How a Mathematician Got Turned Into a Mystic
Ode to Pocohontas
The wind which blows
through all our souls,
The spirit, the qi
Can you not see?
Can you not see the colors of the wind?
==================================
===================================
From age one to age 8, my religion was Roman Catholic,
really echoing the teachings from my mother with only distant respect for my
father. From age 8 to age 15, my religion was mathematics, and logic, which I
considered together. For example, when I was twelve, I remember riding on the
train from the University of Pennsylvania (where I took the junior advanced
calculus course for regular undergraduates) reading a book called
Metamathematics (by Klein?) recommended by my revered mathematics teacher of
that year, Dr. Schub, which I approached as a kind of guide to everything. At
age 15, in my senior year at Lawrenceville, I took several courses in
mathematics at Princeton, including a graduate course in logic taught by Alonzo
Church; I finished the first half, and attended all the second half, but
dropped out of full involvement, as I reconsidered just how far one can go with
deductive logic.
======== Quick
summary of that earlier stuff to age 15
In fact, even as I start to tell the story... I want to tell
it differently from the way I would tell it then, when I would report the raw
logic and verbal reasoning I went through. Now I understand that the nonverbal
part of the brain (let alone the “soul”!) is fully conscious, and I easily
access my memories of what I was thinking at a conscious nonverbal level in the
early days. In a way I resent those psychologists who talk about the nonverbal
level of brain intelligence as “the unconscious” or “the subconscious”. When they look at a cat or a mouse, do they
imagine that this creature is totally unconscious of what it experiences or
what it does? Do they imagine that its brain is empty of all intelligence?”
But since I don’t want to spend too much time... I won’t
really tell the stories about Catholic childhood, a bloody cross over my crib
which puzzled me when I was eight months old and nonverbal, a picture of Jesus
with the Sacred Heart at Holy Martyrs School which seemed more positive and
reminded me of my mother’s spirit of love, the scary nuns who told us stories
of kids turning into pillars of salt and who dreamed of how they could have
enlightened poor Alexander when he built a temple to the unknown God... the
book by Fred Hoyle, The Nature of the Universe, which really got me thinking when
I read it at eight age and thought about it on the way to the bathtub... the
shot of male hormones which Dr. Bone gave me at age 8.(either as a precaution
after a hernia operation at age 7 or intense poison ivy, both indicators of how
much time I spent outdoors in the woods).. the beautiful babysitter I tried to
impress who gave me her paperback “algebra made easy” book soon after...
questions about ethics and the proper goal of life at age 12 (which earned me a
letter from the Vatican saying I was officially ex communicato)... refusing to
sing any words which declared a belief in God even in the very civilized
private school I arranged to go to after I totally rejected Catholicism and
theism altogether...
Feeling ever more powerful in my mind, as I learned more
mathematics and science, and one day staring out at a snowstorm through a huge
window and feeling as if I could swirl things... And the “Aunt Mary” story I
told my kids later; you can find it via the search engine on this blog.
But even then, I was firmly, clearly, logically committed to
the extreme “What You See Is What You get” materialist view of reality, with
total rejection of religion, paranormal, and all that. I do remember my mother
telling me many times I should respect the story of Ferdinand the bull, who
needed to learn to smell the flowers. (But I also remember the day that John
Von Neumann died and what my mother said about that, as she stood on the other
side of a white enamel kitchen table in our small GI house in Oreland,
Pennsylvania, which we moved out of when I was 8.) Oh, and I did some
experiments with hypnosis, following a book by Estabrooks, linked to lots of
thought about AI, neural networks, computers and so on, which I worked on even
before the arrival of FORTRAN.
== logical transition number one: to first-level sanity
Age 15 was the time of my first major reworking of my “ego.”
