll try to clarify some of this as I see it, and hope that it makes sense to some who read it.

The current consensus

The current view, or mainstream consensus of thinking maintains a lively menagerie of assumptions. These assumptions include the fundamental notion that the world is ‘out there’ in all its multiplicity and that we need to build our personal encyclopaedias over the ever-dwindling span of years randomly allotted to us; after which, we die, and that carefully amassed store of ‘knowledge’ simply disappears with our physical bodies, unless we somehow transferred some of it in some way to a storage medium as a pale ghost of what we really ‘knew’, for example, as written work, or visual media, or whatever.

Another set of wobbly assumptions is the mainstream model of the brain’s role in thinking, memory, feeling and consciousness, and the confusion between brain and mind, etc. In spite of all the evidence, we still have neurologists and biologists believing that the brain stores our memories, that the brain ‘is’ the mind, that our brains are no more than some form of computer combining CPU, RAM and storage (see below), and that the communications that occur within our systems are based on molecules colliding! The computer model is an improvement on the previous models of phone exchanges or pigeonhole systems, but it just doesn’t explain all the facts. So while the notion of informational and formative ‘fields’ begins to run rampant in physics and mathematics and other more enlightened disciplines, when it comes to the brain, we are tied down by a bunch of molecular biologists desperately clinging to the ‘one molecule collides with another’ model of consciousness, cellular communications, information processing, etc.

What is being ignored by the mainstream

Much is ignored because it is not (yet) measurable in a lab - all the information and evidence devised by such people as Lynn McTaggart (‘The Field’) and Sheldrake (‘morphogenetic fields’); the extensive proofs of various kinds of paranormal knowing (ESP, premonition, etc.); the work of the depth psychologists starting with Carl Jung, and his notions of the shared consciousness of the race, archetypes, etc.; all the extensive work done in personal development and spiritual traditions on varieties of knowing and being over thousands of years; and much more.

There is also a large body of work by contemporary scientists on the existence of the ‘mind’ of the gut, of the body, of the various organs. The work on the various forms of bio-communication within and between bodies, animals, and plants is also ignored, such as Clive Backster’s work in hooking up polygraphs to plants, etc. as described in ‘The Secret Life of Plants’.

Energy Structures – a model that explains a lot

When someone knows (something), he/she, consciously or otherwise, sets up an energetic structure in the ‘noosphere’ (a term used even by scientists to describe the sphere or field of knowing) which is accessible to all others, whether they realise it or not. This makes the knowing of that matter/informational structure easier for the next person, and easier yet again for the next ‘knower’, and so on. This is referred to as the 100^th monkey syndrome/experiment – it described the development of a skill on one island of many inhabited by a group of monkeys; after a few copied the skill developed by the first, suddenly that same skill spread rapidly throughout the population on other islands, without any physical contact.

This notion of ‘energy structures’ and ‘fields’ is central to the operation of consciousness. For example, Beethoven’s Ninth is a structure, invisible but real and existing in the noosphere, or informational space, or universe of consciousness which we inhabit, and in which we ourselves are ‘energy’ structures. Anybody who listens to a piece of music for the first time is actually allowing a ‘structure’ to form consciously within his energy field or ‘energy body’. He forms a version of it in his personal ‘energy field’ by forming an imprint on his own localised ‘mindstuff’, and he can also go back to the original structure in the general field for more complete detail.

Other energy structures

All of our thoughts, habits, patterns, beliefs, neuroses, etc. can be considered as energy structures within these personal and group ‘knowledge fields’. They are able to be felt by anyone who is in touch with their body, and thus, by extension, with their ‘energy body’. And once you can feel them individually, by simply ‘tuning in’ to the pattern or habit or whatever - usually a feeling which is very familiar to us – then we can actually modify them or remove them or just make them inoperable. (This is what my ‘Freedom Now’ process is about – see www.energy-body-work.com )

There is also, for example, a newly emerging field of information technology that speaks of ‘memes’ or ‘viral communications’ – these are morsels of knowledge, energetic structures, which due to their various qualities (weirdness, newness, usefulness, etc.) hop from mind to mind very rapidly, easily downloaded and sent on through the various methods of transmission we have today – the media, gossip, etc. And perhaps by propagation through ‘knowledge fields’ that we all share. Advertisers research ways of exploiting this propagation of energy structures for the purpose of selling goods, and have certainly made progress in understanding some of it.

