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"Trialogues at the Edge of the West," Chap. 5, part a: Light and Vision

Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Wed 13 Dec 2006 05:49 PM PST  

Editor's Note: I'm posting this portion of Chap. 5 of "Trialogues at the Edge of the West" (TEW) because I think it may relate to the discussion presently under way re the article titled: "Instruments of Knowledge and Post-Human Destinies." My hope is that some of the new theories now surfacing in contemporary science may support our work in deconstructing the insights presented both in traditional Hindu and Buddhist texts and in Sri Aurobindo's more recent writings.

For example, the initial section of TEW, Chap. 5: "Light and Vision," that I quote below raises some interesting ideas about the possible relationship between light, perception, mind and consciousness.  (ron)



Trialogues at the Edge of the West


Light and Vision
(Chap. 5, part a.)

[see bottom of page for background on the interlocutors.]

RUPERT:  I've been thinking about the connection between physical light and the light of consciousness, the light of reason, and the light of vision. It's not enough to say that one kind of light is physical and the others are metaphorical. In some sense they must be aspects of each other.

The key may be in the connection between light and vision. How much do we understand about the nature of vision? Science doesn't tell us much. It tells us that light moves from the thing we see, goes through the eye, forms an inverted image on the retina, and causes patterns of electrical and chemical activity to take place in the optic nerves and cerebral cortex. Then, somehow, what we're seeing seems to spring up in a totally unexplained way as a subjective image. This image is somewhere inside the brain, yet it is subjectively experienced as outside the body. If I'm looking at you, Terence, the light rays come into my eye, and then I have a subjective image of you that is, according to the standard theory, an electrochemical pattern in my optical cortex. This seems to me an extremely peculiar theory of vision, because it locates the visual world we experience inside the brain and not around us where it seems to be.

When I look at you, my image of you is interpreted by me; it's a mental construct. I think this mental construct may not be inside the brain but right where you are, namely, outside me, where my image of you seems to be. The conventional idea that the image is inside my brain does not correspond with my actual experience. It's just a theory, but a theory of remarkable hallucinatory power because we so easily forget it's merely a theory.

If in the process of vision there's an outward projection of images as well as an inward movement of light, if I'm not just playing with words, then there must be something moving out as well as light moving in. If so, people or things might be affected just by being looked at.

The idea that something goes out from the eyes is a very old and traditional view of vision. It was present among the pre-Socratics and is found in implicit form all over the world in the fear and practices associated with the "evil eye." These practices are indeed supposed to involve the outward movement of influences from the eye to the thing or person being looked at. There's also an enormous folklore in Western culture about the sense of being stared at, the feeling people have when they think they're being looked at, for example, from behind.

There's not been much empirical research on the sense of being stared at: three published papers in a hundred years. it's a subject that parapsychologists have ignored as well as psychologists. it could be, oddly enough, the biggest blind spot in our view of the world, because it could hold the key to an entirely new understanding of the relationship between mind and matter, or spirit and body.

Let's assume for the purpose of discussion that it can be established empirically that there is indeed such a thing as the sense of being stated at. Some influence passing out through the eyes can be detected empirically. What kind of influence could this possible be? What kind of influence could be moving outward through the eyes in the opposite direction to the incoming light?

There are two possible ways of explaining such an influence. First, this outward movement could be in a kind of mental field that is somehow over and above the electromagnetic field. The electromagnetic field sets off electrochemical changes in the brain, and somehow the mental field organizes and meshes in and relates to it but is not itself part of it. The mental field then projects outward, placing an image where the person or object being viewed is actually located. Such fields would extend all around us and be filled with our sensory experience of the world.

In the second model, a more economical one, the outward projection process takes place by a reverse movement through the light that is coming into the eyes. In other words, when a photon of light comes in, it corresponds to an antiparticle moving out, and these outward-moving influences move along the exact track of the photons. These particles are then associated with vision, perception, comprehension, and all subjective experience of an object. They're the grok wave, if you like. Since, physically speaking from the point of view of a photon, no time elapses as it travels, the connection between the sources and the place where it arrives, between subject and object, is instantaneous. In this way vision may be very closely related to light.

