Friday, June 23, 2023

Consciousness of Immortality, by Olavo de Carvalho

In October 2010, the philosopher Olavo de Carvalho taught the course The Consciousness of Immortality in Colonial Heights, Virginia, which was later transcribed by his students. The transcriptions were organized and prepared by Ronald Robson and later edited and revised by the author, with the assistance of Mariana Reis. The result of this process, which emphasized the orality of the record, is presented in this book, which also includes a series of articles and lecture notes by the philosopher on the same course topic.

If we are immortal, we must be so in essence and not by accident. Immortality is then our true condition and the reality plane in which we effectively exist. In this case, the present bodily life is nothing more than a tiny fraction of our reality, a momentary appearance that conceals our true substance. Consequently, all the knowledge we can acquire within the limits of bodily existence is merely an appearance within an appearance. Although it grasps genuine portions of reality, it cannot have its own foundation within itself, but must seek it in the sphere of immortality.

Consciousness of Immortality

The layers of the self

The purpose of this course is NOT to persuade anyone about the existence of the immortality of the soul — although we will bring up, at an opportune moment, some facts that make the contrary hypothesis absolutely impossible — but to provide a set of concepts and articulations that allow you to frame the fact of immortality in a more viable way in your everyday consciousness. That’s why the course is not called “Immortality,” but rather “The Consciousness of Immortality.”

The question at hand is how you can become aware of immortality and how this awareness can alter and improve, in some way, the direction of your entire life in the cognitive as well as moral sphere.

In everyday life, we rarely take into account the timescale of immortality in our thoughts and actions. On the contrary, we cultivate the view of a terrestrial temporality limited to a few decades of life, and based on this timescale, we plan what to do. Some believe that after the end of this period, a completely different life will come — although others believe that beyond this end, there is no life at all — a life so heterogeneous in relation to the present life that it ultimately has no importance for the course of the latter.

There is sometimes a vague hope surrounding what is called “salvation” and a diffuse fear surrounding what is called “damnation,” in a game of punishment and reward that can affect believers and even non-believers. But the perspective of this game does not encompass the perspective of the immortality of the soul: if this immortality is real, punishment and reward can be nothing more than aspects of it. The substance of immortal life is set aside in favor of these two qualities.

We do not know what exactly these reward and punishment are. It is common to believe that the reward is the sight of God. Let it be so: but not having any idea of what this actual sight is, how could you desire it so ardently? The same can be said of condemnation, whose current images are more folkloric than expressive of its content. We are thus trapped in physical translations of the symbolism of reward and punishment, far from any understanding of what an immortal life could be. As if we could appreciate immortal life as something very good or very bad, but without knowing what it truly is.

We will meditate, therefore, on what the substance of this immortality is, showing it not as an entirely different life from this one of ours, which would only affect us from the perspective of reward and punishment, but rather perceiving it as integrated into our everyday life as an immediate reference.

What is the consciousness of immortality

The starting point of our investigation is this: if there is an immortal life, it is not possible for you to become immortal only at the moment of your death; if you are immortal, you are so already. Therefore, when you die, you do not transition to another timescale; you already live in that timescale, although you generally do not pay attention to it.

A simple analysis of the concept of immortality leads us to realize this. If there is a timespan in which you live in a certain way, in a certain mode of space, with limitations, and if this is followed by another timespan without duration, endless, with a new mode of space, it is clear that the latter timespan encompasses the former.

I call the ability to frame the acts we perform in this timescale within that other timescale which will continue beyond the present one, the consciousness of immortality. The difficulty in performing this operation means that the idea of immortality seems too evanescent or abstract, and for that reason, we end up not taking it into account, even if we are believers.

The difficulty in perceiving what immortal life is does not differ from the difficulty in perceiving what anything else is. First of all, it must be noted that the question of immortality does not address generality; it is not a doubt about the immortality of the human species; on the contrary, it is a question asked in personal terms: I ask about my immortality. My mortality or immortality is evidently a concern of mine. Therefore, we add a personal element, an individual destiny, to the question from the very beginning: immortality is something that can happen to me and can be very good or very bad for me.

If immortality exists, who or what can be immortal? My “self”? My “soul”? The latter expression is inconvenient because it introduces a separation between what would be the self, the one you speak of and believe yourself to be, and what would be an entity called the “soul.” If at the moment of your death, the self dies and the soul survives, this soul certainly will not be you. Already in this slip, we escape the perspective of personal immortality, which serves as a sample of how inadequate the vocabulary usually used to address the subject is.

Let us further investigate this “self.”

The five layers of the self

When we say “self,” we use the word to denote our immediate presence in a certain place and under certain circumstances. For example, I receive a series of stimuli from the external environment and become aware of them — I receive them and, in some way, receive the reception. Consciousness is this second level of perception that goes beyond mere sensations. So much so that I do not notice all sensations, but only those to which I pay attention. At this moment, you are receiving muscular and thermal sensations, and yet you are paying attention to my words (I hope) and not to them. Consciousness has a selective character that is foreign to the mere perception of stimuli.

We remember always having been somewhere perceiving something; we have never been in nothingness. This means that there has been no interruption in the experience of this self denoted as immediate presence, but it does not mean that it possesses continuity. This present self is constituted only by the notes of the present stimulation, which are entirely different from those that manifested a few minutes before. A while ago, you were out on the street perceiving the movement of cars, the color of the sky, etc., but now you are perceiving something completely different. There is no connection between the present self that perceived those initial stimuli and the present self that perceives these last stimuli — in fact, neither the stimuli have unity nor continuity, as they are entirely fragmented, disconnected from each other. Although the present self is always present, it does not persist continuously.

However, there is a more permanent and enduring sense that we give to the word “self,” corresponding to the repetition of acts and words according to certain social circumstances. For example, I am accustomed to giving lectures. There is then a series of action circuits that I will repeat as long as I am alive and that somehow identifies with my social role. This automatically implies a set of expectations that people have of me and that I have of them. It constitutes my presence in human society, my relationships with all human beings.

Even the least aware person of their own condition possesses some level of consciousness of their social roles and tends not to confuse the modes of interaction that should be established with one individual and another individual; thus distinguishing one set of codes from another set of codes. This social self can undergo many changes throughout life but tends towards some stability. It is clear that the set of rights and duties you have in elementary school does not coincide with those you have when you get your first job; however, such a change is not instantaneous, as in the case of the present self. While changes in stimulation that mark the present self occur without major issues, changes in the function of the social self, on the other hand, are usually accompanied by great difficulty: getting married, moving from school to college, losing a job, etc., are changes that require the effort to adapt to new circumstances.

As the basis of the present self and the social self, there is a third self, one that emerges when you tell the story of your life, whether to yourself, recalling what you have done and what has happened to you, or to another person, narrating it to them. This biographical self has subdivisions, or rather, stages that can be accelerated or decelerated. Certain highly impactful events may require a longer and more meticulous treatment, while other periods of life, in which less significant events may have occurred, can sometimes be narrated quickly, even if they span many years.

This self, as it turns out, tends to be more comprehensive than the present self and the social self, as if you were composing the novel of your life. Each person believes they are capable of telling their own life story to some extent. In telling it, the individual perceives a form, a coherence, a continuity, whether imaginary or real, because no continuity in human life is perfect (we have gaps in memory, entire blocks of events that vanish from our minds and that we would hardly be able to recover). The individual tells their story by giving it an interpretation, which may vary over time. New events can change the individual’s order of priorities, so when looking back at previous interpretations they have given to the facts of their life, they may consider them mistaken in light of the new interpretation they have reached. In other words, the biographical self is constituted by a succession of narrative forms that never perfectly correspond to the entire set of events that have transpired.

Furthermore, if there were no factor of “forgetfulness,” there could be no criterion for selecting the facts to be narrated. To narrate a single episode of your life, you need to select the elements that you will highlight; you cannot encompass all the data and, even less so, coordinate them into a single narrative. If something happened to you, it is because your present self was present in that circumstance; this present self captured a multitude of perceptions at every instant; only through the abstraction of an immense quantity of them can the biographical self concentrate on what seems interesting to it at a given moment.

Sometimes, things that you barely noticed on a given occasion may later reveal themselves to be extremely important. A malicious glance from an acquaintance may not mean much to you today, but perhaps in two years, you will discover that at that moment, they foresaw your misfortune because they were already planning to harm you, of which you would take a long time to become aware. Therefore, the order and hierarchy of the narrated facts can vary over time. The past has not changed; the narrative, the interpretation that you make of it, has changed.

This narrative implies certain moments of extraordinary importance that, however, you cannot narrate because you did not witness them, starting with your own birth. We all know that we were born at some point, but none of us witnessed our own birth. This element, in some way external, is then incorporated into your biography, and the same goes for countless pieces of information that are part of other people’s memory and that you incorporate into your own memory. You may have a sleepwalking episode and do a series of things that you will naturally not remember. But someone tells you what you did; thus, the recollection of that witness is incorporated into your personal memory. The same could be said of circumstances of drunkenness or even episodes from your earliest childhood.

Because of all this, the biographical self also lacks perfect continuity. In fact, the discontinuity can reach such a point that we say an individual is unconscious of their own life. They do not recognize the fundamental factors that govern it, that have composed their trajectory on Earth. My students know that I often refer to the experience of asking a person where they got a certain idea from. They then argue in favor of that idea. I then retort that I did not ask for the foundation but rather the source, the origin—whether they saw it in a movie, if a family member told them, or if they read it in a book. Rarely does anyone manage to pinpoint the moment and the way they adopted an idea as their own. This often requires the effort of unearthing elements that are completely buried in memory.

The famous experiment by Dr. Otto Põtzl—a great Austrian psychiatrist, professor, and head of Viktor Frankl—illustrates this very well. He invented a little machine that projected some spots, some dots on the wall, thus forming very simple schematic figures. The patient would observe them for a few seconds. However, between the projection of one figure and another, Põtzl would intersperse other figures of the same type, but projected for an infinitesimal fraction of a second, so that the person would not perceive them. The next day, when interviewing the patient about which shapes they remembered, he would astonishingly discover that they remembered more of the shapes that had been projected very quickly—as if they remembered what they had not seen. This was called subliminal perception, that is, perception that occurs below the threshold of consciousness. In the case of this experiment, the stimulus was emitted in such a short interval that the subject was not aware that they had captured it, but they still captured it in some way. This gives an idea of the number of elements captured by the present self that do not come to be clearly retained by the individual. However, when ascending to the biographical self and recounting their story, it is possible that the individual precisely reconstructs the picture with those instantly imperceptible elements that become the most perceptible and easy to remember in memory.

These three layers of the self do not result solely from my analysis; they are the meanings in which people actually employ the word “self.” As we have seen, none of them possesses complete continuity; all three are fragmented. Now, if they do not possess any substantive unity, what guarantees the existence of a self?

There have been philosophers who have indeed concluded that it does not exist. David Hume claimed to perceive sensations, memories, and so on, but never to perceive a self beneath all that he experienced. The self has never been an object of his own experience. However, if there were no substantive self, no entity worthy of the name “self” beneath all the fragmented perceptions, what would give them any unity?

From the 19th century to the present, several philosophers have pondered over this problem, generally attempting to escape the idea of a substantive self. One conception, for example, attributes the notion of self to the influence of society: the individual would believe they have a self because they have been given a name, given a social identity, which is repeatedly reinforced in them, so that the entirety of their stimuli and experiences is referred by them to that construct they received from society. This explanation is insufficient. In order for the individual to be capable of referring all their stimuli to the abstract identity they were given, it would be necessary for that identity to reach them through a more intense experience than the one they have of other stimuli. Furthermore, if that individual had no continuity of memory, how could they remember that they are the same individual who was called by the same name yesterday? The mere name cannot be the reason for the continuity of what it names; it is the individual who must remember that they always respond to the same name.

Another hypothesis would be that the notion of self arises from the impression caused by the bodily continuity of the individual. The self would be nothing more than the expression of the permanence of the same body over time. Indeed, we believe in this; however, there is no substantial unity in the human body. You are present before me; however, none of the cells in your bodies existed twenty years ago. All your cells are exchanged over time. At most, the unity of the schema of your bodies would remain, but even in this case, it is not an essential identity. This schema has varied according to your age and size. Today, I see a photo of myself at two years old and perceive this with great clarity. There is more similarity between me as a baby and other babies than between that baby I was and the man I am today. The continuity of my self cannot be given in the continuity of my body.

All other hypotheses that transfer the sense of existence of the self to another instance, which would be the true entity responsible for creating it as a fiction, lead to similar difficulties—as in the case of seeing the notion of self as nothing more than a product of the unconscious. This, well, is impossible: without the prior notion of self, how could I recognize in certain unconscious contents their belonging to the same unconscious, which would ultimately be mine? It is not the unconscious that precedes and creates the self; on the contrary, the self is the condition for speaking of any unconsciousness.

This self is always associated with the notion of immediate presence, self-recognition, action and reaction, human coexistence, and especially the notion of responsibility. We are not only capable of perceiving what is happening but also of judging, of saying yes or no to what is happening. We have a moral responsibility according to how we affirm or deny events.

Generally, we do not need to analyze and justify the existence of the self because, in the course of everyday life, it is not questioned, not called into question. But take, for example, if you are accused of something you did not do, you protest immediately. You do not need to analyze the situation and reconstruct your entire path of actions, which would not have included that action attributed to you. Your simple sense of identity manifests that you were not the author of the act. Conversely, there is a multitude of inner (and even material) acts for which you are the author and to which no other person has had access. Your sense of personal identity allows you to recognize yourself as the author of these acts regardless of whether someone attributes them to you. What were you really thinking when you said something to someone? What were your true intentions in acting in this or that way? Only you know.

See how extraordinary this is. You have always believed yourself to be an individual, a self. You have always believed that you possess something constant, which allows you to identify with that experience when recalling something from when you were three years old. This sense of continuity of the self—I call it that for lack of a better name—is inescapable. At eight years old, I fell off a horse. I still remember the fall. The recollection does not have the same intensity as the event itself, at the moment it occurred (although sometimes it is more vivid), but it allows for the recognition of a fundamental identity. The self only comes to you through this feeling of self-identification, as something so deeply rooted and firm that, as soon as you lose it, you find yourself with a serious illness, schizophrenia—the schizophrenic is someone who can believe they are you.

Your narrative about yourself will always be fragmentary and incomplete, but your center of interest, the one that selects what to pay attention to and what not, remains as a guiding element. Therefore, the existence of something continuous beneath all the discontinuous elements of experience is a condition for perceiving the latter. But this existence, in turn, is a mystery. And absolutely necessary, it is something we have a permanent feeling of, but we are not capable of defining and clarifying it.

Confession and Autobiography. First Approach

The feeling of self-existence can be stronger or weaker, it can undergo development or involution (one of the objectives of this course is, in fact, to provide you with a clearer and more present sense of self). The feeling of self experienced by a baby may be very faint, very precarious, but it is present. Otherwise, it would be useless to attempt to construct a self for them from the outside. On the other hand, the psychoanalytic perspective that the self consists only of a mass of unconscious elements, with a crystallization called “ego” on its surface, is problematic. For this crystallization to occur, the individual must be capable of referring it to themselves. Being a human being implies this capacity.

