I’ve spent a quarter century starting over and over to convey a single idea that hit me on a bus in Arkansas one day in 2020. Over time I’ve given the idea various names, including conscioucentrism, the evolution of perception, and the psychic emergent universe. All these terms express the same basic idea.
The reason I’ve started over trying to explain this idea so many times is that people generally have a hard time understanding me. While admittedly the concept involves a series of complex mental steps mostly due to the need to educate people who are not familiar with these ideas, it is essentially very simple. To keep myself cheerful about this I’ve often joked to myself silently, “Just because you don’t understand me doesn’t mean I don’t make sense.” To see the sense of it, and have the ‘aha’ experience, you just have to pay very close attention and give it the effort it deserves.
Why do I say that getting this idea deserves the effort? It’s because it changes everything we thought we knew fundamentally. If universally understood, this one idea would be the biggest game-changer of all time. Here we’re going to go over the idea one more time.
Now, I never would have thought of this idea had it not been for the fact that I was intimately familiar with the teachings of Meher Baba before I studied the problems of philosophy. And yet it was not as simple as simply lifting an idea straight out of his books. Realizing this idea required an immense amount of interpretation. A teaching like Baba’s can be understood in more than one way. Yet I am now dead certain that in March 2020 I got that interpretation right. I believe that all previous interpretations of Baba were simply wrong. And in a short appendix I’ll explain why I think that is.
Here we will refer to this idea as the psychic emergent universe.
The idea dovetails perfectly with Baba’s teaching. Meher Baba had a rational and coherent system of sanskaras. Sanskaras are at the heart of all his explanations — creational, moral, teleological, etc. But Baba emphasized the place of sanskaras in the life of the individual. But if you read Baba’s works thoroughly you will see that sanskaras are responsible for absolutely everything — for the entire formation of the illusion from start to finish.
Now, Baba didn’t emphasize logical arguments for his explanation. But he did say that they exist.
For these will not be vague talks but facts that are substantiated and supported by scientific arguments. (Lord Meher, 1986 print edition, p. 1607)
I believe Baba left that work to philosophers who would come later.
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. (Lord Meher, 1986 print edition, p. 5296)
There are two main things my books and papers contribute. They apply the concept of sanskaras to the formation of time, space, and natural laws, and they provide the deductive argument for why psychic emergence has to be true.
So now I want to start over explaining both the terminology and logic of psychic emergence.
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After 25 years of trying to explain this concept to people, I have learned that there are simply certain concepts that almost all philosophers understand, but that make no initial sense to most laymen. I say ‘initial sense’ because if you work at it you will get it.
Generally when I’m starting out explaining this idea to a person I point to an object we can both perceive with our eyes and I ask, where is your experience of that thing occurring? Not only can most people not answer the question at first blush, most can’t even understand the question. They get nervous and don’t know what to say.
If I persist in asking where their experience of the object is occurring, they point to the object I’m asking about. This shows they misunderstand the question. I am asking where their experience is, not where in their experience the object is. Their finger they’re using to answer with is just part of the experience I’m asking about.
If you’ve read this far, I hope you can pause a moment and recognize that the experience I’m asking about is happening in the perceiver. This has been understood by philosophers throughout the ages. The interpretation of “in the perceiver” has changed slightly over time, but for the most part every philosopher has referred to our experience as something “internal.” Some would say it occurs in a person’s mind. Today it is more common to say it occurs in a person’s brain. However it is said what remains the same is the notion that it is somehow inside you. This idea that experience is in some way ‘within you’ goes all the way back to ancient Greek philosophy.
The view that your experience is inside you is the source of a giant philosophical problem that no philosopher or scientist has ever been able to solve. It would not be hyperbole to say that this problem caused by the notion experience is inside of you is the biggest problem still facing philosophers. I’ve seen more than one professor of philosophy draw it out on a piece of paper and then stare at it dumbfounded. This ancient, seemingly intractable problem is called “the mind-body problem,” and it is famous.
It’s too bad people are not taught about it in school. But don’t worry; I’m about to explain it.
The mind body problem has three aspects. All three come from the notion that experience occurs in your body. The first is known as the interaction problem. Throughout history people have thought of the soul or mind as an invisible thing inside your body. The idea was that it was doing the experiencing. Eventually it was pointed out that this hardly made sense, for how could a non-physical thing like a mind or soul influence a physical thing like a body? How could a mind push, pull, tug, or in any way influence a corporeal body?