Freud SOMETIMES uses the word “ego” to refer to the complex of verbal, symbolic
reasoning we humans often rely on very heavily. At
www.werbos.com/Mind_in_time.pdf,
a paper published in Russia, I describe how the formal axiomatic foundations we
develop are ever so crucial to human develop, once we let logic into our lives,
as I did at age 8. Some might even say we start becoming humans, and grow out
of being animals, when we let logic into our lives (I apologize for the
fuzziness of this, but it is an important stage) – but at age 15 I made a
rather discrete transition from being a human to being a first-level sane
human, a human who actually did “smell the flowers.” In my ego, the transition
was basically simple: instead of grounding myself in deductive logic, I
grounded myself in inductive logic, which applies the scientific method to
life, which fully understands the importance of the flow of empirical data
(i.e. direct experience) as co-equal with logic in developing rational,
stochastic well-defined conclusions about the state and the dynamics of the
world we live in (including the state of ourselves seen in the mirror). And
which pays full attention to “primary affective feedback,” the raw feelings of “this
good,” “this bad,” light and dark... and is not confused even by reading parts
of what Nietzsche says about such things. Let me not repeat the paper. (See
Mind_in_Time for details.)
But none of that implies mysticism. Quite the contrary. In
many ways, first level sanity is a recipe for living an energetic meaningful
life in the total absence of any “supernatural.” I suspect that the transition
which I made at age 8 is a lot like a major transition which John Stuart Mills
made (described in the book Male Hysteria). He (and I) was a utilitarian both
before and after, but more aware of feeling and of the real ground of our
thoughts (even at the purely brain level).
At the end of age 15, just before starting Harvard, I was
deeply inspired by reading D.O. Hebb, the Organization of Behavior, which
begins by describing how proper Bayesian reasoning tells us to reject all those
silly ideas about parapsychology despite what might seem like persuasive
research studies; I agreed. One of my motives in embarking on a deep study of
intelligence and neural networks was the drive to get the whole world to
understand this better, and to become more sane in its behavior. (This was also
the summer of Barry Goldwater’s peak.)
I remember a friend at Harvard who later said that age 15
was when I changed from being a pure mathematician to being an applied
mathematician. But no, Dr. Schub. I never gave up my mathematics.
I should probably say at least a little bit about Lincoln
Kaye, Lucy Schneider (hi!), and Bertrand Russell, all of whom had an effect on
this transition. For example, I was repelled by what Linc told me about the
concept of yin and yang; the idea that being female must be associated with
being small and dark and wimpy and mousy really upset me. I had an image of the
ideal woman I longed for who would be an exact opposite of that, and it’s funny
that the image in my mind at that time was so close to Luda, whom I did not
meet in mundane reality until late 1996! But when I opened myself to Lucy (as
much as Catholic upbringing would allow), I had feelings on course to marrying
her – certainly not a mouse, but certainly not such an Amazon woman as Luda.
That ended by her choice. I also have a letter in my files (and scanned) from
Betrand Russell to me, kindly explaining some simple points about logic, and
nailing down key aspects of the transition in my ego.
Before age 15, I was somewhat deep into classical music, but
Linc urged me to really let music “inside me.” I was a bit puzzled by his love
of Mahler (who seemed a bit shallow and silly to me at the time, compared for
example with Stravinsky and Bartok). After I made my ego transition, I
certainly did let music get more “inside me,” and listening to my stereo was a big part of
my life by senior year at Harvard.
First order sanity basically gives one all the powers which
Estabrooks describes as the power of autohypnosis, available all the time
(though in drowsy afternoons that may be limited).
==== logical transition number two, spring 1967
As I look back on the curious things I had seen by 1967 (age
19, when I was a senior at Harvard living on the “Gold Coast” of Adams House),
it is a bit amazing to me now how firmly I rejected them all. Like the Aunt
Mary story. Like personal experiences my mother told me about. By the Bayesian
logic seemed overwhelming: based on what we know of physics, it seemed very
clear that the prior probability of such things being real is incredibly low.
Also, the accounts of paranormal and spirit in world culture get to be so
extreme and self-contradictory and obviously biased and silly that I would not
count them as much for evidence, in proper Bayesian convolution. (Hey folks, I
still think in mathematics. I often feel like a bit of a fraud when I make it
seem as if I am thinking in English! Mathematics and images first, English much
later, English mainly as part of how to find crude fuzzy structure in the space
of strategic planning. Hey, is that sentence an example proving how I don’t really
think in English?)
I still remember the day (March something) in 1967 when that
all changed. I have already written up and spoken that story many times. For
example, in my chapter on “Why Space?” in a book on space policy edited by
Krone from Apogee, posted at
www.werbos.com/space.htm.
I remember feeling unusual new energy when I retold it out loud to an audience
of about a thousand people near Qufu, the “Vatican of Confucianism,” in a talk
on “Neural Networks and Confiucianism.” I felt a special shiver up my spine as
I told the story there, because the story involves Mao Tse Tung, and it seemed
to reflect more of the future than it seemed to back at that time in 1967.
