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Suffering ⇄ Awakening: Inside the Learning Lab of Consciousness (Campbell, Hoffman) · Tracking Wisdom

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You're listening to the Tracking Wisdom Podcast, exploring the universal truths that we see woven through culture, consciousness, and the human experience.
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Tracking Wisdom Podcast.
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I'm Ryan.
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I'm Peter.
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And today we are talking about the Learning Lab, an idea of suffering as learning.
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Yeah.
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So the idea of the Learning Lab is from Thomas Campbell, who wrote my big toe, my big theory of Everything toe.
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But what I really want to talk about more is my direct experience of exploring experience and what it's like to be a human with a lot of conditioning and some awakening experiences and trying to, oh, heck, get happier.
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Right.
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To be more in the day to day from the perspective of fundamental well being rather than the perspective of conditioning and suffering.
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And how does progress happen?
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How do I do that?
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And so the reason this comes up is because the past few weeks have been challenging.
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Past week has been pretty unpleasant.
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I mean, relative to.
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Yeah, it's all relative.
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So then on the drive in here, I was still suffering from a lot of recent challenges.
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And then I had some insight and saw a shift out of that conditioned negative experience and into the more spacious, open, touching, fundamental well being kind of way of being.
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I told Ryan that had a little really short Zen story that goes with this, but it has the flavor of it.
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The story is that a powerful samurai goes to a well known monk or abbot or Zen teacher and says, teach me the way of Zen.
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And the teacher says, such a dishonorable, ignorant, violent person such as you could never learn the way of Zen, I would never admit you.
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And the samurai becomes enraged and draws his sword and lifts it to strike down the monk and the monster monk says, this is the gate to hell.
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And the samurai is taken aback and sheathes his sword and pauses.
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And the monk says, this is the gate to heaven.
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But it's basically that it's that simplicity of experiencing heaven and hell in the moment.
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And I'm sure that we've talked about this repeatedly along our journey as to what it's like to suffer and what the immediate experience of heaven and hell is as people, you know.
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So why the Learning lab?
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Because in Thomas Campbell's Theory of Everything, he lays out this model of the progression of consciousness from this absolute oneness that is just pure consciousness in the abstract, and then slowly through what he calls the fundamental process.
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But it is evident evolution.
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It subdivides itself and increases in complexity and eventually becomes this more godlike entity that is then able to create the physical universe for the purpose of continuing this same Process of evolution.
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It's just all one large continuum of evolution and increasing complexity with the evolutionary drive of, of reducing entropy.
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The shorthand he uses basically love is the opposite of entropy.
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So the physical universe was created for subdivisions of this divine entity to have the opportunity to continue their evolution.
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And by having all these subdivisions of, I'm going to call it the Deity, continue to evolve, they contribute to the evolution of the bigger entity as a whole.
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Campbell talks about physical matter reality, which is his term for our universe is the learning lab for consciousness.
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A learning lab because our entire physical universe is only a tiny, tiny fragment of this vast consciousness that created it.
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And it's just one little corner, microcosm corner experiment or lab.
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Yeah, you know, working, running experiment that is busy evolving this tiny fraction of consciousness that's partitioned off as the physical universe and then further partitioned and subdivided into all of what we recognize as conscious or conscious entities and
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everything else that we don't recognize as conscious entities, which are still pieces of consciousness.
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Okay, so that's where the learning lab comes from.
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And so I've had a number of, as Ryan said, first world problem challenges.
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You know, it's like I had an auto accident and I had to deal with insurance and getting the car repaired and then over committed to something that I didn't start with enough time.
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And so I was scrambling over the past four days to meet this commitment and just getting really triggered.
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Yeah, because I haven't had a situation like that since before I retired.
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So it was like a big smack of triggering to the kind of conditioning that I have, which is to say over the past couple of weeks, I've had a lot more awareness of suffering, or I should say direct
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experience of suffering and being caught up in conditioning and being caught up in my ego and conventional self and all that kind of negative experience versus the experience of, of expansive open consciousness and spaciousness and fundamental being where
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everything's good and you feel connected and safe and all that.
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Now I have had that every week, at least to some extent that I'm really conscious of.
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Like, yeah, I'm still in fundamental well being, but for the past several days or couple of weeks, it feels much more like a disproportionate amount of this negative stuff.
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When of course, say three years ago, that was pretty much 100% of my experience.
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Like I did not have any concept of fundamental well being.
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I wasn't really aware of having those experiences.
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I had them, but I couldn't call them up.
