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The Ecology of Consciousness - Part 2
James V. Hardt, Ph.D.
Biocybernaut Institute
 continued from part 1
Egoism and Mysticism
Ego dissolution is the goal of mystical practices
in all cultures and leads reliably to mystical experiences. We are
interested in such mystical experiences for many reasons. In some
spiritual traditions there is a priest or guru who acts as a conduit
to altered reality [mystical experiences] for his or her
followers. The priest or guru sometimes requires that the followers
surrender their personal will to his will, and then he provides
transcendent experiences in return. As history has shown, there is
much mischief that can accompany the follower's submission to the will
of the priest or guru including psychological, sexual, and financial
exploitation of the followers by the leader (e.g. Jim Jones,
etc.). And in addition, once the leader dies and is gone, the
followers often have no further access to the higher states they
craved and which the leader provided (e.g. Swami Muktananda).
Neurofeedback is a profoundly democratizing
influence in spiritual discovery, since each trainee discovers and
develops his or her own personal connection to the Divine, to the
desired states of altered awareness, to mystical experiences. With
Neurofeedback training, each trainee allows his or her ego to dissolve
in order to open more fully to his or her higher self and to the
Divine Will. In Hymn of the Universe (1961) by Teilhard de
Chardin, we see that:
The true self grows in inverse proportion to the growth
of egoism.
Surrendering one's own ego to the ego of another
person [the spiritual leader] thus actually limits the growth of the
individual, in part, because the leader's ego grows and the total
system of leader plus follower does not diminish in total
egoism. While the initial surrender by the "follower" to the leader's
ego may lead to some growth of awareness relative to the original
egoic state, this growth is limited by the inherent limitations of the
leader and the leader's ego. Neurofeedback offers a better way. If,
instead, the Neurofeedback trainee diminishes his or her own ego in
favor of his or her own Higher Self, then the Neurofeedback Trainer
who assists this process has successfully functioned as an Assistant
Coach, whose primary mission is to establish effective communication
between the trainee and the trainee's Higher Self, which is the Head
Coach, and this Head Coach can best connect the individual with the
Divine Awareness.
There is still a role for leadership in spiritual
exploration with Neurofeedback, but this role becomes one of
organizing and optimizing the spiritual experiences of an individual
or of a group rather than, as in the past, the leader being the
source of the spiritual experiences. In addition, the
requirements for leadership change, and rather than being based on
power in evoking mystical experiences in their followers, leadership
now requires wisdom and compassion in guiding the mystical experiences
which the "followers" now have the full ability to evoke on their own
with the Neurofeedback technology. This also means that the leader
must lead with Love rather than discipline, penalties, or
punishment. These later negatives may have been useful, in a less
enlightened past, with some spiritual children, but not now. The
radiant beings awakening through Neurofeedback into fuller
understanding of the Divine source of the Universe will only respect
and gather around leaders whose central premise is Love. Again from
Chardin:
Reflecting ... on the state of affairs
which might evoke this new universal love in the human heart, a love
so often vainly dreamed of, but which now leaves the fields of Utopia
to reveal itself as both possible and necessary, we are brought to the
following conclusion: that for men upon the earth, all the earth, to
learn to love one another, it is not enough that they should know
themselves to be members of one and the same thing; in
planetizing themselves they must acquire the consciousness,
without losing themselves, of becoming one and the same
person. For there is no total love that does not proceed from,
and exist within, that which is personal.
And from Chardin's, Hymn of the Universe:
The true self grows in inverse
proportion to the growth of egoism. The element becomes personal only
in so far as it becomes universal. ... [I]f the human particles are to
become truly personalized under the creative influence of union, it is
not enough for them to be joined together, no matter how. Since what
is in question is the achieving of a synthesis of centres, it must be
centre to centre [through love] and in no other way that they
establish contact with one another. ... In other words the [issue] to
which all this leads is the [issue] of love.
To be pure of heart means to love God above all
things, and at the same time to see him everywhere in all
things. ... Who then could fail to see that the effect of this contact
with God must be to unify it to the innermost core of its being?
