Five Realities, One Truth

The Human Condition

Andrew Lohrey

• Publisher: Rishi Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780987593870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Drawing on the work of David Bohm and Owen Barfield, Andrew Lohrey has sketched out the limits and the freedoms of the human condition through the five principal realities that constitute the psychological make-up of the human mind and its evolutionary path.

Five Realities, One Truth argues that reality is a relative and local state of mind, a state that is not fixed but arises out of and is shaped by the manner in which we make meaning. In contrast, the conventional model of reality is binary where things are either 'real' or 'unreal'. Truth on the other hand represents an unconditional, non-local state of universal consciousness that underlies all realities and every local mind.

1

Reality Research

I am sitting in the Waterside Pavilion in Hobart, Tasmania, meditating. It is 15 September 2010 at the 12 o’ clock ‘No Worries’ daily meditation program run by the Gyuto Monks of Tibet. I have been travelling and missed the first five days of the Gyuto visit and now I have come halfway through their program. Gen Lama talks for ten minutes about Trading Grief and then we meditate.

I have little grief to trade and find it hard to hear the English translation by Sonam, the younger Tibetan who translates for Gen Lama. I sit at the back of the room in my fog of bad hearing. I have come for the meditation, not the talk. I meditate daily and have come to experience the silence of Gen Lama who, along with the Dalai Lama, walked out of Tibet in 1959. He must be a similar age to the Dalai Lama and looks as if he could be related. He sits beneath a picture of the Dalai Lama, so I have a double image of almost the same face; same large glasses, same shaved head, same round face and skin colour. As you would expect, the energy in this peaceful room comes from Gen Lama, not the picture.

I came early and for ten minutes before the talk watched the younger monks play with the children who were there for the period of ‘Culture for Kids’. I rested my hands on the rail looking down at the young monks seated cross-legged on the floor two metres below me, watching them make various forms with plasticine, and all the while being there, with and for the children. The Mawson Pavilion is a small beautiful building that faces east and sits on the edge of a dock full of sailing ships. The sun shines through the windows and the scene is relaxed, full of an easy joyful presence. I merge into the presence so much so that I do not want to talk to anyone.

Meditation begins. I have used a mantra for years but today it does not arise. I just sit with nothing. Sometimes my eyes are open, sometimes closed. I watch Gen Lama. He is a rock. His silence is strong and gentle. After five minutes a question comes into my mind: ‘where is Gen Lama?’ Then a series of images arise: I see myself stand up, take up a two-handed Samurai sword, approach Gen Lama while he meditates and bring the sword down on that brown shaven head, splitting it in two. Blood, brains and bone are exposed. I look into his head and ask, Where is Gen Lama?

Where do these images come from? Perhaps from Gen Lama, perhaps from a recent reading of an interview with a neurosurgeon who spoke of brains. Who knows where they come from, but I am left with the insistent question, ‘where is Gen Lama?’ When the meditation period is over, I leave, weeping. Perhaps I had some grief to trade after all. But these were not the tears of grief. They are the tears that come from being in the presence of, and merging with, a great soul. They are the tears of a weakening ego and perhaps that is my grief. Such tears leak away the ego’s power, so it begins to lose its strength and value.

Three days after the meditation session with the Gyuto Monks I return for another session. After the 12 o’ clock meditation program there is question time where I ask Gen Lama: ‘I can see Gen Lama’s body, but where is Gen Lama?’ He replies in a soft voice, in the same manner in which he replies to every question put to him.

Finally, the translation comes from Sonam: ‘A long time ago there was a radical monk with psychic powers who lived at the time of the fifth Dalai Lama. The fifth Dalai Lama had been very successful at developing his kingdom but had, at some point, decided he would go into a cave and meditate. When someone asked the radical monk where the Dalai Lama was, he said he was in the town looking at rich brocades. This was considered to be an insult to the Dalai Lama, so they arrested the radical monk. When the Dalai Lama finally heard of this, he said that the radical monk was correct for while he had been meditating in the cave he had been thinking of the brocades in the town.’

Gen Lama then said he hoped I was not the reincarnated radical monk for he had wanted to look at the shops in Hobart after this tour. He then said that on a deeper level he does not know who he is or where he is and if he did know this, he would be enlightened. On the face of it his answer did not seem to be an answer at all, yet it was deeply satisfying. He had not directly answered my question, yet he had left me with a sense of connection and profundity. How was this possible? What Meaning had passed between us that had not been framed and encapsulated by the words he used but had left me wordlessly gratified?

If Gen Lama cannot tell me where he is, how am I, a worldly westerner, to know where or who I am? Certainly, the words Gen Lama used gave me the opportunity to answer this question in my own way, which is perhaps what he intended. When he said he was looking in shop windows, he implied that we are where our thoughts are. Yet while I know we are not our thoughts – we have thoughts – it seemed to me he was also saying something important about a quality of being that comes when our thoughts have focus and are strong. The question of where or who I am is a spiritual one, but it wears empirical clothing.