But let me be brief. One day, at lunch in Adams House, we
had an intense debate about whether Mao might be open to trade with the US.
Since I read the New York Times from cover to cover every morning back then
(lying in bed, after quickly dragging it from my door)... I quoted two earlier
speeches by Mao, and the “if” conditions he gave, which I felt the US could
meet without abandoning Mao or giving up the principles of us on the executive
committee of the Young Republicans. (I was still an intense moderate Republican
then, working with Ripon Society; I even had a nice conversation with Nixon in
a Boston bar in 1966.) The SDS folks in the debate disagreed; “OUR Mao would
never trade with you dirty rats, at least not before the full occupation of
Taiwan by the red army.” So then I quoted verbatim a new speech I remembered
from Mao, from when I was reading in bed... the page numbers (from and
something like page 31, NOW I forget the number)... the new “if.” When the SDS
folks look dumbfounded, I “moved in for the kill.” (Oops. Sorry. I was sane,
but not yet Quaker.) Loudly quoted every sentence, and my young Republican
friends loved the moment.
Until dinner time. I had just let that go, and gone back to my
serious work of the day, probably related to a professor at MIT. (Minsky or
Saloma, both of whom I took independent studies with.) Dinner that day was
incredibly depressing. The SDS people and the Young Republicans had both
scoured all the resources available at Harvard very energetically, and did not
find the story I had quoted in such detail. They had found just how many
different editions there were of the New York Times, and verified that not a
one of them had that story. The Young Republicans really tried to be helpful
and said they could try even more newspapers beyond UPI and AP and Globe (which
they had checked)... but I said, no, I remembered it quite clearly in the New
York Times, the only paper I subscribed to... if it’s not there... Have I lost
my mind? My mind really SEEMED to be working so well, but...?
The following morning was a real shocker not only for me but
for the others. There it was exactly as described... but I had not quoted the
date, which was the next morning. I really wondered: “NOW what do I do with may
Bayesian reasoning? How can I do Bayesian reasoning if I just discount the
whole stream of most solid, definite experience I rely on? I myself am stuck
with my own experience to some degree, even if I can throw in a few very
careful caveats. Such caveats could lead to madness, so they are not the way.”
Two major reconstructions of my ego: (1) I formally decided to myself that
there is a 50% probability that the stuff we call paranormal might be real
somehow after all; and (2) precisely because the logic against it is so strong,
it becomes a really first priority issue to try to understand what is going on
here, and how one might explain (or discount) the paranormal nature of this.
Given the highly confused an unreliable nature of what I
could read about paranormal or spiritual experiences of others, I decided to
work hard to get MORE DATA. “DATA is what I need here.” How could I refine the
possibilities in such a huge space of possible explanations, without a lot more
data (including the kind of reliable data which might help me calibrate what to
believe form other people)? At some level, I also remembered how basic physics
is also part of the proper “realm of Von Neumann,” and opened my mind a bit to
the scary idea of going back and revisiting that complex area as well, to get a
better idea of what is or is not possible after all. (I later learned that
things we call “paranormal” and even what people interpret as “soul” is not so
impossible after all, even in empirically-grounded physics.)
Per (1): I ordered myself to “open all my eyes” and look for
any evidence I could find of what might be going on. And I resolved to look
very actively for new data, and try to find ways to get the data of first
person experience I needed to try to sort out what I believed.
========== logical transition number three, summer of 1969
From 1967, to 1969, I did not see anything evidentiary about
the paranormal or spiritual. I spent 1967-1968 getting an M.Sc. at the London
School of Economics, trying to restore the more human side of my life, but much
more involved in seminars on world politics, European institutions and the
search for a future mate. I do remember the day I audited a class by Karl
Popper, when he suddenly unexpectedly smiled, singled me out, and asked me to
address his class on the empirical method as applied to ethics. Maybe Karl
Popper knew more than I realized, and I regret I never had a chance to learn
more about that. Nothing paranormal there – unless you count my strong
reactions to a fellow student, Judith Landstein, whom I later saw as a kind of “shadow”
or “foreshadow” of Luda. (But my former Catholic background still got in the
way.) I also spent a lot of time writing programs in FORTRAN, which I took to
the University of London computer (King’s College?) to begin to implement some
of the neural network ideas I had at the time.
