TARGET ARTICLE 8

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ABSTRACT: I have gained some insights concerning consciousness by simultaneously maintaining two worldviews, the second one being essentially upside-down and backwards from the "standard" viewpoint. I am reporting on this experiential research, that is, on the "running" of this inverted worldview in case it may prove useful to others.

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INTRODUCTION:
The layout here is extremely simple. I will roughly sketch the two worldviews, calling one, View I and the other, View II. The first is "standard", the second inverted. Elements are identified and placed in order relative to our confidence in their "reality."

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Since our confidence level in an element reflects the feedback loop between our filtering core beliefs and our experience, we enter the process through conscious declaration. That is, we declare a change in our core beliefs, in the ordering of the elements which establish the structure of our experience.

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Each view will be described using the same five "elements." These elements are somewhat arbitrary and should be viewed only as representative phenomenal markers.

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I understand that my term, "standard" worldview, seems to be painting everyone with the same brush, but I believe that the core values expressed are nearly universally held. Here's a simple test to see whether my "standard" view is applicable: Pause from reading for a moment and look around you. Within your experience, is there someplace where you "end" and "not-you" begins? Perhaps at the skin? When you leave the room (or wherever you are currently) will the objects in it continue to exist? If you can identify a boundary between you and not-you and if you answered
"yes" to the second question, then the "standard view" applies.

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VIEW I, The standard view

THE ELEMENTS, as hierarchically ordered under View I:
A. The World
B. The Construct of "self"
C. The Culture
D. The Content of our own experience
E. (The Wholeness of experience)

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A. The World:
We are born into a preexisting world. Our personal experience, the result of physical processes in the brain, is the imperfect representation of a small part of that reality. For these and for other reasons we have greater confidence in the reality beyond our experience than we do in our
experience itself.

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B. The Construct of "self":
There is an "I" which is separate from the world. It has a body, it has an experience. If the "I" ceases, we're dead.

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C. The Culture
We are born into a culture, a preexisting communal repository of past experience. It includes language, science, and an historical record. The culture accumulates knowledge and transfers it to each new generation. We live, then, within a world and within a culture that were both here before we came and that will be here after we are gone.

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D. The Content of our own experience:
On a moment by moment level, of course, this *is* our experience of the world. It is all the thoughts and things, the parts and the processes of our experience. We live in a sea of content and have developed various methods to make sense out of it.

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Though, on the face of it, it might seem that we would have a very high degree of confidence in the content of our own experience, I do not believe that is so. The reality-confidence level for the world and the culture is deeper.

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So, though I may declare the meaning or value in an experience, recognize, as an educated twentieth century person, that I am easily fooled and that I may be misrepresenting reality to myself. As a prosaic example, I may buy more deodorant or more life insurance through a general lack of confidence in my own assessment of the matter.

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E. (The Wholeness of experience):
From the standard view there is no such thing as wholeness of experience, lest it be from mystic reference. (The pearl of great price, the Tao, etc.)

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So, the hierarchy of confidence in View I runs from the external (high) to the internal (low).

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VIEW II, The inverted view.

THE ELEMENTS, as hierarchically ordered under View II:
A. The Wholeness of experience.
B. The Content of our own experience
C. The Culture
D. The Construct of "self"
E. The World

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A few comments are necessary before examining the inverted viewpoint. This is experiential research, not conceptual research. This inverted view is understandable only from the inside. In some ways, it is like a non-linear program whose outcome can only be known by running it. So, the research that I am describing is of limited value in any case, but it can be of no benefit whatsoever if it is analyzed from an empirical platform.

The description of this second view assumes an active researcher who is willing to get her feet wet.

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Furthermore, the descriptions to follow also assume an acceptance of being *only* here/now or at least attempting to be in that state. This action does two things at once. It withdraws our background attention from the *projection* of reality beyond experience and withdraws our background attention from the *projection* of the momentum of the "past" or the concerns of the "future." This does not deny or support states outside of experience, it simply expends no energy on them either way.

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A. The Wholeness of experience.
We can only know our own experience, period. This is, of course, tautological if to "know" means to "experience", but I am linking knowledge and the geometrical/logical space that we call our experience. Regardless of the content, the wholeness of experience is constant. Its space is always exactly one experience, whether it is the experience of a cell or of a person. The constant, "wholeness of experience", equals the limits of knowledge for that particular experiential system.

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On this first principle (that we can only know our own experience) we can build the second worldview. Note that in everything that follows the "wholeness of experience", as a *contentless* space, is never dropped from attention. The view builds logically.

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B. The Content of our own experience:
Since the content of experience can't arise from the "outside" (there is no outside established in this view) it must be shown how it arises from within. The following is one model showing how that might happen.

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Before starting on that model, however, we'll need a definition and some statements about the logic. The "content" in "content of experience" is everything meaningful. Strictly speaking, all things in experience, whether they are emotions, theories, dogs or gods are logical objects or complexes of logical objects.

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A logical object is a bordered distinction. The act of raising a distinction or recognizing an object cleaves wholeness into two parts, the object and the object-not. The object is the foreground, raised above a background. Though it appears complex, our experience is composed of a rich multidimensional layering of such objects.

