According to Pushing Ultimates: Fundamentals of Self-Knowledge, for one to awaken spiritually at the threshold of authentic existence, one must question all beliefs that restrain the mind. As Paz says, “There can be no forbidden knowledge, nothing is taboo in the pursuit....” This can be frightening to the person entrenched in an organized religion. It can be overwhelming to the scientist who spends his or her life attempting, like ancient alchemists, to reduce all that exists to one final mathematical equation. It can mind-jerk the person collecting material things who thinks mere possession signifies human worth. It might unbalance therapists who discover their long-held mind theories are someone else’s opinion.
Pushing Ultimates forces readers to scrutinize beliefs about science, religion, evolution, astronomy, physics — all reality — to find that often what are accepted as truths are merely biased hypotheses lacking substantial foundation. Since this is a mental quest, Paz begins by examining the human brain and the mind that works through it.
Reductionist biologists have located specific areas of the brain responsible for hearing, sight, reasoning, feelings. But they straddle a huge logical gap, religiously believing if they just probe deep enough or long enough, eventually they’ll map out the brain’s entirety. They may well accomplish this, but they will not map out the mind.
What they have done is mistaken parts of the brain with its trillions of axons, dendrites, and electro-chemical synapses, for human consciousness. There are researchers who feel that because drugs influence our thinking, the brain is nothing more than jellied tissue. Others feel brain-damaged thinking proves the same hypothesis, and I must admit I was in this category.
Lew Paz settled this question for me and other soul searchers by clever analogy. Pushing Ultimates invites us to imagine an island whose indigenous natives have had no contact with the outside world. Suddenly, a parachute drops a small playing portable radio into their midst. Their irrational conclusion? The music and the voices they hear come from instruments and people that are living inside that radio. Terrified, a native may spear the radio only to damage it. Now it spews static or is silent. But here lies a most meaningful comparison. While the radio has been damaged, radio waves broadcasting the music and the voices continue in the atmosphere.
Article comments
1 - Phillip Winn
The analogy assumes too much. When we can predict the effect of a given action on a person based on other similar but different actions, and that prediction turns out to be true, we're doing more than stabbing radios in fear or wonder.
I don't know that we'll ever discover every secret of the brain, but it's possible we will. And the idea that the mind is something else is a little silly. Wrapping it up in pretty words doesn't make it any less silly!
2 - Regis
The words silly and pretty are "mind" words. The reason we cannot ever discover exactly what the mind is, or how it works through the brain, is that we we cannot get outside of the mind to examine it.
3 - Christopher Rose
Regis: Sure we can. Your objection would only be true if one was trying to study one's own.
Oh, can you please stick a http:// in front of your url in the comments window. As it is people clicking on your url go to an error page not your site. Thanks!
4 - Regis
Sorry about the http://
"Sure we can."
The word "sure" is a mind word.
The three word statement is a mental concept which implies more than what is stated.
5 - Lewis
It’s irrelevant to the individual whether “the mind” remains unchanged by damage to the brain. Whether or not “the mind” is unchanged, the individual can be drastically reduced or obliterated by such damage. When Paz uses phrases like “our mind…” or “waves of consciousness…” it seems like a slightly retooled variation of “oneness” or a “God” which somehow provides hope to the individual that some ‘superseding’ aspect of himself can survive obliteration.
While I’m no atheist, I think that a first step in real Self-knowledge is to abandon such indulgences. If my personal “radio” is “speared,” the concept of universal consciousness still flowing will be of no practical use, and in fact have no meaning, making it useful only to one whose radio is “not speared.” If the world is divided into broken radios/minds and intact ones, the intact ones can discuss at length the luxury of universal consciousness, while the broken ones spew static. Does this mean that the “intact” ones are more accurately portraying the true state of reality? No. It merely means that this is what intact minds do. Intact minds spew “meaning,” while broken ones spew “static.” Neither illustrates objective reality more accurately than the other; the reality of the intact minds is only of value to other intact minds " making any “radio waves in the atmosphere” merely a subjective luxury of that particular state of being.
Buddha is reported to have said: Nothing of the individual will survive. You will be annihilated totally. Far from being depressing, this provides strong incentive to examine, “What do I have now? What is it that I am now?” The title of Pema Chodron’s book, “The Wisdom of No Escape,” suggests that we step onto the threshold of genuine knowledge when we don’t allow ourselves any fantasies that provide relief from our mortality. Only completely defenseless are we able to be fully opened to whatever genuine Mercy exists.
6 - Regis
An interesting point of view. Here is another. What drives science to seek knowledge in the first place? The fact that scientists have an intimation that an answer is there. This heuristic driving forces scientists to state hypotheses (sometimes "null") because they have a hint that an answer is there. One wonders why since the earliest times, man has sought an ultimate unknown if it does not exist.