Likewise, nothing very esoteric in the summer of 1968, when
I had a job at the RAND corporation in California and then did my first year in
the Harvard PhD program in applied mathematics. RAND reminded me a bit of a
James Bond movie, with bright sun and beach and palm trees and security people,
but only one woman I found attractive. That was relevant, because I tried to
get close to her, and discovered more than I had expected. That summer I also borrowed a book on quantum
physics from the RAND library, my only preparation for a graduate course on
quantum physics I then took that fall.
In 1967, I did start reading science fiction again. (I hadn’t
done so since high school). I did look for ideas there about what MIGHT be
going on.
The big ego-changing event of 1969 was a consequence of the
1968 job. When I arrived in Ann Arbor for a new summer job, I had agreed to
rent an upstairs room in a private house on Main Street. But when I entered
that room, I had overwhelming feeling that something was wrong. It LOOKED just
fine to me, a nice woody feeling similar in a way to my old room in Adams
House. But somehow... something horrible. I did not know what to do. Because of
the 1967 experience, I did not just laugh off this very strong negative
feeling. I walked out to a pay phone
along the street, and called up my mother (then an incredibly sensitive Irish
Catholic druid kind of person) and asked what she would feel about this. Bear
in mind, that I had no other place to sleep that night, I had limited money,
and I was carrying everything in a big heavy suitcase, and had never been to
the area before. “DO listen to your feelings if your feelings are THAT strong. You
can find a place to sleep.” I looked around, and could see a lit-up tower about
half a mile away, across a dark quadrangle. The tower turned out to be a
student building, mostly unoccupied for the summer, and I signed a lease on the
spot.
The next morning, a local headline “Murder on Main Street.”
The guy had broken in the door to where I was, found no one, then broke into
the only other apartment on that floor, and killed (knifed) the person sleeping
there in the darkness. I have written more about this elsewhere, but here the
impact was two-fold: (1) this paranormal feeling stuff did seem more likely to
be real after all, and, just as important, personal; and (2) I resolved to order my “subconscious” to
splits its feelings about those James Bond movies, still maintaining love for
sun and beaches and beautiful Russian women and high technology, but firmly
keeping weapons and nastiness as far away as humanly possible.
I started to construct one possible theory of what the
paranormal stuff might be about. The time slippage did not puzzle me so much,
since I certainly knew about time-symmetry even in special relativity. But the
transfer of information puzzled me. The obvious explanation would be something
like radio, based on a force field not yet known (hey, if you don’t know
anything about dark energy or dark matter, why assume it couldn’t be active?).
How could such a communications capability evolve to be part of our brains?
Well, it took a lot of time and some very special molecules for eyes to evolve;
H.G. Wells has a great story about the Kingdom of the Blind, showing how weird
and occult and sacriligeous our eyes could seem to people who hadn’t yet reach
that stage of evolution. So are we at the start of such a transition in
evolution, as our new eyes start to develop? I then decided on a strong
personal commitment to support that progress in evolution – a commitment which
later waned and disappeared, but came back in 2009.
I no longer believe that theory, because a growth in data has
convinced me that a more radical theory (but still viable in 3+1-D) is
necessary. However, I see that evolution in DNA is part of the story.
=========== logical
transition number four, summer of 1971
Back to another summer in Ann Arbor. Where weirdness is
born?
Actually, from summer 1969 to summer 1971, I was open and
personal about esoteric feelings. It was not a purely mundane time, even though
I was working very hard in courses, such as Schwinger’s courses in advanced
quantum field theory. In truth, it was also a period when a fellow student,
Margaret Ho (from a family which started in Beijing, moved to Hong Kong when
she was two, and moved permanently to Pittsburgh when she was eight), followed
perfectly traditional Chinese practices to smoothly and easily slide me out of
remnants of Catholic and Anglican culture. Very early in the game I asked if
she would marry me and “be the mother of my children,’ and she agreed quite
definitely. I really couldn’t say that
our existence was entirely earthbound and mundane. Also, I feel great thanks to
my old Lawrenceville friend Chen, who also joined the Harvard PhD program in
applied math and intoduced me to her (and earlier introduced me to Confucianism).
