Recording: No need to transcend the human experience
Recording 28th Oct 2025
You might think that your dashboard onto reality is something to be transcended, but Bernardo disagrees. This is an unfortunate inheritance from Christianity. The dashboard, your human perception, is also part of reality, governed by the same archetypal templates as Mind at Large. The perceptual apparatus and that which it interprets are equally real and there is no need to rank them.
We are dissociated from Mind at Large, but there are also internal dissociations. So when boundaries dissolve, (either naturally or through psychedelic experience,) we might be in contact with universal experience, or alien bands of reality, or it might merely be our own trauma, and some mix of all the above.
So whilst it is possible to see beyond the dashboard whilst alive, it is very difficult to discern genuine transcendence from delusion.
Anyway, we likely get genuine access to the beyond after death - so Bernardo says; why rush?
There is validity in your perception that the sun moves across your sky.
Enjoy your human dashboard whilst it lasts!
Perception has layers.
The interpretational layers of human perception evolve, over thousands of years and even slower, but the raw sensory data that this interprets is likely quite stable over the history of any given species.
For example, some cultures will have names for shades of green that other people cannot distinguish, but the basic brain structure that receives raw data will be the same.
An example of higher levels of perception modulating lower include the checker board illusion:
The A and B squares in this image are both exactly the same shade, but as our perception has evolved to accommodate shadows cast by objects blocking light and contrast with neighbouring shades, try as we might, B is experienced as lighter than A by every person I've so far met.
The emergence of perspective
The dashboard may evolve slowly, but our explicit awareness of how it functions can come about in sudden shifts. In the Renaissance, artists became aware of how distance is represented by perspective. People further away look smaller:
In contrast to earlier art, in which size would represent the relative importance of the person depicted, not their distance from the observer. Below, the Madonna and child take prominence over the saints and angels attending them.
We continue this exploration of perception and the dashboard next week.
For now, I'll close with a painting from the workshop of Hieronymus Bosch, depicting a Renaissance mountebank fleecing credulous gamblers by taking advantage of our imperfect perceptual apparatus.
Until next time!
Amir
Time Stamps
With thanks to Rita Conde
0:00 Essentia conference catchup:
Commonalities between physics and neuroscience
6:10 Can science participate in the evolution of perception?
11:30 Science isn’t perfect, but does make progress
14:40 Higher level human perception evolves slowly, raw perception mostly doesn’t
23:00 Science makes use of convenient fictions
25:00 Illusion and perspective in art
29:00 No need to transcend the human experience
34:00 Difficult to distinguish transcendence and delusion
39:00 Perception is our creation: a modulated hallucination
00:46:20 - Perspective in renaissance art signifies a new awareness of local individualised uniqueness
00:51:40 - Porous dissociative boundaries
00:55:40 - Dissociation isn't absolute
00:56:00 - Dissociations between self and world, and internally
00:56:30 - 3 Types of experiences when dissociation disolves
00:56:45 - 1st type: encounters with dissociated parts of ourselves
00:58:30 - 2nd type: direct acquaintance with the world behind nature
00:59:10 - 3rd type: making contact with other aspects of reality we didn't evolve to perceive
01:00:40 - Bernardo's sighting of an UAP
01:03:15 - Neuroscientist Andrew R. Gallimore's book Death by Astonishment
01:06:00 - Contacts with other beings coherent under analytical idealism
01:07:52 - Discovering deeper truths about being human
01:11:30 - Why the Dashboard is an artifact of separation and can be the enabler of evil: slavery, war, totalitarianism
01:19:18 - Philippe Guillemant and the role of emptiness
01:20:40 - Closing the session