Ever drifting down the stream–
Lingering in the golden gleam–
Life, what is it but a dream?
WHEN our rational brains are all heated up, arguing life’s complexities, that’s usually the best time to kick off our shoes and give it a rest.
When faced with a critical decision, or stuck on a complex problem, sleeping or napping on it, researchers have found, often leads to the right answer.
The notes of a song, the smell of burning leaves, the babbling of a mountain stream, all open the door to the the non-rational, poetic mind. They can awaken dim recollections of childhood, and even intimations of immortality:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar …
A Dream within a Dream
- Edgar Allan Poe
Wanderesting
Researchers are finding that “zoning out may be the most fruitful type of mind wandering,” reports Carl Zimmer (“Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State.”) The wandering mind, they find, “allows us to work through some important thinking.”
And why, when meeting someone for the first time, do we have an overpowering feeling we’ve met before? The mind really can work in mysterious ways.
Déjà Vu All Over Again
Émile Boirac (1851–1917)
Rector of the Dijon Academy and noted French psychical researcher, Émile Boirac, coined the term déjà vu, denoting such feelings as memories of our past.
But are they all explainable in terms of lost memory, of fragments from the past?
Or are they only strange feelings caused by glitches in the brain’s neurochemical network, as many skeptics insist?
Daydreamers are often judged as lazy and impractical misfits, who are doomed to failure.
Daydreamers Are Smarter
ScienceDaily (May 12, 2009), reports that “a new University of British Columbia study finds that our brains are much more active when we daydream than previously thought.”
“Mind wandering is typically associated with negative things like laziness or inattentiveness,” says lead author, Prof. Kalina Christoff, UBC Dept. of Psychology.
“But this study shows our brains are very active when we daydream – much more active than when we focus on routine tasks.”
“This is a surprising finding,” she said.
- fMRI brain scans from UBC Mind Wandering Study. (Credit: Courtesy of Kalina Christoff)
Many famous daydreamers have gone on to make revolutionary contributions to society. Einstein was one.
Einstein’s “train ride on a beam of light” taught him–and us–his theories of relativity, which revolutionized physics.
Your Unconscious at Work
“A dream led Elias Howe to beat Singer to the patent for the sewing machine,” writes Sandra Weintraub in “Cultivate Your Dreams to Find New Solutions:”
“In the dream, Howe was in a jungle surrounded by natives holding spears, with holes near their tips, Ms. Wintraub recounts.
“When he woke, he realized that putting the hole near the tip of the needle would make a working sewing machine.”
“If you’ve ever awakened in the morning and suddenly found the answer to a question you’d been pondering, perhaps your dreams worked out the problem. You may not remember dreaming, but your unconscious was actively at work while you slept.”
In her article, Ms. Wintraub, the principal of a company called Management Resources, goes on to list numerous other astounding discoveries resulting from dreams.
Also see: The Creative Impulse in Dreams
The Solution Zone
Given such discoveries, might there something more we need to understand about the fundamental nature of consciousness?
“There are many stories in the history of science of great discoveries occurring to people out of the blue,” notes Carl Zimmer in his Discovery article, June 15, 2009:
“The French mathematician Henri Poincaré once wrote about how he struggled for two weeks with a difficult mathematical proof. He set it aside to take a bus to a geology conference, and the moment he stepped on the bus, the solution came to him.”
“Neuroscientists are investigating this paradox by searching for the signatures of mind wandering in the brain,” Zimmer reports.
Kekulé and the Benzene Molecule
Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz discovered the Benzene molecule while dreaming:
“…I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes.
“This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion.
“But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis.”
Collective Consciousness
Distracted mental states are often discouraged by our parents and teachers. ‘Use your head,’ we are told, and ‘think before you act.’
There seems to be a natural tendency for us to daydream. But dreaming and reminiscing is not always an individual matter.
And, human beings seems to be attracted to group states. This shared dreaming Blavatsky called “floating reminiscences,” which “unite the broken links of the chain of time.” And these form, she said:-
“…the mysterious, dream foundation of our collective consciousness.”
Row, Row, Row Your Boat
These nursery rhyme lyrics, says Wikipedia, “have often been used as a metaphor for life’s difficult choices, and many see the boat as referring to one’s self or a group with which one identifies.”
The final line, “life is but a dream”, the writer says, “is perhaps the most meaningful.”
“With a religious point of view, life and the physical plane may be regarded as having equivalent value as that of a dream, such that troubles are seen in the context of a lesser reality once one has awakened.“
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“Whatever you can do or dream, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.” – Goethe
Kirlian Photograph
Global Psychic Reservoir
The term psychic was first used by renowned chemist William Crookes to describe the famous medium and magician Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-1886). In 1871, Crookes attended a Fox sisters séance and came away convinced that the rapping noises they produced were genuine spirits.
