Starting very young (seven years and younger) up through the present, I have been concerned with the problem (usually enunciated as a question): What Is Reality? Almost as soon as I could read, I pursued the writings of Immanuel Kant, Sir James Jeans, Bishop George Berkeley, and any other authors I could find who had something to say about Reality. At age sixteen, I wrote my first article on the subject (“Reality”, published in 1931, and reproduced in full in Appendix One, pages 281-290, Simulations of God: The Science of Belief).
By 1931 I realized (“made real”) an intuitive feeling, which I articulated at that time, that reality has a dual aspect, an outer (“objective”) and an inner (“subjective”) aspect. I quote:
Today reality may be said (in its less involved meanings) to possess the same attributes as the original meaning of the [Latin word] res [“a lawcourt”]. First it expresses that which is completely objective as opposed to anything subjective. By objective we mean existing without the mind, outside it, and wholly independent of it. Subjective, on the other hand, takes the meaning of that which is in the mind...
How can the mind render itself sufficiently objective to study itself? In other words, how are we able to use the mind to ponder on the mind? It is perfectly feasible for the intellect to grasp the fact that the physiological changes of the brain occur simultaneously with thought, but it cannot conceive of the connection between its own thoughts and these changes. The difficulties of the precise relation between the two have caused many controversies as to which is the more real, the objective or the subjective reality [italics inserted].
I then quoted Bishop Berkeley’s dictum that there is no existence without the mind, either in ours and/or in “the mind of some Eternal Spirit.” This article guided my search for answers. I am still in the search, forty-six years later.
From Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, I began to understand that word, language, logic and mathematical descriptions were not adequate expressers of either the inner or outer aspects of reality. Somehow, all descriptions of reality were sterile: they tended to play word games, to cleverly juggle with ideas in intricate patterns as if meaningful. My search for the answer to the question “What Is Reality?” continued in the study of mathematics, of logics, of semantics (“metalanguages,” for example). I found them, each in turn, sterile in the deeper search and helpful in widening my representational capacities, my abilities to see relations internally in myself, my own mind. I was not satisfied that skill in manipulating concepts, no matter how precise, no matter how inclusive, could answer my question.
Consequently, I went into the experimental sciences. I pursued experimental (and theoretical) physics. Cosmogony (the study of the origins of the cosmos, the universe) raised her lovely head: for a time I was entranced (“in trance”) with her seductions (astrophysics, astronomy, etcetera). The study of submicroscopic realms of matter seduced me (quantum mechanics) as did the study of known physical energy (light, photons, thermodynamics, etcetera).
Finally I realized that the study of my own brain and its “contained-restrained” mind was needed in this lifelong search. I took a new direction into new domains: I turned to my program for the search, given above in “Reality”: “the physiological changes of the brain occur simultaneously with thought, but it cannot conceive of the connection between its own thoughts and these changes.” How can one make these connections? How can one record in objective records (1) these changes in the brain and (2) the corresponding thoughts and their fast changes?
As a dedicated young experimental scientist I saw, in a course in neurophysiology at Cal Tech in 1937, a possible means of recording “the physiological changes of the brain.” I inquired of Dr. van Hareveld how to do this desired recording: he gave me (Lord) Edgar Adrian’s paper “The Spread of Electrical Activity in the Cerebral Cortex.” I read it and determined to devise a better method of recording the electrical activity. I wanted a more complete picture (recorded, of course!) of the electrical activity throughout the brain, not just in small areas of the cortex. I also needed to learn more of the mind in the brain (its thoughts, their changes, their “sources and sinks”) in order to find/devise/create a method of recording its activities in parallel simultaneously with the changes in the brain. In short, I was seeking methods of objective fast recording of the activities of the brain, and, simultaneously, objective fast recording of the activities of the mind in that brain.
In this search I went into medical school, seeking more knowledge of these two domains of parallel process. (At Cal Tech, Henry Borsook, M.D., Ph.D., professor of biochemistry, said to the young seeker: “All of the current knowledge you are looking for is in medical school: you will need that medical degree to be free to search further. A Ph.D. degree is not sufficient.”)
