WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT
BRIEF PEEKS BEYOND
Better than any book I’ve come across, Bernardo Kastrup’s collection of essays confronts two mysteries that must be urgently solved. The first is the mystery of reality. …The second …is the mystery of knowledge. …To confront both mysteries at once …requires courage, tenacity, a willingness to swim upstream, and thick skin. …But if you have a persistent, acute mind like Bernardo’s, an exciting journey opens up. (From the Foreword)
Deepak Chopra, M.D., pioneer in the field of mind-body medicine. Author of more than 75 books with 23 New York Times best sellers.
Some words, such as the collection of essays in Brief Peeks Beyond, have the …power to evoke in the reader not just the concept of infinite Consciousness …but the experience of it, a taste of its own essential reality. I have been touched by the profundity of these essays and know that they will imprint their healing intelligence in the broader medium of mind, from which humanity draws its knowledge and experience, for many years to come. (From the Afterword)
Rupert Spira, non-duality teacher and author.
In this pioneering, original and brilliantly written book Bernardo Kastrup is very critical of the still widely accepted materialist approach in science, while making use of many convincing rebuttals to materialist counterarguments. According to him all reality is in consciousness itself, because it is the only carrier of reality anyone ever knows for sure, but it is in a transpersonal mind-at-large, and not limited to our personal waking consciousness. His inevitable conclusion is that consciousness must be fundamental in the universe. This important book is an excellent contribution to the growing awareness that the domination of materialism in science is irrefutably coming to an end, perhaps even in the next decade. Highly recommended.
Pim van Lommel, cardiologist, author of Consciousness Beyond Life.
Occam’s Razor never cut so deep as in this penetrating critique of science, philosophy and the cultural cocoon we’ve constructed. Kastrup has followed up on his previous assault on dopey scientific materialism with a knockout punch.
Alex Tsakiris, author of Why Science is Wrong…About Almost Everything and host of the Skeptiko podcast.
Bernardo has the ability to communicate with the readers, through challenging them, in order to help our human consciousness to (re-)merge with the Whole of Consciousness, the ‘Infinite Womb’ of all that expresses Itself in time/space. For the open-minded and openhearted seekers of truth, this is great stuff to read.
Fred Matser, humanitarian, philanthropist, author of Rediscover Your Heart.
First published by iff Books, 2015
iff Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach,
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For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website.
Text © Bernardo Kastrup 2011-2015
Foreword copyright © 2014 by Deepak Chopra. Used with permission.
Afterword copyright © 2014 by Rupert Spira. Used with permission.
All quotations in this book are either from works in the public domain or are believed, in good faith, to fall well within fair use provisions.
ISBN: 978 1 78535 018 4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930443
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.
The rights of Bernardo Kastrup as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
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CONTENTS
Other books by Bernardo Kastrup
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Deepak Chopra
1. Introduction
2. On metaphysics and cosmology
2.1. A more parsimonious, logical, non-materialist worldview
2.2. Materialist arguments and why they are wrong
2.3. Finding truth within the dream
2.4. Survival of consciousness beyond death: an implication of common sense
2.5. The actual difference between living beings and inanimate objects
2.6. Finding God in metaphysical parsimony
2.7. Quantum physics: a parsimonious solution to the measurement problem
3. On consciousness, neuroscience and the media
3.1. Consciousness: an unsolvable anomaly under materialism
3.2. The incredible trick of disappearing consciousness
3.3. What are memories, after all?
3.4. Misleading journalism and the notion of implanted memories
3.5. Psychedelics and the mind-body problem
4. On skepticism and science
4.1. Intellectual fundamentalism
4.2. Living in a cocoon of mere hypotheses
4.3. Scientific dogmatism and chance
4.4. Science and the defacement of reason
4.5. The taboo against meaning
4.6. Darwinian evolution: an open door to purposefulness
4.7. To understand the anomalous we need more skepticism, not less
5. On culture and society
5.1. The idolatry of a new priesthood
5.2. Education and the meaning of life
5.3. Has academic philosophy lost its relevance?
5.4. Myths in contemporary culture
5.5. Enchantment: the lost treasure
5.6. A cultural narrative of projections
5.7. Direct experience, philosophy and depth-psychology: why we need them all
5.8. Unfathomable change is on the horizon
6. On the strange and mysterious
6.1. Near-death experiences and the afterlife
6.2. Why Sam Harris is wrong about Eben Alexander’s visit to ‘heaven’
6.3. UFOs: even more mysterious than you’d think
6.4. Extra-terrestrial life: implications for the materialist paradigm
7. On free will
7.1. What is free will?
7.2. Where is free will to be found?
8. On practical applications
8.1. Pragmatism and the meaning of life
8.2. What difference does it make if reality is in consciousness?
8.3. The case for integrative mind-body medicine
8.4. Can our thoughts directly affect reality at large?
8.5. It starts and ends with us: what can we do individually?
9. Takeaway message
Afterword by Rupert Spira
Notes
Bibliography
Other books by Bernardo Kastrup
Rationalist Spirituality: An exploration of the meaning of life and existence informed by logic and science.
