Exploring The Unseen Worlds of Consciousness - G. William Barnard (2014)

G.
William Barnard
Exploring the Unseen

Worlds of Consciousness
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
Abstract: For the past two decades, my research has primarily

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013
focused on two interrelated questions: 1) What do the data from mysti-

cism and non-ordinary states of consciousness (e.g. trance, posses-
sion, telepathy, clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences, near death
experiences, shamanic journeys, and so on) imply about the nature of
consciousness understood broadly? 2) In what ways does a careful
examination of the nature of consciousness illuminate the processes
that undergird mysticism and non-ordinary states of consciousness?
In my attempts to offer coherent, cogent, and compelling answers to
these questions, I have been helped, immeasurably, by the work of
William James and Henri Bergson. I have already written a book on
each figure,1 so I am keenly aware that this essay will be unable to
encapsulate, even partially, the richness and depth of their respective
perspectives on this provocative subject matter. Nonetheless, I am
delighted to have been given the opportunity to underscore some of
the insights offered by James and Bergson that over the years have
continued to inspire me.
1. A Jamesian Theory of Mystical Experiences

I would like to begin by noting that for both Bergson and James our
everyday conscious experience is a fusion of two qualitatively
Correspondence:
G. William Barnard, Southern Methodist University, USA.
Email: bbarnard@smu.edu
[1] This essay, not surprisingly, draws (selectively, and one would hope creatively) from
these two texts: G. William Barnard, Exploring Unseen Worlds: William James and the
Philosophy of Mysticism (1997), and G. William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The
Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson (2011).
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 21, No. 34, 2014, pp. 4059
THE UNSEEN WORLDS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 41
different strata of knowledge what Bergson calls pure perception

and memory and what James calls knowledge of acquaintance and
knowledge-about (James, 1981, p. 216).2 Knowledge of acquain-
tance (or as James also frequently terms it, knowledge-by-acquain-
tance) is immediate and direct knowledge, knowledge that feels
indubitable. Knowledge-by-acquaintance occurs when our knowl-
edge of an object is primarily based in sense data, or in the case of reli-
gious or mystical varieties of this type of knowledge, when we
experience or feel something with an immediacy and vividness that is
similar to sensory experiences. Knowledge-by-acquaintance is a pre-
verbal, directly evident, unmediated knowledge of the simple that-
ness of something. When we know the colour blue, or when we taste
an apple, we are utilizing knowledge-by-acquaintance.

Knowledge-about, on the other hand, is conceptual knowledge.
Knowledge-about is operative when we give the blue that we are see-

ing or the apple that we are eating a name (let us say navy or Granny
Smith), and bring to these sensory experiences the wealth of cultural
information that we possess about, for instance, colours or fruits.
Knowledge-about is connected with the what-ness of something.
Knowledge-about analyses, compares, contrasts, explains, and
describes the qualities of an object. Knowledge-about, whether
implicit or explicit, is linguistically structured, discursive knowledge.
James illustrates this distinction by noting that a blind man may
know all about the skys blueness, and I may know all about your
toothache, conceptually; But so long as he has not felt the blueness,
nor I the toothache, our knowledge, wide as it is, of these realities, will
be hollow and inadequate (ibid., p. 656). According to James, knowl-
edge-by-acquaintance cannot be described and it cannot be imparted
to anyone who has not experienced it already.3 As he points out, we
cannot make a blind man guess what blue is like, or give an accurate
account of the taste of a pear. According to James, knowledge-by-
acquaintance gives us information that is qualitatively different than
the information we receive in knowledge-about, even though every
moment of experience is always, to different degrees, a fusion of both
forms of knowledge.
Bergsons analysis is strikingly similar, in that he insists that every
concrete moment of perception is always a fusion of the immediacy
and that-ness of what he calls pure perceptions combined with an
[2] James points out that many languages recognize this distinction (e.g. kennen and wissen,
connaitre and savoir, etc.).
[3] James does not explicitly connect the ineffability of knowledge-by-acquaintance and the
ineffability of mystical experiences, but the similarities are striking.
42 G.W. BARNARD
interpretive overlay of memory memory understood in this case

primarily as a spectrum of pre-conscious, highly distilled, internaliza-
tions of cultural and psychological patterns of belief. Memories of this
sort help to create the fullness of our concrete, lived experience by
interweaving themselves into each pure perception so seamlessly
that we are no longer able to discern what is perception and what is
memory (Bergson, 1988, p. 103).
In order to illustrate this complex perceptual process, it might be
useful to analyse what happens when we pick up an object and look at
it. Many people tend to imagine, for instance, that when we pick up a
smartphone, nothing more is occurring than a complex mechanical
procedure in which our senses relay information to our brain, in effect
communicating data that the phone is such and such a height, weight,
colour, texture, and so on. A careful examination of the process of per-
ception, however, will reveal that much more is occurring below the
surface than we might assume. When we look at the phone, on some
pre-conscious level we know what the phones function is; we associ-
ate the phone with past experiences of reading text messages or seeing
amusing videos. When we look at the messages appearing on the
phone, we dont just see shapes of electromagnetic energy; we see let-
ters, words, and meanings. When we pick up the phone, we are subtly
aware, on some level, of our role as readers and speakers and listeners.
None of these conceptual associations occur in isolation. Instead, they
are fused with the information that comes through our senses in such a
way that is impossible, except perhaps retrospectively, to determine
which part of the final perceptual package comes from the senses,
and which part comes from our tacit conceptual background. In this
way, as both Bergson and James repeatedly stress, we do not passively
receive information through the senses. Rather, at least on a subcon-
scious level, we are in a very real sense co-creators of the world that
we experience.
From a Bergsonian/Jamesian perspective therefore, while we all
inhabit the same universe, it is safe to say that each of us experiences a
very different universe a universe that is, to a degree that is difficult
to ascertain, partially shaped by the unique and constantly changing
lens of how we interpret our world.
However, focusing for a minute on Jamess terms, even if all con-
crete moments of experience are always complex fusions of knowl-
edge-by-acquaintance and knowledge-about, it is perhaps analytically
useful to maintain the distinction between these two types of knowing.
Knowledge-by-acquaintance provides information that knowledge-
about simply cannot replicate; tasting a pear is fundamentally
different than knowing-about pears, even if these two processes are