The intensity of the feeling of self has varied greatly throughout history. Western history has represented a significant improvement in this regard. Georg Misch’s famous work, “History of Autobiography in Antiquity,” shows that the idea of personal biography was a historical phenomenon that required extensive development; we did not historically emerge already endowed with this ability. When pharaohs were buried, they took their autobiographies with them, which included only their great public accomplishments, in order to present a good image to the gods. Later, the autobiography of a Roman general would consist of a list of official services rendered to the state. The first proper autobiography that we know of is Saint Augustine’s “Confessions.” Of course, before the 4th century, people already had some awareness of the continuity of their self; however, the autobiographical self they represented to themselves was quite incomplete.

The autobiographical genre would evolve, along with the intensification of the sense of self, to the point where we see the emergence of a marvel like Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” where the unity between the most private and subtle thoughts and feelings is reconstituted, amidst a multitude of evanescent impressions. It took millennia to reach this level of scrutiny of the sense of self. If we managed to reach that point, it was because we developed a power: the feeling of self, which is always present wherever there is the human phenomenon.1

Human Experience and Scientific Method

We, like the most educated individual or the most illiterate one, are born without knowing how to read or write and with no mastery of language. We will have great difficulties in developing and perfecting this mastery, which is one of the conditions for us to have a more vivid impression of the self and express it with varying levels of detail.

Language is not offered to us in accordance with our total needs; it is offered to us to the extent of what socially exists at a given moment. The function of writers and poets is to shape the present language as efficiently as possible so that it becomes sufficiently expressive for the whole of society. But even this does not make us immune to the influence of certain factors that hinder the direct expression of experience rather than enable it when they claim to make it more secure and precise. This is seen in the case of social scientists who neglect their profound sense of self-existence and focus on the vocabulary and theories of their field of work, thereby asserting that the self is merely a social construct. The professional vocabulary suffocates and reshapes direct personal consciousness: the conventional overrides the real. In other words, we become more foolish when we pretend to be more “scientific.”

Even more radical is the case with the natural sciences. Throughout history, there has been a constant temptation to claim that the body of knowledge available at a given moment is sufficient to provide a complete picture of the physical world. When, with Galileo, all so-called scientific knowledge began to be mathematized, centered on the “primary qualities” (those measurable and “objective”) and indifferent to everything that was a “secondary quality” (those more qualitative and averse to repeatable standardization), the natural sciences began to be regulated by a standard considered definitive and irrefutable, and this continued for four centuries until the physics of the 20th century demonstrated that a series of “qualitative” aspects, rather than primarily quantitative ones, decisively influence the deepest layers of matter, to the point where the notions of objectivity and subjectivity in scientific observation are questioned. In fact, if we think about physical science around 1890, we will see absolute confidence that the pinnacle of possible knowledge had been reached, with only a few decimal values left to adjust. A decade later, the theory of relativity emerged and entirely invalidated that claim. But the temptation to possess a definitive framework of knowledge remains. Just a few years ago, Stephen Hawking claimed that we had achieved an explanation for almost everything…

The frequency with which natural scientists fall into the illusion of a total explanation is enough to show us that they do not provide us with a more real image of the world than the direct experience of any human being does. The sciences offer only another point of view, more or less correct, with their own legitimacy. But, as a matter of method, I consider that direct experience takes priority over any theory or science. Direct experience gives us the lived experience of the concrete world, that is, events taken in the totality of the elements that compose them, including the accidental ones. No science can study concrete facts; it can only study aspects of facts. The smallest fact that you conceive is composed not only of the essential elements that define it but also of a multitude of accidental elements that do not define it, which in a certain way have nothing to do with it, but without which it could not occur.

In everyday experience, we take into account the concreteness of all facts. We know that no fact that happens to us is limited to the vision we have of it, and we are always aware of the infinity of its accidental elements. Even a common human being, even the least capable one, can articulate and react efficiently amidst an infinite network of accidental elements, something that even the most well-developed sciences are incapable of and will never be capable of. An ignorant human being is more intelligent than any science taken as a whole. Direct human experience will always be the judge of science, and never the other way around. Direct human experience existed for millennia before any science existed; but without direct human experience, no science will ever exist. Science is just one more perspective, whose formulations can be completely overturned overnight due to a single new discovery.

In fact, the sciences only have some respectability to the extent that they accept their principle of permanent self-correction, which implies that they only consist of hypotheses (better or worse, more productive or less productive), never truths. A scientist, as a scientist, may be satisfied with this, but no human being can be content with it throughout their life. Man needs to distinguish truth from error; no science can give him that distinction.

Therefore, there is no scientific worldview, and there never will be, even if the knowledge of all sciences is articulated. Combine everything that all sciences know, and you still won’t be able to create an armadillo.

The invocation of scientific discovery data—something I will do several times throughout this course—cannot be done with the intent of providing proof. In science, only negative proof reigns: one can prove that something is impossible, but not that something is this way or that way. Proof can only come from direct evidence. Only what is self-evident can be the object of certainty.

Substantial Self and Bodily Existence

If the feeling of self-continuity is not based on social structures, language, and, by extension, not even on the materiality of the body, then the hypothesis that the self dies with the body seems unjustified. It is not a matter of proving the immortality of the soul; it is a matter of proving that the feeling of self-continuity ceases with the life of the body. In other words, when we speak of the immortality of the soul, what is at stake is not so much immortality as mortality. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the possibility that this core, the substantial self, disappears along with the body, which, in turn, requires questioning the nature of the relationship between the substantial self and the body.

This relationship is one of the most problematic. From an ancient or scholastic perspective, it is said that man is a rational animal; this definition, however, does not exactly clarify what a human being is, but only where to place them in the hierarchy of other beings. There is a range of entities that we call animals because they possess their own movement, the ability to feed, to feel, and to develop, among which there is an entity endowed with the ability to speak, calculate, engage in rational argumentation, etc. This is enough to distinguish human beings from other animals, but that’s all. It is a classifying definition—based on a close genus and specific difference—not a substantial one.

This definition, inherited from Aristotle by the scholastics, was somewhat inadequate from a Christian perspective. The scholastics, as Christians, believed in the existence of the immortal human soul. What would survive in terms of immortality: their animality or their rationality? It certainly would not be their animality, which ceases at the moment of death. But rationality, in itself, is only a set of rules; an individual’s thought is rational to the extent that it conforms to the rationality recognized by other individuals. Therefore, it does not make sense to suppose that an individual’s individuality continues into eternity in the form of rationality, which itself has no trace of individuality. Elementary arithmetic, for example, is the same for everyone. There, one cannot speak of personal rationality.

This naturally creates a series of difficulties for the scholastics, as is evident in the discussion (more among their disciples than among themselves) between Saint Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. The former believed that only the substantial definitions of species exist; individuals within a species would only differ numerically. Thus, all human beings would have the same essence and would only be quantitatively distinguished from each other. On the other hand, Duns Scotus argued that if the difference between human beings were purely material, it would not be possible to speak of the immortality of the soul. The soul requires a specific form of the human individual, which is denied by the idea that we all possess the same substance. Therefore, it would be necessary to add to the idea of the substantial form of the human species the idea of an essential form of the human individual. Scotus called this essential form of the individual “haecceity” (haec, “this”).

Everything leads me to believe that Duns Scotus was right. Obviously, his perspective complements that of Saint Thomas in some way: there is indeed the substance of the species, there is merely material or numerical differentiation of this same substance, but there is also, in each differentiated individual, an individual substantial form.

Haecceity does not depend on the concrete individual existence of beings. If you possess an individual form, it is because you already possessed it before coming into existence. Simply by not having been born yet, you were already distinct from another person. You existed as a possibility, but that possibility was already, in itself, distinct from all others. Furthermore, your difference from other individuals was already complete: the possibilities that would be realized in you were entirely distinct from the possibilities that would be realized in other individuals.

What do I perceive when I perceive myself? It is not my body (which, on the other hand, is not an instrument of the substantial self but a form of its presence in a certain range of reality), it is not my memories or my feelings, it is none of the elements that compose me. What I perceive, indeed, is my irreducible individuality, and therefore, my haecceity.

Of course, this still leaves us in the dark regarding the foundation of this haecceity. We do not know its origin, we do not know why it exists; we only know that it is an experiential fact. Each of us is oneself and endowed with the feeling of self-identity, a feeling that persists over time and reflects the irreducible individual form of the individual.

The substantial self and the body

ANY DISCUSSION ABOUT THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SELF has become very difficult due to the impregnation, in contemporary culture, of a series of concepts that, in common use, define the vocabulary related to the subject.

The two main currents of thought regarding the problem are, in the modern world, the one that sees the human being as a “mind served by organs” (a Cartesian dualistic definition in which one substance, which is the soul, mind, or consciousness, assumes the position of the rider, and another substance, the body, assumes the position of the horse) and the one that sees it as a set of organs that produce consciousness through their functioning (thus, consciousness would be nothing more than a product of the brain).

These two currents bring immense difficulties in explaining even the mere concept of immortality. From the Cartesian point of view, it would be necessary to explain how the rider can continue riding without the horse; from the sensualist point of view, it would be necessary to explain how a consequence can continue to act without a cause.

As if that were not a patent impossibility, it must also be observed that, in the case of the sensualist perspective, it has not been experimentally verified to this day the possibility of inducing acts of consciousness through the creation of brain stimuli. Believing in this possibility is an act of faith. Stanislav Grof, a Freudian psychoanalyst and assistant professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, summarized his decades of study on the nature of mental activity as follows:

My first idea was that it [consciousness] had to be connected to the brain. [...] Today, I come to the conclusion that it does not derive from the brain. In this sense, my conclusion supports what Aldous Huxley believed [...]. He came to the conclusion that perhaps the brain acts as a reducing valve, which actually protects us from excessive absorption of cosmic information [...]. I don’t think the source of consciousness can be localized. I’m pretty sure it’s not in the brain — not inside the skull [...]. According to my experience, it is actually beyond time and space, and therefore not locatable. In reality, you reach the source of consciousness when you dissolve any categories that imply separation, individuality, time, space, and so on. You only experience them as a presence.1

Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, on the other hand, considers that “none of the actions we attribute to the mind have been initiated by electrode stimulation or epileptic discharge.” Furthermore, “if there were a mechanism in the brain capable of doing what the mind does, it would be expected that such a mechanism would convincingly betray its presence through better evidence obtained through epileptic activation or electrodes.” Thus, the mind “exerts its impact on the brain” but is not “within” it.2

There is a significant collection of facts gathered by scientists that attest to the operation of consciousness far away from or independently of the body. But even in recording these phenomena, a corrupting element is introduced — inherent to Cartesian dualism — to the extent that they are understood as acts of consciousness “outside” the body. To say that there are acts of thought outside the body assumes that during other moments, consciousness operates within the body. In any case, the duality of substances is implied: there would be two substances, the soul and the body, which would relate to each other in two ways, one habitual (the soul within the body) and another less frequent (the soul outside the body).

Some experiments

Note the following about phenomena of “out-of-body” vision (it will become clearer why I use quotation marks), which are essentially of two types. One relates to people with special abilities, known as “paranormal,” who, while in one location and with their eyes closed, are able to see what is happening elsewhere, sometimes completely inaccessible, and sometimes even on the other side of the world. One example occurred during the return of the Skylab satellite (actually a space laboratory) to the atmosphere in the 1970s. Knowing where it would fall was a big problem. There were no scientific means to make precise calculations to avoid the satellite falling in a populated area. Three clairvoyants were called upon to indicate the point of the spacecraft’s fall, each separated from the others. They all pointed to the same day and time when it would fall in the Australian desert, as it actually did.

There are countless examples like this. The most famous case is the Stargate Project conducted by the US Army from the 1970s to the 1990s to confirm the existence of remote viewing and investigate its possible military uses. The project achieved remarkable results, as did the 154 experiments and 26,000 tests conducted by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) under the direction of Dr. Edwin May. Faced with this immense amount of research, Jessica Utts, a professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, concluded that “anomalous cognition is possible and demonstrated. [...] The phenomenon has been reproduced in different forms in various laboratories and cultures.” Driven by the same impression, Craig Hogan writes:

Unless there is a gigantic conspiracy involving about thirty university departments located in different parts of the world and several highly respected scientists in different fields, many of whom were originally hostile to the claims of paranormal researchers, the only conclusion that an unbiased researcher can reach is that there are indeed a small number of people who obtain existing knowledge either from the minds of other people or from the external world through means that science does not yet know.5

And of course, remote viewing has numerous limitations. For example, there has only been one case of a person capable of reading text through remote viewing. In any case, it is something that requires study and meditation. However, although universities have a large body of research documenting phenomena like remote viewing, academics in general are not interested in them or view them negatively. It is the research institutes of the military — after all, the main responsible for the development of fundamental technologies throughout the 20th century — that have a great interest in the subject.

A second type of “out-of-body” vision is that of a subject who, in a state of clinical death, with no cardiac activity and often without any identifiable brain activity, when revived, describes everything that happened3 not only in the operating room during the period when their body was lifeless but also, with perfect accuracy, what happened in neighboring rooms. This has happened even in cases where the person’s brain had been removed from the skull.

Certain characteristics are always present in these phenomena. One of them is that the individual reports having seen their own body, seeing it from the outside when in a state of clinical death (although there may be hesitation at first, the individual soon realizes they are dead). This leads me to consider the expression “out-of-body vision” inadequate. If the individual sees their own body, it is because this is a datum of their consciousness, it is in a way within their consciousness, integrated with it. It becomes evident that the body is not capable of producing consciousness, although they are somehow related. Consciousness can perceive things that are beyond the reach of the body, and if it encompasses it in a moment of near-death, it is because it encompasses it in all other moments (there is no reason to assume that the lack of vital activity creates this state; at most, it activates it, intensifies it).

In a state like clinical death, consciousness can only continue to act as a manifestation of the substantial self, and not the present, social, or biographical self. This explains another common feature in accounts of near-death experiences. The individual usually says that during the phenomenon, they felt much more intelligent than they are in general. Everything was immediately understandable, their entire life appeared to them in a single glance and with a coherent form. Thus, they came to know themselves much better.

In some cases, this experience was accompanied by a state of intense spiritual exaltation, caused by the perception that they had transitioned to another form of space, unlimited. There, the individual encounters deceased friends and relatives who, in some way, come to receive them; in other cases, they see approaching figures that will take them to an uncertain and unknown place. In both cases, there is an expansion of consciousness.

Levels of consciousness

The consciousness of oneself can expand or restrict, demonstrating the existence of different levels of consciousness.

The present self, the social self, and the biographical self are merely adaptations that restrict consciousness to a specific field for the purpose of orientation according to the conditions of earthly life. The brain does not produce thought; on the contrary, it limits it. None of its self-images, as they appear in the present, social, and biographical spheres, actually corresponds to who you truly are. It is the substantial self that identifies with your true person, and perceiving this identification is something that can be trained and developed.

The consciousness that you are a substantial self can be strengthened by recalling what you did, what you thought, what you witnessed, while simultaneously affirming that you were the responsible and active person in all these circumstances, even in the circumstance of remembering them. By doing so, your level of self-awareness and awareness of everything you know is elevated.

Knowledge of the Other

The body, on the other hand, is not secondary to the soul. It is part of who you are, it has a history, it is part of your biography, which you carry beyond bodily death. The body dies, but its accumulated bodily history is carried forward by your substantial self because it was the foundation and made it possible, as the body itself could not find the basis for its continuity within itself.

