Brief Peeks Beyond

by Bernardo Kastrup

  • The outside image of (self-reflective) egoic processes in consciousness are particular types of brain activity.

  • An outside image of the (non-self-reflective) personal obfuscated psyche is the metabolism in the rest of the physical body.

  • An outside image of the collective obfuscated psyche (mind-at-large) is the physical activity in the rest of the universe.

  The key point in this whole story, as far as integrative medicine is concerned, is this: beyond certain specific types of brain activity that correlate with self-reflective egoic awareness, the rest of the physical body is an image of our personal obfuscated psyche. The body isn’t merely a lump of matter fundamentally independent from, and outside, our psyche. Instead, it is what buried emotions, feelings, beliefs and cognitive processes that escape the field of our self-reflective awareness look like from the outside. Now, just as blue flames are the image of hotter combustion and red flames the image of colder combustion, so a healthy body is an image of healthy psychic activity and an ill body is an image of unhealthy psychic activity in the personal obfuscated psyche. This way, if we need to speak in terms of causation, it is fair to say that unhealthy psychic activity in the personal obfuscated psyche causes all illnesses. This shows the importance of integrative medicine: we can treat all illnesses by influencing obfuscated psychic activity.

  A note of caution is required at this point. Many alternative healing techniques are promoted today that focus on the ego: affirmations, positive thinking, visualization, etc. But for as long as the corresponding psychic activity remains in the ego – that is, remains in self-reflective awareness – it won’t affect the rest of the body. Because the body is an outside image of non-egoic psychic activity, whatever remains in the ego cannot influence the body. How many people get seriously ill despite assiduously practicing positive thinking and visualizations? How many people continue to suffer from the conditions they try to overcome with their daily health affirmations? Clearly, it isn’t enough to refurnish the ego: the new furniture has to sink into the cellar of our personal psyches if it is to have bodily effect. It has to be assimilated by the obfuscated core of one’s being.

  This isn’t necessarily bad news, for it works the other way around as well: hypochondriacs, for instance, need not worry about ‘attracting’ the very illnesses they are constantly anxious about. Their anxiety resides in their self-reflective egoic awareness, this being precisely the reason why they suffer. Remaining self-reflectively aware of unhealthy psychic activity causes psychological distress, for sure, but it also prevents that activity from becoming somatized as physical illness. Depth psychology has, for decades, insisted in the need to bring unhealthy psychic activity into the light of self-reflective awareness, where it does less damage and can be more easily treated through talk therapy.

  Nobody needs to feel guilty about ‘attracting’ illness due to a negative mood disposition, since such disposition isn’t obfuscated or ‘unconscious.’ If it were, you wouldn’t be aware of it and wouldn’t feel guilty to begin with. Do you see what I mean? Generally speaking, you cannot know at an egoic level whether your psychic dispositions are going to compromise your health, for the dispositions that can do so are, by their very nature, obfuscated. Case in point: a meta-study reported that:

  Extremely low anger scores have been noted in numerous studies of patients with cancer. Such low scores suggest suppression, repression, or restraint of anger. There is evidence to show that suppressed anger can be a precursor to the development of cancer, and also a factor in its progression after diagnosis.181

  This is entirely consistent with the explanatory framework I am putting forward here: anger only becomes somatized if it escapes egoic awareness and drops into the personal obfuscated psyche. But the irony is clear in the quote: it is precisely low anger scores that indicate high internalized levels of, well, anger! How is a patient to tell a healthy lack of anger from internalized, obfuscated anger? Should people who do not feel angry start worrying about anger-caused cancer? That would be preposterous. Only trained therapists can differentiate between a healthy lack of negative emotions and deeply buried emotions; and even then only tentatively. Either way, worry is illogical.

  Another thing to take into account is this: as the image of our personal obfuscated psyche, the body is connected not only to the ego on one side, but also to the collective obfuscated psyche – what analytical psychology calls the ‘collective unconscious’ – on the other side. Since the physical world we perceive around us is an outside image of the activity in this collective psyche, it is no surprise that environmental stressors like viruses, bacteria, exposure to the elements, nutrition, physical trauma, pollutants, drugs, etc., all influence our bodily health. The problem is that this is the only avenue of influence that materialist medicine acknowledges. Therefore, it misses half of the problem and half of the avenues of healing: the connection with our self-reflective, egoic thoughts and feelings.

  The view that all reality unfolds in consciousness points to the following twin-avenues for effective integrative medicine: first, the patient must be helped to bring all unhealthy psychic activity into the light of self-reflective awareness, so it doesn’t become somatized. The patient’s ego must acknowledge and welcome the patient’s buried, repressed material. Once this happens, the patient can be treated through the oldest, simplest and most effective healing method ever devised by humankind: heart-to-heart interaction between patient and healer. Second, healers can influence the psychic conditions in the personal obfuscated psyche – the seat of all illness – through the egoic channel. But for this to be effective, healers must help patients internalize the treatment, so it drops past the ego and into the deeper layers of the psyche. Here is where the art and skill of the healer comes into play, for this ‘dropping in’ must be accomplished through bypassing egoic barriers and defense mechanisms. A form of benign manipulation is required, which may conflict with present-day notions of ethics.