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So that's the context and the specific is I was driving in this morning and being pulled even more into this combination of self criticism and criticism of others, into this general experience of ego and fear.
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And I guess all that air quotes, typical human stuff.
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And I started to question or query, do inquiry about why am I suffering so much?
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And so it was more of an intellectual question.
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But the point is that I had the clear experience of shifting pretty quickly after I started to just ask this question about suffering to myself.
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And, and then I was more on what I think of now as my more typical track and, and thinking about consciousness and the nature of suffering, the nature of awakening and having the insight of, oh, okay, so I
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just suffered a bunch.
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And when I say suffered a bunch, I don't mean like a bunch of bad stuff happened to me.
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I mean that I was caught in a pattern of suffering because when I shifted, I didn't undo any of the bad stuff that happened, right?
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I only shifted my way of experiencing it.
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I don't know if that's the right way of saying it, but it was a very clear relief.
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And that's, that's why I like that Zen story because it dramatizes that clarity.
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And making the statement or the metaphor of heaven and hell is very apt.
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And so I was thinking about this in the context of Campbell's model of the learning lab, one sub experiment of our learning lab.
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So I would say the main aspect is the experiential aspect aspect of moving, what I'm going to say is back and forth from suffering to non suffering and then back into suffering.
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So I'm a small element of consciousness in this experience, learning something so that my improvement and reduction of entropy and my perfection of love contributes to the collective evolution of the infinite, beyond that of which I'm a part.
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Right, of which we all are a part.
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But I guess what I'm talking about is what's my individual experience of this kind of learning right now, today?
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And so part of it is the struggle of language.
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And even though it is in some sense antithetical to the experience of awakening, the exercise of trying to talk about the experience, awakening, using words, is itself helpful to deepening the awakening experience.
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And this is something that came out in Jeffrey's research, that journaling and talking about the experience is a form of sinking in a way of deepening in that experience and therefore shifting to make it tend to become more
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prevalent, which is my personal goal.
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But in Campbell's model, it's the evolutionary purpose of the physical universe.
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This portion of consciousness which is assigned to physical matter can perfect its love and reduce its entropy and therefore contribute to the reduced entropy of the whole.
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And when we say the whole, we're talking about the consciousness that exists outside of and including the physical universe.
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So somehow that experience of shifting from this intense experience of suffering on the way in and feeling bad about how bad I felt and how I was interacting with people and how triggered I was, but also internally, a
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lot of self criticism, impatience, internal experience reflected in external behavior.
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And then seeing the shift, recognizing the possibility of shifting back into more spacious awareness clarified to me or reified the experience of learning and progress this fractal nature of reality and consciousness.
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So I think that pulling in internal family systems and the concept of parts and that we all have parts in conflict and that the process of healing and becoming happier is a healing of those parts and an integration
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of those parts.
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That also became clear to me.
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And it's very easy to then connect that to the integration of us as humans, right?
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The the perfection of interpersonal love and then hopefully global unity.
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And this idea of increasing integration of divided parts and perfection of love is powerful.
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Like the idea of you don't just have an awakening experience and then go into permanent bliss and never have conflict with anyone, you never have suffering from then on.
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I mean, that's the popular culture view of the awakening experience.
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And a very common experience which comes up in the groups that I participate in is why am I suffering again?
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I've already had these wonderful, open, spacious experiences and I've done a lot of healing and now all of a sudden I'm thrown back into suffering.
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Why?
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Because it's another opportunity to re experience that transition.
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And experiencing the transition from suffering to non suffering, re recognizing the contrast between dark and light is reinforcing the lesson which is perfecting our love and making real the shift from suffering to non suffering.
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And it sounds, it sounds a little nonsensical.
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Why does God want us to suffer?
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Right?
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If we are inherently enlightened and non suffering, then why go through this suffering?
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And in a way it's recognizing that suffering is not bad, which is a potentially problematic way of expressing it.
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Because to say suffering is not bad is not to minimize experience of those whose suffering seems to be greater than mine, but that in terms of human experience, suffering is the necessary lesson to be able to shift from
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suffering to non suffering.
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And everyone can do it.
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I mean, this is not accurate, but I almost have the impression most people I've met have had a lot more suffering than I have.
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And most especially a Lot of people who are in awakening communities and who are great teachers.
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In fact, some of my personal teachers, I know of their experiences that are so far beyond what I've had.
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So it's not a contest, I guess, is what I'm saying.
