The 12 Central Principles of EOP

In this post, the initials EOP refer to my concept of the evolution of perception that I have written about for over 25 years.

The 12 principles of EOP

In this essay, the initials EOP refer to my concept of the evolution of perception that I have written about for over 25 years. 

Imagine you are on a show room floor where utility vehicles are on display and you come upon a brand new shiny red fire engine. You walk around it admiring its size, shape and colour. Running your hands over its sides you sense its smooth, cold surface. You tap on it and the metal has a solid metallic ring sound. As you walk past its brand new hoses you notice they have a strong factory smell, not unlike that of a brand new car.  

I’ve just named 7 qualities: size, shape, colour, texture, temperature, sound, and smell. In philosophy these kinds of qualities are called ‘sensible qualities,’ because you experience them with your senses. 

Now you notice a plaque in front of the fire engine that gives other facts about it such as its scored rating, its weight, its speed, its year of manufacture, and its price. 

That’s another 5 qualities: rating, weight, speed, age, and price. These are qualities you read about on the plaque and consider in your thoughts, unlike the sensible qualities you discover by your own observation. We thus call these ‘mental qualities’ because they are abstractions that you go over silently in your mind.

So, in all, you have discovered 12 qualities of this fire engine.

Where were all these qualities when you were learning them? According to modern neuroscience you accessed all 12 of them in your brain.

According to science all of these qualities can only supervene in the form you experienced them in a brain. Colour can only occur in a brain. The same with texture, temperature, sound, and smell. And obviously the writing on the plaque you assessed in your brain from sensible qualities of letters that you interpreted. 

How do we know this to be true? 

It is because clearly at no time did the fire engine (that we presume exists outside our brain) leave the show room floor and pass through an orifice into our head. It remained right where it was when we came up to it. 

Now, if the real fire engine exists outside your head, but all of its qualities you experienced occurred inside your brain, then there must be two fire engines. One fire engine, that you cannot possibly directly experience, must exist outside of your head, and the other, which you experience directly (composed of the qualities named above), exists inside your head. Ask yourself if you are aware of any part of the fire engine besides those 12 qualities you experienced in your brain. According to modern neuroscience, there is none. That there is a fire engine outside your head you merely infer from your sensible qualities. You have no proof it exists, or any way to compare it to the fire engine you experience in your head. The qualities you directly experience in your brain and with your brain are only a ‘representation’ of a theoretical real fire engine you will never see, an invisible one in a second invisible world called the ‘real world.’ 

And not only is this the prevailing view of modern neuroscience, but it was and remains the view of every important philosopher who has ever thought about this problem. 

“It still remains a scandal to philosophy . . . that the existence of things outside of us [meaning outside our experience] . . . must be accepted merely on faith, and that, if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence, we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof.” (Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant, 1787)

In fact, this problem has a name and you can easily look it up in Wikipedia if you like. It is called “the mind-body problem,” and no one has ever claimed to have solved it. 

However, in the year 2000, while studying for my MA in philosophy at the University of Arkansas, I came up with a way that the problem can be solved. Writing it out, I showed it to a professor who said he had never seen it before and that I should develop it. I did exactly that, and four years later, in 2004, I published my first attempt at fleshing it out in a book titled The Evolution of Perception. No academic who has looked at it has ever seen how to dispute it. However, it is so radical they don’t know what else to say. A professor once said, 

The whole raison d'êtrer of a University is to replicate the dominant ideology. That’s what it exists for.

I only have a Masters Degree in philosophy and not a Ph.D. So no reputable peer reviewed journal is likely to ever publish my idea, meaning most academics are unlikely to ever know about it. 

However, I never gave up letting people know. Twenty years after my first book, I published a second, where I expanded further on the concept. That book, published in 2021, is titled Evolution of Perception Re-Explained. I later updated and combined both books in a third publication in 2024, Two Philosophical Works. In addition I’ve made and uploaded to the internet many videos explaining portions of the idea. Incidentally, in Evolution of Perception Re-Explained I go over in detail all historical attempts to solve the mind-body problem, and explain why they failed.