interwoven during each bite. Analogously, seeing and feeling the
Hindu God Shiva in a visionary experience can be understood to give
the visionary a categorically unique type of information, information
that could never be gained from years of arduous study of Shaivite
doctrine, even if these conceptual understandings, to one degree or
another, were inextricably intertwined with the form of the visionary
experience itself.
Drawing upon this Jamesian epistemological outlook, we can theo-
rize that a visionary experience is formed in roughly the following
way: a pre-existing, objective, partially-structured, unnameable
something appears within the consciousness of the mystic. This
knowledge-by-acquaintance aspect of experience, however, does not

appear alone, but rather, comes into consciousness fused with the
mystics knowledge-about, and is therefore structured by the mystics

cultural and psychological categories. Let us envision, for example, a
Christian mystic immersed in an ecstatic meditation on the radiant
form of the Virgin Mary. If we analyse this process using Jamess
epistemological categories we could say that, during the entire time
that this mystic was meditating on the form of Mary, she had an expe-
rience that was a fusion of knowledge-by-acquaintance and knowl-
edge-about. The knowledge-by-acquaintance components of the
experience were those elements of the experience that entered the
mystics awareness with a high degree of objectivity, that came with-
out the conscious instigation of the mystic, that shone with what
James calls immediate luminosity. And yet, this mystical experience
also possessed important elements of knowledge-about. For instance,
knowledge-about was present in the cultural constructs that helped to
create a visionary form of the Virgin Mary instead of, for example, the
Hindu goddess Kali, or in the tacit egoistic identifications present
within the mystic during this experience, or in the mystics pre-con-
scious understanding of the functions and goals of meditation, and so
forth.
While James would agree that the cultural and psychological back-
ground of a mystic is an inevitable and important factor in the forma-
tion of that mystics experiences, he would also argue that every
authentic mystical experience has a core of raw material. This raw
material is always subconsciously shaped according to the assump-
tive world that the mystic inhabits, even if, as James admits, at times
this mystical raw material can, in turn, override the psychological
and cultural expectations of the mystic, producing in this way new,
unanticipated experiences that, in turn, can alter the cultural and
44 G.W. BARNARD
psychological landscape that the mystic inhabits. In this way, in a

Jamesian mystical epistemology, the knowledge-by-acquaintance
aspect of experience maintains a degree of theoretical autonomy and
coerciveness, and is not pushed out of the picture by the jostling insis-
tence of the mystics culturally based interpretative framework.
According to James, even though this undefinable, but directly felt,
higher power will always be perceived differently, nonetheless its
energy is what catalyses and undergirds every mystical experience. (It
is perhaps important to note, however, that James does not necessarily
claim that there is only one source for mystical experiences, nor does
he claim that it is necessary to understand this source as completely
distinct from the consciousness of the mystic.)
This Jamesian (and implicitly Bergsonian) way of understanding

the genesis of mystical experience allows scholars to affirm the
important insight that our experience is shaped, below the surface of

our conscious awareness, by numerous social, cultural, and psycho-
logical forces, while not reducing mystical experiences to the sum
total of those forces acting within us. This Jamesian understanding of
the genesis of mystical experience offers us a way to say yes to the cul-
tural and psychological uniqueness of each mystical experience, with-
out denying the possibility that perhaps underneath all of that
particularity something more exists (to use Jamess own delightfully
ambiguous term), something more that underlies and empowers all
of that difference and specificity.
2. Jamess Transmissive Theory of the Relationship

between Consciousness and the Brain
Another crucial similarity between James and Bergsons thought is
that they were both prominent advocates of a non-materialistic theory
of the relationship between consciousness and the brain what
James termed the transmissive theory or what scholars of Bergson
(and others) often refer to as the filter theory.4 Jamess initial foray
in this direction appeared in an early essay: Human Immortality: Two
Supposed Objections to the Doctrine. In this essay, James notes that
there is, of course, some sort of relationship between the brain and
consciousness. As he points out, different types of drugs have the
power to alter our state of awareness and the stimulation of various
[4] This way of understanding the relationship between the brain and states of consciousness
was extensively discussed and developed in Europe and America in the late nineteenth
century, not only by James and Bergson, but also by thinkers such as F.C.S. Schiller and
F.W.H. Myers. For a thorough and insightful discussion of this perspective, see Kelly et
al. (2007, pp. 289 and 60638).
parts of the brain will often provoke changes in our consciousness.

