http://www.physixfan.com/wp-content/files/GEBen.pdfAnyone read this book. How does it tie in with the astral? I feel like some kind of connection might be made.excerpt
It is still of great interest to ponder whether we humans ever can jump out of ourselves-or
whether computer programs can jump out of themselves. Certainly it is possible for a
program to modify itself-but such modifiability has to be inherent in the program to start
with, so that cannot be counted as an example of "jumping out of the system". No matter
how a program twists and turns to get out of itself, it is still following the rules inherent
in itself. It is no more possible for it to escape than it is for a human being to decide
voluntarily not to obey the laws of physics. Physics is an overriding system, from which
there can be no escape. However, there is a lesser ambition which it is possible to
achieve: that is, one can certainly Jump from a subsystem of one's brain into a wider
subsystem. One can step out of ruts on occasion. This is still due to the interaction of
various subsystems of one’s brain, but it can feel very much like stepping entirely out of
oneself. Similarly, it is entirely conceivable that a partial ability to “step outside of itself”
could be embodied in a computer program.
In Zen, too, we can see this preoccupation with the concept of transcending the system.
For instance, the koan in which Tozan tells his monks that "the higher Buddhism is not
Buddha". Perhaps, self-transcendence is even the central theme of Zen. A Zen person is
always trying to understand more deeply what he is, by stepping more and more out of
what he sees himself to be, by breaking every rule and convention which he perceives
himself to be chained by-needless to say, including those of Zen itself. Somewhere along
this elusive path may come enlightenment. In any case (as I see it), the hope is that by
gradually deepening one's self-awareness, by gradually widening the scope of "the
system", one will in the end come to a feeling of being at one with the entire universe.
Perhaps the greatest contradiction in our lives, the hardest to handle, is the knowledge
"There was a time when I was not alive, and there will come a time when I am not alive."
On one level, when you "step out of yourself" and see yourself as "just another human
being", it makes complete sense. But on another level, perhaps a deeper level, personal
nonexistence makes no sense at all. All that we know is embedded inside our minds, and
for all that to be absent from the universe is not comprehensible. This is a basic
undeniable problem of life; perhaps it is the best metaphorical analogue of Gödel’s
Theorem. When you try to imagine your own nonexistence, you have to try to jump out
of yourself, by mapping yourself onto someone else. You fool yourself into believing that
you can import an outsider's view of yourself into you, much as TNT "believes" it
mirrors its own metatheory inside itself. But TNT only contains its own metatheory up to
a certain extent-not fully. And as for you, though you may imagine that you have jumped
out of yourself, you never can actually do so-no more than Escher's dragon can jump out
of its native two-dimensional plane into three dimensions. In any case, this contradiction
is so great that most of our lives we just sweep the whole mess under the rug, because
trying to deal with it just leads nowhere.
Zen minds, on the other hand, revel in this irreconcilability. Over and over again,
they face the conflict between the Eastern belief: "The world and I are one, so the notion
of my ceasing to exist is a contradiction in terms" (my verbalization is undoubtedly too
Westernized-apologies to Zenists), and the Western belief: "I am just part of the world,
and I will die, but the world will go on without me."