The following is the most condensed version of my idea, and the arguments for it, that I’ve ever given. I enumerate its 12 central principles. I then repeat the list with proofs they the principles have to be right. If these ideas seems too weird to even consider, it’s my opinion that this is due to their being so radically different from how we have hitherto been accustomed to thinking about these matters.

Principles

EOP operates by a set of 12 principles. These principles also include the avoidance of certain fallacies. If these seem difficult to understand or accept I suspect it is partly because it is unfamiliar and because old mental habits die hard. For this idea is simple at its core. At the end I will rephrase this in simpler terms I think anyone could understand. 

1. The world is none other than our shared experience of it. Our world is not a thing in itself independent of its being perceived, but is comprised solely of our shared experience of it. 
2. It follows that the world is an event, a happening, an occurrence, a verb. There is no world independent of this event of perceiving that is occurring.
3. Because the world is a happening and not a thing, it follows that in seeking the cause of the world we ought to have asked ourselves how it all happened, instead of who or what caused it. To ask how something happened is to ask for the process by which it occurred. A true explanation always includes a process. Imagining a thing causing something without considering the process by which it did so is simply magical thinking. Asking how this experience happened is the same as asking for the process by which it came about. 
4. The process that brought about this experience had to have been a process of evolving experience. Complex experience had to have evolved from a simpler state of experience. The cause of our complex shared experience had to be a process by which a simpler unitary state of experience evolved into this complex plural shared state of experience. The analogy I like to use is Pangaea that evolved from a unified continent into many diverse continents or biological evolution that conceives of the simplest one celled organism evolving into many complex organisms. The same principle can be applied to the evolution of our shared experience. So Creation of this Universe involved an evolution of experience, which in my books I call an evolution of perception. 
5. Changes that culminated in this Experiential Universe over time had to have been minor adverbial changes. The small changes in the evolution of perceiving obviously had to be adverbial ones. Imagine a bear riding a bicycle in a circus. Riding is a verb. A change in the bear’s riding is adverbial. For instance it can ride the bike fast or slow, straight or wobbly. Any modification of an action is described by an adverb.
6. The initial catalyst of this experiential event to begin and then evolve into its current condition we find it in had to be a psychic event. Meher Baba calls this catalyst the original whim. 
7. The smallest unit of adverbial change in this evolution of perception is the perceptual schema (way of perceiving). Each new perceptual schema contributes something to the content of experience, culminating finally in our finding ourselves in that experience as apparently separate experiencers of it. In the past we have sought a physical unit like an atom or a physical event like an explosion to account for our world. Such thinking commits the fallacy described below in principle 10, i.e. that of reading effects back into their cause. In EOP the smallest causal units are adverbial changes, which in Evolution of Perception I compare to lenses that gradually shaped experience. Each adverbial lens contributes to the content of our experience. After a long period of such evolution we eventually find ourselves in that experience as separate beings, and that is the reason we find it to be a shared experience. In my books I lay out the steps in this evolution.  
8. Fallacy of Thinking World is a Thing. We must avoid the mistake of thinking of the world as a thing. This is the result of projecting the contents of our experience onto experience itself. We cannot perceive experience, but we imagine it as a discrete object like the discrete objects in that experience. No one can perceive the perceiving that the world is, nor can they imagine it. If there is one causal entity that we cannot see it is seeing itself and its adverbs (seeing and ways of seeing). The world as we find it in our experience is composed of discrete objects. However, this appearance of plurality is the result of an evolution from a condition which had no plurality. So, when we conceive of reality as a thing, we really are committing fallacy no. 10 below, reading effects back into causes. Projecting effects back into causes is how we wound up with the chimerical mind-body or two-world problem. 
9. Fallacy of Believing that Things Can be Causes. Only processes can cause anything. The fallacy of imagining a thing as the cause of something is where we got our primitive concepts about animal and human spirits creating the world. This is magical thinking. It is also an example of fallacy no. 10 below.
10. Fallacy of Reading Effects into Causes. The fallacy of reading effects back into their own causes. We must avoid reading something that comes about because of a process back into that process. For example, Plato explained tables we perceive by imagining a world of forms where a perfect table existed. If X obtains only after Y obtains and only as a result of Y obtaining, then X could not have obtained contemporaneous with Y. See my books for elaboration on this fallacy, also known as the historical fallacy or the psychological fallacy (Dewey).
11. Necessary Preconditions are Necessary for What They Condition. In reflecting on the order of events occurring in a process that leads to some outcome, we must take particular care not to imagine an event occurring before conditions necessary for it to occur were present. Again, We know this to be a logical mistake by the law of noncontradiction. Obviously if X requires Y, X cannot obtain prior to Y obtaining. 
12. Magical Causation. The following are in fact examples of fallacies no. 9 and 10 above, only with invisibility added to the imagined causal thing. (1) To explain an X that we perceive, we imagine something just like X that we can’t perceive as its theoretical cause. (2) The cause of a thing we perceive X is a second X we don’t perceive. The habit of reading our memories of things we’ve perceived back into the causes of those things I call the process order fallacy.  

