I’ve been describing an edifice of thoughts for the last 25 years. But these thoughts evolved slowly literally over a lifetime, starting when I was very young. Although I’ve expressed most of it somewhere, still I feel my thoughts are scattered about and would be hard for someone to find and put together. For that reason I’ve decided to write this exhaustive summary of the most cogent parts, how these ideas formed, what they solve, and how they fit together to form a whole.
While I originally began my journey in this life as a Baba follower, when I came to philosophy in middle age I was careful to separate my thoughts on philosophical subjects from my thoughts derived from what Baba said. For example, my first book The Evolution of Perception (2004) didn’t even mention God, let alone Meher Baba. However, there never was a time that these two things could be fully separated. My philosophy and my knowledge of what Meher Baba taught were always intertwined.
So the first point I want to make here is how exactly they are related. My knowledge of Meher Baba’s teaching definitely inspired my concept of an evolution of perception forming the world. I never would have stumbled upon such a concept had I not first been deeply ensconced in Baba’s concepts — especially his cosmology as described in his main book God Speaks. I actually began reading God Speaks as a teenager, so at 40 its ideas were never far from my mind.
However, it would be untrue to say the evolution of perception simply is Baba’s teaching. God Speaks tells the big picture of Creation and its purpose. It is written from a God’s eye point of view. But it does not delve into arguments, nor deal with the kinds of issues important to philosophers such as the origin of time, space, and the natural laws. The evolution of perception, in contrast, deals with these things straight on. So one could see the evolution of perception concept as a kind of overlay. It adds a layer of skin to an otherwise complete overview.
But just because these aspects of time, space, and the natural laws are an overlay upon what Baba taught, it does not mean they are unimportant. Their importance lies in their making God Speaks cogent to an intellectual. It addresses the immediate concerns that a philosopher or discerning mind would likely have in addressing it for the first time. For instance, Baba says there is no time. Then how is it that we experience things temporally? Baba says the world is an illusion. Then how is it that we encounter it palpably?
I once asked a professor of mine to glance over God Speaks, explaining to him that the ideas I wanted to write about had their source in it. After glancing over it, he pointed out it was not philosophy, but rather a simply a series of declarative statements. He was absolutely right. And that is where the place and value of my writing lies. It gives the arguments missing from Baba’s work. It argues for what he said.
Speaking of a book he had not published at the time, but which I am convinced was the manuscript for what we now call the Intelligence Notebooks, Baba once said:
I have explained it all in detail in my book. Even scientists will be astonished to learn the secrets I have explained there. For these will not be vague talks but facts that are substantiated and supported by scientific arguments. (Lord Meher, 1986 print edition, p. 1607)
Baba’s allusion to "scientific arguments" that would "substantiate and support" his work, I have come to believe, refer to arguments by the philosophers that he said would follow after him. And I believe those arguments he referred to began in my own writing in around 2001.
In short, my written works where I describe the evolution of perception can be read apart from Baba’s writing on their own merits. And Baba’s writing can be read on its own. But for those who are intellectually inclined and prefer to use scientific reasoning, and are not comfortable with declarative statements that seem counterintuitive, the two are best read together. For the evolution of perception will give a way to grasp what Baba is saying — and assuage the natural objections a scientific person is liable to have to Baba’s words. On the other hand Baba’s writing paints the entire panorama and provides the context.
Awareness
The word “consciousness” as it is used today only entered the English language in the late 1600s. It referred to “the state of being aware” of anything. By “anything” was meant that the object of awareness could be something external or something in one’s mind.
Unfortunately, beginning in the 1960s the word “consciousness” began to take on all kinds of pseudo-scientific and mystical allusions in the sub-culture. For example “Consciousness-raising” is attested from 1968. Raising one’s consciousness became a trope of the drug culture. For this reason I have avoided the term, and chosen to instead use its synonym “awareness.”
Now in all my works, I’ve clarified that what I mean by awareness is the act of being aware, understood in isolation from any assumed subject or object. Let me explain.
I recently asked a person if he knew what awareness was. He said yes, and I asked him to say what it is. He said, “Well — for instance I am aware of that bowl over there.” Notice that I asked for one thing (the meaning of awareness) and in reply I was given three, i.e. a subject, an action, and the object of the action. X is aware of Y.
Below are two iconic images of children observing nature. In each case a child is aware of something it observes through a magnifying glass. Whether one child is doing the looking or a group, as in the second picture, the children are the subjects.
The bug or whatever it is the children happen to be gazing at is the object. And the action they are doing is the looking — the taking conscious experience of or the being aware of.