I will not repeat details of what she said coming back from
her family, after a visit when she agreed to break off the engagement. I can
say it was the most painful period of my life, bar none. I felt as if all the
colors in the world were permanently gone, and I remember having to control my
body like a puppet from afar just to inject the minimum quantity of food into
it. My ego and my soul kept me alive, when normally I would have just died,
really. (Some day I should also talk about a Harvard friend Jeff Keppel who
also experienced things.) But I do remember a very bleak day, walking up
Massachusetts avenue, looking at a tree and reaching out... and feeling how
life and gentleness were not entirely gone from the world...
In such a state of mind, perhaps cauterized emotionally and
still somewhat on remote control, I started a job in Ann Arbor with the Bendix
Office of National Security Studies, which paid enough that I could rent a car
and drive to work (again at University Towers) and eat at restaurants. I do
remember a nice German restaurant I liked, in 1969 or 1971 (sorry!) and a nice
German woman (no romantic connection) who mentioned her work with the Princeton
group studying anomalous phenomena, which reminded me of my desire to be
helpful with that next phase of evolution.
In the evolution of paranormal abilities... I tried to get a
feeling or picture of who it was I was committing to try to be special help to.
And forgive me... yes, I had a very extreme and anomalous dose of testosterone
biasing my thoughts (hey, folks, testosterone encourages friendliness... well,
a complex subject)... I probably had read some stuff by Anne McCaffrey by then,
giving HER picture... what does a psychically sensitive person look like? How
can you find them?
That was background. Here was the jolting experience of
1971. One day, eating (dinner?) in a Howard Johnson restaurant, I was served by
a waitress with blue eyes who somehow felt like the kind of person I wanted to
know. I decided to do an experiment. (If she can’t hear me, nothing is lost. If
she CAN hear me, great.) I decided to think a thought very clearly: “If you are
ARE one of those people, and you CAN hear me, I am totally putty in your hands,
totally under control, to help in whatever way you want. To show you can hear
me, just turn to the unusual red ring on my finger, a Harvard ring with a big red
stone, and come up and comment on it.”
Dhe then turned around, and focused intently on my hand.
Then she saw the ring, a rather special ring, and her eyes opened with the most
incredible surprise... not fear but not motion... just weirded out but not
ready for any more of this... and she quietly walked away almost as if in a trance
of bewilderment. I suppose she wondered what to make of this, but so did I. Once
more, new data forced an adjustment of theory.
There was an obvious adjustment to make. OF COURSE, radios
require both receivers and transmitters. I forget whether the McCaffrey novel
on that topic came before or after. But then I realized this was more personal
than I thought. I realized that I too am quite different from the other folks
she encountered in her life, even in this realm of the paranormal.
==============
============== logical transition number 5, fall of 1972
By the summer of 1971, I had completed the course
requirements for my PhD, and all attention shifted to thesis topic. That was a
large subject for me, which I have written about in many places. It was
especially frustrating for me years later when a gamesman in AI (of whom there
are many, as inventive as Trump in making up stories) said that one of those
professors had invented backpropagation first, implicitly... when that same guy
refused even to let me have computer time to implement backpropagation in
recognizing letters of the alphabet. “It
could never work, and I do not believe you could get correct derivatives that
way.” Later, as part of the thesis work, I proved that my chain rule for
ordered derivatives is exact, but it was unclear for years whether they would
even let me have a chance to go for the proof, because feelings were so bad. I
respected them less and less, and feelings like that tend to become reciprocal.
Still, while focusing my work and my time on neural networks
and intelligent systems, I also made some time to try a few experiments on
transmission and such. More and more, I began to see myself as a kind of “bull
in the China shop,” ultimate yang, in need of better input data just to guide
my use of what I could do, let alone understand more.
In the fall of 1972, for three months, I shared a suite in a
slum apartment in Roxbury, in Boston, because of money issues related to some
folks in the faculty who actually wanted me to starve me away. I am grateful to
my suitemate there, Michael Lambert, who took me in for $80/month room rent,
though I was upset later when he double counted utilities and found a way to
extract the extra money. In that period I mainly lived off of soybean soup
(Michael had found a place to get a whole bushel at wholesale price) and soup
made up of long brewing of chicken necks in vinegar (10 cents per pound). I
remember times of hands shaking from limited nutrition. For a long time, my
daily routine was to walk to the Harvard Medical School Library, across about a
mile of sidewalks just full of dog shit, and immerse myself in books on
neuroscience. But on a couple of those
days, I did read through all the back issues of the journal of the American
Society for Parapsychology, to see what ideas I could find there. (I was especially
intrigued by the study of a youth names... Julius.. working at a warehouse,
where boxes flew in the air when he was working.)
