Did I dream this belief,
or did I believe this dream?
- Peter Gabriel
"In the further adventures of Achilles, he again crosses paths with the Tortoise just as he is pondering certain imponderables thrown up by an unfortunate accident involving excessive physical activity and mild concussion.
Achilles: Tortoise! I'll have a word with you, since you're going nowhere fast.
Tortoise: By all means. Nothing would give me more pleasure!
[at this point, authorial licence gives way to reality...]
Achilles: I have been thinking about when I went unconscious. When I was dreaming, do you think that was some function of the brain?
Tortoise: I do.
Achilles: What do you think is the evolutionary purpose of it?
Tortoise: My 'official' reaction would be to say that dreaming is probably an accidental by-product of analytical thinking
Achilles: hmmm, not very convincing
Tortoise: I'll elucidate then. Let us consider that we have this function to think analytically and not just instinctively like most other animals
Achilles: So animals don't dream?
Tortoise: Clearly they do! But their dream is a shadow of their particular form of thought process, as ours is a shadow of how we think. I wouldn't like to begin to address what I have not experienced, when explaining what I have experienced is such a challenge.
So we were considering the analytical thought process, a function that doesn't go away when we sleep. Working solely with memory data, as opposed to sense data, the analytical thought process is on shaky ground. It confabulates fantastical visions for the 'experiential self' by performing its normal function, which is to recognise, assign nominal or symbolic value and classify. That is, it reads memory, performs some processing (which was designed for waking operation), and writes back to memory.
That is my 'official' line.
I would stand by that (because it's not really very deep at all, so it's reasonably safe).
However, if I was going out on a limb, I might say that there is more scope for interaction with unusual sensory perception when asleep simply because our analytical minds are shut down.
I might go so far as to say that this extra-ordinary interaction causally precedes our evolution - i.e. we dream because the dream state is there to be had, in the same way that we see because sight is possible.
Now, I wouldn't defend that view since, by all standards of reason, a defence is impossible!
Achilles: What do you think of aboriginal concepts of Dream time?
Tortoise: I know of it, it's a mythology built around the common idea of the mythic oneness. I wouldn't gainsay it - we know time to be entirely subjective, so I have no problem with Dream time as a metaphor for reality, outside of a single frame of reference.
Achilles: Is it possible, do you think, that the evolutionary consciousness rises out of dream time, and is used to pick and choose its subjective linear experience
Tortoise: Evolutionary consciousness? Explain.
Achilles: Well, consciousness as an evolving construct - rising out of the primordial soup as it were.
Tortoise: Consciousness associated with what? A single human? The collective unconscious? Gaia?
Achilles: A single human - but at different levels it drops further into a larger "dreaming"
I just feel that what I experienced was something akin to a dream time experience, and that it was my evolutionary consciousness, that values my linear experiences, that pulled me out and kept my alive...although, the human experience also helped me, as I was woken up by another human being.
Tortoise: To my mind, it's a double question really
a) does consciousness come from before, and last after, the human body?
b) is there really a single great consciousness so that a single personality is just an illusion, one that we can 'awake' from (whether that be in dreams or in death)?
At first reaction, I honestly can't answer either question. These are truly imponderables.
Achilles: Well, if b) is true, is it possible that the dream isn't a shadow of the waking self, as you seemed to be suggesting?
Rather, that the dream is a fundamental state of being that we can all share and partake of, and where we all become incredibly similar...but in which the identity becomes increasingly malleable.
Tortoise: My own experience of dreams leads me to believe that most dream experiences are akin to normal conscious experience, and all the stuff about identity being malleable results from the faculty of imagination - modelling!
BUT...I cannot deny there is possibly something more happening.
Achilles: Surely though, what we bring back from dreams is influenced by our own waking self
Tortoise: I think I see what you mean - that we reinterpret the dream experience on waking.
Achilles: yeah
Tortoise: We 'remember' the dream, based on a model that is built by our conscious mind?
Achilles: yup
Tortoise: Well, I agree that may affect remembrance...but it doesn't actually imply anything different is happening when we dream.
I am open to the idea that there is something extra happening, but I can't really approach that idea of a greater consciousness...because the more I think about it, the more clear it is that any rational answer will only approximate a model of a level of consciousness which I cannot understand or even discuss rationally!
For instance, imagine a Gaia consciousness that persists based on a substrate of electrical energy within the world [or solar system or galaxy, why not?]. We have a concept there, but what more can we say about it? the why, how, what...none of our experience can begin to help us form answers.
