Great Enigmas of Psychic Life

Toward the Next State of Humanity's Initiation, Part One

It was a delight to interview idealist philosopher Bernardo Kastrup earlier this week (listen here). Kastrup proposes that the most logical perspective is that reality is mental in nature, a projection of an underlying consciousness that is instinctive and unitary. As he puts it:

The body of my work is a defense of what in the West is called the philosophy of Idealism. In the East, essentially the same view is entailed by the philosophies of Nondualism. According to this view, all reality consists in excitations of consciousness, there being no need to infer a material world fundamentally outside consciousness. As such, reality is akin to vibrations of a 'membrane' of pure consciousness, an idea indirectly corroborated by M-theory. The intricate patterns and regularities of these vibrations are the universe around us. Yet, in the same way that there is nothing to a vibrating membrane but the membrane itself, there is nothing to the universe but consciousness itself. The universe is a behavior of consciousness, not an ontological entity outside and independent of consciousness.

Over time, I will unpack some of the places where Kastrup and I differ. I suppose one difference is that he sees reality unfolding from this underlying field of consciousness in an indeterminate and instinctive way. There is no particular purpose or teleology to this unfolding. I am more persuaded by the views put forth by visionaries and thinkers including Amit Goswami, Rudolf Steiner, and Sri Aurobindo (and found in many ancient and indigenous cosmologies), who propose that there is a directed  evolutionary impetus, a kind of cosmic blueprint, which leads to an ongoing intensification of self-reflective awareness that may take different forms in various incarnational cycles.

In a sense, we differ in that Kastrup (and he can correct me if I get this wrong) understands our reality to be something like a dream of this instinctive consciousness, without any particular purpose beyond the exploration of itself. I sense/perceive/understand the universe as more like an incredibly intricate art work / masterpiece that advances toward deeper intensities of self-reflective being and self-knowing. There is a kind of symphonic structure of endless themes-and-variations, expertly orchestrated, but in sense happening thoughtlessly, in a perfect flow state.

In The Self Conscious Universe, Goswami, drawing upon Aurobindo, proposes that consciousness in a sense directs or makes use of physical and biological evolution to create increasingly sophisticated, self-aware beings, with more capacities and more freedom. Like Aurobindo, he suspects that this evolutionary impetus eventually leads from our current level of mind, intelligence, and conditioned awareness to what Aurobindo calls Supermind or “the Supra-mental.” a more evolved condition of integrated knowledge, or truth consciousness. When we attain this “supra-mental” condition, we will possess fundamentally greater abilities to transform our world directly, without requiring the crude mediation of technology.¹

This brings me, actually, to the very beginning of what I hoped to write about today: The great enigmas of our psychic life, the vastly untapped, occult potential we find within the Psyche, when we dare attempt to unlock it.