In medical school, I continued the search, in neuroanatomy, neurology, neurosurgery, psychiatry. I found more data but no new methods. I saw the limitations of the methods used: spoken and written language and questions (in the mind domain), EEG and fast electrical recordings (in the brain domain). Literally, there was no method (yet) of recording the mind activities and the brain activities simultaneously. I also learned that most medical researchers did not feel that there was any hope of ever accomplishing this difficult task.
Upon graduation from medical school, the search was interrupted by a period of devising means of measuring fast physiological changes in high altitude aircraft personnel: oxygen and nitrogen in the gas breathed, in explosive decompression, in conditions of anoxia and bends. I learned about states of my own mind engendered by too-low oxygen in the brain, about states of my mind in the excruciating pain of decompression sickness (bends), and states of my mind excited by fear during explosive decompression of a pressure cabin. My knowledge increased, but I felt diverted from the search.
Soon after the war, the search resumed. I devised new methods of recording the electrical activity of the brain in many places simultaneously, recorded and reproduced on a two-dimensional array.9 I worked out new safer ways of placing small electrodes within the brain.10 This work lasted eleven years and was terminated when I realized that, as yet, there is no way of picking up/recording the activities of the brain without injuring/altering the structure of the brain itself, and changing the capacities of its contained mind.
Also soon after the war, in my “spare time,” I pursued the study and development of the mind, my own. I studied semantics, logic, mathematics, means of modeling the brain’s and the mind’s activities. Warren McCulloch and Heinz Von Foerster were working in the area of representation of the brain’s activities and I studied their work. For the mind studies, I needed more “new data.” I pursued psychoanalysis in depth—I found a psychoanalyst’s psychoanalyst: Robert Waelder, who had a Ph.D. (Vienna) in Physics and was trained with Anna and Sigmund Freud in Vienna, Austria. I worked with Dr. Waelder for three years, five to seven days a week, one hour a day. I found much that was pertinent to the search: the question “What Is Reality?” was researched within my mind intensively.
I confirmed (as I had earlier suspected) that wholly complex domains of thought/feeling/doing/memory below my levels of awareness acted so as to program my current beliefs about “what is real.” Inner reality had its own laws, distinct from (and many times counter to) the laws of outer reality. I struggled with the theories—belief sys-tems—of others in regard to inner reality. I revised my own belief systems in regard to my own inner reality (“realities” would now be more accurate: “the inner reality” of 1931 had acquired a plural label “inner realities”). With Waelder’s help and quiet acceptance, I was able to enter new inner domains of feeling/thinking/emoting, emerge, and represent the experiences verbally—vocally—in writing. My modeling of inner reality became more open: my respect for the Unknown in my own mind increased greatly. I realized, finally, that the depths of mind are as great as the depths of cosmic outer space. There are inner universes as well as outer ones. My concept of metabeliefs (beliefs about beliefs) as the limiting beliefs restraining-confining-limiting the processes-operations of my mind originated in the work with Robert Waelder.
In parallel with the brain-activity studies, the mind studies continued with the solitude-isolation-tank work and its origins at the National Institute of Mental Health (1954). Why is isolation necessary for the study of mind? My reasoning was founded on a basic tenet of certain experimental sciences (physics, biology, etcetera): in order to adequately study a system, all known influences to and from that system must either be attenuated below threshold for excitation, reliably accounted for, or eliminated to avoid unplanned disturbances of that system. Disturbances from unknown sources may then be found and dealt with more adequately.
Using this injunction from experimental science, I decided to isolate my body-brain-mind, insofar as this is currently possible (without damage-“trance”-chemicals) in the external reality. I saw that to study my own mind, it must be isolated from all known “sources” of stimulation and from “sinks” of reaction, in the here-and-now external reality. I devised the isolation tank method for the study of my own mind, an isolated mind studying its own processes, free of feedback with the external world. Quite quickly I found this method gave a new source of data of great richness.
During such studies over the last 21 years (1954-1975) I have found that which began to open during the years with Robert Waelder: a newness, a uniqueness, a penetration deep into new (for me) domains of the mind. (Some of these experiences and domains are recounted in limited-by-consensus-articles-books-lectures: see republished papers in appendices to Simulations of God: The Science of Belief; in References and Categorized Bibliography in Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer and in Recommended Reading in The Center of the Cyclone, and other portions of The Dyadic Cyclone.)