Achilles: I think our analytical brain does influence the dream a lot, even during sleep...yet what was strange for me was how little influence it had during unconsciousness, and then its sudden attempt to reassert itself. It felt like the evolutionary process speeded up in a second, pulling random impulses into a fully formed human.
Tortoise: Ok, so I have a concept of some rather unapproachable level of consciousness, and you have your unconsciousness/dream concept, which brings us back to your recent personal experience...and I feel I can say this much:
Consider the analytical, self-oriented left-brain part as 'You' for a moment. 'You've' basically got a will to live, or a will to die - stay in the human body, or exit it. You can think of dying as the end of things, or as reunion with the One, enlightenment. Yet if there is this greater consciousness, then it doesn't matter what you think, because you can't approximate the truth with thought...and you can't escape it.
If it true, then when you die you join it.
If not, when you die you rot.
Seems like I just made a good rational argument for not worrying about spirituality too much!
Achilles: I think its the "you" part that I am having difficulty coming to terms with!
Tortoise: Is there anything more that we can say regarding the transcendence of dreams? What is the 'I' if all we need to do to wash it away, is to fall asleep? Are we remembering a true state of experience when we sleep or when we wake?
A good question, Achilles, and I thank you!"
4 comments:
Zenben:
Evolutionary conciousness.
Does it mean it’s a matter of time that humans will evolve to become enlightened and consciousness grows up if we wait long enough? I’m gonna wait, lotus-sitting on a lawn, until my enlightment comes to me ;o) Oooohmmm! (until it starts raining…).
Dreams are said by some to be electric impulses which generate random images taken from real experiences housed in our memory. According to that, these images don’t build the stories we rememeber afterwards when awake, but our aware mind attempts to make sense of those building up something with cognitive significance (although it’s a mixture of nonsense and sense). Then… our mind is imposing its interpretation. Are we missing something else? In the same way we hear a fuzzy whisper and our brain attempts to make it understandable (trapped in a left-brained world! A left-brained translation for us logic-beings of reason…). I guess it’s brain’s job after all.
Aye ‘don ‘now, aye just ‘don ‘now.
Gimme sum truth.
Always a pleasure.
Ibichka
Evolutionary consciousness is a tricky one. In this piece, (which was based on a real conversation, where I am the Tortoise, in case I didn't make that clear) I believe Achilles was referring to the growth or extrusion of consciousness from a ground state into a physical 'substrate' or vessel - that is, a human being. Of course, that ground state assumes what would be called the collective unconscious in the Jungian framework (correct me if I'm wrong in the Jungian reference).
With a collective unconscious in place, your view of the phrase 'evolutionary conciousness' could also apply to that picture - that the collective unconscious might be subject to evolutionary processes and thus be changing toward a more 'enlightened' state.
However, evolution can only be used in the loosest sense here. True evolution works on populations from species of organisms, where there is heredity, an environment and natural selection pressure.
If you take consciousness to be a population (of humans), you need some method of heredity, which is troublesome unless you are a strong believer in the theory of memes and the 'man as machine' ideas of Gurdjieff. Even in this view, the environment in which evolution takes place is hard to define since it must be shared between the physical environment of the human and the environment of ideas that comprises society and culture.
If you take consciousness to be a singular entity underlying the humans who temporarily express it, then you have no population in which evolution should take place.
Perhaps, however, all these views could be melded to provide an answer? True evolution as the natural sciences understand it, operating on the population of humans inheriting traits through the collective unconscious but mutating while embodied as people through spiritual 'insights' and teachings. Oooohhmmmm.
Certainly, the idea of evolving consciousness is not new. Certain recent mystics/sages believed absolutely in the idea that we are heading to a 'higher state', Teilhard de Chardin and Martin Buber among them. I think Rudolf Steiner also thought the same, although there my information is sketchier. I don't think they bothered with trying to fit their definitions of evolving consciousness to something that would fit natural sciences though.
"Dreams are said by some to be electric impulses which generate random images taken from real experiences housed in our memory"
Which begs the question which part of the brain is experiencing the triggered memory. Could it be a pre-judgement part, that only takes in perception and doesn't try to categorise it? Or does it have to be the 'left-brain'? After all, can memory be laid down without being an experience perceived by the awake mind and therefore judged and categorised? And if it can't, how can it be replayed by any other section of the mind?
I admit this is a quite computer-sciencey view of things, as though memory were a data-type that needs a specific software to be read.
I don't know either!
Quoting the smartest...
I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each other's dreams, we can play together all night. Calvin.
Wasn't it Hobbes who said that?
It's true though :)
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