Logical Justifications of the 12 principles

1. The world is none other than our shared experience of it. If we reflect on what we mean by a toaster in the kitchen, we would describe our experience of it. No ordinary person would claim that the qualities he described belonged to a mere representations in his head but that the actual toaster exists in a realm he cannot see or describe. If he did so, he would effectively be inventing a second occult (here meaning hidden) world. And yet philosophers have conjectured essentially that for over 2000 years. Philosophers who have taken this position inadvertently created the so called mind-body or two-world problem they now find intractable. Clearly they cannot solve it with the thinking they used to create it. In addition, nearly all superstition is derived from this single flaw in thinking — that there is a second world we do not see that contains things analogous to the ones we do. Under the fallacies section below we describe the problems in thinking that led this unfortunate situation. The only justification for belief in such a second occult world is that no other explanation for why our experience of things is shared is forthcoming. However, this justification becomes moot when we are faced with a system that does not require it, namely EOP. Hence while the occult second world cannot be disproven, as an invisible thing can never be proved nor disproved, there is absolutely no justification for believing that it does. If what we mean by a rational belief is one for which we have a empirical or logical reason for holding it, then the belief in an occult second world is an irrational one.
2. If the world is none other than our shared experience of it, then the world is an event, a happening, an occurrence, a verb. Experiencing or perceiving are actions and hence verbal. If the world is an experience it is an event — something that is happening and not a thing. We know experiencing is an action and not a thing by definition. Any objection that experience can only be of a thing apart and independent of such experience is put to rest in the subsequent arguments. The content of experience includes things. But we will see that the pluralistic content of our experience is the result of a process that is not pluralistic. The mistake is projecting effects back into their causes. 
3. Having established that the world is a shared experience and hence an ongoing occurring event, we ought to ask how it happened, instead of who or what made it. Ancient people assumed that things like spirits and talismans were responsible for events we perceive occurring. But more advanced modern thinking about causation recognises that to explain phenomena we perceive occurring around us we need to seek the processes that are responsible — not just a responsible object like a talisman or a humour or an incantation. Imagining a thing causing something else without any process is the definition of magical thinking, for the causal connection is absent. So asking how this experience happened, which is the same as asking for the process that brought it about, is in fact in line with modern thinking. We know from history there has been this advancement in thinking about causation. The ancient Greeks taught that the gods shaped the continents (See Critias by Plato). Today we know the shape of the continents is the result of a process called Plate Tectonics. There are numerous other examples where process has supplanted invisible things as causes.
4. The process responsible for our shared experience had to have been a process of evolving experience. The cause of our complex shared experience had to have been a process by which a simple unitary state of experience evolved into the complex plural shared state of experience we currently enjoy. How do we know this? Experiencing is an action. Therefore, its cause also has to be an action. We call an action that causes something a process. How else can something arise except by a process? So Creation of this phenomenal Universe involved an evolution of experience, or what I call in all my books an evolution of perception. 
5. The minor changes that occurred sequentially over time and culminated in this Experiential Universe we enjoy had to be adverbial in nature. They were changes in how experience took place. Changes in an occurrence over time have to be, by definition, changes in how that occurrence is occurring. Hence these changes are adverbial. This is true by definition. 
6. The original catalyst of this experiential evolution had to be a psychic event. A brick cannot cause an experience to occur. We can theorise that lightning striking a pool of chemicals in a primordial soup sparked first life and then biological evolution, and then in the course of evolution chemical and electrical activity in brains slowly gave rise to conscious experience. The problem with this is all these things (lightning, pools, chemicals reactions) are found in the contents of our experience, hence we are projecting effects (the contents of our experience) back into its cause. This is circular reasoning. The result of a process ought not be read back into the process that supposedly brought it about. See 10-12 below.
