Bernardo Kastrup - Affinity p.3

So far, in our journey down that stretch of the road that Neville Goddard and Bernardo Kastrup shared (each using his own methods and terminology) we established a worldview that most today would call insane. Here is a recapitulation, in two parts.

Part 1

Neville’s contention was that the principle stated in the Hermetica is actually correct: we live in a universe that is nothing but mentation. As he says, the idea of the world of nature – as something external to the mind – must be rejected. You may have heard him say in one lecture that “there is nothing but God” and probably misinterpreted him. Now you discover exactly what he meant: when you behold a tree or a mountain or a river, you are not looking at a material thing that somehow God is mixed up in. No, you are looking into the mind of God. You are beholding mentation itself.

Well, if you have tried to internalize this information and live by it, you probably did not bring up at a family gathering or at a business meeting. In fact, you probably thought yourself to be, shall we say, on the fringes of society... until we discover Bernardo Kastrup.

Bernardo takes the results of experimentation done over a period of decades and dares to admit the conclusion they point to: stand-alone materiality does not exist. There certainly is no billiard-ball materiality that the senses seem so naturally to reveal. Bernardo points out, in so many words, that we deceived ourselves because we were not careful in our thinking. We took the conscious experience of inexplicable qualities – the redness of the rose or the sweetness of a strawberry – to somehow be cobbled together from the material, which, according to the very same body of reasoning, has no qualities. These elusive qualities cannot be material. They must be mental events, and irreducible.

Part 2

Well, maybe this was just luck. Neville’s most audacious and blasphemous precept – that Man and God are one –certainly could not find corroboration in a modern, rigorously developed metaphysical argument... or could it?

Bernardo’s argument (as I am reconstituting it) continues: All must be mind. But the notion of billions of separate consciousnesses held by the multitudes, as seems to be the case, is an untenable argument. So he proposed, as hypothesis, that which the 1st century mystics (whether Hermetic or Christian) had already declared as given: there is one and only one universal field of consciousness, which encompasses the ALL. This corresponds clearly enough to the idea of God, although Bernardo does not use the term, as it lies outside the scientific lexicon.

This formulation still left an obvious problem: how to account for the billions of seemingly separate instances of consciousness in humanity, if there were only one universal mind? Bernardo remained committed to sound argumentation; the criteria were: empirically supported, parsimonious, and logically coherent. The naturally occurring phenomenon of multiple personalities – dissociative identity disorder – demonstrates how it is indeed possible for one mind, one field of consciousness, to be comprised of more than one identity. The parallels (see podcast S02E04) with Neville’s account of God and Man are truly striking, especially with regard to the psychological conditions experienced, such as amnesia and a residual but imperfect connection to Source.

Incredible consequences
As far as I can see at the moment, there is no need to press the correlation between Bernardo’s and Neville’s systems of thought. In fact, there are discrepancies – but none that contradicts the fundamental worldview they agree upon: the world is mentation – and nothing but mentation – of a universal consciousness whose very identity is us.

It might take a lifetime to comprehend the exciting and beneficial consequences of this discovery. We start to explore this in the podcast episode S02E05. You can access the audio or transcript. As Neville says, once you understand this, the adventure of life begins!