The transpersonal future

The future will allow us to directly access as ‘packets’ whole areas of knowledge in an instant, a completely non-verbal process, essentially a ‘download’ from the noosphere into our personal awareness. There are people doing this now quite consciously, such as the people mentioned below who are working at the level of the ‘transpersonal’. And this is nothing new – the Christian Gnostics for example had a fundamental precept which said that to know oneself deeply enough was to eventually know the universe itself.

All knowing over all time is kept available in this noosphere (or in the ‘akashic records’, in the old parlance) for anyone who gets clear enough energetically to be able to ‘resonate’ with those records that most interest them. Increasingly more people will access more of this. The internet provides a more physical analogue of this arrangement, and should make it easier for many to understand the possibilities. Simply consider that computers now can download huge amounts (terabytes) of data in vanishingly small time frames from ‘cyberspace’. The analogy of our own analogue computers (consisting of the brain, central nervous system, the ‘gut brain’, the energy body and much more than is normally allowed) taking in huge quantities of information/inspiration from the noosphere is not really so far-fetched. Indeed, practically all of us do this now whether we know it or not, just as we dream whether we know it or not.

An example of someone who does this is Ken Wilber, who ‘sees’ his books essentially as a ‘vision’, fully developed, a complete package … and then he spends a month or two writing them down with scarcely a pause, and without the need for any notes. (Ref: see the interview with Ken Wilber on his experience of this – www.integralnaked.org where, incidentally, you can access huge amounts of excellent audio and video, without cost for a month).

Another example is the spiritual teacher called ‘Daskalos’, born in 1919 in Cyprus, and I quote from the website cited below:

Daskalos taught that by developing our latent abilities of attunement, which will lead us to at-one-ment, we could assimilate knowledge about anyone or anything directly. Furthermore, the direct knowledge gained from attunement/at-one-ment comes much, much faster than it does by conventional studies. What would take years and years of earthly learning can be accomplished in moments through at-one-ment.

(http://www.researchersoftruth.org/Daskalos_Researchers_of_Truth_System2.htm )

Daskalos started doing this in earnest at the age of seven years.

Rudolf Steiner was another who seems to have reached these high levels and beyond. His understanding, simply put, was that spirit and nature exist, and that knowing fuses the percept (what we perceive through the senses) and the concept (gained by thinking) into the combined, completed unity. He suggested that our spiritual life is a search for the unity between ourselves and the world, and as single separate beings we sense, feel, perceive. But insofar as we think (and this was for Steiner a developed function way beyond our usual mental chatter, in that love is the power that pervades true thinking) we are the all-in-one being that pervades the universe.

As an example of this in action: Steiner ‘accessed’ the records of the past specifically to investigate the life of Jesus. He wrote down what this research revealed in a fascinating book called ‘The Fifth Gospel’, literally a 5^th version of the life of Jesus Christ.

The intermediate stages of the new knowing

Getting back to the here and now, we are unfortunately not at the level of these remarkable people yet, and there is a wide spectrum of potential development between the old doggedly rational-only level of mainstream culture, and this more transpersonal level of knowing. Along that curve of development lie hunches, intuitions, insights, inventions, inspirations, premonitions, ESP, lucid dreaming, dowsing, kinesiology, synchronicities, the ‘siddhis’ of Hindu spirituality and much more. Humour and genius also lie in this realm – Arthur Koestler had a great insight in ‘Ghost in the Machine’ in which he realised that humour was the intersection of two or more ideas or notions or ‘energy structures’ which had never been seen to intersect before. This is the same ‘aha!’ of discovery, and of genius (‘Eureka!’).