When you relate to a person, you do not relate to their body. You relate to a specific substantial identity that is distinct from the body, which is enough to show you that not only you but all individuals have an awareness of their own identity. A person can be known, but never fully understood. You will never be capable of grasping all the characteristics that make them unique. However, the portion that you perceive is enough to identify that person, to consider them as that person. Even a person closest to you, like your spouse, cannot be an object of your knowledge, even if you were capable of thinking and simultaneously thinking about all the elements you know about them. Try to compose a mental image of them and realize that, no matter how hard you try, that image will still be poor, too schematic, compared to the real model. Something would be missing from that portrait, something very personal to them, because everything I know about their substantial self is not known through my “mind” but through my being, through my own presence of substantial identity.

A substantial self knows another substantial self far beyond what the mind can apprehend. Otherwise, all human communication would be impossible, as it would be reduced to what is perceived and thought, while human interaction takes place in an ontological sphere in which one being presents itself before another being. If we do not observe this, we believe that interaction is an illusion, precisely the error in which most of 20th-century psychology found itself, by understanding the human being only based on their mental activity.

Knowledge by Presence. Preliminary Approach

This serves as an example of what I call knowledge by presence. All knowledge unfolds in a world of realities. The very distinction between body and mind is merely mental, an abstraction that occurs in a broader reality in which, as the scholastics say, body and soul form an indivisible unity.

In addition to the knowledge that resides in my mind, there is knowledge that is ingrained in my being and has never been the content of my mind. There are thousands of books on mineralogy in the world, and condensed within them is an endless set of mineralogical knowledge. However, there is much more condensed knowledge of mineralogy within the minerals themselves. And part of this content, which humans, through certain techniques and methods, through trial and error, transform into verbal content that speaks about the mode of existence of minerals.

Now, if this applies to minerals, how could it not apply to myself? As an existing being, I possess an immense condensation of knowledge, of which only a tiny portion ascends to the state of consciousness, to the content of my mind. Everything that is within me and unknown to me is not strange to me; rather, it constitutes my presence. Just as the real presence of any other person consists of what they are beyond what they themselves know about themselves, not to mention what I know about them. The vast majority of our knowledge comes from presence. Mental knowledge corresponds to a tiny fraction of it.

Unfortunately, in academic, scientific, and philosophical discussions, only mental knowledge is taken into account, which is the source of countless insoluble confusions. René Descartes can only say that he consists of two substances, one that consists of occupying a place in space and another that consists of thinking, because in this very act he forgets to inquire about his own person taken substantially. His person is not just the meeting of one thing with another, of body with mind. He can record this idea in a book, but he cannot believe in it for a single minute. Descartes always believed in the existence of René Descartes, despite the fact that the consciousness of knowledge by presence does not become incorporated into his work—an issue also evident in many other modern philosophers.4

As academic instruments improve, the separation between being and knowing deepens. These instruments bypass everything that is knowledge but cannot be reduced to a mental datum of public communication. You cannot prove to me that we are here in this precise moment and in this precise place, even though it is evident. The existence of the substantial self is of the same nature; it is evident to us, but its existence cannot be a matter of proof because every proof is a mental content. If the substantial self could be proven, it is because it could be entirely reduced to a mental thing, which I pointed out earlier is an impossibility.

Evidence and Proof

Any proof, no matter how modest, is based on a multitude of knowledge that is not the object of proof. It is these unproven yet evident objects that lend their evidence to what, not being evident at first, one seeks to prove.

Hence, the conditions for any scientific knowledge are: 1) the existence of evidence, something that imposes itself immediately as true, without the need for proof (for example, the existence of the world, along with the consequent awareness that you are not the only thing that exists); 2) the possibility of proof, which is defined by the transfer of truth from a self-evident truth to another that is not self-evident (so that what you have evidence of will evoke more certainty in you than what depends on the truth of another element); 3) the existence of a connection, a link between the evidence from which one starts and the proof one arrives at, a connection (a relation between different propositions) that is the proper object of logic; and 4) the evidence of the connection because if the connection itself is the object of proof, if, in addition to the evidence of the connected elements, it is necessary to prove that the connection that unites them exists, a new process of proof will need to be initiated, in which the connection will be the object whose truth will depend on the truth of another self-evident object, and so on, without any process of proof ever being concluded.5

This is equivalent to saying that the rules of logic are self-evident and not objects of logical proof. Furthermore, it indicates that the mass of self-evident knowledge is necessarily much larger than the mass of proven knowledge. The teaching of logic itself can assist in the process of proof, but not in the process of perceiving what is self-evident, which is, after all, true and essential knowledge. Proven knowledge, in comparison, is merely accessory.

The recognition of the evident requires the method of confession, through which you acknowledge that you know what you already know, initially independent of your ability to prove it to someone else. Through confession, you bring into the expressive level what is already given in your presence as a substantial, existing being. What we need is to know, not to prove that we know; knowledge must come first, and proof only afterward, if it is possible at all.

The Sincerity of the Lone Witness

Furthermore, unless we are dealing with formal demonstrations in mathematics or logic, every proof depends on human testimony. No testimony has an external witness to testify on its behalf. I can say that I conducted a certain experiment and drew this or that conclusion from it; how many people will have witnessed that? At most, a few individuals may have seen me present, seen me perform certain acts, but they have not witnessed my act of perception, based on which I later testify. The repetition of an experiment itself is another act and dependent on a new testimony, which may or may not confirm the previous testimony but will never be identical to it. And the new testimony will also not have an external witness. All human knowledge is based on the lone witness.

Thus, one can measure the misconception of taking proof as the realm of certainty and the rest of human life as the realm of uncertainty. The realm of proof consists only of that which we do not have evidence of; thus, proof is a set of mental frameworks we rely on to complete the realm of evidence. Prioritizing proof over evidence is like building a crate with only the nails, without the boards: the nails, which only serve to attach one board to another, will be suspended without supporting anything.

People do this because proofs are eminently communicable, whereas evidence is not. I can only communicate evidence through a sign, whose connection to the evidence is not evident at first glance; on the other hand, proof can be enclosed in a verbal scheme and transmitted to a person in such a way that they can execute the same reasoning. Proof tends toward consensus, while evidence tends toward personal certainty. But it is clear that the circle of what is a matter of consensus is minimal. This produces the most prodigious inversion: the world does not exist, reality does not exist; only that which academia and scientists have constructed a consensus around exists, and we are obliged to accept this diminished reality and live within it. The irony is that every scientist depends on the personal credibility of the testimony of other scientists: unable to fully encompass even their own area of research, every scientist relies on specialized scientific literature; that is, they rely on the truthfulness of the testimonies recorded there.

Four centuries ago, Giordano Bruno, a man of extraordinary intelligence, already warned that by following the path that the sciences were beginning to take, scientists would end up doubting their own existence. And that’s exactly what happened.

The veracity of testimonies depends on sincerity. Sincerity is the adaptation of speech to the reality of being. It is true that the exercise of sincerity, although not absolutely rare, fails at times. However, even the biggest liar only lies for a few minutes of their day. If they were to lie constantly and about everything, they would not be able to tell the first lie. Lies are based on an endless foundation of truth.

The Modern Philosopher as Universal Judge

From antiquity until the beginning of modernity, there were a series of ontological and cognitive assumptions that were consensually accepted by philosophers and were denied at a certain point without reasonable cause. Many of these assumptions are explicitly stated in the works of Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle, for example, states something quite obvious: all new knowledge is based on some old knowledge; we always start from the known and move toward the unknown (as I have just observed regarding the process of proof); philosophers, in general, accepted this proposition. Another assumption, also expressed by Aristotle, is that human beings normally know the truth, they have a inclination to know it, even though sometimes they may be mistaken. A third assumption is that any purported scientific or philosophical knowledge, that is, knowledge that receives the contribution of critical or analytical consciousness, is based on pre-scientific or pre-philosophical knowledge that will remain its foundation. Philosophers and scientists do not want their knowledge to replace the common knowledge shared by all, but rather to improve it in certain areas.

At the beginning of modernity, René Descartes inverted the usual stance of the philosopher. He stated that all knowledge is doubtful except those that have passed his own analytical scrutiny. The philosopher becomes the judge of all human knowledge, placing himself above the knowledge shared by humanity; it is he who separates the valid from the invalid, with a pretension that would never occur to Plato or Aristotle, to St. Thomas Aquinas or Duns Scotus, because he bases his authority on the ability to prove everything he believes in.

By doing so, he disregards the fact that over the course of a lifetime, only a limited amount of things can be proven, insufficient for general human guidance.

Furthermore, the idea of general doubt is absurd. Authentic doubt is always particular; general doubt is an impossibility, and Descartes implicitly admits this by saying that he follows certain general principles that have never been denied by anyone. In other words, he will admit as true not only the things he can prove but also many more things, which is exactly what we all do.6

Confession and Autobiography: Second Approach

Knowledge is only possible due to the human inclination towards truth, even though it may not be complete and permanent. When Aristotle states that human beings naturally tend towards knowledge, he expresses the same idea as Saint Paul the Apostle when he says, “In Him, we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). It is not the truth that is within us, within our “mind”; rather, we are within it. If Saint Augustine says that “truth resides in the interior of man,” he does not think of the mind; he means that truth resides in the essence of man. You carry within yourself the truth of your being, and it is through it that you should shape your thoughts, not the other way around. You arrive at the truth of your being through confession, not through the analytical scrutiny of right and wrong.

In writing his Confessions, Saint Augustine tells the story of his life and tells it to a specific reader, God, who, being omniscient, knows his story much better than he himself does. With each episode he recounts, God reminds him of many others, which he may not have wanted to remember. These are indeed confessions, not just narratives. Confession was not the name of a literary genre; it was the name of a sacrament of the Church. With Augustine, the confessional literary genre is born, giving the sacrament a literary extension. In other words, confessional writing is a sacramental act, and that is why it works. The author tells what he knows about himself and allows God to reveal to him the corners of his soul that he naturally did not remember, but which are important for the moral purposes of confession, especially the sinful elements. Writing becomes an activity of self-knowledge.

In the evolution of the genre, at the time of Descartes, false autobiographies begin to abound, including Descartes' own, who instead of presenting himself fully before God, boasted of “living incognito.” These are texts in which the subject tells his story not to self-know and even less to reveal himself to God, but to convey a certain impression to his audience. This is evident, for example, in the introduction of fictional elements into autobiographies, in order to give greater plausibility to some self-impression that the author wants to communicate. The peak of this procedure is found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, which are mostly composed of lies. Rousseau goes so far as to invent imaginary sins, sins he had never committed, so that by appearing horrible in a certain aspect, he would highlight his own beautiful qualities.

The art of confession begins to decline from there. Ironically, I believe it will only be restored in the 20th century, not through the proper genre of memoir, but through fictional genre. I have already mentioned the case of Proust. I could also highlight the case of Henry Miller, a man who, until his forties, tried to write about everything, with great failure, and then decided to tell the story of his failure in a series of books. They are absolutely spectacular memoirs. In a famous interview with Paris Revietv, the reporter immediately noted that he had never met anyone who spoke with as much sincerity as Henry Miller. Even if he said nonsense, he was seen as a real, substantial person, a situation that you only achieve when you give up having a mental control over your self-image—or, at the extreme, when you no longer have a self-image.

Self-image, especially when reinforced by false autobiographies like Rousseau’s, becomes a prison. In the bourgeois world, we have reached a point where there are therapies to improve your self-image: your self-image may improve, but you will substantially worsen. The cult of self-image is ultimately a choice for the mental and a rupture with reality. On the other hand, by becoming aware of your substantial self, you immediately convince yourself that it can never be a content of your consciousness to be fixed in a self-image.

This means abandoning the pretense of absolute coherence in human beings, especially if it is the coherence of a public image or a personal self-image. There will always be supervening elements in your life that contradict who you were until a certain point. In truth, there is nothing shocking—and people were not so shocked by this in the 15th century—about the fact that the greatest French poet, François Villon, was a thief and a murderer. These are elements that worsen the image and even the substance of that human being, but they inescapably compose him beyond any closed view of his image.

When I started my web-radio program True Outspeak in 2006, people were scandalized by my vocabulary and claimed that a philosopher would not speak that way. But I do. I use swear words. And I will not file them down to meet a certain self-image. A person here in the United States, upon reading my texts, had the following impression: “But how baroque! He quotes Latin and then uses a curse word right after!” And that’s exactly it.

We all have the right to be unpredictable. If we are not, we live as slaves to a self-image that is tied to bourgeois moralism, which arose and spread in the 19th century with the obligation that people outwardly behave like Christians or well-behaved little bourgeois. However, the Church exists precisely because people do not behave like that. In the past, sin was understood as a kind of human inevitability that we all go through. Notice that, as Denis de Rougemont observes in Love in the Western World, adultery is the predominant theme in all Western literature. And it can only be so because it is understood as something that should be confessed to God and forgiven, so that the individual can renew his way of life. It should not be confessed to society, and it should not be rejected solely as something harmful to self-image.

The loss of perspective on the substantial self leads to the creation of substitutive and petty mythologies (such as social etiquette) that will serve as a new guiding direction. This happened in Europe due to a hiatus of about two centuries in the teaching of Christian doctrine. In the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century, texts from the Cartesian tradition and rationalistic theology were used as the basis of teaching in seminaries. This is how the radical dualism of body and soul permeated pseudo-Catholic doctrine. The reaction would only come with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris and his proposal to restore the teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

The Substantial Self and Immortality

The Sense of Existence

ALL HUMAN COGNITIVE ACTIVITIES are constituted by fragments, whether they come from the senses or from mental activity, which can be reconstructed into larger wholes by the activity of the mind itself. We do this by creating a narrative, assembling various isolated perceptions into a sequence and giving them a sense of continuity, or by constructing a reasoning process, structuring propositions according to their internal logical connections. However, no such operation can give us a sense of totality. We continue to navigate based on fragments, even though we assume, behind all these perceived fragments, the continuity of existence and the continuity of ourselves, which we never have direct access to. This has been observed repeatedly by philosophers. I have already mentioned David Hume in this regard.

The presence of being and our substantiality in being are not mental given; they are, so to speak, pre-mental. They are a prerequisite for any mental activity to make sense. We all know that we exist and that we are in a universe, in an unlimited field we call being. What we do not know is the origin of this idea. And when we subject it to philosophical analysis, we find no foundation for it within the realm of the thinkable. It is something knowable, but not thinkable.

However, in the previous class, we saw that the knowledge we have of a simple human being also has this same characteristic. You can know a person, but not think about them; you can have enough information about them to identify them, but you cannot reduce them to a content of your mind. When you try to assemble the various pieces you know about a person, you will notice that they are insufficient to compose them entirely; and yet, you interact with a real, whole person.

Keeping this in mind, let us consider the functions of the mind. The first one is thinking, which consists of representing things through certain signs and establishing relationships between signs, assuming that these relationships somehow reflect the relationships between the corresponding real things. The second function is intuition. Intuition is perceiving a presence, perceiving something that is present. It only functions in the realm of instantaneity. It is not possible to have intuition of what happened yesterday or what will happen tomorrow.