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I'm just aware of the possibility of saying suffering is not bad, triggering someone in a very bad way and feeling like blaming the victim.
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And that's not at all the intent there.
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I'm pointing to a different kind of direct experience.
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I think it's important to reinforce the idea that suffering is internal, not external events.
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And the reason I say that is while I think it's important to not come off as trivializing somebody's significant external experiences, it is that internal experience that drives suffering.
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Which means where we may be inclined to judge another for having significant suffering over a perceived trivial external experience is to misunderstand the nature of suffering, which is an intrinsic experience.
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So I just wanted to make that disclaimer as well, that somebody could weather significant external circumstances in a very non suffering way where somebody else can experience deep suffering over something that may be perceived by others as I've
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dealt with worse and, and not having the compassion and grace to understand that that person's suffering is real in that moment, in that time for that person, I think is an important idea.
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Right.
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I mean, I think many, many people probably know others who are in much worse circumstance than themselves and yet seem happier.
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And I mean, I certainly know people like that and people who are not in what I would call my awakening community or you know, they're just, they're weathering horrendous challenge and yet they're extremely grateful, graceful and grateful.
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And yet we also know others who are in positions of privilege and plenty and how bad their suffering is when they're, you know, in this really very positive circumstances.
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Yeah.
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As far as the comment about conflating things you've heard me say and what maybe they've come from conversations with God or not specifically in conversations with God.
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The concept is that we're not here to learn.
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There is no learning.
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There's only remembering, which I think is probably nuanced and maybe semantical a little bit because I can see a way that we can conceive of remembering as learning.
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But that is the notion that is put forth is that there is actually nothing to learn.
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It is only to remember who we really are, which is the vast godly perfection.
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So remembering in terms of returning to.
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True nature, yes, but not in like the oh, I'll be there someday in Nirvana, Right, like embodying it now, which awakening.
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Yes, essentially.
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So, so, so now we're getting caught in semantics and me attaching to alternate meanings of words that are being used in conversation with God.
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Because, yes, I remembered that there was nothing to learn, but that the purpose was to have experience.
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Like, because in pure consciousness there's no.
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Or pure God.
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That I think is the language of conversations.
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Like God has no experience.
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So some of what has been said around that is my own interpretation, understanding.
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But there is this idea of contrast in order for there to be experience.
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And of course, we've talked about before, and it's one of my favorite parables from the book is the candle in.
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The sun, which is that a light within the light can be seen.
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Yeah, right.
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The candle in the sun cannot know and experience its light while dwelling in the sun.
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And it required descending into darkness and accepting onto itself all the different things, things that are not it, for it to understand and experience what it was.
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And this is something that is a thread throughout the book that there is a very distinct path that starts with knowing, then experiencing, then being.
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So the path of you can't experience what you don't know.
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You can know, but not experience.
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But I think the deeper thread in the context of what I just said is to fully come into being of what you really are.
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So you can know what you really are.
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But until you can experience and understand what you are not, you cannot have that being ness.
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So that's the general thread and concept of conversations with God, specifically book one, because that was the one that resonated most with me.
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I've gone through book one many, many times.
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That's the one I wr reference the most.
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Just to point out as.
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As we had discussed a little earlier off mic, right.
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Our objective is not to teach people what other people have said, it's to share how we're relating to these things that we're reading and the experiences that we have coming into contact with this information and how it affects
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us.
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You know the distinction that you're making here with conversation with God, of there's nothing to learn, there's only remembering our true nature, right.
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Which is to point to some direct experience.
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Again, as I come in contact with this information, as I read things and try to learn what people are saying, the real experience is not learning that someone said this is the way it is.
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And therefore now I know that's the way it is.
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It's a process of coming into contact with.
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With information and recognizing the truth in it.
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And that's A huge part of my personal path right now is looking for things that I recognize, including, and most especially I would say, in interpersonal interactions, talking to people so that I can recognize what they're experiencing.
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And I see that as, oh, namaste, right?
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That is the God in me recognizes the God in you.
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So just to go back to the beginning of that, our purpose in introducing these various authors and speakers and whatnot isn't so that we can tell you what they said.
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We're trying to present a lot of different opportunities for recognition and a lot of that not through explicitly presenting what someone said, but in sharing our experience of interacting with this information.
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Yes.
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So I had a comment written down when we were first discussing this episode, and I think it speaks directly to what you were saying.
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And so I'm going to give a slight backstory.
