10/31 The Economics of Reunion

Reading for this class
1. Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics, pp. 157-248
2. Sylvia Chi, "This is how to pay for the Green New Deal"

Notes on Usury, Debt Peonage, Debt Jubilee and Public Banking

§1. Def. “Usury” - the charging of interest on money, or “the abuse of the money system for personal gain, by charging interest on the use of money” (Stephen Zarlenga) If money is just a technology for trading, why is it destroying the world? “Usury is the very antithesis of the gift, for instead of giving to others when one has more than one needs, usury seeks to use the power of ownership to gain even more - to take from others rather than to give.” (Sacred Economic, p.94)

§2. Interest creates structural scarcity (artificial scarcity) in money supply 

Money created as interest-bearing debt owed to a bank creates a chronic shortage of money in the economy since the money to service the interest was never created. Incentivizes “competition, insecurity and greed”and perpetual growth. (e.g. Bernard Lietaer’s parable “The Eleventh Round” in Eisenstein, p.95)

Three outcomes to the parable: 

1. default (transfer of wealth from debtors to creditors - “consolidation” 
2. growth in the money supply (via economic growth - new bank loans to wealth-generating activities) new debt to pay down old debt: “Any time money is created through debt, a need to create even more money in the future is also created. The amount of money must grow over time, which means that the volume of goods and services must grow over time as well.” How usury drives the extractive economy, requiring the transformation of natural, social, spiritual and cultural capital (The Commons) into financial capital. 
3. Redistribution of wealth (progressive tax, fiscal spending, debt jubilee, revolution - the 1930s New Deal as a compromise between the creditor and debtor classes to save the ‘system.’

§3. Imposes hidden tax on society

(a) “In 2013 this cost the US government $416 billion in interest charges on the national debt – about 11% of the annual federal budget. Not to mention the interest the banks also charge against all the private borrowings. So the banker creation of fiat money acts like a private tax on all of society, to the benefit of the banks with the privilege to create such money. This has spread poverty and has concentrated wealth to obscene levels.” 

(b) “The U.S. federal debt has more than doubled since the 2008 financial crisis, shooting up from $9.4 trillion in mid-2008 to over $22 trillion in April 2019. The debt is never paid off. The government just keeps paying the interest on it, and interest rates are rising. Projections are that by 2027 U.S. taxpayers will owe $1 trillion annually just in interest on the federal debt. That is enough to fund President Donald Trump’s trillion-dollar infrastructure plan every year, and it is a direct transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy investors holding most of the bonds.”

§4. Makes rich richer and poor poorer

If interest grows faster than economic growth, the wealth of the creditor class will grow faster than the debtor class, concentrating wealth at the top. Debt always grows faster because it grows exponentially (“hockey stick curve”) whereas economies grow linearly following an S-curve.

- Creates permanent debt peonage for the masses

- Debt servitude - a person's pledge of their labor or services as repayment for a loan or other debt. 

- An effective way to enslave people by making them feel responsible for their own indebtedness.

§5. The 5,000 year history of debt peonage

“Debts that cannot be paid will not be paid. The only question is how they won’t be paid.” - Michael Hudson. 

“A study of the long sweep of history reveals a universal principle to be at work: The burden of debt tends to expand in an agrarian society to the point where it exceeds the ability of debtors to pay. That has been the major cause of economic polarization from antiquity to modern times. The basic principle that should guide economic policy is recognition that debts which can’t be paid, won’t be. The great political question is, how won’t they be paid? There are two ways not to pay debts. Our economic mainstream still believes that all debts must be paid, leaving them on the books to continue accruing interest and fees – and to let creditors foreclose when they do not receive the scheduled interest and amortization payment. This is what the U.S. President Obama did after the 2008 crisis. Homeowners, credit-card customers and other debtors had to start paying down the debts they had run up. About 10 million families lost their homes to foreclosure. Leaving the debt overhead in place meant stifling and polarizing the economy by transferring property from debtors to creditors. Today’s legal system is based on the Roman Empire’s legal philosophy upholding the sanctity of debt, not its cancellation. Instead of protecting debtors from losing their property and status, the main concern is with saving creditors from loss, as if this is a prerequisite for economic stability and growth. Moral blame is placed on debtors, as if their arrears are a personal choice rather than stemming from economic strains that compel them to run into debt simply to survive.”

