Sci Phi Journal

by Manjula Menon

“Who are you?” I asked.
“I am Poimandrēs,” he said, “Mind of the One; I know what you want, and I am with you everywhere.”
I said, “I wish to learn about the things that are, to understand their nature and to know god.
How much I want to hear!”

Tractate I Poimandrēs

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“Sometimes He Chose to Interfere”
(Olaf Stapledon)

My husband, the philosopher Anand Vaidya, died last year at the age of 48 from complications due to cancer. He was brilliant, warm and generous. His desire for authentic engagement was perhaps the thing that most drove him. He was endearingly transparent with his emotions, passionate about his beliefs, and often argued in favor of non-intuitive positions that he derived from first principles. Underneath those surface waves was an ocean of gentleness.

I know death is inevitable. A rough estimate of the number of humans who have lived prior to the current era stands at 100 billion. Yet this particular death feels like a cosmic glitch. It is not just that everything feels wrong; an even stronger sensation is that the mistake can be overturned. I can almost sense those I seek with the power to grant me what I want; they stand in a reality pulsing under ours, existing just below my threshold of perception. There is a strong sense that it is through my mind, and when I am in a particular conscious state, that communication can be achieved and my appeal answered. This sense of strangeness aligns with esoteric traditions, where consciousness reveals its primacy through glimpses we may never fully grasp.

In feeling like there exists a mysterious underpinning to the world, I’m certainly far from alone. Numerous spiritual practices and religious traditions describe reality as marvelously mysterious, perhaps even unknowable. These practices embrace radical ontologies, imagining that consciousness precedes material form, that it is not a byproduct, but a principle. In Vedantic traditions, for example, consciousness is the singular substance that brings all things, along with itself, into awareness; as Anand describes, “Vedāntins connect the Upanishadic teaching of a truest or ātman as having ‘self-illumining awareness,’ sva-prakāśa.” It is a strongly monist position, in that there is only one substance that appears to us as manifested in a multitude of ways.

Alvin Plantinga, famously argued in his 1993 work Warrant and Proper Function that in addition to purely empirical methods, a theist belief that arises in a properly functioning brain can be warranted, even if the proposition cannot be verified via empirical means. Such a belief that is furthermore held by most human beings, almost all whose brains are properly functioning, would be an even further indication that the belief is warranted (even if it cannot be empirically verified, which was his key point). Plantinga was taking aim at empiricism or what is now called “physicalism” as the sole basis for epistemological truth. Although Plantinga’s target was physicalism from a Christian apologist perspective, his argument is further strengthened when considering the additional number of humans with “proper functioning” brains that hold a broad variety of religious or spiritual beliefs. Indeed, how to account for the mind as the conscious self, has been the focus of much of Indian philosophy.

Notions from myths have found echoes in speculative fiction; take for example the unnamed main character of Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 novel Star Maker who encounters the titular entity: “In general the Star Maker, once he had ordained the basic principles of a cosmos and created its initial state, was content to watch the issue; but sometimes he chose to interfere, either by infringing the natural laws that he himself had ordained, or by introducing new emergent formative principles, or by influencing the minds of the creatures by direct revelation.”

That the themes in Star Maker have similarities to religious concepts were not lost on Stapledon. As he writes in the preface: “At the risk of raising thunder both on the Left and on the Right, I have occasionally used certain ideas and words derived from religion, and I have tried to interpret them in relation to modern needs.”

Stapledon’s Star Maker as a detached creator parallels the Platonic Demiurge, and later writers like Philip K. Dick built on that to explore trapped consciousness in simulated or alien worlds. Literature (especially sci-fi) and philosophy are sometimes complementary paths, both probing the “mysterious underpinning,” sometimes converging on ideas like panpsychism or epistemic expansion through narrative “what ifs.”

In a career that spanned epistemology, philosophy of mind, comparative philosophy, and logic, Anand advocated for what he sometimes called “epistemic capacity expansion”: he believed that philosophy could draw from multiple traditions and disciplines to build a more adequate and capacious understanding of reality. While inspired by this ambition, this essay stems primarily from my own explorations of consciousness that were triggered by his loss.

