Thank you Jon. I emailed you…

Jon Atack is good, but too pedantic for my taste.

Thanks Jon. I’ll email you.

as for ‘other names,’ could you please edit / delete the name you mentioned???

Thank you sir!

my public email address is ja (at) jonatack.com. It is spammed to a significant extent, but I’ll check today for anything from you. Do you also post under the name Dean Cholakis?

I’ve heard about the original Bunker culture from a couple of never-ins who were savaged, because they were mistaken for OSA trolls. I must say that I’ve been amazed at the civility and compassion I’ve seen expressed here on the few occasions that I’ve looked. I guess mention of the brain is enough to upset those still mired in Hubworld. How to explain the very specific nature of brain damage seems to quiet them down from their implanted notion that the brain is simply a ‘switchboard’.

I remember when you couldn’t even mention “euphoria” in this comment section without someone accusing you of being ‘brainwashed’ or ‘OSA.’

I got banned for telling Bunkerites to where to go.

I came back.

I asked Tony for your email, but he didn ‘t answer me…

Always nice talking to you Jon!

🙂 🙂 🙂

I think we should keep going and write a book!

As you doubtless know, Donovan was quoting a statement made by a Zen master about the stages of practice – the ordinary man sees a mountain as a mountain; the novice can no longer see it as a mountain; with enlightenment, the mountain is once more a mountain. Zen seeks to confound the intellect, so that interpretation no longer obfuscates perception. This is called ‘bursting the bag’. Neurophysiologist James Austin is interesting in his Zen and the Brain.

I have maintained my interest in mysticism – as self-exploration – and especially in the last 25 years found more and more convergence between psychological notions and good old-fashioned religious teaching.

Some of the deepest stuff is found in Sufi theology. I can recommend Tom Cheetham’s The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism, which hurls the reader into the realm of the Active Imagination.

My own brief involvement with Buddhism was through a Soto Zen monastery – under the ultimate direction of Jiyu Kennett, who is quite rightly criticised, by the former president of her association, in the new edition of Steve Hassan’s Combatting Cult Mind Control.

A thousand years after Buddha, Theravadim had come to be seen as intellectual, and tending away from the pure practice of meditation – dhyana, pronounced ‘chan’ in China and ‘zen’ in Japan. My own preference would have been for the intellectual form of Zen – Rinzai – replete with ‘koans’, but I do understand the perception that the intellect is a ready barrier to understanding, as we learn from the enlightenment story of the recorder of the Sutras, Ananda, who was told to ‘chop down the flagpole’ or admit intellectual defeat.

Here is the link to my ruminations on aesthetics, some ten years ago, when my webmaster abandoned the site: http://www.jonatack.com/paintings/words/twixt.php

I also have a novel in first draft which is an elaborate (and hopefully at times amusing) discussion of aesthetics. One day…

Hubbard was a solipsist. He comes close to admitting this in the story One Was Stubborn (there is an excellent Scn sponsored performance of this on You Tube). It is consistent with the delusion that the universe is simply an extension of consciousness, being ‘mocked up’ at every moment. I am fascinated by the more intelligent version of this proposed in the various strengths of anthropic theory in physics, but the notion that we are all involved in mutually generating the illusion concerns me, because it quickly degenerates into the notion of ‘postulates’ found also in Christian Science and The Secret, and better expressed as magical or wishful thinking.

With the Buddha, I take the view that the universe is an illusion, but only because everything that any one of us perceives belongs in the private, individual world of a private, individual mind. To grasp the universal, or Buddha Mind, is beyond me. I tend to believe that the universe is real and does not rely upon my extraordinarily limited mind for its existence.

I’m overwhelmed with deadlines at the moment – preparing for Toronto and finishing a short book on undue influence, as well as trying to put my blogs into a book to aid in escape from the trap of Scientology – so I will have to return to your suggested viewing and reading. Ask Tony for my email and we can continue this fascinating discussion.

Thank Mr Atack for your reply and for sharing your thoughts.

I think there is a deep connection between art and how we make sense of the world around us.

Roger Penrose makes a good argument for that…

Computationalists says the brain is a computer. They say that computations produce consciousness.

So what does Penrose do? He questions the concept of computability. He points out mathematical concepts which are essentially non-computable (such as his Penrose Tiles which tile an infinite plane. Some of them do so in non-repeating non-computable patterns which are actually quite beautiful.)

Penrose also points out that mathematicians are never satisfied by computation alone. Mathematicians want their theories to be ‘elegant.’ Elegance is an element of aesthetics. Why is elegance so important to computation?

In “The Emperor ‘s New Mind” (1989) he looks at scientific explanations for consciousness. Most of the book is an entire recap of the history of science – just so everyone’s on the same page – and then he goes to work critiquing various theories of consciousness.

I like his theories, but I don’t believe in them religiously. I would never deny myself the pleasure of imagining other possibilities.

