Henri Bergson, Louis MacNeice, and William James

 But first the poem by Louis McNeice which clearly shows the influence of Henri Bergson:

This is a republication of an earlier post with an addition and proper tags:

Louis MacNeice

August

The shutter of time darkening ceaselessly

Has whisked away the foam of may and elder

And I realise how now, as every year before,

Once again the gay months have eluded me.

For the mind by nature stagey, welds its frame

Tomb-like around each little world of a day;

We jump from picture to picture and cannot follow

The living curve that is breathlessly the same.

While the lawn-mower sings moving up and down

Spirting its little fountain of vivid green,

I, like Poussin, make a still-bound fete of us

Suspending every noise, of insect or machine.

Garlands at a set angle that do not slip,

Theatrically (and as if for ever) grace

You and me and the stone god in the garden

And Time who also is shown with a stone face

But all this is a dilettante’s lie,

Time’s face is not stone nor still his wings

Our mind, being dead, wishes to have time, die,

For we being ghosts cannot catch hold of things.

Was Louis MacNeice a Bergsonian? In Creative Evolution I find:

“Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general.”

(pg.332, Mod.Library edn.)

Poems enact duration in such a way as to bring us into the reality of what makes knowledge possible, what Aquinas called connaturality. We find our way into the being of things through such artefacts.

Addiition: The spatialization of time, its mathematization, is an example of a useful fiction that becomes taken for reality. (cf.Matter and Memory) We ‘catch hold of things’ by freezing the flow. In an interesting speculation that has mythic dimensions Bergson envisages godlike duration:

And would not the whole of history be contained in a very short time for a consciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which should watch the development of humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the great phases of its evolution? In short, then, to perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an intenser life, and in thus summing up a very long history. To perceive means to immobilize.

(from Matter and Memory)

Not only is MacNeice influenced by Bergson but the following extract from a lecture by William James has a similar catenary of images.  

But all these abstract concepts are but as flowers gathered, they are only moments dipped out from the stream of time, snap-shots taken, as by a kinetoscopic camera, at a life that in its original coming is continuous. Useful as they are as samples of the garden, or to re-enter the stream with, or to insert in our revolving lantern, they have no value but these practical values. You cannot explain by them what makes any single phenomenon be or go—you merely dot out the path of appearances which it traverses. (from lecture VI.on Bergson’s Critique of Intellectualism in  A Pluralistic Universe by William James)

Bergson Madness

 This way lies madness I say to myself.  After poring over Matter and Memory for years you have finally begun to see some light dawn .Themes emerge from the fog and shapes at last settle into an intelligible form.  The next point of departure is to feel that nobody really understands Bergson but your own self.  Nevertheless there are false steps or a characteristic misprision that arises when there is interference from an overweening conceptual schema so established that it ignores Bergson’s order of business. As I wrote previously the aporiai generated by the internal/external; idealist/materialist were considered insuperable by him.  The alternative then is to move away from a subject/object schema to a plenum of consciousness in which the two are merged.  It is the interaction that is being conscious in a state of pure perception.  As the Vipassana Buddhist meditation instead of saying ‘I hear a song’ say ‘singing is singing’.  Of course this is a limit experience, memory that is linked to a point of view and a history particularises the personal.  Memory and perception work together but the fundamental ontology is of an immediacy that lays down experiences as they happen and is a permanent record.  Forgetting is then a device that cuts out of this plenum what is needed to act efficiently.    Its on a what we need to remember basis.  

What then of interpretations that stay within the rubric of internal/external, qualia and the like conundrums generated by the standard epistemology?  Whatever of my rough hewn farrago they are certainly straying from the master’s order of business.  

I rise from my couch and resume a vacant and pensive mood.  

Bergson as a Dualist

 

In the introduction to ‘Matter and Memory’ Bergson states that his philosophy is dualist but having read his rejection of both Materialism and Idealism we are inclined to say ‘yes Henri, it’s dualism but not as we know it.  He starts from the common apprehension of a primal division between subject and object.  It’s perfectly natural and inevitable but the aporiai that it spawns sends him in a new direction.  Let’s take it that there is an interaction between a sensitive actor, the subject, and the world of sensible inputs. It is this interaction which is experienced as a plenum but not from the vantage point of a subject.  The natural tendency to place this experience in the subject is what the Advaitins call adhyasa or superimposition.  In Bergson’s panpsychist analysis memory pervades this interaction and lays it up never to be forgotten.  Now the perception which is a function of the superimposed subject has its images in a direct way in contrast to memory which is non-temporal but can insert its input.  This I think is the source of the notion of reality as the ‘aggregate of images’.  There is a pooling together from both sources.