§6. “Mainstream economic models leave this problem to “the invisible hand of the market,” assuming trends will self-correct over time. But while the market may indeed correct, it does so at the expense of the debtors, who become progressively poorer as the rich become richer. Borrowers go bankrupt and banks foreclose on the collateral, dispossessing the debtors of their homes and their livelihoods. The houses are bought by the rich at distress prices and are rented back at inflated prices to the debtors, who are then forced into wage peonage to survive. When the banks themselves go bankrupt, the government bails them out. Thus the market corrects, but not without government intervention. That intervention just comes at the end of the cycle to rescue the creditors, whose ability to buy politicians gives them the upper hand.”

§7. Documented Periodic Debt Jubilees in the ancient Near East

“Sumerian kings solved the problem of “peak debt” by periodically declaring “clean slates,” in which agrarian debts were forgiven and debtors were released from servitude to work as tenants on their own plots of land. The land belonged to the gods under the stewardship of the temple and the palace and could not be sold, but farmers and their families maintained leaseholds to it in perpetuity by providing a share of their crops, service in the military and labor in building communal infrastructure. In this way, their homes and livelihoods were preserved, an arrangement that was mutually beneficial, since the kings needed their service.” (Ibid.)

§8. How do create a modern debt jubilee?

“One possibility is to nationalize … banks and sell their bad loans to the central bank, which can buy them with money created on its books. The loans can then be written down or voided out. Precedent for this policy was established with “QE1,” the Fed’s first round of quantitative easing, in which it bought unmarketable mortgage-backed securities from banks with liquidity problems…. “Another possibility would be to use money generated by the central bank to bail out debtors directly. This could be done selectively, by buying up student debt or credit card debt or car loans bundled as “asset-backed securities,” then writing the debts down or off, for example. Alternatively, debts could be relieved collectively with a periodic national dividend or universal basic income paid to everyone, again drawn from the deep pocket of the central bank.” (Ibid.)

§9. Won’t creating free money lead to inflation

“Critics will object that this would dangerously inflate the money supply and consumer prices, but that need not be the case. Today, virtually all money is created as bank debt, and it is extinguished when the debt is repaid. That means dividends used to pay this debt down would be extinguished, along with the debt itself, without adding to the money supply. For the 80% of the U.S. population now carrying debt, loan repayments from their national dividends could be made mandatory and automatic. The remaining 20% would be likely to save or invest the funds, so this money too would contribute little to consumer price inflation; and to the extent that it did go into the consumer market, it could help generate the demand needed to stimulate productivity and employment.” (Ibid.)

10/29 Usury, Debt Peonage and De-commodified Money

Readings for this class
1. Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics, Chapters 6 & 7.
2. Ellen Brown, "The Key to a Sustainable Economy is 5,000 Years Old"
3. Michael Hudson lecture on money and debt (below).

Notes on Property Ownership, the Commons and the Fate of Community

§1. Privatization of the Commons

Starting with the Romans in the west, followed by Enclosure in the 16th C. Europe;  The conversion of “what was once sacred, unique and personal into the status of a commodity” (Sacred Economics, 68) 

The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? - Chief Seattle’s Letter

§2. Roman concept of private ownership includes three senses of right:

1. Usus (use) is the right to use or enjoy a thing possessed, directly and without altering it.

2. Fructus (fruit, in a figurative sense) is the right to derive profit from a thing possessed: for instance, by selling crops, leasing immovables or annexed movables, taxing for entry, and so on.

3. Abusus (literally abuse), the right to alienate the thing possessed, either by consuming or destroying it (e.g. for profit), or by transferring it to someone else (e.g. sale, exchange, gift).  

§3. John Locke’s Theory of Acquisition in Two Treatises on Government (1689)

"Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.”

This theory rests on the concept of an autonomous self: Self-ownership allows a person the freedom to mix his or her labor with natural resources, thus converting common property into private property. Locke concludes that people need to be able to protect the resources they are using to live on, their property, and that this is a natural right, provided others are not worse off.

§4. A modern formulation by the libertarian anarchist Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State and Utopia 1974)

“Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.”

§5. Critique of land ownership

The earth belongs in usufruct to the living, and that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” - Thomas Jefferson

Henry George: “But who made the earth that any man can claim such ownership of it, or any part of it, or the right to give, sell, or bequeath it? Since the earth was not made by us, but is only a temporary dwelling place on which one generation of men follow another; since we find ourselves here, are manifestly here with equal permission of the Creator, it is manifest that no one can have any exclusive right of ownership in land, and that the rights of all men to land must be equal and inalienable.” - Idea for the “Single Tax” - economic rent tax on the value of land, not on the uses or products created on the land (buildings or crops).