I also remember reading both front page and home page of the
Christian Science Monitor, posted next to the sidewalk, which gave me a feeling
“If only I could belief something offering more positive hope... but reality is
reality..” But I could at least glare at cars in a way which got me across the
street pretty easily.
One day, Michael showed me a little paperback book entitled
something like “How to help yourself with ESP.” I would have laughed at such a
thing in contempt a few years earlier, but at this time, still seeking more and
better data on the unknown side of the human mind, I realized: “This guy
proposed clear and simple exercise/experiments I could do myself. I don’t need
to evaluate his intellect. I only need to try the experiments, and see if they
work. If they do, I can learn something. If not, I won’t spend too much time on
it.”
The curious thing is that they work, enough for me to do
something with. I forget all the details, and some which I remember are not
suitable for a blog. The first led me to see and feel energy flows around a
little plastic mobile. Unconsciously I learned a kind of deep steadying
breathing to marshall my focus, to visualize the motion as it was and as I
wanted it to be, and push. Not easy, nor really remarkable, but remarkable
enough to give me feedback on the important feeling part of it. The second was
basically just a simplified version of the old kundalini exrecise of moving
energy from chakra to chakra.. and that worked very neatly, even though (or
perhaps because?) I had never even heard of it before. That was an incredible
zinger.
After that, I resolved to learn more about what exercises or
experiments had been used by serious, focused people all over the world across
time. I mentioned a few in my previous blog post. Then at one point, when I was
coordinating a group of people supporting Scoop Jackson for President, I met an
attractive woman who casually mentioned she belonged to the Rosicrucian Order.
I looked into that, studied a bit of the history, and concluded that this would
be the least hokey group with the most useful exercises of all the ones I could
find; some people found it suspicious that they had been committed to using
simple English as much as possible since the massive reorganization under
H.Spencer Lewis, but this did not bother me. I read Lewis’s book the Rosicrucian Manual, and it made a lot
more sense to me than alternative around then. Lewis was very active in Quakers,
but he argued that there is a need for an additional structure of (competing)
schools to get deeper into specifics and basic training, even within the
absolute freer structure of Quakers and America in general. Though he gave his
views/experience of the specifics, in ways which seemed self-contradictory at
times, he emphasized the spirit of free inquiry, the “walking question mark.”
Some of the old symbolism seemed alien to me, but there was a lot less of that
here than in the Catholic Church, for example, and Lewis was careful to subordinate
all that to the greater context and to goals which I could fully commit myself
to.
And so I joined, and was a member until something like 1981
(after a boss of mine in the US government made some scary noises and I
realized I needed to avoid stupid misunderstandings). (Also, by 1981, I had
learned enough that I could go to what Lewis described as a later stage
anyway.) I still recognize the great importance of having schools out there
which address very directly the issue of creating curricula to help people enhance
their own experience and capabilities, within a free context in which they can
shift from school to school or quite without trouble. With “mystery schools,”
as with universities, a certain degree of hierarchy and even evaluation is
unavoidable, to build up a system of teachers; this often leads to corruption
and death by power seeking, in many schools, but embedding them in a larger
(competitive) free society reduces those costs/risks.
For awhile, I disentangled the basic history of this and
many other groups. Certainly I noted the roles of Pythagoreans, Stoics and
Platonists, a connected part of a long tapestry of mystery schools moving
forward to today and back at least to Egypt. As one small part of this, I
looked through the magazine Rose-Croix published in France in the nineteenth
century and held in Harvard’s Widener library, and compared signatures between
that and Lewis’s famous “FUDOSI” charter. I was also intrigued to learn of Walt
Disney’s role in the group; great cartoons like Pocohontas (or Wall-E?) were
not just superficial in nature.
By 1981, I had given enough feedback and thoughts that Ralph Lewis appointed me to the International Research Council. I also wrote a long manuscript (120 pages or so, double spaced)
in common English, "Science Mysticism and the Nature of Man" connecting what I knew then about the mathematics of intelligence to the development of human potential. But after that... I learned a lot more about that strand of mathematics, beyond what was there then. My paper in Neural Networks 2012 can be read at several levels.