  A case in point is the so-called placebo effect. Current practice in approving new drugs and treatments is that they must be demonstrated to be more effective than the proverbial ‘sugar pills.’ A serious problem for the pharmaceutical industry is the growing effectiveness of placebos in combating illness, which makes new drugs increasingly more difficult to approve.182 The elephant in the room, obviously, is that placebos work, and more so in recent years. Clearly, through the power of suggestion and a form of benign egoic manipulation, a real effect is produced in the patient’s personal obfuscated psyche; an effect whose image is renewed bodily health. To close one’s eyes to the greatly beneficial implications of this fact is unwise. Even the ethical questions often raised –‘Can we deliberately deceive the patient?’ – are based on prejudices: there is no deception if the method works. It is hardly relevant, for instance, whether reiki or homeopathy work for the theoretical reasons claimed by their practitioners or for entirely different reasons, as long as they do work. As a matter of fact, the theoretical reasons offered by the practitioners may be integral to the treatment, insofar as they provide the patient’s ego with models and images that help lower the ego’s defenses. Without those, the treatment may never fully penetrate the patient’s egoic barriers and drop into the personal obfuscated psyche, the only place where physical healing can occur. Moreover, even mainstream science depends largely on convenient fictions such as, for instance, forcecarrying subatomic particles.183 We claim these convenient fictions to be legitimate because we can build working technology based on them: empirically, things work as if the fictions were true and that’s good enough. Why not apply the same sensible pragmatism to the healing arts? Maybe acupuncture works as if energy meridians were true and, until we know better, that’s good enough too.

  We have every logical reason – not to mention myriad empirical ones – to give ourselves rational permission to embrace and trust integrative medicine. It explores effective avenues of treatment that have been left largely untouched by mainstream
materialist medicine. Today’s healthcare systems treat us as biological robots because the materialist metaphysics defines us as such. Consequently, doctors often behave as mechanics, instead of healers. But for millennia prior to modern medicine, it was the sheer strength of the healer’s personal presence, as well as the psychic effects of his or her often-intricate techniques, that helped people to heal. Back then, we lacked the avenue of the collective obfuscated psyche in the form of effective drugs and surgery. Now, the situation has been reversed: we focus solely on drugs and surgery, ignoring the egoic channel. The time has come to explore both of these avenues concurrently. Human health and wellbeing demand no less.

  8.4. Can our thoughts directly affect reality at large?

  A recurring theme in popular culture, at least since the birth of the New Thought movement in the 19th century, has been what I call the ‘intentional mind-over-matter hypothesis’: the notion that our thoughts can deliberately and directly influence reality. According to the hypothesis, we should be able to purposefully mold reality – at least to a small extent – to our own wishes by the use of mental practices such as positive thinking, visualization, affirmations, etc. Documentary films and books like The Secret have given a renewed, modern spin to this idea, spreading it far and wide.

  As discussed in essay 2.1, my own view is that reality unfolds entirely in consciousness – the medium of all thoughts – as opposed to a strongly-objective world outside consciousness. This view is called monistic idealism. One may then legitimately wonder if monistic idealism doesn’t lend support to the intentional mind-over-matter hypothesis. After all, if both thoughts and empirical reality are in consciousness, it doesn’t seem to be at all implausible that they could influence each other. But is the possibility of an intentional mind-over-matter effect a necessary implication of monistic idealism? The answer isn’t as straight-forward as it may seem.

  Before we can address the question fairly, some brief background is required. According to monistic idealism, all reality is in a transpersonal form of consciousness that transcends your personal psyche alone. Thus, it is your body-brain system – as a part of reality – that is in consciousness, not consciousness in your body-brain system. The body is an outside image of a process of localization of experiences in transpersonal consciousness, like a whirlpool is the image of a process of localization of water in a stream. For exactly the same reason that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water, your brain doesn’t generate consciousness. Yet, because an outside image of a process correlates tightly with the inner dynamics of the process, brain activity correlates with subjective experience. Active neurons are what our localized, personal experiences look like from the outside, not their cause.

  As such, it is true that positive thinking, affirmations and visualizations can affect the reality of our personal psyches and bodies: they can change our emotions, general outlook on reality and even our physical health, as discussed in essay 8.3. After all, these thoughts, affirmations and visualizations are experiences created by, and unfolding within, the whirlpool that we identify with as personal entities. Disturbances arising within the whirlpool can, of course, directly influence the whirlpool’s inner dynamics. They can also indirectly influence the broader stream through contact with the rim of the whirlpool: with the use of our arms and legs, we can physically act upon our thoughts to change reality at large. We do this every day when we wipe the floor, move furniture around or build a house with our own hands.