So, these two mental functions, thinking and intuition, are incapable of providing me with the perception of continuous existence over time. Furthermore, I have no mental means of accessing the knowledge of the substantial existence of even a single being throughout all its moments. What gives us the perception of this is what, lacking a better name, I will call the sense of existence.

The sense of existence exists; it is not a product of our minds. Remove the sense of existence, and immediately your mind will produce the most absurd theories to justify its continuity in existence, including, to mention just one besides those we saw in the first class, the one that Heidegger summarized in the famous expression (famous only for its stupidity, in my opinion) that “language is the dwelling of being” (which is a pure impossibility since, for that to be true, language would have to possess something that is not purely linguistic).

The sense of existence imposes itself on us as a kind of inevitability. We do not invent it; we have no power over it; we can only admit that we are here and that nothing can remove us from reality. Deprived of positive means of proving the existence of existence, we can at least resort to the negative proof that we cannot withdraw from existence, spend some time outside it, and then return to existence. That is inconceivable even as a mental hypothesis.

Even though always present, this sense of the density of existence has no immediate connection with the activity of the mind. The mind can function perfectly as if nothing exists and as if everything is hypothetical. Both from a rational and an intuitive perspective, the mind is not a reliable guide, ultimately, for the knowledge of anything, as everything it does is based on the sense of existence, which, in turn, is averse to being transformed into mental content. It is never within our reach and cannot be manipulated by us.

I can think that I am not here at this moment. But I can only think that because I am here. That is, the ability to lie and to err is also fundamental for the mind to distinguish itself from the real world. If everything we thought followed the thread of reality strictly; if everything we thought were entirely a slave to the sense of existence, then we could not even perceive the mind as an individualized element, a distinct phenomenon within the entirety of reality. It would remain diffuse in existence, much like the minds of animals. Thus, the mind can be distinct from other elements of reality, but it can never be separated from reality. Contrary to what Descartes thought, if I did not exist first, I could not think. To arrive at any proof that I think, I need to have first admitted that I exist.

Curiously, the sense of existence — what Louis Lavelle called “total presence” — is the most forgotten element throughout modern philosophy. Even when problems related to existence are proposed, philosophers do so based on the mind or what they call matter, without even paying attention to the fact that the distinction between mind and matter is only something that happens to us during existence. In this respect, the scholastics, in general, were much closer to the truth than Descartes when they affirmed that the compound body-soul is indivisible, rather than Descartes' dualism of mind and body, which has been the framework of discussions for four centuries.

As soon as we try to think about the substantial self, we already reduce it to a content of the mind and subtly start talking about something else — at most, about an aspect of it. We will be dealing with a sign of the substantial self, not the self itself. Nor can we approach it through sensory intuition. Sensory intuition can only give us what is immediately present, what is now, while the substantial self is something that has existed since the moment we were born and continues to exist uninterruptedly and immortally. And finally, we cannot say that the substantial self can be reached through some feeling, as every feeling presupposes an object that stimulates the mind and evokes a reaction from the whole psychophysical being as it is in a given moment. Being aware of this is a further step towards intensifying our experience of reality.

The Foundation of the Self is Inaccessible

Therefore, the question of the foundation of the self has no answer. If there were any foundation or origin of its “selfness,” then this would be a phenomenon that manifests another cause, which would be its true reality. This would cause its “selfness” to change from the condition of an entity to the condition of an appearance — it would pass from substance to the quality of something else that sustains it. Thus, we would arrive at the paradox that to know one’s own existence would, for a human being, mean denying that they exist as an entity. If I believe, as in the verses of Fernando Pessoa, that “Emissary of an unknown king, / I fulfill vague instructions from beyond, / And the abrupt phrases that come to my lips, / Sound to me like another and anomalous meaning,” then I cease to consider the individuality of my entity and dissolve it into a phenomenal appearance.

In the extreme, I can dissolve not only my self but also the whole of existence into a phenomenal appearance and ultimately into falsehood. However, the notion of an entire universe consisting of inherently false things is self-contradictory; it contradicts itself. Falsity can only exist, by definition, in contrast to a broader set of true things. Total and universal falsehood can be stated, but never believed; it can have an enchanting power, it can make you experience the world in that way for a few moments, but you are unable to sustain that same state of mind continuously, even if justified by some very complex theory. Because you cannot burst the artificial bubble within which, perhaps due to linguistic or expressive insufficiency, you found yourself trapped, you consent to momentarily experiencing reality in that way. You theoretically deny the substantiality of the self, but you continue to act as if it is real. Entire cultural universes can be constructed only through language games similar to that. Hence the need to remember the things we have always known but for which there are not always socially available linguistic instruments.

Now, all human communication is based not on the direct expression of truth but on the expression of its contrast with falsehood. As we have seen, the ability to think falsehood, to think what is not, is essential to be able to say what is.

Immortality is not Dissolution of the Self

Willpower, in general, is an illusion since the mind does not have the control over us that we usually attribute to it. Willpower is merely a position you take based on representations in your mind: you think one thing, then another, and yet another, and you choose one of them. All of this takes place within your mind, within a realm of discontinuity based on the substantiality of a self that supports it. Thus, this substantial self is the real directing force, which ultimately acts continuously and responsibly, and we only know it through the experience of existing.

This leads us far away from traditional esoteric teachings that urge us to destroy the illusion of separation. They preach that you deceive yourself by believing that you have your own will and your own self when, in fact, you are not any individuality but merely a point in being connected to the mind of God. What I am saying here is exactly the opposite: you are a concrete, irreducible individuality that can never be transformed into something else and will remain eternally the same.

The fact that the substantial self is immortal does not mean that it does not have a history. On the contrary, it has a certain course that extends beyond physical death. The self will not live in eternity (which belongs to what has no beginning and will never have an end, that is, God); it will live in a specific form of temporality called immortality (which belongs to what had a beginning but will never have an end). You will always be you; you will never be God.

All esoteric traditions that speak of the suppression of the self are radically mistaken. There is no suppression of being; there is the suppression of the image of the self as given in the present self, the social self, and the biographical self. In Hinduism, it is said to peel away the various layers that compose the psyche — memory, language, emotions, etc. — until only something that constitutes true substance, the Brahma, which is eternal, remains. However, this act is not only impossible but also overlooks an even more serious fact: it is only in the condition of an irreducible substantial self that you can have the experience of divinity. This condition, instead of being an obstacle, is your path to that experience.

Just one case of an individual retaining the data of their individuality after death would be enough to show the impossibility of the Hindu doctrine. In this regard, accounts of near-death experiences are very eloquent in always presenting a temporal sequence. There is no case of an attempt to express a cosmic or transindividual consciousness in near-death experiences. The individual always retains their individuality and the limitations that characterize it, such as personal memories. Dr. Peter Fenwick, a neuropsychiatrist and one of the leading experts in near-death experience studies in England, draws attention to the complete lack of scientific explanation for the continuity of human memory between the moment before and the moment after the near-death experience:

The brain is not functioning. It simply isn’t there. It’s destroyed. It’s in a pathological state. But despite that, it’s capable of producing these very clear experiences [...]. The memory systems are particularly sensitive to unconsciousness. So, the person won’t remember anything. Yet, after one of these experiences [of near-death], the person comes back with clear and lucid memories [...]. This is a true enigma for science.[^12]

If a person is able to retain their memories and impose a temporal order on their account, it is because they have not entered “eternity.” Thus, just as there is another form of corporeality, there is another form of perceiving time. The individual continues with their biography; they do not merge into the cosmic mind, nor do they lose their individuality. On the contrary, they exhibit a consciousness of individuality even more acute than in the normal course of their bodily life.

You are not the Brahma; you are you and only you. You never become a universal macro-consciousness that knows everything.

Divine Love

Suppose that during a certain period you deepen your awareness of the substantial self. Thus, you will take all your thoughts, feelings, memories, and impressions - in short, all your mental data - only as signs of the substantial existence that sustains them. You will then accept the reality and the fact that you live in an existing world. You will no longer be so concerned about what occupies the mind.

At first, the experience of the substantial self will appear to you as an experience of power. It represents the discovery that we are something enduring and indelible of existence. The self reveals itself as an indestructible force, the true basis of its permanence in being, an element of continuity that extends beneath and beyond all the fragmentariness of its mental life.

But as soon as the existence of the substantial self is lived and the accompanying feeling of power is experienced, the question arises: why does the substantial self exist?

This question inaugurates a second moment of reflection - a moment now marked by powerlessness. Yes, because immediately follows the realization: it is not possible to find any origin or foundation for the substantial self. The self does not fundamentally have something within itself that justifies its existence; it simply is there, but not as a causal foundation that justifies itself. It is not possible to go back to the moments when it did not exist and observe how it came into being. The self appears, seen in this way, gratuitous and almost absurd. If it does not carry within itself the necessity of existence - after all, it is not eternal, and for some reason it came into existence only from a certain point in existing existence - it is because it is a product of an act of will. Every substantial self, every immortal soul, is a free creation, not necessary, of God’s action. God created each soul because He wanted to. Nothing forced Him to do so.

Therefore, we are creatures of divine love. There is no other possible explanation for the existence of substantial selves.

The recognition that a free action of divine love created your immortal soul can instill a feeling of gratitude in you. This feeling will not be limited to the moment of perceiving this fact. In fact, it will tend to become a permanent mark of your way of life, for this gratitude is, in truth, the existential stance compatible with the nature of human existence. Immortal life, after the earthly stage, will be reduced to contemplation. Because, freed from the dispersing elements of current existence, the substantial self will be able to concentrate only on what is proper to its situation of permanence. It will not return to the state of forgetting divine love, which corresponds to a shift towards unreality.

However, it may be that the perception of divine love does not satisfy the one who has discovered the lack of foundation of their substantial self, who perhaps intends, in some way, to take control of the general process of their existence, to find a total explanation for it. This pretension is absurd in itself. After all, there is only an explanation of the particular. “Explanation of the whole” is a self-contradictory expression; to explain the “whole,” there would have to exist another “whole” even greater than the first one and from which it would be possible to justify it, since every explanation is a passage from particularity to universality according to a certain proportion. There can be, therefore, no total explanation of the existence of the substantial self. And because of that, mental activity must be limited to the function of giving coherence, to the extent of its possibilities, to the fragments that make up human perception and reason and the earthly world.

City of God and City of Man

Earthly life is the transition between two forms of permanence: the permanence proper to the human soul and the eternity proper to God. This can be appreciated from the doctrine of original sin.

It is often said that Adam and Eve tasted the forbidden fruit because they did not resist the temptation of knowledge, and that the Fall, the moment of consummation of original sin, would have been the beginning of the history of knowledge. I consider this interpretation quite mistaken.

What the serpent promised to Adam and Eve was the knowledge of good and evil; it was not any knowledge. Furthermore, it was not any particular kind of knowledge of good and evil: it was the divine knowledge of good and evil. Now, for us, good and evil are objects, things that we can know or mentally represent. They appear to us as qualities inherent to certain beings and actions. However, for God, since nothing can be placed as an object outside and before Him, the knowledge of good and evil is not like that of someone who only perceives something; His knowledge of good and evil is that of someone who establishes them. He knows them insofar as He himself determines that certain things are good or evil.

As can be seen, the knowledge promised by the serpent could never be given to human beings. It is pure impossibility. The divine knowledge of good and evil was forbidden to Adam and Eve, but they had human knowledge of good and evil, which was inscribed in their understanding that everything was good except touching those forbidden fruits.

Knowledge through Presence

The primacy of the critical problem

The interest of philosophy in the process of knowledge is relatively recent. With Descartes, philosophical attention begins to turn from the problem of being, the structure of reality, to the problem of knowing. It does so in response to the premise that it would be naive to throw ourselves into direct knowledge of reality without first verifying whether the instruments at our disposal are sufficient.

I do not believe that this position, which would become known as Kant’s “critical caution,” is in itself legitimate. Human knowledge is not a specifically distinct element from the rest of reality; on the contrary, it is just another element of it, so if we cannot know an elephant or a lamppost, much less can we know something as subtle as the internal processes by which we attain knowledge. If one wants to follow the recommendation of going from what is more secure to what is more hypothetical and conjectural, then one should start with objects of the external world and only gradually attempt an examination of more evanescent realities.

The modern critical tradition, whose most important representatives are Descartes, Hume, and Kant, reverses the hierarchy of more distant and closer knowledge and thus makes the problem of knowledge precede the problem of being. In doing so, it introduces an artificial division into the scheme of reality: the knowing subject is taken, in some way, as an external element to reality, as an entity consisting solely of knowing. Clearly, such a subject does not exist substantially; it is nothing more than a hypothesis. First and foremost, we are integral human subjects that exist and, among other activities, engage in knowing, an activity that is sometimes difficult to separate from others—in any action, it is problematic to isolate what is its executive component and what is its cognitive component.

The “philosophical subject,” therefore, comes into existence with the Cartesian cogito and its consequent division of reality into something that consists of occupying space and something that consists of thinking. Curiously, the things that occupy space are accessible to all, but the activity of thinking, non-spatial and ethereal, is only accessible to the subject. This thinking subject, conceived in this way, can only appear as something separate from the whole of reality, marking the transition from the existing historical self to the sphere of a supposed eternity in which it contemplates its identity with itself. The subject contemplates itself in its thinking condition and therein sees its existence; it thinks and affirms its existence in the moment it thinks and thus believes itself to be unconditioned by any external factor.

However, it is easy to see that this thinking self did not arise out of nothing. Descartes, up to the point in his life when he enunciates his thesis, already had a biography (he himself takes the trouble to tell it in the Meditations). The analytical examination of the method of knowledge is something that occurred to him in the course of his life, something he chose to do at a certain point in his existence, which existed previously. In short, the cogito is just a given in the biography of a historically existing subject, not a separate moment from all the others. It is merely an abstracted moment, in the sense that we abstract the geometric forms from the entities perceived in space, and then continue to reason based only on those forms, not based on the respective entities from which they were abstracted.

Therefore, what exists concretely is the historical subject René Descartes, not the ego of the cogito. Thoughts exist (they are not unreal), but they exist according to the mode of existence of thoughts, not things.

A priori forms and the suppression of the real subject

All modalities of knowledge studied in the course of the modern tradition presuppose some modification of the subject: whether it is some data that has reached him, some thought he has thought, or something that has happened to him in general. When I have a sensory perception, for example, I receive external information (a certain temperature, a color, a certain shape, a taste, etc.); when I think, something also occurs to me in the form of thought (a deductive chain, an intuition in a split second), something that alters me in a certain aspect. Thus, the set of data that make up the theory of knowledge consists entirely of modifications of the subject.

But now the question arises: where is the subject? To which subject do these modifications occur?

Kant had already realized that for there to be any modification, there must be a subject that is modified. He seeks, then, this subject in those elements of knowledge that are permanent and structural: the categories of sensory perception (space and time) and the categories of logical thinking (reality, possibility, equality, difference, etc.). There he identifies the permanent structure within which modifications take place.

However, it must be noted that these a priori forms always refer to perceived objects. Time and space, equality and difference are forms that allow us to catalog different objects, which shows Kant’s reasoning—cognitive processes require that their course not be chaos; they require a form. However, this does not point us to where the subject is. The rules that the subject employs to classify and categorize the received data are its properties, but they are not the subject itself. Surprisingly, the problem of the permanent subject is never addressed, which blocks any further investigation into the human soul from the outset.