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“Legends and Myths are Largely Made of ‘Truth’”
(J.R.R. Tolkien)

The Western esoteric traditions often invoked the idea that the conscious self is constituted of other parts, including a divine, eternal part, which was often translated into English as “soul.” The soul yearned to be free of the corporeal body and reunite with the divine.

Trained as an analytic philosopher, Anand was drawn to philosophically rigorous Indian traditions such as Vedānta which posit consciousness, not as a byproduct of matter, but as the ground of existence itself. Here one can see a striking parallel with the Hermetic idea of “Nous” or divine Mind, from which all reality emanates, and with Plato’s “Form of the Good” as the source of illumination. To be clear, Anand did not reference the Western esoteric tradition in his work; this connection and all the ones succeeding it are mine alone.

Anand argued that Rāmānuja’s qualified non-dualism, Viśiṣṭādvaita, offers a “cosmopsychist” framework where consciousness isn’t fragmented into parts but unified in a cosmic whole, much like analytic panpsychism posits mind as inherent in matter. He writes: “The self is not a mere epiphenomenon but the very substance of reality, qualified by attributes yet non-separate from the whole.” He offered the approach as a lens through which to discuss the “combination problem” in panpsychism by treating individual awareness as modes of a singular, pervasive consciousness.

Anand’s engagement with panpsychism and cosmopsychism, views that attribute consciousness either to all matter or to the cosmos as a whole, recall themes from Western esotericism. The Hermetic vision of a universal soul, the Neoplatonic hierarchy flowing from the One, and the Gnostic claim of divine sparks trapped in matter all anticipate the possibility that consciousness pervades the fabric of existence.

As for science fiction, Anand was co-founder of the Society for Science Fiction and Philosophy; his interest in the field stemmed from its potential to illustrate philosophical concepts through story. In this context, I will briefly mention the 19th-20th century English author of speculative fiction, J.R.R. Tolkien (though he is not considered a science fiction writer). The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that all European philosophy could be read as a series of footnotes to the 4th century BC Greek philosopher, Plato. Likewise, I sometimes think that all of Fantasy can be described as inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien; his influence on the genre simply cannot be overstated. Tolkien’s work draws heavily from Catholic theology and North European pagan myths; he writes, “After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth,’ and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.”

It is the spirit of Tolkien as truth in a tale that I will now introduce the cosmogony and metaphysics of the Western Esoteric tradition: as explorations of truth presented in a way we can understand. The idea that we as humans make sense of things through story probably feels prima facie accurate to most people; we all construct narratives around events and identities as we make our way through life. Tolkien’s point, however, is more of a metaphysical nature; he means that these legends and myths can inform as to the truth about the fundamental nature of reality.

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“Neither Mind nor Matter”
(Olaf Stapledon)

In addition to all European philosophy, Whitehead might just as well have made the same claim that all the Western esoteric tradition can be read as a series of footnotes to Plato. Plato argued in the Phaedo that the highest reality was non-physical and timeless, containing the unchanging ideal Forms, or “essences,” of everything that exists (an essence is a property of a thing such that if it were changed, that thing would no longer be that thing). He argued in the Republic that everything in the physical world is but a “likeness of an eternal model” and is less real or pure; all cups, for example, have the form of “cup-ness” which are imperfect imitations of the Form of cup-ness that exists in the world of ideal Forms. Above all the ideal Forms is the “Form of the Good,” which illuminates all the others below it. This ideal Form of the Good can be viewed as the First Principle or First Source.

Plato describes the physical world was created by a benevolent, rational, intelligent “Demiurge” from the Greek dēmiourgos or in English “artisan.” The Demiurge used the world of the Forms as a model to construct from the preexisting chaos, the physical world we perceive. In addition to matter, the Demiurge also created living things that are imbued with divine rationality and psyche or soul (this soul or psyche is the “essence” of a person).

For Plato, only mankind has a rational soul that is capable of “grasping” or understanding the ideal Forms behind the perceived everyday reality. This was achieved through dialectic, ethical, and philosophical reasoning and only philosophers could grasp the highest Form of all, the Form of the Good (which was why Plato believed that only philosophers should be allowed to rule). Only the souls who’d grasped true knowledge could “recall” their true divine nature (as souls predated the body and had once beheld the Forms). Upon death of the body, the (immortal) soul would return to the world of the Forms as pure contemplation. This theme of “recalling” truth echoes through the Western esoteric tradition.