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You were sharing that you had been consuming content that had contrast of the idealist perspective versus the physicalist perspective, and speaking specifically about scientifically credentialed people, pointing to, number one, not needing to go down the road of alternate
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paradigm while we still have work to do within the paradigm of the physical and scientific realm of discovery.
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And it did seem like that person in particular had a bit of a dogma about science in general and was somewhat dismissive of the utility of conceiving and considering something alternate.
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But my point was, when we're talking about consciousness and some of these illustrations or conceptualizations of what is beyond what we already know, and when I'm thinking of somebody like Donald Hoffman or Tom Campbell who speak more, I
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guess, in a fringy kind of nature to the mainstream science narrative, I don't buy, you know, air quotes, buy into this because of their credential or any of that.
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It's.
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It's not belief, I think, was the word you were talking about.
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Right.
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It's.
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I don't believe it because Donald Hoffman's an accomplished scientist and he said this thing.
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I believe it because it explains very clearly relative to my experience.
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And the mainstream scientific narrative does not adequately explain my experience.
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Experience.
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What is my experience?
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You know, the.
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The more subjective reality.
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Yeah.
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And it also seems that the scientists who seem to have had contact with this secondary subjective experience seem to then start to look into how do we describe this in scientific means.
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And those scientists that have not had that experience tend to be dismissive of it as an experience either as just a manifestation of the mental cognitive structures and all of that.
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But those who experience it, I think know intrinsically, not scientifically, not intellectually.
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It's an intrinsic knowing of the truth, of the experience, of the realness, the reality of the experience.
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Now I think that's a really interesting point.
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So I guess broadly what we're talking about is the exploration of or the research into consciousness and well, there's kind of two areas actually.
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There's research into the nature of reality and there's research into the nature of consciousness.
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And what we are gravitating to, I would have to say what we recognize is that the nature of consciousness is the nature of reality.
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Which brings you very quickly to the, the broad dichotomy of between physicalism and idealism, where physicalism is the mainstream dogma.
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And I think we've touched on this before, right.
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In terms of the history of science and the schism of the physical and the non physical.
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Like oh well, science is just going to study what's physical.
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So if you're not going to study what's not physical, you're never going to prove anything about what's not physical.
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And if your entire history of science is built out of we're just deciding to study what's physical, then the concept of reality, like all models of reality are going to be built only on what you decided to study,
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which is the physical.
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Right.
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And therefore talking about non physical will violate all known models of reality, which sounds pretty nonsensical, but it's purely historical choice and not a foolish choice.
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Right?
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I mean an immensely profitable choice, but a choice to say we're going to focus our energy and resource on studying what we can physically study and measure.
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And it's gotten us a lot of good things.
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The problem is the inability to recognize, number one, the historical fact of that choice and number two, the impact of that on our ability to think about the non physical.
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So this creation of a worldview.
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And it's a worldview, right.
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It's not a fact.
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And that's what's called the religion of science, that it's a belief that anything that is non physical and can't be physically measured is therefore not real, which flies in the face of human experience.
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I think that it, that's part of the root cause of it.
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But recognizing the limitations like it's fine to continue to investigate the physical world, but the problem becomes when you start making dogmatic denials.
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Yeah, yeah.
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I mean, basically there's this really weirdly circular argument and Tom Campbell really gets on the soapbox with this of saying it can't be real because we can't study it because all of our tools have been developed to study
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only the, the physical world.
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And therefore, because we don't have tools to study it, it's not.
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And it's a very.
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On the face of it, it's a very weird blind spot because it's so highly illogical.
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It's like, well, how do you know what you know?
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Well, because we've done all these experiments.
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Well, how did you do these experiments?
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Well, we did them using all these physical things and like, it's all directed towards physical reality.
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And so it's, it's like, you know, to trivialize it.
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The person looking for their keys under the street lamp.
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Like, where did you lose your keys?
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Oh, down the road.
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So why are you looking here?
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Because that's where the light is, you know, and it's like, well, that's the only place you're looking is where you have the street light that you built.
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Like you put the street light there.
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So what's interesting is how good people can be at critical thinking.
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Mm.
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And how intensely they can dismantle people's critical thinking errors and then still have a blind spot.
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I was telling you before about this pariah of physics who, you know, is a real iconoclast and basically has been thrown out of every.
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Like, can't make a living as a professional physicist because she's so alienated community of physicists.
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And yet I think she's a bonafide physicist.
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She's just one who has absolute zero tolerance for non critical thinking and will not back down and will always call bullshit on people's work.
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And so by never backing down, she's completely locked herself out of the community of physicists.