Now it might sound odd, but what I am trying to isolate by my use of the word “awareness” is what appears to take place between subject and object, i.e. solely the act of being aware.
This is hard for some people to get their mind around or grok because awareness is not a thing you can see.
We can’t even meaningfully point to it with an arrow. There seems to be nothing there. This has been a problem for philosophers for thousands of years and more recently has even led some philosophers trying to deny it exists. Radical behaviorists like B.F. Skinner, linguistic philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein, and so-called machine functionalists like Daniel Dennett are good examples.
Such denials fail, of course, mostly on the basis of a casual sniff test. A sniff test is a modern idiom for an informal reality check of an idea or proposal, using one's common sense. Obviously we are aware. There is no rational argument that those who claim we aren’t actually use to back up that claim. Rather, such a denial that people are aware is simply a way to dodge the inconvenient fact that no philosopher or scientist has ever been able to explain awareness. Science does not know what awareness is or how it arises in us. There isn’t even a proposed theory. Therefore, denying its existence has seemed like a pretty neat trick for a almost a hundred years. However, to tell students with a straight face that they are not aware is simply a pernicious form of gaslighting to avoid a problem.
So when I speak of awareness I am speaking solely of the act, irrespective of and independent from any assumed subject or object. And my argument that awareness takes place is that it cannot be coherently denied, without contradiction. For the very denial of awareness is a confession of being aware.
Perception
In all my writing I focus on perception. After my first book, which included the term in its title, and when some people seemed confused I started to take the time to clarify exactly what I mean by the word. Today the word “perceive” is often defined narrowly, to refer only to perceiving with the five senses. But this narrowing of the meaning is modern. The original classical sense in English was always pretty much what we mean by awareness. And this is how I use the word.
In its classical original sense, from its Latin root, perception refers to becoming aware of something, anything. Just like with awareness, what we perceive can be a mental experience like a thought or it can be a physical object in the room with us like a chair or a lamp. We perceive both.
perceive | pəˈsiːv |
verb [with object]
1 become aware or conscious of (something)
It also follows that everything I said above about awareness being a concept we can consider removed from its supposed subject or object also applies to perception. When I speak of perception I am referring to the act of perceiving, irrespective of who is apparently doing the perceiving or what he is perceiving. So, for instance, if a boy is examining a caterpillar through a magnifying glass, my focus is primarily on the act of perceiving and only secondarily on the boy or the caterpillar. As you will see as we go on, the boy and the caterpillar become incidental compared to the perceiving. For in the concept I work to convey the boy and the caterpillar emerge out of an evolution of perception, rather than perception being some power emerging from the boy.
We are getting ahead of ourselves. But in those last words is the whole idea of the evolution of perception. The world we observe around us is an outcome of an evolution of perception.
Internal and External Experience
What do we really mean when we speak of someone’s internal and external experience?
Colloquially I get it. It is just a metaphor. If someone has an experience that they say left them with a “warm and fuzzy feeling,” we normally say that this “warm and fuzzy feeling” is something that occurs solely in them. We don’t see the “warm and fuzzy” oozing out of their skin. We rely solely on their testimony that they are having it.
But if the same person says they perceive the sound of a fire alarm in the distance, we call that experience external.
However, this talk, while useful in everyday conversation as it communicates well enough what we mean, leads to some serious dilemmas when applied to philosophy. Let me explain what they are.
Analyzing what we mean by this distinction between internal and external experience isn’t as easy as it seems. For if we mean by “in,” inside a brain, brains are technically external — in so much as the inside and outside of a brain are part of the physical world — as anyone can observe with the help of a scalpel, and hence the interior of your brain belongs to the external world.
We might consider equating the word "outer" with the word “objective,” and the word "internal" with “subjective.”
Objective: Something is deemed objectively true if it can be confirmed by more than one witness.
Subjective: Something is subjective if it is privately experienced by a single person.
In the The Matrix many share the experience of the simulacrum with Neo
However, this fails too because all experience is had subjectively, even if it is shared. Shared subjective experiences are called intersubjective experiences. "Intersubjective" means shared by more than one conscious mind. Two people can reflect and come to the conclusion that 2 + 3 = 5. We normally say this is objective. But are such thoughts about number external objects?
Baba used the words "inner" and "outer." But he means it in the first sense, as hidden in your mind. But this is colloquial and not technical or literal. We get his meaning.
But when we go to analyze why the analogy of "inside" and "outside" is used by philosophers, it gets hazy. I have long suggested that this analogy be abandoned in philosophers, for it is largely responsible for the so-called "mind-body problem." See Wikipedia if you are not familiar with this philosophical conundrum.
