Neurological Relativism:
"As the result of the yogic and alchemical disciplines I have practiced during the last 15 years, I know that the solipsist position is the minimal truth, i.e., that all we really know is a stream of sensation. The common sense hypothesis that there is an Ego ("me") observing/experiencing this stream, are unprovable, but denying them seems to lead to worse confusion than (tentatively) accepting them.
But I also know that everything I think I know about the Ego ("me") and the External World ("it") is woefully little, and very misleading (more "untrue" than "true") because it is such a microscopic fragment of what the total Me and the total Universe must be. Blake said, wisely, that "Every thing Capable of being Believed is an Image of the Truth;" but it is also true, as Blake no doubt realized, that Every thing Capable of being Believed is Self-Hypnosis.
It is emperically known to me, through neurological experiment, that every time I manage to change to focus of my nervous system, a new Me appears, and a new External Reality, and that these mingle in curious ways, and each grows steadily bigger, weirder, more mysterious and more humorous as my researches proceed.
Artemus Ward put it this way: "The trouble with most folks is not that they don't know enough but that they know so much that ain't true." Or, in the more slashing style of Neitzsche's soaring sarcasm, "We are all much greater artists than we realize." Whatever we know of Me and The Universe through the filter of our nervous system is much more of a record of the structural functioning of the nervous system itself than it is of the enormous mysteries of the real Me and real Universe.
...All around one the True Believers trudge by, mouths grim, brows furrowed, ulcers and worse eating at their innards. This 'desperate company of oddfellows' (Thoreau) live in what psychologists call 'cognitive dissonance.' Because their reality-maps are, one and all, too small to cover the vast, eerie, amusing world in which we live, they are perpetually frustrated: the world does not live up to their fixed beliefs. They are all convinced that there is something radically wrong with the universe itself, or with the rest of humanity, and they never suspect that the real trouble is in their own rigid and robotic nervous systems.
Thus I 'believe' in libertarianism, in strict scientific method (the objective yoga of the West), in yoga (the neuroscience of the East), in Space Migration, in Life Extension, and in dozens of other things. But I can suspend any of these beliefs at will, or all of them, and look impassively into the Buddhist void, or switch around to other beliefs temporarily, to check out how the world looks to those who hold those beliefs."
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