Announcer: Welcome to the Neville on Fire podcast. Neville Goddard was a twentieth century spiritual teacher who offered a profound message. Your creative imagination is the very source of reality. As we learn to use it properly, life becomes intelligible and rewarding. Join your host, Ed, to explore our most valuable asset, the human imagination.
Ed: This is episode three, Bernardo Kastrup affinity part one. This is the start of a series to explore the affinity of the thought of Bernardo Kastrup to that of Neville Goddard. And I start out by saying that this is solely my own interpretation. To my knowledge, Bernardo has not pronounced anything about Neville Goddard. Bernardo Kastrup is a philosopher.
I'm reading here from the Wikipedia entry. Born October 1974, Brazilian born Dutch philosopher and computer scientist best known for his work in the field of consciousness studies, particularly his development of analytic idealism. And that's exactly what we're going to be focusing on. Bernardo holds two PhDs, one in computer science and one in philosophy. What is striking in his material is the way he sets out a philosophical argument in a very precise and articulate manner in a way that a non expert can grasp, and he does it also with a sense of humility and a sense of humor. Something that Neville and Bernardo hold in common. They both arrived at the same conclusion, and that is that the world is mental in nature, which leads us to the critique of materialism. Then we can offer a few thoughts about why materialism is so pervasive and so influential in modern society. One point of clarification.
The two systems, Neville's and Bernardo's, I'm not claiming that they're equivalent. They're not. There's important points of discrepancy. It's simply a matter of exploring how Bernardo's argumentation supports so well the foundational elements of Neville Goddard's system of thought, even though they will not agree on all points. And just to reiterate, this is all entirely my own analysis and conclusions.
I'm not aware of anything that Bernardo has ever written or spoken about Neville Goddard. It follows then that any error, any mistake that I make in representing Bernardo Kastrup's thinking is my own fault. It's my own responsibility. So what is it that motivates this comparison between the thought of Bernardo Kastrup and Neville's system? Speaking from the point of view of someone who wants to try to assimilate Neville's worldview and really understand it and live by it, I think it would be helpful to have some confirmation, some validation.
That doesn't mean we need social proof or something like that. It just means that we need to have a better conceptual foundation. And why is that? It's because the first tenet of Neville's thought is very counterintuitive, and that is that the seeming physical universe has something external to the mind and independent of it does not exist. And here, I'm going to quote from Neville from The Power of Awareness chapter two. "Nature then as a thing or a complex of things external to your mind must be rejected". He says it right there in black and white. Well, that was written back in 1952. So fast forward to contemporary times, Bernardo Kastrup says similarly that contrary to overwhelming cultural consensus, the outer physical world does not really exist in a material sense. His system of thought called Analytic Idealism characterizes all that we take to be the material world as mind, and only mind.
So since about 2013, when Bernardo published his book Why Materialism is Baloney, he has rigorously argued this, citing conclusions from modern physics to support his case. Well, to look at how materialism fails, we're going against a very powerful social narrative, a sort of cultural consensus.
We live in a very superstitious age. That's the ironic thing for all our science and technology. The most prevalent superstition is materialism, which really has the mind of modern man in a vice like grip. Now, why do I call it a superstition? The reason we call it a superstition is because when you look at it objectively, it simply collapses whether in the face of empirical evidence or in the face of coherent logic.
So on its own terms as a science, as a rational logical argument, the whole thing simply cannot hold water. Well, I'm getting ahead of myself. I should really present the evidence first, right? So this is both an imperfect summary of some of Bernardo's material, as well as things that I have already read and put together. I'm going to put links in the show notes so that you can follow-up and see Bernardo's explanation, and that way you'll get a full definitive account.
Materialism has two aspects. One of them is what we could call sense based thinking. And this is simply the ordinary intuitive frame of mind that we all have, whereby what we perceive we assume to be reality. And it's pretty easy to demonstrate that that's just false. There's a huge discrepancy between what we know to be reality, whatever its nature, and what we perceive through the five senses.
So for example, we don't perceive the full spectrum of light. We don't perceive the full spectrum of electromagnetic radiation or sound. We don't perceive the actual position of the sun in the sky because there's a discrepancy that's introduced by the fact that it takes eight minutes for the light to reach our eyes from the sun. So we see the sun where it was eight minutes ago. Now this critique of the ordinary sense based thinking is familiar to anyone who's read Maurice Nicoll's Living Time, for example.
So this sort of critique is good as far as it goes, but it's really not enough to overturn our belief in an external physical world. We still believe that the books and tables and chairs in front of us really occupy physical space and have an independent existence. And the problem is just in the nature of our sensory apparatus. Somehow our sense organs are really not finely attuned to reality. And that's why we're perceiving things in a skewed way.
So in order to really challenge materialism, we have to go to its second aspect, and that is to consider its official philosophical argument, which Bernardo tells us is called physicalism. As Bernardo explains, science has progressed in its investigation of the foundation of physics. And over many experiments done over many decades with all kinds of loopholes and conditions being controlled for and discounted, the inescapable conclusion is that matter does not actually have its own standalone existence. So it's a very strange position to find yourself in where matter is not something that you can call an empirical observation. What we took to be physical matter turns out to be only a conjecture or a hypothesis.