However, James goes on to emphasize that the exact nature of the rela-
tionship between the brain and consciousness is not readily apparent.
What James suggests is that this relationship can be understood in
two rather basic ways. The first is what he terms the productive the-
ory. This theory, which the vast majority of scientists and intellectuals
today typically take for granted, postulates that consciousness is pro-
duced by the various complex neurochemical interactions that take
place inside the brain.
James notes, however, that there is a second, equally respectable,
alternative: it is also possible that consciousness pre-exists the brain,
and that the role of the brain is to mould that pre-existent conscious-
ness into various forms. James refers to this relationship between the
brain and a pre-existing consciousness (often understood as universal
in scope) as the transmissive theory. From this perspective, the

brains task is to receive and transmit limited forms of this conscious-
ness in much the same way as, to use an anachronistic example, a radio
receives portions of pre-existing radio waves and then transmits them,
suitably modified, through the air as sound waves. (Jamess own
example is of a prism or lens that receives the energy of light and then
limits and modifies it James, 1982, p. 86.)
James insists that it is just as logical and scientific to postulate that
the brain receives, limits, directs, and shapes pre-existent states of
awareness as it is to postulate that the brain produces different states
of consciousness. Both theories (and this is crucial) take into account
the complex neurochemical activity of the brain. They only differ in
their understanding of what that activity is accomplishing. The pro-
ductive theory insists that brain activity is what generates conscious-
ness. The transmissive theory says that brain activity is indicative of
the complex operations needed to limit, shape, and direct some sort of
pre-existing, larger consciousness. (James does not explicitly mention
this, but it seems clear that both theories would also be able to
acknowledge that the brain performs numerous other functions as
well.)
According to James, although it might not be immediately appar-
ent, the theory of production is not a jot more simple or credible in
itself than any other conceivable theory. It is only a little more popu-
lar (ibid., p. 89). Indeed, James claims that in some ways the trans-
missive theory has certain theoretical advantages over its more
popular competitor. For instance, if the transmissive theory of con-
sciousness is accepted, then consciousness does not have to be gener-
ated de novo in a vast number of places. It exists already, behind the
46 G.W. BARNARD
scenes, intimately connected with this world (ibid.). In this way, the
transmissive theory, especially when aligned with philosophical sys-
tems such as transcendentalism or idealism (as well as the panpsych-
ism that James adopted towards the end of his life), can be philo-
sophically quite fruitful, in that it does not have to overcome the gulf
between mind and matter that is assumed by a Cartesian dualism, nor
does it have to explain how the activity of the material brain under-
stood by most advocates of the production theory as inherently inert
and non-conscious somehow magically transforms into our con-
scious experience.
James points out several more apparent advantages of the trans-
missive theory of consciousness over the productive theory. For
example, if the transmissive theory is correct, and consciousness is

not utterly dependent upon brain activity, then it follows that con-
sciousness could exist in some form after the death of the physical
body. Individuals who assume the productive theory, however, have
to insist that postmortem survival of consciousness is impossible,
given that their theory insists that consciousness is solely the product
of brain activity.
In addition, the transmissive theory is able to account coherently
for a wide variety of phenomena that the productive theory has diffi-
culty explaining, such as religious conversions, providential leadings
in answer to prayer, instantaneous healings, premonitions, apparitions
at time of death, clairvoyant visions or impressions, and the whole
range of mediumistic capacities (ibid., p. 92). (As the president of the
American branch of the Society for Psychical Research, James stud-
ied all of these phenomena, and more, with great care.) James notes,
for instance, that it is difficult to see how the productive theory could
explain the account of an individual having a vision of someone who,
hundreds of miles away, was at that very moment dying. (Phantasms
of the Living, a scrupulously researched two-volume text of the SPR,
carefully documents over seven hundred of these sorts of cases.)5 But
if the transmissive theory is accepted, these sorts of phenomena are at
least somewhat more comprehensible, in that consciousness is under-
stood to be inherently free of spatial limitations.
James was well aware that many scientists and intellectuals of his
time refused to acknowledge the value or validity of information gath-
ered on non-ordinary phenomena. As he points out in a chapter in The
[5] The Esalen Center for Theory and Research has a searchable version of this text on their
website, www.esalen.org/ctr, under the heading scholarly resources.
Will to Believe (1979) entitled, What Psychical Research Has

Accomplished:
No part of the unclassified residuum has usually been treated with a
more contemptuous scientific disregard than the mass of phenomena
generally called mystical [i.e. such phenomena as] divinations, inspi-
rations, demoniacal possessions, apparitions, trances, ecstasies, mirac-
ulous healings and productions of diseases, and occult powers
possessed by peculiar individuals over persons and things. (James,
1979, p. 223)6
James emphasizes that if this sort of anomalous data were to be taken
seriously, it could potentially disrupt the taken-for-granted world-
view of the reigning scientific paradigm. Consequently, the scientific
establishment, consciously or not, often attempts to minimize this

potential threat by either ignoring the reported anomalies or by
aggressively denying their validity.

For James, the almost complete disregard of such a large body of
information is scientifically reprehensible, especially since, in his
opinion, science avoids stagnation primarily by paying attention to
anomalous phenomena that challenge contemporary scientific
assumptions.
Increasingly, James became convinced that the data provided by
psychical research and studies of mystical experiences were not only
compelling, but that they could, and should, be drawn upon to help us
to envision a more comprehensive understanding of who we are in our
depths, as well as the nature of reality itself. Over time, these data
prompted James to articulate his own nuanced and sophisticated
philosophical vision of the world a world consisting of a complex,
multi-layered, plurality of existents that, at bottom, were intercon-
nected with a deeper, unseen world. In the conclusion of another
important essay, Confidences of a Psychical Researcher, James
speaks of this vision:
Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one fixed
conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives
are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the
pine may whisper to each other with their leaves, and Conanicut and
Newport hear each others fog-horns. But the trees also commingle
their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang
together through the oceans bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cos-
mic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but acciden-
tal fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea
or reservoir. Our normal consciousness is circumscribed for
[6] Notice here the almost complete merging of mystical and psychical phenomena.
48 G.W. BARNARD
adaptation to our external earthly environment, but the fence is weak in