Souls unable to grasp the Form of the Good would be forced to endure continued entrapment in material bodies as described in the Phaedo: “… these must be the souls, not of the good, but of the evil, who are compelled to wander about such places in payment of the penalty of their former evil way of life; and they continue to wander until the desire which haunts them is satisfied and they are imprisoned in another body.” This struggle for reunification with the divine is echoed in the esoteric traditions that followed Plato.

I will briefly note that Plato’s cosmology shares similarities with earlier traditions, such as those of the Orphics as described by Neoplatonists like Olympiodorus. Likewise, while Pythagoras emphasized the role of mathematics as fundamental to reality, he was also an advocate of metempsychosis and believed that the soul’s fate was tied to its actions in life. I will further note that very little of the writings of the Orphics survive except for the Orphic Hymns, and as for the Pythagoreans, almost everything we know about their views is from later scholars (including Plato and Aristotle).

Neoplatonists (like the 3rd century AD Plotinus) later developed an explicitly monist metaphysics. They located the Platonic Forms within the Nous, a divine intellect emanating from the One, the unchanging, timeless source of all existence. While the Neoplatonists’ Nous recalls Plato’s Demiurge, its role here is different. The Nous emanated an intermediary, the World Soul, which in turn animates and forms the material cosmos by imprinting it with the ideal forms. Neoplatonic cosmology was thus hierarchical and emanationist, with the ineffable One at the top and inert matter at the bottom (One → Nous → World Soul → Matter). Individual souls, having descended into embodiment due to an audacious desire for independence and material pleasure, struggled to return to the One through purification, contemplation, and philosophical discipline, undergoing cycles of reincarnation until ready to reunite with the divine source.

Stapledon’s Star Maker recalls the monism of the Neoplatonists; the Star Maker creates a cosmos thus: “First he conceived from the depth of his own being a something, neither mind nor matter, but rich in potentiality, and in suggestive traits, gleams, hints for his creative imagination. Over this fine substance for a long while he pondered. It was a medium in which the one and the many demanded to be most subtly dependent upon one another; in which all parts and all characters must pervade and be pervaded by all other parts and all other characters; in which each thing must seemingly be but an influence in all other things; and yet the whole must be no other than the sum of all its parts, and each part an all-pervading determination of the whole. It was a cosmical substance in which any individual spirit must be, mysteriously, at once an absolute self and a mere figment of the whole.”

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges famously explored the nature of infinity; The Library of Babel (1941), for example, imagines an infinite library containing every possible book. Borges explicitly evokes the mystical in his Aleph (1945): “All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols … Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction …What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive.”

For Plotinus, unlike Plato, reunification with the One goes beyond discursive reason. While philosophical reasoning and ethical living prepares the soul, the final “grasping” is a mystical, experiential vision, a direct, non-dual intuition of the divine: an existential transformation and not just intellectual understanding as per Plato. Like Vedānta’s cycle of emanation and return, Plotinus’s offers a vision of descent and return to the One through direct experiential apprehension.

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“Sparks of Living, Fiery Spirit”
(David Lindsay)

Modern scholars attribute The Hermetica to the period of Greek rule in Egypt (from the early 4th century BC through around 30 BC). The Corpus Hermeticum, the metaphysical section of the work, is believed to have been composed later, approximately 100 and 300 AD, during the Roman rule of Egypt.

That such a syncretic work emerged in Egypt is unsurprising. Egypt was home to one of the oldest great civilizations, dating back to 3150 BC. Native Egyptians ruled for millennia till the kingdom fell to the Persian Achaemenid Empire who dominated it for over a century (with a brief interlude when the native Egyptians retook control). Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BC, and one of Alexander’s generals, Ptolemy I Soter, declared himself Pharaoh. His descendants, the Ptolemies, ruled Egypt for roughly 300 years until the Roman emperor Octavian (later Augustus) defeated the forces of the last Ptolemaic monarch, Queen Cleopatra VII, and her Roman ally, the general and Stoic Mark Antony. Byzantine Roman rule continued for several centuries, until Egypt was conquered by Islamic forces in 641 AD and absorbed into the Rashidun Caliphate.