So the whole thesis of materialism very quickly gets into hot water. Because first of all, the materialists would propose that physical forms as perceived are actually indicative of the things in and of themselves. But then the materialists contend that quality such as color are not perceived as the thing in and of itself, but are created in the brain. So according to the materialists, a comprehensive description of reality is achieved by an aggregation of measurements. But then you find yourself in a strange situation where that which is described, like color or consciousness, for example, arises from the description.
In other words, the redness of an apple, for example, cannot be admitted. It has to be described and comprehended only by the vibration frequency of the color red in the light spectrum. The experience of I am, of consciousness, can only be accounted for by some brain measurement. So Bernardo suggests an analogy to illustrate this fallacy. It's like an artist painting a self portrait that is a representation of oneself, and then points to the portrait and says, "I am that portrait".
Now, Bernardo didn't say this, but is it possible that in the mindset of a materialist scientist who's conducting this sort of experimentation, there is really no self awareness, and therefore there's no consideration of the phenomenon of consciousness. It took a long time for consciousness even to be admitted as something that was worthy of discussion and of inquiry. The materialist scientist prefers to think of consciousness only in terms of what can be measured physically, like brain wave patterns. And so naturally they come up with a hypothesis that consciousness is produced by the brain, and that brain activity as measured with various instruments is synonymous or perfectly correlated with mental activity. Well, there is a correlation, but it's not perfect.
When there's one anomaly, it discounts the entire theory. Bernardo explains, when people are undergoing hallucinogenic experiences, which are extraordinarily vivid and are very energetic in terms of the subjective experience, the measured brain activity is actually greatly reduced, it's diminished. So there's no question that while there is some correlation, it's not absolute, and therefore some other explanation has to be found. As Doctor. Rolf Alexander wrote back in 1954, quote, "The human mind is not examinable as a physical system...
...It is not possible to measure it quantitatively as a form of energy and all attempts to find a scale of equivalence between conscious experience and energy have been fruitless." Can we imagine that things have changed in the intervening years because the instrumentation has gotten better? No, the whole thing is a conceptual problem. The materialist scientist says, in effect, (if mind can even be admitted to directly perceive qualities), well then that mind has invented something called scientific materialism. Whatever it measures must remain devoid of qualities, but be merely an aggregate of measured quantities.
The mind of the scientist then uses that same science to account for qualities like redness or consciousness itself by placing them inside the brain. But then the brain can only be another artifact in the measured physical universe - which is devoid of qualities! So it's like a dog chasing its tail, exactly as Bernardo explains. So materialist scientists have tried to rescue the situation by accounting for mind through something called constitutive panpsychism. This is what Bernardo explains.
The idea is to attribute to the smallest particles of matter the quality of consciousness itself. So every electron, every atom, every molecule has its own degree or amount of consciousness as an attribute, and somehow this all aggregates to become the human mind. Well, there are huge problems with this argumentation, and Bernardo explains them. But even if it were somehow plausible, the problem remains that the whole thing is still materialism. The little particles, subatomic particles and so forth, they don't exist as particles.
That's just a convention of speech. What are referred to as particles are simply effects, like the ripples in a pond. You cannot attribute to larger and ever larger chunks of matter the quality of consciousness because these particulate bits don't even exist. So on balance of the evidence developed over decades of experimentation and the examination of logical argument, we can see that materialism, that is the explanation of matter, something called matter as physical stuff that occupies space independent of the human mind, simply is not a tenable hypothesis. Even so, it's rather rare for scientists to concede to the results of their own research.
It's difficult for us in ordinary daily life to escape the whole mindset of materialism. But why is that? And has it always been that way? First of all, we're very much impressed by the results of science and technology. In other words, technology will take the conclusions of science and be able to manipulate seeming physical things and produce amazing effects.
There's no question of that. But that does not get to the heart of the matter. That does not prove anything about the nature of the material that we're working with. Bernardo talks about how this has developed historically. So materialism is pervasive in the mindset of the West because it goes hand in hand with historical development, socialism, communism, the industrial, technological, informational, and digital revolutions.
So all of these vast cultural influences have established themselves in the psyche of modern man. Materialism is a cultural construct that pervades all aspects of conceptualization so that we're really tainted by it, in a sense. Believing ourselves to have escaped from it, if we have religious beliefs, nevertheless, we still have it as a foundation in our thinking. It took decades, if not hundreds of years to build this up as a foundation in the mind when it is really an artificial construct. Well, let's go over what we covered today.
What I propose is that we review some aspects of Bernardo Kastrup's system of Analytic Idealism in order to elucidate foundation pieces of Neville's worldview. The one that we were really concerned with in today's episode is the idea that the physical universe, as something external to the mind and independent of it, does not really exist. It's so difficult to understand and to internalize! And that's why it's helpful to turn our attention to Bernardo Kastrup's argumentation along these lines. He also contends that the physical universe does not exist as a separate, independent entity outside the human mind.
In order to substantiate that argument, we saw not only evidence resulting from decades of research in particle physics, but also logical argumentation. And the result of all that was to show that materialism or physicalism is really untenable. For a more comprehensive formulation of this argument, I urge you to follow-up on the links to Bernardo's materials, which I will put in the show notes. In the next episode, we'll take a look at the other foundational piece in Neville's worldview that we wanted to examine, and see again how Bernardo's Analytic Idealism can help shed light on it.
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