Given a really deep insight into the concept of
collectivity, we are bound to understand the term without any
attenuation of meaning. ... [T]he stuff of the universe does not
achieve its full evolutionary cycle when it achieves [merely]
consciousness; ... we are therefore moving on towards some new
critical point. ... The noosphere becomes a single closed system in
which each element individually sees, feels, desires, and suffers the
same things as all the rest together with them.
Thus we have a harmonized collectivity of
consciousnesses which together make up a sort of super-consciousness;
the earth is covered by myriads of grains of thought but enclosed in
one single enveloping consciousness so that it forms, functionally, a
single vast grain of thought on a sidereal scale of immensity, the
plurality of individual acts of reflective consciousness coming
together and reinforcing one another in a single unanimous act.
Such is the general form in which, by analogy and
in symmetry with the past, we are led scientifically to envisage that
humanity of the future in which alone the terrestrial drives implicit
in our activity can find a terrestrial fulfillment.
As phenomenologists we are interested in the
elucidation of the structure of consciousness and are interested in
understanding how a person's reality comes to be
constituted. Phenomenologists have shied away from mysticism for
several reasons, such as : (a) Mystical experiences are usually
ineffable, that is they cannot be adequately described or
communicated. (b) Mystical experiences often overwhelm those who
undergo them with an irresistibly given sense of their realness. But
phenomenologists are often unwilling to commit themselves to the
reality of their experiences of others. For Husserl only the structure
[not the content] of experience could have the true reality of
permanence. He noted the changes in the contents of normal experience,
realized their limited or relative reality, and looked for his true
reality in the less mutable structure of the ever varying
experiences. Stall (1975) notes phenomenology's reluctance to ascribe
reality to the content of experience and its insistence on the a
priori structure of experience and he concludes:
... the phenomenology and history of
religion is (1) always unsatisfactory and insufficient because it does
not investigate the validity of the phenomena it studies, and (2)
often wrong because of incorrect implicit evaluations.
We should note in passing that mystical experience
need not be religious (as in the nontheistic advaitist school of Yoga
and in Teravadin Buddhism). Mysticism may be simply another way of
constituting reality and so should fall within the scope of
phenomenology. In fact if phenomenology is to present itself as a
method for discovering the structure of consciousness, it had better
not exclude fundamental forms of consciousness or modes of knowing. If
we consider transcendental phenomenology as the study of the normal
states of adult consciousness through the bracketed perspective, that
implies consideration of two fundamental forms of consciousness from
which to generalize about the structure of consciousness (the normal
states and the bracketed states). The discovery or the investigation
of a new form of consciousness would give us the opportunity to
increase our knowledge of structural principles by 1/2, or 50%. Let us
consider why this is so.
If physics only knew of two elements, say Hydrogen
and Helium, it could begin to theorize about the structure of
matter. Just as ordinary consciousness comes in stable and unstable
varieties, so does Hydrogen come in various isotopes, - two of which
are stable (protium and deuterium) and one of which is not: tritium is
unstable and thus radioactive. Comparison of the properties and
construction of the two elements would permit deductions as to the
structure of matter, but how limited those deductions would be!
Electrons would be seen with plus and minus spins, but only the "s"
subshell variety of electron would be seen. There are no p, d, f, g,
h, i, or k electron subshells in Hydrogen and Helium so those unique
structural properties would be missed and maybe would not even be
guessed at.
But if we add a third element, - even a large,
complex, and difficult to understand element like Uranium, our
understanding of structural principle would be enormously enhanced. We
may even have to abandon our present theories of the a priori
nature of the structure of matter in favor of a new theory of
structure implied by the evidence we find in Uranium itself and in the
comparisons between Uranium, Hydrogen and Helium. In this way our
understanding will grow. Mystical experiences may be as difficult to
understand as the structure of Uranium, and may not fit into the
structure of our beliefs about the nature of consciousness, but that
merely means we have some revision and some growing to do.
Continue to Part 3 
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