The limitations placed upon communication of these new domains of the mind to other minds were also found: once one has been deep in one’s deeper and deeper Self (it deepens at every exposure to isolation), one’s ability to transmit the data must also be increased. I found that most (not all) other minds are not prepared to hear-understand-grasp what it means to explore-experiment-be-immersed-in such researches. Certain domains of the mind, certain states of being, certain states of one’s own consciousness, are so foreign-alien-weird-strange-unfamiliar to most other minds that they cannot listen to or read what one says or writes without becoming upset, or without using ready labels for the explorer, rendering one’s efforts to communicate either negative or null and void.
I have found a few others who do not do this. I hesitate to give their names here; they, in turn, do not want, nor are they yet ready to want, to face the onerous burden of open communication in an unreceptive, possibly hostile or coercive consensus world. Among these others are those who went too far: the consensus world of the (numerically superior) persons who fear these domains exerted powerful external reality means to reduce the communications of those they fear to near zero.
Over the years of this search, I have carried out several experiments in public communication about these domains of the mind. I experimented with means of reaching those who in the privacy of their own minds were in or entering into new domains. I wrote books, gave workshops, lectured—in this experimental mode. I openly pushed my own accounts to dangerously unaccepted edges of credibility. I purposely held back accounts that in my judgment and/or my publisher’s judgment would break the consensus thread of communication, with possible disastrous results for me.
Many of my former colleagues disavowed me and my researches: I understand their belief systems and the power such systems have over our minds. I do not recriminate them, nor do I blame former friends for not maintaining contact with me. In my search (for “What Is Reality?”), I have driven myself (and hence, close associates-relatives-friends) to the brink of the loss of all communicational contacts for months at a time, by means totally alien to the previously accepted belief systems (what is appropriate?) in our culture. I have explored and have voluntarily entered into domains forbidden by a large fraction of those in our culture who are not curious, are not explorative and are not mentally equipped to enter these domains.
I find rebels quite disturbing to research unless restrained, disciplined and limited in their actions to effective realms; consensus external reality furnishes a platform for exploration, as long as it is stable enough for the researches. Such research as I have done/do has required, over the years, stability in support (financial, emotional, intellectual, political), or I could not do the work required. There have been numerous difficulties in maintaining the necessary support, but no insurmountable difficulties, yet. So far, there has been a peculiar concatenation of the right events to support one or another aspect of the search. A person, here or there, suddenly comes over the horizon of my mind to facilitate either the new ideas, the new money, the new emotional-intellectual-environment, or the new political means needed for the continuance of the work. Somehow, by at times apparently mysterious means, the social consensus reality provides that which is needed at the right time. For this support I am profoundly thankful and grateful.
My own mind provides its own difficulties in this search: there are times in which I feel the search must stop; it is too much to ask of my biology as a human; it is too much to ask of my functioning as a social being in the world of humankind with its neglected suffering millions of humans. I take time for the search away from other activities. It may be that I should not continue the search and should turn to politics, to more direct expressions of helping others to help one another. This dilemma has always been a distraction, a seduction enticing me away from the search as I now know it. Over these years of work I have sidestepped, or once in it, I have desisted from, leading/participating /belonging to various groups in a responsible position: scientific societies of many sorts, local town/city politics, fraternities, and even dedicated family life. Because of the search for the bases of reality I minimized participation in the social reality, limited it, insofar as this was possible, to communication of the results of the search.
In the search there have been many times of great joy, of breakthroughs into new domains, of a new grasp of the previously ungraspable. Internally, in the privacy of my own mind, thus far, I feel infinitely rewarded by the results.
My life has been lived continuously in the search. At times my efforts have been hidden: I could not expose the experiments being done to the gaze of others without irreversibly altering the experimental conditions and thus changing the results with the changed conditions. Today as yet, I cannot discuss certain experiments I have done: many are, of necessity, still hidden. Even the facts of my own motivations (“What Is Reality?”) given in this chapter will change the current experiments. Thus it is, in the huge feedback system of which each of us is a very small part.
Many others (in one way or another) have pursued this search for reality and its representations. I owe many debts to those who cleared some of the jungles of beliefs, who removed accumulated layers of nonsense before I started digging. (As an aside, I feel somewhat like the sparrows I watched in Minnesota as a boy: unerringly each sparrow found the undigested edible single kernels of grain in the drying manure. If only it were so easy for us to find the viable kernels of true knowledge in the masses of nonsense given us in books, in the media, in political speeches, in ourselves by ourselves!)