Dreamed up Reality: Diving into mind to uncover the astonishing hidden tale of nature.
Meaning in Absurdity: What bizarre phenomena can tell us about the nature of reality.
Why Materialism Is Baloney: How true skeptics know there is no death and fathom answers to life, the universe, and everything.
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. …What you are being taught h
ere is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system.’1
Doris Lessing
Disentrenchment of formative contexts provides societies with a range of material and intangible advantages …In fact, all the varieties of individual and collective empowerment seem to be connected in one way or another with the mastery the concept of disentrenchment …describes.2
Roberto Unger
Acknowledgements
The inspiration, insights and intuitions behind a book never arise in a vacuum. Indeed, I am indebted to many who, directly and indirectly, have helped in the development of the ideas expressed here.
The many free-flowing, openhearted conversations I’ve had with my friends Rob van der Werf, Paul Stuyvenberg, Guiba Guimarães, Natalia Vorontsova, Fred Matser and Rick Stuart, about the nature of life and reality, have helped open me up to myriad aspects of my own humanity and the world. These people are no longer lost in the trance of our society’s usual games. Instead, they are willing to engage with truth whatever it may entail. I gratefully acknowledge their influence on me. I am also grateful to my friend Alex Tsakiris and Niclas Thörn for the sharp discussions that helped shape some of the more critically incisive essays in this book. Finally, the subtle encouragement I was given by Pim van Lommel and Henry Stapp – two people I greatly respect and admire – have strengthened my resolve to complete this work.
I am thankful to the participants of my online discussion forum3 for their help with this project, particularly in its initial stages, when their suggestions influenced its directions most clearly. With the risk of leaving equally important names out, I’d like to explicitly acknowledge the contributions of Don Salmon, Bob Clark, Saajan Patel, Peter Jones, Neil Creamer, Paul Middleton and Stewart Lynch. I am also grateful to Robin Carhart-Harris and Enzo Tagliazucchi, researchers at Imperial College, London, for their willingness to engage with me in an in-depth email discussion regarding the effects of psychedelics in the human brain.
I am indebted to Deepak Chopra for his continuing support in promoting my work and for the wonderful foreword he wrote for this book. While I may have some skill in logically explaining aspects of the truth, Deepak has the exceptional ability to make them alive to those with the eyes to see. Having come to know him and his ideas more closely than through the occasional TV show or debate, I’ve developed great respect for Deepak. Likewise, the generous validation I’ve received from Rupert Spira, someone who knows more intimately and profoundly than me much of what is written here, has been crucially encouraging. The masterful afterword he wrote captures the spirit of this book in a manner I couldn’t hope to emulate.
Finally, this work may have never seen the light of day. As I wrote my earlier book, Why Materialism Is Baloney, a very dark and difficult period of my life was unfolding. Only a strange yet irresistible – even compulsive – sense of duty kept me going. Once the manuscript was duly complete, however, the compulsion had nothing left to attach itself to. An incongruous mixture of relief and emptiness overtook me. I was done; there was nothing else to achieve or aim for. Life had lost its felt meaning. It’s hard to describe how dark that mental space is, or how strong its gravitational pull. Had I stayed there much longer, I don’t know how things would have turned out. Yet here I am, with a new book imbued with more fighting spirit than any of my previous ones. It was the serendipitous appearance in my life of Claudia Damian, who embodied and radiated the very meaning I could no longer feel in being alive, that enabled this revival. Her love, affection and living example of how to relate to life simply and authentically, helped me escape the cage of my thoughts and reconnect with immediate experience, source of all true meaning. Her entrance into my story – timed to perfection – was palpable evidence, if any were needed, of something I already knew: nothing really happens just by chance. I am grateful to her, as well as to whatever organizing principles or agencies placed her in my world, for my new lease of life. With this book, I am trying to make it count.
Foreword by Deepak Chopra
Better than any book I’ve come across, Bernardo Kastrup’s collection of essays confronts two mysteries that must be urgently solved. The first is the mystery of reality. Holding this book in your hands, or any physical object, you are being unwittingly tricked. The object feels secure and stable. It occupies three dimensions. You can feel its weight in your hands. Yet none of these facts are reliable or even valid. They slip through our fingers like sand once we take seriously the quantum revolution that occurred over a century ago. The solid, stable, reliable world vanished into clouds of invisible energy, and in a stroke everything we took for granted in everyday life was returned to its true state, as a profound mystery.