The second aspect of the mind-body problem regards a problem with the ‘external world’ or ‘outer world.’ If your experience is in you, and my experience is in me, what can we say about the “external world?” How can we even know it exists?
We must face it that for any one particular individual, his experience is his whole world. Even if such an individual heard someone else tell him something about their experience, that testimony would be encountered in his experience. In short, an individual can’t escape his own experience. By definition a person only experiences his own experience. We are all confined to our personal experience.
This raises the problem of what a person can know about the world that is not in his experience.
Technically, logically, you can’t say anything! Even if you imagined something as being in the external world, whatever you imagined would be occurring in your internal one.
This raises the profound question of what it is outside our experience that is causing our internal experience. We can’t even begin to look for an answer because we are limited to our experience.
Now, the fact that we can’t give any logical or rational or scientific reason for saying anything about the external world, or even that there is one, has not prevented some people from doing so.
The problem arises when such people go about trying to give evidence for their claims about the external world. Obviously they can’t appeal to observation. Testimony can’t help either as testimony is also encountered only in our experience. Logic can’t help either. To understand why see Evolution of Perception Re-Explained, p. 90. Inductive logic relies on observation, which is found in our experience. And deductive logic only proves if one’s propositions are consistent, not if they are true. In short, logic can’t help us to know about the external world.
Now I hardly need to point out that it is no small matter that no one can provide any kind of empirical or logical evidence for his basic claims about reality. For such claims are the very definition of “superstition.” Beliefs that we say are rational are those for which we can provide a rationale – meaning we can give a reason for holding those beliefs. No person has even given a genuine scientific argument for the existence of an external world — or even articulated what such a world would entail. At most people have projected objects found in their experience onto a theoretical second unseen world. I discuss the illogic of such psychological mirroring in Evolution of Perception Re-Explained, p. 30.
There is a third aspect to the mind-body problem and we will just touch on it. This is the problem science has in explaining what consciousness is and how and why it arises at all. Being conscious is a necessary condition for having experience. So if we’re going to explain experience, we have to explain consciousness as well. And science does not even have a working hypothesis.
That sums up the mind-body problem. So now, how is it resolved in the concept of psychic emergence?
I hope the reader has noticed that all three aspects mind-body problem are the result of the notion that one’s experience is something occurring in one’s body. Luckily this is not the only way to frame the issue of experience.
I wish the reader to ask himself what this notion solves?
Hold your nose. Cover your eyes. Or plug your ears. What happens? We curtail smell, sight, and sound. Obviously something that normally enters our head through its orifices is being stopped. But what?
Today we say that certain molecules enter the nose, electromagnetic radiation enters the eyes, and vibrational waves enter the ears. Your brain interprets the first as scent, the second as color, and the third as sound.
There are a couple of problems with this. How did we learn this? By studying experiments set up within our experience. But remember, we are looking for the cause of our experience. These processes are found within our experience. So they are the effect of what we are looking for.
Another way to describe this problem is as follows. How can our experience be in our head when our head is in our experience? We are looking for the cause in its effect. We are assuming the cause of our experience is something in experience. Remember that these sense organs, nerves, and electrical modulations we assume have something to do with the cause of experience are in fact themselves found in our experience.
What is at the heart of the error is elsewhere, however. We are looking for things and happening located in space (like the things and events we experience) to be the cause of our experience.
Luckily the idea that our experience is happening is in our heads is not the only way of addressing the problem of experience. There’s a clear alternative to this thinking.
The alternative to imagining that experience is a thing or event in our heads (analogous to things we discover in our experience) is to see for clues of an evolutionary process — an evolution of experience itself. What we are looking for is a process that has occurred in the past and is ongoing that logically accounts for the experience we find ourselves in.
In other words, the mind-body problem was the result of trying to explain something (experience) as something inside another thing. The alternative is to this primitive thinking with the much more modern concept of a formative and transformational process — an evolution.
One of the reasons that no one ever thought of this as a solution is that the idea of evolutionary processes, such as we see today in biology, geology, chemistry, and astrophysics, is a very recent development in the history of science. And no philosopher has thought of applying it to the mind-body problem at all. Even I would not have thought of it had I not known about Meher Baba’s extremely unique cosmology.
