More on Consciousness

In Physical Spirituality I mentioned how the Jungian collective unconscious could be regarded as the processional spirit of our species or of our planet and may even constitute the personification of our Planetary Deity. In describing the psychedelic journey I mentioned that it is not only our personal habits in the form of our egos that need to be overcome in order to maximize the benefit of the drug, but that our Planetary Deity actively endeavours to have our consciousness remain architective. In both these cases, the counter-productive 'dark' or 'shadow' is seen as being both transpersonal and architective.

There is a significant consequence to seeing them in this way. Since these counter-productive forces are architective, they are spatially confined more or less to our planet. So the Jungian idea of a 'shadow' is not a universal one and should not be seen as as a fundamental feature of the universe in it's entirety (though there might be equivalents on other planets).

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The conceptions of sentience and consciousness as described in Physical Spirituality offer a way for us to live well (though not necessarily happily):

One's connective sentience does not require that it be conscious in order to function optimally, only that its narratives not be terminated. Contrarily, one's architective sentience insists on being conscious at all times. So they could be quite a well-suited couple, with one's architective sentience conscious at all times and one's connective sentience subconscious at all times.

Unfortunately one's connective sentience is not able to ensure the continuity of its narratives in the face of the world's architective distractions and impacts, so we need to bring it into consciousness every now and then to restore its narrative integrity. This is not an onerous or time-consuming task and can be done for example by meditating on a regular basis, though our social and cultural contexts generally make no allowance for this.

These "time out" moments are a small price to pay by one's architective sentience for the overall harmony they facilitate. And taking such "time out" moments require a decision by one's architective consciousness to voluntarily suspend itself, so we need to cultivate our architective consciousness to recognize the benefits of doing so.

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Connectivity is grossly overlooked in our normal consciousness. To see it, one must specifically choose to attend to it.

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Synaesthesia operates on the connectivity of our perceptions - it is a purely connective phenomenon.

In physical Spirituality, when discussing psychedelics, I offered synaesthesia as an analogy for the experience of cosmic integration. While talking about synaesthesia as a merging of one's senses, I didn't specifically mention one's sense of somatic feeling, though it was implied. The merging of one's other senses with one's somatic feeling is particularly significant though, for I also distinguished somatic feeling as the primary marker of connective sentience (with thought being the primary marker of architective sentience). So the merging of any of one's other senses with one's somatic sense gives a particularly powerful connective appreciation of that other sense, and we may see this when, for example, a piece of music or a visual scene generates a visceral response in one (a la synaesthesia), and one might say that the music has "hit the spot". Is this what great artistry is about - able to generate a synaesthesic somatic response?

While exercises such as meditation allow one to bring one's somatic feelings to one's attention, those feelings only assume a condition of greatness when they are mirrored or harmonized by what one is sensing in the external world through one's other senses such as hearing and sight. Is such synaesthesic somatic responsiveness to the external world the essence of "being high"?

Architectivity, of course, can provide intrusions to prevent such harmonization, whether internal or external.

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When we first perceive connectivity consciously we still have the architective habit of focusing on each perception individually. Indeed, to start with we might still see connectivity with architective eyes as it were. The trick is to realize that we are actually able to take in all our connective perceptions at the same time.

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Connective perceptions likely have a frequency. I find it helps to start the switch into connective consciousness by focusing on the highest frequency I can perceive, after which all the lower frequencies become perceptible.

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Musics (frequency) are connective timekeepers, clocks are architective time keepers.

Architective time becomes less relevant when tripping as frequency becomes the dominant timekeeper.

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Emergence by simple complexification implies that consciousness comes from having a sufficient number of neurons. It also implies that those with more neurons are smarter. But Physical Spirituality suggests that life did not emerge simply as a series of complexifications, but as a result of the emergence of novel and unexpected fields of serial expression. That is, it is only when a complexification delivers a suitable new field of serial expression that consciousness might emerge.

The fact that we are conscious indicates that fields of expression amenable to consciousness are possible.

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Our ability to 'read' organisms and people directly, that is, not through an architective language, improves markedly when our connective sentience is conscious.

Such connective 'reading' gives us a bigger but less precise picture than a detailed architective examination.

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Just because a group of people (or beings) all have the connective mode of sentience conscious does not mean they are necessarily "in tune" with each other. Being "in tune" with another means not only sharing the connective mode of consciousness but sharing the same frequency or harmonic thereof, as well as keeping up with any changes in each other's tunes, so that the "being in tune" persists across changes.

Nonetheless, when a group of people do all have the connective mode of sentience conscious, it becomes easier for them to get in tune.

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Another possible way that psychoactive drugs might work is by altering the paths by which our brain neurons aggregate into networks. By aggregating in non-normal patterns the neurons would generate non-normal fields of expression. Our minds can play in these new fields, with different drugs making different fields of expression available to us. Psychedelics tell us that the smallest change in brain chemistry can have a very profound effect.

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If all our senses enter our brains as vibrations it could mean that at some early point in the process of perception, all our perception is connective and our architective perceptions only arise as a subsequent extract from this primary connective perception. Using Iain McGilchrist's notation, the left hemisphere does not perceive reality directly, but takes snapshots or intermittent samples of the right hemisphere's primary perception, which it subsequently abstracts and analyses. So Iain is right in saying that right hemisphere sentience is primary - BUT this primacy only applies to our human (and perhaps other brain based) perception of reality, not to the ontology of reality.

This extraction mechanism of architective perception could give rise to an architective equivalent of our perceptibility limit (as described in the chapter on psychedelics in Physical Spirituality). While our perceptibility limit would determine the maximum rate at which we can resolve frequential change, an extraction limit would determine the maximum rate at which we can resolve architective configurational events such as processional steps. Our frequential rate vibrates while our extraction rate ticks.

Our extraction limit could be sufficiently regular for us to compare it to every procession we encounter and thereby provide a base by which we sense the passing of time. I do believe that for any organism to experience time it must somehow be ticking.

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Should these perceptibility and extraction limits, or rather their respective processes, be singular ( that is, be the same across all our perceptions or extractions), they could constitute carriers of our connective and architective sentiences.

As the carrier frequency of our connective sentience, frequencies above our perceptibility limit would not be resolved while any below could be emulated by it (to a very good approximation, at least).

Similarly, as the "carrier rate" of our architective sentience, configurational event rates above our extraction limit would not be resolved while rates below could be emulated by it.

This is why we like to "get high" rather than low. Raising our perceptibility limit expands our connective sentience. Raising our extraction limit expands our architective sentience.

So we "tune up" to cosmic integration by raising our perceptibility limit, then "tune in" to the song of the Cosmic Deity which we are then capable of 'hearing'.

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Using the idea of consciousness as being sentient of one's own sentience, I suspect that adding yet another layer of sentience, as in being sentient of one's own consciousness, would also add another layer to one's intelligence. Perhaps the presence of more layers might account for the higher levels of conscious intelligence in humans as compared to other animals.