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And yet I believe that she's a staunch physicalist.
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I mean, I've seen her in conversations about consciousness and reality and siding with physicalism and not recognizing and to be fair, not having it pointed out.
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I mean, yeah, I wonder why I haven't yet seen someone bring this argument to a meeting.
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Because I've started watching more content about the physicalist versus idealist position and I haven't yet heard the history of science argument made, which to me is like a hugely powerful.
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It's not quite an argument, it's just an eye opener, Right.
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It's just like, wait, look at your critical thinking here, right?
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And look at your.
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What are the assumptions you're making?
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And you know, you can't point to all of the existing evidence as proving.
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Again, it's.
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It's the light post argument.
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Just one more comment.
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And this.
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Maybe it's just reiterating the same thing.
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But to put Donald Hoffman's challenge out there to the physical physicalist perspective is that model has not proven the source of consciousness at all.
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That is the whole big problem of consciousness.
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The only thing that perspective can say is we're sure that following this path will get us there.
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And Hoffman's challenge is show me the physical manifestation, the physical source of the experience, of the taste of chocolate or whatever.
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Not just synaptic, but the subjective experience.
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How is that manifest in the physical world?
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These are the assumptions I'm taking.
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This is my work, mine meaning from Donald Hoffman.
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This is the work body of work that I'm putting forth to try and answer this.
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Show me the counter argument from your perspective.
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That's part of why I'm inclined to pay attention to somebody like Donald Hoffman or Campbell is one.
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Their work seems to illustrate at least a plausibility of the experience that I have.
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But even more so they seem to be genuine in their pursuit of.
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Look, we're just trying to actually be open minded about it.
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Yeah, I think one thing we have to do in the future in this journey is look for, for experimentation in those areas because they've certainly had time to develop some experiments.
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And so I presume there must be some experiments underway for the idealist paradigm.
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I will say that I'm becoming progressively more interested in doing the research myself, as Campbell recommends subjectively.
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Right.
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And so I mean we've talked about lucid dreaming already.
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I've continued to dream journal.
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I have not been disciplined enough to have good sleep hygiene, much less to actually engage in learning lucid dream techniques.
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Although I have had some progress and insights and experience in that.
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But I'm curious as to.
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And of course, as I've said, Campbell is like one of the original out of body guys.
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Yeah, I mean he worked with the guy who literally wrote the book on out of body experience.
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And so again, he has not only the physics background, but he also has this non physical research background which sounds obviously by definition is totally fringe because there's no such thing as non physical research.
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Like in the scientific community, all research is physical because science as a whole dogmatically studies the physical.
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But the point that Hoffman makes is that science can study the non physical if it chooses to.
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It's a process that can be applied to any phenomenon, just if you choose to.
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And it's very much along the lines of, I'd say evolution, what Campbell calls the fundamental process that is not limited to physical reality.
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It can be applied to anything that you.
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Well, it applies Period.
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Right.
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It's one of his founding assumptions.
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So as far as evolution is concerned, it's interesting, I took a note after just to touch back to conversations with God slightly and its relevance, maybe in its alignment with Campbell's model.
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One of the key concepts in conversations with God, with remembering who you are and all of that, that the purpose of being here, the reason we're here, is to basically be the greatest vision of ourselves that we can
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imagine that ties back to remembering who we are.
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And this iteration of what is the greatest vision I have for myself and becoming that.
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And that, to me, isn't learning, but it is this refinement and evolution and iteration of experience here that continues to move everything forward to recognizing and being that which we truly are.
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So what's the takeaway here?
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Our.
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Our initial thing was suffering in the Learning lab.
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Yeah.
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I mean, we obviously went far afield once we started talking about the different paradigms.
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But I think, I guess for me it was recognizing the purpose of suffering in the context of refining, to put it, what, broadly and poetically in terms of perfecting love.
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But I think that, and this is something that I think Jeffrey's work points to, that you always have some conditioning.
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There's always areas left to decondition.
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So I'll just say that for me, it provides supportive insight and feels as if it is supportive of awakening, that continued revisiting of suffering.
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Not intentionally.
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Right.
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It's just this cycle of returning.
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That's a whole nother talk.
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Well, thank you all for listening.
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We appreciate your time.
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Please drop comments and let us know your own experiences with the Learning lab, your idea of the learning lab, or if you do disagree with that, we'd love to hear from you.
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And until next time, bye bye.
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Thank you for listening to the Tracking Wisdom podcast.
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Join us next time as we continue the discussion.
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