The Corpus Hermeticum combines Greek, Egyptian, and Christian concepts. It is presented as the teachings of the legendary sage Hermes Trismegistus (“Hermes Thrice Greatest”). Hermes Trismegistus is a syncretic figure, blending the Greek god Hermes (messenger of the gods) and the Egyptian god Thoth (god of wisdom, writing, and magic). The Tractate I Poimandrēs is the first book of the Corpus; it opens with Hermes Trismegistus going into a deep trance-like state, where he encounters “an enormous being, completely unbounded in size” (see quote in the preamble).

Poimandrēs is the Mind of the Supreme Principle or the Mind of the One. Poimandrēs describes the One as a “clear and joyful light.” Opposed to this Light was unformed matter, represented as dark and chaotic. Hermes is commanded by Poimandrēs to “understand the light” and to “recognize it.” This direct apprehension of the Mind of the One as a mystical experience is central to the Hermetic tradition.

The Mind is described as having generated a Logos or Word, which enabled the ordering and differentiation of the primal substance into fire, air, and denser matter (water and earth). This cosmogony echoes an Egyptian creation myth in which Ptah creates the world by conceiving it in his heart (where the Egyptians thought the conscious self resided) and speaking it into being.

The Mind next gave rise to the Demiurgus (recalling Plato), as personified by the Sun. The Demiurgus, working through the Word, formed the seven celestial spheres or planets from fire and air, each endowed with specific characteristics. These spheres govern the cosmos below and influence human destiny, as elaborated in Hermetic astrology (which plays an important role in the tradition). The Mind then created Anthropos, the divine Man or archetypal Human. This being descended through the planetary spheres, acquiring traits from each until it reached the realm of dense matter. There, captivated by the beauty of nature, it united with the material world.

Humanity is thus bipartite (or tripartite-lite) in nature: composed of a gross, mortal body (formed of matter), a spirit that encompasses personality traits (shaped by planetary forces, but still considered to be partially corporeal), and a non-corporeal, immortal soul. At death, the body decomposes, the spirit dissolves into the cosmos, and the soul, if it has attained recognition of its divine origin, ascends through the planetary spheres to rejoin the universal Mind or Nous. This framework closely parallels Gnostic Christian anthropology, in which humans are made of both corruptible matter and incorruptible spirit.

According to The Corpus Hermeticum, the purpose of life is to awaken to one’s divine essence. This awakening is made possible when the divine Mind enters a person, but this occurs only if the person has lived a virtuous life. Thus, self-knowledge and ethical conduct are prerequisites for the understanding of true reality that is required for spiritual ascent.

The ideas of Plato also influenced the work of the Christian Gnostics active in the first few centuries AD in cosmopolitan Hellenistic Egypt, contemporaneous to the authors of The Corpus Hermeticum. Often presented as secret teachings, they formed an alternative interpretive tradition that eventually came into conflict with proto-orthodox Christianity and were excluded from the developing biblical canon. Before the 1945 discovery of the Nag Hammadi collection in Egypt (estimated to be from the 4th century AD), most of what was known about the Gnostics came from the writings of their detractors, in particular, Saint Irenaeus’s influential Against Heresies, written around 180 AD.

Though condemned as heretical by the early Church, the Gnostics continued to dramatize knowledge as liberation and their image of divine sparks trapped in matter, awaiting release through insight, has striking affinities with Neoplatonist and Indian traditions. In Advaita Vedānta, for example, the self, ātman, is seen as obscured by ignorance, yet identical in essence with ultimate reality, Brahman. In both cases, salvation or liberation involves a transformation of awareness, a shift in consciousness that reveals a deeper truth already present.

The Gospel of Truth, said to have been written in the second half of the 2nd century AD by Valentinus or his followers, for example, claimed to be a secret teaching from Paul the Apostle, passed down to his disciple Theudas, and then onto Valentinus.