To see why the analogy of ‘in’ and ‘out’ leads to confusion, consider the 1999 movie The Matrix. Normally we think of Neo’s experience of the Matrix as internal, while the real world is an external world. However, if you follow me you’ll see the issues that arise from this thinking. Neo’s experience of the computer-generated "Matrix" is internal in so much as it occurs solely in his physical nervous system. However, his experience of the post-apocalyptic "real world" that Morpheus gives him a glimpse of during his briefing before taking the red pill is equally internal. For it also occurs solely in his physical nervous system. Where else could experience occur? Therefore, both are ontologically identical.
Both are subjective experiences. In fact, there is no such thing as an objective experience because experience is, by its nature, had personally. Objective experience is in fact an oxymoron. There is at best intersubjective experience, where more than one sentient being shares the same experience. But in The Matrix, both the so-called "real world" and the manufactured "computer-generated" one are experienced intersubjectively by numerous people simultaneously.
So subjective and objective are also useless when it comes to analyzing the difference between the inner and the outer.
Therefore, in my later writing I avoid the internal-external dichotomy altogether and emphasis instead the actual experienced difference between experiences we have that are fully private and cannot possibly be shared, like pain and dreams, and experiences that are routinely shared. But I make no ontological distinction between them. For both are experienced, and experience is by its nature had by an individual.
This leaves to be explained only why some experiences are solely private and why others are experienced intersubjectively by more than one person. Rather than trying to explain this in terms of unobserved theoretical substances we point to where and how these three modes of publicity arise out of the process.
As I said the ‘inner’ ‘outer’ dichotomy is the culprit behind what philosophers call the mind-body problem and what I call in my book Evolution of Perception Re-Explained the two-world problem. The two-world problem is essentially the mind-body problem explained in an updated way. When we divide the phenomenal world into ‘internal’ and ‘external’ halves we wind up effectively with two worlds — one being the inner world of experience and the second an external one that is purely theoretical. The second is purely theoretical for if it were observed it would have to be included with the first experiential world.
Prior to making this change from the ‘in-out’ metaphor to the actual observable distinction between private and public, philosophers relied on invented metaphysical substances — invariably creating their own intractable problem. How does one resolve the causal connection between a world you experience and one you made up?
Speaking about the mysteriousness produced by such unobserved theoretical substance we feel forced to presume exists beyond our faculties John Locke (1632 – 1704) wrote:
The idea of corporeal substance in matter is as remote from our conceptions and apprehensions, as that of spiritual substance, or spirit. (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke, 1689).
And the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), referring to the theoretical outer world we can’t see, wrote:
It still remains a scandal to philosophy . . . that the existence of things outside of us . . . must be accepted merely on faith, and that, if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence, we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof (Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant, 1787).
And finally, the contemporary philosopher Christopher Hill, who currently teaches philosophy at Brown University and who received his Ph.D. at Harvard, concedes in his University lectures that matter is a “theoretical entity.” (Chris Hill, Lecture notes from the University of Arkansas, 2000)
The Theory of Psychic Emergence
When we say that a system is an emergent one, what do we mean? We mean that everything — and here I literally mean everything including the subject and object — emerge from an original primordial something. Just as a tree ‘emerges’ from a seed where all that it is was latent, the Universe emerged from some simplest reality.
In the case of the tree analogy, the tree emerges from a physical thing — a seed. However, for reasons I explain in Evolution of Perception Re-Explained, this emergence is a psychic emergence. Psychic means relating to the soul or mind. A simple psychic original state preexisted and then began to evolve. The appearance of the Universe was one result.
The question is, what was the nature of that original psychic state?
In 2004 in The Evolution of Perception I began my explanation of the evolution like this:
IN THE BEGINNING, before time and space, before language and thought, before logic and number, and before distinction of any kind, there was perception. (The Evolution of Perception, p. 38)
In 2021 in Evolution of Perception Re-Explained I began it just a little differently like this:
IN THE BEGINNING, before time and space, before thought, before logic and language, before number or shape or direction or opposites, and before distinction of any kind, there was unlimited intelligence. (Evolution of Perception Re-Explained, p. 1330)
A person might ask a couple questions regarding these beginnings? How can I be so presumptuous as to pretend I know what was in the beginning? And secondly, why does it say in the first that there was originally ‘perception’ while in the second ‘intelligence?’ While I cover these questions in Evolution of Perception Re-Explained I’ll try to summarize the answers here before going forward in explaining the system.
The first question is, how do I presume to know what was in the beginning?