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An object of experience can also be understood as a projected (or mirrored) system value. The value is assigned contextually within the experiencing system. In other words, the experiencing system actively impresses the content of experience on the experiential "space" according to its internal system dynamics. Take a moment now and view several objects in your experience. Pick ones that you value differently. Note how the objects you care about are "weighted" within your experience as though your invested valuation had mass.

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In a system that applies self-referent meaning to its experience, each new distinction fractally connects established meanings. So, if I'm proposing a self-arising manifestation, where did the first distinction come from?

I really don't know. I can vaguely imagine an ambient pressure of potential in the experiential field, a pressure of "life", to be poetic.

Through its undivided presence outside space/time, perhaps the wholeness imparts a pressure by virtue of its infinite potential. Perhaps this triggered some arbitrary first distinction.

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This self-creating system generates internally consistent content of experience contextually without the logical requirement of an external reality. The system is solipsistically isolated, an encased bubble of self-referent experience. I think that a good name for this is a "solipsystem."

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C. The Culture
I have said so far that wholeness of experience is primary and that content of experience is solipsistic. From whence do "others" come, then? Who is Kant or Husserl within the solipsystem? What is science? In this inverted view, how do we discern value in the culture?

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The shifting of authority from the world to the internally arising life is a significant difference between the two viewpoints. There's something of Emerson in this view. As he says in his essay, _History_, "The world exists for the education of each man." And in _Self-Reliance_, "A man is to carry himself in the resence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he."

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I would say that this inverted viewpoint receives all input as counsel within the "wholeness of being" rather than as an input from outside "self." In a way the entire content of experience takes on this advisory or staff function. Manifestation, from this view, is informational feedback, the view out the rear window of the exfoliating creation.

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D. The Construct of "self":
It seems to me that complex systems arising within experience would naturally develop "centers" or "selves", since it's an efficient way to process some types of experiential flows; Tiger!! Run!

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However, such "selves" are "as if" beings. At the heart experience is ontologically undivided. Within this inverted view there aren't any boundaries separating beings. There are content distinctions that arise within the system's self-referent flow, but there aren't any separate *beings* in experience. The experience itself is whole and complete, full of indivisible *beingness*, and that beingness is impressed on experiential contents.

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So the construct of "self" is unimportant. The "I" might fade away to nothing and the observer be forgotten with little change because (on this view) the experience itself is the root of being.

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E. The World
If the "self" is unimportant, the world is even less important. Whatever needs to be noticed by the "living" wholeness of experience will naturally be raised to system attention. Whether "a world" even exists becomes an idle metaphysical curiosity since we always have an experience around us that requires our attention.

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Summing up, this second worldview exhibits an inverted hierarchy of confidence. The highest confidence is internal and the lowest is external.

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I'm reminded of our little test and how it would look from this other perspective. Pause from reading again and take another look around.

Within experience there is no boundary where you "end" and "not-you" begins. As *being*, you and the wholeness of the experience are the same.

There is a "self" which arises as a center of a complex system but it is *content* only and can be taken up or dropped nearly at will. When "you" leave wherever you currently are the experience will mutate and will continue to have "presence in wholeness" and new content. Whether objects, which exist only as self-referential content, continue to exist "outside" of such a continuing experience is unanswerable and (after a few fruitless queries) uninteresting.

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REFERENCES

Like the other members of this forum I have read widely on consciousness research and theory but it would be an inappropriate distortion to claim evidentiary support from previous researchers for a model that inverts the source of authority.

If I were to pick a few books that most closely parallel my thoughts and that less frequently appear in a list of references, they might be:

G Spencer-Brown, (1994) Laws of Form. Cognizer Co.

Campbell, Jeremy, (1982) Grammatical Man. Simon and Schuster, NY.

Pearce, Joseph Chilton, (1971) The Crack in the Cosmic Egg. Julian Press.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

I was born in New York City and raised primarily in Maryland. After a tour in Viet Nam, I attended college in San Francisco but withdrew before completing my BA. Instead I joined a non-denominational religious order and was ordained a minister in 1975. My wife and I left that group in 1980 and settled in Florida where I returned to college and took a technical degree in electronic engineering. From then until 1996 I worked as a field engineer, primarily on mainframes and high-speed item processing equipment.

Throughout my life I have been keenly aware of the reciprocal nature of belief and experience. Any declared "reality", even if I earnestly attempted to believe in it, soon shifted under my feet and revealed its arbitrary roots. It seemed obvious to me that the most interesting aspects about manifestation would be found within processes that contained a floating point of understanding.

Of course, very few people were interested in this obscure and seemingly profitless inquiry in the seventies when I first began to seriously look at it. Though much excellent work was happening behind the public view ( Bohm, Prigogine, Kauffman and others were exploring the border between chaos and order, for instance), not much was in print. Self-education, a lively process that has never ceased for me, is much easier now than it was then.

At any rate, I was left to construct my own path, one that I’ve come to think of as experiential philosophy. This is, romantically speaking, pursuing the goddess of wisdom by immersion. It requires dismantling the observing platform a piece at a time, as though the sense of security embedded in its structure was the only acceptable fuel for the goddess’s altar. I’m speaking in these terms to juxtapose this path to academic philosophy which is *about* the pursuit of wisdom. Experiential philosophy is holistic process and its results are contextual.

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