spots, and fitful influences from beyond leak in, showing the otherwise
unverifiable common connexion [sic]. (James, 1986, p. 374)
James recognizes that this type of panpsychic belief is only the bare
bones of a theoretical structure that needs fleshing out, and that many
questions remain:
What is the structure of this common reservoir of consciousness its
inner topography? What are the conditions of individuation or insu-
lation in this mother-sea? Are individual spirits constituted there?
How numerous, and of how many hierarchic orders may these then be?
How permanent? How transient? and how confluent with one another
may they become? (Ibid.)
James concludes that these extremely complex and difficult questions

will never be solved unless the facts of psychical research are

acknowledged to be worthy of study. However, if psychical research
were to be taken seriously by the scientific community, then James
(rather optimistically) predicts that the most important scientific dis-
coveries in the near future might well emerge out of this openness to
non-materialistic realities.
3. Bergsons Filter Theory of the Relationship

between Consciousness and the Brain
Jamess understanding of the relationship between the brain and con-
sciousness is strikingly similar to Bergsons, even if Bergson offers
several contributions that are uniquely his own (in fact, it could be
argued that Bergsons writings strongly influenced Jamess later will-
ingness to adopt a form of pluralistic panpsychism.) Like Jamess
work, Bergsons metaphysics not only dramatically challenges the
philosophical materialism that is for the most part tacitly assumed by
most academics in western culture, but also opens the door to a
re-visioning of the aetiology of a wide range of non-ordinary
experiences.
However, before plunging into an examination of Bergsons under-
standing of the genesis of non-ordinary phenomena, it is important to
become acquainted with the basics of his theory of ordinary percep-
tion, since the former emerges, quite organically, from the latter.
Our common sense understanding of how we come to know the
objective world around us is that physical stimuli from the external
world impacts our sense organs and these organs then send signals to
our brain via the nervous system. Our brain, receiving these signals,
promptly translates them into our conscious perceptions. The problem
with this common sense understanding, however, is that our con-

sciousness appears to be qualitatively different from the physical mat-
ter that constitutes the brain (as well as the senses and nervous
system). Consciousness, on the face of it, is inherently non-spatial,
inner, subjective, and private, whereas the material brain is inherently
spatial, outer, objective, and publicly accessible. We are therefore pre-
sented with an urgent philosophical question: how are these two very
different stuffs related? How is it possible that the inert, squishy,
neurochemical activity of the brain somehow manages, almost magi-
cally, to change into our conscious perceptual experience?7
Bergson offers an ingenious, albeit difficult to grasp, solution to
this philosophical dilemma in his second book, Matter and Memory
(Bergson, 1988). He begins by positing a universe that is, below the

level of appearances, a pulsating, interconnected field of images.
These images possess qualities that are similar to how both matter and
consciousness are often understood. Like matter (at least as matter is
articulated in quantum mechanics), images are dynamic patterns of
energy, vortices of vibrations that radiate outward, contacting and
affecting other complexly patterned vortices. Understood in this way,
the physical world is an interconnected, dynamic continuum of
becoming, in which numberless vibrations, all linked together in
uninterrupted continuity travel in every direction like shivers
through an immense body (ibid., p. 208).
Bergson postulates that this transmission of energy-information is,
moment to moment, passed on to other images, automatically, fully,
without hesitation. It is this measurable, predictable, lawful interac-
tion of images that, according to Bergson, is the basis for the stable,
objective world of matter, a world rooted in the dependable, repeat-
able patterns of cause and effect studied by the natural sciences.
However, unlike how matter is typically understood, the overlap-
ping fields of vibration that make up the universe are neither inert nor
non-aware, but instead are a type of virtual or latent consciousness.
According to Bergson, the material universe itself, defined as the
totality of images, is a kind of consciousness, and therefore con-
sciousness, in a latent form, is already present in this universe of
images (ibid., p 235). It is this assertion that forcibly calls into ques-
tion one of the western worlds most central (and typically unexam-
ined) metaphysical assumptions about matter, i.e. that matter is dead,
inert, non-aware.
[7] These questions are simply one way to confront what David Chalmers calls the hard prob-
lem; that is, exactly how do physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experi-
ence? (Chalmers, 1995, p. 63.)
50 G.W. BARNARD
In Bergsons vision of the universe, consciousness is not a mystery

to be solved. Instead, consciousness is always present in the very heart
of matter itself. As Frdric Worms astutely notes, from a Bergsonian
perspective, It is not the world which is a content of consciousness,
but consciousness which is a property of the world (Worms, 1997, p.
103). Consciousness is not somehow inexplicably and almost magi-
cally produced by the interactions of inert matter. Consciousness is
not secretly added into the mix at just the right moment. Instead, it is
already there under the surface as a latent aspect of the very tangible
and material stuff of the universe Bergsons images.
The benefit of Bergsons model of perception is that the genesis of
our conscious perceptions does not have to be explained, since every-
thing in the material world, as the totality of images, is at all times

already a type of latent or virtual consciousness. For Bergson, the
photograph of our perceptual experience of the world, if it is being