One might first guess that I lifted it from Baba’s books since I have frequently said that his writing formed my inspiration. But this would not be true. Nowhere does Baba write about perception existing in the beginning. I arrived at the thought rationally.
I first arrived at this idea of perception preexisting the Universe and being eternal and fundamental in about 2001, purely through thinking about it. Beginning by simply assessing possibilities is called ‘abduction.’ In this form of logic one hypothesizes what seems the most likely explanation for something and then checks it with careful reasoning to see if it holds up to scrutiny in hindsight.
But in 2020 when I was preparing my notes for Evolution of Perception Re-Explained I realized there was in fact a powerful way to determine the order of stages in a process. While my hypotheses of what came before what might have begun simply as a guesses, albeit initially ad hoc based on what seemed reasonable, in 2020 I realized there was a way to test the rationality of that order using the most rigorous form of reasoning known, i.e. deductive reasoning.
Consider this proposition.
A thing cannot exist before the conditions necessary for its existence exist.
How do we know this? We know it by deduction. That a “necessary precondition” is necessary we know a priori because it is true by virtue of the words themselves. We can apply this principle to knowing the order of the emergence of properties as they had to have occurred.
Consider the example of motion. Motion can be described as a ratio of time and space, or more specifically as a ratio between a unit of time and a unit of distance. For example, if we are traveling 55 miles per hour in a car, this is the same as saying we traverse 55 miles every hour. An hour is a unit of time. 55 miles is a unit of space. It follows, then, that time and space are necessarily preconditions of motion. Therefore, time and space arose before motion, necessarily.
So, we’ve answered the first question of how I came to determine the order of emergence of perceived qualities. Now for the second question regarding the change from my first to second book regarding what that primordial state was. This change was definitely influenced by the writing of Meher Baba.
In 2004 I wrote that in the beginning was perception. At the time I conceived of this like a humming activity with no one doing the action and nothing to perform the action on, hence before there was any subject or object. The gradual evolution of perception would much later bring about the appearance of subject and object. The subject would thus inevitably ‘find himself in the evolved experience.’ He would effectively emerge out of it. This was a very original and interesting idea, and many were immediately attracted to it. Part of its appeal was that it did not include God — which many today find to be a difficult concept. I actually empathize with this feeling. Our concept of God has for far too long been grotesque. We’ll talk more about that below. But I have since moved beyond it to accept God in a revolutionary new way.
What is left is to answer the second question. Why does it say in my first book that there was originally ‘perception’ while in my second ‘intelligence?’ To answer that I begin a new chapter, Discovering Meher Baba’s Intelligence Notebooks.
Discovering Meher Baba’s Intelligence Notebooks
Prior to writing The Evolution of Perception in 2004 I had only read the books by Meher Baba that were in print, most importantly God Speaks. But just one year after I published it a book titled Infinite Intelligence (2005) was published. It was based on a manuscript by Meher Baba discovered in India after his death in 1969.
It was another couple years before I was able to get hold of a set of scans of the original manuscript that Infinite Intelligence was based on. Downloading the scans I did my own edit of them, staying as close as possible to the original, which I titled simply Intelligence Notebooks (2012). Anyone can download my version for free online.
As I slowly edited the material over several months I was impressed to discover it had allusions to many of the same notions I had written the year before, including my analogy of lenses. I had simply inferred my ideas from God Speaks, but here many of them were explicitly stated. But what was new to me was the idea of Intelligence being the primordial original state.
In Baba’s teaching, consciousness (awareness) does not exist in the beginning before Creation. Rather the acquiring of consciousness is the teleological motivator of the evolution itself. But what Baba said did exist was Intelligence. It occurred to me that this intelligence was a latency. In God Speaks Baba gives the analogy of a human fetus that is latently intelligent. The analogy of the relation between a seed and a tree could also fit. The whole tree is latent in the seed.
Due to the research and thinking I did for The Evolution of Perception a few years earlier, many concepts that would have been difficult for someone else I found readily understandable. For instance, I grasped right away that this was not initially the intelligence of someone. It was a latency that existed before subject and object.
The question remained, where did perception fit in?
One need only use the a priori logic I described above. A thing can exist only after the necessary conditions for its existence exist. For the act of perception to be complete a perceiver must be aware of its object. Awareness is thus a necessary condition of perception. But to be aware (to be conscious) requires intelligence. Intelligence is a necessary precondition for increasing awareness and increasing awareness is a necessary precondition of perception. Hence before perception was intelligence. And I made this adjustment, a minor one, in my second book 15 years after I wrote my first one.