Today, for the first time in over 30 years, I decided to go
back and attend a small Rosicrucian discussion group.. as part of respecting
and supporting an important mission. I do not know what the best way forward is there, but we would be idiots to carelessly throw away a database developed over thousands of years of focused effort, independent creative thinking and experiment.
Who knows? All for now.
P.S. As for 2009... well, I remember a little dinner in Georgetown which I set up by Katherine Neville hosted, with Karl Pribram and high-ranking Sufi leaders from Turkey and Pakistan. Rosicrucians tend to emphasize what all humans can learn (a very important principle!), but folks in Istanbul reminded me... of Card's Song of Earth.. and the serious questions of how to design a computer which interfaces more directly with the noosphere . (Well, less a question and more of something no one begins to know how to do!) That feeds into appreciation of the reality that DNA is an unavoidable part of evolutionary realities here, even though every government policy and medical intervention which has tried to interact with DNA has made a huge mess, as bad as frontal lobotomies.
================================
===========================================
Added later:
As more and more scary things start to come into the open, I
owe you more details on logical transition number 5, and 6, and a hint about
later steps.
Each of these logical transitions were changes in the axioms
I use in thinking about the world. Some would use the term “:worldview,” which
is close, but not quite so fundamental. I hesitate to fill in step 5, let alone
the later ones, because in the absence of simple mundane sanity (step two!!),
people tend to have hot buttons (and cold buttons) so extreme that they stop
being constructive and rational when too much is said too soon. Our world is
still all too full of gestapos and thought police!! I still remember the day
when I said to Yeshua:” Hey, I don’t want to end up like John the Baptist here,”
and he replied: “There are worse things, my friend, but we all die in the end.”
Dying was NOT the purpose of Jesus’ life, sin or no sin, and I am sad that so
many misconstrue it that way – but since we all die in the end, in the body, the
rational way is to push ahead even in the face of bullets, when it is important
enough. (Speaking of John Kerry... )
OK: how much to say about the effects which I saw after I “raised
the kundalini” in step 5?
Time to be precise.
The simple book said: “After you get energy and consciousness
swirling in the ‘third eye’ center, do the same to a point about a foot above
your head. And then project (not out loud!) the words: ‘I ask my inner self to
please speak out so that I might better listen to it and better guide my life.”
(Didn’t I already do that ala Estabrooks? I forget whether I asked the same in
1972.) So then: a vast cloud of energy full of love appeared, and a voice came
in English: “Sorry, Paul, I am not your inner self.” And then in a simultaneous
mix of English and thought-image/language: “You can address me as ‘father.’”
Then a switch to all thought-image language.
The first phase was probably already an example of what
Greeley and McCready describe in their important classic paper “Are we a nation
of mystics?”, reprinted in Goleman’s book on Consciousness. (A book worth more
than the $2 it now costs on Amazon.) That paper was based on extensive
NSF-funded research, and it has a big impact on how I see our lives on earth
today. In the first phase, we swirled up together a bit higher... and, if I had
been in a dream state, I might well have reconstructed that as riding on a
white horse. Or at least in an earlier century I might have. In that higher
place, he discussed the state of my relations with my thesis committee, and the
application of love all ways around, to foster clearer understanding and
communications. And then he showed me. And events then flowed as he said, an
outcome I would have considered improbable.
This experience was actually one of many which persuaded me
that the brain/radio theory would not cover the reality. Step by step, I felt
logically forced to accept the idea that we are part of a many-one symbiosis
with a larger but real biological entity which I call the “noosphere” --- similar
to that of Vedansky and Teilhard de Chardin but with the important caveat that it
is just one organism of an entire species, evolved in the “dark matter and
energy” of the galaxy (or more, but we are too small to see more, at least
yet). I remember the things I remembered about Jesus’s words in the New
Testament, words very different from the narrow narcissistic megalomaniac
things one hears from hermeneutic theologians. Of course I also remembered how
he used the word “Father” so often. (Also, to be honest, I did not think this
was a local tribal deity; for example, I wondered whether Norse talk about “All-father”
also reflected a bit of valid contact, mixed in with the other things we see
more easily in historical accounts.) In my first trip to Spain, just a few
years ago, I used the term “pater galacticus,” just in my thought, as part of
some effort to improve communication channels. And I am happy to have seen
echoes of the image.