Privatization of the Cultural, Spiritual and Social Capital 

§6. Cultural Commons (i.e. “intellectual property”) Lewis Mumfold: “A patent is a device that enables one man to claim special financial rewards for being the last link in the complicated social process that produced the invention.”

§7. Privatization of Spiritual Capital: “Locus of attention…our mental and sensuous capacities, the ability to concentrate, to create worlds of the imagination and to derive pleasure from experiencing life.”

§8. Privatization of Social Capital: “…relationships and skills, the services that people once provided for themselves and each other in a gift economy, such as cooking, child care, health care, hospitality, entertainment, advice, the growing of food, the making of clothes, the building of houses.”

§9. Catherine Austin Fitts’ “popsicle index”: “The Popsicle Index is the % of people in a community who believe that a child can leave their home, go to the nearest place to buy a Popsicle and come home alone safely. When I was a child growing up in West Philadelphia in the 1950's, the Popsicle Index was 100%. We were a modest neighborhood, even poor by some standards. But we were rich in safety. Today, after years of federal government supported drug trafficking and subsidy and loan programs, the moms in my old neighborhood probably feel the Popsicle Index is about 0%.”

§10. Community, can’t be purchased, rooted in gifts

The word "community" is derived from the Old French communité which is derived from the Latin communitas (com, "with/together" + munus, "gift"), a broad term for fellowship or organized society. 

“Community is woven from gifts. Unlike today's market system, whose built-in scarcity compels competition in which more for me is less for you, in a gift economy the opposite holds. Because people in gift culture pass on their surplus rather than accumulating it, your good fortune is my good fortune: more for you is more for me. Wealth circulates, gravitating toward the greatest need. In a gift community, people know that their gifts will eventually come back to them, albeit often in a new form. Such a community might be called a "circle of the gift.”” [Eisenstein]

§11. Modern Economics generates financial wealth through the conversion of natural, cultural, social and spiritual capital.

The Corporation as a machine for internalizing profits and externalizing costs. With one hand, corporations take valuable stuff from the commons and privatize it. With the other hand, they dump bad stuff into the commons and pay nothing. The result is profits for corporations but a steady loss for everyone else, to whom the commons belong.

Example of corporate piracy of the commons: The government give-away of the ownership rights to the electromagnetic spectrum in 1995. 

§12. Tools for reclaiming the Commons

A. Decommodification of Land ”...A Community Land Trust is a not-for-profit organization with membership open to any resident of the geographical region or bioregion where it is located. The purpose of a CLT is to create a democratic institution to hold land and to retain the use-value of the land for the benefit of the community. The effect of a CLT is to provide affordable access to land for housing, farming, small businesses, and civic projects. This effect can be achieved when a significant portion of the land in an area is held by a CLT. - Bob Swann, “Land: Challenge and Opportunity”

B. Strengthening common property rights (for airspeeds, watersheds, other ecosystems), overhaul management, make polluters and broadcasters pay, e.g. the Alaska Permanent Fund, this year paid $1600 dividend to residents. 

C. The Idea for a Social Dividend: Thomas Paine’s Proposal for a “social dividend” ; Compensation for an individual's loss of her portion of the Commons) Beyond social security, this idea is being explored currently with the concept of Universal Basic Income, related to a negative income tax.

D. De-commodification of Money: Public Banks, Nationalizing the FED, national and regional community currency systems.

Second Paper Topics for PH270

Due: Monday, November 11th

Length: 5 pages (min.)

Format: Argumentative

References: Use at least two sources from class and two outside sources. 

Submit: Via email to justin@oursanctuary.org 

Note on Form: If you are addressing a yes/no question in your second paper, you are invited to employ a dialectical form, meaning that you develop your argument by making the strongest case you can for the opposing view, and then offering a critique of the opposing view based on evidence and arguments you construct to support your position.  

Permaculture and Indigenous Worldview

1. Permaculture offers an integrated design framework for sustainability based on the foundational issue of soil fertility, but expanding to include all dimensions of human life. Explore the permaculture design system by focussing on a specific environmental problem that could be potentially resolved or mitigated using permaculture principles.

2. In her study of Ladakh in Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, Helena Norberg-Hodge argues that modern ideas about process and human happiness are actually making people less happy, and undermining the conditions which lead to living a peaceful and meaningful life. What is her argument and is she correct? If so, why? If not, why not? In your response, make use of Norberg-Hodge’s analysis.

3. Are there ethical principles, ecological practices and/or social arrangements in indigenous societies which have supported their long-term environmental sustainability and which may be necessary for modern societies to retrieve to save themselves from ecological collapse?