7. The working unit of change in the evolution of perception is a perceptual schema (way of perceiving). The addition of perceptual schemas over time added more and more to the content of experience, culminating in our finding ourselves in our current experience as apparently separate experiencers of it. How do we know this has to be true? In the past we have sought physical units like atoms or a physical concoctions like a primordial soup or physical events like the ‘Big Bang’ to account for our world coming into phenomenal existence. All these theories commit fallacy number 10 below, i.e. reading copies of things we perceive back into their supposed cause. We are looking for the cause of physical things and events that we perceive. It solves nothing to posit physical things and events back into the process we come up with to explain them. For if we do that we still have those posited causal things and events to explain. In this system we avoid these fallacies by positing adverbial changes in experience, which in my books I compare to lenses that gradually shape and form experience into the condition we find it. Each adverbial lens contributes to the content of experience. After a long period of accumulation of these lenses we eventually find ourselves in that experience as separate beings, and that is the reason we find it to be a shared experience. See my books for a detailed layout of this process.  
8. Fallacy of Conceiving of the Phenomenal World as Fundamentally a Thing, as opposed to a shared set of experiences. We must avoid the mistake of thinking of the world as a thing. This way of conceiving of the world is the result of projecting the contents of our experience onto experience itself. We cannot perceive experience, but we imagine it as a discrete object like the discrete objects within that experience. No one can perceive the perceiving that the world is, nor can they imagine it. Another way to say this is we cannot see seeing, we see its effects. If there is one causal entity is occult (meaning that we cannot see it) it is seeing itself along with its adverbs, i.e. seeing and ways of seeing. The world as we find it in our experience is composed of discrete objects. However, this appearance of plurality is the result of an evolution from a condition which had no plurality. So, when we conceive of reality as a thing, we really are again committing fallacy number 10 below, reading effects back into their causes. And this habit of projecting effects back into causes is how we wound up with the illusory mind-body or two-world problem. Seen correctly, these chimerical problems disappear as never having really existed.
9. Fallacy of Supposing that Physical Things can be Causes. Only processes can cause anything. The fallacy of imagining a thing as the cause of another thing is where we got our primitive concepts about animal and human spirits creating the world. This is magical thinking. How do we know this is a fallacy? Try to think of an example where a thing is caused by another thing. If you try, you will wind up describing a process. By themselves things are inert. 
10. Fallacy of Reading Effects into Causes. This is the fallacy of reading effects (or worse, imagined invisible copies of those effects) back into their cause. Or more accurately we must avoid reading something that comes about because of a process back into that process. For example, Plato explained our recognition of objects in this world by theorising we remembered like things in another world prior to birth, which he called forms. The explanation of our recognition of a chair was our recognition of a similar chair in another world we can’t see. That’s reading effects back into causes. We can formulate some examples of commission of this fallacy in different ways. If X obtains only after Y obtains, and only as a result of Y obtaining, then X could not have already obtained at the time of Y. See my books for more elaboration on this fallacy, also known as the historical fallacy or psychological fallacy (John Dewey, 1896).
11. Necessary Preconditions are Necessary for What They Condition. Some things we know by definition. We must take particular care not to imagine an event occurring before conditions were present necessary for it to occur. Obviously if X requires Y, we cannot have X without Y. It’s a tautology. Noticing this is valuable in EOP because we can know for certain the order of the evolution of certain perceptual schemas because they were necessary preconditions. Thus the order of the evolution of perception can be known a priori — meaning by reasoning alone. We do not need to go back in time and see. It could not have been any other way.
12. Magical Causation. Magical causation is also where effects are read back into their cause, with a twist that the causes cannot be observed. Plato’s forms are an example. So is the primitive notion of gods. So is ‘matter’ in the sense of a theoretical entity as described by some philosophers, as opposed to the plainly observable materials we directly experience. We can formalise magical causation as: To explain an X that we perceive, we imagine something just like X that we can’t perceive as its theoretical cause. What makes this form of explaining something implausible is that no account of how the invisible X created the visible one. A secondary problem is that we have no way to observe the invisible X to see if it truly causes the visible one, or how it does so. And a tertiary problem with this form of explanation is that, since the cause is mysterious, while we began with only one thing to explain we wind up with two things to explain, for we now have our invisible X to explain along with our visible one.