The other day, a friend recently said casually: “Of course
we communicate with pater galacticus every day...” Dubeo. From Greeley’s study,
I do suppose that more than half of the most educated people out there have
probably had at least one contact... but folks, the galaxy is a big place. The
vast majority of voices people hear in their heads are their own subconscious
breaking through (when lack of full sanity requires such a thing), and the vast
majority of the others are from other people or nodes in the noosphere. The
more confident that those nodes are that they are omniscient, the more certain
it is that they are not, that they are confused. (Philip K. Dick had a beautiful
image of this in one of his novels, where a person who projected as an old
Chinese pot was much more reliable than one who pretended to be God. But in
truth, there was a time in graduate school when I tried a projection
experience, and was deeply embarrassed when someone said: “Jesus came to me and
he said the most implausible things... he said...” and it was me. I learned to be more conscious about carrying
caveats with me, to avoid what Hayden calls ‘being heard as an untruth.’)
One test is whether the person you are talking to knows the
answer to very difficult mathematical questions which a corner drunk or megalomaniac
couldn’t, but you need to learn some math yourself to get that straight. In any
case, I believe that the “cosmic consciousness” which I now attain almost every
night is mainly an engagement with the noosphere, not beyond, and that the
attainment of that level is already ambitious enough for the most serious of us
today. (Maybe too ambitious for most, to start.) In fact, there was a Quaker
meeting a few weeks ago when I felt impelled to really try to reach out all the
way to Pater Galacticus because of really overwhelming questions facing all of
us on earth.. and I do think I received a kind of reply: “Sorry, Paul, but you
have to work this out YourSelf, together with the rest of you in the noosphere.”
Even whether we live or die in this planet may not be as important as whether
we learn to work together at that basic spiritual level.
Certainly I remember vividly the spiritual experience of
reaching out and meditating in the past few years, first in a place in Acadia
Maine when there was a clear sky, and later in the high Andes near Alma,
reaching out as best I could to the galaxy. I feel much more energy for and
with the galaxy as a symbol than I do for any of the historical symbols
mentioned by H. Spencer Lewis in his book The Rosicrucian Manual. But this
week, we are mainly called to work on our activities on earth, which include
even our best efforts to reach through science to more universal understanding.
After step five, I moved back to Harvard dorms proper (actually,
the law school dorms) for about a half year, and moved into a job as a lab
instructor for a class in electrical engineering, a slot which opened up quite
suddenly. But then for two years, I moved to a very wonderful graduate dorm,
formerly all-female, by Brattle Street, and worked in a regular full-time job
at Tech Square by MIT, developing/programming applications running on their
Multics computer system.
It was very, very strenuous doing a tough full-time job,
working full time on my PhD thesis (not a small or trivial one) and also
pursuing the new questions and activities I had started in 1972... but I did.
For example, I even went to one very small sample class of a local Gurdjieff
group, where they showed me some basic exercises... but I remember calling up
the group leader and apologized I could not come back because of time pressures.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “From what you say, the struggling you are doing right
now is already close to what we recommend for a higher path..”
From 1973 to about 1979 (when US government schedules forced
me to put that stuff on a back burner), I had a routine of listening to new age
music every night as I went to bed, raising energy through variations of the
Gurdjieeff exercise and things I could figure out myself from basic principles
and other things I read... and feeling reassured and comfortable when the
intense poltergeist effects broke out all around me, like clockwork. Lots of
experiments, lots of veridical checking, but not a real logical transition.
But somewhere in that period near Brattle Street, I made a
more fundamental logical transition, the transition to understanding and fully
accepting the principle of “Alchemical Marriage” , which I sometimes call “the
second level of sanity.” It is a matter of really accepting what it means that
we are a symbiotic form of life, that “I” refers not to brain or to soul (let
alone some formal metaphysical construct!) but to a combination of the two, and
that Pareto optimality is what really feels right to us. Logical transition 6.
What happens in the noosphere is just as important as what
happens in plain sight in the mundane world, even in deciding our mundane fate.
Seeing that was another important part of logical transition number 6, which
occurred back in the period (fall 1973 to August 1975) when I was in that nice
dorm at Harvard.