It would be crude to say that the antiparticle of the photon is the visi-on — the particle of sight — but this concept may be the missing link between vision and light. It may simply be that the photon is in some sense reversible, and that the electromagnetic field is in some sense the field of vision as well.

TERENCE:  There are a number of questions to be asked here. If the visi-on were simply the antiparticle of the photon, the phenomenon of light pressure should not exist. Since this phenomenon does exist and is well studied, the visi-on must be more esoteric than an antiphoton.

RUPERT:  This is no problem at all. The photon is a particle with physical properties in the physical realm and therefore exerts physical pressure. The visi-on has to do with conscious experience, with properties of mind. It's moving in the opposite direction, and the sensing of being stared at would be a sensing of those particles or waves impinging. There would be a kind of pressure in that direction of the psychic kind.

TERENCE:  A more elegant way to describe what you're saying would be to call this reverse wave phenomenon a quality of the photon itself. From the point of view of the photon, the travel time to and from its destination is zero. Likewise, travel time from destination back to origin is zero. Why not simply take a page from superstring theory and visualize the photon as a kind of particle that is stretched in one dimension? It is present at its origin and its destination simultaneously and thus able to impart information at a distance.

RALPH:  As hypotheses go, this is the big bag full. Certainly if it were established that no effect could be produced in a person by looking at them from behind, this discussion would be less interesting. There would still remain some serious outstanding questions about the morphogenetic fields proposed as the memory banks of the species in Rupert's books.

RUPERT:  There would be questions as well about the relation of mind and matter and the nature of vision and light.

RALPH:  Nevertheless, it doesn't seem very useful to make the assumption that such an effect has been established. If it were, it would be the first of all the various so-called paranormal phenomena of recent decades to be validated and accepted. That would mean a lot of paradigms would be shifted, and we would also be seeking explanations for telepathy, remote viewing, clairvoyance, and other effects of vision at a distance.

RUPERT:  Second sight.

TERENCE:  I don't think it would automatically follow, if this effect were confirmed, that people would think it had anything to do with eyes or light at all. If we establish that attention can be felt across space, this would be an establishment of telepathy. The felt sensation would not be due to the fact that I'm looking at the back of someone's head, but that I'm focusing my attention, which would be most effective when I really bore in. The output of the optical system does not increase; it's the output of the mental act of concentration that does.

RALPH:  If we agree, then, that science would be stood on its head by the discovery of one paranormal thing, which would make all paranormal occurrences fair game, then we can assume that field theories would expand considerably. Mathematical models of the morphogenetic field would abound. Let's say we did have an experimental result in the laboratory demonstrating that a person can get someone else's attention by staring at them, or by boring in, as Terence says. Would it really be natural then to propose the electromagnetic field as an intermediary for that influence? Or would we rather propose another field as a conceptual model for the observed phenomenon?

Since ancient times, we've thought of mental, physical, and spiritual phenomena as operating in different planes. The planes used metaphorically be the ancients of Greece and the rishis (seers) of India are more or less what we're calling fields, and these thinkers found it useful to separate these fields.

The electromagnetic field is physical —— at least I think of it as physical. I like the idea of a separate mental field. The mind somehow follows the eye and extends itself so as to actually engulf the object being viewed, to know it through intimate touch. Cognition is then a kind of engulfing, like eating. This motion is visualized in the mental plane and therefore belongs to a different field. I feel a bias toward this view.

On the other hand, if you could show that this telepathic transmission from one person to another can be modulated electromagnetically by a magnet or filter, that would strengthen the argument for the actual proximity of the two separate planes without, even then, identifying them.

