Innerworlds and Integral Websites - Case Study Example

Transpersonal Consciousness Studies Comparative Review of Innerworlds and Integral Websites By comparison with the clear-cut precise motif of Ken Wilber's Integral website, the visual presentation of Todd Murphy's Innerworlds website is confused, eclectic, and patently busy. The choice of typeface in ill-assorted sizes and the haphazard nature of the overall design, easily epitomizes the scattered deductive thinking in the articles presented, as well as in the pseudo-scientific details describing the Shakti magnetic field contrivance as spiritual technology. It is difficult to appreciate just how Todd Murphy can claim to be genuinely open to the reality of all levels of consciousness. On the contrary, the articles on the website irrationally reduce even the Spiritual/Mystical level of experience to the first level of the Neurophysiological, with very little indication of really precise scientific inquiry even from that perspective.1 The assertion that Todd Murphy is truly convinced that he is not altogether closed to psychic or mystic experiences is suspect. If Murphy accepts those states as real, it is clearly in the light of a neurobehaviourist bias that precludes any truly impartial openness to a Level 4 enquiry into the psychosomatic unity of conscious experience. At first it was unclear exactly what type of cerebral consciousness, beyond the artificial neural awareness passively generated by a Shakti device, Todd Murphy would be willing to identify as a feasible validation for the global transpersonal phenomenon in question. Further research into his thought suggests that Murphy, echoing his mentor Dr. Persinger, proposes to reduce all vindication for any such psychic phenomena to the a priori existence of an internal epileptic propensity or to an external environment of unusually strong magnetic activity. The operative assumption implies that intuitive or mystic experiences can easily be reduced scientifically to subjectively generated responses due to the action of environmental electromagnetic energy. The cross-cultural understanding of intuitive insight experienced in the responsible human subject through a transpersonal consciousness is basically reduced to a behavioral response to a stimulus. 2 Shakti works on the principle of manipulating the magnetic fields that carry signals from the human brain to stimulate specific brain structures considered to be active in spiritual experience in order to induce an altered state of consciousness. Though there are disclaimers, in reference to feedback from its limited clientele, as to the range of levels of consciousness that can be roused by the contrivance, the advertisement of versions of the Shakti device pictured haphazardly on the home page of the site appears to imply that a suitably-susceptible person can be intrinsically and remarkably manipulated by artificial technical means into an authentic altered state of consciousness. In several of the many articles found in links to successive pages of the site, the principle of cerebral stimulation is touted further as capable of generating the experiential equivalent of Level 4 processes of consciousness. It should follow by default that certain gifted individuals could expect to be passively stimulated through frequent recourse to the Shakti helmet to the very zenith of mature personhood and ultimate well-being.3 Though the person using the Shakti may be in quest of stimuli from outside the body-spirit entity of the self, the individual under the helmet would hardly be truly transcending self through a synthetically induced altered state of consciousness. Hallucinogenic drugs most likely do a similar job of producing artificial highs by supplanting the chemical receptors in the synapse between the nerve cells. The human subject experiences only the disembodied neural reaction, passively receiving signals rather than actively participating in any meaningful content. There is nothing essentially transpersonal involved in an introverted event produced by the empty initiative of an inert device. According to the website, the Shakti stimulation is based on scientific criteria. The amygdala and the hippocampus each has its own distinct signal which the Shakti apparatus is said to duplicate. Each unique impulse or brain wave, replicates the original that would appear on an electroencephalograph (EEG) that records electrical signals. The advertised Neuromagnetic Signal Generator (Shakti ) purports to convert these specific EEG signals into magnetic signals. The assertion in the ad notifies the user: "What you experience depends on who you are and how you choose to use Shakti."4 The Shakti helmet allegedly applies the amygdaloid wave form to the dominant hemisphere (usually the left side), and the hippocampal wave form to the non-dominant side (usually the right). According to Murphy, the amygdala is an emotional structure, and its positive emotions affect its activity on the left side.5 The hippocampus is a cognitive structure, and its positive reflections direct activity on the right side. These assertions are said to be corroborated by previous work with the limbic system using the accurate electrical waves derived from it. The data purportedly incorporates published and unpublished laboratory studies, not specifically referenced but vaguely alluded to, and the non-controlled self-reported results from some 100 internet participants in the Shakti project6, as well as the author's first-hand experience. Though Murphy's autobiographical details refer to the "temporal lobe epilepsy"7 of his childhood, Murphy unequivocally admits in his article Forgetting about Enlightenment that he is definitely not speaking from experience: "I need to be frank on one point: I am not enlightened."8 This article goes on to incorporate a number of imprecise graphics of the amygdala and the hippocampus in a generic view of the crown of the human brain, with right and left sides labeled positive and negative by red and green coded marks vaguely indicating the limbic area in question. A representative description of the graphics follows: "These two brain parts are next to each other. Intergrown, in fact. And a normal brain has a positive and a negative one on each side. However, some people have left-handed limbic parts. For them, the positive amygdala will be intergrown with the positive hippocampus. Communication between the two will be much easier than