taken, is being taken (and developed) at every moment in the very
heart of things and at all the points of space (Bergson, 1988, p. 38).
According to this model, the brain does not produce consciousness;
instead, it receives and responds to those pre-existing fields of con-
sciousness in ways that serve its own practical needs.
From this perspective, one of the primary jobs of the sense organs,
nervous system, and the brain (which are all images) is to receive the
pulses of virtually-conscious vibrations from the other images of the
universe, and then, from this infinitely complex, interpenetrating field
of latent consciousness, to select out and actualize only those vibra-
tions that serve the needs of our particular organism, letting the rest of
the information from the universe pass through unimpeded. In Matter
and Memory, therefore, Bergson postulates that pure perceptions (i.e.
our personal, subjective set of images the raw data of perception
minus most of the influence of memory) occurs when we select out
and actualize only a tiny percentage of the infinitely complex, inter-
penetrating, multi-layered, vibratory field of virtual consciousness
that surrounds us. Our pure perceptions are, therefore, the result of a
radical truncation, a culling process by which we ignore most of what
we might potentially know. As a result, we perceive only the external
crust or the superficial skin of what actually surrounds us (ibid., p.
36).
According to Bergson, it is important to remember that the creation
of pure perceptions is intimately linked to the physical activities tak-
ing place within our body (especially within our brain and nervous
system). He argues, however, that the relationship between the activ-
ity of the brain/nervous system and perception is not the simple,
one-way, causal relationship that is often assumed by most philoso-

phers, psychologists, and scientists. These theorists often act as if it is
self-evident that the neurochemical activity of the brain/nervous sys-
tem causes our perceptions of the world around us; however, as
Bergson notes, strictly speaking, all that observation, experience, and
consequently science, allows us to affirm is the existence of a certain
relation between brain and mind (Bergson, 1920, p. 46).
As George Wald, a Nobel Prize winning physiologist from Har-
vard, points out:
There is no way of knowing whether the brain contains consciousness
in the sense that it is producing it or whether it is simply a reception and
transmission mechanism which, as Bergson has argued, has the func-
tion of selection and realization of conscious images and not the pro-
duction of such images. As a neuroscientist, one can only intervene in
the brain and record whether the intervention in particular parts of the
brain results in the evocation or abolishment of conscious experience.
(Wald, 1987, pp. 34950)
Wald, rather insightfully, compares the brain to a television set. It is
clear that there is an intimate relationship between the electrical and
mechanical activity of the television set and the programmes that are
appearing on the screen. But no one ever claims that the programme
that is appearing on the screen has been produced by the television.
Instead, a television set receives, limits, directs, and shapes pre-exist-
ing electromagnetic signals of various frequencies into the pro-
grammes that we watch on the screen. Similarly, as Wald notes, if we
pull a transistor out of [our] T.V. set and it no longer works, we
would not (or at least should not) conclude that the transistor is the
source of the program (nor, one might add, is the TV set as a whole),
anymore than we are forced to conclude that the brain is what pro-
duces consciousness simply because of the fact that when a persons
brain has been damaged by a severe organic illness or trauma, a per-
sons cognitive abilities are often severely impaired (ibid., p. 350).
Nonetheless, from a Bergsonian perspective, the brain still pos-
sesses a crucial role, in that it continually acts to filter out the vast
majority of the streaming universal flux of images in which we are
immersed. If we were to perceive and attempt to act upon the physical
world as it exists at its most fundamental vibratory level we would
become incapacitated. If, for example, we no longer saw an oak table
as a solid structure of wood, but instead consciously perceived and
responded to the flux of almost infinite energetic patterns that underlie
the table, we would become lost in the moving immensity of what
previously had been a motionless rectangular solid object (Bergson,
52 G.W. BARNARD
1946, p. 69). We are therefore continually, on subconscious levels,

carving out manageable islands of stability in the onrush of universal
becoming by choosing to focus only on that level of experience that
best serves our needs.
According to Bergson, another crucial factor in this creation of
solidity in the midst of continual flux is memory, understood (as was
mentioned above) as the vast and constantly changing internalization
of our past experiences: our psychological background, our cultural
matrix, our economic status, and so on. According to Bergson, it is the
fusion of memory with our pure perceptions that creates our day-to-
day experience of life.
The key point to retain from this discussion is that the interaction
between perception and memory that creates our moment-to-moment

experience of the world is fundamentally pragmatic: we perceive and
interpret only a select subset of the universal flux that surrounds and
interpenetrates us, i.e. only those aspects of the universe that are nec-
essary in order to act in any given situation. But if this is the case, if
our predominant mode of attunement with the world and each other is
pragmatic, then it becomes possible that numerous other worlds of
experience exist. Bergson addresses this possibility in these remark-
able lines:
Nothing would prevent other worlds corresponding to another choice,
from existing with it in the same place and the same time: in this way
twenty different broadcasting stations throw out simultaneously twenty
different concerts which coexist without any one of them mingling its
sounds with the music of another, each one being heard, complete and
alone, in the apparatus which has chosen for its reception the wave-
length of that particular station. (Ibid., pp. 6970)
In these lines, we have what I call Bergsons Radio Reception Theory
of Consciousness. From this perspective, our mundane level of con-
sciousness is simply one channel out of theoretically unlimited alter-
nate possibilities, a channel of consciousness whose function is
simply to play the music that is appropriate to our day-to-day practi-
cal functioning in the physical world.
It is crucial, however, to recognize that according to Bergson these
channels of consciousness are not made of some sort of Cartesian
mental substance that is ontologically distinct from matter. While
Matter and Memory emphasizes the functional and practical differ-
ences between mind and matter, in the final analysis, Bergson asks us
to conceive that both mind and matter are simply differing manifesta-
tions of a unified (albeit continually changing and intrinsically plural-
istic) reality: dure the dynamic flow of consciousness writ large,
or expressed in different terms, the ongoing temporal flux of images.

