Taking control of an ' illusion'

Taking control of an illusion

Posted on October 5, 2010 | Author: Mukul Sharma |

Is the self — as in the thing whichis‘me’,whichapparently is in charge of things that are ‘mine’ — really an illusion, as a lot of enlightened mystics, Eastern faith systems and sages down the ages have been telling us?

Much of the resistance to this concept springs from ingrained, reinforced habits and deep personal feelings of experiencing a self which seems to be very much there all the time and being very much in control of all our conscious decisions, ideation and

Lately, however, a few chinks in this armoury are beginning to get noticed by scientists.

As mentioned here earlier, in a series of experiments spanning the 1980s the psychologist and consciousness researcher, Benjamin Libet demonstrated that unconscious electrical processes in the brain actually precede people’s conscious decisions.

Subjects hooked up to instruments were instructed to carry out a simple motor action such as pressing a switch and then told to record when they first became aware of the wish or urge to do so.

When Libet compared the actual time of the start of brain activity with the time the subjects reported their awareness of wanting to act, he was surprised to find a lag of several milliseconds.

As of 2008, other researchers have found that in some cases, brain activity precedes a subject’s awareness by up to seven seconds.

Materialist philosophers have interpreted these results as bolstering their long-standing claim that consciousness — that is, the mind, self or ‘me’ — is merely an epiphenomenon or byproduct of the brain which only retrospectively creates a scenario of being in command and that we possess no real free will as such.

But in that case, how does one follow the wise counsel to get rid of the illusion of self if there’s no one there to do the ridding?

That’s where Libet’s experiments come in again.

He also found that although the brain is responsible for initiating an action because our consciousness is too slow to do so, it’s still fast enough to have the power to ‘veto’ that action — something called ‘free wont’.

Meaning, it appears there’s someone in the saddle after all holding the reins.

So, even if the brain does generate an epiphenomenon that creates the illusion of being in control — an illusion we blindly embrace — we still have the power to reject that as merely a chimera. Just like the enlightened have been telling us all along.

Depth of property rights

The depth of property rites
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| Author: Mukul Sharma

There's something very sad and self-defeating about possessing things. Take land.

Forget the bigger picture about how we’re all going to die and take nothing with us — definitely not a large chunk of real estate — but how much of what we think we possess do we really?

Like, what part of that freehold actually belongs to us? The answer is, it depends.

On the surface, for instance, the flat two dimensional area of a hundred or thousand square metres is certainly ours to enjoy for as long as our lineage produces progeny but what about depth?

How deep do our property rights go? Well, the cheerless answer to this is, very little. In fact about 0.00002% of the Earth’s diameter.

In other words, if gold, fossil or aburied meteorite is lying plumb under the master bedroom at a depth of a hundred metres it can’t usually be claimed by anyone because, depending on the jurisdiction or mineral rights involved, that part of land belongs to someone else which is usually the government.

It makes sense. Otherwise, because the earth is round one would eventually infringe on someone else’s property on the antipodal side of the globe.

Fortunately, this is not much of an issue because we cannot possibly explore that deep. Yet people like to think that what they mean by owning property is owning it to the centre of the planet.

Sadly, this misguided feeling of absolute territoriality has overlapped into other modes of tenure too.

Slave-owners, lovers and parents, for example, have for thousands of years continuously laboured under the delusion that their serfs, mates or offspring are totally theirs to the depths of other’s being — until, of course, they’re brought rudely back to the surface of the skin when uprisings occur, infidelities abound and children rebel.

Yet very few learn that what we actually think we own is a projected flat outer surface and perhaps to a few millimetres below — if that — and that what lies way underneath can’t be claimed as ours because it’s not in our jurisdiction even metaphorically and never will be.

This, too, makes sense, else we would be infringing on a much larger whole which the person undeniably is and which also involves many others coming in from different directions.

Again, this isn’t much of an issue because no one can possibly explore that deep. And we should be thankful for that because very often we ourselves happen to be the other person.

Accidental Spirituality aka Divine Madness

An utterly sane madness

| Author: Mukul Sharma |

Findings published in the latest issue of Neurone indicate that damage to the back part of the brain induces people to become more aware of themselves and boosts their spiritual thinking. Researchers from the University of Udine in Italy interviewed 88 people with brain tumours of various severities before and after their surgeries and later mapped the exact area of the brain that was operated on. They found that those who had operations performed on the left and right posterior parietal regions of the brain were significantly more likely to be rated as having a“stable personality dimension related to transcendental self-referential awareness” after their surgery than those whose operations were performed on other areas of the brain.

Aside from the induced spirituality, the team’s study also noticed differences in the way the patients dealt with their illnesses following their surgeries. Those who had lost posterior parietal tissue, for example, were now less troubled by their cancers and their own mortality while those who had had their anterior portion removed tended to react more bitterly and were less able to accept their condition.

Does this mean those who develop a sense of oneness with the universe and exhibit heightened self awareness are in some way brain damaged? Could it also be true that that mysticism and madness are somehow related — a skewed view that a lot of people from various cultures have long held? After all, the study’s lead researcher did not suggest that this was a great way for inducing a spiritual dimension in people; rather, he was of the opinion that further research along such lines could one day lead to new strategies for treating at least some forms of mental illness.

Another way of looking at it, however, is to think of spirituality as an emergent phenomenon arising from latent tendencies lying dormant in us which can sometimes accidentally or artificially be triggered by tumours. This would mean those who consciously or unconsciously make an effort to be connected to nature, lost in the moment, detached from time or just feel like everything in existence is one single organism are also somehow altering their brains in the process. And altering it in ways that evolution never intended or could without the occasional pathology of cancer. It’s hardly insane thinking; if anything, it’s a divine madness.