Can human nature be changed?

Aldous Huxley, Altered States, Amanda Feilding, Bart Huges, Beckley Foundation, brain science, brainwave, cognitive enhancement, Consciousness, drugs, Evolution, Joe Mellen, neural activity, Science, social commentary, Trepanation

http://www.brainwaving.com/2009/12/30/can-human-nature-be-changed/

ADVANTAGES OF THE TRANSCENDENT STATE -QUOTE FROM ALDOUS HUXLEY'S AFTER MANY A SUMMER:

• “He had come to this bench under the eucalyptus tree in order to recollect himself, in order to realize for a moment the existence of that other consciousness behind his private thoughts and feelings, that free, pure power greater than his own. He had come for this; but memories had slipped in while he was off his guard; speculations had started up, cloud upon cloud ……. Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance; and he had failed to be vigilant. It wasn’t a case, he reflected ruefully, of the spirit being willing and the flesh weak. That was altogether the wrong antithesis. The spirit is always willing, but the person, who is a mind as well as a body, is always unwilling – and the person, incidentally, is not weak but extremely strong.”


• The above quote contains many truisms we all too conveniently shelve and ignore. The other cionsciousness if handled aright is free unfettered and pure , greater than this transitory and sorry state lived by us and clutched onto by us for "dear life". Personality is a bondage will fight to keep and the personality is strong on this battle. Bondage is usually retained with clever resourcefulness and extreme cunning. The battle always has been to transcend the ego.We are so enslaved to this ego, that we most often work against our better self interest which is transcendance.


• The true good, the animal level and the level of eternity: The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people, in a word – they are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.”“Then where ought we to fight for good?”“Where good is.”“But where is it?”“On the level below the human and on the level above. On the animal level and on the level … well, you can take your choice of names: the level of eternity; the level, if you don’t object, of God; the level of spirit – only that happens to be about the most ambiguous word in the language. On the lower level, good exists as the proper functioning of the organism in accordance with the laws of its own being. On the higher level, it exists in the form of a knowledge of the world without desire or aversion; it exists as the experience of eternity, as the transcendence of personality, the extension of consciousness beyond the limits imposed by the ego. Strictly human activities are activities that prevent the manifestations of good on the other two levels. For, in so far as we’re human, we’re obsessed with time, we’re passionately concerned with our personalities and with those magnified projections of our personalities which we call our policies, our ideals, our religions. And what are the results? Being obsessed with time and our egos, we are for ever craving and worrying. But nothing impairs the normal functioning of the organism like craving and revulsion, like greed and fear and worry. Directly or indirectly, most of our physical ailments and disabilities are due to worry and craving. We worry and crave ourselves into high blood-pressure, heart disease, tuberculosis, peptic ulcer, low resistance to infection, neurasthenia, sexual aberrations, insanity, suicide. Not to mention all the rest.”