Knowledge through Presence

At this point, I propose a change of perspective. For the subject to undergo those modifications—the acts of knowledge—it must exist before and independently of the cognitive process. Not in a temporal sense (we begin to know from the moment we are born), but in a hierarchical sense. The subject that ontologically exists must precede any knowledge of it and even precede its forms of knowledge. These are only part of the subject; they do not encompass, however, its substantial existence.

The real structure of the subject, which it can entirely ignore—that is, which may not be a knowledge datum—is presupposed in all acts of knowledge. This structure is composed of information that exists in the subject as an existing thing; it does not need to be in its mind. To perform arithmetic calculations, you do not need to take into account the element of “human respiration,” but without breathing, you will not be able to make any calculations. Or, to put it another way, nothing is as non-spatial as an arithmetic calculation, and yet, if you were not located in some point of space, you could not perform the calculation.

Calculation is independent of space, but you cannot occupy an indefinite space. You occupy space, and every space is defined.

This set of factors that determines the real existence of the individual is not part of the cognitive process but underlies it. Nevertheless, this set cannot be considered an unknown or obscure part of human knowledge. It is constituted of information that can be brought to the surface of consciousness at any time. The real data that make up the existential structure of the human being are not entirely unknown to them. Throughout their life, they will eventually know something about these foundations of their existence. And this element of real presence is what I call knowledge through presence.

Accepting it represents the recognition that being precedes knowing; that knowing is only something that happens to being. Therefore, the world cannot be an object of proof. Proof is something that takes place within the mind (through a manipulation of signs that refer to the external world), and thus within the world. Hence, the existence of the world cannot be proven, but if the world did not exist, nothing could be proven.

The limitations of knowing in the face of being, which inspired philosophers to “critique” knowledge so much, should not be seen negatively. The knowledge that is possible to us is limited because it is human; if it were unlimited—which would imply making knowing coextensive with being—we would not be able to have any knowledge. The limitations of the way an object appears and the limitations of the way a subject knows are conducive to the existence of one and the cognition of the other, and vice versa.

A priori forms of manifestation

This entirely escaped Kant. Now, an appearance, a phenomenon, is not nothing. It, as an appearance, is something in itself. Human beings necessarily have to know something about the object itself because at least the “appearance” with which it appears to us is, in itself, real.

If we analyze the problem from the perspective of the object, Kant’s position becomes even more absurd. Let’s suppose that a certain object emits information that we capture by framing it according to the a priori forms. But the question arises: can this object emit any information, and is it only our a priori forms that frame it according to the object’s own appearance? No. The object only emits information that is co-proportional to its way of being. A frog cannot speak to you in German. It is not that you lack the capacity to receive that type of information from it; on the contrary, it is the frog that lacks the capacity to emit that type of information to you. If there are a priori forms of perception, there are also a priori forms of manifestation.

Every entity is limited not only by the subject of knowledge but also by its own condition as a known object. The adequacy of the message emitted by the object to the message received by the subject shows that no information has been lost between one pole and the other. You are not capturing just a phenomenal appearance; it is much more than the name we give it: it is precisely the appearance that its respective object has the ability to send to you. It is something specific to that object. By knowing it, you know the object.

When we arbitrarily separate the subject from the object in studying the process of knowledge, we forget that everything that is a subject of knowledge can also be an object of knowledge. For example, I see what is around me, but I am also seen by you. And just as I have limitations in my perception, I have limitations in my expression, and both orders of limitations reflect my real structure. Kant limited himself to examining the fact that he received information; he did not examine the fact that he also emitted information.

Appendices

Immortality as a Premise of the Philosophical Method7

IF WE ARE IMMORTAL, WE MUST BE SO IN ESSENCE and not by accident. Immortality is then our true condition and the plan of reality in which we effectively exist. In this case, the present bodily life is nothing but a tiny fraction of our reality, a momentary appearance that conceals our true substance. Consequently, all knowledge that we can acquire within the limits of bodily existence is merely an appearance within an appearance. Although it apprehends genuine portions of reality, it cannot have its own foundation within itself, but must seek it in the sphere of immortality.

All of this is quite clear. What confuses things is that the term “immortality,” in present culture, has acquired the connotation of something that only manifests itself—if it exists—after physical death. An entirely absurd suggestion is hidden there: we are mortal in life, but we “become” immortal after death, as if death were the transition to a radically separate, heterogeneous, and incommunicable state of existence from the present life.

It is on this assumption that all hope for purely immanent knowledge rests, without reference to the “beyond.” If immortality exists, this hope is as absurd as the assumption that supports it. If we have a life that transcends all duration, this life transcends, and therefore encompasses, rather than excludes, its slice immersed in duration. If we are immortal, we must be so now, from the present life, rather than being, so to speak, immortalized by death. Death cannot immortalize the mortal; it can only make preexisting immortality manifest and, in the same act, challenge the illusion of mortality.

But if we are already immortal in this life, it is evident that we can only adequately know the latter in the light of immortality: the mortal knowledge of mortal life is the illusory knowledge of an illusion.

The clarification of immortality thus becomes a primary requirement of the philosophical method: either we demonstrate that immortality does not exist, or, if we accept it at least as a hypothesis, we must found in it all the possibility of effective knowledge of reality.

Demonstrating that immortality exists may be difficult, but proving that it does not exist is impossible: all proofs would be limited to what is accessible in present life, in no way undermining the possibility that there is something beyond it. On the other hand, proofs of immortality lose nothing with this limitation, since present life is within immortal life, and what is known of one can reveal something about the other.

However, proofs are of no use if, once obtained, they do not modify the reflex habit of reasoning from present life as if it were a closed and self-sufficient whole—a habit that can be based on the denial as well as the affirmation of immortality.

The very search for scientifically valid and compelling evidence, therefore, for the entire community of scholars, tends to make present existence the measure of immortal life, since, on the scale of the latter, human authority in the scientific community counts for absolutely nothing.

On one hand, scientific proof of immortality does not give anyone, by itself, a consciousness of personal immortality, much less the strength to make the transition from a cognition based on temporal experience to one based on a sense of immortality.

On the other hand, anyone who has made this transition does not need scientific proof of what has been given to them through direct personal experience. They can use such evidence as pedagogical means to encourage others to seek identical experience or to silence opponents of immortality, but these two objectives are minor and secondary compared to the experience itself.

The expression “experience of immortality” is certainly metonymic. It designates the object of experience by one of its parts, implying that it inevitably requires the existence of the whole. We should speak of experiences of extracorporeal cognition, or more precisely, supracorporeal cognition, implying that if consciousness operates outside and above the body, it does not have to die when the body dies.

These experiences are not necessarily “paranormal.” Anyone can have access to them, provided they prepare for it through an appropriate series of meditations. Generally, it is not a matter of perceiving objects at a distance or in the future, but of becoming aware of what, in common and current perception, is already supracorporeal although not habitually perceived as such. As soon as you become aware of the supracorporeal elements that permeate and underlie bodily perception, your notion of “self” will automatically change. When I say “become aware,” I mean that there is more to it than a simple isolated or even repeated act of perception.

“Becoming aware” is more than “becoming conscious”: it implies an act of intellectual and moral responsibility by which you commit yourself intimately not to allow the door open to consciousness of extracorporeality to close and the assimilated content to dissolve in the flow of bodily impressions until it is forgotten or at least loses all structuring force on your experience of “self.”

Consciousness and Form8

“Matter” presents itself to me as a given of consciousness, but consciousness never presents itself as material data. Suppose I could observe all neuronal reactions in a human brain in conscious activity; they would tell me nothing about the contents of that consciousness at that moment. A greater activation of the visual areas would not inform me, for example, whether the subject under observation is seeing a cat or a photo of a cat, a nude woman or a painting of a nude woman, a plate of food or an image of the plate of food on the restaurant menu. But a subject incapable of instantly apprehending these differences would be condemned to perish due to an absolute inability to deal with the physical environment. The intensity of reactions in the verbal area would not tell me if the subject is mentally writing a soap advertisement or King Lear. If it were possible to obtain this information through brain examination, every neuroscientist would be a new Shakespeare.

These difficulties stem from another, more serious one. If, as Husserl said, there is no “consciousness in itself,” empty consciousness, but every consciousness is consciousness of something, it is absurd to say that consciousness is “in” the knowing subject: it is in a relation established between the subject and the object, a relation that cannot be entirely in one or the other but simultaneously in both. When the subject apprehends any quality of the object, let’s say its size, position, or color, it is because the object shows, exhibits that quality to it; it does not arise from within as a pure autonomous creation of the subject but as a molding, so to speak, of the perceptual capacity of the subject to the form of something that is not itself, that is not its consciousness, but that presents itself to it as an object. Therefore, if consciousness is not in the subject, within the subject, much less could it be in one of its parts, whether we call it “soul” or “brain.”

If we designate the psyche as the set of internal, immanent activities of the soul or the brain, it is evident that consciousness only appears once the boundary is crossed in which the psyche transcends itself and reaches an object.

Even assuming, ad argumentandum, that all activities of the psyche are determined by those of the brain, that they are therefore ultimately material and governed by the laws of physics and chemistry, and that there are no objects in the world except material objects governed by these same laws, consciousness—the relationship established between psyche and object in the act in which the psyche becomes aware of the object—remains perfectly immaterial and cannot be physically present in either the subject or the object.

When I see a cat, there is a present subject and we assume it to be entirely material and governed by material laws, and an equally material object governed by these same laws. The psychic act by which I perceive the cat can also admittedly be determined by the material functioning of my brain and sense organs. But the coincidence, the total or partial identity between the form of the perceived thing as it appears to my brain and the form of the object that presents itself to me as a cat cannot, in itself, be material, for it would have to be an object itself and, like me and the cat, occupy a place in space. Now, it is only this identity that guarantees that I saw a real cat and not merely produced an imaginary cat within my psyche. Any and all objective knowledge depends on the formal identity between the perceived and the given.

More seriously, of all the possible relations that can be established between the psyche and its object, none, absolutely none, can be called material, for it would have to occupy a place in space and be perceived itself as an object; and its relationship with the knowing psyche would be a new spatial object, and so on indefinitely, making the perception of anything impossible.

When discussing whether “consciousness” is material or immaterial, the consciousness is generally confused with the psyche. The latter may perhaps be entirely explained by the functioning of the brain, but when we move from the realm of the psyche to that of consciousness, we are talking about a relation with objects that transcend the realm of the psyche (even when they are themselves psychic facts taken as objects), and there we can only speak of a cerebral cause of consciousness if we attribute to the brain the power to create by itself all spatial objects, and to create them spatially, not knowing how such a large number of things could fit inside a cranial box.

The problem of consciousness, therefore, cannot be resolved by the study of the psyche or the brain. It refers to a world of formal identities and differences that, in themselves, cannot be material or occupy a place in space.

All discussions that seek to reduce consciousness to matter, matter to consciousness, or proclaim the existence of two distinct and separate spheres of reality stem from the confusion between psyche and consciousness and do not go beyond it.

The universe around us, with our own being within it, consists of material objects structured in forms, thus being inseparably material and immaterial, physical and spiritual. Consciousness is the formal relationship established between two forms: the form of an individual psychophysical presence and the form of an immediate or mediated bodily presence.

Human Consciousness in Danger9

ONCE AGAIN, I invite readers to join me on a quick philosophical investigation. The subject—the foundations, or lack thereof, of human self-awareness—seems far from immediate political relevance, but those who have the patience to reach the end of the article will see that it is not so. Never before, as today, when an enlightened elite of bureaucrats freely tamper with the pillars of civilization like a troop of escapees from an asylum playing scientists in a nuclear laboratory, has it been vital for every inhabitant of the planet to acquire a clear idea of the constants that define the human condition before the very concept of humanity, under the impact of deforming experiments imposed on a global scale, fades from their memory. But one of these constants is precisely that every human constancy reveals itself, like filigree, against the background of incessant historical mutation. Only knowledge of the comparative history of civilizations and cultures reveals, beneath the almost hallucinatory variety of forms, the durability of the general structure of the human spirit. And since what is at immediate risk of being lost in the whirlpool of forced transformations is above all the very unity of each individual’s self-awareness—the fragmentation of culture resulting in the shattering of souls—it has never been more important to know the historical mutations of the image of the “self” throughout the ages, in order to distinguish in it what is accidental and transitory from what is essential, permanent, and indispensable for the ultimate defense of human dignity.

One of the richest sources of material for this study is autobiographies. The historical development of this literary genre clearly evidences the transformations of individual self-awareness throughout the ages, parallel to the changes occurring in the respective experiences of time, memory, and the act of narration.

Among the many works that have been published on the subject, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing by James Olsey10, an English professor at Louisiana State University, is one of the most useful because it focuses on the history of the autobiographical genre from Augustine’s Confessions (397) to Samuel Beckett’s theatrical monologue, Company (1979). It clearly outlines, between these two extremes, the progressive loss of the sense of unity in self-awareness, without which the very intention of narrating one’s own life becomes absurd.

The structural model of narrative is the same in both cases. Augustine summarizes it with the example of prayer. When he recites a psalm, he already knows it by heart, in its entirety, beforehand. As he recites it, the words that follow in his voice are updated in time against the static backdrop of the complete text that remains in his memory. Once the recitation is finished, the psalm has completed its course in time and is returned to memory, ready to be recited again and again. All autobiographical writing has more or less this structure. The life that is to be recounted is complete in memory but continues in the act of remembering and extends beyond the conclusion of the narration, returning to memory to be recounted again, read, or heard. What is the “substance” of this narrative? Time, but which time? The past, which no longer exists? The present, an infinitesimal atomistic instant that dissolves as soon as it appears? The future, which has a purely conjectural existence? The enigma appears more or less the same in the Confessions and in Company.

Unified by a common concern with time, memory, and the self, the two books could not be more opposed in their respective views.

Augustine’s memoirs are the formal confession of a soul that, fully assuming authorship, responsibility, and consequences for each of its acts, thoughts, and inner states, even the darkest and most remote in time, stands before its own judgment as if displaying an integral identity in which the various conflicting internal forces only serve to highlight the tensional unity of the whole. Augustine is able to do this because he composes his narrative before an all-knowing audience—God Himself. “Walking before God” means nothing other than acting and thinking in permanent confrontation with the symbol of “omniscience”—the unattainable and inescapable source of all consciousness, the only guarantee of the sincerity of thoughts, actions, and remembrance. Although the expression appears in the Bible, Augustine was the first to explicitly articulate the sense of the experience summarized therein. The man who walks before God governs and conceives himself at every moment as if he were facing the Final Judgment, in the complete form of his individual being consciously responsible for choosing his own eternal destiny. The complete life of the future is therefore the measure of the remembrance of the past, which the narrator undertakes in the present.

It is from there that Augustine also derives the solution to the problem of the insubstantiality of time. God is not only omniscient but eternal. Boethius, later on, will define eternity as “the full and simultaneous possession of all its moments,” but the concept is already implicit in Augustine. If the various moments have no unity among themselves, they can only crumble into immense nothingness. Only their total and simultaneous unity has existence, but that unity is eternity itself, and nothing more. Time, in itself, has no substantiality whatsoever. It is merely an illusion, a “moving image of eternity.” If Augustine can intellectually master his past, it is because he exposes it to the gaze of omniscience. If he can have an intuition of the continuity of his existence, it is because he perceives it as a temporal reflection of eternity. The articulation of moral self-awareness is the same articulation of the three times on the axis of eternity.