I have previously mentioned  my intuition of the metaphor of mirror and images as being a source for his philosophy.  Metaphors instead of being merely an illustration of a point to be clarified can themselves be a higher realisation which hovers on the edge of the inexpressible.

More anon on that.

The Image in Bergson

 

What is the best way to read Bergson?  I would say, no more than 3 pages at a time.  Anymore will cause overheating .  It will take an hour probably.  It is said that a matchbox full of Aristotle weighs as much as the world.  Bergson is like that.  He reads smoothly of course but that is no indication of ease of comprehension.

My interim understanding of the source of his 'image' and 'the aggregate of images'.

The image is something like the image in a mirror.  It's there but it's also part of a totality which includes the person that is standing in front of it.  It's a  totality that can be broken into the various elements that can be considered on their own as though they were subsistent or free standing. So when Bergson writes about affection and perception this sort of division is reflected.  As I understand it the image represents the totality that we are immersed it.  The perception is of a really out there as it is thing and the affection is bodily.  But the bodily affection is also an image.  However the affection is subtilised and becomes cerebral excitations. 
And then he gravels you.
"Affection is, then, that part or aspect of the inside of  our body which we mix with the image of external  bodies; it is what we must first of all subtract from perception to get the image in its purity.'

Understanding Bergson

 “It is known to him to whom It is unknown; he does not know to whom It is known.  It is unknown to those who know well, and known to those who do not know.”  Kena Up. II.3

I was thinking of this when reading Bergson’s Matter and Memory again.  It’s a difficult book but the difficulty is of a different order to simple complexity and close reasoning.  You have to renounce your usual understanding of internal and external, idealism and realism by whatever name you call them.  Everything changes perceptually as I move my body around so to understand what is going on I have to begin with that central element.  Such is the common understanding, indeed the default position, when we turn our attention as thinkers to the problem.  When we are not thinkers and disciples of Descartes we find ourselves immersed in a non-dual world.  Bergson puts it thus:

Why insist in spite of appearances, that I should go from my conscious self to my body, then from my body to other bodies whereas in fact I place myself at once in the material world in general, and then gradually cut out within it the centre of action which I shall come to call my body and to distinguish from all others?

Bergson and Transhumanism and Coathangers

 

Why is transhumanism a pipe dream?  If your brain has a chip installed in it to reroute input around a damaged section caused by a stroke is that an indication of the possibilities of a full machine human interface?  Questions like this arise out of a materialist view of the nature of the human person.  That the brain is a place where memories are stored seems to be a solid scientific fact but it is questioned by Henri Bergson.  He demonstrates through a close analysis of lesion induced aphasia and apraxis that things are not so simple.  He distinguishes between two different sorts of memory, rote memory and the fuller sort which reaches over the whole life of the person and is alway totally present to him.  Both however are focussed on the present moment the brain being an organ of action.  Recognition it will be readily accepted is essential for action.  This happened before and my reaction was successful then so here I go again.  Yes sort of.  Bergson picks this analysis apart:

On one theory, the recognition of a present perception consists in inserting it mentally in its ormer surroundings. I encounter a man for the first time : I simply perceive him. If I meet him again, I recognize him, in the sense that the concomitant circumstances of the original perception, returning to my mind, surround the actual image with a setting which is not a setting actually perceived. To recognize, then, according to this theory, is to associate with a present perception the images which were formerly given in connection with it. But, as it has been justly observed, a renewed perception cannot suggest the concomitant circumstances of the original perception unless the latter is evoked, to begin with, by the present state which resembles it.(page 185 'Matter and Memory')

