An Ecology of Natural Mindlessness: Solitude, Silence, and Transcendental Consciousness

This article attempts to define spirituality from a brain studies perspective. In holonomic and connectionist brain studies there are three possible forms of consciousness: objective, narrative, and transcendental. Objective consciousness concerns linearities, order, structure, sequentialities, linguistics, time keeping, and so on. This form of consciousness is detrimental to achieving a spirituality. Narrative consciousness is an extension of objective consciousness with the addition of metaphoria and aesthetic flow. Narrative consciousness concerns an aesthetics of silence, paralinearities, daydreaming, life stories, feelings, and the like. Solitude is necessary to achieving a deeper kind of silence because well-planned solitude helps to eliminate pervasive kinds of objective, everyday consciousness. Also, solitude is an escape from the "pathologies of speed" and clock insanities that are increasingly troublesome with an increasing exponential acceleration. Some suggestions for achieving spiritual and deeper kinds of silence within naturalistic, solitudinal environments are offered. Transcendental consciousness concerns a deep, meditative silence, or widespread, temporary cortical brain synchronizations. This more profound silence concerns deeply restful, narrative, and peaceful solitude, leading to possible synchronous brain processes, an extensive now-ness, a primitivation of time, and a sense of timelessness. I propose that these highly synchronous brain states are necessary to many kinds of spiritual journeys.