Thoughts on Experience

You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking . . . ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”
~ Baudelaire, Be Drunk

Krishna claims in the Bhagavad Gita that he is all people, has been all people, experiences the world through every pair of eyes from all of history. I was recently inspired to finally try to write down what this means to me. For one thing, it is the antithesis to Descartes conclusion– rather than I think therefore I am, I think therefore I know thinking is a thing that can happen, I know consciousness exists. And supposing conscious beings exist, what makes them different from me? That they prefer virtue over poetry when they get drunk? But as Baudelaire points out, when we do finally get drunk, when we dissolve into that state of oblivion, we enter a timeless space of experience, cut off from the contingencies of our history and our physiology.

And this is how this view reentered the European psyche in particular. Schopenhauer seeing all minds as windows onto a single underlying Will. Instead of being trapped in subjectivity we become part of something universal. Everything that makes us particular instances, particular minds, is revealed as contingency– where and when you were born, into which body, into which family. For me, it becomes much easier to forgive and to be grateful, two of the most banal but powerful lessons of any spiritual practice.

We can go further, and we do. Instead of seeing each person as a mind experiencing life in some particular time and place and form, we can take each instant of experience as one of many. Having had a history, ‘being someone’ becomes part of the character of experience, nothing more. I feel like there is a collection of experience instants which I remember, which make me me. But this is just part of the nature of experience. And perhaps I could also remember being other people, people similar to me from a similar time and place. Perhaps, when my memory and my physiology is blasted out of my awareness by drugs or music or reading or sex– when I am drunk on poetry or dancing– when I enter into a particular kind of undifferentiated experience I can also remember any other people– or any other mind-instances– which have shared this experience. This is the ultimate cure for solipsism. A vast multiplicity of experience moments flickering in an out of existence on this planet.

Some people call this the Absolute Self-Sampling Assumption– that we should act upon the assumption that at every moment we are experiencing a randomly selected moment from a given class of experiences. I should assume that, from all the people reading poetry in front of an audience, I am but one, I am experiencing but one of them. This one. Is it too absurd to suggest that at the next moment I might suddenly wake up in the body of an aoidos, in pre-historic Greece, singing poetry to a young Homer? Or in a stone-age hovel in the Scottish highlands beating a drum and belting out an ancestor to a bothy ballad? In some sense it is, of course, and we don’t want to make the mistake of being too literal. I will probably still be here, in this body, for the rest of my life. But I do literally believe in the connection between these different moments of experience.

You may find this unstitching of experience– forgetting yourself and your past and your particular state of being– sounds terrifyingly lonely: don’t worry! I have one more trick up my sleeve. The Australian sci-fi author and mathematician Greg Egan suggests that all computations of a particular kind share the same mathematical universe. We can weave these disparate moments into one conected whole, one universe of minds outside of time and space.

And this is not a metaphor or a fantasy. This is a practical idea, it is pragmatic, it is testable and constructive. For instance, the inside of a cell (particularly a cell in a body) is an environment that is kept in a particular state essentially forever. Of course there are perturbations, but they stay within defined limits (otherwise the cell dies). All cells are in this same state. Thinking of cells in this way, as defining a single unified environment, really helps to understand how evolution happens, how ATP synthase got so damn efficient. There are countless cells existing just now, maintaining this particular universe. There have been a lot of cells in the last 3 billion years. These cells are seperated by enormous reaches of time and space, and yet the entities that live in them, proteins and DNA, are living in a shared space where the lessons they learn, the way their forms change, the new ways they discover to redefine themselves and their affordances, what they can do with their little parcel of matter, their few billion molecules, they evolve with a kind of synchrony that belies their seperation. Treating the inside of all cells like a single universe is not a silly abstraction, it is essential to understanding evolution and molecular biology.

Following this lead we can reassemble all of these fragmented moments of experince into one universe– a real universe, but one very different from the one laid out in technicolor before your eyes. In the universal mind, similar moments are mapped onto one another, every time you are drunk, really drunk on wine, poetry or virtue, you are in a specific part of this space. Your experience meshes with all the others and contributes textures and unique characteristics to the area. Perhaps a particular kind of experience is like an island, rising out of the sea of the subconscious.

The regions of the universal mind are created by layering the experiences of people. The density of minds in a particular region determins the detail in which that region is mapped. There are lonely deserts where only a few minds have gone, filled with alien thoughts incommunicable. But the busy places are busy indeed, particular works of art or experiences of nature have been crowded since the dawn of time. What does it mean for a space to be crowded like this? When countless minds have traced the same paths through the same experience, they aren’t just visiting - they are carving out the topology, defining its contours with ever greater precision. Like water wearing grooves in stone, or roots breaking apart soil to create new channels, each mind adds definition, reveals new facets, discovers hidden caves and unexpected vistas. The more minds that gather in a region, the more real it becomes, the more thoroughly explored and richly textured, until these well-worn territories of human experience become inexhaustible - not because they are infinite, but because they have been mapped in such intricate detail by so many minds before.

We are in the midst of engineering vast new territories in the universe of mind. New spaces of experience are erupting like volcanic islands from the sea - digital landscapes where different kinds of thinking can happen, where new forms of pattern and meaning emerge. And we are populating these spaces with novel entities that process, think, create in ways we are very far from understanding. But perhaps this great manifold has always been more richly populated than we imagined. Perhaps the space of human minds is not so independent. Perhaps there is an overlap or a continuum between the universal mind and the universal cell, and between them and the slow dreaming thoughts of forests and cities, with the vast distributed minds of nations and cultures and languages.

Lets see. I am, as I speak or as I write this in a very well-populated part of that universe. All the way back to Krishna and beyond, before writing, before history, people have been spending time here. Generation after generation has discovered this island and come here to worship and study, decorating and adorning it with temples, populating it with intricate festivals and rituals. Being here, in the space defined by this idea, I hear their voices and admire their works. I can hear them whispering to me from between the pages of every book I read.