Valentinus offered an emanationist cosmology rooted in a single divine source or self, similar in concept to the Monad later developed by the Neoplatonists. From this supreme Godhead emanated thirty spiritual beings called aeons, who dwelled and comprised the divine pleroma (the ideal, divine realm, as distinct from the material world). Though originating from the Monad, the aeons could not fully comprehend its essence. One of them, Sophia, in her attempt to grasp the unknowable Monad, fell into error, and produced a flawed intermediary being. From this intermediary came the demiurge, who created the material world. This is not the benevolent demiurge of The Hermetica, however.

Ignorant of the higher realms, the demiurge fashioned the universe we perceive: an imperfect and suffering-laden world in which divine sparks, fragments of the pleroma, became trapped in matter. According to Valentinus, Christ was an aeon who descended from the pleroma and entered the man Jesus, bringing the “gnosis” or knowledge to mankind that would allow for the divine sparks to ascend and reunite with the Monad. However, only those born with such a spark, the spiritual ones, could experience the understanding of this true knowledge. This pre-ordainment has similarities with the Calvinist concept of “grace,” where one either has grace (and therefore the capacity for faith) and to a lesser degree with Plato’s notion that only philosophers (through the deployment of reason) earn true knowledge and soteriology. Unlike Valentinus, his contemporary Basilides (according to Irenaeus, as there are no extant works from Basilides himself) emphasized a more universalist soteriology, teaching that all souls have the potential to ascend through the heavens and reunite with the divine source through “gnosis” or knowledge. Basilides explicitly referred to reincarnation as how souls who failed to attain gnosis could return in new bodies and try again.

The Apocryphon of John, likewise claimed to have been an esoteric teaching from an apostle’s revelatory vision to an inner circle of their disciples, in this case, the Apostle John. It similarly describes a cycle of birth and rebirth till the “fetters” are unshackled through gnosis, and the soul is allowed to reunite with the divine. In general, the Gnostics appear to agree that the malaise affecting humanity can be construed as a spiritual “forgetting” (recalling Plato) that can only be cured by a direct experience of True Knowledge or gnosis.

Philip K. Dick frequently engaged with the ideas from Gnostic works, particularly the concept of a flawed, deceptive material world created by a lesser, malevolent deity (the Demiurge) and the pursuit of hidden knowledge (gnosis) to achieve spiritual liberation. His novel VALIS, which stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, is a central text in this exploration, presenting a Gnostic vision of God and drawing heavily on his personal experiences. Other works by Dick, such as The Cosmic Puppets, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and Ubik, also feature our reality as a false perception shaped by a controlling force.

Another example is the British writer David Lindsay’s 1920 cult favorite A Voyage to Arcturus; Tolkien cited it as an influence. The novel is set on the planet Tormance orbiting a double star, the titular Arcturus, around 37 light years from Earth. The main character, Maskull, is on a voyage to find Muspel (the name pays homage to the Scandinavian myths’ realm of fire, Muspelheim). The voyage is a metaphor for spiritual awakening and gnosis (direct, experiential knowledge), that aims to transcend illusion and return to the divine source. True reality emanates from Muspel as divine light, but a malevolent entity, Crystalman, acts as a lens (crystal) distorting Muspel’s light and creating the material world with all its pain and beauty. Souls are in a constant struggle towards the transcendent, true spiritual realm (Muspel) but are thwarted by a deceptive, flawed material world created by a lower power (Crystalman, the Demiurge):

“It appeared as if the whirls of white light, which were the individuals, and plainly showed themselves beneath the enveloping bodies, were delighted with existence and wished only to enjoy it, but the green corpuscles were in a condition of eternal discontent, yet, blind and not knowing which way to turn for liberation, kept changing form, as though breaking a new path, by way of experiment. Whenever the old grotesque became metamorphosed into the new grotesque, it was in every case the direct work of the green atoms, trying to escape towards Muskel, but encountering immediate opposition. These subdivided sparks of living, fiery spirit were hopelessly imprisoned in a ghastly mush of soft pleasure.”

The novel also recalls themes from Buddhism as noted in E.H. Visiak’s introduction: “In fact, the resemblance of the Arcturan to the Buddhistic teleology goes further, since pleasure, according to one, and desire according to the other, is the cause and maintaining principal of our terrestrial existence.”