In this temporal non-dualism, both matter and mind are two ends of a
single interactive spectrum of temporal becoming and the stuff of
existence is the creative unfolding, on all levels, of the oneness/
manyness of dure.
However, similar to Bergsons radio analogy, this dynamic stuff
of becoming (i.e. dure/time) is not monolithic; reality does not take
place on a single plane. According to Bergson there are multiple
dimensions of experience, multiple levels of reality (e.g. quantum,
molecular, mineral, vegetal, animal, human, and perhaps higher),
each possessing a unique, albeit ever-changing, temporal rhythm;
there are countless levels of experience (and time) other than our own;
there are countless planes or, if you will, channels of dure. It is to

these other channels we will turn in order to see paranormal phenom-
ena as extra-ordinary: i.e. phenomena that ordinarily pass above or

below our pragmatic experience but which are neither unreal, nor,
with the right tuning, inaccessible to experience.
In an essay that he wrote for his 1913 inaugural address as the
newly elected president of the British Society for Psychical Research,
Bergson draws upon his filter theory of consciousness to suggest
that it is possible that we perceive virtually many more things than we
perceive actually, and that here, once more, the part that our body
plays is that of shutting out from consciousness all that is of no practi-
cal interest to us, all that does not lend itself to our action (Bergson,
1920, pp. 956). Given this theoretical outlook, he asks: is it not also
possible that around our normal perception there is an unconscious
fringe of perceptions associated with psi phenomena, a fringe that
will occasionally enter into our consciousness in exceptional cases or
in predisposed subjects? (ibid., p. 96).
Bergson theorizes that the task of the brain is not just to filter out the
flood of images that pour in and through us from the physical world.
In addition, the brain also attempts to screen out a concurrent, perhaps
even more extensive, torrent of coexisting, interpenetrating memo-
ries, thoughts, and feelings. To a certain extent these subconscious
memories, thoughts, and feelings correlate with our personal biogra-
phy. However, Bergson emphasizes that our minds, in a way that is far
more pronounced than matter, overlap and interpenetrate each other
and in fact transcend spatial boundaries altogether.
Reiterating much of what he explored earlier in Matter and Mem-
ory, Bergson argues that consciousness is not a function of the brain;
therefore, it can and does transcend physical boundaries (ibid, p. 93).
This freedom from spatial limitations means that it is quite possible
54 G.W. BARNARD
that our minds are continually blending and overlapping with other
minds in a reciprocal flow of mental information below the surface of
our awareness. As Bergson notes: between different minds there may
be continually taking place changes analogous to the phenomena of
endosmosis. If such intercommunication exists, nature will have taken
precautions to render it harmless, and most likely certain mechanisms
are specially charged with the duty of throwing back, into the uncon-
scious, images so introduced (ibid., p. 97). However, if this mental
intercommunication is indeed continually taking place under the
surface of our everyday awareness, then he suggests that it is quite
possible, even likely, that certain images might occasionally slip past
this mechanism, leading to moments of telepathic and clairvoyant
knowledge.
As a scholar of religious studies, I am struck by how Bergsons
philosophical perspective offers a nuanced and sophisticated account

of the genesis of the numerous non-ordinary experiences that fill the
pages of religious texts and ethnographies (e.g. not only telepathy and
clairvoyance, but also mediumship, visionary encounters, and so on).
Seen from a Bergsonian point of view, these types of powerful (and
often transformative) spiritual experiences no longer have to be
understood as the meaningless result of the mechanical neurological
activity within the brain, nor do they have to be seen as nothing more
than the sum total of the psychological, economic, and cultural factors
at work within an individual.
Rather, what this Bergsonian point of view allows us to do is to note
that, while we need to give careful attention to physiological, psycho-
logical, economic, and cultural factors in understanding the genesis of
these types of experiences, we can also posit that there could be
trans-personal, trans-cultural, trans-historical factors at work as well.
From a Bergsonian perspective, we can suggest that these non-ordi-
nary types of experiences are moments when, for a variety of reasons,
individuals change channels and tune into dimensions of reality with
which they are already connected subconsciously. We can argue that
our own subconscious may well overlap with countless higher and
more inclusive superconscious strata of awareness and volition;
strata of consciousness that we typically filter out of our daily con-
scious awareness, but that nonetheless might well occasionally mani-
fest themselves powerfully within the psyches of mystics, shamans,
and visionaries; levels of consciousness that, while interpenetrating
our own, might well also possess their own ontological distinctive-
ness and agency.
In the past, paranormal and religious phenomena were frequently

ignored, or were dismissed as superstitious relics of backward, irratio-
nal cultures, or were reduced to nothing more than a conflux of vari-
ous psychological, sociological, cultural, economic, or physiological
forces. Given the fact that many (if not most) of the Enlightenment
(and post-Enlightenment) theorists of religion internalized a highly
positivistic and materialistic set of presuppositions, these reductive
explanations of paranormal and religious phenomena made quite a bit
of sense. However, given a different set of foundational assumptions
about the nature of external reality and the nature of the psyche, we
can easily begin to understand these types of a-typical phenomena in
much more non-reductive (albeit equally complex and sophisticated)
ways.
Seen from a Bergsonian perspective, we are (subconsciously) con-
nected with the entire universe and the apparent clear-cut separation
between objects is not ontologically real, but instead is created by the
filtering mechanisms of the brain as well as by unconscious, deeply
engrained patterns of memory and belief. Given this alternate set of
metaphysical assumptions, it makes sense to posit that different spiri-
tual disciplines (e.g. chanting, fasting, meditation, dancing, ritualized
ingestion of sacred plants, and so on) simply serve to open up the inner
floodgates in a ritually controlled and culturally sanctioned fashion,
allowing practitioners to more easily and effectively absorb and inte-
grate the powerful information that is pouring into them from differ-
ent currents of the ocean of the ever-changing images that make up the
universe as we know it. From a Bergsonian perspective, therefore, it
can be argued that many religious/mystical/visionary experiences are
indications that it is possible to see (and to know) more, and even sug-
gest that we can see and know better than is typically possible from
within the context of our everyday level of consciousness. This
Bergsonian understanding of non-ordinary experiences allows us to
claim that it is quite likely that many (if not most) paranormal phe-
nomena are not delusions or superstitious nonsense; in fact, we can
argue that they might well be manifestations of a more profound, more
inclusive quality of perception (or at the very least a level of percep-
tion that is an equally valid and valuable alternative to our more pro-
saic modes of experience).
It is also important to emphasize that it is not only the more spec-
tacular forms of paranormal and/or religious experience that can be
re-evaluated from a neo-Bergsonian metaphysical framework. If we
can begin to let go of the idea that we are bounded, atomistic, billiard
balls of dead matter that bump against each other in mechanistically
56 G.W. BARNARD
predictable ways; if we can begin, instead, to view ourselves as some-