It, the previous event, must be already here with you.  You did not have to go back to fetch it.  Isn't it the case that we recognize without having an image that we refer to.  Bergson again and again demonstrates his ability to turn a single observation into a revelation.  Every so often I have to read ‘Matter and Memory’ again to find new insights that I didn’t grasp before.  Here he is using a homely metaphor:

there is also a close connection between a coat and the nail on which it hangs, for, if the nail is pulled out, the coat falls to the ground. Shall we say, then, that the shape of the nail gives us the shape of the coat, or in any way corresponds to it ? No more are we entitled to conclude, because the physical fact is hung on to a cerebral state, that there is any parallelism between the two series psychical and physiological. When philosophy pleads that the theory of parallelism is borne out by the results of positive science, it enters upon an unmistakably vicious circle, for, if science interprets connection, which is a fact, as signifying parallelism, which is an hypothesis (and an hypothesis to which it is difficult to attach an intelligible meaning *), it does so, consciously or unconsciously, for reasons of a philosophic order : it is because science has been accustomed by a certain type of philosophy to believe that there is no hypothesis more probable, more in accordance with the interests of scientific inquiry. (Matter and Memory- Intro.)

Professor Auerbach meets Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse

It’s pointless knowing a lot if you only see what you already know. Auerbach in Mimesis was hewing to certain lines but when he comes to modernist writers who run off those he seems to be a little blunted. Knots no doubt. The Brown Stocking which I skipped to wanting to see what he made of To the Lighthouse misses a great deal particularly the influence of Bergson via Proust. (Proust was the best man at the wedding of his cousin Louise Neuberger to Bergson.) The concept of Duration, how memory sifts it and the density of poetic expression which reflects its compression in the present moment; all these elements are present in To the Lighthouse. I have posted before on the panpsychist element in the book
panpsychism
Mrs. Ramsey is herself the lighthouse illuminating with intense beams different sections of the cone of memory.
cone of memory
She is compared in Auerbach’s citation to a Greek goddess. I think this must be an ironical reference to the Moirai (Fates), the spinners which decide the fates of men, here ironically knitting her yarn into a pair of socks. Her matchmaking schemes are the fates she ordains.

Mr. Ramsey shares with the author’s father fussiness about soup. Leslie Stephen in his essay A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps taken from the collection Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking admits to this crankiness but does not specify its exact nature. I take this essay i.e. ‘Bad 5 mins.’, to controvert William James’s Will to Believe. More on that later. L.S. edited a collection of the essays of William Kingdon Clifford of which The Ethics of Belief is one and of course Clifford is perhaps the first of the modern panpsychists. ‘What goes around comes around’.

((All of Sir Leslie Stephen's books can be found at wikisource:
Leslie Stephen

Correction: William James’s essay was delivered in 1896 and the Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking were first published in 1873 and so for James to tackle Stephen on the matter of faith under pressure would be proleptic time travel, or something. In any case the connection is clear because James mentions Stephen in his first paragraph.

Whitehead meets Bhagwan Hamsa on Mount Kailas

(repost from 2012)

This misapprehension is promoted by the neglect of the principle that, so far as physical relations are concerned, contemporary events happen in causal independence of each other. This principle will have to be explained later, in connection with an examination of process and of time. It receives an exemplification in the character of our perception of the world of contemporary actual entities. That contemporary world is objectified for us as 'realitas objectivas', illustrating bare extension with its various parts discriminated by differences of sense data. These qualities, such as colours, sounds, bodily feelings, tastes, smells, together with the perspectives introduced by extensive relationships, are the relational eternal objects whereby the contemporary actual entities are elements in our constitution. This is the type of objectification which (in Sec. VII of the previous chapter has been termed 'presentational objectification'.

(from Process and Reality by A.N. Whitehead. Chap. II: The Extensive Continuum

From Sankara's commentary on the Brihadaranyaka Upanisad II.iv.11:

Objection: In everyone of these instances the mergence of the objects only has been spoken of, but not that of the organs. What is the motive for this?
Reply: True, but the Sruti considers the organs to be of the same category as the objects, not of a different category. The organs are but modes of the objects in order to perceive them, as a lamp, which is but a mode of colour, is an instrument for revealing all colours. Similarly, the organs are but modes of all particular objects in order to perceive them, as is the case with a lamp. Hence no special care is to be taken to indicate the dissolution of the organs; for these being the same as objects in general, their dissolution is implied by that of the objects.

I place these citations together to show that the dissolution of the subjective point of view arrived at by the progressive absorption of lower perspectives into higher ones, brings in its train the monistic condition of pure self-awareness, "one without a second". According to Whitehead the natural awareness of the subject is an atomised one because "The notion of a direct 'idea' (or 'feeling') of an actual entity is a presupposition of all common sense." (P&R) From that bare pre-theoretic intuition Whitehead concludes:

Some real component in the objectified entity assumes the role of being how that particular entity is a datum in the experience of the subject.