  The question, of course, is whether our localized mental activity can directly influence the world without the physical mediation of our body. Can a disturbance created within the whirlpool remotely affect the flow of water on the other side of the stream, without any form of contact with the rim of the whirlpool? Framed this way, the answer doesn’t seem all that obvious anymore, does it? Indeed, monistic idealism doesn’t necessarily imply that we can ‘attract’ a promotion or the ideal lover by merely visualizing it. It doesn’t necessarily imply that thoughts or imagination within the whirlpool can remotely affect anything outside of the whirlpool. The consensus world clearly unfolds according to stable patterns and regularities that we’ve come to call the ‘laws of nature.’ Monistic idealism doesn’t deny this; it simply brings these patterns and regularities into the scope of consciousness: they become certain ‘laws of consciousness,’ so to speak.

  Yet, monistic idealism also doesn’t refute intentional mind-over-matter effects. It is true that disturbances arising within a whirlpool can influence the stream outside by going through the rim of the whirlpool – that is, through body-mediated, physical intervention in the world. But there may also be ways for disturbances to propagate under water. Indeed, what we call the physical world is the ripples propagating on the surface of mind-at-large. They are all we can ordinarily perceive. The glare of the surface obfuscates the currents and disturbances that may be flowing underneath, so we can’t discern them in a self-reflective manner. It is thus conceivable that thoughts and imagination originating in our personal psyche, if they somehow sink into the deepest, most obfuscated, collective levels of consciousness, could indeed affect consensus reality directly.

  According to monistic idealism, the physical world is an outside image of collective mental processes. See essay 2.6 for details. But the image of a process doesn’t necessarily reflect all there is to know about the process. Flames don’t tell all there is to know about combustion. Lightning doesn’t tell all there is to know about atmospheric electric discharge. Our physical appearance doesn’t tell all there is to know about our state of health. Therefore, what we ordinarily perceive as physical cause and effect reflects merely the visible regularities of the unfolding of those collective mental processes. There may be a lot more going on beyond our view. Moreover, our understanding of even these visible regularities is very incomplete, as argued in essay 4.2. We do not know that the physical world is causally closed, or self-contained. As such, the empirical reality we ordinarily perceive may be just the surface of an ocean of untold depth. Unfathomable complexity may lie immersed, obfuscated from view by the glare of the surface.

  In one of his many wonderful talks, Alan Watts related a very evocative analogy for what we call physical causality: he asked his audience to imagine themselves sitting in front of a wooden fence, with just a thin slit allowing them to see what lies on the other side of the fence. If a dog were to walk along the other side, one would first see the dog’s head through the slit and, a little while later, the dog’s tail. Every time the dog would walk along the fence, one would first see the head and then the tail. Watts then argued that we would, very naturally, conclude that the dog’s head causes the dog’s tail. The logic behind this conclusion seems indeed impeccable.

  You see, if all we have is a partial view of what is actually going on – a small slit in the fence – our understanding of the chains of cause-and-effect in nature may be very limited and inaccurate. The dog’s head obviously doesn’t cause the tail, even though every empirical observation through the slit would consistently reinforce this erroneous conclusion. The head and the tail are just regularities of a broader pattern unfolding beyond ordinary perception; namely, a walking dog. If consensus reality is merely a partial image of obfuscated, collective mental processes, our position as its observers may be entirely analogous to that of the person sitting in front of the wooden fence. The true, complete causal processes behind our observations – that is, the actual dog walking by – may lie in obfuscated depths below the surface. It is thus conceivable that, by somehow allowing our self-created thoughts and imagination to sink into the lower depths of the psyche, we could plug them into the actual causal chains of nature, whose effects could spread far beyond us. By allowing them to sink in we could conceivably release them into wideranging underwater currents.

  In conclusion, monistic idealism does not necessarily imply that one can directly influence consensus reality through positive thinking, affirmations or visualizations. In fact, it implie
s precisely that, for as long as our self-created thoughts and imagination remain in our personal psyche, they cannot influence reality at large. At best, they could influence our mental and emotional outlook, as well as physical health. But monistic idealism does leave a door open for intentional mind-over-matter effects when our self-created thoughts and imagination are allowed to sink into the lower, collective levels of the psyche. How this form of release can be intentionally accomplished is unclear. After all, for as long as our personal intentions remain personal, they are still circumscribed by our personal psyches and cannot affect the world. But it is conceivable that techniques or skills for achieving the effect may have been developed through the course of history. It is also conceivable that the effects could grow if the techniques or skills were to be applied by a large number of people working in synch, as some studies on meditation suggest.184

  8.5. It starts and ends with us: what can we do individually?

  In early 2013, I was discussing with a reader what could be done to prevent the growth of meaninglessness and isolation in the heart of our culture from crossing the point of no return. Although my conversation with her included more practical issues, such as the alarming environmental deterioration and dangerous geopolitical trends we all bear witness to, here I want to focus more on the psychological and ‘spiritual’ – a word I use with caution, since its meaning is so loose – health and wellbeing of humanity. On this specific point, my young reader felt strongly that vocal and decisive initiatives should be taken by those with insight into the situation; that something should be done in the form of practical actions. It wasn’t lost on me what she was trying to suggest she expected of me.