The future of knowing

Our minds have the eventual capacity of reflecting everything in all informational directions and in all ‘times’. That is the future of knowing, and another name for this eventual capacity is ‘enlightenment’, which has little to do with thinking as we know it now, but is being derived from this basic faculty in a long process of much development, training and integration. Many people are already well down this path, often without realising it. Many people I see for ‘energy work’ are actually well-endowed on this level of development, in that they are very sensitive to attunement and empathy. However, they have never been acknowledged in this way, rather they have been seen to be a bit ‘odd’or over-sensitive, and often end up locking themselves down on these very levels which hold their real power, leading to all sorts of problems such as being ‘out of the body’, and thus often anxious and fatigued. Once they have been taught how to be in their bodies, and then in their ‘energy bodies’, a simply enough process for most, and then their apparent ‘weaknesses’ shown to be their hidden strengths, big changes naturally occur. It is a sad fact that the human race is evolving fast, but that the culture we inhabit does not even allow for an ‘energy’ model or the idea of human spiritual evolution. The result is that powerful people often use their own powers against themselves for lack of clear perspective on themselves.

Storing our knowledge – the role of memory

The internet analogy helps in clearing up some notions about memory, too. Remember that a computer is a CPU (brain, processing unit), RAM (short-term memory) and hard drive storage (long-term memory). The old consensus seems to be that of course, without doubt, the memory is held in the neurons of the brain (in the CPU), and even the ‘leading thinkers’ act as if this were quite an unassailable notion, even though there is no ‘mechanism’ or theory given at all to substantiate this old-fashioned and illogical notion. They just assert it and hope nobody queries it, and they’ve been quite lucky so far. It’s a bit like looking at the news on TV about a car crash, and then trying to find the crashed car inside the TV box. The TV is just a transmitter/receiver of signals from elsewhere, just as our brains are.

Just as the internet now serves as our information storage system or generalised encyclopaedia or info field and allows us to access it in millions of distributed computers all over the world, so you can imagine a series of information fields (e.g.: morphogenetic fields: Rupert Sheldrake, etheric fields: Rudolf Steiner, etc.) arranged all through informational space where every point has access to every other point, and each of us is a point in that field, as well as being (potentially) the entire field. This is a little like the beautiful image of ‘Indra’s net’, an infinite set of jewels arranged in a lattice or matrix, each jewel reflecting every other, infinitely. The whole matrix is contained in each jewel by reflection… It is also reminiscent of Bell’s theorem of non-locality, which also suggests that the whole universe is of one piece, that locality is just a useful illusion (it helps us get our ‘heads’ around this world and navigate it) which obscures the fact that each part of the universe is instantly and constantly ‘alive’ to all other parts.

ESP and premonition and other psychic events can be imagined as the reflection of particular other jewels in our own bejewelled surface, our ‘mind’ – the clearer that surface, the more we can reflect clearly other events and people and times. And we are able to make our surfaces more clear by our own efforts, a kind of ‘bootstrapping’ which is the purpose of all self-accelerated evolution, that great power that humans have available, and even occasionally use!

The computer analogy helps to clarify this idea of ‘self and Self’. Just as a computer has its own local short-term and long-term memory (RAM and local hard disk, for example), so does our individual body-mind have its own localised versions of memory retention in our local field (or ‘energy body’). What we imprint into these fields as a process of growing up, being conditioned and socialised, studying, etc., is a small map of the whole territory of knowledge spread throughout the unimaginably huge fields of consciousness of this universe, as we experience it. This map gets enlarged and polished during a life, in some cases amazingly so, but in the end there is a quantum leap from an identification with the local imprints of our local ‘self’ (our ‘map’), to an identification with the whole territory, a process sometimes called ‘enlightenment’. If you read the experiences of those who have done this, it seems that this process is a surrendering of all the data collected in the local map (of self), to allow for the expansion into the whole territory. There is a good description of this process by Eckhart Tolle in the introduction to his book ‘The Power of Now’.

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