To be ‘somewhere’ implies that we are in a place that has a relatively precise location in space and time. This kind of empirical precision is demanded by a culture that relies on explicit details and the expectation that everything will have a visible, precise, certain and differential location. The material world that can be mapped by this kind of language was called the explicate order by David Bohm (1983). This is the order of the everyday physical universe, a visible world of material objects reflected in, and reinforced by, the language of materialism, which has a bias towards the local and differential. In this explicit world there can be a relatively precise answer to where a thing is, as for example the question: ‘Where is my book?’ Answer: ‘It’s on the third shelf, four books from the left-hand end.’

Bohm called the other great order of the universe the implicate order. This is often considered to be a mysterious order and has been much ignored by Bohm’s fellow scientists. Within the implicate order there are no visible, extended and differential relations in time or space. In this domain there is no possibility of arriving at even a moderately precise location in time and space in response to such questions as ‘where is Gen Lama?’ This kind of question relates not to measurements but to the essence of Gen Lama’s being, and the essence of his being has no precise or explicit location. (This question is discussed further in Chapter 10.)

2

Paradigms

Reality research demands that we should begin not halfway through a process but at what seems to be the secure beginning. So, what is that secure foundation of reality for science? Within the scientific community the concept of a ‘paradigm’ appears to function as the foundation for scientific theories and experiments, so we need to ask does this make a paradigm the secure foundation from which to investigate reality?

The Galileo Commission Report, ‘Beyond a Materialist Worldview’ (https://explore.scimednet.org), has argued that a set of background assumptions are inescapably necessary to the way in which scientific investigation is thought about, discussed and practised. Such background assumptions operate as a paradigm or worldview which is adopted by scientists to guide their theories and experiments. In the Foreword to the report Iain McGilchrist writes that a paradigm is like a ‘lens through which we apprehend reality, the problem being that, while such paradigms are indispensable, we tend to be oblivious to the inevitably distorting effect of the lens.’

For McGilchrist a paradigm operates like a pair of conceptual glasses that enable us to see and understand our practices even when the lens distorts that which we construct. If this is the case, then the reality researcher should pay close attention to the nature of paradigms. McGilchrist has a relatively clear description of a paradigm’s place and role in science, yet the idea that the current scientific paradigm can distort our view renders that reality unstable. The man who contributed the concept of a scientific paradigm to the philosophy of science was Thomas Kuhn who wrote The Structure of the Scientific Revolution in the 1960s. Kuhn’s view of a paradigm was somewhat ambiguous in that at times he implies that a paradigm has the status of a scientific theory that is supported by experimental evidence. His more controversial contribution to the philosophy of science was that science is periodically punctuated by intellectual revolutions in which one conceptual worldview (paradigm) is replaced by another. Thus, his view of paradigms was tied in closely to the conditions of scientific revolutions (Kuhn 1970: 175).

Kuhn was accused of making science akin to a subjective and irrational enterprise because of his views about periodic intellectual revolutions. In a Postscript to the 1970 second edition he attempts to clarify his view: ‘On the one hand, it stands for the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community. On the other hand, it denotes one sort of element in that constellation’ (Kuhn 1970: 175). The distinction between a constellation and one element of the constellation was never resolved.

Later in his Postscript Kuhn suggested that a paradigm was a ‘disciplinary matrix’, which is a network of norms, values and rules common to the practitioners of a particular discipline. He went on to describe a disciplinary matrix as involving generalisations, beliefs, values, and a group’s shared commitment to the matrix. What appears to be missing from this description of a paradigm is a clear distinction (more evident in McGilchrist’s comments) between the framework that guides a scientist’s approach and the actual theories and experimental practices that are undertaken. Without this distinction between ‘frame’ and ‘practice’ the paradigm tends to be identified with theory or experimental results. In other words, the lens through which we apprehend reality becomes no more than the outcomes of our practices. While this view fits the criteria for an ‘objective’ approach it does not pass muster in any serious analysis.

In general, we can say that the guiding framework of a p...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• 1 - Reality Research
• 2 - Paradigms
• 3 - Meaning
• 4 - Relations of Meaning
• 5 - Dynamics of Meaning
• 6 - Learning
• 7 - Logic
• 8 - Aristotelian Logic
• 9 - Quantum/Empathetic Logic
• 10 - Being
• 11 - The First Two Paradigms
• 12 - Local Realism
• 13 - Local Implications
• 14 - Nonlocal Realism
• 15 - Nonlocal Implications
• 16 - Nondual Mind
• References
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes