Abstract
In this chapter it is argued that spirituality is the next if not last taboo that science has imposed on enquiry, similar to the taboo imposed on studying sexuality at the beginning of the twentieth century. This taboo needs to be broken in order for science and society to progress. In this chapter, some presuppositions are clarified and questions posed in relation to the content and reality of spiritual experience. The epistemological presuppositions of how we actually know that a spiritual experience is a spiritual experience and not just a hallucination, and how individual consciousness can actually touch reality if it is only an epiphenomenon of material organization are tackled and potential solutions offered. It is shown that by subscribing to a complementarist view of the mind-body problem or the way consciousness operates, inner experience can be seen as a way of approaching reality similar to the way science approaches reality through sense experience. Finally the question of what the referent of such an experience is addressed and a bridge built briefly towards the traditional philosophical notion of reality, God, and totality.
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In that sense such topics are indeed being studied scientifically, for instance the evolutionary benefit of being altruistic, or the role of religion in creating social coherence, or the question whether being religious produces health benefits (See Henrich et al. 2010; Norenzayan and Shariff 2008; Schwartz et al. 2003).
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Some may want to use other terms such as “noetic experience” meaning the experiential preverbal understanding that comes from such a type of inner experience. I stick to the term spiritual as explained in the first chapter.
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i.e. what is intended by the term; the reality addressed by it.
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As I stated: Wilber changes his outlook quickly, adapting to new points raised. Thus, he has long ago stopped being a protagonist of the transpersonal movement but his thought continues to influence it. With all the changes in his system and how he calls himself the idealist undercurrent seems to be a constant, if I am not mistaken. (See, for instance, Wilber 1998, 2000).
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We won’t follow up this discussion here as it is a side issue for the discussion. We share the argument and the comparatively plausible presupposition of neuroscience that the activity of the brain is a necessary precondition of consciousness, at least in the way we normally know it, see for instance Tremblay (2007) and Koch (2004).
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This does not negate, of course, that single individuals subscribing to an idealist position as many sages and enlightened individuals have done, such as Vivekananda, can be highly effective in the material world, and that within an integral world-view the material world is honoured in its own right; see Learning in Depth: A Case Study in Twin 5 × 5 Matrices of Consciousness (MacPhail 2013). But life practice and the lived world is not philosophy and does not provide in and of itself a satisfactory theoretical solution to the conundrum as to how matter should derive from spirit. It goes without saying that a materialist solution has the same problem the other way round. The fact that the majority of scientists seem to be happy with such a materialist solution does not make it truer or better than an idealist solution. It is just swapping one unsatisfactory solution for another.
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It is interesting to note that leading psychologists have rarely followed this trend. Brentano remained a transcendental philosopher for his whole life although he did not like German idealism at all. Wilhelm Wundt also followed a kind of parallel dualism. Jung was a follower of a transcendental monism in the vein of Neoplatonism. Freud surely adopted a materialist worldview, at least in his public writing, and it was only with the behaviourist turn and after that with the functionalist mainstream that a materialist ontology has also become the majority view in psychology. This was mainly due to the behaviourist authors, who brought clearly identifiable materialist philosophy into psychology. (See Baars 2003).
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Still a classic is Jantsch (1980) The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human implications.
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The fact that we have not understood what emergence actually is and how we can understand it is quite another matter. There are some interesting ideas in Kronz and Tiehen (2002) which show that, at least within the framework of quantum mechanical formalism, emergence can be understood formally as a tensor product of two matrices that cannot be factorized, i.e. not be reduced to their original matrices. This is a mathematical expression of entanglement.
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A good example is Tononi, G. (2004). An information integration theory of consciousness.
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See Noë, A. (2009) Out of Our Heads: Why You are Not your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness for a good rebuttal.
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A very sophisticated version of such a view is presented by Metzinger (2003) Being no one: the self-model theory of subjectivity, and in a more readable version by Metzinger (2008). The Ego Tunnel. The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. Another very popular materialist account is given by Dennett (1991) Consciousess Explained.