This sums up the 12 principles of EOP and my justifications for them. I recommend anyone interested in reading more pick up one of my books at Amazon. 

__________________

What I believe when I say I believe in EOP

Now how can I explain EOP in a way that a person can grasp? I think the best way is to describe how I see the world through the EOP lens. 

For me, there is no God in the sense of a discrete thing or person apart from the world. Nor is God the world itself as in the pantheism of Spinoza. Rather, for me all there is is God. So I would say, there is no God; there is only God.

We do not see God because God is our seeing itself. And not only our seeing, but that of everything that sees, no matter how remotely such as a sparrow or flea. In short, God is our seeing and that is why we do not see him. Nor do we become him for there is nothing else to have been. Nor do we unite with him because there is nowhere else we could have been.

When I say ‘seeing,’ I mean the word in its broadest sense, as perceiving with the senses or the mind. The capacity to perceive with awareness is the earmark of intelligence. And I believe God is infinite Intelligence, and that this Intelligence that is God is eternal and always existed even before there was a world to see. However, I believe it had to awaken originally and awakens slowly again and again in each of us as we discover our existence of God in that process. See the chapter “Evolution of Consciousness” in God Speaks by Meher Baba, 1955.

I believe the world evolved in the imagination of God. I believe it is a shared dreamt experience, for we fundamentally are none other than God dreaming it. 

I don’t believe God permeates the Universe. For there really is no actual Universe other than God’s dream of it. I don’t believe I am in God, for “in” is a spatial world and the perceptual schema of space is part of God’s dream. 

I believe I will one day wake from this dream and find that I shared in its creation, and that is what the Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs call moksha, the Christian mystics call mystical union, and the Sufis call najat.

All there is is seeing and ways of seeing. The laws of nature are ways of seeing. I am seeing itself. This Universe came into apparent being so I could discover my own existence and awaken to my own reality as the creator of my own dream. We are all really one Soul having a shared experience. I believe in reincarnation that that eventually even the sinner becomes a saint.  

And I believe in the teachings of Meher Baba, but that is my personal preference. I would not push such a thought on anyone. 

What my belief in EOP means I no longer believe in

I do not believe in invisible causes. 

For instance:

I don’t believe you have an invisible soul inside your body.

I don’t believe in an invisible God existing somewhere. 

I don’t believe in the many unperceived theoretical entities proposed in science fiction or theorised in the so-called new physics, such as wormholes, extra dimensions, dark energy, strange energy, and dark matter.  

I don’t believe in parallel universes or a multiverse. 

I don’t believe in invisible places like heaven, hell, purgatory, a subtle world, a mental world, or an astral world. These are actually psychic states, not places.