4. While modern classical economics posts a fundamental scarcity of resources for human life, indigenous societies rooted in gift economics experience an abundance of "resources" for humans. What are the social, economic and/or ecological ramifications of these differing worldviews and which can support the future of human civilization?

Theory of Value and Cosmology

5. Is Nature Sacred?   

6. Is acknowledgment of a sacred, or spiritual, dimension to nature and relationships a necessary aspect of a culture which supports environmental sustainability? Some thinkers, termed “deep ecologists” (E.g. E.F. Schumacher, Christopher Alexander, Charles Eisenstein) within the environmental philosophy movement, have argued that environmental degradation is predicted on a materialistic cosmology which denies inherent, or sacred, value in nature. Is this true? If so, why? If not, Why not?

7. Is each Self separate from other selves or is each self inherently connected to other selves? What bearing does this question have for a cosmology which supports human happiness and environmental regeneration?

8. Does creating an environmentally-sustainable and non-violent civilization require, as Charles Eisenstein argues, the restoration of the Spirit of Gift Economics? If so, is this a plausible suggestion, and how might it be undertaken as a realistic project?

Money, Banking and Growth

9. Philosophy of Money: Where does money come from, and why does it matter for environmental sustainability? Public banking, nationalizing America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve Bank, as well as community currencies are all ways people are developing to restore the “Money Power” to democratic control. Make use of any of the documents posted on our blog to develop your paper.  Other questions related to money that you can write on: 

Are we ethically-obligated to pay back our debts? 

Is there an essential systemic connection between monetary systems and violence? 

What is usury, and is it a sin?

Is global debt peonage a justifiable result of monetary systems or an ethical abomination? Should commercial banks have the power to issue new money? 

Should the FED be nationalized? 

Should there be a global debt jubilee?

Environmental Aesthetics and the Theory of Unfolding Wholeness

10. Environmental Aesthetics and Theory of Value - Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? The Theory of Unfolding Wholeness implies that our perception of beauty in nature is objective and quantifiable as the density of life (interacting centers of live as living form), thus challenging the modernist principle of the subjectivity of beauty as a value. Does the theory of unfolding wholeness developed by Christopher Alexander offer a compelling refutation of modernist views of aesthetics?

11. Phenomenological Study of Beauty as Unfolding Wholeness. Spend 4-6 hours in SILENT EXPLORATION of the Wesleyan campus (or somewhere else) as a PLACE of intersection between a human environment (a built environment within which humans do things, work, study, communicate, eat, etc. and the larger natural environment. Your objective will be to use your intuitive feelings to help you measure the contrasting degrees of LIFE in different places around campus. You are looking to find two places: (1) the PLACE-THAT-FEELS-MOST-ALIVE, and (2) the PLACE-THAT-FEELS-LEAST-ALIVE. What do I mean by “alive”? I do NOT mean the place that has the most biological beings living there, or the most natural place. I mean the place that makes you feel most alive, most at home in the world there, that is relaxing, that allows you to feel connected to the place and to yourself, and that gives you a feeling of living beauty. It is suggested that you DO NOT SPEAK OR VERBALLY COMMUNICATE during your search. Language (a feature of the left-brain) suppresses the feelings (created by the right-brain) and makes it more difficult for your intuitive FEELINGS to guide your perception of living form. During or after your silent exploration, ask yourself: how do I express/represent life or the lack of life in this Place? Use as many of the 15 properties of wholeness as you can in your project. Write a paper on your experience, using it to explicate the theory of wholeness.

12. The Meaning of Environmental Aesthetics: The theory of wholeness suggests that the deepest expressions of beauty in the natural and built environment correspond to the condition of COHERENCE between systems. As I discussed during a presentation, this suggests a structural connection between ecological well-being, and our perceptions of both ethics as well as beauty. In your paper, explore the importance of beauty perception as a tool for understanding environmental sustainability in however manner you find relevant.

13. Make you own topic up, just check it with me first!

10/22 Land, Property Ownership and the Commons

Readings for this class

1. Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics, Chapters 4 & 5.

2. Bob Swann and Susan Witt, "Land: Challenge and Opportunity"

Recommended

3. Peter Barnes, "The State of the Commons"

4. Bob Swann, "Land Reform as Community Land Trust"

5. E. F. Schumacher Society information about Land Trusts

10/17 Gift Economics Case Study: Ladakh

Texts for class
1. Interview with Helena Norberg-Hodge
2. Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics, Chapters 4 & 5.
3. We will be screening the film posted below. If you miss this class you can rent it on your own through vimeo.

Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh from The Economics of Happiness on Vimeo.

Notes on Gift Economics and Money

Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics   

A. The Spirit of the Gift  

1. Sacredness and Money - Uniqueness and Relatedness versus money as abstract, comparative, quantitative, anonymous. Money as destroying sacredness of things and beings: Money as homogeneous, purely quantitative, homogenizes everything it touches. Money turns things into commodities - things equal (in value) to the money that can buy/replace them. Money turns unique individuals into producers and consumers - people who despite all their complex differences and unique motivations all want the same thing: money. Biology infected with the same ideology: selfish genes maximizing reproductive self-interest.

2. The Spirit of the Gift: Life as a Gift - gratitude as a response; talents as gifts, meant to be developed, giving life purpose; gifts are meant to be shared. 

3. Gift economies as the origin of money, not barter; Adam Smith’s story from The Wealth of Nations (1776) fails to find confirmation by economic anthropology. Barter/money as forms of exchange versus gifting as circulation (e.g. The Trobriand Islanders’ kula system.)

4. Surplus is always shared. “Gifts flow continuously, only stopping in their circulation when they meet a real, present need…. “Our generosity may leave us empty, but our emptiness then pulls gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us. Social nature abhors a vacuum.” (Lewis Hyde quoted by C.E. p.7)

5. Gifts create connection (bonding and obligation - open-ended) versus exchange (money/barter) which maintains equality as separateness (closed out-finished). Gifts widen the ‘circle of the self.’ System coherence as a ‘web of gifts.’

6. The word "community" is derived from the Old French communité which is derived from the Latin communitas (com, "with/together" + munus, "gift"), a broad term for fellowship or organized society.

B. Scarcity

7. Is the lack of money necessary for “making a living” the result of greed or of the design (intended or otherwise) of the monetary system? 

8. Is scarcity a true premise of economic/biological realities or a protection of the false ideology of modern economics (modern materialism, the modern ‘story of the separate self (ego)’? 

9. Is the world economy unable to support the human population due to scarcity or due to waste? Does greed lead to wealth or does wealth make people greedy?

Forms of waste: military, McMansions, industrial food system, planned obsolescence, overconsumption.

10. Scarcity as a creation of economic growth: e.g. free and abundant versus costly bottled water, childcare as abundant in village life versus a costly expense for modern families; time as infinite versus never enough.

C. Money

11. Theories of the origin of money: markets (evolving from limitations of barter), governments (legal tender for tax purposes/financing standing armies), religion (offering to the temple), extension of the gift economy (money as a token of gratitude). 

12. Functions of money as a tool/ technology

(a) A medium of exchange

(b) A store of value

(c) A unit of measurement

(d) Source of political and social power

13. Essence of money

(1) as a commodity, such as gold or silver - Money as a thing

(2) as a legal concept created by legislation - Money as an agreement, I.e. an IOU.

14. “Money has value because of skilled people, resources, and infrastructure, working together in a supportive social and legal framework. Money is the indispensable lubricant that lets them “run.” It is not tangible wealth in itself, but a power to obtain wealth. Money is an abstract social power based in law; and whatever government accepts in payment of taxes will be money. Money’s value is not created by the private corporations that now control it. As Aristotle wrote: “Money exists not by nature but by law.”

C. Source of money: fractional reserve banking

15. “In our present system, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, one of the 12 private Federal Reserve branch banks, begins the process by creating money out of thin air. Then using this money as a reserve base, the rest of the banks create about ten or more times that amount of money out of thin air by what’s called “fractional reserve banking.” When banks issue loans, they are creating money (as debt). By deciding who gets the money, and how cheap that money is, they get to decide the direction our society grows in.”

I.e. Banks turn private IOUs into money by guaranteeing your IOUs to the larger market. 

16. “The power to create money is an awesome power – at times stronger than the Executive, Legislative and Judicial powers combined. It’s like having a “magic checkbook,” where checks can’t bounce. When controlled privately it can be used to gain riches, but much more importantly it determines the direction of our society by deciding where the money goes – what gets funded and what does not. Will it be used to build and repair vital infrastructure such as the New Orleans levees and Minneapolis bridges to protect major cities? Or will it go into warfare and real estate loans creating the real estate bubble – leading to a crash and depression…” (HR6550)

Footnote to the Theory of Unfolding Wholeness

For anyone interested, this is a famous debate between Christopher Alexander and one of his critics, Peter Eisenman, which offers a dialectical treatment of the topic. 