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This discussion was started by Nagel (1974) in his article What is it like to be a bat? and has not yet been resolved. For a brilliant account of how the qualia-argument jeopardizes a materialist account of consciousness see Chalmers (1996). The Conscious Mind. In Search of a Fundamental Theory and more recently Chalmers (2010) The Character of Consciousness.
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“Categories” are types of speech and notions, as Aristotle has already seen. A category mistake happens if I apply a notion from one category to another, for instance if I say “My food tastes 30 feet”. This is the type of language that can either be found in speakers who are not competent in a language, in mentally disordered people whose bizarre language is due to a lot of such mistakes, or, deliberately, in poetry, for instance if a poet were to say “The heaven was heavy with the pain of the slain below on the ground…”. Here the mixing of categories produces imagery that can convey meaning that is otherwise difficult to convey. In science category mistakes are problematic as they normally lead to incorrect conclusions. Mental and material notions simply belong to different categories, and emergence does not help either because emerging concepts normally belong to the same category. “Liquidity”, although emergent, is also a material concept. Recently Hoche (2008) pointed out again that an identity theory commits such a category mistake that would lead to meaningless sentences of the type of “Caesar is a prime number”. This is a sentence that is neither true nor false, but simply without meaning, because one category has been placed in relation to another category with which it is not compatible. For this simple formal reason, a purely materialist identity theory is not tenable.
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The classical analysis of causality according to Hume, who followed Ockham, is that causes precede their effects (temporal precedence), effects are normally contiguous to their causes (spatial contiguity), and produce those effects regularly (regularity, lawfulness). However, both are quick to point out that causality is an abstraction of our mind, not a thing found in nature.
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This case is reported on a number of websites, but in most detail by Sabom (1998), who was the neurosurgeon active in the operation. For a critical reader, this book is quite problematic because of the openly fundamentalist religious attitude of the author, who quickly jumps from a single case to all sorts of proof of God and immortality. If one is able to detach from these ideological problems of the text and just look at the case as an empirical piece of data, then this case has quite some epistemological value. Critics normally mention that the descriptions weren’t very precise and are rather from the final phase of the resuscitation process; therefore they might have been the experiences of a brain that is kicking back into action. If that is the case, they may not have been near death experiences or consciousness experiences during surgery, but resuscitation experiences. This critique doesn’t hold in my view in this case, because the experiences described are from the middle of the surgical process.
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The information about the impossibility of brain activity in one of his well documented cases are reported by Pim Van Lommel in his 2011 article Endless consciousness: A concept based on scientific studies of near-death-experiences. This long duration of cessation of brain activity in some patients with cardiac arrest and the fact that this experience is not universal in all patients, seems to make other attempts at explanation improbable. The important argument here is that there seem to be some experiences that occurred during a time when the brain is not active, and precisely not during awakening, and during which the EEG was likely to be flat. However, there are of course no studies where EEG has been taken. Apart from that, according to Van Lommel, one would have to expect that more people than the 13 % of cases he had documented would have near-death experiences if this experience were indeed the self-support mechanism of a dying system. (See van Lommel 2001, 2004; Marsh 2010).
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The fact that the Christian tradition has frequently and wrongly been connected with such dualist positions has its reason in the fact that it has only been partially integrated, and that more subtle distinctions have been blurred. Apart from that, Christianity has always, despite all attempts to the contrary, involved a Manichean stance. The scholastic Aristotelian formula of the soul as a form of the body (anima forma corporis) assumes that soul and body together are foundational for the living organism, and therefore belong together. The Aristotelian active intellect was, in the teaching of Thomas Aquinas and others, interpreted as a Divine element in man, the trace of the Divine in the soul or the similarity with God in the soul. It is this that reverts into the realm of the Divine. However, it would not be correct to interpret this as a dualist teaching of mind and body. See Fischer 2003; Schneider 1973.
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For those readers interested in the details: We have developed the arguments in more detail and technical precision in Römer and Walach (2011) Complementarity of phenomenal and physiological observables: A primer on generalised quantum theory and its scope for neuroscience and consciousness studie, and Walach and Römer (2011). Generalized entanglement – A nonreductive option for a phenomenologically dualist and ontologically monist view of consciousness.