The Concept of the Perceptual Schema
One of the most important ideas I introduce in my writing is the perceptual schema. I have always felt satisfied that I have explained what I mean by it adequately. A person would have to be trying to not understand it to fail to. They are a ways of organizing our experience and we see them acting upon our awareness all the time.
For instance, I look upon a dollar as being equivalent to a hundred cents. However, there is no observable connection. The only connection is one that I read into my experience of pennies and dollars. I do this through a schema. To an alien who did not share this schema he could find no connection between pennies and dollars.
In my writing I give many examples. Language is possible for us only due to schemas. Meaning is read into words. It is not found in them.
To discuss this psychological phenomenon I have long used the analogy of lenses we see through. The lens organizes our experience and produces much of what we find ourselves perceiving. While the lens is only a metaphor, it is a very useful one. It allows us to conceive how the evolution of perception forms our experience in a schematic way that anyone can see at a glance.
In Baba’s teaching the perceptual schemas is called a sanskara. This is a Sanskrit word that means ‘impression.’ Sanskaras are psychological imprints that color one's thoughts and actions.
Practically the entirety of the evolution of perception can be seen in charts. Schemas form the content of our experience.
I would like to add a few comments about the inspiration for this analogy.
To begin I began my career as an animation camera assistant. My job responsibilities included attaching lenses to cameras, doing tests, ordering and changing film, and projecting the dailies (prints that come from the laboratory each day) at night.
So the metaphor of lenses came naturally to me.
I should add that Meher Baba oversaw the opening of a movie theatre through one of his disciples in 1931. However, this was after he completed his Intelligence Notebooks (1926). In the Intelligence Notebooks, Baba also makes frequent use of film analogies, including motion picture frames, lenses, and film projection.
There is one other comparison between the evolution of perception concept and Baba’s Intelligence Notebooks. On page 1 of the notebooks a chart conveys the idea that all souls effectively emanate from the Infinite Intelligence — and effectively are all the Infinite Intelligence perceiving through different minds or filters — one real “I” perceiving through innumerable infinite false “I”s.
A single Self within all individual selves
I find it interesting that if you take the above chart from Baba’s Intelligence Notebooks and you turn it to its side, it begins to look very much like my own charts, even thought I did mine a couple years before I had heard about Baba’s notebooks. This is because I found the notion of One real self behind every individual self in his other books.
A Revolution in Man’s Thinking
Every great change must be carefully timed. How else could it be with the greatest revolution in the mind of man? (Lord Meher, 1986 print edition, p. 2060)
I tend to be a serious boring speaker and writer. This is partly due to my avoidance of hyperbole. It might also be just my lack of skill as a writer.
Anyway, let me explain why these things I’ve been describing are revolutionary here in my boring style. I’ll leave it to some future enthusiast who likes sees the merit in these ideas to figure out how to catch people’s attention with them. The fact that what Baba teaches is revolutionary is a point that I have often been concerned I have failed to adequately convey. Hence I want to explain here why certain points are revolutionary in any way I can.
There are several ways that Baba’s teaching is truly radical. This becomes even more clear when it is overlaid by the evolution of perception concept in order to make certain aspects clearer. In fact words like unprecedented, game changing, tour de force and C-change fit here. I want to go over what some of these are. This is especially true when it comes to his cosmology and ontology. Some of the game-changing differences include:
- In describing Creation instead of traditional a third-person narrative it is described in first-person narrative mode.
- A change from the pagan question of ‘who’ or ‘what’ cause the world to the modern question of ‘how did it emerge.’ Hence a change from residual pagan thinking to modern scientific reasoning.
- A change from conceiving of Creation as mysteriously made to psychologically emergent by understandable sanskaras.
- A change from a conception of a deity who ‘made’ the world to a conception of God whose own emergence caused for Himself the ‘mere appearance’ of a world.
- A change from superstition to scientific thinking.
- A change from a sociopath Ruler Sky-God to a God whose very meaning is morality itself when fully manifest.
Let’s start with the first. Well call Baba’s teaching framed by the evolution of perception concept “the new view.” The new view amounts to a radical turning inside out of the point of view from which Creation narrative is told.
Throughout history, the question of how the universe came into being has been a paramount one. But what we’ll see is that how men traditionally framed this question had a big impact on the kind of answer he came to, along with any limitations of those answers.
To see this we need to go back. From neolithic archeological sites we find evidence of what we can here call here pagan thinking. This is the thinking that there exist spirits we can’t see (both in the form of animals and human) that are responsible for things. So if you want to know the cause of rain, you would phrase your question in terms of who caused it — meaning in this case which spirit or entity or god. You would likely have a name for this imagined being. I needn’t elaborate. You get the picture.