thing closer to a relatively stable whirlpool in a surging sea of con-
sciousness; then it also becomes increasingly possible to make sense
of a wide range of more prosaic levels of intuitive awareness as well,
modes of experience that frequently occur within many of us, but
which we often choose to ignore or deny.
For example, this Bergsonian point of view allows us to argue that
our intuitive insights, while not inevitably accurate, are also not sim-
ply psychological in nature, but rather have a deeper ontological
dimension as well. Coming from this perspective, we can legitimately
claim that our sense that someone is sexually attracted to us (or con-
versely, the sense of danger or wrongness that we pick up from some-
one) is not irrational, nor is it simply based on subtle bodily cues, but
instead may well be rooted in an accurate perception of what is actu-
ally occurring under the surface of our normal sensory perceptions.

This Bergsonian perspective also gives us a framework from which to
suggest that something more than simply quirks of our psychology
underlie those trance-like moments when we are composing a song, or
are painting a picture, or are playing the piano, or are writing a story
and it seems as if something or someone else is working in and
through us: perhaps we are in truth inspired by some deeper strata of
the universe (and/or deeper levels of our selfhood). Similarly, we can
posit that our empathetic feelings about our pets or even wild animals
are not subjective anthropomorphic projections unto other species,
but actually reflect a genuine, albeit muted, awareness of a deeper
underlying ontological connection with these beings. We can argue, in
a rational, sophisticated fashion, that it is quite possible that all of
these phenomena, in actuality, are simply varieties of ways in which
we are tuning into and acknowledging the flow of subliminal informa-
tion that we constantly receive from the mysterious universe that
surrounds and interpenetrates us, but which we (for a variety of evolu-
tionary, cultural, and psychological reasons) typically ignore or
choose not to see.
4. Entheogens as Seen Through

the Work of James and Bergson
For the last several years, I have been researching the Santo Daime
religion, a syncretistic Christian tradition that incorporates within
itself elements of West African religiosity, Spiritism, esotericism, and
various indigenous practices. The Santo Daime emerged in Brazil in
the 1930s and now has churches throughout the world. The core
religious practice of the Santo Daime is the ingestion of the Daime, an

entheogenic (i.e. psychoactive) drink perhaps more commonly known
as ayahuasca. Followers of this tradition believe that when they drink
the Daime they are taking a sacrament, a sacred substance that enables
them to intimately commune with the spirit of the Christ, as well as a
host of other spiritual beings, during their miraes, or visionary
experiences.
Many academics might be tempted to imagine that the followers of
this religion are simply giving a religious interpretation to the halluci-
nogenic experiences that are produced by the chemical activity of this
(non-addictive, in fact medicinal) drink. Given my prior background
in James and Bergson, I am inclined to offer an alternative hypothesis
an hypothesis that has been previously offered by the writer and

thinker Aldous Huxley in his well-known work The Doors of Percep-
tion (1954). In this book, Huxley explicitly draws upon Bergson to

help make sense of the experiences he had while taking mescaline (the
active chemical component of peyote and San Pedro). He suggests
that each of us is, under the surface of our normal everyday awareness,
connected to, and potentially aware of, the entire universe. We are typ-
ically, however, cut off from this Mind at Large because our brain
filters out the vast majority of what we are potentially able to perceive
in order to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this
almost infinite amount of information (ibid., pp. 227). Our brains,
therefore, act in essence as biological reducing valves. Huxley goes
on to postulate that perhaps the ingestion of sacred substances im-
pair[s] the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve, resulting in an
influx of extrasensory knowledge as well as perceptions of a world of
visionary beauty (Fuller, 2000, p. 73). He theorizes that perhaps
entheogens (as well as, at least implicitly, spiritual technologies such
as chanting, fasting, meditation, contemplation, ecstatic dance, and so
on) allow us to tap into previously untapped levels of our own
mind and previously unrecognized dimensions or levels of reality;
seen in this way, these sacred substances do not distort reality, but
rather, disclose dimensions or levels of existence that are otherwise
screened by the rational ego (ibid.).
Seen from this perspective, we can theorize that entheogens such as
the Daime are simply a way to change the channel of the television
of the brain so that it can receive information from other (and in this
case spiritual) dimensions of reality. If we are willing to accept this
alternate way of understanding the relationship between the activity
of the brain and changes in our states of consciousness as a philosoph-
ical possibility, then the visionary/mystical experiences that take
58 G.W. BARNARD
place after ingesting various entheogens can be understood as poten-