All actual entities are open to all other actual entities in a philosphy of organism. In short to divest the essential insight of the bewildering prolixity of Whiteheadian categories - everything is open to everything else and this openness is limited by the nature of each entity. But what is an entity? It is from our subjective point of view, according to the evolved interests of the human being, that we divide the world. Ecology has taught us, that, although these are natural to us, Nature continuously draws back into seamless unity the pieces we have cut out of the whole.

I believe that I can connect these two citations, not by an easy assimilation but by the telescoping that is a feature of both. In the way that actual entities are in each other according to the rubric of their eternal objects, do I dare to call them limiting adjuncts, so are the limiting adjuncts/upadhis successively dissolved. as described in the experience of the sage on Mount Kailas. That this is merely a fanciful connection with the philosophy of organism must be countered by the remark of Whitehead’s in Process and Reality:

This conception of an actual entity in the fluent world is little more than an expansion of a sentence in the Timaeus “But that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in the process of becoming and perishing and never really is.” Bergson in his protest against ‘spatialization’ is only echoing Plato’s phrase “and never really is”.

The words of the sage Bhagwan Hamsa on Mount Kailas mirrors the progressive dissolution of the stages between becoming and being:

Here my Manas merged into Antahkarana (heart); the antahkarana with the Manas merged into Chitta (mind-stuff); the Chitta along with Antahkarana and Manas merged into Buddhi (intellect); the Buddhi with Chitta, Antahkarana and Manas merged into Ahankar (egoism); and the Ahankar along with Buddhi, Chitta, Antahkarana and Manas merged into Absolute Brahma! I found myself reflected everywhere in the whole Universe! It was all one harmony - full of wisdom, Infinite Love Perennial and Bliss Eternal! Where was the body, its tenements and the ‘I’! It was all Satchitananda. (Truth, Wisdom, Bliss).

(from The Holy Mountain by Bhagwan Shri Hamsa)

De Quincey's Palimpsest

Amongst the posthumous works of De Quincey is the essay The Palimpsest of the Human Brain sometimes included in Suspiria de Profundis. Find a copy at
suspiria de profundis
He shares with Bergson the strong conviction that at the moment of death your life is present before you in simultaneous review. This is a common report but only Bergson offers a metaphysics that naturalises it. The Frenchman destroyed all his notes before his death perhaps to secure his reputation from the judgement of scientistic sciolists. De Quincey destroyed nothing except inadvertently through the practice of reading by candlelight. How easy it is as you approach the light to get a better squint to set the page on fire. Or your hair, or both.

What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, oh reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished.

further down:

The fleeting accidents of a man’s life, and its external shows, may indeed be irrelate and incongruous; but the organizing principles which fuse into harmony, and gather about fixed predetermined centres, whatever heterogeneous elements life may have accumulated from without, will not permit the grandeur of human unity greatly to be violated, or its ultimate repose to be troubled, in the retrospect from dying moments, or from other great convulsions.
Such a convulsion is the struggle of gradual suffocation, as in drowning; and, in the original Opium Confessions, I mentioned a case of that nature communicated to me by a lady from her own childish experience. The lady is still living, though now of unusually great age; and I may mention that amongst her faults never was numbered any levity of principle, or carelessness of the most scrupulous veracity; but, on the contrary, such faults as arise from austerity, too harsh, perhaps, and gloomy, indulgent neither to others nor herself. And, at the time of relating this incident, when already very old, she had become religious to asceticism. According to my present belief, she had completed her ninth year, when, playing by the side of a solitary brook, she fell into one of its deepest pools. Eventually, but after what lapse of time nobody ever knew, she was saved from death by a farmer, who, riding in some distant lane, had seen her rise to the surface; but not until she had descended within the abyss of death, and looked into its secrets, as far, perhaps, as ever human eye can have looked that had permission to return. At a certain stage of this descent, a blow seemed to strike her, phosphoric radiance sprang forth from her eyeballs; and immediately a mighty theatre expanded within her brain. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, every act, every design of her past life, lived again, arraying themselves not as a succession, but as parts of a coexistence. Such a light fell upon the whole path of her life backwards into the shades of infancy, as the light, perhaps; which wrapt the destined Apostle on his road to Damascus. Yet that light blinded for a season; but hers poured celestial vision upon the brain, so that her consciousness became omnipresent at one moment to every feature in the infinite review.