RUPERT:  There's a part of me that thinks the separate field idea is more attractive, but I've been leaning over backward to see whether we can come to a new understanding of the electromagnetic field in which the connection between vision and light is a very close one. Even if there is another field involved, it must be in intimate resonance with the electromagnetic field. There's no doubt that changes in the brain are largely changes in electromagnetic patterns, and there's scope for resonance there, but the mental field may also resonate with the light that's coming into our eyes. If this mental field is resonating with the electromagnetic field of light, then indeed it will connect us through the light to the object we are seeing. Anything that resonates with the light that's in between us will directly connect us via the light.

RALPH:  I'm more comfortable with the wave rather than the particle metaphor. Let's just think of waves. Here I am looking at waves of the ocean, and I see that there's a rock out there. As the waves pass the rock, their shape is changed: there is a hologram of the rock within the wave that comes forward and crashes on the beach. Then there's a reflected wave that goes back. I think the electromagnetic field, as physicists view it, is something very much like this. Its mathematical model is a wave equation. This seems to be a suitable medium for influence to go both ways. But somehow I don't see it as having a rich enough structure to model all mental processes.

RUPERT:  I'm only modeling vision, so far.

RALPH:  The visual part of the mental field may be a very thin slice of the morphogenetic field that is in very close resonance with the electromagnetic field.

RUPERT:  I think that if we take the idea of interfacing planes —— the old idea of different levels —— and think of the planes as fields, then we do actually have a series of stratified levels.

First there are the quantum matter fields, which have to do with the strong and weak nuclear forces in atoms and which determine the shape and structural properties of atoms and molecules. they only work at very short ranges.

Then there is the electromagnetic field, which is an organizing field of more complex structures. The electromagnetic field actually holds together atoms, molecules, crystals, and everything else. One could say that the electromagnetic field is associated with the morphic fields of molecules and crystals.

At the level of plants, there's a morphogenetic field of vegetative growth that somehow interfaces with the electromagnetic field. In animals, over and above the morphogenetic fields are the fields of instincts and movements; they organize and coordinate the activities of the nervous system.

There are hierarchically higher planes above these, such as perceptual fields and fields of higher level understanding. There may be planes of fields that are like the levels you spoke of, Ralph, but in a nested hierarchy. The gravitational field embraces all; it's the universal field.

RALPH:  The electromagnetic field, a constituent component of the morphogenetic field or the world soul, should be utilized economically to carry as much of the burden of explanation as possible. Certainly all of the morphogenetic phenomena of crystals and so on are intimately connected by resonance with the electromagnetic field.

TERENCE:  There are not only electromagnetic fields but chemical fields. I think that pheromones are vastly underrated for their organizing power in biology and social systems. In fact, the whole Earth may be chemically regulated through very small molecules, aromatic compounds that are byproducts of the metabolism of various species but that percolate out through the environment and set up the ambience in which a lot of animal and plant business is done. Easily volatilized low-molecular-weight compounds are probably behind a lot of the mechanisms for the self-regulation of nature. If materialists can seriously argue that the progressive ease through time of crystallizing new compounds has to do with seed crystals moving around from laboratory to laboratory on chemists' beards, then they will certainly be in agreement that the percolation rates of nature are effective enough to move these control-and message-bearing chemicals around everywhere.

RALPH:  This idea is very supportive of Rupert's economy move, because the olfactory bulb is nothing but a transducer of information from the chemical field to the electromagnetic field. Just a small number of molecules of a pheromone are enough to excite an identifiable electromagnetic wave across the bulb, which is then identified by some kind of associative memory living primarily in the electromagnetic activity of the brain. This coupling shows that the electromagnetic field is an intermediary between the chemical field and the mental field.

TERENCE:  The chemical field is simply a higher-order manifestation of the electromagnetic field, because most of these volatile compounds have very electronically active ring structures.

RUPERT:  It's a resonance phenomenon.

TERENCE:  It is charge transfer and resonance, and doubtless bioelectronic activity of other types. The most electronically active molecules are the drugs, the pheromones, the growth regulators, and so forth.