10/15 Introduction to Sacred Economics

Reading for this class
Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics, pp. 1-68

Notes on the Epistemology of Reincarnation

1. Article on Jim Tucker’s research into past-life memories of children

2. Jim Tucker on possible explanations of “past-life memories”

2. Andreas Sommer, "Anomalies and the 'Scientific Community': What Research on Alleged Reincarnation Cases can Teach us about Myths of Scientific Practice." 

3. Ian Stevenson on the Evidence for Reincarnation

3. Documentary on Eben Alexander’s Near Death Experience

4. Controlled Remote Viewing: The CIA’s successful Program at Stanford Research Institute to weaponize psychic functioning

Controversial TEDTalk about Psychic Abilities | Russell Targ from SuzanneTaylor on Vimeo.

Notes on the Epistemology of Reincarnation, NDEs and Non-Local Mind

1. What is good evidence? 

“One such piece of evidence might be this. A Japanese woman might claim to remember living a life as a Celtic hunter and warrior in the Bronze Age. On the basis of her apparent memories she might make many predictions which could be checked by archaeologists. Thus she might claim to remember having a bronze bracelet, shaped like two fighting dragons. And she might claim that she remembers burying this bracelet beside some particular megalith, just before the battle in which she was killed. Archaeologists might now find just such a bracelet buried in this spot, and at least 2,000 years old. This Japanese woman might make many other such predictions, all of which are verified.” Actually, the evidence is much better than this!

2. The distinction between Evidence and Proof

Logically speaking, no scientific hypothesis can be proved due to the Problem of Induction, i.e. all predictions refer to the future which has yet to occur. Evidence can be found which supports or undermines an hypothesis, but never evidence which conclusively proves an hypothesis. E.g. there is much evidence but no ‘proof’ that cigarette smoking causes cancer. An hypothesis is considered ‘proved’ when all alternative hypotheses have been disproved (aka “critical realism”).

3. Epistemic objections to studying ‘paranormal’ phenomena

4. “This is not a rational or scientific phenomenon.” 

Ideological debunking versus real skepticism (being fair and open-minded, open to evidence, open to questioning background assumptions like materialism) - ideological debunking conflates (confuses together) the scientific method (a procedure for empirical/logically verifying beliefs) with scientism (the view of science as a metaphysical belief system not open to being questioned)

5. “Consciousness cannot exist separate from the physical brain so all of this is just impossible.”

1. This objection expresses the metaphysical postulate of materialism, sometimes called physicalism, which holds that to be real is to be measurable or empirically quantifiable - this is a methodological assumption made by scientists but not provable or valid unconditionally. Many scientists believe that the advent of quantum mechanics as already refuted the materialist postulate, e.g. Max Planck (co-founder of quantum mechanics) “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.” 

2. Easy vs Hard Problem of Consciousness (David Chalmers) holds that there is currently no scientific explanation for why or how or if the brain creates consciousness; neural correlates of consciousness only tell us what is going on in the brain during experience, not what is producing the experience. 

3. There is much positive evidence for non-local consciousness (awareness not linked to or limited by the sensory organs of a human body, e.g. the Sense of Being Stared At, Distance Healing, Telekinesis (e.g. test to affect random number generators), and psychic functioning generally, e.g. Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV), the CIA-developed program to weaponize psychic functioning.

6. Kinds of Evidence for the Continuance of Consciousness/Self/Soul outside of (separable from) and before/after death of body self. 

7. Near Death Experience (NDE) Witness testimony to Out-of-Body Experience (OBE), between life review process, encounters with spirit beings, choosing new lives, etc.

8. Interesting data-points: information received through NDE that was not previously known or could not have been known by witness; radical change in behavior and life attitude after NDE; third-party witnesses. 

9. Objections: merely ‘anecdotal’ information or violation of the postulate of materialism; ad hominem critique of the motives of someone who believes in the veracity of the NDE.

10. Regression Hypnosis Use of the officially sanctioned medical procedure of hypnosis to retrieve memories of past lives.

11. Interesting data-points: Emotionally-charged response to memories; therapeutic efficacy in retrieving the past life trauma, i.e. leading to real healing and behavior modifications; retrieval of information which should not be known by witness

12. Objections: Non-objective (suggestive) nature of hypnosis, non-quantifiable or ‘merely anecdotal’ nature of first-person reports. 

13. Scientific Studies of Children with spontaneous memories of seeming past lives (Dr. Ian Stevenson's research framework)

Components of the “Complete” Case of the reincarnation type

1. Prediction by a dying or elderly person about parents and/or circumstances desired for the next reincarnation

2. Announcing dream

3. Birthmarks or birth defects corresponding to physical textures or wounds of the deceased person.

4. Statements by the subject about persons, places and events of the previous life.

5. Unusual behavior corresponding to behavior shown by the presumed previous personality, phobias, philias, aversions, e.g. phobia of the instrument or mode of death or phobia of the site of death.