((The woman referred to is his mother))

Henri Bergson and the Phonograph

A good mind can make out more than a fair one on a particular topic though the latter may be infinitely more supplied with information. One of the strengths of philosophy is this getting back to first principles and asking the simple questions that can give a fundamental orientation to research. Bergson's impugning of the theory amounting to a doctrine, of mind brain identity proceeds on the simple query:

Impressions made by external objects are supposed to subsist in the brain as it were on a sensitive plate or a phonographic disk. But, when we look more closely, we see how fallacious these comparisons are. If, for example, the visual recollection of an object were really an impression left by that object on the brain, there would not be one recollection of an object, there would be thousands or even millions of them; for the simplest and most stable object changes its form, its size and its shade of colour, according to the point of view from which it is perceived. Unless, then, I condemn myself to a position absolutely fixed when looking at it, unless my eye remains immovable in its socket, countless images in no way superposable will be outlined successively on my retina and transmitted to my brain. And what must the number of the images be if the visual image is of a person, whose expression changes, whose body is mobile, whose clothing and environment are different each time I see him ? Yet it is unquestionable that my consciousness presents to me a unique image, or, what amounts to the same, a practically invariable recollection of the object or person ; evident proof that there is something quite different here from mechanical registration.

(from: The Soul and the Body in Mind-Energy by Henri Bergson)

Please note that the phonograph was the killer app of the day, April 12th. 1912. We now of course have the computer but the objection still stands. Memory in shellac or silicon is just not human memory. In spite of all the variety of sensible impressions it remains singular. My memory of our garden is not that of an abounding variety of plants that each day presents, it is just 'the garden'.

Joy/Ananda/Anantam

There are two definitions offered of the absolute by the advaitin. There is Sat Chit Ananda Brahma and Satyam jnanam anantam Brahma. The former is the one that is usually met with, the latter is in the Taittiriya Upanisad and the subject of a profound commentary by Shankara.

The knower of Brahman attains the highest. Here is a verse uttering that very fact: "Brahman is truth, knowledge, and infinite. He who knows that Brahman as existing in the intellect, lodged in the supreme space in the heart, enjoys, as identified with the all-knowing Brahman, all desirable things simultaneously.

From that Brahman, which is the Self, was produced space. From space emerged air. From air was born fire. From fire was created water. From water sprang up earth. From earth were born the herbs. From the herbs was produced food. From food was born man. That man, such as he is, is a product of the essence of food: Of him this, indeed, is the head; this is the southern side; this is the northern side; this is the Self; this is the stabilising tail.

Tai Up. II.i.1

Satyam, jnanam, anantam - truth, knowledge, infinite (an anta / without boundaries).
Sat, Chit, Ananda - Being, Consciousness, Bliss.


I am going to focus on Ananda/Anantam in this note.
What is it that gives bliss? It is primarily the freedom from the trammels of contingency and the limits of a conditioned individuality. The state of liberation is defined as the unconditioned. We escape from what the Buddhists call 'causes and conditions'. This is achieved by a resolution back into our true nature in a reversal of the order given in the latter half of the sutra quoted. Freedom is also the knowledge of necessity because here we are stuck within a range of possibilities. The non-liberated/realised individual can get a sense of moving past his limitations through creativity.

Philosophers who have speculated on the meaning of life and on the destiny of man have failed to take sufficient notice of an indication which nature itself has given us. Nature warns us by a clear sign that our destination is attained. That sign is joy. I mean joy, not pleasure. Pleasure is only a contrivance devised by nature to obtain for the creature the preservation of its life, it does not indicate the direction in which life is thrusting. But joy always announces that life has succeeded, gained ground, conquered. All great joy has a triumphant note. Now, if we take this indication into account and follow this new line of facts, we find that wherever there is joy, there is creation; the richer the creation, the deeper the joy. The mother beholding her child is joyous, because she is conscious of having created it, physically and morally. The merchant developing his business, the manufacturer seeing his industry prosper, are joyous, — is it because money is gained and notoriety acquired? No doubt, riches and social position count for much, but it is pleasures rather than joy that they bring; true joy, here, is the feeling of having started an enterprise which goes, of having brought something to life. Take exceptional joys,— the joy of the artist who has realized his thought, the joy of the thinker who has made a discovery or invention. 

