Symbolic Ruminations on Non-Symbolic Consciousness

(This is sort of a continuation of my last post on Jungian archetypes, cognitive psychology and grandiosity... actually the ability to lead onto this post was much of the point of that one... this is a "now the other shoe drops" sort of post, I guess...)

My friend Jeffery Martin has spent years of his life studying various versions of "enlightenment", and has organized a methodology called the Finders Course that seems remarkably effective at helping people transition toward more blissful, deeply awake and aware state of consciousness. My son Zar wrote about his experience with the Finders Course on his own blog, and I’d encourage you to read his account as a very concrete and personal (yet also intellectually well framed) prelude to this one. .

Jeffery doesn't use the word "enlightenment" nor constructs like "advanced states of consciousness", he refers instead to "persistent non-symbolic states." This terminology perplexed me at first, because it was clear to me that enlightened gurus and holy fools and what-not were definitely forming and manipulating symbols -- otherwise they wouldn't be able to think effectively, or create humanly meaningful art, or multiply numbers, etc.

When Jeffery talks about “non-symbolic” it clearly doesn’t mean that these enlightened-ish people don’t reason using symbolism when solving a math problem, and can’t understand symbolic references in movies, etc. What he means, put crudely and conceptually,, is mostly that concepts like “my own self” or “my love for my son” are not not reified into mental objects that then become the primary subject of the mind’s emotion and attachment. Let your love for your son or wife be an experience unto itself, rather than mainly a symbol that gets all sort of other persistent attachments associated to it…. Let your theory of some aspect of the world be a fun dynamic artifact, but don’t let it preoccupy you to the extend that you see it more vividly than the raw experiences from which it was abstracted.

The point is not that people in PNSE (Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience) actually don't form or use symbols... it's rather that they don't lose track of the fact that symbols ARE symbols and don't actually substitute for what they stand for. In the PNSE mind, symbols are useful and meaningful conveniences -- but the way each symbol emerges from and connects with the things it stands for, is not forgotten and is never far out of mind. The symbols in one's minds are perceived as floating in, and emerging from and then dissolving into, a more fundamental sea of non-symbolic experience.

In a non-symbolic state, the mind does not perceive the world or itself through the mediation of symbols. Rather, when it uses symbols, it transparently and fluidly understands these symbols as what they are, contextually convenient mechanisms for representing certain aspects of the world to other aspects of the world.

One way to think about the role of symbols in human consciousness generally is to frame it in terms of the dynamics of long-term memory. The mind forms a concept to abstract concrete experiences and percepts and actions, then -- in "ordinary" states of consciousness -- what happens is it retains this concept for easy cognitive manipulation in cases when all the concrete cases would be too unwieldy to think about. Abstract, symbolic knowledge regarding concepts accumulates — and then gets its own importance in the mind, which even goes beyond the importance of the concrete cases that led to its emergence.

Networks of abstractions self-reinforce. This is natural, it’s how mind works — but then emotions get associated with the abstractions in the network … and these emotions assist the self-reinforcement of circular networks of mental abstraction (“mental knots”)….. One way, to cut through all this is to decrease the emotional attachment to {human-relationships or intellectual-drives as general entities}, as opposed to the specific experiences involved in these relationships/drives …. Feel the good times with your wife when they’re there, and love her and support her as needed, but if something takes her away, then plunge into whatever new experience is there, rather than be attached to the idea of the relationship w/ her as opposed to the specific experiences…

So, then — what holds minds back from enlightenment isn't use of symbols per se -- it's when symbols get too big for their britches. It's when a symbol takes itself to supplant the collection of things it stands for, and have some rigid meaning beyond just pointing to and gathering together a motley collection of instances.

It's when the idea of love for someone becomes more important than the actual experience of love. It's when a self-description like "I'm afraid to talk to strangers" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy rather than an empirical reportage of phenomena existing wholly independently of it.

There is a clear relationship between the way a mind construes concepts in general, and the way it construes itself (its self-concept). E.g. people who draw thicker boundaries around themselves, separating themselves more from the world, also tend to create more rigid concepts. Thinner-boundaried people create less rigid concepts and tend to be more creative and more psychically sensitive.

Along with this principle, we may also say that people who tend to overly reify *themselves* -- i.e. to take their self-models as real, beefy entities with some sort of fundamental substance, rather than as collections of observed regularities -- will generally also tend to overly reify various concepts in their minds. I.e. those who perceive their symbols as fundamentally real and super-important, rather than as temporarily constructed shortcut approximations to underlying complex shifting realities -- are also likely to perceive themselves in the same overly rigid and delusory manner.

Which is consonant with the observation (made by JM and others) that those carrying out mostly post-symbolic thinking (i.e. thinking which symbols are explicitly understood as rough, shifting, contextually dependent approximations floating in an infinitely vaster sea of non-symbolic mind-stuff), are also mostly viewing themselves in a post-self manner (I.e. their own inner self-model/perception is based on a self model that is, explicitly and u real-time, understood as a rough, shifting, contextually dependent approximation floating in an infinitely vaster sea of non-symbolic mind-stuff).

Or taking the flip side, those who are plagued with grandiosity in their inner selves -- will tend also to be "grandiose" in their construction and manipulation of concepts. They will assume that their concepts are definitively the right way to chop up the world into pieces, and the best terms to use as the basis for a language describing the world. They will tend not to perceive or create patterns that aren't conveniently expressed in terms of these concepts.