I don’t believe in any of the following ‘spiritual’ places certain people are said to go:

• Happy Hunting Grounds (Great Plains tribes of American Indians, including the Oglala Lakota)
• Heaven with pearly gates, clouds, and angels playing harps (19th century American and English protestant sermons, usually by poorly educated self-ordained folk-evangelists)
• Shambhala (Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist traditions)
• Avalon (Arthurian legend)
• Valhalla (Norse)
• Fólkvangr (Norse)
• El Dorado (Disney® Corporation)
• Fountain of Youth (If you get there, avoid death altogether)
• Unlimited Ocean (Meher Baba, this was only a metaphor)
• 72 Virgins (9th century non-Koranic Islamic invention)
• Being made an immortal star (Greek, for some lucky ones)
• Fields of Aaru (fields of reeds in Egyptian mythology)
• World of Forms (Plato)
• Olam ha-Ba ("the world to come" and refers to a heavenly afterlife in the divine Presence in Jewish eschatology) 
• Elysium (Virgil)
• Divine Palace (Poetic invention of Bhau Kalchuri, first attested to in "Awakening," 2001)
• Hades (dreary Greek underworld)
• Purgatory (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican Christianity)
• Hell (Numerous faiths by different names)
• Hel as well as Niflhel (Norse)
• Jahannam (Islam)
• You cease to exist (Atheism, some modern Jews, Greek Stoics)
• Lower astral (Where Meher Baba said ghosts go to haunt the living, includes animal spirits, somehow linked to the physical world, similar to Hades where shades go)
• She'ol (where people go as shades in the Talmud)
• Gehinnom (Hebrew place equated with Hell, tho sometimes compared with Purgatory. Gehinnom is the Hebrew counterpart of Islamic Jahannam mentioned above)
• Planes of existence (Meher Baba, these are states of consciousness that are often misconstrued as actual places or other worlds.)

I also do not believe in the spiritual value of places of pilgrimage, except for their value in changing how you may think. If you think you feel something, this may inspire, and thus help you. But they are meaningless in themselves. All talk of a vibration or emanations from them are fantasy. 

Someone might be disgusted in me and say I don’t believe in anything spiritual. Wrong. I believe seeing is God, and all there is of anything is seeing. All planes and heavens are actually ways of seeing.

If I could sum up all my thinking, all there is is seeing and ways of seeing. All else is fantasy. 

The Angry Gods of Old-Time-Religion and the Bright Future of EOP 

The errors in thinking described in this paper are not merely of academic interest. They led to our primitive way of considering causes, which in turn led to our primate notions of gods and God. 

From the primitive notion of gods, we get the angry God of the old world. Such an angry deity was a projection of our own lower nature onto the cause of Creation. It followed that our gods were conceived as jealous, self-righteous, angry, and destructive. See the fallacies above for why such a projection was nearly inevitable. It was the result of the simplistic way we thought about causes.

Having projected our own lower nature into these gods, they were in turn useful to priests to justify divisiveness, wars, colonialism and genocide. We claimed our atrocities were the wish of our gods. This was only natural since our gods were themselves a projection of our own lower nature that included these negative impulses. So all this misery and cruelty was born of a form of projection, which was the result of the thinking I described above, which EOP replaces.

Note that Jesus came in the midst of this misery created in the name of God, and spoke of his ‘father’ in a very different way from this projection, as something good within each of us, very in keeping with EOP.

The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

(Luke 17:20-21)

Today, many people no longer believe in God. Yet the legacy of such a history of divisiveness (thought to be moral and rational by those who espoused the old gods) lingers in such people’s minds. You see this expressed even in the 20th century in lingering Jim Crow laws, tropes like “white man’s burden,” Europe as garden and the global south as encroaching jungle, apartheid in South Africa and Israeli, colonialism, and racial superiority. These awful things, now beginning to be seen for what they are and bad, were once justified in the name of old-world God.

Young people are ready for EOP because they have begun to distance themselves from this separatist thinking, and having abandoned the old gods, are open to a new collective world view that helps and unites us rather than harms and divides us.