I had a chance to listen to the Jack Hunter interview at Rune Soup, as Alex mentioned in this episode, to try and get more of a handle on the idea of bracketed reality. They talked about how an influential anthropologist observed a ritual with a particular tribe in Africa early in her career, and was holding herself back from fully participating. She was trying to be an objective observer, and so she experienced it more from her Western anthropologist bracket. Then, many years later, she returned. And this time, she participated in the ritual, and let go of some her Western anthropologist bracket, and participated physically, emotionally, etc. Instead of just observing, she joined in dancing, singing, clapping, crying, etc. And lo and behold, she had a powerful experience where she saw a spirit leaving the person who was being healed, and later, they discovered that the spirit had turned into a tooth in the jar where it had been captured.
So on the Rune Soup interview, Gordon talks about removing brackets, (or removing dams) and flooding the self with broader mystical/spiritual experience. The idea seems to be that there's aspects of the Western mind, the structure of an individual personality and cognitive apparatus, that holds mystical/spiritual experience at bay. And if we can figure out how to be less specifically bracketed, then we can be in touch with a greater reality. So that's my interpretation, for what it's worth.
I think this can be a powerful model to use to consider the questions that are tossed around on the show and in the forum. I think it's a good idea to observe our brackets or perspectives, our worldviews, our favorite ideas, our models, and to gain some facility in turning the volume up or down on the different perspectives and ideas and even behaviors that influence our experience.
One thing about removing brackets and flooding the self with spiritual experience, is that the brackets that are removed may be the same brackets that connect a person deeply to some core aspect of materialist scientist culture.
Jeffrey Kripal explores the concept of brackets in The Super Natural, the book he did with Strieber. He calls it phenomonology, and, if I recall correctly, it's about letting experience happen without drowning it out with certain flavors of materialist analysis. He refers to it as "making the cut." I believe it's a technique for reflecting on experience with a more intentional use of perspectives or brackets that are available to the person.
Raymond Moody's "logic of nonsense" material is related to these ideas of brackets, too. I think he would agree that putting all one's energy into dropping brackets so that one can flood oneself with spiritual experience is all well and good, and would be personally meaning for individual people. But that approach alone won't be effective for ultimately changing the core materialism that has been so resistant to paradigm shift. For thousands of years, mystics have been sharing stories of unbracketed mystical experiences, but some core materialism still remains. I think Moody would suggest that more intentional work within that powerful materialist bracket has to happen from the inside out, and you can't do that work if you've just dropped the bracket entirely.