We can call these ‘who done it’ questions. Naturally such questions solicited ‘who done it’ answers. The problem was that very little thought was given to how such and such deity performed this stunt of creating. It was enough to say who. Traditionally that settled the issue of cause.
For a large majority of the world today, we continue to live in a pagan world. The religions tend to differ only on ‘who,’ and none delve into ‘how.’
Notice too that when we imagine our preferred deity creating the Universe in the beginning of time, we are inadvertently picturing this act from the privileged vantage point of a witness standing apart from the event. In such a view, we are effectively a third party. And in the parlance of books we would say such stories are told in 3rd person, i.e. from the point of view of a third party.
But if you think about this, where would “we” (the witness) be? And how could we be there if we had not yet been from? In other words, how could we stand apart from our own creation? There’s something mixed up about this.
In Baba’s book God Speaks he turns this around, or you could say he turns our conception of Creation inside out. He describes it from a 1st person point of view, as if the author is God telling the story of how He emerged from a seed of Himself. Hence the title of his book, “God Speaks.”
In 1932 Baba literally admitted this was the starting point in his narrative. It’s not just something I’m making up here.
Baba narrated details of the experience he had when he was five years old and saw before him circles within circles of shining light and various brilliant colours. He was dazed and fainted at the time. He concluded:
“I have the actual experience of it all today, and feel the universe and creation emanating and projecting out of me. I feel all today that which I had a mere sight of then.” (Lord Meher, 1986 print edition, p. 1607)
Why is this revolutionary? Once we read God Speaks and the Intelligence Notebooks we see that what Baba is saying also is that we are all that One that makes this 1st person journey. I know of no better way to express this concept of the One in the many than my own set of charts I have so often returned to.
This is an entirely different way of envisioning both God and Creation, as if we are ourselves involved and responsible participants. The moral implications of this are radical.
Next, Baba answers not simply a ‘who done it’ question with a ‘who done it’ answer, as was always the tradition in religion. But he actually delves deeply into ‘how’ the Universe formed. To understand that explanation you must first grasp what I’ve already emphasized, that the world is only apparent. It is psychogenic. Psychogenic means it has a psychological cause, not a physical one. The physical is an appearance that manifests from the evolution of the psychological. And the smallest unit of that psychic change is the sanskara or perceptual schema — the evolving lenses.
The appearance of the Universe, along with our apparent presence in it, formed out of a series of gathering sanskaras, likened to lenses. An evolution of perception. How we see produced what we see.
This is a complete inversion of how men have tried to understand creation in the past. It is truly revolutionary, and its implications, too numerous to go into, are revolutionary.
The next revolutionary difference in Baba’s teaching is a change from a conception of a deity who ‘made’ the world to a conception of God whose own emergence caused for Himself the ‘mere appearance’ of a world.
In other words in Baba’s teaching, the phenomenal Universe is not the only thing that emerged. But this emergence of appearances in a sense caused God to emerge. For Baba God always existed, but God was originally in a latent unexpressed state. For the emergence of the apparent Universe had the reciprocal effect of causing the witness (God) to become conscious, and thus be fully expressed.
Hence, in conformity with this theme, Baba dedicated God Speaks:
To the Universe—
the Illusion that sustains Reality
This not only explains the purpose of Creation, it explains God’s existence.
The next thing that is radical in Baba’s teaching is the change from a sociopath Ruler Sky-God to a God whose very meaning is morality itself when fully manifest. That full manifestation, Baba teaches, is expressed as the Avatar, the highest expression of God in human form.
This new influx of the creative impulse manifests, through the medium of a divine personality, an incarnation of God in a special sense-the Avatar. . . Being the total manifestation of God in human form, He is like a gauge against which man can measure what he is and what he may become. He trues the standard of human values by interpreting them in terms of divinely human life. (Discourses, 7th edition, 1987. pp. 268-9)
For Baba there is no sky-daddy God. Nor does he teach the New Age idea of “ascended masters.” These are pagan ideas.
But why this is not just revolutionary, but increasingly important, is seen today in the rise of some of the most horrible acts of genocide in the name of God. Nowhere has this been more exposed that in the Middle East at the moment. And this has been going on for 3000 years.
Such atrocities have been and continue to be carried out and financially supported literally in the name of a sky-Deity God. God is dead. We need a new God.
The next thing I want to discuss is the revolutionary transition from superstition to scientific thinking that Baba’s teaching invokes.
Some will think it strange to speak of a tale of psychic emergence being ‘scientific.’ It is. But this will take a bit of explaining — for we are used to a very limited understanding of science today, which is actually a misconception of what it is.