They were so busy fighting off belief in theoretical unseen souls that they wound up inventing their own theoretical unseen ‘second Universe,’ inadvertently perpetuating the mind-body problem right into the 21st century. I believe that very soon they will begin to catch up.
So the idea of psychic emergence is simply that this whole entire infinitely varied kaleidoscope of experience we enjoy and call ‘The Universe’ is in fact the result of a long evolution of perception.
The word “psychic” refers to experience and comes from the Greek word psykhikos, meaning "of the soul, spirit, or mind.” And “emergent” literally means in the process of coming into being.
The title of this article implies I would speak about vocabulary.
A process is broadly defined as a series of actions or events performed to make something or achieve a particular result. But when I speak of process, I’m referring to processes of a particular type. We must distinguish between ‘events’ and ‘formative or transformational processes.’ It will help to give examples.
A walk to the store is, in a way, a process. To achieve the result of reaching the store I have to take certain actions such as find my keys, lock the door, take several hundred steps and arrive at the store. But nothing transformational happened. Nothing that was not already present came into being because of it.
But now let’s take the example of baking a loaf of bread. I begin with ingredients, one of which is yeast. By mixing the ingredients, adding the yeast, and applying heat, the ingredients go through a chemical reaction. Because of the heat, gas is released by the yeast, resulting in the bread rising. When I open the oven something very different from a pan full of soft wet ingredients is found. A fluffy risen loaf of bread. It is the result of a process.
The universe came about as the result of a process. Yet it was not a chemical process as with the loaf of bread. Rather it was a psychic process, an evolution of experience itself from a primordial latent state to its fully manifested current presentation.
My books explain that process in some detail. Meher Baba explains much more of it. His works were, after all, the source of my idea.
Appendix
Here is the reason I think many among the first generations of Meher Baba’s followers misunderstood him. This applies both to those first ones in the 1930s as well his later ones in the 60s and 70s. And I’m speaking of Western followers.
Prior to the 19th century Westerners deferred to the Bible for the formation of the world. They believed God was a powerful and benevolent incorporeal “person” who created the world out of matter. When he created man he implanted a soul into him and breathed life into it.
This kind of faith began to come apart at the end of the European Enlightenment as people began to question traditional views. And this corresponded with a new influx of ideas from the East.
The Bhagavad Gita was first translated into English in 1785 and published under the authority of the East India Company. The earliest widely recognized English translation of a work by the Buddha was Daniel Gogerly's partial translation of the Dhammapada in 1840, with a more complete English translation following by Max Muller in 1870.
Such books were highly popular amongst the avant guard and occultists, especially in England and the United States, and many rushed to develop ideas either based on such Eastern ideas or at least written to sound like them.
The same period coincided with the rise of spiritualism in the West. At the time the word “spiritual” was literally correlated with an interest in “spirits.” And channeling and seances became widespread.
In 1875 the Theosophical Society formed in Greenwich Village with the stated purpose of attempting to gain ancient secret knowledge by communicating with invisible spirits.
One of the side-effects of this movement was a growing belief in so-called “ascended masters.”
When Meher Baba appeared on the Western spiritual scene in England in 1931 he immediately attracted occultists who were eager to project these new Theosophical spiritualist ideas onto whatever he said. Baba himself tried to distance himself from groups such as the Theosophists, saying they hadn’t even a smell of the truth. However, this didn’t stop many from continuing to try to syncretize things he said with these so-called secret doctrines.
The same thing repeated in the 1960s and 70s as, even as Baba was passing away, hippies and social misfits began to flock to Baba groups and Centers. By this time books such as those published by the Theosophists and more recent occultists like them had a huge resurgence.
The result was that when Baba died, many began to claim to be in communication with him through visions and channeling. Baba was, after all, believed by them to be an ascended master.
Because of this belief in Baba as an incorporeal ascended master who governs the world from afar and visits his followers in visions and dreams to advise them on worldly affairs, Baba’s own much more subtle teaching of Creation as the mere formation of an illusion due to sanskaras is ignored. Baba, they insist, is still alive does everything personally, a theological view known as occasionalism. For such followers, Baba is believed to have literally created the world out of matter, energy, and mind which oozed out of a point in space 13 billion years ago. And they have returned to old ideas of people having souls inside their bodies that can leave the body and travel around in astral projection.
Today it seems like the entire Baba faith is geared around channeling and astrology
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