in a normal brain. The other side of the brain will have strong communication between the negative hippocampus and the negative amygdala. Such an individual might find themselves very emotionally labile, or sensitive."9 On the BBC website a laymen's version of the interactive brain map is markedly more precise in describing the hemispheres of the human brain. A detailed image indicates the relatively small and intricate region of the limbic system toward the inner section of the brain curving into still smaller extensions of the hippocampus and amygdala. The amygdala is said to be responsible for generating negative emotions, such as sadness, anger, fear and disgust. Work on non-emotional cognitive tasks (hippocampus) is said to inhibit the amygdala and help ease emotional anguish. The hippocampus is said primarily to integrate sensory information that is crucial to memory organization. The corpus callosum, a bundle of nerve fibers just above the limbic system, facilitates communication between the left and right hemispheres, a crucial connection for functions that lie only in one hemisphere.10 Areas of the limbic system interconnect with the frontal lobes of the brain, where reason and emotion are incorporated into intentional planning and decision making. James H. Austin asserts that limbic associations infuse emotional overtones into our experience and into our affective responses, and that the hippocampus processes data and transmits it to be recorded in the relevant cluster of the brain's vast memory circuit. Austin also notes that in cerebral processing no response is determined solely by one structure or even one system, nor are responses based on simple one-direction activity but on the intricate interplay of a vast complex of integrated neural communication. He adds that in the interactive brain, no component acts in isolation. 11 Austin points out that modern resources have made the old fixed maps of the brain from medical texts obsolete. Neuroscientists now visualize brain cells in an intricate vibrant mega-network. A incredible framework of dynamic relays connect many widely-dispersed systems. Neural interaction operates most often in circuitries that are multidimensional and poly-topographic, stretching up from the brain stem to the cortex and back down again, and integrating each side of the brain with the other and the cerebellum as well.12 One small thought resonates deftly through many areas of cortex. Rather than being set in some strict design, like a one-dimensional mosaic of black-and-white bits, the detailed data in our cortex acts like a kind of fluid kaleidoscope, apt to oscillate through a myriad of diverse designs of contour and color. These networking regions develop unusual properties as they engage the cortex. The simplest experience draws on broadly differentiated systems of neural networks. Each network of links varies in texture from others, based on differences in the sequential patterning within each interconnected region, and, in turn, these regional configurations differ further, depending on how many other connections they make to still wider looping circuits. These loops are elastic, varying with each unique situation.13 Neural synapses go on firing spontaneously, day and night to form a lot of extraneous background noise. The conscious message gets in, records its signal, and creates a lasting impression only when its content clicks with many other convergent themes of associated impact. The brain's soft-wiring provides a dynamic architecture of intertwined intuitions that far outstrips the connecting facility of the normal computer.14 In Integral Psychology Ken Wilber conveys his indictment of a subtle reductionism in contemporary thought on transpersonal consciousness. With everything assessed by the least common denominator of the empirical and connected at the same level to everything else, nothing has primacy, everything is relative, and any one thing is as true as anything else. Wilber notes that the pre-suppositions we bring to our study are often subtly disguised and need to be identified. Unlike so much modern scientific reductionism, the real value of research lies less in justifying a pre-conceived hypothesis than in integrating all results and suspending premature judgment on all mysterious or unidentified aspects.15 The danger to genuine progress is to become mired in the past and atrophy rather than incorporate, integrate, and advance still further. Wilber believes that in our modern western society we are at risk of becoming stuck in the conventional and the comfortable, a melancholic place without energy or spiritual values, ruled by skepticism and ambiguity. We need enough inquisitiveness to appreciate the mystery, to try the untried, to open-mindedly query the unknown and to question the predictable. White light mysteriously integrates all the colors of the spectrum and also demonstrates such contradictory properties as photons and waves. The experimental sciences themselves do not reject mystery, freeze at enigma, or attempt to fit evidence into predetermined compartments.16 Ken Wilber's Integral website breathes harmony and expertise. The four-minute flash tour on the Integral University link animates a well-drawn precision matrix interconnecting an intricate sphere of professional disciplines. From the clear-cut, meaningful visuals in the presentation, to the breathtaking vista closing the tour, the Integral University webpage presents a visually refined and technically professional overall design. Participants in the Integral University, made up of experts in each field, work together to incorporate a host of valid perspectives from every discipline. Though Consciousness Studies is only one of the many disciplines offered, the AQAL approach (all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types) is eminently relevant to the variety of perspectives that can inform the development and study of transpersonal consciousness. The most number of truths from the most number of disciplines serves to advance a deeper, more effective, and more inclusive integration.17 Integral suggests inclusiveness, balance, completeness. The Integral approach may be contrasted to so many systems which in essence exclude other perspectives as being defective. Actually, by such a priori exclusion the latter by definition, make themselves partial and incomplete. These attitudes, although widely established and prevalent in world cultures, are