The idea of the world 

And God said, Let there be numbers!

WHAT?! What about Genesis's 'Let there be light,' or John's 'In the beginning was the word'? It seems both the Old and New Testaments got it wrong. Or both right! Numbers are words, and Google AI opines about the intricate relationship between light and mathematical concepts, its dual nature as both a particle and a wave, geometric optics, Maxwell’s equations (light as electromagnetic waves), and Einstein's theory of special relativity, which establishes the speed of light as the universal speed limit. And we haven't even got to quantum mechanics. It's all maths to me.

The only timeless Truths 'we' or the universe has/have that are accessible to us are in numbers, maths. Everything else is subject-object, observer, messy Matter.

But brain is made up of matter, you say, so how do we get to messy Matter and then crazy ideas like 'first there was maths', the bane of every schoolboy/girl? Not to worry. Mind and brain/matter are different realities.The mind and maths, i.e., thoughts, emotions, intuition are a higher order, more abstract. Which means they include, describe messy matter, not messy matter including, describing thoughts, etc.

This is the chicken-egg issue solved.There are animating underlying forces underlying/ transcending nature. Such laws are abstract. Forces making the universe sing, like a taut string. Excite it, produce 'good vibes' and voila! Music, 'music of the spheres'. All creation is excitation of matter, music.

Chladni Experiment -- Natural Telos

My favourite scientific experiment is the Chladni Plate Experiment (Acoustic Levitation/Vibration): Iron filings are spread on a metal plate that is vibrated at specific frequencies using a frequency generator or a bow. The filings vibrate and, rather than staying scattered, they settle into ordered patterns (nodal lines) where the plate is not moving.

How can anyone doubt there is an underlying telos towards order in nature? But telos means meaning, a Prime Mover, the World as Idea, the idea of the World. That is the title of Bernard Kastrup's phenomenal phenomenological theory, a multi-disciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality (2019).

Not only that, but, if you make it to the end with me, you'll find out you can change the past and predict the future. Control timespace, or rather timespaces, as each living thing, with its own little miracle, consciousness, is a universe of its own, with its own timespace. And now, in a modern world all lit up, with God's powers tamed, i.e., electricity and computers, we can eliminate timespace altogether.

Analytical idealism

Kastrup's analytic idealismⁱ posits that reality is fundamentally mental, consisting of a universal, transpersonal field of consciousness referred to as 'Mind at Large'. What we see as matter is what the mental states of 'Mind at Large' look like when observed from a distance, analogous to how an MRI scan (matter) is a representation of brain activity (mental state).

Warning!: You are NOT your MRI scan. That's the misplaced concreteness of Enlightenment Scientism, which posits the 'mind' is really just a fancy computer made of matter. No. The painter is NOT the self-portrait, no matter how brilliant (and befuddled) s/he may be. We can never know him/her, only admire/ despise the portrait .

Neurotic Nature

Kastrup uses Freud to psychoanalyze nature. Individual minds (humans, animals) are 'dissociated alters' of this universal consciousness, similar to personalities in Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). The boundary of this dissociation makes the external world appear as a non-mental 'material' world 'out there' rather than as direct thoughts of that which is experienced (only God has them). Our sense organs act like a 'dashboard' on an airplane, providing a simplified, actionable representation of the mental environment that exists outside our personal ego.

Our personal psyche forms through dissociation in universal consciousness, analogous to the psyche of a person suffering from DID differentiates him/herself into multiple centres of experience alters. Dissociative feelings affect our thoughts, behaviours, while dissociated expectations mold our perceptions. Excitation of an alter's boundary is sense perception. The world we perceive is a coded phenomenal representation, the extrinsic appearance of phenomenal processes unfolding across the dissociative boundary of our alter.

Just as humans can be neurotic, with split personalities, the universal consciousness is (benignly) neurotic. We are its split personalities. Some of us are evil, some are good. A healthy society is one where the Good is nurtured and outweighs the Evil. A healthy Nature is one where all the alters work in harmony, none (i.e., Man) are exploiting and destroying, but rather using and renewing the messy Matter, so it doesn't get murdered, destroyed by its inner demons, its psychopathic alters.

In short, matter is the image of thought from across a dissociative boundary. It is the way mental states appear when viewed from a specific, limited perspective. You see what you want to see, not having a bird's/God's eye view to Know Absolutely. We are dissociated mental complexes of universal consciousness (DIDs) surrounded like islands by the ocean of universal consciousness.

Context, nurture, is everything. Nurture shapes Nature as we are all part of universal consciousness:

*The hills are alive With the sound of music, With songs they have sung For a thousand years. The hills fill my heart With the sound of music.ⁱⁱ

*Nature imitates art.ⁱⁱⁱ

 Nature sings, imitates art? Poppycock!

