An excerpt from philosopher Bernardo Kastrup's session in the Liminal Institute online course The Future of Consciousness. Kastrup, executive director of the Essentia Foundation and the leading proponent of analytic idealism, argues that treating everything we have a word for as a separate thing with its own point of view mistakes the structure of language for the structure of the world, using the example of a fist that vanishes when the hand opens. He says the boundaries of distinct points of view follow the boundaries of biology. Kastrup adds that he finds ordinary experience mysterious enough that the paranormal holds little interest, but that synchronicity and telepathy follow straightforwardly from a single mind divided by imperfect dissociative boundaries. Pinchbeck raises the Kogi, the Hopi, and Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance.
Guest: Bernardo Kastrup
In brief
- Kastrup argues that animism errs by treating every entity we have a word for as separate and possessed of its own private point of view, and that distinct points of view instead track the boundaries of biology.
- Kastrup uses the fist as an illustration: it has a name but disappears when the hand opens, showing that linguistic structure does not map onto the intrinsic structure of the world.
- Kastrup says he is not motivated by the paranormal because ordinary experience is already overwhelmingly mysterious to him.
- Kastrup holds that under analytic idealism synchronicities are unremarkable, since inner mind and outer world are the same mind governed by the same archetypal templates of unfolding.
- Kastrup explains telepathy as leakage across the dissociative boundaries that normally keep experiential centers private, since no natural process is perfect.
- Pinchbeck proposes that indigenous cultures such as the Kogi may cultivate a field of resonance with their environment in which otherwise impossible phenomena occur, and asks whether Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance offers a way to conceptualize it.
Full text
there is only one inanimate World objects are things we impose onto the world for our own convenience and the mistake I think a lot of people make is to think that the world has as its intrinsic atic structure the structure of our language that we have separate words for separate things doesn't mean that those things are separate uh concrete example is fist we have a word for fist here is the fist where's the fist the fist has disappeared just violated the law of conservation of energy you see this is the kind of mistake you make when you mistake the structure of language the word fist or the structure of the world and I think that's the animist mistake it's to think of everything we have a word for as a thing separate from other things which has its own private point of view that I think is flawed I think the boundaries of different points of view follow the boundaries of biology yeah I don't know if I completely agree that that's how animist cultures that I visited uh like you know the kogi and Columbia or the Hopi necessarily understand the nature of reality but what I wanted to um kind of I acknowledge that I acknowledge that this may be our own Western mising of what anism is exactly but I wanted to delve in a little bit here this is something that's just been fascinating to me I mean and I know I know you've also discussed a little bit like the psychic and the paranormal and how so for instance like the materialist reductive worldview you know which is still the governing structure and the mainstream academies institutions completely rejects you know psychic and paranormal phenomena for the most part and we're having some people in this course who are you know like David Luke who's a par psychologist Dean Raiden who studies um psychic phenomena Jeffrey kpal and so on who authors theoc of the impossible and as I was exploring Shamanism and psychedelics I had many many different um psychic and paranormal experiences that I I didn't actually believe in you know beforehand and also when I visited different indigenous cultures I discovered that they had kind of like a field uh of understanding in which in which different phenomena that were like impossible from our way of understanding the world uh would occur so for instance the kogi you know would know things like let's say you were in your room at night and a humming bird you know came into your room with like a butterfly in its mouth they would say oh like that means your cousin you know is probably you know gotten ill in another city and you know you should go visit them or something and often you'd find out that whatever weird thing they had this idea about was was true uh so so I guess what I began to think is that if if there's the sort of underlying field of Consciousness that's then kind of like sculpted and shaped by like human societies um who maybe overdevelop uh over a long period of time a kind of field of resonance uh with their local physical environment and that also leads to them developing a certain like torical system mythological system and they're actually able to kind of make different things happen um you know that we would experience as impossible within that local container and maybe the rert sheldrick's ideas of like morphic residence or morphic Fields is a way for us to begin to conceptualize this and and you I'm so I'm curious how that resonates with you and what you think if that if that's clear yeah what you said is clear um I have never been particularly motivated by the Paranormal and and not out of prejudice for the following reason I think the normal is incredibly mysterious and I'm overwhelmed by The Mystery of the normal every moment of the day so there there is very little psychic energy left in me to develop an interest for the Paranormal I'm already overwhelmed by The Mystery of the normal um that said um there are two things at least that go under the label of paranormal that I think only um surprising level of theoretical commitment prevents people from seeing and considering rather banal even uh one of them is so-called synchronicities they happen all right there are correspondences of meaning between our own inner experiential events and events in the world and yes some of the has to do with confirmation bias we only see what's meaningful we never see what's not meaningful but even taking into account all that sometimes the correspondences of meaning are so specific so detailed that you you have to be very theoretically committed to something not to to see it happen uh in front of you I have had several experiences of synchronicity like this the other thing I think happens is what can go under the label of telepathy in other words our private mental contents somehow leaking out into the world and being picked up by somebody else without the intermediation of language or the senses this two things I think are empirically ban now but it's happening all the time um and how do I reconcile analytic idealism with them well that's a rather straightforward let's start with synchronicities under analytic idealism our mind in here is the same mind as the mind out there there is just a dissociative boundary in between therefore the archetypes that govern that govern the expression of my mind in here are the same archetypes that govern the behavior of the world out there the templates of unfolding are the same so it stands to reason that there will be correspondences between the two because the archetypal templates in forming both are the same same they are part of the same mind operating under the governance of the same templates of behavior templates of mentation the same archetypes so synchronicities trivial there is nothing extraordinary about it you may expect them to happen again this is not giving license to the schizophrenic idea that everything is a synchronicity that has the meaning I project onto it I'm not saying that I'm saying there are synchronicities that have meaning but not necessarily the schizophrenic meanings we compulsively May project onto them the other thing telepathy um under analytic idealism it's all one mind so how come I can't read your thoughts and you read mine well it's because there are two dissociative boundaries between us it's dissociation that ensures the the private aspect of inner experience so dissociation is a process in nature that sort of insulates different centers of experience but no process in nature is perfect when it stops raining the the ground doesn't dry immediately or completely uh when something's burning and not everything that is combustible is actually burned combustion is not a perfect process no process in nature is perfect when it rains it doesn't rain every water molecule that is up in the air no process in nature is complete and perfect why would dissociation be dissociation has an obvious evolutionary Advantage you have to think of yourself as an agent separate from the environment otherwise you're not going to ensure that you would take the correct actions to survive if you think you're are the whole environment you're not committed to your own Survival why would you care oh the body died oh so what so evolutionarily um there's a clear reason why we should be dissociated only dissociated processes would remain until now everything else would would be extinct but that dissociation will not be perfect it it's extraordinarily plausible that it would be perfect every now and then it will leak every now and then the dissociative boundary will be porous that it will allow for some direct Commerce of mental states that others can then pick up so telepathy in that sense is also completely understandable under analytic idealism and I would call both of these things synchronicity and telepathy not even as par normal paranormal is a word that concedes too much to our current culture it's just normal it's natural
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.