The Same Machinery

I.A word I didn’t know

Not long ago I was watching a man named MrBiscuitSpeaks react, on YouTube, to Tool’s Rosetta Stoned. It’s a song about someone who has been shown everything and cannot hold on to any of it, and halfway through, Biscuit paused it to explain what the narrator was going through. He used a word I had never heard. Ontonormative.

He meant a state that doesn’t just feel real. It feels more real than ordinary life. You wake from a dream and say: that was a dream, I’m back. You come back from one of these and say the opposite. The waking world is the thinner one.

I went looking for the word and found two things behind it. The first was a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto named John Vervaeke, whose vocabulary Biscuit speaks fluently and whose fifty-episode lecture series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, turns out to cover most of the ground this site stands on, from Plato and Plotinus to the Buddha and Meister Eckhart. The second was a study he cites. In 2017 a team of researchers asked 701 people about a religious, spiritual or mystical experience they had had, and how it compared with their usual reality. Sixty-nine percent said it had felt more real than their usual sense of reality. And the more real it had felt, the more they said their lives had changed since: more purpose, less fear of death.

That was the word. What I found by following it was more uncomfortable: a careful, well-argued answer to the question this whole site is built on. And it is not my answer.

The question is simple. Why do they agree?

II.The answer this site has been giving

Open the Map and the first thing it tells you is its wager: these are not twenty answers to twenty questions, but one recognition arriving in many voices.

That wager has a name and a long history. An Italian librarian in the Vatican, Agostino Steuco, coined it in 1540: philosophia perennis, the perennial philosophy. Leibniz took the phrase up. Aldous Huxley gave it to the English-speaking world in 1945, in an anthology that opens by defining it as “the metaphysic that recognises a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds”, and then spends three hundred pages showing that Hindus and Taoists and Sufis and Christian mystics kept saying so.

Stated plainly, the claim is this. The traditions agree because there is something there to be seen. Different cultures, different centuries, different words, and the same report, because they were all looking at the same thing. The convergence is the evidence for the object.

I believe some version of that. I built this site on it. And I have to confess something: in more than a hundred and forty teachings and two dozen essays, I have stated it far more often than I have argued it. A claim that large owes its readers better. It ought to be able to survive the strongest objections anyone has, put at full strength, before it says a word back.

There are two. Here they are.

III.They don’t agree as much as you say

The first objection is that the agreement is an illusion, and that sites like this one manufacture it.

Its sharpest form is a 1978 essay by the philosopher Steven Katz, who put the whole argument in one sentence and printed one word of it in capitals: “There are NO pure (i.e. unmediated) experiences.” Every experience arrives already shaped by the concepts, expectations and language of the person having it. A Christian contemplative meets Christ. A Buddhist meets emptiness. A Kabbalist meets the Ein Sof. On this view the tradition does not interpret the experience afterward; it builds it beforehand. And if the experiences differ at the root, then any agreement you find was put there by the one doing the comparing, by translating everything into a single vocabulary and then admiring how alike it all sounds.

Which is, I have to say, a fair description of what a map does.

So let me concede what Katz wins, and it is a lot. The Map arranges teachings by what they’re reaching for, and arranging is an act; it is not neutral, and it has a point of view. Some of what looks like agreement is not independent discovery at all but inheritance. Plotinus taught in third-century Rome, and his One flowed into Christian mysticism, into Sufism and into the Kabbalah. When the Map sets Eckhart’s Godhead beside the Ein Sof, part of what I was seeing was a family resemblance, not two strangers who happened to describe the same face. Buddhism and Taoism grew up side by side in China and borrowed each other’s words for centuries. Every one of those agreements is real, and every one of them is weak evidence, because a cousin who agrees with you proves less than a stranger does.

But not every convergence on the Map has a family tree.

Meister Eckhart died in 1328, a Dominican preacher who never left Europe. He said, in German, God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground. The Chandogya Upanishad had said tat tvam asi (thou art that) something like two thousand years earlier, in Sanskrit, on another continent. The first translation of the Upanishads into any European language was a Latin rendering of a Persian version, printed in Strasbourg in 1801 and 1802. Eckhart had been dead for almost five hundred years. There is no line of contact between them. There is no line between Black Elk and Plotinus either.

And some of the agreement has been measured. In 2001 the psychologist Ralph Hood and his colleagues gave the same questionnaire on mystical experience to people in the United States and in Iran, and found the same three-part structure in both. The furniture of the experience differs from culture to culture: who you meet, what you call it, what it means. The architecture holds.

That distinction is the first piece of honest ground. Katz explains the furniture very well. He explains the architecture less well. The first objection wins most of the field, and it does not win all of it.

IV.They agree, and it proves nothing beyond us

The second objection is the stronger one, because it gives the perennial claim everything it wants and takes the conclusion away anyway.

Yes, says Vervaeke, the traditions converge. Here is why. The basic job of any mind is working out what matters: out of everything you could notice, think or do at any moment, finding the few things that are relevant, constantly, and correcting yourself as you go. He calls it relevance realization, and the trouble with it is built in. In his words, “the very machinery that makes you adaptive is the machinery that makes you vulnerable.” The same capacity that lets you focus lets you fixate. The same capacity that builds a self lets it harden into a prison. The same capacity that finds meaning lets it drain away.

So the problems are everywhere, because the minds are. “These are perennial,” he says, “because they are inherent in our machinery.” And every culture, running on the same hardware and hitting the same faults, built what he calls “ecologies of practices that help alleviate the suffering of these perennial problems.” Meditation, prayer, ritual, contemplation, the retreat into silence, the dropping of the self.