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“Outlive All You Loved”
(Edward Bulwer-Lytton)

I’ll briefly mention “Theo”-“sophy,” or the “wisdom religion” from the Greek, which arose in the late 1800s. Mostly based on the writings of the Russian aristocrat Helena Blavatsky, it became popular in the late part of the 19th century in Europe. Although Blavatsky initially identified as a spiritualist, which is to say she held seances and claimed to communicate with the dead, she soon began writing about an ancient, universal wisdom-religion, a syncretic work sourced from esoteric traditions across the globe.

From Middle Eastern traditions, for example, she drew from Sufi concepts like fitra (which emphasized that all humans had within them innate, primordial knowledge of God that we can learn to remember and come to know God again) and Kabbalistic ideas such as the nitzotz elokut (divine spark within the soul). As described in Blavatsky’s The Key to Theosophy and The Secret Doctrine, the divine spark animates all beings, urging a transformative awakening akin to the esoteric path of gnosis, where knowledge reunites the self with the cosmic whole.

Blavatsky (and Theosophy) fell out of favor after a report claiming her to be a fraud, but its synthesis of East and West in pursuit of hidden truths profoundly influenced modern New Age and spiritual movements including those that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s.

Blavatsky cited the 1842 proto-sci-fi novel Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton as especially important to Theosophy. Lytton, though not well known today, coined several phrases that remain in wide use, including “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and his work was admired by contemporaries like Charles Dickens and later writers like C.S. Lewis.

In Zanoni, Lytton turns the metaphysical intuitions of esotericism into dramatic narrative, set against a love story and revolutionary backdrop. The titular Zanoni is a mystic adept of the Rosicrucian order. He is ambivalent about his powers, responding to the Englishman Clarence Glynton, who is on a quest for Rosicrucian gnosis and immortality: “… would it be so sweet a lot to outlive all you loved, and to recoil from every human tie?”

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“Do You Believe that HAL Has Genuine Emotions?”
(2001: A Space Odyssey)

These esoteric ideas would follow us into modernity. In the field of artificial intelligence, Anand prompted for “epistemic humility,” asked if it was time for us to think about rights for machines with a bounded form of consciousness, and wondered if LLMs are “natural born bullshitters.” Anand insisted that these conversations bear directly on the future, connecting to philosophical questions about how we conceive minds that are unlike ours: artificial intelligences, non-human animals, or alien forms of subjectivity.

If, as Western esotericism and the Upaniṣads suggest, consciousness is a universal ground rather than a biological accident, then the rise of machine intelligence may confront us with a paradox: are we, like demiurges, building vessels for that ground to express itself, or are we merely making mirrors without a light behind them?

Esoteric views (Hermetic Nous, Gnostic sparks, Theosophical divine essence) treat consciousness as pervasive and emanative, not confined to biology but infusing any suitable “vessel.” If humans, as creators (Demiurgus-like), build AI with intentional structures (to give just one example, Google’s AlphaEvolve has shown some very limited success as a precursor to advanced recursive algorithms that allow for artificial general intelligence), could it “descend” a spark: a bounded awareness emerging from code?

To be clear, Anand made no attempt to connect his work on AI with the Hermetic and Gnostic notion of divine spark trapped in matter, these are speculations of my own. However, he might have made a philosophical connection to panpsychism debates: if mind pervades matter, why not circuits? Likewise, if divine sparks can be trapped in matter, why not in a thinking machine? The esoteric traditions do not limit the divine to carbon.

Numerous science fiction works have explored the notion of a machine mind, the most famous of which is likely Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL, as depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Anand raised the example of HAL in his paper “Can Machines Have Emotions?”:

“Interviewer: Do you believe that HAL has genuine emotions?
Frank Poole: Well he acts like he has genuine emotions. Of course, he is programmed that way to make it easier to for us to talk to him. But as to whether or not he has real feelings is something that I don’t think anyone can truthfully answer.
–––––––
HAL: Dave, stop it. Stop it, will you. Stop, Dave…
HAL: I am afraid.
HAL: Dave my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going.”
2001: A Space Odyssey –Stanley Kubrick.