In the predecessor post I suggested a decomposition of "Evil" into four suboptimal parameter-tunings along the lines

• Self-Stagnation -- the opposite of Self-Transformation, the drive to persist the self as it is

• Self-Explosion aka Grandiosity -- the drive to self-transform faster, bigger and better than a real life-rhythm can support

• Self-Destruction -- the suicide of the individual, not via self-transformation but via choices that lead to simple dissolution of the individual

• Self-Protection -- reification of the boundaries of the individual, so that growth is possible but only if it doesn’t threaten the strength of the individual as a discrete being

These all overlap, of course, but also have significant differences. For instance, the difference btw self-stagnation and self-protection is like "I don't want to change" versus "I'm open to becoming stronger in ways that will defend myself better, even if this turns me into something new."   The percent of situations in which the latter is dangerous to other entities -- including superorganisms of which the given entity forms a portion -- is much higher.

What I’ll observe now is that this decomposition has a morphed version in the sphere of concept formation,

• Concept Stagnation (fear of concept change) -- the drive to persist a concept as it is, without letting it evolve along with experience

• Concept Explosion (fear of concept stasis) -- the drive to evolve concepts into new ones constantly and frantically, even before current concepts have been fleshed out and their relationship with experience has been well understood

• Concept Destruction (killing a concept, e.g. via giving up on thinking through how it applies) -- destroying or deactivating a concept due to frustration or other issues, giving up on trying to adapt or apply the concept due to resource limitations or other reasons

• Concept Protection (fear of concept death) -- reification of the boundaries of a concept, so that growth and learning are possible but only if the concept remains intact, distinct and important

In a mind operating in a "non-symbolic" state, the use of concepts and symbols is not absent nor even necessarily minimal -- the point is that the use of symbols is well-tuned to avoid all of these concept-dynamic "sins." Avoiding these sins allows symbols to pop in and out of the mind, to play their roles in various processes insofar as they're valuable and then fade as appropriate, and to generally be perceived, manipulated and interpreted in the context of the subsymbolic and supersymbolic processes that give them their meaning.

Putting symbols in their proper place in this way solves a number of the pathologies that plague most currently "normal" human and collective states of consciousness. It then opens the door to a variety of wild new directions for the evolution of consciousness, which Jeffery Martin's ontology of consciousness states described as a series of "positions" 1, 2, 3, 4. 5,.... Position 1 being the basic shift from symbol-dominated into primarily non-symbolic consciousness, then the other positions more thoroughly pervading the non-symbolicity — e.g. as one advances,

• self “dissolves” in the sense that most reflective perceptions of the system’s state are no longer mediated by the symbol of a self-model

• will “dissolves” in the sense that most reflective perceptions of the system’s actions are no longer mediated by the symbolic system of “free will”

• space and time “dissolve” in the sense that most experiences of change and extent are no longer mediated by the symbols associated with space and time (past, present, near, far, etc.)

Animals with pre-human capability for abstraction would seem to be operating at “Position -1” or lower in Martin’s ontology — i.e. their state of consciousness is mostly non-symbolic as a result of being pre-symbolic. Symbols don’t mediate perception and action, because they are not formed so much anyway. Being non-symbolic via being post-symbolic is something different, and is what Jeffery’s Positions 1+ are about.

As these stages are transitioned through — according to routes that vary widely from one individual to another, yet also show marked common patterns — the minds in question can still practically leverage symbolic models of self, will, space and time… but their experiences are no longer heavily mediated by these. Instead these symbolic models are just experienced as “chunks of experience” among the others, floating in the experiential sea and serving their own purposes within the constantly fluctuating interconnected matrix….

The. more advanced positions are not necessarily to be considered “better” — one must bear in mind that the portion of the cosmos we live in owes its current form of existence in substantial part to the presence of minds that reify its aspects via their symbolically-mediated consciousness. But what we can say is that, as minds in our corner of the world undergo their natural ongoing processes of individuation and self-transcendence, healthy operation in many cases naturally leads to an unfolding from symbolic to non-symbolic consciousness, and then through various positions of increasingly thoroughgoing non-symbolicity.

Having said all this to elucidate why the terminology of “non-symbolic states” makes sense, I still am not so sure it’s the terminology I will prefer for the long term. But it does have less of a spiritual/woo-woo aura than “enlightened”, and I don’t have a better alternative at this moment — except maybe “post-symbolic”. In any case the nature of being post-symbolic is not to sweat particular names so much, right? — these in the end are just semi-arbitrary symbols floating and flickeringly internetworking in the radiant space of subsymbolic joy ;-)

(As a brief P.S. on my own personal experiential relationship to all this, I seem to reside largely in the vague region of Jeffery’s Positions 1 and 2 these days… I’ve occasionally voyaged into the “higher realms” but then something within me pulled me back down, with the sense I had more work to do, of a nature that can best be executed at more of an intermediate level of cosmic-ness…. According to Jeffery’s studies this is not entirely uncommon. But does have its risks — projecting oneself back down to Position 1, one can occasionally find oneself stuck for a while back in Position 0 where experience is less joyous, and then one has to re-ignite the fire within and blast oneself back up….)