Read the Map through that lens and it works uncomfortably well. The Clearing has a whole course on practice. Epictetus tells you to separate what is up to you from what is not. Krishna tells Arjuna to act without grasping at the fruit. Lao Tzu says that in pursuit of the Tao, every day something is dropped. Three cultures, centuries apart, one instruction. On Vervaeke’s account that is exactly what you would expect from three independent repair manuals written for the same engine. They agree because the engine breaks in the same places. No Ground required.

The feeling of more real fits too. Vervaeke does not treat it as a report about the world. He treats it as a fact about certain states of mind, one to be explained, and he spends lectures explaining it: how fasting, chanting, long meditation and psychedelics all disrupt the mind’s habitual framing; how insight shades into flow and flow into something larger. Sixty-nine percent is not evidence about what those people saw. It is evidence about how the seeing felt.

And he doesn’t need anything supernatural to hold any of it. About one of the oldest names for the Ground on the Map, he says: “The Sacred that is the Tao, I do not think is supernatural or absolute.”

I have to concede this too, and it costs more than the first. This account explains why the methods converge, why the obstacles converge, why the states feel the way they do, and why lives change afterward. It does all of it with nothing but a human nervous system in a shared world. If I am honest, it may explain most of what is on the Map.

V.The instrument and the object

So here is what is left standing, stated as flatly as I can.

What the machinery account explains is the instrument. It explains, very well, why every human mind built this way would produce the same picture under the same conditions. What it cannot do on its own is tell you whether the picture is of anything.

Think of a telescope. If every telescope ever built shows rings around Saturn, then either Saturn has rings, or every telescope ever built shares the same flaw. Optics alone will not tell you which. You need some other way of looking. For Saturn we had one: we sent a spacecraft, and the rings were there. For this question the only instruments we have are the ones under suspicion.

That sounds like a stalemate, and in a sense it is. But the traditions make a move here that neither objection anticipates. They distrust the instrument too. More than anyone.

Zhuangzi says the trap exists for the fish, and once you have the fish you can forget the trap: the words are not the thing. Krishnamurti says the observer is the observed, and the moment you watch yourself being aware, awareness ceases. The Buddhist schools spent centuries cataloguing the ways a mind misreports its own experience, and Zen has a name for the visions that arise in long practice: makyō, things to be noticed and let go. The mystics were the first constructivists. They knew before Katz did that the lens colors everything, which is why so much of what they teach is not believe what you see but some version of clean the lens: subtract, empty, let the seer get out of the way. Their claim is not that the instrument is trustworthy. It is that something is still seen when the seer has been subtracted.

Whether that is possible is exactly what Katz denies, and it is the whole fight. It is not settled. I don’t know how it could be settled, and I distrust anyone who says it has been.

And then the last surprise, which is Vervaeke himself. He is not a debunker. In the same lectures where he explains these states, he sets himself two tasks, not one: to explain why they are so compelling, and to ask whether the transformations they produce can be justified. His account explains the machinery and keeps something it still calls sacred. That is not the posture of a man explaining the sacred away. It is the posture of someone who thinks the explanation and the sacred might both be true.

Which brings me back to a sentence this site published this summer, about a film, that I didn’t know would turn out to be the hinge of the whole project:

Empirical inquiry and contemplative inquiry are legitimate epistemic orientations, and they are aimed at different targets with different tools. When they collide, it is almost always because one of them has been asked to do the work the other is built for.

The two answers to why do they agree? look like rivals. They are not quite asking the same question. One is about how the seeing works. The other is about what is seen. The cognitive scientist can tell you, better than any mystic ever could, how the eye is built and where it fails. He cannot tell you, from inside the eye, what it is looking at. Nor can I.

VI.One eye

So what changes here?

I am not taking the sentence off the Map. One recognition arriving in many voices is still my wager. But it now owes you its footnote, and here it is. Some of the agreement is inheritance: a tradition repeating a teacher it learned from. Some of it is us: the same machinery, the same faults, the same repairs, and that may be most of it. And some of it is residue: agreements across lines of no contact, a structure that holds from the United States to Iran, a state that seven in ten people who reach it call more real than ordinary life, and come back changed by. Nothing anyone has yet measured tells us whether that residue is a fact about the world or a fact about the ones looking at it.

The mystics have an answer to that question, and it is the strangest thing on the Map. Eckhart gave it in a sermon seven hundred years ago:

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

Ask him whether the convergence is a fact about the world or a fact about the seer, and his answer is that you have drawn a line that is not there. Instrument and object, one eye. That is not a proof. It is a report from inside the residue. It is either the deepest thing a human being has ever said, or the most elegant way an instrument has ever described its own flaw. I cannot tell you which. I don’t think anyone can yet.

You sit with that. So do I.

Here is what I can tell you. This summer, in Despite Knowing, this site promised to take up the empirical questions properly, in a place of their own, rather than waving at them from inside essays about films. That place is called The Edge, and this is the first thing in it. The method starts here: the strongest case against goes first; the losses are reported in public; and every piece ends by saying plainly what it has not shown. So:

This dispatch stands on the Map’s own words: the perennial philosophy; Eckhart, The Eye Through Which God Sees; Tat Tvam Asi; Plotinus, The One Beyond All Being; Krishnamurti, The Observer Is the Observed; Zhuangzi, The Fish Trap; Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy; and Einstein, The Cosmic Religious Feeling. It opens The Edge, and adds one teaching to the Map: The Same Machinery. It continues a line of dispatches that walked up to this door and stopped: The Third Man, Despite Knowing and Everything That I Am, from which the indented passage in §V is quoted. The word that started it came from MrBiscuitSpeaks.