Does a falling tree make a sound if there's no one to hear it? Now THAT's poppycock.I take my proof from Ronald Knox's double limerick God in the quad:

 There was a young man who said God

Must find it exceedingly odd

To think that a tree

Should continue to be

When there's no one about in the quad.

And the reply -- Dear sir: your astonishment's odd;

I am always about in the quad.

And that's why the tree

Will continue to be

Since observed by, yours faithfully, God.^iv

The so-called Physical World depends on observation. Reality is a mentation, i.e. phenomenal. 'Seeing is believing' not 'Seeing is True Knowledge.' Matter-outside-the-mind is not an empirical fact but merely an explanatory model. Physical matter and mind are different levels of abstraction. Phenomenon vs noumenon. Qualities of experience are epistemically and ontologically primary only in our perception. Only consciousness is fundamental.

Yes, Descartes and Kant and dualism were unfortunate diversions. Even Whitehead and Bergson hedged, with mind and matter co-dependent opposites and elan vital. Physicalism/ materialism is our satanic religion, trying to explain consciousness from matter. Less satanic but equally deluded is pure idealism where 'all sense data is reduced to mental contents', solipsism. Data itself is a mental construct! We're still at 'painter as self-portrait.' Dualism is just plain wrong.

Alters of the 'mind at large'

We living things are all just alters of the 'mind at large', constantly excited into doing whatever. Even inanimate matter is dancing God's minuet, the hills and birds thundering and singing to us, the floor of Heaven thick inlaid with patines of bright gold. There's not the slightest orb that thou beholdest but in his motion like an angel sings. Such harmony is in immortal souls, but whilst this muddy vesture of decay doeth grossly close us in, we cannot hear it.^v

Only mathematical parameters, used to describe behavior of matter, are real, archetypal. Ontic pancomputationalism. This admits the world itself is mental and continuous with our minds. We think like the universe and vice versa. To say information (the falling tree) exists in and of itself is like imagining the spin without the top. The Cheshire cat's grin without kitty.

We only know our conscious perceptions (I'm sitting on chair) fully. To make claims based on them is less sure. I.e., to claim matter is the only reality and our perceptions are just supplementary confirmation is backwards. We can imagine the Cheshire cat's lingering smile as easily as the cat itself. So can the universe.

Language errs in conflating one level of abstraction to another. Wittgenstein warned, 'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.' Watch how you use language, as it can mislead, especially where humans are concerned. Can a liar tell the truth?

Physicalist worldview as neurotic ego-defense mechanism

Back to DIDs (Dissociative Identity Disorder). Recall the Libet 'free will' experiment^vi showing brain activity a fraction of a second before the decision to activate a switch. Proof of no free will? Decisions outside consciousness? Sorry.

Everyone is a 'neurotic', an alter, suffering from DID. And everyone has nested within his/her universe at least one split in personality,^vii a second centre of cognition (right hemisphere), the unconscious. So the brain activity in the experiment is there, inspiring the left hemisphere to 'decide'. A clever variant of the experiment found that the subject could have that brain activity and then NOT press the button, i.e., using his/her 'free won't'.

It all boils down to context. To report an experience, you must a/ have the experience and b/ know it, i.e., dissociation. Even if you're not aware, it's still part of consciousness, if only unarticulated by the left hemisphere.

The physicalists insist 'no free will'. No meaning, no real human agency apart from brute mechanical determinism. But this denial of meaning is itself a meaning, using denial as a defense to enhance the ego's sense that the world has no (semantic) meaning, construing it as a mechanical contraption governed by blind laws, chance.

In Freud's language, a psychopathic split personality, Descartes etc's dualism. The diagnosis of 'physicalist as psychopath' is very real, as our ongoing destruction of the world makes abundantly clear. We are 'shooting ourselves in the foot', 'we are the enemy' trying to 'have our cake and eat it too'. Our cliches tell us The Truth-in-timespace.

Contrast this with Kastrup's analytical idealism, which sees the world as the symbolic appearance of God's mind. Nature holds hidden semantic meaning. The telos of life is to contemplate and understand God's thoughts from a perspective unavailable to God. Okay, not really, as God can pretend he's a human (Christianity?). Whatever.

A sicko neurotic projects onto the world (dead) attributes to avoid confronting unacknowledged aspects of his/her own (dead) inner life. Physicalism gives this intellectual elite a sense of meaning in their own lives – I know better than the plebes. Consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon, an emergent property of complex entities.