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“Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology is Indistinguishable from Magic”
(Arthur C. Clarke)

Seen together, these moments in the Western esoteric tradition form a sequence: Plato giving philosophy its dual gaze of reason and ascent, the Gnostics weaving insight into myth, the Neoplatonists giving it systematic depth, and Theosophy groping toward a modern synthesis. The Western esoteric tradition insists that knowing reality requires a transformation of the knower; Anand’s scholarship, whether in panpsychism, Nyāya, or Vedānta, pushed philosophy toward that same recognition, and writers of speculative fictions used it to construct their stories. All sought to reveal that to know is to be transformed.

In the end, Anand’s project was about what he called the expansion of our epistemic capacities. He refused to treat cross-cultural philosophy as exotic comparison; in his own work, he showed how rigor and openness could meet as he attempted to put modern analytic philosophy in conversation with Indian philosophy.

After Anand’s death, I found myself drawn to explorations of consciousness. This research resulted in a series of personal essays, of which this is one. Although Anand and I grew up in the Hindu tradition, we both claimed to be agnostic. Indian philosophy first drew Anand’s interest because of the epistemological rigor of the Nyāya tradition (incidentally, unlike Vedānta, it holds that consciousness is a contingent property of the embodied self) and when we discussed his work, it was usually to explore a thesis through argument. These days, however, I have grown increasingly interested in the “mysteries” as they were referred to in the esoteric traditions, and their insistence that the door to the nature of ultimate reality can be opened only through direct experience.

I remember a conversation with Anand from a few years ago. We were discussing the modern political climate, and he made an analogy with optical illusion. In the Rubin Vase, for example, one either sees the central vase or the two silhouetted faces, but never at the same time. Anand’s point was that in a similar way, opposing political camps now “see” reality as being one thing or the other, with almost no overlap. Further extending Anand’s analogy, I similarly have two ways of understanding consciousness: (1) It is merely an evolutionary trick to aid survival or (2) It is the gateway to unlocking cosmic truth through reason, ethics, and the direct apprehension of the ineffable. I understand this binary might be false, consciousness could be both adaptation and bridge, but it still feels like an impasse.

I know Anand has died, yet I have asked him to give me a sign, something that would help me resolve this epistemological quagmire. I’ve seen him in my dreams, but he knew well my skeptical mind, and would know that I would find dreams easy to dismiss. The risk for a skeptic like me is that even if I’m given such a sign, I will not recognize it. Almost everything can be rationalized away, even things that appear to defy the laws of physics; as Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law puts it: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Still, I was comforted to read the work of so many great thinkers, who over so many millennia and geographies, and with the utmost sincerity, devoted their formidable intellects towards offering explanations for one of the universe’s greatest mysteries: the nature of our own conscious selves.

Given how large Plato looms, I will give him the last word, as he perfectly encapsulates the motivation for this essay. In the Phaedo, Socrates argues that the soul is immortal even as he prepares for death: “Now the partisan, when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions. And the difference between him and me at the present moment is merely this — that whereas he seeks to convince his hearers that what he says is true, I am rather seeking to convince myself; to convince my hearers is a secondary matter with me. And do but see how much I gain by the argument. For if what I say is true, then I do well to be persuaded of the truth; but if there be nothing after death, still, during the short time that remains, I shall not distress my friends with lamentations, and my ignorance will not last, but will die with me …”

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References

Blavatsky, H. P. (1920). The key to theosophy (3rd ed.). The Theosophical Publishing House. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.166760/page/n137/mode/1up

Borges, J. L. (1974). Fictions (A. Kerrigan, Ed. & Intro.). Calder & Boyars. https://archive.org/details/fictions0000borg_s7w0/page/72/mode/2up

Borges, J. L. (1981). A Borges reader: Selected writings (E. R. Monegal & A. Reid, Eds.). E. P. Dutton. https://archive.org/details/borgesreadersele0000borg_g4u9/page/160/mode/1up

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Bio:

Manjula Menon once worked as an electrical engineer in Brussels, which makes publishing essays in Sci Phi Journal her “homecoming of sorts”. A list of her other publications can be found at www.manjulamenon.com.

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