The English Victorian novelist George Eliot was famous for her ability to hit the psychological nail on the head with an apposite sentence. Here’s one of them :

We walk about “well-wadded with stupidity. … If we had but keen vision and feeling … it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence”.

A very happy New Year to all our readers.

Staying on the theme of recent posts : mind expansion and extended mind, let’s take a look at former Glasgow barber, Gordon Smith. He’s not to everyone’s taste and it requires some belief, or direct experience of his work, to get into the swing of it.

I usually buy Gordon Smith’s latest books as they are published, because they always contain rich nuggets of wisdom on all aspects of the spiritual and the afterlife.

Gordon Smith is generally held to be the most accurate spiritual medium in Britain. He started life in a lowly part of Glasgow, ran his own hairdressing business for a while, and now makes his living as a TV presenter and an author of books.

The following passage occurs in his latest volume : Stories From The Other Side.

“Our consciousness keeps expanding but because we live in a world where there are linear thought and time and space we are restricted by what we can describe and what we can understand.

“The very nature of our existence is about ripening our consciousness. So often people restrict themselves by thinking that everything has to be achieved or got over in this life. It is such an unburdening process to come to the realision that there is no beginning and no end.

“Eventually we learn to mistrust the material world because everything we hold on to ages and dies, including our bodies — a process we monitor daily. As that happens, we become dimly aware of a realm above the bodily which, strangely, a part of us already inhabits.”

Gordon Smith’s strength is that he is acutely aware of the thin veil which prevents many of us seeing beyond the linear aspects of our daily lives.

When we talk about “realization” or “enlightenment” we find ourselves right in the heart of religion with all its political and cultural baggage. Really, though, we should be thinking psychology and practical philosophy. Here’s why.

Religions tend to follow a recognized cycle of development : a parabolic curve of usefulness and decay. Shakyamuni Buddha knew this and forecast that his Dharma (teachings) would last for 500 years, no more. Sure enough, at the 500 mark, “Buddhism” became “Mahayanaism”, and changed out of all recognition … though to be fair, the Mahayana did have many remarkable insights of its own.

The pattern of change is always relentless. The initial spark by an Enlightened individual is taken over by a conservative elite who wish to preserve it in all its literal aspects. Invariably this movement is led by a group of disciples who claim apostolic succession from the now deified founder.

Meanwhile a more adventurous group of young bloods want to adapt the message and make it relevant to changing circumstances … as they see it. This polarization results in a political auction of claim and counter claim, while truth suffers almost grotesque inflation from both sides. The newish “religion” reverses itself and adopts the very infrastructure and corruptive practices that the original movement sought to replace.

All our instituional religions have gone through this disheartening process and are looking distinctly threadbare and careworn in the 21st century.

It seems to me that what most Westerners are seeking today is not an alien culture imposed on them through an ancient apostolic religion, but a simple process of spiritualization : a technology of realization, or “extended mind” in the language of biologist Dr Rupert Sheldrake. The aim would be nothing less than the widening and deepening of our individual consciousness.

By “technology” I mean the artful implementation of a principle that has been proved workable under specific conditions. So it would utilize both art and science — mind and spirit — by acting on empirical data from productive fields of practice. If this sounds rather technical, it’s not. It’s just a way of creating a general definition of something like the Buddha’s “mindfulness” program of recollection. Other types of insight meditation (vipassana) are equally valid as Mind Technology.

Such a technology of realization, without the pressing burden of belief in human-made creeds and ensacredized worship, would remove the pedantry and inherent violence from our religious lives by concentrating our minds on actionable areas for the integration of our divided being.

The scientific journal Science is reporting the findings of neuroscientist Dr Henrik Ehrsson who has succeeded in simulating out of body experiences under laboratory conditions.

The experiments have a lot in common with those of Dr Rupert Sheldrake, whose concept of “extended mind” is one of the more interesting developments in biological research this century. The findings seem to reveal that the mind relies on the senses of sight and touch to locate itself inside the human body.

When the connection is disrupted, whether by illness, drugs or deliberate confusion, strange things begin to happen. The sensation arises that the mind has left the body.

Ehrsson used goggles, a video camera and rods to confuse the brain and create the effect. A sitting volunteer wore goggles linked to a video camera pointing to his back. Looking through the goggles, he saw an image of his back from the perspective of someone sitting around six feet behind him. A technician then touched his chest with a rod, which was unsighted to the camera behind. The split effect then took hold.

Dr Ehrsson tried the experiment out on himself, “You really feel that you are sitting in a different place in the room, and you’re looking at this thing in front of you that looks like yourself, and you know it’s yourself, but it doesn’t feel like yourself. This experiment suggests that the first-person visual perspective is critically important for the in-body experience. In other words, we feel our self is located where our eyes are.”

This has an uncanny resemblance to Sheldrake’s experiments on extended mind and certainly supports many people’s experience of being outside their body during sleep or at unusual moments in their lives.