Pathetic. Give me the richer view from depth psychology of William James, Freud, Jung. Consciousness and the unconscious, the ego as experiential centre, with the unconscious influencing consciousness.

The physicalist narrative allows neurotics to avoid confronting unwanted affects of the unconscious like free will, morality, religion. It relies on ego defense mechanisms: denial, distortion, dissociation, repression, projection. You let your worldview be hijacked to prevent short-term suffering, e.g., troubling thoughts of Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing.^viii

Hermeneutic of everything

Everything we do is hermeneutic, interpreting phenomena. We project our passion onto Nature. Or give it no meaning, only utilitarian predictions, scientism. No, no! The World has its own meaning. Only Mind has semantic value and the World is first and foremost Mind.

Your alter's experience of the extrinsic world has its own special meaning (evoking emotions, insights, pathetic fallacy^ix) in your own little universe as part of a greater world of alters. We desecrate Nature if it has no meaning for us beyond use value. Shame! Hegel overcomes this toxic Man-Nature separation in his dialectic of Nature. As does his nemesis Schopenhauer.

Aufwachen! Wake up guys, before it's too late. The cosmic narrative hints at something prior to itself. The collective world dream points to underlying transpersonal mental dynamics:

*Plato's Theory of Forms: the ontological ground of reality is archetypal thoughts in the transpersonal mind. The visible world is modelled after the patterns of these archetypal thoughts. Our only access to God is through images on the screen of perception of the world.

*Hong Zicheng 16th c: The chirping of birds and twittering of insects are all murmurings of the mind. The billiance of flowers and colors of grasses are none other than the patterns of the Dao.

*Shakespeare: 'All the world's a stage^x and 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on'.^xi

*Sufi Henry Corbin: To come into this world means to pass into the plane of existence [alters], merely metaphoric existence has meaning only with the view to leading that which is metaphoric back to true being.

Third person objectivity, i.e., scientism, is fine for predictive models. But it focuses on Nature's behaviour vs its meaning, so fatally limits human spirit. A distraction from our telos.

Look at your family members as characters, and family stories as episodes of a great saga evoking something above its pedestrian appearances. Our lives as a small part of the symbolic cosmic drama. In the mental world it is wrong to interpret life literally. Dreams cry out for Meaning.

Changing past, predicting future

In ideal (block) time^xii: Time present and time past. Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.^xiii

I'm presently trying to healing from childhood trauma, a bad DID. If I succeed, I will have^xiv undone the past! And together the new past Little Eric and new Present Eric will team up to make Future Eric whole, i.e., predict the future. Timespace means our choices only influence the world through bodily actions in the present. We can't rub out the past. But in consciousness, we can change the whole of an imagined story at any moment. The entire narrative in ideal time is acquiescent to choice and amenable to revision.

Recall Schrodinger's cat. Observation not only determines physical properties observed at present but also retroactively changes their history accordingly. The past (which is memory) is created (interpreted) at every instant to be consistent with present. The World is malleable mental narrative. If memory changes a past 'event' then its meaning changes for you now and in the future.

The whole damn thing

By reducing physical regularities (laws of nature) and psychological regularities (axiomatic intuitions behind mathematics and logic) to the harmonics of universal consciousness, our ontology explains the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics. The truths of human intuition apply to the physical world at large because human intuition and the the physical world are at the most fundamental level, continuous with one another.

Spacetime is built into language, thinking. A vibrating string requires spacetime. Telos 'takes time'. Timeless consciousness is the sole primitive, fundamental. Experiences are like vibrations of consciousness, excitations of consciousness, so they too are not in spacetime. Space and time are qualities of experience. Our memories, hopes. Past has memory, future – imagined possibilities. 

 We unavoidably project otherwise inaccessible reality onto the cognitive scaffolding of spacetime. Just as a letter on paper folded multiple times must be unfolded for you to read and make sense of the message. We unfold reality along spacetime dimensions to make it intelligible. Not 100% Truth but corresponding to Truth-within-spacetime.

We are consciousness itself, the rest of our self-image arising afterwards in spacetime, as thoughts and images constructed in consciousness, the fish's water. Wise old frog to tadpoles: The water's fine today. Tadpole 1 to tadpole 2: What the hell is water?

Re birth/death, neither are relevant to the existential status of consciousness itself. Birth is the image (i.e., what we perceive) of the beginning of DID dissociation and Death the end, entailing reintegration of memory, identity and emotion lost at birth. At death there is an expansion of our felt sense of identity. NDEs^xv feel expansion of the post-death environment, an awed sense of the universe. So be in this world as if you were a stranger or a traveller.^xvi

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