• Our ideals are merely like chimaera: extensions of our ego.
• Act of transcendence steps of climbing: Saints fast for days on end to achieve a state of enlightenment. By doing without the most obvious physical need, for food, they endure the temptations of St Anthony to reach the goal of disinterested awareness. In an enlightened vision the individual’s needs and desires are subsumed in a common, categorical view of those of the species as a whole. A feeling of indivisibility with all of life infuses the mind, an exalted feeling of being at one with the whole of existence. In mystical traditions, such as the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life, there are various stages of development through which the individual can ascend. The lowest is the material level, the level of the body, then comes the level of personality, including the moral sphere, and the highest is the level of the spirit, the transcendent state of mind.
• The meaning of words and language relative to ecstatic states of consciousness assumes an intuive and direct character as opposed to intellectual comprehension of meaning.
  But that which surrounded the words was the awareness itself; for this vigilance which was now an effortless awareness – what was it but an aspect, a partial expression, of that impersonal and untroubled consciousness into which the words had been dropped and through which they were slowly sinking? And, as they sank they took a new significance for the awareness that was following them down into the depths of itself – a significance new not in respect to the entities connoted by the words, but rather in the mode of their comprehension, which, from being intellectual in character, had become intuitive and direct, so that the nature of man in his potentiality and of God in actuality were realized.
• ...unmediated participation. .....for the blissful freedom from personality …”
• What he is saying is that the only ideal worth pursuing is the ideal of liberation from personality. All other ideals are merely projections, on an enormously enlarged scale, of one or another aspect of personality, be it the artist’s ideal of beauty, the scientists’s ideal of truth, the humanitarian ideal of “goodness”, the political ideal of social justice or the chivalrous ideal of romantic love. What is commonly called self-sacrifice is the sacrifice of one part of the ego to another part, one set of personal feelings and passions for another set.
• The formation of self bondages are deceptive and look very alluring at first glance.The fanatic may be completely devoted, but in the final analysis his devotion turns out to be directed towards another aspect of his personality. His apparent selflessness is not really a liberation from the ego, but merely another form of bondage.
• The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people, in a word – they are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.” Th curse those bring upon mankind with their "noble ideals".
• The fight for good : where good resides.“Where good is.” “But where is it?” “On the level below the human and on the level above. On the animal level and on the level … well, you can take your choice of names: the level of eternity; the level, if you don’t object, of God; the level of spirit – only that happens to be about the most ambiguous word in the language. On the lower level, good exists as the proper functioning of the organism in accordance with the laws of its own being. On the higher level, it exists in the form of a knowledge of the world without desire or aversion; it exists as the experience of eternity, as the transcendence of personality, the extension of consciousness beyond the limits imposed by the ego. Strictly human activities are activities that prevent the manifestations of good on the other two levels. For, in so far as we’re human, we’re obsessed with time, we’re passionately concerned with our personalities and with those magnified projections of our personalities which we call our policies, our ideals, our religions. And what are the results? Being obsessed with time and our egos, we are for ever craving and worrying. But nothing impairs the normal functioning of the organism like craving and revulsion, like greed and fear and worry. Directly or indirectly, most of our physical ailments and disabilities are due to worry and craving. We worry and crave ourselves into high blood-pressure, heart disease, tuberculosis, peptic ulcer, low resistance to infection, neurasthenia, sexual aberrations, insanity, suicide. Not to mention all the rest.”
• We crave ourslves into addictive ailments of the worst kind one can imagine when the real good is sought on two simple levels, on the level below man, the animal, and the level above commonly called the mystical or ecstatic.
• Huxley writing in the 30's the remarkable book and the methods of attaining to ecstasy .There is just one thing missing in Huxley’s vision – he says that humans have it in their power to transcend personality and reach the level of “God”, but he doesn’t say how … only suggests that it can happen spontaneously on occasions – alternatively it takes a disciplined life of asceticism and contemplation to reach that level, which pretty well precludes the normal life of child-raising and money making … of course the book was written in the thirties, before Huxley had taken psychedelics, so it was fairly remarkable … The mystics had a built in mechanism , a yearning that worked spontaneously usually with out entheogens that indigenous peoples had been using since time immemorial both for healing and visions. AFTER MANY A SUMMER... A remarkable book, anticipating the age of psychedelics.
• The elite of the mystical initiate has a preponderance since the time of the ancients.Exclusively in the hands of th esoteric elite who guarded their secrets zealously.Because they are all stuck in one of these ego-traps which Huxley has so elegantly described in the above excerpts and they don’t want to be “released”, or, to put it another way, to admit the folly of their ways or the fault-lines in their belief-systems – it is an almost insuperable problem in fact … Huxley’s brilliant prose paints a good picture of the transcendent state, but it is a poetic description, as it were. What Bart Huges did was explain the experience in physiological terms. He provided a scientific explanation of the mystical experience, thus bringing within reach of the common man what had previously been a secret guarded by the esoteric elite, the priests and shamans, who protected the sacraments for the exclusive use of initiates I will try and explain Bart’s discoveries. I believe that they provide the answer to this all too human predicament of ours, how to transcend the Ego. I believe that expanded consciousness is the central religious experience. Bart’s explanation of it is an advance on all previous explanations. It explains what is happening in the brain – not that previously religions have stated that as their purpose, but still the concept of God, as expressed by Huxley in the excerpts above, and as expounded by the mystics of all religions, the state of mind in which union with God is experienced, is just that, a state of mind – and Bart’s discoveries explain that in materialistic terms – so it is a big advance on the mystics’ poetic gropings in the dark.