inclined to generate only partial analysis and incomplete resolutions to problems.The fractional character of inquiry in any of these disciplines renders the conclusion less efficient, less effective, and less balanced than that of the Integral approach.18 The Integral insight was shaped by a cross-cultural assessment of most of the known forms of human inquiry. The outcome was a type of all-inclusive map of human aptitudes. This blueprint, generated from all the existing research and evidence, identified five major aspects which espouse a more wide-ranging, efficient, and wholly informed approach to explicit problems and their resolution in every field of endeavor and inquiry.19 As Wilber defines it, the strength of an all level, all quadrant approach, both for an individual or a field of inquiry, inescapably proceeds along a distinct, yet essentially hierarchical path, where each successive level both includes and transcends its antecedent plane. The course makes its way through the personal, to the transpersonal, to the psychosomatic synthesis. All quadrant indicates that at every stage for every individual (at once a whole made up of parts and part of a greater whole) each of four facets must be recognized: the individual interior (consciousness); the shared interior (culture); the individual exterior (the body); and the shared exterior (society).20 The hierarchical imperative neither implies nor necessitates any sort of inflexible succession or linear sequence: the lines, waves, and streams all convey the variation of tempo and degree determined by different aspects within the overall maturing process from body through mind to spirit. In addition, the social context and cultural pressures may modify responses day by day and hour by hour. Wilber envisions an all-embracing, ever-expanding space within which both vertical and horizontal interchange operate. At the same time, persons (and cultures) consistently have a specific center of gravity where actual lines or streams generally converge and to which they tend to revert, still tending to move forward, towards and within the entity.21 Wilber offers thorough substantiation to support his contentions. In particular, he details statistically the remarkable agreement between researchers in anthropology, developmental psychology and social studies with regard to the universal model within which cultures and persons emerge. The text is reinforced by a number of correlative charts cross-referencing the work of over a hundred other developmental theorists, all of whom generally recognize, to varying degrees, the same basic composition. Wilber also confronts the intricate problem of consciousness and the nature of conscious experience. Reassessing the old metaphor of world knot, Wilbur disentangles the rhetoric to rise above the persistent dualism of body and mind. He subscribes to the transpersonal sphere situated beyond the level that most of us, and the civilization in which we are immersed, have attained thus far. Yet he accentuates the imperative for science to mature by growing more comprehensive, as well as for scientists themselves to realize a transpersonal transformation.22 Personifying the full breadth of his integral insight is the idea of employing different realistic means to enable the overall self to integrate in harmony all the quadrants (self, culture, nature), the various levels or waves (body, mind, soul, spirit), and the many personal interrelated streams (cognitive, moral, affective, creative, spiritual). In a very real way, psychology or the study of the psyche (mind or soul) is best seen as the multilevel study of spirit itself throughout all the domains and dimensions of the dynamic cosmos.23 Intriguingly, Wilber's integral theory with its remarkable implementation in an all-inclusive community of professionals imitates on a communal plane the incredible interconnectedness of the human brain. In the modern world, every extraordinary breakthrough in technology and the human sciences has depended mightily on the accumulated research, contributions and initiative of almost as many trillions of human minds over the last several centuries as the fantastic network of the billions of nerve cells linked in a complex mosaic of meaning, discovery and maturation in the individual human brain. The open-minded implementation of Ken Wilber's perceptive insight in the area of transpersonal consciousness could lead to a genuine synthesis of understanding from the global perspective of all levels of enquiry which Todd Murphy and his mentor have so regrettably confused. Bibliography Austin, James H. Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). Chalmers, D.. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Dennett, Daniel Clement. Brainchildren: Essays On Designing Minds (Cambridge, MA. MIT Press, 1998). Dennett, Daniel Clement. Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Montgomery, VT: MIT Press, 1981) Ferrer, Jorge N. Revisioning Transpersonal Psychology: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality. (New York: Albany State University of New York Press, 2002) Forman, Robert K.C., ed. The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Grof, Stanislav. Psychology of the Future: Lessons From Modern Consciousness Research. (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 2000). Lancaster, Brian L. Mind, Brain and Human Potential: the Quest for an Understanding of Self. (London: Thorsons Element, 1993). Metzinger, Thomas, ed. Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Issues. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000) Murphy, Todd. Spirituality and the Brain: Neurotheology, Magnetic Brain Stimulation, Deja Vu, Death, God, Sex, Love, and More. Available from http://www.innerworlds.50megs.com Raynes, Brent. "Interview with Todd Murphy." Alternate Perceptions Magazine Online, no. 78, April 2004. Available from: http://www.mysterious-america.net/interviewwithtod.html Science and Nature, Human Body and Mind. "Interactive Brainmap." BBC Website. Available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body/interactives/organs/brainmap/ Velmans, Max. Understanding Consciousness. (London: Taylor and Francis, Inc., 2000). Wilber, Ken. Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy. (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2000). Wilber, Ken, Founder and President. Welcome to Integral University. Available from: http://www.integraluniversity.org/ Read More