Even a quantum physicist would feel shaken to accept that he is driving a cloud of energy to work instead of a Honda, and so the mystery of reality has been pushed aside. Science is about things that can be measured and data that can be collected. With a shrug, most of us believe that this is enough. Only a sliver of thought is given to the ‘real’ reality that lies beyond the world’s appearance.
The second mystery to be solved is wrapped up in the first. This is the mystery of knowledge. How do we know what we know? The obvious answer is ‘through the brain.’ But the human brain is a physical object like a bicycle, tree, or block of granite. It has no privileged position in Nature. The glucose that serves as your brain’s primary nourishment can’t think, any more than the sugar in a sugar cube can think. Besides, the brain vanished into a cloud of invisible energy along with everything else in Nature after the quantum revolution. Relying on it for true knowledge is shaky at best.
If only a sliver of thought is devoted to the first mystery – finding the ‘real’ reality – even less is devoted to the second – discovering where knowledge comes from. To confront both mysteries at once, as Bernardo Kastrup does, requires courage, tenacity, a willingness to swim upstream, and thick skin. Science disparages and dismisses metaphysics, even though 99% of scientists haven’t actually investigated what it is. History isn’t just written by the victors; it’s thought about by the victors. Science in our time feels supremely victorious, and the door to metaphysics is padlocked with a sign reading ‘Don’t Bother to Enter.’
But if you have a persistent, acute mind like Bernardo’s, an exciting journey opens up. You get to think your way to the truth, and when thinking falters, you can ‘peek beyond’ by means of insight, intuition, and self-awareness. This is what separates physics from metaphysics (and why the ancient Greeks placed metaphysics higher). If the ‘real’ reality is accessible at all, it must be knowable through the mind. Beyond space, time, matter, and energy, nothing can be measured scientifically. There is no data to collect. There is no time before time came into the picture via the Big Bang. What does exist is the pre-created state of the universe. To explore it requires an Einstein of consciousness – as Einstein himself realized. Having theorized relativity strictly through mental work (so-called thought experiments), he declared that he was astonished when Nature turned out to confirm his theory.
Why should Nature conform to what we think about it? If you stand back, there’s no compelling reason for it to. Nature could conform instead to a cat’s perception of reality or a snail’s or perhaps any nervous system at all, including those we can’t conceive of. There’s no reason to give the human mind access to the ‘real’ reality except for one possibility. Nature and the human mind could be intimately connected in the ‘beyond’ that metaphysics points to. The cosmos may be conscious, as some physicists are beginning to speculate. The human mind could be a reflection of God’s mind, a religious notion that can be translated into non-religious terms. Or, if you want to be truly radical, creation may be a single thought expressing itself across the canvas of the uni
verse in countless ways, including our individual thoughts. When you think the word ‘rhinoceros,’ you could be going to the same creative source where stars are born.
What saves these possibilities from being mere fancy is that for thousands of years there have been sages, seers, mystics, and philosophers who undertook the journey into consciousness that is the primary – indeed, the only – tool of metaphysics. Their findings are just as valid about reality as colliding electrons in a high-speed particle accelerator. The field in which they are valid, however, isn’t materialistic. There are two fields, actually. One is the field of existence, or ontology, which looks into what ‘real’ means at the most basic level of being. The other is the field of knowledge, or epistemology, which looks into how it happens that reality allows itself to be known in the first place.
Bernardo isn’t fortunate by the standards of mass media, which breathlessly announces the discovery of the Higgs boson but remains silent about metaphysics. But he’s very fortunate to discover many cutting-edge topics that push the envelope of both science and philosophy. To be frank, unless a philosopher can satisfy the demands of science, meeting it halfway about the brain, the nature of time, the existence of multiple universes, dark matter and energy, etc., the whole enterprise will just be zombie philosophy. It will move around as if alive but actually be dead.
Fortunately, this is a fruitful time for ‘peeking beyond,’ because the accepted worldview of science, locked in its materialistic assumptions, has failed to show where time and space came from, what consciousness is, how deterministic laws of nature can be reconciled with free will, whether the brain can think or only parallels the mind’s invisible processes, and a host of related questions. These ‘meta’ issues will never be resolved, Bernardo holds, unless we investigate the two areas that are his passion: ontology and epistemology. Do you know where your next thought is coming from? Do you know where any thought comes from? Neither does science with all its confidence and research findings. Brief Peeks Beyond is as much a book of questions as of answers, but it has the enormous advantage that its author knows which questions to ask and where to go to find the answers.
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