Usually we think of materialism is science. Some would even say that only materialistic ideas are scientific by definition. For instance if you look up definitions of science today, many will literally speak of “physical explanations” as the only explanations that are scientific.
But there is a contradiction here. Science purports to be “empirical.” Empirical means observable. The scientific method begins with an observation, asks a question question about it, usually a causal one, hypothesizes an answer, and then tests that hypothesis empirically. And the test should be repeatable.
But remember, material substance is only a theoretical entity. So there is nothing scientific about a “physical explanation.”
We only have access to our experience. No person can step outside of it. Even the contents of his imagination are within his experience. But science has no idea how experience emerges or what it is. As I have pointed out, some in philosophy, trying to address this problem, have resorted to denying that we are conscious altogether, as they have no “physical explanation” for it.
It was known in the time of Isaac Newton that imaginative flourishes to explain things was not science. After inducing the uniform equation for gravity and faced with offering an explanation for why it existed or how it worked Newton famously wrote, “
I feign no hypotheses
(Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica)
To “feign” something means make a pretense of it. He meant that to create some metaphysical hypothesis purely out of one’s imagination was beneath science. It was only within the empirical methods of science to say what could be observed. Being an empirical discipline it was not in the purview of science to speculate
on such metaphysical causes.
But around the year 1900, this began to change. Theoretical science ceased being scientific. It ceased to be rigorous and empirical. There is actually a book about this fact by the highly acclaimed science journalist John Horgan. It is titled The End of Science (1996).
Horgan writes that the 1800s were filled not just with great inventions, but great developments in theoretical science regarding the quantifiable laws of nature. Something that is quantifiable can be expressed mathematically. But in around 1900 something happened. What began to come from scientists Horgan calls “ironic science.” Here is where conjectures about unobservable phenomena like bent spacetime, wormholes, superstrings, strange energy, and backward time began to be trendy. There are numerous books about this problem.
I wish to tell a strange story of how I think this began.
In 1896 a German translation of H.G. Wells’ then new science fiction adventure The Time Machine came out under the German title Die Zeitmaschine. Albert Einstein was 17 and in High School.
In The Time Machine Wells describes a scientist, simply named “The Time Traveler,” explaining his invention to an assembled group of other scientists.
It should be known that in the late 1800s when Wells was writing "The Time Machine," hot air balloons were in common use and considered cutting edge technology. The Time Traveler uses the analogy from hot air balloons to explain how his invention works. Since time is actually "a kind of space," according to the Time Traveler, it should be possible to make a machine that can travel to and fro through time just as a hot air balloon travels to and fro through space. This thinking is childish, but this is what it says.
“Scientific people,” proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required for the proper assimilation of this, “know very well that Time is only a kind of Space.
(The Time Machine)
Actually, no one ever thought this. The notion was meant to be a MacGuffin. A MacGuffin is something in a movie or a book that serves merely as a trigger for the plot.
Such details of the mechanics of story telling likely being lost on a young Einstein, he appears to have taken the thinking in the book to heart.
But Wells goes further in The Time Machine and calls his newly invented space-time (time as a kind of space) "the fourth dimension." I need to say something important about this.
Since ancient times a "dimension" (from the Latin dimensionem) referred to a measurement. For instance in geometry a solid is defined by three dimensions (measurements) — length, width, and height. But shortly after The Time Machine, it began to be used to mean different things. The following is from the Online Etymology Dictionary.
- Sense of "bulk, size, extent, or capacity" is attested from 1520s
- Meaning “any component of a situation" is attested from 1929
- As a kind of realm or universe is attested to from 1912.
(Online Etymology Dictionary)
Today the word “dimension” is used for a kind of metaphysical unobserved place -- not a measurement as it once was in science and mathematics. It was not something you observe and measure but something you ponder like in a religion.
By the year I was born, 65 years after The Time Machine, the idea had completely taken over the culture. The following is from the opening narration of "The Twilight Zone.”
There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone.
(Rod Serling, 1959)
In other words what began as science, in the absence of any way to explain our experience, had devolved into essentially superstition. Cambridge Dictionary defines superstition as “a belief that is not based on reason or scientific thinking and that explains the causes for events in ways that are connected to magic.”
An my Apple Computer Thesaurus simply says, “unfounded belief.”
What then happened? Certainly this can’t simply be the result of a science fiction book for boys in the 1800s. What happened is called ‘postmodernism.’ In post modernism, there is no real epistemology (method for gauging what is true and what is false). It is entirely permissible to base one’s beliefs on imagination. Einstein didn’t just admit to doing this, he proudly proclaimed it.
