The World Within

One of the early insights I had in my "religious" period was that the entire universe we perceive is completely "in our heads". We cannot directly perceive the real world around us. On the other hand, by nature, we systematically ignore this fact and proceed as if what we experience around us is "out there" in the "real" world.

My involvement with "charismatic" Christianity forced me to truly "own" this insight. It really is "all in your head". "Charismatics" believe in (and actually experience) a world filled with miracles and the presence of the supernatural. I often encountered people who had had a "peak experience" and had a few myself. Such experiences seem to tear open the curtain between our inner world and the world "outside", revealing deep insights and invoking ecstatic feelings of awe and wonder. People tend to describe these experiences in terms of the vocabulary they already know. For example, a charismatic Christian will describe them in Christian terminology, such as claiming to have "seen God" or experienced the "spirit of God'.

People strongly resist any attempt to "explain" these experiences, preferring to hang on to the supernatural interpretation, especially since these are some of the most precious moments in their lives -- they don't want them "explained away".

I had a lively interest in psychology since my years in University. I was particularly interested in studies of cats and frogs that gave us the earliest hints of how processed and massaged our view of the world is, even before signals reach the higher centres of the brain. For example, the visual cortex identifies boundaries of objects, slightly higher centres identify things like "dogs" and "refrigerators". Even knowing this, though, like everybody, I took what I saw to be more or less an accurate representation of the world. The fact that I was actually "observing" the contents of my own brain was easily forgotten.

At the time, I was also very interested in dreams. The apparent reality of the dream scene fascinated me and I was able to become aware that I was dreaming without waking up (lucid dreaming). I was able to perform experiments and remember the results. I learned how the brain (at least my brain) was unable to handle even moderate complexity such as:

• Creating stable, readable text (reading is an enormously complex learned task)
• Creating a mirror image of my face 
• Simulating a glass shattering on the floor

On the other hand, many experiences were surprisingly realistic, including the feeling of touch.

I came away from these experiments with a "feel" for how much of reality was created by the brain and how much the brain utterly depended on a flow of information from the "real" world to create what we experience. So it's not all in your head. There is a real world out there and it's responsible for what you perceive, however indirectly. Much later, in my days as a computer expert, I learned about how amazingly little raw information comes in to our brain from the outside. For example, the bandwidth (capacity) of the optic nerve is nowhere near the bandwidth handled by your Internet connection. Almost everything you see is constructed from memory, assumptions and a little dribble of new information.

Back in the 70's, I came to the issue with some experience with LSD and a few manic episodes. I knew that strange things could appear "out there" in the real world that were (in retrospect) created by "crossed wires" in my head. Many people go through their lives without experiencing a full-blown, 3D illusion-the proverbial "Pink Elephant". Or we might say, they never realize that everything they experience is a full-blown illusion.

Getting back to peak experiences and the world of charismatic christianity, given my background and prior experience, it was natural for me to think of these magical experiences as happening entirely in a world between the ears of the believer. For me, this was not an "explanation" since, if you think of it this way, there is not much that requires "explanation".

This all leads me to an insight that was crucial to everything that followed. Something so obvious to me that I found it impossible to explain, because it was not obvious to others, who had not gone through the experiences outlined above.

One common aspect of "peak" experiences is the impression that there is a living God behind all reality. Behind creation or the heavens or little green apples for example. This seems like a direct perception. God is real. But of course this is all about a universe simulated in a brain. Of course that universe is alive. It is created by billions of living neurons firing away in your head. In a sense, it's your perception of yourself - the "producer" of the inner movie that plays in your head.  You don't go around thinking of the entire world around you as being manufactured in your brain. But it is. This opens the door to a perception of life in virtually anything from rocks to idols to teddy bears to the universe as a whole.

For thousands of years, philosophers in the East and West have grappled with this insight: that we really don't know anything about the world for sure. In the West, idealism tries to make something useful of the insight but fails because of the intrinsic prejudice in the West that favours word games over experience. In the East, Buddhism and especially Zen came to completely accept the fact that the world as experienced is a creation of the mind. Although there is no shortage of philosophy (words) spun around this insight, Eastern practice focuses on the experience, or what Western philosophy dismisses as the "purely subjective".  Zen accepts that all perceived reality is a story we tell ourselves, without rejecting the reality of the external world. We approach understanding of true reality by casting aside illusions that are created by our brain. Zen is inherently skeptical of "belief" and talk about experience. While all we perceive about the world is an approximation, some approximations are better than others.

Modern skepticism leans heavily in the opposite direction. The skeptic considers all evidence with a "grain of salt". There is a tendency among skeptics to entirely discount raw evidence of the senses as anecdotal or "merely" subjective. In the skeptical world of Science, phenomena are real only if they are repeatable and available (at least in principle) to anyone. Oddly, many of the most important advances in Science challenge this assumption, especially in Quantum Mechanics, where (so far) it has proven impossible to remove the observer from the phenomena observed. 

I have found it possible to follow Zen and hang on to skepticism. It's possible to be skeptical about everything, including what is happening inside my head. But it's also possible to pay close attention to my thoughts and sensations -- they are me. 

As to God, my problem is that people who use this word generally ignore all the considerations above. To them, these insights would seem to relegate their most cherished belief to a matter of opinion. To me, it makes perfect sense that a person experiences God and is absolutely sure that God exists. But he cannot mean anything other than that God exists in his head. Since I have no access to his private experience, I need to take his word for it. Of course, it's also possible he's lying about his own experience (definitely true in some cases), but that's a subject for another essay.

Let us consider the Pope, who (I think) genuinely lives in a universe populated by saints, the risen Christ and the Virgin Mary in heaven. People are mystified by the fact that I totally applaud the Pope's point of view when I also view his "theology" as pure fantasy. It's pretty simple. I can accept that it's all real to him - part of his universe. He's not insane. He's perhaps not quite as skeptical as I am, but he's certainly not alone in that.

We're all in this together.