Natepod The weblog of Nate Cull

Irreducible Mind

I've finally finished reading Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century.

It's a hefty tome, just published this year, tracing the outlines of mainstream cognitive psychology/neuroscience versus the evidence for various forms of anomalous cognition, altered states of consciousness and extreme psychophysical interaction, with a view to proving that mind is demonstrably not a function of the brain but is something entirely elsewhere. The authors (apparently mostly involved with the Esalen Center as well as University of Virginia) recap over a century of data from hypnosis, meditation, trance mediumship, dissociation/multiple personality, psi and near-death experience studies, and seem particularly taken with the turn-of-the-century ideas of William James and Frederic Myers, both of whom were involved with the Society for Psychical Research in the 1880s to early 1900s.

The idea that the soul/spirit/mind/psyche has a separate existence from the body is not news to many religious believers, anyone who's had any kind of anomalous experience, or even anyone who's read any pop-science New Age book about the philosophical implications of quantum physics in the last twenty years, but coming even from the fringes of the scientific world it's a bit startling to see stories of the kind that have long circulated in the underground laid out all in one place with real footnotes.

There seems to be a a bit of a 21st century psi / anomalous cognition publishing renaissance happening right now, what with Dean Radin's Entangled Minds, and Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer's Extraordinary Knowing (next in my read pile). Irreducible Mind, though, has the weight and feel of a textbook. It's not a book you'll necessarily lend to a friend over coffee. It took me a solid two weeks to plough through it.

Myers' theory, published in his book 'Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death' in 1903, centers around the idea of a 'Subliminal Self', which is different from the Freudian or Jungian unconscious in that it is conscious (but of which we are not normally aware in our usual cognitive stream). More of a 'superconsciousness', perhaps. The theory appears to have emerged in response specifically to 19th century multiple personality studies, which apparently showed a cluster of hypnosis / enhanced psi / MPD connections, to the point where it seems Myers believed that the most progress in uncovering the true nature of human psychology and the keys to enhanced human mental/psychic abilities would be found by studying MPD patients - and possibly even, though I'm not sure he went so far as to say this out loud, deliberately inducing alter personalities through hypnosis in a lab setting. (This will be ringing familiar loud bells to anyone who's read Rigorous Intuition and delved a bit into the underground MKULTRA mythos out there on the net. Not something I personally want to turn out to be true, but it resonates strongly here. Perhaps the creators of the 'Bluebird' story are themselves big fans of Myers and the SPR, and that's how the same material has seeped into the underground? It seems a very steampunkish sort of retro-obsession to share, though.)

Leaving aside the MPD/DID weirdness - and there's plenty of weirdness left to go around - the other main feature of the Subliminal Self theory is that it seems to cover a continuum of multiple 'selves', whether manifesting in one person (trance/possession/alter) or potentially across multiple people (telepathy/clairvoyance/synchronicity). By the way, Myers was the person who first coined the word 'telepathy', so perhaps he knew a thing or two about the subject?

An analogy of Myers of a possible cognitive spectrum, akin to the electromagnetic spectrum - ranging from 'infrared' autonomic processes through 'visible' conscious state to 'ultraviolet' higher-level super-consciousness of whatever sort, made me sit up and take notice, because again it's spookily similar to P J Gaenir's Rainbow of Soul. Perhaps she's also a Myers fan?

What intrigued me most, though, were the absences. Despite lots of mention of faith healing, hypnosis/mesmerism and placebo effect in the late 1800s/early 1900s, there was not a peep about Christian Science (who surely were some of the first to document case studies of this sort of thing?) The authors sketch out the vague outlines of two possible lines of cognitive synthesis in the final chapter, a dualist and a monist approach, and mention that they find the monist one more challenging but ultimately more attractive. But no mention of the monism of A Course In Miracles - itself an artifact of high cognitive strangeness - which seems to me to slide neatly into a few holes in the cognitive psychology field at right about this point. Extend the idea of the Subliminal Self to its logical extent and you seem to get something very similar to a One Self. But the authors stop short of this, presumably figuring they've burned enough karma as it is and don't want to get into religion and philosophy as well. But I do, because otherwise what's the point? Still, I'm not really even pretending to be scientific about my approach.

No mention of Walter Russell's ideas about genius and divine inspiration either, though they parallel Myers' and the author's stance (and though his self-reported 'illumination' experience includes levitation, which they admit as a known side-effect). Bertrand Russell, yes, gets plenty of footnotes. But not the other one.

I have a few new leads to follow up having read this. The philosophy of David Bohm, for one, feels familiar and worth exploring. Human Personality itself, I guess, though I'm really less impressed by sheer bulk of data at this point than by philosophies that somehow seem to internally resonate. What exactly I'm looking for I'm still unclear about; this kind of research seems to skim to one side, being almost but not entirely irrelevant, though still useful as a sort of brute-force tool. I'm almost afraid of coming too close to material of too high strangeness in case it leaves me psychically burned; I'm certainly very wary of attempting to process it using strict waking-mind logic like a dutiful little scientist. That seems like a good way to give oneself a headache and get lost in strange loops.

But, on the other hand, it is very nice to see that there are people willing to think seriously about approaching weird psychological states with an open mind and risk exposing both it and themselves to reproducible experimental protocols. I don't think psi will yield to scientific examination of the old 'we're humans dammit and we'll smash God Himself to find out what's inside' kind, because we're dealing with systems that are observer-dependent, sentient and smarter than us -- but there are, I think, perhaps ways of approaching this stuff humbly and wisely with the intent to catalogue and learn and not getting burned.

At least, I hope so.