Can Human Nature Be Changed?Health & Happiness — POSTED BY Joe Mellen on December
30, 2009 at 5:57 pm
An introduction to the discoveries of Bart Huges
relating to the economics of the blood supply in the brain, consciousness, LSD,
and trepanation – something new…
Life is a struggle for survival. For plant
or animal of any kind that is an unescapable fact. It is true for each
individual human being, as it is true for the human race. In the course of our
evolution we have become social animals. In society a balance has to be
maintained between the needs of the individual and the group. Individuals must
sacrifice their personal interests to a certain degree for the interests of the
group as a whole. This is ultimately in the best interests of both; it is
entirely reasonable and uncontestable.
Ever since man became a thinking
animal, with the invention of speech, the best minds have been applied to
finding a way to transcend the ego.
The question then arises, how come we
have arrived at the present state of chaos, with human activities threatening
our very survival as a species? The answer to this is actually well known; it is
a result of the struggle between egotism and altruism, in which egotism usually
wins. In an imperfect world the individual puts his own interests ahead of the
group’s.
This is not altogether surprising, because the bottom line is that
nobody else is responsible for your life. There are exceptions to this rule.
People will sacrifice their lives for other people if they are driven by love or
loyalty. Mothers will die protecting their children, so will fathers perhaps,
soldiers will risk their lives to save comrades in arms etc, but in the general
course of life, when push comes to shove, most people will save their own skin.
It is human nature.
Having more blood in the capillaries means there is more
available for the brain cells to use, so more brain cells than normal can
produce consciousness and the total amount of consciousness is
increased.
But, whilst in matters of life and death, it is understandable
that individuals should put their own interests ahead of the group’s, in other
matters that are less extreme, it is less understandable. In fact it is often
short-sighted and counter-productive, the result of stupidity and
wrong-thinking, an inability to see clearly what course of action is really in a
person’s best interests in the long run.
This may be true, but the fact is
that it happens and it is widespread. Unfortunately human behaviour is dominated
by the ego. What can we do about it?
There is no short term answer to this
question. Ever since man became a thinking animal, with the invention of speech,
the best minds have been applied to finding a way to transcend the ego. In the
past this has led to the creation of religions, in which a higher purpose than
personal gain is proposed and the reward of a place amongst the blessed offered
for the postponement of immediate gratification. This has had limited success
and has often led to the establishment of ecclesiastical hierarchies as
tyrannical as the temporal ones they attempt to transcend.
Now the question
arises again – how to persuade people to transcend the ego in their own
interests? Why is it so difficult? Because they are all stuck in one of these
ego-traps which Huxley has so elegantly described in the above excerpts and they
don’t want to be “released”
The very act of transcendence implies a climbing
above. A transcendent state is one on a higher level than the one transcended.
What does this “higher” in fact mean? Some people use the word “spiritual” to
describe this level, implying that it is above the material level. Saints fast
for days on end to achieve a state of enlightenment. By doing without the most
obvious physical need, for food, they endure the temptations of St Anthony to
reach the goal of disinterested awareness. In an enlightened vision the
individual’s needs and desires are subsumed in a common, categorical view of
those of the species as a whole. A feeling of indivisibility with all of life
infuses the mind, an exalted feeling of being at one with the whole of
existence.
In mystical traditions, such as the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life, there
are various stages of development through which the individual can ascend. The
lowest is the material level, the level of the body, then comes the level of
personality, including the moral sphere, and the highest is the level of the
spirit, the transcendent state of mind.
Aldous Huxley wrote a lot about the
idea of transcending the ego and was a pioneer in the taking of LSD. In his book
“After Many a Summer”, written in 1939, his character William Propter expounds
his philosophy. Here are some excerpts from that book, which put in words
exactly the advantages of the transcendent state that I would propose offer the
best chance of overcoming the inbuilt disadvantages of our ego-dominated
existence:
“He had come to this bench under the eucalyptus tree in order to
recollect himself, in order to realize for a moment the existence of that other
consciousness behind his private thoughts and feelings, that free, pure power
greater than his own. He had come for this; but memories had slipped in while he
was off his guard; speculations had started up, cloud upon cloud ……. Bondage is
the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with
tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning. The price of freedom is
eternal vigilance; and he had failed to be vigilant. It wasn’t a case, he
reflected ruefully, of the spirit being willing and the flesh weak. That was
altogether the wrong antithesis. The spirit is always willing, but the person,
who is a mind as well as a body, is always unwilling – and the person,
incidentally, is not weak but extremely strong.”