(from the essay Life and Consciousness in the collection Mind Energy by Henri Bergson (1920).

Bergson's Mind-Energy (Phrenology for Philosophers)

You will likely have often seen areas of the brain circled as the probable focal points of consciousness, the hippocampus, Broca’s etc. It’s as though the bumps of phrenology had migrated inwardly – gone to Broca’s, on my way back already.

In Matter and Memory (1896) Bergson offered his close analysis of the difference between Idealism and Realism going by the standard version of those philosophies. In 1904 in a paper entitled Brain and Thought: A Philosophical Illusion (from Mind-Energy) he again goes into the topic. I found it more accessible but still quite idiosyncratic. What the contemporary philosopher would refer to as the neural correlates of consciousness he describes thus:

The idea that there is an equivalence between a psychic state and its corresponding cerebral state is widely accepted in modern philosophy. Philosophers have discussed the causes and the significance of this equivalence rather than the equivalence itself. By some, it has been held that the cerebral state is reduplicated in certain cases by a psychical phosphorescence which illumines its outline. By others, it is supposed that the cerebral state and the psychic state form respectively two series of phenomena which correspond point to point, without it being necessary to attribute to the cerebral series the creation of the psychic. All, however, agree in admitting an equivalence or, as it is more usual to say, a parallelism of the two series. In order to express the idea, I will formulate it as a thesis: "Given a cerebral state, there will ensue a definite psychic state." Or it may be stated thus: "A super human intelligence, watching the dance of the atoms of which the human brain consists and possessing the psycho-physiological key, would be able to read, in the working of the brain, all that is occurring in the corresponding consciousness." Or, finally, it may be put in this way: "Consciousness tells no more than what is going on in the brain; it only tells it in a different language."

You will recall the phosphorescence remark of Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind. Was this its origin? Anyway Bergson places this way of thinking about consciousness in the proto-idealism of Descartes. Let me try to give a feel of the originality of his treatment of idealism which he describes thus:

 For the idealist, there is nothing in reality over and above what appears to his consciousness or to consciousness in general. It would be absurd to speak of a property of matter which could not be represented in idea. 

In his paper he contrasts this with the usual pattern of realism but to avoid confusing myself I will simply focus on his analysis of idealism. He holds that after the initial plausible statement of that position there is then a switch over to realism by an intellectual sleight of hand which is not noticed by the thinker. (The realist does the same switch towards idealism.)

In the case of Idealism the brain is an element in the world and it must also represent the world. The part then is equivalent to the whole. That’s bad enough but when we focus on the parallel process in the brain we get into a profound muddle:

That is to say, the thesis is intelligible only because, by an unconscious trick of intellectual conjuring, we pass instantly from realism to idealism and from idealism to realism, showing ourselves in the one at the very moment when we are going to be caught in the act of self-contradiction in the other. The trick, moreover, is quite natural; we are, in this case, born conjurors, because the problem we are concerned with, the psycho-physiological problem of the relation of brain and thought, itself suggests by its very terms the two points of view of realism and idealism,— the term "brain" making us think of a thing, the term "thought" of an idea. By the very wording of the question is prepared the double meaning which vitiates the answer.

Find Mind -Energy at
mind-energy

The Two Sources of Morality and Religion by Henri Bergson

I tend towards Bergsonism which is an alert attention to his thought whether it seems inscrutable, as it often does, or not. Bergsonianism I take to be a willingness to co-opt a slice or two into one’s own loaf. I’m not sure that any of the modern Bergsonianisms have much use for his last major work The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. A citation will hint why which is odd because there is no major conflict with evolutionary ethics/ethology at present fashionable.