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Plaum (1992) shows how psychology was the source of Bohr’s concept of complementarity. Most important for this were Bohr’s contacts with Harald Höffding, a philosopher, and with Edgar Rubin, a psychologist of perception who was one of the first people to introduce bistable images, images that can be seen in two ways. Additionally, Bohr was very likely familiar with William James, who had used complementarity as a notion in his book on psychology and applied it to two aspects of different personalities being present at the same time in some clinical problem. (See Plaum 1992; James 1981, p. 204). Niels Bohr’s contribution to epistomology (Rosenfeld 1963) has drawn the attention of the public to Bohr’s sources for his notion of complementarity. See also Rosenfeld (1961) for a fuller description.
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As I have pointed out earlier, modern day quantum mechanics does not need the notion, but is still using the same concept, however formalized as the treatment of incompatible observables, using a C*-algebra that can actually do this. We have shown in our concept of a generalization of quantum theory that exactly this is the core of the theory that cannot be given up (Atmanspacher et al. 2002; Filk, and Römer 2011). Kim and Mahler (2000) prove that complementarity cannot be reduced to another notion, and hence is indeed fundamental for our understanding of nature.
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Formally this is visible in what is called non-commuting operations that are written in mathematical language of the C*-algebra as, for instance p*q – p*p <> 0. This is the most general version of what is expressed in the Heisenberg uncertainty relationship that is key. You understand immediately, how strange this is, if you put the figures “2” and “3” in place of “p” and “q”. For in our, normal, Abelian, algebra the result would be clearly “0”. But in the formal structure of the C*-algebra this is not the case. This is the formal-mathematical expression of complementarity.
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K.H. Reich (2003), a former physicist-engineer (who built the very first hadron collider at the CERN) and psychologist of religious development has called such a new way of thinking relational contextual reasoning and has derived it directly from complementarity as known in quantum mechanics.
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This proposition follows Fahrenberg (1979). His attempts were taken up by Reich (ibid) in the process of developing his complementarist way of thinking and then followed by a more explicit exposition in Walach and Römer (2000). The concept is not new and had previously been proposed by Spinoza and others such as Feigl (1973). See also note 29 for more technical accounts.
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There are also other ways of moving ahead if we want to salvage the implicit unity with phenomenological multiplicity. Whitehead, for instance, and, later, process philosophy, support seeing the ultimate constituents of being as very basic mind-matter units which have both a physical and a mental pole. However this concept has other difficulties, such as how to derive a unity of experience from such a viewpoint. Whitehead has only insufficiently solved the problem and I have not seen any solution so far. See Whitehead (1978) and, for instance, Griffin (1988).
- 29.
This proposal would involve conceptualizing mental and physical systems as inequivalent representations of one underlying system arising out of a symmetry breaking process.
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Bohr (1966) has already pointed out that the concept of complementarity can not only be seen in a narrow sense and applied to physical entities, but that it is also a more general structure of epistemology which would also be applicable to the different perspectives of natural sciences and religion.
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Jorge Ferrer (2002) criticizes the epistemological prejudice of systematic authors within transpersonal psychology, especially Ken Wilber. In his view, stating that transpersonal psychology allows access to reality in the same sense and in a similar way of experiencing as normal science, and is therefore scientific, is making a category mistake. I think Ferrer is right on this point. However, by using complementarity to make the relationship between inner and outer experience systematic, and by providing a systematic place for consciousness to access reality by inner experience, I think we have at least a partial solution to the problem. I think Ferrer is also right in critiquing Wilber for using traditional criteria of scientific demarcation, which is basically buying into a critical rationalist understanding of science in the sense of Popper and Lakatos. This has been shown, within the theory of science itself, to be highly implausible, let alone sufficient for a positive grounding of epistemology of inner experience itself. This is because inner experience is, by definition, subjective, and therefore not inter-individually accessible. Spiritual traditions know pragmatic criteria of usefulness in life, and thus externally testable pragmatic criteria, which, however, can only be tested indirectly. This issue is also tackled in the next chapter. (See also Walach and Runehov 2010; Wilber 1998).
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See Erinnerungen an Franz Brentano (Stumpf 1919). On p. 93f. Stumpf says (translation mine): “Gleichzeitig mit der philosophischen Ausbildung lag Brentano die religiöse Vertiefung seines Schülers am Herzen. Er legte außerordentliches Gewicht auf die Meditation, d.h. die ruhige nachdenkliche Vertiefung in die Geheimnisse und überlieferten Begebenheiten der Religion, wie sie von der mittelalterlichen Asketik und Mystik gepflegt wurde. … ‘Wer nicht betrachtet,’ schrieb mir Brentano nach Göttingen Silvester 67, ‘scheint mir kaum zu leben, und ein Philosoph, der die Betrachtung nicht pflegt und übt, verdient den Namen nicht, er ist kein Philosoph, sondern ein wissenschaftlicher Handwerker und unter den Philistern der philiströseste. Lassen Sie sich um Gottes willen durch nichts in Ihrem Entschlusse wankend machen, tägliche eine kleine Zeit der Betrachtung zu weihen. Die Untreue gegen die Vorsätze, die Ihnen Gott einflößt, würde sich bitter rächen. Für immer würde Ihnen vielleicht die schönste Blüte des Lebens, erst halb erschlossen, verwelken. Könnte ich Ihnen nur aussprechen, wie unermesslich dieser Verlust sein würde! Ich kann es nicht, aber das eine sage ich mit Wahrheit, dass ich lieber allen meinen gelehrten Kram in den Wind streuen, ja dass ich lieber sterben würde, als dass ich auf die Betrachtung verzichtete.’… Bei der Abreise nach Göttingen schenkte er mir ein kleines griechisches Neues Testament… Das Aussehen des Büchleins bezeugt, wie der Dürstende, dem er’s schenkte, getrunken. – Together with philosophical training Brentano had the religious deepening of his student close at heart. He put extraordinary emphasis on meditation, i.e. the quiet, contemplative deepening of the secrets of religion that had been handed down and exercised by medieval ascetism and mysticism… “Whoever does not devote time to contemplation” he wrote to me in Göttingen at New Year’s eve 1867, “does not seem to be really alive, and a philosopher who does not practice contemplation does not deserve to be called one, but a scholarly craftsman at the most, and among hypocrites the most hypocritical. I beg you in the name of God let nothing change your decision to dedicate a short time each day to contemplation. The infidelity against those propositions that God has suggested to you would not go without bad consequences. Perhaps the most beautiful flower of life, only half opened, would wither forever. If I could only tell you how immeasurable the loss would be! I cannot, but this one I say in truth, that I had rather strewn all my scholarly trash into the wind, nay that I had rather die than let go of contemplation.” When I left for Göttingen he gave me as a present a small Greek New Testament… How it looks now proves to what extent the thirsting one who he had given it to has drunk from it” 93f.
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Carl Gustav Jung pointed out that there are specific moments in which this separation between inner and outer reality, sometimes called the Cartesian cut, can be suspended. In such moments outer reality seems to behave in a way as if it were answering or conforming to an inner sense or reality, and vice versa. Jung called this experience “synchronicity”. This is a notion which he had worked out in his dialogues with Wolfgang Pauli. It presupposes some relationship between inward and outward reality through meaning. (Jung 1952; Meier 2001).
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I repeat: This is only true for the West. There is a sophisticated science of inner experience in the East, in Vedanta and Yoga, and in the Buddhist tradition. The fact that the anatta teaching of Buddhism is to some extent contrary to Vedanta and a reaction towards it, both gleaned with the same methodology of meditation, tells us, however that it is not quite simple and straightforward. In that sense we are still at the beginning, whether in the East or in the West.
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Walach, H. (2015). Spirituality, Taboo, and Opportunity for Science. In: Secular Spirituality. Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09345-1_4
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