tially valid and valuable, and not necessarily as delusive psychopatho-
logical hallucinations.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience (e.g. James, 1985), James
cautions that it is crucial that we question our frequent tendency to
assume that any insight that arises in conjunction with a powerful
alteration of our physiology is invalid. As he points out, we would
never dismiss the validity of a scientific insight simply because it
arose during a fever. Similarly, we should not dismiss the insights of a
mystic or visionary simply because their bodys chemistry has shifted
in certain respects. In fact, it is quite possible that the visions or
insights that arise in conjunction with drinking ayahuasca may in
actuality be more truthful and beneficial to our well-being than the

perceptions and beliefs that emerge from our normal waking state of
consciousness. At the very least, they should not be prematurely dis-

missed simply because of a bias in favour of the state of consciousness
that our culture assumes to be normative.
I would like to suggest that we might think of these sorts of mind-
altering substances as tools, similar to a microscope or telescope,
that enable us to explore realms of consciousness that were previously
inaccessible. James himself, after having experimented with taking
nitrous oxide, recognized the potential value of mind-altering sub-
stances. He said that his experience with nitrous oxide left him with
one unshakable conclusion (a conclusion that while frequently
quoted, deserves to be re-stated yet again):
It is that our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of
consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of
screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply
the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their complete-
ness No account of the universe in its totality can be final which
leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to
regard them is the question, for they are so discontinuous with ordi-
nary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they can-
not furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map.
At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.
(James, 1985, pp. 3078)
References
Barnard, G.W. (1997) Exploring Unseen Worlds: William James and the Philoso-
phy of Mysticism, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Barnard, G.W. (2011) Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri
Bergson, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Bergson, H. (1920) Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays, Wildon Carr, H. (trans.),

New York: Henry Holt.
Bergson, H. (1946) The Creative Mind, Andison, M.L. (trans.), New York: Philo-
sophical Library.
Bergson, H. (1988) Matter and Memory, Paul, N.M. & Palmer, W.S. (trans.), New
York: Zone Books.
Chalmers, D.J. (1995) The puzzle of conscious experience, Scientific American,
(December).
Fuller, R.C. (2000) Stairways to Heaven: Drugs in American Religious History,
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Huxley, A. (1954) The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, New York:
Harper Perennial.
James, W. (1979) The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
James, W. (1981) The Principles of Psychology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
James, W. (1982) Essays in Religion and Morality, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
James, W. (1985) The Varieties of Religious Experience, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
James, W. (1986) Essays in Psychical Research, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Kelly, E.F., et al. (2007) Irreducible Mind, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Wald, G. (1987) Consciousness and cosmology, in Papanicolaou, A.C. & Gunter,
P.A.Y. (eds.) Bergson and Modern Thought, New York: Harwood Academic.
Worms, F. (1997) La Thorie bergsonienne des plans de conscience: gense, struc-
ture et signification de Matire et mmoire, in Gallois, P. & Forzy, G. (eds.)
Bergson et les neurosciences, Le Plessis-Robinson: Insitut Synthlabo.

Exploring The Unseen Worlds of Consciousness - G. William Barnard (2014)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Exploring The Unseen Worlds of Consciousness - G. William Barnard (2014)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

G.

Exploring the Unseen

Abstract: For the past two decades, my research has primarily

focused on two interrelated questions: 1) What do the data from mysti-

1. A Jamesian Theory of Mystical Experiences

different strata of knowledge what Bergson calls pure perception

an apple, we are utilizing knowledge-by-acquaintance.

Knowledge-about is operative when we give the blue that we are see-

interpretive overlay of memory memory understood in this case

different than knowing-about pears, even if these two processes are

knowledge-by-acquaintance aspect of experience, however, does not

mystics knowledge-about, and is therefore structured by the mystics

psychological landscape that the mystic inhabits. In this way, in a

This Jamesian (and implicitly Bergsonian) way of understanding

important insight that our experience is shaped, below the surface of

2. Jamess Transmissive Theory of the Relationship

parts of the brain will often provoke changes in our consciousness.

in scope) as the transmissive theory. From this perspective, the

example, if the transmissive theory is correct, and consciousness is

Will to Believe (1979) entitled, What Psychical Research Has

establishment, consciously or not, often attempts to minimize this

aggressively denying their validity.

adaptation to our external earthly environment, but the fence is weak in

James concludes that these extremely complex and difficult questions

will never be solved unless the facts of psychical research are

3. Bergsons Filter Theory of the Relationship

with this common sense understanding, however, is that our con-

(Bergson, 1988). He begins by positing a universe that is, below the

In Bergsons vision of the universe, consciousness is not a mystery

thing in the material world, as the totality of images, is at all times

photograph of our perceptual experience of the world, if it is being

one-way, causal relationship that is often assumed by most philoso-

1946, p. 69). We are therefore continually, on subconscious levels,

between perception and memory that creates our moment-to-moment

or expressed in different terms, the ongoing temporal flux of images.

there are countless planes or, if you will, channels of dure. It is to

ena as extra-ordinary: i.e. phenomena that ordinarily pass above or

philosophical perspective offers a nuanced and sophisticated account

In the past, paranormal and religious phenomena were frequently

predictable ways; if we can begin, instead, to view ourselves as some-

ally occurring under the surface of our normal sensory perceptions.

4. Entheogens as Seen Through

religious practice of the Santo Daime is the ingestion of the Daime, an

an hypothesis that has been previously offered by the writer and

tion (1954). In this book, Huxley explicitly draws upon Bergson to

place after ingesting various entheogens can be understood as poten-

actuality be more truthful and beneficial to our well-being than the

consciousness. At the very least, they should not be prematurely dis-

Bergson, H. (1920) Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays, Wildon Carr, H. (trans.),

You might also like