6. Vengefulness and Inclinations to Crime related to features of a previous life.

7. Play in childhood corresponding to vocation of a previous life.

15. Alternative Hypotheses of the phenomenon 

A) Normal Interpretations

1. Fraud

2. Fantasy

3. Cyptonesia (source getting information then forgetting how)

4. Paramnesia (source being influenced by witnesses, e.g. family)

5. Genetic memory

B) Interpretations that include paranormal/non-physical? processes

6. Extrasensory perception + dev of secondary personality

7. Possession / imposition of false memories into subject

8. Accessing genetic memory via non-local consciousness

9. Reincarnation

Requirements for a Case to be considered Strong Evidence

1. The subject’s statements correctly correspond to events in the life of only one deceased person.

2. The two previous families had no previous knowledge of each other

3. The subject’s statements were recorded before verification

4. The case was investigated with a few weeks or months of its development.

10/9 Transpersonal Architecture

Texts for this class

1. Stan Grof, "Science and Spirituality: Observations from Modern Consciousness Research"

2. Alex Grey, "What is Visionary Art?"

3. Christopher Alexander, "The Mirror of the Self" from The Nature of Order, Vol. 1 (excerpts)

1. ”For three hundred years our mechanistic world view has disconnected us from our selves. We have a picture of the universe that is powerful and apparently accurate, but no clear sense of how we, our own selves, enter into this picture. We have a disconnected vision of reality, which seems secure, which seems strong and objective – but which leaves me out. My experience of self, my own actual person, my existence of self, my own actual person, my existence as I experience it every day is not part of the “objective” world-picture. So, in my daily encounter with the world, I have to make do with a world-picture that fails to connect me to the world. I flail around in it and struggle… In the new world picture based on wholeness and the structure of centers, the connection between the outer or objective world and my experience of the self is profound and immediate. It makes sense. It is pervasive. It is direct.

AN EMPIRICAL TEST FOR COMPARING THE DEGREE OF LIFE OF DIFFERENT CENTERS

2. “To decide objectively which centers have more life and which ones have less life, we need an experimental method that allows people to escape from the trap of subjective preference, and to concentrate instead on the real liking they feel…. How can this be done? Is there a way of seeing life or wholeness in a building which allows the observer to see life or wholeness clearly as a quality in the object, and to rise above overlays of learned preference, inexperience, opinion, and bias?

3. “I believe there is. The methods I propose make use of the fact that each one of us, as an observer, is directly tuned to the phenomenon of wholeness, and is able to see both wholeness itself and the degree to which it is present in any given situation. It accomplishes this awareness of wholeness, by asking people for a judgment which comes directly from their own feeling. I do not mean by this that we ask someone, “Which one do you feel is best?” I mean that we ask, specifically, which of the two things generates, in the observer, the most wholesome feeling…

4. “In the method of observation which I propose, the observer asks to what degree each of the two things we are trying to judge is, or is not, a picture of the self – and by this I mean your and my wholesome self,  perhaps even our eternal self.

5. “Suppose you and I are discussing this matter in a coffee shop. I look around on the table for things to use in an experiment. There is a bottle of ketchup on the table and, perhaps, an old fashioned salt shaker. I ask you: “Which one of these is more like your own self?” Of course, the question appears slightly absurd. You might legitimately say, “It has no sensible answer.” But suppose I insist on the question, and you, to humor me, agree to pick one of the two: whichever one seems closer to representing you, your own self, in your totality.

6. “Before you do it, I add a few more words. I make it clear that I am asking which of the two objects seems like a better picture of all of you, the whole of you: a picture which shows you as you are, with all your hopes, fears, weaknesses, glory and absurdity, and which – as far as possible – includes everything that you could ever hope to be. In other words, which comes closer to being a picture of you in all your weakness and humanity; of the love in you, and the hate; of your youth and your age; of the good in you, and the bad; of your past, your present, and your future; of your dreams of what you hope to be, as well as what you are?

7. "Now I ask you again to look at the two things, the salt shaker and the ketchup bottle, and decide which of the two is a better picture of all that. In the experiments I have made, more than eighty percent of all people who ask themselves this question choose the salt shaker. The result is, as far as my experiments can tell, independent of culture or personality. People make the same choice whether they are young or old, man or woman, European or African or American.

