Philosophical travels within a yogi life.

The rationale is based on becoming a member of a New Religious Movement (NRM). The NRM events include a life as a Brahma Kumaris Yogi. The Brahma Kumaris (wiki) in Australia is where I became involved, and to an extent participated, through going to retreats, attending daily class (Murli) and meditation as well as assisting in coordinating activities at the branch situated in Broad beach, Gold Coast, Queensland. Though the question of what is a New Religious Movement is a theoretical construct for sociologists that requires some analysis given its relevance to an artist lifestyle and the high percentage of artist personas who were drawn to actively participate in such movements for whatever reasons.

A yogi life’s millinarian sense of destiny

The photo’s, if interpreted within a millinarism context, by token of the Brahma Kumaris predictions, are a testament to some vagueness of expression within the yogi life of this author. It’s the story of peak encounter with the numinous. A spiritual seeker’s (analysis page) ,stage one, phase two, part two, life and times. There were times with the ‘bliss’ of finding ones place, interlaced with forms of alienation from the social norms within Australian public life.

A yogi life imagined community unfolds

The classic millinarian new age unfolds within 1000 years, however for the Brahma Kumaris of that period, the time scale was substantially reduced from the standard New Age model (wiki), or for that matter the standard Hindu cosmology eschatology too(wiki), as well as the metaphorical references to the Classic Greek mythology (wiki) of Golden, silver,copper, and iron ages. It was back in the day (1984 to 1989) a highly constructed cultural syncretism (wiki) account. This neo-social narrative did in a sense give an international sense of duty and destiny to personal numinous intuitions of self within a rapidly changing modernist globalising society. The imagined community was a possible world of utopia supervening on this world through a rapid universal constructive configuration of pschons of experience interacting with the universe of photons and particle physics in general. This was not a two world account running in synchrony. It was rather a interdependent account of a world in a spacial temporal loop. My challenge of the day was to get to terms with consciousness as a theoretical construct given the philosophical problem it presented in various forms. The meditations are of interest from a perspective of being a philosophical materialism since it poses challenges for the materialist that I have come to construct through various constructions through a mixed media practice.

Psychon’s of Experience within a yogi life

The non- material physicalism of the infinitely small point of light thesis assumed a Planck sized particle of consciousness. The issues I ran up against were classic combination/binding problem. How could the soul (consciousness as a Planck sized psychon particle) bind with the physical macro structure of the body/brain functional complex? However my problems were linked to philosophy of mind whereas other detractors created push back based on broader ideological concerns.

The non trivial binding problem

This question emerged over time without having yet participated in academic philosophy. The initial imagination in meditation was the spacial problem. If a psychon were Planck sized (infinitely small) there would be an infinite space between a psychon of experience and the nearest material synapse within the interdependent brain to body to environment. If binding were possible it would be through some other intermediate property such as ‘karma connectors’. The problem of karma is that of binding entails sharing properties. Karma seemed to share properties of the soul by token of a theory of ethics, but not of the micro material structure of the universe unless ethics is a universal phenomenon bound in particle physics. This seemed to over determine the theory of karma given mathematical correlates to physical phenomenon.

Karma theory under determines the binding problem.

So it seems the karma theory under determines properties of the soul binding with the micro material structure such as synapses by token of complex interdependent nature of quantum world to macro physical structures such as tables and chairs. The question poses as how could a psychon (smallest detail of consciousness) be determined to be in a relation to a set of neurons via a brain? If the answer is karma then karma under determines the connection through a set of brain interactions with the infinity of other interdependent material particles. It may be the case that a pschon could have a connection for a duration other than sub-femtoseconds (wiki) given the number of sub atomic particles in the universe. This throws the problem back in the lap of consciousness.

Categorical states of consciousness.

The hard problem of consciousness (wiki) has an easy side too which kept me pondering other plausible candidates (key analysis blog) than karma. However the point of light people (POP) program, after some deliberation, took a turn to research sonic vibrations (biographical blog).