The idea of the individual as a complex and dramatic unity that forms and assumes itself at the crossroads of the three times has become so ingrained in Western tradition that it has inspired all modern psychology of personality. Sixteen centuries after Augustine, Maurice Pradines, in his Traité de Psychologie Générale (1948), defined consciousness as “the memory of the past prepared for the tasks of the future.” Even in Freud, who is erroneously attributed much of the blame (or credit) for the dissolution of unity in the self, personality is the result of a progressively imposed arbitration by consciousness over the antagonistic impulses of the id and the superego. Nothing could more clearly celebrate the final victory of unity than the famous prophecy of the father of psychoanalysis: “Where id was, there ego shall be.”

The perspective in Company is completely different. Here, an old immobilized man on stage hears episodes of his life—Samuel Beckett’s own life—narrated and commented on in a monologue by a faceless voice. Is it the “voice of conscience”?

Yes and no. It speaks to him about himself in the second or third person. The one who, in the present, remembers the past no longer knows whether that past is his own, a third party’s, or an invented character’s. And the voice challenges the elderly man’s sense of identity in a fearsome way: if you do not remember your own birth, how can you be sure that the life you are recalling is the same as the one whose birth you think is yours?

Like Augustine, Beckett’s character—indistinguishable from the author—draws his memories on the contrasting surface provided by an invisible interlocutor who transcends the narrator and has the authority of a formative instance. The result, therefore, differs depending on the identity of this interlocutor. The eternity and omniscience of God give Augustine’s autobiographical self-image the unity of a story assumed as a responsible personal creation. But Beckett’s interlocutor is not omniscient; they are merely more astute than the character. It is the critical reason, a corrosive potion that dissolves the temporal unity of the self through epistemological demands that the self cannot meet. The immobilized elder does not even have the power to say “I” with conscious cause, but therefore, perhaps, he is not culpable for his sins or deserving of merit for his achievements. The fragmented self, incapable of recounting its own story, is a victim of its own existence and therefore has no responsibility for it. Augustine’s narrative rises from the dark depths of the heart to the divine light, which, in response, bestows upon it participation in its own unity and clarity. Beckett’s narrative emerges from an external darkness that obscures the little light the ego thought it possessed.

In the transition from one extreme to the other, Olsey documents some stages of the “crisis of narrative memory” that, as a guiding thread, runs through the entire history of modern Western mentality. He traces the beginning of the “crisis” to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782), but he is mistaken. It was already fully established in René Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), which presents itself as an interior autobiography, the narrative of a cognitive experiment.11 The philosopher’s appalling confusion between the concrete existential self and the abstract concept of the self as absolute self-awareness (cogito ergo sum), moving from the former to the latter without realizing that he has leapt from the temporal order to the deductive order, is one of the most prodigious mutilations ever imposed upon the autobiographical consciousness of Western man. Beckett’s entire problem was already there. As Jean Onimus aptly observed, “Position yourself in the Cartesian cogito at its point of origin… and you will see Beckett’s man in the full extent of his misfortune."”

The Cartesian self cannot narrate its story because it is merely an isolated abstract form in space, severed from temporal experience. Yet, if the philosopher presents it in narrative form, it is because he literally does not perceive what he is doing. Cartesianism is not the inaugural chapter of the dissolution of narrative self-awareness (in an unpublished appendix to my Philosophy Seminar, I attributed that dubious honor to the autobiographical fragments of Niccolò Machiavelli),12 but it is an important episode in the process. Descartes’s incongruity will be tremendously amplified by Immanuel Kant through the idea of the “transcendental self.” This astonishing creature of German philosophy has the authority to delimit the boundaries of experience accessible to the poor existential self without being limited by them. Yet, it does not even open a narrow slit through which the existential self can see beyond those boundaries. It is called “transcendental” precisely because it closes off access to the “transcendent.”

Installed at the middle heights of the transcendental self, which is only slightly above the existential self, the philosopher does not allow anyone to rise above him. The perverse satisfaction with which he believes he determines the “limits of human knowledge” shows that he is conscious of being something like, in initiatory climbs, the “guardian of the gate,” a kind of metaphysical Pasionaria shouting at seekers of eternity: No pasarán! No pasarán!

I have no doubt that Beckett’s interlocutor is the Kantian transcendental self. On one hand, Kant believed that human knowledge is limited to sensory experience, space, and time. On the other hand, he stated that the data of experience are a chaotic jumble to which consciousness imposes its own unity. But left to itself, without the backdrop of eternity, consciousness crumbles. Even more clearly than in Descartes, the isolated and desperate man of Samuel Beckett is present and manifest in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781). By prohibiting consciousness’s access to eternity, the transcendental self renders consciousness itself inaccessible and evanescent. Hence the apparent logic and profound absurdity of the challenging voice that emerges from the darkness: the idea that only the self that clearly remembers its own birth would have the authority to affirm that its story is its own story is entirely based on a Kantian trick, and this trick, in turn, has a colossal incompetence as its premise: it supposes that the only legitimate self-awareness would be that of a being who could consciously observe its own birth. However, for that to happen, it would have to exist temporally before entering temporal existence. In real experience, every beginning, every gestation, occurs in obscurity; light is a progressive conquest. To narrate one’s own life without being a witness to one’s own birth is not an unwarranted pretension; it is simply the real condition of human experience. The transcendental self, purporting to critique experience, establishes premises that deny the possibility of all experience and, therefore, of critique itself. Beckett is aware of the humorous nature of his speculations. But Kantian humor is pathetically involuntary.

Olsey’s study has the merit of elaborating on the fundamental concept of the “crisis,” but in exemplifying it, it is quite incomplete. Descartes is only mentioned in passing, and Kant’s name does not even appear. Unforgivable is the omission of Proust, who spent his life trying to solve Augustine’s problem of time, as well as Arthur Koestler, who, in Darkness at Noon (1940), documented the reduction of self-awareness, under the pressure of modern totalitarianism, to a “grammatical fiction.” The author also shows no sign of associating the “crisis of memory” with a parallel and inseparable process: the epidemic of consciously falsified autobiographical and biographical narratives for the purposes of political propaganda, a phenomenon observed in France at least a century before that not very self-aware liar Rousseau. It would be impossible, indeed, for the dissolution of self-awareness not to coincide with the progressive loss of the sense of eternalness in modern times, and it is impossible to accept the dissolution of self-awareness while simultaneously preserving high moral standards of conduct. In this end of an era, the historical consequences of intellectual decisions made three, four, five centuries ago take the form of totalitarianism, widespread violence, genocide, and, above all, the universal empire of lies.

Those who seek in political action a remedy for these evils will sooner or later have to understand that their root lies in the ethereal regions of abstract thought. And those who, out of personal affinity, dedicate themselves to abstract thought must examine with the utmost conscientiousness the devastating effects of seemingly innocuous abstractions created by the philosophers of past centuries. In this sense, philosophy is political, and politics is philosophy.

The Consciousness of Consciousness13

ALTHOUGH THESE ARTICLES ARE FILLED WITH ANALYSES of specific political situations, I rarely reproduce in them anything about the foundations of political philosophy and general philosophy that I teach in my courses. The result is that the analyses float in the air like ownerless balloons, detached from the thread that ties them to the common ground. Here, I will remedy this a little by explaining one—just one—of those foundations.

The fact that in the so-called human sciences, the subject and the object of knowledge are the same has often been lamented as a cause of subjectivist distortions incompatible with the aspirations of scientific rigor.

In an effort to eliminate these distortions, many scholars have tried to establish that object as an entity of the external world, in the manner of natural facts, neutralizing the subjective bias of the observer. However, that coincidence of subject and object is the true and effective situation of knowledge in the human sciences, and I see no reason to escape from this situation by means of analogies with models borrowed from other sciences, which may be more useful and profitable than taking it entirely seriously from the outset as an inescapable given reality.

Any attempt to constitute the object “man” as an external thing—and worse, to cut it out from its concrete background by selecting its mathematizable aspects to the exclusion of the rest—can only result in the production of an analogy, a figure of speech, a poetic simile. Studies oriented in this way may create interesting metaphors, but not true science. One can compare man to ants, laboratory rats, computer programs, or, as Dr. Freud does, to a system of hydraulic pressures. All of this is very suggestive, but since the number of similes is unlimited by definition, the whole set is inevitably inconclusive, just as the reading of universal literary masterpieces is inconclusive.

The coincidence of subject and object, on the contrary, is a privileged position that must be assumed from the outset as a premise and guiding norm in the entire field of human sciences. The technique for studying such a defined object already exists and has been one of the most refined cognitive instruments available to human beings for millennia. It is called “meditation” and should not be confused with any of those oddities that pseudo-Oriental sects have circulated under that name. Hugo of St. Victor explained that thinking is the transition from one idea to another (whether wandering through the forest of analogies or moving up and down the scale of propositions, from the general to the particular and vice versa). Conversely, meditation is a methodical regression from a thought to its foundation or root in the experience that made it possible. Classical models of meditation include investigations into the nature of the “self” undertaken in Saint Augustine’s Confessions, in Vedanta, in René Descartes' First Philosophy, in Husserl’s phenomenology, in numerous passages by Louis Lavelle, or in Eric Voegelin’s Anamnesis.

Reviewing these celebrated descriptions would already be material for an entire course. In summary, the central question is: “To whom do you really refer when you use the word ‘I’ in everyday life?” The path to the answer leads from a mere idea or verbal convention to the experience of a reality that is both immediate and profound, which that word simultaneously conceals and reveals.

The self—not the philosophical, abstract self, the hypothetical subject of metaphysical demonstrations, but the concrete, real self—is not the body, not the sensations, not the emotions, not the thoughts. It is not even pure memory but the memory of memory, the memory that remembers having remembered and responds before others and before itself as the author and sole bearer of its own contents. “Consciousness,” Maurice Pradines defined, “is a memory of the past prepared for the challenges of the present.” The “I” is the one who answers for what it knows, and even more so, for what it knows it knows. The highest self-knowledge consists only in the admission of a previously known knowledge assumed responsibly.

But this self exists not only in the heights of philosophical meditation. It is the one who answers for the demands of the world around it in everyday tasks and leisure. The responsible self is the most direct, universal, and enduring human reality. Even cultures that have not had a clear notion of psychic individuality already knew this, as evidenced by the fact that in all of them, the one called upon to answer for their actions is the author of them, not a third party. There is no society, no matter how primitive, where the notions of authorship, guilt, and merit are not perfectly identified with each other.14

The self could not be created by the incorporation of social roles if it were not already prefigured, on the one hand, in physical individuality, and on the other hand, in the memory of memory—the recollection of inner states relived in the pure intimacy of the individual with themselves.

The responsible self—the consciousness of consciousness—does not exist as a thing or a state; it exists only as a permanent tension toward more consciousness, more responsibility, greater scope, and greater integration. Consciousness grows as it recognizes itself, and it can only recognize itself by continuously opening up to knowledge that transcends its previous heritage. Thus, openness to transcendence—to what lies beyond the current horizon of experience—is a permanent given in the structure of consciousness. To suppress it is to distort the fundamental situation of knowledge.

Responsible consciousness is the true condition of human beings in the world. This can be observed in the simplest interactions, where the speaker always expects the other to understand them: not only to grasp the meaning of a sentence but to intuit an intention and behind it, perceive the presence of a conscious self similar to their own. The opposite would be like talking to the walls.

The responsible self is one of the primary foundations of human society. It is the origin of all ideas, creations, institutions, laws, habits, and structures. Anything in society that cannot be traced back to its origin in conscious selves appears as an external thing that seems to have entered the world through pure spontaneous magic. It is the coefficient of phantasmagoria that remains in every society as a result of alienation and loss of memory. The fact that many scholars of society prefer to concentrate their attention on this objectified residue, evading the inconvenience of demanding self-awareness, whose demands they can still meet as ordinary citizens outside working hours, shows that what is honored with the name of “science” is often nothing more than an elegant form of escape from reality.

Consciousness Without Consciousness15

IN DIFFICULT MOMENTS OF LIFE, we have all tried to explain ourselves to someone who does not want or cannot understand us. The gaze of the subject slides from side to side behind an opaque veil, unable to focus on what we are trying to show them. And because it has no focus, it cannot articulate in a coherent picture what we tell them. They grasp the words and even whole sentences, but empty them of meaning or attribute an improper sense to them, disconnected from the situation. It is an annoying and sometimes desperate situation.

We have also seen people who, when facing difficulties themselves, fail to realize the trouble they have gotten into. They either remain alienated, in suicidal unconcern, or become nervous and frightened for invented reasons that have nothing to do with the real problem.

These two types of people are “conscious” in the sense of neurophysiology and cognitive science but not in the sense that the word “consciousness” has in real life. The “consciousness” studied by these sciences is simply the ability to notice stimuli. They cannot go beyond that point. They cannot distinguish between the fool who feels the cold on their skin and the sensitive person to whom the sight of snow suggests, in an instant, the contrast between the beauty of the landscape and the danger it poses to the poor homeless.

This difference, albeit on a different scale, is the same as that between individuals with musical sensitivity and those with tune deafness. This term, for which I could not find a universally accepted translation in Portuguese (it can be “melodic deprivation”), refers to a person who, although not suffering from any hearing impairment, simply cannot grasp a melody. They hear the individual notes but cannot perceive the musical phrase they form. If the singer sings out of tune or the pianist plays a D instead of an F, they do not notice the slightest difference. In severe cases, the individual cannot even understand what music is: they do not notice the slightest difference between the Brandenburg Concertos and the sound of car horns in congested traffic. The condition is peculiar but not rare: recent data indicates that two percent of people have some degree of tune deafness.

Victor Zuckerkandl, in Sound and Symbol (1956)—a splendid book—states that this difference marks the specific distinction of music, separating it from all other acoustic phenomena. Music, in short, has not only order—the noise of an engine also has order. It has meaning: it points to something beyond the sound elements that compose it. The gap between hearing sounds and apprehending a melody is the same as that between hearing words and understanding what they say—or worse, between understanding the mere verbal sense of phrases and recognizing what they refer to in real life.

To further complicate matters, a recent study that sought to find some neurocerebral explanation for tune deafness discovered, to the researchers' great astonishment, that although those affected by this deficiency do not perceive a wrong note, their brains register the difference with the same acuity as Mozart’s brain would. They hear the music perfectly well, but according to the authors of the study, they hear it “unconsciously.” Their brains perceive the melody—the ones who do not perceive it are themselves.16

Zuckerkandl, who died in 1965, could not have expected that his theory would receive such eloquent confirmation half a century after its publication. What he did not miss was the philosophical importance of his discovery, which, going against scientific trends, remained largely unknown to the educated classes for many decades (prior to the 1990s, I only saw it cited in Henry Corbin, who used it to explain mystical states in 13th-century Iranian esotericism—not exactly a popular topic).