8. “But the value of the result and the success of the experiment depends on the question they are answering: and on whether it really is this question they are answering. There are, always, those who choose the ketchup bottle. There are good reasons why they do. Ketchup goes with hamburger. It is an icon, almost, of our modern life; we associate with it because it is ordinary, comfortable, relevant to everyday life, and highly identifiable. Also rather nice. The salt shaker is almost archaic by comparison. Though many people still have this type of salt shaker around, it feels as though it might disappear from our lives, be replaced by another way of dispensing salt. All this is true, and explains why twenty percent of the people who ask themselves this question choose the ketchup bottle. But none of this is relevant to the way I mean the question to be asked. The question I mean to ask is, of the two, which is more deeply connected to your eternal self? Which feels as if it is a better picture of your eternal self, your aspiration, the core of you that exists inside?

THE LUMINOUS GROUND

9. ”Somehow – whether it be in color, or in a harmonious garden, or in a room whose light and mood are just right, or in the awesome wall of a great building which allows us to walk near it – some placid, piercing unity occurs, sharp and soft, embracing, tying all things together, wrapping us up in it, allowing us to feel our own unity. What, physically, is this unity which seems to speak to us of I?”

10. “When I look at a thing which has a living quality, sometimes I am aware of it, almost as if it is faintly glowing. I am aware of something like light – not actual light itself, but something softer, something very like it – in the thing. The more it is alive, the more it seems faintly to shine.

11. “In my later years, as I have encountered this sensation more and more concretely, and with more and more certainty, it seems to me, that I am seeing God, the glowing of all things, shining out from that old brick wall, or from that bush, or from that face, or from the flowers in a vase.

12. “It is the same life, already described so many times. But in the end, this is what I am left with, the sensation that somehow, in this living thing, there is something faintly luminous, there is something streaming from it, something visible, and something real.

13. “It has been said that God is immanent, that all matter is imbued with God, that God is the ultimate material of the Universe. And that may be so. But if so, why is it that this shining forth of God is visible more in some things than others; why is God visible more in some events, and less in others. What causes the life in things; what causes God to be more visible in one thing, more visible in one moment, less visible in another?

POSSIBLE EXISTENCE OF A SINGLE UNDERLYING SUBSTANCE

14. “I am going to start with the idea that the I exists physically, that there is some plenum, not part of the physical space and matter, but nevertheless there in fact, at every point of what we think of as space and matter… [According to this I-hypothesis], we postulate that there is, in the universe, and underlying all matter, a single plenum or Ground. Above all, it is single, and it is personal. This plenum is the “something” which shall simply be called “I.”

15. “However, I now add the idea that it really exists everywhere, it is single, underlying all things. It may exist in another dimension curled up in space, or it may exist in some other linkage we cannot yet imagine. I am viewing this plenum as being perfectly connected to all the physical reality that we know about, like a deeper reality which shadows and underlies the first. For the time being I shall say that this plenum is either “I” or “Self,” a huge, single Self, underlying all the matter in the universe.

16. “Now I am going to say that some kind of tunneling can occur, to connect physical structures in our familiar physical domain with the single I-stuff of the plenum. I use the word “tunneling” in the sense that modern physics uses it, to mean a direct connection between two regions which are in different dimensions. I am asserting that some connection can occur between the physical structure of the everyday world of matter and the underlying I.”

17. The most common example of this tunneling would be the one which occurs in the experience of I and self which each person has. In a human body, which is at least in part a structure of matter alone, the experience of I or “self” arises. In spite of various sociological attempts at explanation, this everyday experience of our selves is not yet understood in a satisfactory way by physics. But it would be relatively easy to understand if we postulate the plenum of I, universal and general, linked to matter, and if it were a fact that the matter in a body, once organized, is able to make direct connection with this I. We would then experience the bridge or tunnel to the I as our own self, not realizing that it is in fact merely one bridge, of a million similar bridges, between the matter in different beings and the I. That is to say, in such a conception the I which one of us experiences as his own self is not a private and individual thing, as most of us imagine it to be, but a partial connection of our own physical matter (my body) to this very great, and single, plenum of I-stuff.

18. Now I am going to say, much more generally, that every living center in the matter of the universe – even the smallest center which is induced in space – starts this kind of tunneling towards the I-stuff. And, the stronger the center is, the bigger the tunnel, the stronger the connection of matter to the I. That means, that every beautiful object, to the extent it has the structure which I have described, also begins to open the door towards the I-stuff or the self."

Presentation on Transpersonalism and the Mirror of the Self Test