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. (Albert Einstein, The World as I See It, 1934)
Obviously I am not saying that there are no real scientists today. And Einstein did isolate observable and testable quantifiable laws of nature such as the law of the photoelectric effect for which he received a Nobel Prize in 1921. But I am talking about theoretical science. As John Horgan points out in The End of Science, theoretical science as effectively devolved into fanciful and publishable flights of fancy.
So how is Baba’s cosmology actually scientific thinking and not superstition?
First of all the change from a pagan style of question about cause such as “who” or “what” is the cause, to “how” did things evolve conforms to very modern thinking. When we ask “who” or “what” caused something to happen, but fail to say how that person or thing caused that effect, we’ve effectively said nothing.
For example, to ask who made the world and hear that God did tells us almost nothing. The same is true in materialism. To say that something occurred in the unobservable “outer world” to cause our subjective experience, but not say what, is also to say nothing.
Baba actually explains how the phenomenal world came about in terms of psychic emergence due to sanskaras. He leaves nothing out.
And how do we observe this? I made the answer to this question clear from my very first book. Once you understand what a perceptual schema is and what it does, you can literally observe them acting upon your own mental operations. No, they aren’t physical things you observe with your hands, eyes, and ears. But they are perceived in their effect. That you have a schema to perceive things spatially is proven by the fact that you do, which you need only look around to confirm. That you schematize a dollar as a hundred cents is proven by the fact that you can make change. That the laws of nature are operating in your experience is proven by the fact that nothing takes place in the physical world that does not conform to them.
And the logic that these had to have evolved, and that they had to have evolved in the order that I have laid out roughly, is deductive and can be checked by introspection. So it is logical.
What may be shocking is that this works. Is it true? That, as I said in the Conclusion of The Evolution of Perception, will always be a decision the reader has to make on his own.
Speaking about "Infinite Intelligence" in 1932, Baba said, "Even scientists will be astonished to learn the secrets I have explained there. For these will not be vague talks but facts that are substantiated and supported by scientific arguments."
I take “a scientific argument” to mean a logical one.
The Genesis of an Idea
Why did I think of this while others didn’t. That is not very hard to figure out. First, unlike other children my father began to explain Baba’s teaching to me when I was four years old.
I began to read God Speaks when I was 15 and I discussed it with my parents. I was fortunate that my mother had her degree in philosophy from Radcliffe and my father his in art from the Rhode Island School of Design. They were educated people. Not all kids have that privilege.
But there were other factors I have often pointed out that made this idea especially easy for me. Both my parents were artists and the focus of our whole family was on perceptual aesthetic. And just to make things more dramatic, my father was losing his eyesight throughout my childhood. My father became fully bind when I was about 50. But his gradual loss, made all the more existentially threatening by the fact that our entire family relied on his income as a painter, kept perception very close to our minds.
It made me especially empathetic, checking to see if he could clear doorways from the age of four. When I was 16 I made a pair of glasses to show people how he viewed the world. So the notion of “how” we see and its effect on “what” we see was always intuitive for me.
Then one can add my first career being in filmmaking.
And finally studying philosophy in middle age with an emphasis on metaphysics. All these things added up to making The Evolution of Perception nearly a foregone conclusion.
It’s not because I’m smart. I have average intelligence. But because I was there in the right place at the right time. Isn’t that how things always are?
For more of my writing and for videos discussing these points visit my philosophy hub at https://sites.google.com/view/chris-ott-hub.
So, what do I think of Baba today?
I think Baba was the Avatar. I think he came to rescue humanity from itself by bringing a new idea of God, self, and Creation. One that is modern, that requires all the developments of the last 500 years such as discovered natural laws, psychology, evolution, and process theory.
The old idea of idea of God as a sociopath that commands men to steal each other’s land and commit genocides in the name of Manifest Destiny has had his day. He has no place in a nuclear age.
In 1937, speaking before a group of reporters in India, Baba said,
I have come to bring about a revolution in man's thinking, the slowest of all revolutions.
Years before his passing, Baba had his tomb constructed on a hill in Meherabad. In February 1958, he led a group of eight men up the hill to that tomb and said:
Seventy years after I drop my body, this place will turn into a place of pilgrimage, where lovers of God, philosophers and celebrities will come to pay homage.
Gone is the God of old, and the materialism of old. Science and religion need no longer be so artificially divided due to misconceptions that are equally primitive. I think a new period of enlightenment is coming as a result. And I think in Baba’s teaching is the last hope for mankind.
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