____________________________________________________________

“For little by little these thoughts and wishes and feelings had settled like a muddy sediment in a jar of water, and as they settled, his vigilance was free to transform itself into a kind of effortless unattached awareness, at once intense and still, alert and passive – an awareness whose object was the words he had spoken and at the same time that which surrounded the words. But that which surrounded the words was the awareness itself; for this vigilance which was now an effortless awareness – what was it but an aspect, a partial expression, of that impersonal and untroubled consciousness into which the words had been dropped and through which they were slowly sinking? And, as they sank they took a new significance for the awareness that was following them down into the depths of itself – a significance new not in respect to the entities connoted by the words, but rather in the mode of their comprehension, which, from being intellectual in character, had become intuitive and direct, so that the nature of man in his potentiality and of God in actuality were realized by an analogue of sensuous experience, by a kind of unmediated participation.
The busy nothingness of his being experienced itself as transcended in the felt capacity for peace and purity, for the withdrawal from revulsion and desires, for the blissful freedom from personality …”
What he is saying is that the only ideal worth pursuing is the ideal of liberation from personality. All other ideals are merely projections, on an enormously enlarged scale, of one or another aspect of personality, be it the artist’s ideal of beauty, the scientists’s ideal of truth, the humanitarian ideal of “goodness”, the political ideal of social justice or the chivalrous ideal of romantic love. What is commonly called self-sacrifice is the sacrifice of one part of the ego to another part, one set of personal feelings and passions for another set. For example the feelings connected with money or sex may be sacrificed so that the ego may have the feelings of superiority, solidarity and hatred which are associated with patriotism or some political or religious fanaticism. The fanatic may be completely devoted, but in the final analysis his devotion turns out to be directed towards another aspect of his personality. His apparent selflessness is not really a liberation from the ego, but merely another form of bondage.
In discussing these things with the young man Pete, the old man (Father William) tells him:
“Scribes and Pharisees aren’t any better, in the last analysis, than publicans and sinners. Indeed they’re often much worse. For several reasons. Being well thought of by others, they think well of themselves; and nothing so confirms an egotism as thinking well of oneself.
……………………………….
The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people, in a word – they are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.”
“Then where ought we to fight for good?”
“Where good is.”
“But where is it?”
“On the level below the human and on the level above. On the animal level and on the level … well, you can take your choice of names: the level of eternity; the level, if you don’t object, of God; the level of spirit – only that happens to be about the most ambiguous word in the language. On the lower level, good exists as the proper functioning of the organism in accordance with the laws of its own being. On the higher level, it exists in the form of a knowledge of the world without desire or aversion; it exists as the experience of eternity, as the transcendence of personality, the extension of consciousness beyond the limits imposed by the ego. Strictly human activities are activities that prevent the manifestations of good on the other two levels. For, in so far as we’re human, we’re obsessed with time, we’re passionately concerned with our personalities and with those magnified projections of our personalities which we call our policies, our ideals, our religions. And what are the results? Being obsessed with time and our egos, we are for ever craving and worrying. But nothing impairs the normal functioning of the organism like craving and revulsion, like greed and fear and worry. Directly or indirectly, most of our physical ailments and disabilities are due to worry and craving. We worry and crave ourselves into high blood-pressure, heart disease, tuberculosis, peptic ulcer, low resistance to infection, neurasthenia, sexual aberrations, insanity, suicide. Not to mention all the rest.”

____________________________________________________________

Now of course this is all very true, but in everyday life, with children and the need to earn a living etc, it is not so easy to avoid the worry and craving – it is easier if you can lead the life of a contemplative! Still, that is the way … and taking acid regularly keeps you in touch both with the animal and “God” …
There is just one thing missing in Huxley’s vision – he says that humans have it in their power to transcend personality and reach the level of “God”, but he doesn’t say how … only suggests that it can happen spontaneously on occasions – alternatively it takes a disciplined life of asceticism and contemplation to reach that level, which pretty well precludes the normal life of child-raising and money making … of course the book was written in the thirties, before Huxley had taken psychedelics, so it was fairly remarkable …
Now the question arises again – how to persuade people to transcend the ego in their own interests? Why is it so difficult? Because they are all stuck in one of these ego-traps which Huxley has so elegantly described in the above excerpts and they don’t want to be “released”, or, to put it another way, to admit the folly of their ways or the fault-lines in their belief-systems – it is an almost insuperable problem in fact …
Huxley’s brilliant prose paints a good picture of the transcendent state, but it is a poetic description, as it were. What Bart Huges did was explain the experience in physiological terms. He provided a scientific explanation of the mystical experience, thus bringing within reach of the common man what had previously been a secret guarded by the esoteric elite, the priests and shamans, who protected the sacraments for the exclusive use of initiates.
In giving an explanation of expanded consciousness and also the Ego’s domination of behaviour, Bart opened the way to a reappraisal of the advantages and disadvantages of the particular adaptation that homo sapiens has made use of to arrive at his present position in evolution, standing in the upright position and talking. It should be said that the explanation flies in the face of a lot of received wisdom.
I will try and explain Bart’s discoveries. I believe that they provide the answer to this all too human predicament of ours, how to transcend the Ego. I believe that expanded consciousness is the central religious experience. Bart’s explanation of it is an advance on all previous explanations. It explains what is happening in the brain – not that previously religions have stated that as their purpose, but still the concept of God, as expressed by Huxley in the excerpts above, and as expounded by the mystics of all religions, the state of mind in which union with God is experienced, is just that, a state of mind – and Bart’s discoveries explain that in materialistic terms – so it is a big advance on the mystics’ poetic gropings in the dark.