Some searchers end their books (and apparently their search) with pessimistic statements. I give one example of a foremost thinker, Ludwig Wittgenstein:11
“6.522 There are, indeed, things that [a] cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest [b] . They are what is mystical.”
I added [a] and [b]. For [a] substitute the words “as yet.” For [b] add the words “by other means.” This transforms these two statements of Wittgenstein into the explorer’s domain. Substitute for his third statement the following:
“They are now what is in the Unknown yet to be found.”
Thus do I operate: If I see premature closing off of possibilities, as if something is impossible (“mystical”), I paraphrase, reorient the statements, so as to continue my own metabelief: The province of the mind has no limits; its own contained beliefs set limits that can be transcended by suitable metabeliefs (like this one).
Returning to the Tractatus, there is an oft-quoted statement:
7. “Whereof one cannot speak [c], thereof one must be silent.” (“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.”)
In the added position [c], I add the words “as yet,” transforming the statement into an opening injunction, rather than, as it is given by Wittgenstein, an absolute closure by this injunction of a system of thought.
Of that which we cannot yet speak, we remain silent until a new experience or way of expression allows us to speak. (Radio waves in 1700 A.D. were silent.)
G. Spencer Brown shows (in Laws of Form, pp. 77-78) that Wittgenstein probably was referring to descriptive language rather than injunctive (instructional) language. Injunctive language (in its far-reaching uses) instructs on how to do-make-create something in the inner reality and/or in the external reality. Wittgenstein did not have either later neurophysiological knowledge nor the later knowledge of computers, each of which directly opens the domains expressible in new languages (of the descriptive and injunctive types). Experimental science somehow seems to topple previously expressed absolutes about reality, about meaning, about language, about perception, about cognition, about creating descriptions of minds with limits, specified by the constructor-descriptor. The limits defined are only in the description used, in the simulations of the mind doing the describing.
Realization of the lack of any limits in the mind is not easy to acquire. The domains of direct experience of infinities within greater infinities of experience are sometimes frightening, sometimes “awe-full,” sometimes “bliss-full.” I quote from a writer who feels this lack of mind limits in his own experiences, Franklin Merrell-Wolff, The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object: Reflections on the Nature of Transcendental Consciousness, pp. 38-39.
1. The first discernible effect in consciousness was something that I may call a shift in the base of consciousness. From the relative point of view, the final step may be likened to a leap into Nothing. At once, that Nothing was resolved into utter Fullness, which in turn gave the relative world a dreamlike quality of unreality. I felt and knew myself to have arrived, at last, at the Real. I was not dissipated in a sort of spatial emptiness, but on the contrary was spread out in a Fullness beyond measure. The roots of my consciousness, which prior to this moment had been (seemingly) more or less deeply implanted in the field of relative consciousness, now were forcibly removed and instantaneously transplanted into a supernal region. This sense of being thus transplanted has continued to the present day, and it seems to be a much more normal state of emplacement than ever the old rooting had been.
2. Closely related to the foregoing is a transformation in the meaning of the “Self” or “I”. Previously, pure subjectivity had seemed to me to be like a zero or vanishing point, a “somewhat” that had position in consciousness but no body. So long as that which man calls his “Self” had body, it stood within the range of analytic observation. Stripping off the sheaths of this body until none is left is the function of the discriminative technique in meditation. At the end there remains that which is never an object and yet is the foundation upon which all relative consciousness is strung like beads upon a string. As a symbol to represent this ultimate and irreducible subject to all consciousness, the “I” element, I know nothing better than zero or an evanescent point. The critical stage in the transformation is the realization of the “I” as zero. But, at once, that “I” spreads out into an unlimited “thickness.” It is as though the “I” became the whole of space. The Self is no longer a pole or focal point, but it sweeps outward, everywhere, in a sort of unpolarized consciousness, which is at once Self-identity and the objective content of consciousness. It is an unequivocal transcendence of the subject-object relationship. Herein lies the rationale of the inevitable ineffability of mystical insight. All language is grounded in the subject-object relationship, and so, at best can only misrepresent transcendent consciousness when an effort is made to express its immediately given value.
