In 2001, a remarkable medical case came to the attention of the scientific community.1 A 51-year-old male from England was admitted to hospital with a sudden, severe headache. Scans revealed multiple cerebral artery aneurysms, which were causing hemorrhage in the brain. The patient – named Tommy – was subjected to surgery and subsequently released from hospital.
Tommy was a builder who reported having, prior to this event, a short temper, an aggressive personality, and no interest in creative arts. Yet, about two weeks after his surgery, Tommy began what was to become years of prolific artistic production. His works included poetry, drawing, painting, and sculpture, all of surprising quality. His obsession with art led him to cover the walls, floors, and ceilings of his house several times over with paintings. As he claimed, each element of his drawings wanted to explode into something more, in a never-ending stream of artistic inspiration and creative insight. It was as if Tommy’s brain were being constantly flooded with impressions and images from a source yet to be identified. Somehow, the physical effects of the hemorrhage and subsequent surgery on the structure and function of his brain opened a valve to a major pipeline of impressions and inspiration.
Dr. Mark Lythgoe, the scientist who investigated this case most closely, used a metaphor to explain what happened.2 According to him, two major processes are at work in our brains all the time: one is an excitatory process, responsible for the influx of new ideas; the other is an inhibitory process, called “latent inhibition,” responsible for focusing our attention on the perceptions that are most practical and important to our immediate priorities and survival. He speculated that, in Tommy’s case, the inhibitory process had been damaged. With his latent inhibition diminished, Tommy then struggled to handle all the uninhibited impressions that kept flooding into awareness. What he then did was to create art. Scientists postulate that the excitatory process is, somehow, a brain-based process explainable by, and reducible to, the physiological mechanisms of the brain. However, as compulsory as it may seem to be according to the materialistic paradigm, this is still an assumption, for the implied mechanisms have not been pinned down.
Tommy’s case could, instead, be interpreted according to the “mind at large” metaphysical model popularized by acclaimed author Aldous Huxley and eminent philosopher Charlie Dunbar Broad in the 1950s: that mind is intrinsically capable of remembering all that has ever happened and perceiving all that happens in the entire universe. The nervous system would have then evolved to sort through this abundance of impressions and filter out everything that was not useful to the immediate survival of the physical body.3 What becomes available to awareness after this filtering process is mostly the inputs from our five senses, which correlate well with the location in space and time of the physical body and, therefore, are most practical to its survival. Perhaps our five senses have themselves evolved not to produce information, but as parts of a selection and emphasis mechanism responsible for picking out impressions, anyway available to consciousness, based on a criterion of locality in both space and time that was most relevant to body survival. Such metaphysics echoes the philosophies of several schools of mysticism and spirituality, particularly those from the East, which claim that consciousness is a unified field capable – by its very non-local, field-like nature – of extra-sensory perception across time and space.
My own metaphysics, as discussed in my earlier work “Rationalist Spirituality,”4 points in the same direction. I have argued – though I cannot repeat the complete substantiation of that complex argument here – that we are all, in principle, capable of accessing a universal record of all conscious impressions ever registered by any conscious entity. I have called such record a “universal memory of qualia.”
What all these metaphysical speculations suggest is that the process of latent inhibition is the only one firmly grounded on the physical nervous system. The excitatory process responsible for creativity, on the other hand, may not be entirely brain-based. Instead, it may entail the non-local influx of impressions and knowledge inherent to consciousness. According to this interpretation, in Tommy’s case a physical perturbation of normal brain structures and operation may have compromised his latent inhibition, causing his brain to lose its ability to filter the influx of impressions from the universal memory of qualia. One wonders if a partial and temporary disablement of these filters could also be achieved on a safe, controlled, voluntary basis, without brain damage.
If these speculations are correct, then the most direct and efficient way to acquire knowledge about reality is through a partial and temporary disablement of the filtering mechanisms of the brain. Indeed, as we will see in the next chapter, there is an abundance of empirical evidence that, through technologies like meditation, yoga, hypnosis, prayer, lucid dreaming, shamanic rituals, sensory and sleep deprivation, fasting or other ordeals, etc., people throughout history have been able to perturb their evolved brain filters and temporarily tap into a universal source of direct knowledge.
We can further speculate that the direct impressions received in such non-ordinary states of consciousness can be partially imprinted onto the physical brain through collapse of the brain’s quantum wave function. This would allow for the imprinting of extra-sensory impressions onto the brain without violating causality or any of the known laws of physics, like energy and momentum conservation. Scientists like Henry Stapp5 and Roger Penrose6 have proposed various concrete mechanisms by means of which such imprinting could take place.
It is my view that the repository of experiences and direct knowledge entailed by the universal memory of qualia is not necessarily physical in nature. When stating this, I do not mean to imply substance dualism, but simply that the mechanisms behind such record may be grounded on aspects of nature not yet known to our science and not even touched upon by our materialistic models. That said, there have been attempts to find a physical basis for a form of universal, non-local information storage. To mention only one prominent example, eminent Hungarian philosopher Ervin Lászó sought to link an “Akashic field” of universal information to the vacuum state of quantum field theory.7
So the hypothesis I am postulating here is the following: consciousness is a non-local field phenomenon not caused by, nor reducible to, the brain, but simply coupled to the brain. All understanding and knowledge ever registered by a conscious entity survives ad infinitum in the field of consciousness as permanent experiences, or qualia. Therefore, all universal knowledge is, in principle, accessible by any conscious entity. It is the local attention filters of the nervous system, evolved as a consequence of earlier survival advantages, which prevent us from accessing this universal repository of knowledge. But through perturbations of ordinary brain operation, which partially and temporarily disable or bypass some of these filters, one can gain awareness of it. The consequent input of knowledge can be imprinted onto the brain – where it is later interpreted, articulated, and reported – through a process of quantum wave function collapse.
While currently not corroborated by science, this hypothesis is logical and consistent with empirical evidence. Importantly, it also does not contradict current scientific fact – perhaps only scientific prejudices – for science today does not have even tentative explanations for the phenomenon of consciousness. Indeed, in what is often referred to as the “explanatory gap” or the “hard problem of consciousness,” we have not been able to articulate even a tentative model for reducing consciousness to supposedly non-conscious material substrates.8 As philosopher David Chalmers put it, referring to earlier work by renowned physicist Steven Weinberg, “despite the power of physical theory, the existence of consciousness does not seem to be derivable from physical laws.”9
The “mind at large” hypothesis formulated in this chapter will be our starting point and conceptual framework for the investigation that follows. I do not ask you to simply believe in this hypothesis at this point, but just that you maintain an open mind about it. In the next chapter, we will look at some of the technologies for awareness expansion that have been used in different human societies throughout history. By “awareness expansion” I mean any method through which one can partially and temporarily bypass the brain’s attention filters and gain direct awareness of the universal repository of knowledge postulated above.