The perception of music, ultimately, requires the same kind of comprehension needed to grasp a complex dramatic situation, whether it be one’s own, that of an interlocutor, or one read in Hamlet, Crime and Punishment, The Magic Mountain, and so on. Now, to explain the fact that the brain registers a sensation of cold, scientists are obliged to break down this banal phenomenon into a series of incredibly complex neurobiological processes. Even these processes are not yet well explained, but since the dream of materialistic science is to reduce consciousness to them, explaining it as a “product” of the brain, many materialism adherents act as if they have already achieved the reduction and provided the most conclusive and irrefutable evidence for it, thereby concluding that consciousness, as such, does not even exist: it is merely a cerebral function among others. This is charlatanism, obviously, but the sources that inspire it are even lower than simple charlatanism.

Note well: in addition to the difference marked by tune deafness, consciousness has another distinctive trait that sets it apart from any other known phenomenon in the universe. No matter what you are talking about, the miracle of abstract language allows you to refer to objects not only without the need for them to be physically present but also without the need to think of them as real things. You can even replace the mere abstract concept of them with an algebraic symbol and continue reasoning about them without even remembering their real counterparts, confident that if the reasoning is formally correct, you will arrive at conclusions that apply exactly to these counterparts. Without this, computers could not exist. However, nothing similar occurs with consciousness. You cannot speak of it without it being present and active in that very moment. True discourse about consciousness, on the contrary, intensifies consciousness in the very instant you reason about it, like a light that, as soon as it is turned on, automatically lights up a series of others and illuminates the entire room. That is the sense in which “consciousness” is spoken of in real life. This discourse requires the presence of the conscious and responsible speaker who assumes their presence in the act of speaking. If, on the other hand, you reduce consciousness to a generic phenomenon that you can speak of as an external thing, the object instantly escapes your horizon of consciousness, and now you are no longer speaking about actually existing consciousness but only about some mechanism or aspect of it, which does not exist in itself.

Consciousness, in the strong sense of the word, is present self-consciousness, responsibility—it is something that can only exist in the real, present, active individual. Generic, abstract consciousness is a mere logical fetish. If someday they discover how the brain produces this fetish, consciousness will remain unexplained. The reductionist effort, in this case, has no real scientific scope whatsoever. It is merely a hypnotic deception, an instrument of totalitarian control over society. In a forthcoming article, I will explain the political function of this artifice in greater detail.

Meditation and Consciousness17

ONE OF THE SADDEST ASPECTS OF BRAZILIAN LIFE, in the opinion of this commentator, is the scarcity or complete absence of spiritual activity in what is written and published, whether in books, in the media, or even in blogs. By spiritual activity, I understand the solitary meditation in which consciousness takes possession of itself as self-creation and freedom that struggles to be realized in the space-time world, encountering both its obstacles and its instruments.

Only by apprehending in this way the measure and proportion between what we can be and what we are becoming, do we come to know ourselves as inseparably created and creative nature, in the sense of Duns Scotus, indescribable, therefore, as figure and image, and only apprehensible as force and conflict until the moment when death, as Mallarmé’s sonnet teaches us, fixes us forever in the unchanging form of a fulfilled and exhausted destiny.

Only those who dedicate themselves incessantly to this activity can utter the word “I” with some knowledge and even with some legitimate right. The others, when they say it,

designate nothing more than the completely fictitious figure they would like to project onto the screen of another’s mind or onto their own.

If the non-meditator can only apprehend himself in the succession of disguises that he mistakenly calls “I,” behind which there is nothing but a vague feeling of guilt and perpetual anxiety engaged in denying itself, it is obvious that one who lives in this condition cannot truly communicate with others, only use them as characters in an inner theater that they are unaware of, nor can they, on the other hand, know God, whether to deny or affirm Him, except as a gigantic figure of fiction always available to reinforce, alleviate, or conceal guilt and anguish.

Through the clear consciousness of our partial and limited creativity, we understand that the existence of billions of other small creative forces around us manifests an infinite creativity, and thus we catch a glimpse of God as Pure Act, without form or figure because the incessant creator of all forms and figures. It was this God who spoke of Himself: “I am that I am.” Only He properly has an “I” because the “I” is a creative source without figure or form, whose analog the human being only becomes, and even then partially, through the act of freedom by which he accepts and assumes being the image and likeness of God.

Do not confuse meditation, on the other hand, with religious confession or with self-examination. It is the prerequisite that gives spiritual substance to these two activities, without which they are reduced to a mechanical cataloging of shameful acts and thoughts, without the slightest notion of their inner root as well as their dialectical function in the struggle for the self-realization of consciousness.

Perhaps the greatest sin, the true crime against the Holy Spirit, lies in allowing thinking faculties

to detach themselves from the meditative and creative center, acquire autonomy, and assert themselves as the supreme distinguishing characteristics of the human being.

The more these faculties improve, the stronger the tendency to alienate from them a power and prestige that rightfully belong only to the true “I”.

Even worse when, consecrated in more or less uniform and impersonal formal codes, they impose themselves from the outside on the individual, corrupting him to the core and rewarding his alienation with the welcoming applause of some intellectual or academic community.

The more one relies on these codes, believing thereby to prove the strength of one’s intellect, the more the citizen sacrifices his birthright for a bowl of lentils, becoming a living personification of “science without conscience”.

Nothing exemplifies this more clearly than the reduction of philosophy to the logical analysis of language, which still today, in more diversified or camouflaged forms, fascinates immature students eager for academic approval. These students often show that they have one or several intellectual abilities developed to exceptional levels. They only lack the self-aware “I” that binds them together and synthesizes them in the form of a “personality,” without which all presumption of intellectual responsibility is nothing more than obedience to an external code, that is, a theatrical pretense.

Alongside and in contrast to mere ideological homogenization, which is to some extent less serious, this pathology currently affects a significant portion of philosophy and humanities students in Brazil, especially those of the so-called “right-wing,” foreshadowing for the coming decades, when the Marxist intoxication subsides, their exchange for a form of alienation even more sterilizing and difficult to cure.

Signs of authentic interiority are practically absent in public debates and academic production in this country, which, in this aspect, as well as in so many others, has already seen better days.

Your Eternal Self

[The last appendix in the book was a translated collage of these sections from Your Eternal Self, by R. Craig Hogan, et alia. Instead of translating the Portuguese back into English, I have used the original book text for this. I have reproduced the collage closely, and therefore not given any of Hogan’s citations for his claims, for which see the original book. In doing this, I fixed some apparent transcription errors that I found, such as merging unrelated sections under one heading, or putting material outside a quotation which was originally part of it. —Thiago]

Where Are You?

Each day about 50 billion cells in the body are replaced, resulting in a new body each year. The body is just temporary. It can’t be who you are. Every second, 500,000 of your body cells die and are replaced, so we’ll have to keep this conversation short—much of you will be gone before we finish!

Who am I talking to when I speak to you? It’s certainly not your brain. That’s just a collection of fat and protein made of 85% water squeezed into the dark enclosure of your skull. Around 50,000 to 100,000 brain cells die each day [...].

You are not your body. The body changes constantly.

Science Doesn’t Know Where You Are

Stephan Patt of the Institute of Pathology at Friedrich Schiller University in Germany summarized the research on the mind and the brain:

Nevertheless all these experiments and descriptions of brain activation processes do not explain how neural activity is the cause for consciousness. Likewise, all attempts which have been undertaken to specify the neurological mechanisms of consciousness in terms of neurobiological, information processing and even social theories of consciousness have failed to prove this causal relationship.

Sir John Maddox, former editor-in-chief of the renowned journal Nature, summed up our knowledge of consciousness in the December 1999 issue of Scientific American:

Nobody understands how decisions are made or how imagination is set free. What consciousness consists of, or how it should be defined, is equally puzzling. Despite the marvelous success of neuroscience in the past century, we seem as far from understanding cognitive processes as we were a century ago.

Stuart Hameroff, MD, a renowned researcher in neuroscience in the Department of Anesthesiology, Arizona Health Sciences Center, wrote,

[...] Most explanations portray the brain as a computer [...]. However this approach fails to explain why we have feelings and awareness, an “inner life.” So we don’t know how the brain produces consciousness.

David Presti, Ph.D., Professor of Neurobiology, University of California-Berkeley, wrote that “little progress has been made in the scientific understanding of mental phenomena.”

David J. Chalmers, Ph.D., Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University, wrote in Scientific American: "Consciousness, the subjective experience of an inner self, could be a phenomenon forever beyond the reach of neuroscience [...]".

Other researchers report that efforts to find the locations of memories in the brain have proven to be unsuccessful. Karl Lashley [...wrote:] “Memory ought to be impossible, yet it happens.”

Brian Boycott [...]: “Memory seems to be both everywhere and nowhere in particular in the brain.”

Many Scientists Are Suggesting Your Mind Is Not in Your Brain

Dr. Sam Parnia, a physician from Southampton General Hospital in England [...]: “The brain [...] is not really capable of producing the subjective phenomenon of thought that people have”.

Simon Berkovich, Professor of Engineering and Applied Science in the Department of Computer Science of the George Washington wrote: “The brain is merely a transmitter and receiver of information, but not the main place for storage or processing of information (i.e., memories).”

Stanislav Grof, MD, Ph.D., Freudian psychoanalyst, assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine [...] summarized his conclusion after his lifelong study of the mind and the brain:

My first idea was that it [consciousness] has to be hard-wired in the brain. [...] Today, I came to the conclusion that it is not coming from the brain. In that sense, it supports what Aldous Huxley believed [...]. He came to the conclusion that maybe the brain acts as a kind of reducing valve that actually protects us from too much cosmic input [...]. I don’t think you can locate the source of consciousness. I am quite sure it is not in the brain―not inside of the skull[...]. It actually, according to my experience, would lie beyond time and space, so it is not localizable. You actually come to the source of consciousness when you dissolve any categories that imply separation, individuality, time, space and so on. You just experience it as a presence.

Sir John Eccles [...] concluded

[...] that the mind is a separate entity from the brain, and that mental processes cannot be reduced to neurochemical brain processes, but on the contrary direct them. And [...] a mind may conceivably exist without a brain.

Sir Cyril Burt [...] wrote:

The brain is not an organ that generates consciousness, but rather an instrument evolved to transmit and limit the processes of consciousness and of conscious attention so as to restrict them to those aspects of the material environment which at any moment are crucial for the terrestrial success of the individual. In that case such phenomena as telepathy and clairvoyance would be merely instances in which some of the limitations were removed. [14]

Wilder Penfield [...] summed up his conclusions:

[...] none of the actions that we attribute to the mind has been initiated by electrode stimulation or epileptic discharge. If there were a mechanism in the brain that could do what the mind does, one might expect that the mechanism would betray its presence in a convincing manner by some better evidence of epileptic or electrode activation.

The mind, he writes, “makes its impact on the brain” but isn’t in the brain.

The Brain Doesn’t Have the Capacity to Hold the Mind or Memories

Pim van Lommel is a cardiologist and author of an article in the medical journal, The Lancet (December 2001). His conclusions were summarized by Tim Touber:

[...] that it is impossible for the brain to store everything you think and experience in your life. This would require a processing speed of 1024 bits per second. Simply watching an hour of television would already be too much for our brains. [...]

[...] For memories to remain over 50 or 60 years, brain cells would have to remain the same ones that were there when the memories were created, but that doesn’t happen since they’re replaced by new brain cells regularly.

Some sources today estimate that from 50,000 to 100,000 brain cells die each day.

[...]

Dean Radin quotes Paul A. Weiss, of Vienna’s Institute of Experimental Biology[...]:

And yet, despite that ceaseless change of detail in that vast population of elements, our basic patterns of behavior, our memories, our sense of integral existence as an individual, have retained their unitary continuity of pattern.

Missing Large Parts of the Brain Doesn’t Affect Memory.

This account is from a July 19, 2007, story on Reuters:

[...] Scans of the 44-year-old man’s brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle took up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue.

He was a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant [...].

Mind and memory function perfectly well when half the brain is removed or the brain doesn’t develop fully.

The Government Found Remote Viewing Is Valid

For several decades at the end of the twentieth century, the CIA had a remote viewing program named Operation Stargate that attempted to use remote viewers to spy on the Russians. The program had remarkable results [...]. the government agencies commissioned the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to perform 154 experiments with 26,000 separate trials over 16 years. At the end of that testing period, Edwin May, Ph.D., [...] headed a team of researchers that analyzed the experiments and reported to the government.

They concluded that the odds against someone merely guessing what remote viewers had described when focusing on a target at a distant location, was more than a billion billion to one. His only explanation was that they genuinely were seeing without using their eyes and without regard for how many miles away the target was.

[...]

Jessica Utts, professor in the Division of Statistics at the University of California at Davis, prepared a report assessing the statistical evidence for remote viewing [...]:

anomalous cognition is possible and has been demonstrated. [...] The phenomenon has been replicated in a number of forms across laboratories and cultures.

No one who has examined all of the data across laboratories, taken as a collective whole, has been able to suggest methodological or statistical problems to explain the ever-increasing and consistent results to date.

Credible Sources Involved in Government Remote Viewing Projects Agreed It Occurred as Described.

“I never liked to get into debates with the skeptics, because if you didn’t believe that remote viewing was real, you hadn’t done your homework.” — Major General Edmund R Thompson, U.S. Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, 1977-81, Deputy Director for Management and Operations, DIA, 1982-84

“You can’t be involved in this for any length of time and not be convinced there’s something here.” — Norm J., former senior CIA official who tasked remote viewers

Repeated Research Studies Demonstrated Remote Viewing’s Validity

The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Laboratory at Princeton University began conducting its own, independent studies of remote viewing in 1978.

[...]

The remote viewers in 334 trials were able to describe [from miles away] details about where the person was with odds against guessing the details of the location of 100 billion to 1.

What Remote Viewing Means for Your Life

The data showing that remote viewing is a common phenomenon are overwhelming. [...]

That means that the mind isn’t in the brain. It isn’t trapped inside the bony encasing of a skull. [...]

Studies of remote viewers in lead-lined rooms show that they still get images, so no electromagnetic signals (light, radio waves, infrared waves, microwaves) are involved. There is no energy that carries the image. The remote viewer sees instantly, regardless of distance. [...]

You aren’t in a brain. Your mind is outside of the brain.

Evidence We Know Information Without Using the Brain

A large number of studies have demonstrated that people can know information without having any contact with what they have learned about. From the 1880s to the 1940s, there were 142 published articles describing 3.6 million individual trials with 4,600 people attempting to identify the number and suit of a playing card face down in front of them. [...]

The result was that participants were, on average, able to identify the cards at rates higher than chance. [...]

Unless there is a gigantic conspiracy involving some thirty University departments all around the world, and several hundred highly respected scientists in various fields, many of them originally hostile to the claims of the psychical researchers, the only conclusion the unbiased observer can come to must be that there does exist a small number of people who obtain knowledge existing either in other people’s minds, or in the outer world, by means as yet unknown to science.

A Unified Visual Image in Our Mind Can’t Be Accounted for with Just Using Brain Neurons.

The fact that we can see without using the eyes indicates that no signals come to the brain, and yet the mind sees. That means the brain may not be involved in the process at all. [...]

John Eccles, Nobel Prize winner [...], wrote Facing Reality: philosophical adventures of a brain scientist. In it, he explains that when we see using the eyes, the light enters the eye and turns into nerve impulses in the retina that travel along the optic nerve to the brain. However, when they arrive there, they are fragmented and sent to different areas of the brain. Science can find nothing in the brain that is able to bring the visual experience together. Eccles writes that the only explanation is that there must be a conscious mind outside of the brain that influences the brain and makes patterns using it.

The mind outside the brain apparently experiences a sight and forms the brain so it lights up with electromagnetic energy indicating that seeing is happening. The vision is a whole experience in the mind, however, so the apparent fragmentation of the image as the physical senses interact with the brain is just the whole, integrated sight in the non-physical mind registering within the limitations of the physical brain.

Blind People, Whose Brains Cannot Process Sight Images, Are Able to See During Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences.

Blind people, including those blind from birth, can actually see during near-death experiences (NDEs) and out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) [...]. Kenneth Ring, Ph.D., professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Connecticut, and Sharon Cooper interviewed 31 blind and sight-impaired persons who had NDEs and OBEs, and found that 80 percent of them reported correctly “visual” experiences, some in detail. [...]

Dr. Larry Dossey, former chief of staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital, describes this case of a woman who had been blind from birth being able to see clearly during her near-death experience:

The surgery [...] Sarah’s heart stopped beating[...]. [When she awoke, Sarah had] a clear, detailed memory of the frantic conversation of the surgeons and nurses during her cardiac arrest; the [operating room] layout; the scribbles on the surgery schedule board in the hall outside; the color of the sheets covering the operating table; the hairstyle of the head scrub nurse; the names of the surgeons in the doctors’ lounge down the corridor who were waiting for her case to be concluded; and even the trivial fact that her anesthesiologist that day was wearing unmatched socks. All this she knew even though she had been fully anesthetized and unconscious during the surgery and the cardiac arrest. But what made Sarah’s vision even more momentous was the fact that, since birth, she had been blind.

“Echolocation” Experiments Show Blind People Can See without Physical Eyeballs.

Another phenomenon, called “echolocation,” also seems to show that blind people can “see” objects in their environment even when they can’t use their optical organs. In echolocation, the blind person makes sounds by tapping, clicking, or speaking, and while doing so, is able to walk or even ride a bicycle through an environment filled with obstacles. [...]

Ben Underwood, who lost his sight to cancer as a toddler, has two artificial eyes made of plastic. However, he walks without a cane or seeing-eye dog, plays video games, and identifies objects he passes by name: “That’s a fire hydrant” or “That’s a trash can.” In a pillow fight, he can throw a pillow to hit a target person even when the person is moving and silent.

People See, Hear, and Remember When the Brain Is Not Functioning

Accounts from physicians and nurses abound about people brought back from near death who had experiences of entering a warm, loving environment where they speak with their deceased loved ones. The phenomenon was named a near-death experience (NDE) by Raymond Moody. [...]

A Gallup and Proctor poll in 1982 estimated that 5 percent of the adult population of the United States have had near-death experiences. Other surveys put the number at 7.5 percent.

[...] One of the most remarkable things about NDEs is that while brain dead, without a trace of brain function, these people see and hear what is going on in the scene where their body lies unconscious, and at times in other rooms of the same building. They then remember all of the details and recount them…

During the near-death experience, no sensory experiences and no memory production would be possible if the mind were located in the brain. [...] Dr. Peter Fenwick, a neuropsychiatrist and one of the leading authorities in Britain on near-death experiences, describes the state of the brain during a near-death experience:

The brain isn’t functioning. It’s not there. It’s destroyed. It’s abnormal. But, yet, it can produce these very clear experiences[...]. An unconscious state is when the brain ceases to function. For example, if you faint, you fall to the floor, you don’t know what’s happening and the brain isn’t working. The memory systems are particularly sensitive to unconsciousness. So, you won’t remember anything. But, yet, after one of these experiences [an NDE], you come out with clear, lucid memories[...]. This is a real puzzle for science.

Another study, published in the medical publication Journal of Resuscitation, concluded that people with no brain function who describe a near-death experience in fact have lucid thought processes, reasoning, and memory during the period of time when their brains are not functioning. In the study, doctors at Southampton General Hospital in England interviewed 63 heart attack patients who had been evaluated to be clinically dead, but were subsequently resuscitated. [...] They described details and events in which they were thinking, reasoning, and consciously moving around during the period when they were unconscious, [...]

The researchers went on to collect over 3,500 similar cases [...].

Dr. Sam Parnia, one of the physicians, described a child 2½ years old whose heart had stopped beating. He was unconscious and clinically dead, but was revived. Afterward, the child’s parents contacted Parnia to tell him that the boy had drawn a picture of himself portraying what it was like during the trauma, but in the picture he was outside of his unconscious body looking down at himself. [...]

A study of near-death experiences in the English medical journal, The Lancet, concluded “that the NDE might be a changing state of consciousness (transcendence) in which identity, cognition and emotion function independently from the unconscious body”.

Sample Individual Near-Death Experiences Indicate the Brain Is Not Involved.

Maria, a migrant worker brought to Harborview Medical Center’s cardiac care unit in cardiac arrest, near death, felt herself floating upward out of the hospital. As she rose, she saw, on a third-story window ledge of the hospital, “a man’s dark blue tennis shoe, well-worn, scuffed on the left side where the little toe would go. The shoelace was caught under the heel.” Health care workers investigated and found the tennis shoe precisely where Maria had described it. [...]

In another, similar incident, after an unconscious patient was revived, she described floating above the hospital where she saw a red tennis shoe on the roof of the hospital. A janitor investigated and found a red tennis shoe, just as the patient described.

[...]

In another documented case, a nurse had removed the dentures of an unconscious heart attack victim and put them into the drawer on the table in the operating room called a “crash cart.” A week after the incident, as the nurse was distributing medications, she came to the heart-attack victim’s room and he exclaimed excitedly, “'Oh, that nurse knows where my dentures are. . . . Yes, you were there when I was brought into hospital and you took my dentures out of my mouth and put them onto that cart; it had all these bottles on it and there was this sliding drawer underneath and there you put my teeth.” At the point when the nurse did that, the patient was in a deep coma with his eyes closed, but he was perfectly accurate about what had happened.

People Commonly Describe Separating the Mind from the Body in Out-of-Body Experiences.

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) [...] are surprisingly common. Five surveys done in the United Sates, dating back to at least 1954, show that as high as 25 percent of those polled responded that they had experienced an OBE. [...]

The researchers reported that those who experience OBEs describe them as being distinctly different from dreams or hallucinations. They describe feeling a real sense of separation of the mind from the body.

Psychics Know Information the Brain and Body Haven’t Experienced or Sensed

An Australian series on psychic detectives entitled “Sensing Murder” aired its first episode on June 6, 2002. The psychics were under the scrutiny of the television producers and skeptics who witnessed psychics Debbie Malone and Scott Russel-Hill attempt to provide details about a case, knowing only that it was a murder, nothing else. These are the details they correctly identified:

  • The victim was female.

  • Her name was Sarah.

  • She was in the early twenties.

  • Her body was still missing.

  • The victim had been dead around 13 years (it was actually 15 years).

  • She was coming home from tennis.

  • A car involved was a cream-colored early 80’s Holden Commodore.

  • The victim was attacked getting into her little red car.

  • Frankston was the area.

  • Kananook was the specific place of the murder.

  • She was killed with a knife.

  • They identified the attacker by name.

  • The incident was at night.

  • The killer was with a group.

  • Etc.

The Mind Knows Information before the Brain Can Even Have Access to It

More evidence that the mind is outside of the brain is in the finding that the mind knows information before it’s even available to the brain, then tells the brain about it so the brain registers activity.

[...] The tests consistently showed that some people reacted to the pictures with the appropriately matched calm or stress as early as six seconds before the pictures were shown, even though the computer hadn’t selected them at random yet.

[...] The results were that the subjects were able to predict which target would be selected more often than would occur by chance guessing, with the odds against it being by chance at ten trillion trillion to one. [...] As might be expected, when these findings were published, other researchers from around the world, from Edinburgh University to Cornell in the United States, rushed to duplicate the experiment and improve on it. They all got similar results and extended the experiments and findings:

It was soon discovered that gamblers began reacting subconsciously shortly before they won or lost.

Scientists Have Become Convinced by the Evidence that the Mind Knows Before Sensed Information is Available.

Professor Dick J. Bierman of the University of Amsterdam and Utrecht University [says]: “We’re satisfied that people can sense the future before it happens[...].”

Professor Brian Josephson, a Nobel Prize winning physicist from Cambridge University, similarly concluded,

So far the evidence seems compelling. What seems to be happening is that information is coming from the future.

Creativity Comes from Outside the Brain.

Physicist Michael Faraday, renowned for his work with electromagnetism, said that his thinking was almost entirely visual. He originated his theories without the help of a single mathematical formula.

Max Knoll, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University and inventor of the electron microscope, described this inspiration [...]:

The fact that an idea suddenly emerges full-blown call[s] for the existence of [...] a special intuitive function. The content of this idea is best described in [...] timeless, nonspatial [...] terms. [...] Always unmistakable are the suddenness and activity of the intuitive event, and its tendency to occur in a state of relaxation, and after a protracted “period of meditation.”

The Evidence the Mind Knows without the Brain Having Access to the Information Is Overwhelming

Edward F. Kelly is currently Research Professor in the Department of Psychiatric Medicine at the University of Virginia. He is author of Computer Recognition of English Word Senses, Altered States of Consciousness and Psi: An Historical Survey and Research Prospectus, and Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century. He asserts that the reality of psychic knowledge (knowing outside of the brain) has been experimentally established beyond any reasonable doubt, and any viable theory of human personality will have to accommodate this fact.

People Are Coming to Realize that the Afterlife Is As Real As This Life

In 1970, 77 percent of Americans polled said they knew the reality of the afterlife. But in a 2000 poll, 82 percent of Americans said they knew the reality of the afterlife. Among Jews, 19 percent said they knew the afterlife is real in the 1970s. Then, 56 percent said they were convinced of it in the 1998 poll.

Millions of Everyday People Are Having After-Death Communications

In 1988, Bill and Judy Guggenheim began The ADC Project, in which they interviewed 3,300 people who had experienced after-death communications. [...] They described them in their book, Hello from Heaven.

[...] Communication with deceased loved ones is a common, everyday occurrence. To deny it is to suggest that most people in the world today are insane, delusional, or lying.

People Having After-Death Communications Learn Things They Couldn’t Know Otherwise

It is common for someone having an after-death communication to receive messages about things the person could not have known if the messages didn’t come from the deceased.

Pre-death and Deathbed Visions Are Common

In 1959, Karlis Osis, Ph.D., psychology professor at the University of Freiburg, and Erlendur Haraldsson, Ph.D., psychology professor at the University of Munich, studied deathbed visions in the U.S. and India by interviewing doctors and nurses who had been present when people died. They mailed out questionnaires to 5,000 physicians and 5,000 nurses, providing information on over 35,000 observations of dying patients. Over 1,300 dying patients saw apparitions and almost 900 reported visions of an afterlife.

They found the following consistencies:

  1. Some dying people reported seeing angels and other religious figures, but most reported seeing familiar deceased people.

  2. Very often, the friends and relatives in these visions communicate that they have come to help take them away.

  3. The dying person is reassured by the experience and expresses great happiness with the vision and is quite willing to go with the deceased greeters.

  4. The dying person’s mood and health change often when they have such a vision. During these visions, a once depressed or pain-riddled person is elated and relieved of pain.

  5. During the vision, the dying person is acutely aware of their real surroundings and conditions, not immersed in a fantasy.

  6. The experience and reactions afterward are the same for all experiencers, whether they believe in an afterlife or not.

They reported their findings in a book titled At the Hour of Death [...]:

In our judgement, the similarities between the core phenomena found in the death-bed visions of both countries are clear enough to be considered supportive of the post-mortem survival hypothesis.

People in the Room with a Dying Person Sometimes All See the Same Vision

Victor Zammit, B.A.(Psych.), Grad. Dip.Ed.(UTS), M.A. (Legal Hist.), LL.B.(UNSW), Ph.D., a retired lawyer of the Supreme Court of the New South Wales and the High Court of Australia, cites records from the Society of Psychical Research in which apparitions of dead relatives have appeared at the bedside of dying patients and have been seen by more than one person there:

There are many cases on record with the Society of Psychical Research where the apparitional visitor has been seen by others at the bedside of the dying person, sometimes by several persons simultaneously.

  1. History of Autobiography in Antiquity, 2 vols., Harvard University Press, 1951.↩

  2. Id., ibid., p. 7.↩

  3. R. Craig Hogan, op. cit., p. 22.↩

  4. Cf. Olavo de Carvalho. Visões de Descartes: entre o gênio mau e o espírito da verdade. Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2013; and Maquiavel ou a confusão demoníaca. 2nd ed. Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2020. — no↩

  5. For more details about what the author calls the “essential conditions of scientific knowledge,” to which certain “existential conditions” must be added, see Edmund Husserl contra o psicologismo: preleções informais em torno de uma leitura da Introdução às Investigações lógicas. Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2020, pp. 21-36. — NO↩

  6. Cf. Olavo de Carvalho. Visões de Descartes: entre o gênio mau e o espírito da verdade. Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2013. — NO↩

  7. Base text of Lesson 61 (June 5, 2010) from the Online Philosophy Course. Reproduced in A filosofia e seu inverso [Philosophy and Its Inverse]. Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2013.↩

  8. Base text of Lesson 241 (March 10, 2014) from the Online Philosophy Course.↩

  9. Diário do Comércio [Commerce Diary], March 13, 2006. Reproduced in A filosofia e seu inverso [Philosophy and Its Inverse]. Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2013, and in O mundo como jamais funcionou: cartas de um terráqueo ao planeta Brasil — volume II [The World as It Never Worked: Letters from an Earthling to the Planet Brazil - Volume II]. Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 20H.↩

  10. University of Chicago Press, 1998.↩

  11. Alien Braun et al., “Tune Deafness: Processing Melodic Errors Outside of Conscious Awareness as Reflected by Components of the Auditory ERP". Available at http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/joumal.pone.0002349.↩

  12. Beckett, un Écrivain devant Dieu [Beckett, a Writer before God], Desclée de Brouwer, 1967.↩

  13. Cf. Olavo de Carvalho, Maquiavel ou a confusão demoníaca [Machiavelli or the Demonic Confusion]. 2nd ed. Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2020.↩

  14. Diário do Comércio [Commerce Diary], May 5, 2008. Reproduced in A inversão revolucionária em ação: cartas de um terráqueo ao planeta Brasil — volume IV [The Revolutionary Inversion in Action: Letters from an Earthling to the Planet Brazil - Volume IV]. Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2015.↩

  15. This observation would lead the author to speak of the principle of authorship. Cf. the unpublished handout “Esboço de um sistema de filosofia” [Outline of a Philosophy System], p. 15, available at www.seminariodefilosofia.org.↩

  16. Diário do Comércio [Commerce Diary], March 13, 2009. Reproduced in A filosofia e seu inverso [Philosophy and Its Inverse]. Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2013, and in O império mundial da burla: cartas de um terráqueo ao planeta Brasil — volume v [The World Empire of Deception: Letters from an Earthling to the Planet Brazil - Volume V]. Campinas, SP: Vide Editorial, 2016.↩

  17. Diário do Comércio [Commerce Diary], September 29, 20H. Reproduced in A cólera dos imbecis: cartas de um terráqueo ao planeta Brasil — volume X [The Rage of Fools: Letters from an Earthling to the Planet Brazil - Volume X]. Campinas: Vide Editorial, 2019.↩

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