We have been searching for pure obligation. To find it we have had to reduce morality to its simplest expression. The advantage of this has been to indicate in what obligation consisted; the disadvantage, to narrow down morality enormously. Not indeed because that part of it which we have left on one side is not obligatory: is there such a thing as a duty which is not compulsory? But it is conceivable that, starting from a primitive basis of obligation pure and simple, such as we have just defined, this obligation should radiate, expand, and even come to be absorbed into something that transfigures it. Let us now see what complete morality would be like. We shall use the same method and once more proceed, not downwards as up to now but upwards, to the extreme limit.
In all times there have arisen exceptional men, incarnating this morality. Before the saints of Christianity, mankind had known the sages of Greece, the prophets of Israel, the Arhats of Buddhism, and others besides. It is to them that men have always turned for that complete morality which we had best call absolute morality. And this very fact is at once characteristic and instructive; this very fact suggests to us the existence of a difference of kind and not merely one of degree between the morality with which we have been dealing up to now and that we are about to study, between the maximum and the minimum, between the two extremes. Whereas the former is all the more unalloyed and perfect precisely in proportion as it is the more readily reduced to impersonal formulae, the second, in order to be fully itself, must be incarnate in a privileged person who becomes an example. The generality of the one consists in the universal acceptance of a law, that of the other in a common imitation of a model.
Why is it, then, that saints have their imitators, and why do the great moral leaders draw the masses after them? They ask nothing, and yet they receive. They have no need to exhort; their mere existence suffices. For such is precisely the nature of this other morality. Whereas natural obligation is a pressure or a propulsive force, complete and perfect morality has the effect of an appeal.
Only those who have come into touch with a great moral personality have fully realized the  nature of this appeal.

The primitive morality of which he speaks is the in group tribal morality of the closed society. This is a fundamental virtually instinctual promptness to align oneself with the good of the group. Bergson’s delineates the impossibility of moving to the open religious moral schema without the powerful spiritual magnetism of the avatar.

Panpsychism

I’ve been reading here and there about panpsychism, panexperientalism, protopanpsychism and whatever you’re having yourself. It’s various and varied and those deeply read in the literature of the topic such as David Skrbina, (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy), would claim that many thinkers hold it. Among them would be Henri Bergson. His ideas on memory and duration fit with only light trimming into the information based intuitions of David Chalmers. The concepts of ‘experience’ and ‘memory’ are analogical applied to inanimate nature. We feel that they are present in some rudimentary form. The canyon holds the memory of many floods, the pitting of the rock is the memory of rain. Their history is written on them, they are informed and their nature is made manifest. Inanimate matter is submissive to events. Simple cells and bacteria can ‘select’ their experience and move to a better part of the petri dish of life. This is all metaphorical and that is just the point.

In the concrete object memory and experience are layered as information. They are embedded. In the sentient creature they can be separated out and considered in a an abstract way as well as interact. The greater the separation the more consciousness their is. In the human we have memories, dreams, and reflections all inter- penetrating yet Bergson would say that our soul reality is duration. All these elements which are conscious are compacted in a sold ‘I AM’.

The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.

(from Biographia Litteraria by Coleridge)

Continuous Immediacy (Upadesa Sahasri)

75. The teacher said to him, Your doubt is not justifiable. For you, the Self, are proved to be free from change and therefore perpetually the same on the ground that all the modifications of the mind without a single exception are (simultaneously) known by you. You regard this knowledge of all the modifications which is the reason for the above inference as that for your doubt. If you were changeful like the mind or the senses (which pervade their objects one after another), you would not simultaneously know all the mental modifications, the objects of your knowledge. Nor are you aware of a portion only of the objects of your knowledge (at a time). You are, therefore, absolutely changeless.

The response to this can take a number of forms, two of which are ready to hand. One is that ‘mental modification’ linked with immediate awareness is no more than a dormitive definition so named after the doctor who said that opium cause sleepiness because of its dormitive power. A mental modification is an awareness by virtue of being a mental modification.

The second rebuttal which is identified with Buddhism within the Vedic tradition suggests that knowledge is constantly changing. Apprehension is a progressive affair. As we go on perceiving we come to know more and more. Knowledge is then an active business and is therefore not changeless. This is the line taken by the Disciple.

The Teacher in his reply does not deny that there is an experience of change. What he wants to stress or the insight that he wishes to induce is the immediate nature of the consciousness that accompanies any sensible state. This is a reflection of the nature of the Self. In an image used elsewhere in the book the Self is likened to a mirror that is not changed by the reflections that occur in it.

May I offer the idea of continuous immediacy paradoxical as that sounds. It has I maintain a connection with the Bergsonian concept of duration. Eliot in The Four Quartets wrote about the ‘still centre of the turning world’.

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.

