In August 1991 a thirty-five-year-old musician from Atlanta named Pam Reynolds was taken to the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix with an aneurysm at the base of her brain too large and too deep to be reached by ordinary surgery. The neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler proposed a procedure then used only a handful of times: hypothermic cardiac arrest. Her body was cooled to fifteen degrees Celsius, her heart stopped, the blood drained from her head so that the aneurysm collapsed and could be clipped, and for something under an hour her electroencephalogram was flat and the auditory evoked potentials from her brainstem, measured through moulded speakers in both ears that emitted continuous clicks at a hundred decibels, had ceased. Her eyes were taped shut. By every clinical measure available in that theater she was, for that interval, without a functioning brain.
She reported afterward, to the cardiologist Michael Sabom, that she had watched part of the operation from above the surgeon’s shoulder. She described the bone saw as looking like an electric toothbrush, with interchangeable blades kept in a case resembling a socket-wrench set, and she described a conversation about her femoral arteries being too small for the bypass cannula, which the operating record confirms took place. The saw and the conversation both fall in the period after anesthesia and before the arrest, when the speakers were already in her ears; the critics have made that point and it stands. What the case establishes is narrower and more important than a proof of survival. A person under deep general anesthesia, with her hearing occluded by a hundred decibels of clicking, gave an accurate account of the instrument opening her skull and of what was said across her body. Something received that, and it was not the auditory cortex.
The first given
The case is a doorway to a claim that does not depend on it. Before any observation of the brain, before any theory of matter, there is the fact of experience: that there is something it is like to be here, receiving. Every instrument that has ever measured a neuron was read by a consciousness, and every theory that explains consciousness in terms of neurons is itself an event in consciousness. The reductive program, which for five centuries has undertaken to explain everything by the interactions of the smallest parts, has produced no account of how those interactions could give rise to the one thing that is directly known, and the philosopher Thomas Nagel drew the conclusion in 2012 that the program has failed, not at its edges but at its foundation. The failure is not a gap awaiting a discovery. It is the structure of the attempt: an explanation of experience in terms of what has been abstracted from experience.
The oldest traditions began from the other end. The Poimandres, the first treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum, opens with a vision in which the light that precedes all form announces itself: that light is I, Mind, your God, who was before the watery nature that appeared out of the darkness. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad describes the dreamer who, having taken the material of the waking world with him into sleep, builds from it chariots, roads and rivers where there are none, for he is the maker; and it draws the inference that the same self is the maker of the waking world too, and the light by which it is seen. The dream is the standing demonstration. Every night a complete world, with weight and distance and other people in it, is rendered without any of those things standing before the senses. The question is then whether waking is a different kind of thing, or the same kind with a different source of constraint.
The second view is the one taken here, and the modern philosopher Bernardo Kastrup has restated it as analytic idealism: that consciousness is the one thing whose existence is given, that matter is what mental processes look like from the outside, and that the individual mind is a dissociated center within a field of mind that is not individual. The brain is what a person’s experience looks like when observed from across the room. It correlates with experience as an image correlates with the thing imaged, and a lesion to the image is a lesion to what can be shown, which is why Reynolds’s cortex mattered to what she could report and why it did not matter to what she received.
How consciousness takes form
If consciousness is first, matter is what it has done. The traditions that place mind at the origin agree that it descends: into limitation, into form, into the slowness and resistance of bodies, in order to learn what cannot be learned without them. The Hermetic account has the Mind produce a second Mind, a craftsman, who sets the spheres turning and lets down into the elements the forms that become living things; the Vedāntic account has the one become many through a self-forgetting that the many can reverse; the alchemical account has the light buried in lead and the whole Work consist in freeing it. What each is describing, in its own vocabulary, is a movement from an undifferentiated ground into a field of centers, each with a boundary, each with a position, each able to receive only part of the whole.
The sequence has a direction. Consciousness first undergoes binding, form, organization and movement as constraint, in the mineral, vegetal and animal kingdoms, and the constraints are real: a stone cannot choose, a plant cannot leave, an animal cannot ask what it is. Each kingdom retains what the last one won. The animal inherits the plant’s metabolism and adds motion; the human inherits the animal’s perception and adds a self that can be turned upon itself. Matter, on this account, is accumulated relation and history, the record of what consciousness has learned to hold, and the human instrument is the point at which the record becomes able to read itself. Arthur M. Young described this as the reflexive turn of an arc: descent through increasing constraint to the point of greatest binding, then ascent through the same powers as freedom, so that what was suffered as gravity is exercised as movement, what was suffered as form is exercised as craft, and what was suffered as time is exercised as memory and intention.
The return is the point of the descent. A world of centers that could not remember what they had learned would have to learn it again each time; a world in which retention is possible can accumulate, and what it accumulates is capacity. This is why embodiment is a productive act and why the traditions that despise the body have misread their own sources. The body is where the learning happens. A life that can be used up is the condition of the learning; consequence requires a center that can be spent, and a being exempt from ending accumulates duration without ever completing a form. The question every later page asks in some form is what can be retained through a change of body, and what is lost.
The seam
Two things are true at once. The ground is complete; the Hermetic Mind lacks nothing and the Upaniṣadic self is already what it will become. And the finite centers develop; the arc is real, the kingdoms did succeed one another, a human being in 1991 could report a bone saw she had been prevented from hearing because something in her had learned, across a very long history, to receive without ears. The relation between an eternally complete source and an evolving whole is the oldest problem in metaphysics, and it will not be solved here. What can be said is that the development happens in the ground and not apart from it: the centers are how the whole comes to know what it contains. A complete ocean still has to be tasted one mouth at a time.
Reynolds recovered, and lived another nineteen years, and the aneurysm never returned. She kept the saw. Whatever received it during the interval when her brain was silent was continuous with the person who described it afterward, which means that the receiving and the retaining were done by the same thing, and that the thing was not the organ that had been switched off. What that thing looks like from outside, and how it comes to sit inside a body with a boundary and a plurality of voices, is the subject of The Instrument.
Further reading
See Harmonic Recursive Cosmogenesis, The Architecture of the Dream, and The Human Instrument for the fuller treatments. The synthesis sheets The Emerald Tablet as Recursive Cosmogenesis, How Consciousness Becomes a World, and The Universal Platonic Hologram take the argument into particular cases. The evidence is gathered at First Principles and The Vessel. Reading paths through the archive: What survives death?, How does the whole remain present in the part?, and How does consciousness inhabit a body?.
References
Sabom, Michael. Light and Death: One Doctor’s Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences. Zondervan, 1998. Ch. 3, “Death: The Final Frontier,” on the Reynolds case.
Woerlee, G. M. “Could Pam Reynolds Hear? A New Investigation into the Possibility of Hearing During this Famous Near-Death Experience.” Journal of Near-Death Studies 30 (2011): 3–25. The critical timing argument, accepted above.
Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Corpus Hermeticum I (Poimandres) 6; XI. Trans. Copenhaver, 1992.
Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 4.3.9–14. Trans. Olivelle, 1996.
Kastrup, Bernardo. The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality. Iff Books, 2019.
Young, Arthur M. The Reflexive Universe: Evolution of Consciousness. Delacorte, 1976.