Thomas Ray
-- He studies psychoactive drugs and their effects on the mind/brain. He basically created a taxonomy of how one aspect of the mind is organized by compiling reams of reports of what happens on certain drugs with what neurobiological receptors those drugs bind with. The resulting hypothesis/theory includes a model where self has two components that both create the sense of separateness. There is the cognitive self and the affective self. Interestingly, he theorizes that children develop into adults following a trajectory going from a state of natural nondualism to cognative-heavy dualism. But it is the affective self in adulthood, yearning for the joyousness of youth perhaps, that creates the seeker looking to transcend the self. His model of consciousness is unusual in nonduality circles, in that it is neither the 'substance' itself that all the universe is comprised of, and not an emergent property of living systems, but rather due to an organ itself, which has evolved in certain living systems. I listened to him via a
SAND Interview.
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From
Mental Organs and the Origins of Mind :
I ask the reader to suspend disbelief and allow me to present a new view of the
mind that has tremendous coherence and explanatory and predictive power. The
human mind is populated by mental organs, which play diverse roles within the mind.
Some mental organs provide consciousness (in separate adult and childhood forms);
others function as gatekeepers to consciousness (in long- and short-time scales);
others give salience, meaning, or signi fi cance to the contents of consciousness, while
others provide content to consciousness. Some mental organs support the facilities of
language, logic, and reason, which appear to have arisen in the last hundred thousand
years in humans. I will refer to language, logic, and reason simply as cognition. The
facilities of cognition appear to be fully developed only in adult humans. The children
we develop from and the animals we evolved from lack those facilities and yet
have fully functional minds and are capable of making their way in the world. Other
mental organs provide affective ways of knowing the world, through feeling alone,
which provide the complete archaic mind in our developmental and evolutionary antecedents.
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From:
Future minds, mental organs and ways of knowingAt the Tofukuji Buddhist temple in Kyoto japary there is a large rock, which is ten to fifteen feet tall, three to four feet wide, and about a foot thick' On this rock is carved, in beautiful flowing vertical Japanese script, a haiku' The haiku rcads:
'Furuike ya karnazu tobikomu mizu no ofo'.
This translates into English as 'old pond, frog jump, sound of water'. This is perhaps the most famous haiku, written by Matsuo Bash (1644-L694). The book One Hundred Frogs (Il. Sato, 1995) is a collection of nearly 150 translations into English of this simple haiku. There is a joke about a haiku vendor with a sign that reads 'Haiku 100 yen. With fto9,25 extra'.
There are two ways of knowing this haiku. We can know the haiku with our rational mind. In this case, well, if a frog jumps into water, it will make a splash, and that will cause vibrations in the air, so of course there will be a sound, which we can hear. If we know the haiku this way, it is kind of silly and pointless. Or we may rationally interpret it as a metaphor, in which case we may be able to find symboiic meaning in it.
The other way to know the haiku is with our heart. If we know it this way, it paints a beautiful and timeless scene of an ancient pond, with a frog jumping in and splashing, as frogs have jumped in for millions of years. While we may not have a visual image of the scene, we can feel it. We paint the scene with feelings. It may even be better not to visualize it, because then its representation is purely affective. When we know the haiku in this way, we can understand why it is the most famous haiku.
There are, broadly speaking, two fundamental ways of knowing, the cognitive and the affective, the head and the heart, reason and feeling' The cognitive domain understands the world in terms of language, reason, ideas, symbols and concepts, while the affective domain understands the world in terms of feelings. Both domains, cognitive and affective, are capable of 'knowing' and 'understanding' the world, each in their own way. And each domain is able to construct a 'model' of the world, a rich, subtle and complex representation of the world, each within its or.tm domain.
It appears that children are dominated by the affective domain, while adults arc largely dominated by the cognitive mind, at the expense of emotions, feelings and intuition. When we mature into adults, we find ourselves knowing the world almost exclusively through language, logic and reason. We lose touch with the way we knew the world as children, the archaic way of knowing, through feelings, through our heart.
Reason as a way of knowing and understanding is evolutionarily new, and appears to be fully developed only in adult humans. However, before the emergence of reason, we still knew and understood our world and ourselves through feelings, and adult humans retain this capacity (even if it is not exercised). Our developmental and evolutionary accidents (0children and non human higher animals) have a fully developed affective mind and still know the world exclusively in this way. The affective mind of humans predates the cognitive mind (developmentally and evolutionarily), and is ancient, complex, subtle, rich, and capable of knowing and understanding of the world, based on feelings alone. The ineffability of many mystical experiences arises from this affective way of knowing.
Reason has emerged recently in evolution, the affective way of knowing has been elaborating through evolution for hundreds of millions of years. This archaic way of knowing has great evolutionary depth, and remains profoundly valid today. While the faculties of language, logic and reason seem to be mediated by one or a few mental organs based on serotonin receptors, the affective mental organs are numerous and diverse, mediated by a wide variety of receptors (among the dozen mental organs that I have characterized: alpha-1, alpha 2, bcta, histamine, imidazoline, dopamine, sign.ra, mu, kappa). Thus the affective systems do not represent a single, alternative, way of knowing, but rather a multiplicity of ways of knowing.