(Four Quartets Section 5: Burnt Norton)

The Memory Hole

How can we forget anything that we have paid attention to? Is that making an event in consciousness that has occurred dependent on personal omission? In the view of Bergson everything remains 'out there' requiring only retrieval by a focussing of the brain. Using a holographic analogy Dr. Stephen Robbins writes of a reconstructive wave which requires a similar wavelength to the original conscious event. The idea of the brain scanning the contents of the brain itself is rejected. The loss of memory due to brain damage is not due to the destruction of storage there because in time the reconstructive aspect of brain function can pass to another area of the brain. Stroke patients can recover language and memory returns.

In his simpler formulation of the brain's function Bergson likens it to a reducing valve. We screen out the dross and retain only the highlights so even the events we think we are attending to are chopped up. Forgetting is a good thing, the totality of the flow of events would overwhelm us. Living in an extended intuition of duration requires a special environment like a monastery or an ashram or a well appointed cave.

Bergsonian Meditation

Experience the present as though it were being remembered.

Is that dissociative or is it trying to do what we are already doing? The latter is a blocking regress or a trying to try. It initiates an automatic pause or poise and that is a good thing for the mental carousel.

That is what I would call a special meditation as against a general practice like mantra/japa. It might be considered an experimental reconfiguration.

The basis of Bergson's Holographic intuition

The whole difficulty of the problem that occupies us comes from the fact that we imagine perception to be a kind of photographic view of things, taken from a fixed point by that special apparatus which is called an organ of perception - a photograph which would then be developed in the brain-matter by some unknown chemical and psychical process of elaboration. But is it not obvious that the photograph, if photograph there be, is already taken, already developed in the very heart of things and at all the points of space? No metaphysics, no physics even, can escape this conclusion. Build up the universe with atoms each of them is subject to the action, variable in quantity and quality according to the distance, exerted on it by all material atoms. Bring in Faraday's centres of force: the lines of force emitted in every direction from every centre bring, to bear upon each the influences of the whole material world. Call up the Leibnizian monads: each is (pg 32) the mirror of the universe. All philosophers, then, agree on this point. Only if when we consider any other given place in the universe we can regard the action of all matter as passing through it without resistance and without loss, and the photograph of the whole as translucent: here there is wanting behind the plate the black screen on which the image could be shown. Our ‘zones of indetermination' play in some sort the part of the screen. They add nothing to what is there; they effect merely this: that the real action passes through, the virtual action remains.

(from Matter and Memory pub.1896)

Dr. Stephen Earle Robbins and Bergson's Holography

Dr. Stephen Earle Robbins has produced an excellent series of youtube lectures on Bergson’s theories ie. notes and bullet points with voice over.
holography
They are adjunctive to his series of papers
papers on Bergson
on the holographic reconstructive wave theory of awareness which eliminates the need to solve the ‘storage’ problem in the brain and the conundrums generated by the classic metaphysic of an external world. By developing the difficult and counter-intuitive concepts more slowly than would be possible in a written paper and adding the enhanced instructive effect of voice plus diagrams and headings one understands more easily rather profound concepts.

Having been struggling with Bergson for years the work of Dr. Robbins is the first I’ve come across that has an understanding of this uncannily neglected philosopher.

Au Contraire M.Ruskin said M.Bergson

Even granting the constant vigour of observation, and supposing the possession of such impossible knowledge, it needs but a moment's reflection to prove how incapable the memory is of retaining for any time the distinct image of the sources even of its most vivid impressions. What recollection have we of the sunsets which delighted us last year? We may know that they were magnificent, or glowing, but no distinct image of color or form is retained—nothing of whose degree (for the great difficulty with the memory is to retain, not facts, but degrees of fact) we could be so certain as to say of anything now presented to us, that it is like it. If we did say so, we should be wrong; for we may be quite certain that the energy of an impression fades from the memory, and becomes more and more indistinct every day; and thus we compare a faded and indistinct image with the decision and certainty of one present to the senses. How constantly do we affirm that the thunder-storm of last week was the most terrible one we ever saw in our lives, because we compare it, not with the thunder-storm of last year, but with the faded and feeble recollection of it.

As I ironically wrote in my story Bodhgaya ‘every sunset is the most beautiful sunset'.
Bodhgaya
M.Bergson of whom I had not heard at that time would say that all memory is eternally present and compounded in duration so nothing is lost.