I change his last statement by means present in his own writings into, once again, a transforming injunction: “That language (not ‘all language’) grounded in the subject-object relationship misrepresents transcendent consciousness when, in that language, an effort is made to express the immediately given value (of transcendent consciousness).”
G. Spencer Brown’s doorway12 out of this dilemma is the development of an injunctive language that gives instructions (suitable to the listener-reader-experiencer) on how to evoke-enter-create transcendent consciousness in one’s Self.
I have found Merrell-Wolff’s writings on his own experience to have injunctive qualities for me, for changing my “subject-object” consciousness into the new domains that he so beautifully expresses.
The distinction between descriptive language and injunctive language disappears in the domains of inner experience (and probably in the domain of external experience also) as follows:
A mind isolated from all known stimuli-reaction probabilities (in a state of being with attenuated or missing feedback with the outer reality) for a long enough time, frequently enough, enters new (for that mind) domains. Once that mind has the experience of entering-creating new domains, it has self-referential programs-beliefs-metabeliefs that can be used (at some future times) to transform its own state of being into further new domains. (One learns rules of exploring new domains under the special conditions.)
To achieve this new level of learning-to-learn, one sets aside previous limits set upon domain exploration: one drops irrelevant beliefs about inner/outer realities previously stored; one examines beliefs-about-beliefs (metabeliefs), especially those about “the limits of the human mind.” One drops the usual self-limiting languages (useful for use with other persons not so equipped) found in the external reality. One gives up entrancement-seduction by “systems of thought,” by other persons, by successes-failures in the consensus realities of others linked to one’s self and of one’s self in those realities.
However, without the disciplines outlined above and without experience of solitude-isolation-confinement in the external world, these considerations may be meaningless. Once one has been immersed long enough in the above, description of new domains by others now become injunctive to one’s Self. Their descriptions invoke-evoke new domains in Self, in one’s own mind.
Thus can language instruct one to move into new states of being, new domains of experience.
Of particular interest to me are the domains represented by the mathematical concepts of: zero (the origin at which numbers and variables cease having any value); of infinity (the non-terminus approaching which, numbers and variables assume values that cannot yet be represented); of the point (the smallest possible value of any number or of any variable that approaches, but does not reach, zero); of various differential operators (∇2 = 0, for example), which can move through their defined domains free of constraints by the domain in/upon which they operate.
Of particular interest is the relation of identity, one variable to another, in the consciously functioning domain. Assuming one’s conscious Self to have a “size” in a certain domain (say equivalent to that of a human brain in the external reality domain), one identifies one’s Self with that “size.” Start cutting down that “size” until one is a point: in any domain, a point is not zero. Identify one’s whole Self with a point. This kind of point has consciousness, memory, the complete knowledge of the individual Self. It can remain a fixed point in a defined domain, a moving point in the same domain, or a point in any domain. Such a point has no mass, no charge, no spin, no gravitational constant and, hence, is free to move in any physical field.
And so on and on—for identities of Self with differential operators, with infinities, with zero. Identify Self with a differential operator that can move through a field unconstrained by the presence of the field. Assume that oneself is infinite, what is the experience? Assume that oneself is zero, what is the experience? The reader is left with these exercises to perform on/in himself/herself.
I would like to end this discussion with a quotation from a researcher who investigates the bases of reality—G. Spencer Brown: 13
Unfortunately we find systems of education today that have departed so far from the plain truth, that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance. This is doubly corrupt. It is corrupt not only because pride is in itself a mortal sin, but also because to teach pride in knowledge is to put up an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bonds imposed by one’s ignorance.
To any person prepared to enter with respect into the realm of his great and universal ignorance, the secrets of being will eventually unfold, and they will do so in a measure according to his freedom from natural and indoctrinated shame in his respect of their revelation.
To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practised, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behaviour of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know. And yet those with the courage to tread this path to real discovery are not only offered practically no guidance on how to do so, they are actively discouraged and have to set about it in secret, pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the frantic diversions and to conform with the deadening personal opinions which are being continually thrust upon them.
In these circumstances, the discoveries that any person is able to undertake represent the places where, in the face of induced psychosis, he has, by his own faltering and unaided efforts, returned to sanity. Painfully, and even dangerously, maybe. But nonetheless returned, however furtively.