Penrose’s theories of consciousness are deliberately paradoxical. Amazingly, he’s not a dualist, he’s a trialist! It’s as if he’s begging for someone to someday simply his theory – if not now, in the future. He leaves a lacuna wide enough for others to contribute their own new ideas. It’s a process. Penrose understands that. He hedges his bets. I think that’s intelligent.

Roger Penrose – What Things Really Exist?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H9Q6SWcTA9w

Roger Penrose: The Emperor’s New Mind, Quantum Mind, Quantum Consciousness, The Laws of Physics
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eVq39QbFQXE

I like what Douglass Hofstadter about Zen, that it’s “an anti-philosophy, a way of being without thinking.”

“Zen is holism, carried to its logical extreme. If holism claims that things can only be understood as wholes, not as sums of their parts, Zen goes one further, maintaining that the world cannot be broken into parts at all. To divide the world into parts is to be deluded, and to miss enlightenment.”
Godel, Escher and Bach 1979 pg254
http://librarun.org/book/10090/228

As soon as you look at something, you’re already categorizing it on some level…

Why must we always be making sense of what we see?

I wonder if, a long time ago, intelligent people got tired of the unscientific analogies of their age. Did they find themselves categorizing things in ways that didn’t really make sense? Maybe that’s why they invented Zen – as a way of cleansing the cognitive palate.

Donovan reminds me of me and what I believe about categories. When I try to observe something without comparing it to something else, I’m left with what I see…

First there is a mountain

But, as I look at ‘something,’ a new category comes to mind, almost without thinking – what if there were nothing?

Then there is no mountain

But ‘something or nothing’ is just another category, so I’m left with what I see…

Then there is

I like Hofstadter’s “Surfaces and Essences – Analogies as the Fuel and Fire of Thought” 2013 very much. Like Kahneman’s fast and slow thinking, Hofstadter talks about analogies we make without even thinking about it.

Do you SEE what I mean?

An effortless visual analogy.

And then there are analogies which require a lot of thought and sustained effort – like Einstein’s analogy of ‘special mass’ – which led to his famous equation that shook the world.

But the hard problem remains. That’s why I brought up Zen, because it comes down to that one ‘thing’ of being conscious and aware. But aware of what? Qualia? If that’s the thing consciousness is conscious-of, then all is art.. no… we are art.

Perhaps the ‘interface’ between art and artist is the inter-space of appreciation, the same for the viewer, having her own aha moment when looking at your art.

I like the art take very much. I too like Penrose (the bits I understand). As an artist, my own interest for many years has been the idea that art exists at the interface between the viewer and the work. I wrote a ponderous piece on my jonatack.com site called ‘Twelve seconds twixt cup and lip’. Once artists separated themselves from the other decorating minions, and became stars, the idea of the super genius developed. Of course, Michelangelo was exactly such a man, but I like the idea of the viewer as participant. James Joyce took this a stage further by incorporating a mass of typesetter’s errors in Ulysses (there are limits – imagine what would have happened to Finnegans Wake!).

My painting comes from a fascination with the interpretive abilities of the mind (which goes dead against the accepted theology of ‘non-objective art’). Even though I was nominally a scnist, I read about gestalt (the psychology, not the strangely scientological therapy) and became fascinated by the way in which we are compelled to make sense of the world around us. While I was still at college, a fellow student declared that one of my pictures was of hell. The next week, another student, without prompting, said it was paradise. Nothing could please me more – to use art as a mirror. But, when we apply this to consciousness, we arrive at the infinity of mirrors that reflect only themselves. And perhaps that is as close as we can get. I can’t say that I have any particular concerns over belief, any more. Though I’ve always preferred the quietly rational to the emotional approach. I inhabit the eternal now and if i cease to be, then I will no longer be aware of it, so there will be no upset (or as Woody Allen said, I don’t mind dying, as long as I don’t have to be there, when it happens).

I’m keen on Edelman’s work (again, the bits I understand) and his notion that the brain is the best example of natural selection in process. The simple dictum ‘what fires, wires’ has awful implications for cult-fixation. I call it the inertia principle (though Cialdini calls it consistency or commitment – but I think we tend to keep going in the same direction, once we’ve made a decision. So it is very hard for us to change our minds).

I feel incredibly lucky that I found it relatively easy to slough off scn – it only took me a year or so – and I still find it incredibly frustrating when I have to take the scenic route to help someone ‘exteriorise’ for long enough to see that it is a trap, pure and simple.

Sorry, yes, that’s why I used the adjective ‘despicable’ but I realize that some might think I was saying something otherwise. So, for anyone who is concerned, please read Norman Cohn’s exceptional expose of the fraudulent creation of the Protocols, Warrant for Genocide. Thanks for pointing this out.

And, yes, the Brainwashing Manual was a deliberate attempt to follow in the footsteps of the fraudsters (probably in the Russian secret police) who created the Protocols. He dictated it to Henrietta de Wolf, with both Nibs and John Sanborn present, so it isn’t even necessary to point out the significant discrepancies (as I have elsewhere), but it does of course mention ‘the Church of Scientology’ which is impossible, as the lecturer, Beria was dead before even Hubbard’s secret first registration of that entity, in December 1953.