Michael Patterson
Member
As with so many things, the general public are often ahead of the specialists. I agree Idealism answers some of the prejudice against mind, but mainly to people steeped in materialist metaphysics. Dean Radin is on the same path, crunching the percentages to show real but marginal effects on reality for the appraisal and concern of physical fundamentalists. For anyone not in the game, it seems like a lot of hard work to get to the self-evident conclusion that we are conscious not epiphenomenally, but actually.
Personally I'm more sympathetic to Sheldrake's approach. Identifying that consciousness is likely to be an agent in morphogenesis, he put morphic resonance out there as an idea, for others to test. Most of the challenge is from metaphysical prejudice, not glitches in the hypothesis, but that's true for Kastrup and Radin also. People can waste a lot of valuable life debating influences that are self-evident with people for whom they are extraordinary. The problematisation of the mundane is not something that interests me beyond staying on top of the ideas. Sheldrake manages to do the science without being defined by it. I regret the use of words like magic in Radin's scientific vocabulary, but it may be the lexicon of the publisher not the lab.
I seem to recall Radin flagging an interest in magic - in the sense of being aware that things he was working on in the lab were also being induced in 'the wild'. For me Radin is an expression of a long campaign to invalidate and mistrust personal direct experience - so he seeks to validate what is known and experienced informally in a formal way - as defined by materialistic science. It has set the agenda by pushing the invalidation and mistrust of direct personal experience.
No you can accept the premise and work against it by demonstrating that is false - as Radin strives to do - or you can reject the premise and dismiss attempts to invalidate direct personal experience as a kind of tyranny. At what point, once you have demonstrated that the premise is false, do you decide to forget the formal science stuff and just become a magician?
As an experiencer who entered a deep existential crisis many years ago I was forced, for the sake of my own sanity, to make a choice. It was evident that neither science nor religion was going to help. I was either mad or bad to them. I chose to believe I was neither mad nor bad, and so had to find a truth and a reality that validated my faith in myself. That was a long and difficult and painful (and dangerous) business. There's a lot more to this stuff than is apparent in the grip of a crisis - or a conventional frame of mind.
So there is another dimension to this matter. The deeper traditions of magic and spiritual disciplines function within a multi-dimensional community that has its own forms of governance. That is to say that there are claimed hierarchies that oversee experimentation and study. It is worthwhile considering Radin's, and Sheldrake's work as if these hierarchies are relevant and pertinent. While both operate in relation to a materialist scientific culture and its institutions they arguably also operate in relation to the other 'esoteric' hierarchy - which offers, guidance, support and inspiration.
The fragmentary claims about deeper levels of consciousness and the presence of non-physical agents rarely get into the proposition that there is a coherent community of skilled actors which influences the lives of folk in physical form. Its as if there is order and organisation in the physical and chaos and disarray beyond. But that's not what is reported from multiple sources.
Part of the materialist mentality is to invalidate the 'inner reality' as illusion, delusion, fantasy or error. So we don't think about it in organised or communal terms.
Long's work provides fragmented cameos featuring agents of various degrees of potency. But nobody asks where they go and what they do after the NDEr wakes up. We are left to marvel at the 'fact' the encounters, as if that alone is all there is - and that is sufficient.
There is, in fact, a considerable body of evidence that suggests there is a far more complex nature to that invisible aspect of our reality. Trying to understand what Radin is about from entirely our side of the fence is a little one-sided. Radin validates magic, and we respond to Radin not from the magician's perspective, but the materialists'.
Reading though the above comments - many very insightful - it seemed to me that there was a general furious agreement, subject to some nuanced and clever hair splitting. But where do we go now? If real what next?