RUPERT:  These principles could also apply to hearing. When I see you, you are localized somewhere outside me, where you are. If I hear you, your sounds are also localized outside me. I don't hear sounds as if they're arising inside my auditory cortex. I hear them as if they're rising around me in three-dimensional space, and I can locate which direction they're coming from.

This means we are not only surrounded by a visual perceptual field that spreads out from us and fills the space of our perception, but we are also surrounded by an auditory perceptual field. We are surrounded by an ocean of fields.

RALPH:  The ocean has infinite structure and complexity but nevertheless could never function as a brain. The brain is, in the neurophysiology it presents to the experimentalist, certainly much simpler than the mind. The brain cannot function through the electromagnetic field alone, even though all of its effects and patterns are manifest in the electromagnetic field. Its structure is much richer than the electromagnetic field, which can't control all these patterns without the brain's complex structure of cortices, intercortical cells, chemical messengers, and ion channels.

Modeling the brain requires much more mathematical structure than does modeling the electromagnetic field. The brain is much closer to the physical universe than to the mental universe, so I think the electromagnetic field is too thin to occupy more than a fraction of the entire structure of the field that carries recognition, memory, the ability to serve in tennis and learn a new language and recognize haiku, and so on.

RUPERT:  I think that somehow the brain plays an interface role between the chemical and morphic and mental realms. The question that arises is, how does the electromagnetic field interface with the quantum mechanical fields that hold together the structures of atomic nuclei and electrons in their orbits? These structures are actually maintained by fields that in a sense are stronger than the electromagnetic field, for they resist it in such a way that the positively charged protons bound together in the nucleus do not fly apart through mutual repulsion, and the negatively charged electrons do not plunge into the nucleus. The electromagnetic field works around these matter fields as a more subtle field.

RALPH:  Perhaps the quantum mechanical field, not the electromagnetic field, is the intermediary between the physical and mental planes. ...

(To be continued in a later posting ...)

About the Authors:

Ralph Abraham was born in Vermont in 1936 and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1960. He participated in the creation of global analysis, a new branch of mathematics, while teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, and Princeton University. He has been at the University of California at Santa Cruz since 1968, where he has been a leader in the new theories of nonlinear dynamics, chaos, and bifurcation.
       Abraham is the author of several mathematical texts, including the pictorial introduction to dynamics, Dynamics, the Geometry of Behavior. After a three-year tour of Europe and India, he began a program of expanding mathematics into its role in individual and social evolution, manifest today in a series of articles and a book, Chaos, Gaia, Eros. He lives in a redwood forest and frequently goes skiing and surfing with his two grown sons.

Terence McKenna, author and explorer, was born in 1946. He spent twenty-five years studying the ontological foundations of shamanism and the ethnopharmacology of spiritual transformation. He graduated from the University ofr California at Berkeley with a distributed major in ecology, resource conservation, and shamanism. After graduation, he traveled extensively in the Asian and New World tropics, becoming specialized in the shamanism and ethno-medicine of the Amazon Basin.

With his brother Dennis, McKenna is the author of The Invisible Landscape and Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Growers' Guide. A talking book of his Amazon adventures, True Hallucinations, has also been produced. His two most recent books are Food of the Gods and a book of essays, The Archaic Revival.

He is the father of two children, Finn and Klea, and lived in California and Hawaii. He was a founder and director of Botanical Dimensions, a tax-exempt, nonprofit research botanical garden in Hawaii devoted to the collection and propagation of plants of ethnopharmacological interest.

[Terence McKennna died in 2000 of glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer. - ed.]

Rupert Sheldrake was born in Newark-on-Trent, England, in 1942. He studied natural sciences at Cambridge and philosophy at Harvard, where he was a Frank Knox fellow. He obtained his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cambridge in 1967. In the same year, he became a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where he was director of studies in biochemistry and cell biology until 1973. As a research fellow of the Royal Society, he carried out research at Cambridge on the development of plants and the aging of cells. From 1974 to 1978, he was principal plant physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India, where he worked on the physiology of tropical legume crops. He continued to work at ICRISAT as a consultant physiologist until 1985.

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