Crookes’ psychic investigations were largely ignored by his contemporaries, but frequently quoted by H. P. Blavatsky, who herself witnessed the Fox sisters’ performances—and, the Eddy farmhouse manifestations.
While at the Fox home, she met newspaper correspondent Henry Steel Olcott, who was to remain a lifelong friend. Together with William Quan Judge, they founded the Theosophical Society.
“The only difficulty,” in explaining such phenomenon, Blavatsky wrote in Isis Unveiled 1:116, her first book:
“… is to realize the fact that surrounding space is not an empty void, but a reservoir filled to repletion with the models of all things that ever were, that are, and that will be; and with beings of countless races, unlike our own.”
The Extended Mind
An Eternal Now
If all this is true, then there is no real separation between past, present and future, and everything represents an “eternal now.” The recovery of what was, or will be, requires only that we tune into its information frequency.
Tuning in is the same way we tune into a particular program on radio or TV, by turning the dial. Only in life, both the dial and the dialer are within ourselves.
This concept suggests that déjà vu, clairvoyance, paranormal phenomena, remote viewing—or even remembering a past life—are like locating a film or book at a 24 hr. library.
It means we are swimming in an impeccably accurate, microfiched universe—which is also the essence and substrate of our own being—what ancient teachers called the Akâsa (Sk)—“the subtle, supersensuous spiritual essence which pervades all space.”
It is roughly analogous to what science today calls dark matter and dark energy. This “God principle” is in, within and around everything, everywhere. We are as inseparable from it, as the fish is the ocean.
Uncharted Waters
The lower realms, or layers, of this noetic ocean, are called the “Astral Light”— “the invisible region that surrounds our globe.”
In addition to images and other records, there exist in it “beings of countless races, unlike our own,” Blavatsky says—and, it is the dangerous and confusing realm of mediums and psychics.
She describes this astral, just-below-the-surface level of physical existence, Transactions (64), as “simply the dregs of Akâsa”:-
“… or the Universal Ideation in its metaphysical sense. Though invisible, it is yet, so to speak, the phosphorescent radiation of the latter, and is the medium between it and man’s thought-faculties.”
“It is these [thoughts] which pollute the Astral Light, and make it what it is—the storehouse of all human and especially psychic iniquities.
In its primordial genesis, the astral light as a radiation is quite pure, though the lower it descends approaching our terrestrial sphere, the more it differentiates, and becomes as a result impure in its very constitution.
“But man helps considerably to this pollution, and gives it back its essence far worse than when he received it.“
If our thoughts were “inspired and illumined” only by our highest, altruistic Self, she says, “there would be little sin in this world.”
But our thoughts are usually not so enlightened. Instead, the tendency is to become “entangled in the meshes of the Astral Light,” separating ourselves “more and more from [our] parent [spiritual] Egos.”
A Universe of Duality
Just like thoughts, swarms of bacteria, viruses and other creatures, good and bad, invisibly inhabit our physical world. We take probiotics to support the billions of beneficial bacteria that live in our gut, and antibiotics to rid ourselves of their harmful cousins—yet, we still know very little about either.
Correspondingly, this is why Theosophy clearly warns against “dabbling” in those astral spheres. As uninitiated mortals, we are ignorant of the harmful side effects of astral wanderlusting.
That there is hardly a hair’s breadth separation between the astral world and this one, should be cause enough for pause.
The astral field is the source of memory, dreams and déjà vu, but is also the origin of our nightmares and unbalanced mental states.
Battle of the Hemispheres
Krishna, began to unveil the complex nature of consciousness to his disciple Arjuna in(Bhagavad-Gita, Ch. 6). The mind-self functions in a dualistic way, he says :-
“Self is the friend of self, and, in like manner, self is its own enemy.”
This five-thousand year old teaching is alive today. One of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in The World,” neuroanatomist, Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD, describes what she calls her “Stroke of Genius,” in a book by that title.
The story of her life-and-death ordeal, seems a good place to begin unraveling the psycho-puzzle of mind and brain. As she recounts her experience, in this brief video interview, we get a picture of the two physical hemispheres of the brain, and how each is a unique vehicle to express the Yin-Yang of “self.”
This begs the question: “Why do we have two hemispheres?” Students of the Bhagavad-Gita point to the fact that the two “selves” in us are two aspects of one universal matrix. They are necessary—but they also are in urgent need of some very determined balancing and prioritizing, by us humans.
My Stroke of Genius
Double Mind, Double Brain
“The mind is dual in its potentiality: it is physical and metaphysical. The higher part of the mind is connected with the spiritual soul or Buddhi, the lower with the animal soul, the Kama principle.
“There are persons who never think with the higher faculties of their minds at all; those who do so are the minority and are thus, in a way, beyond, if not above, the average of human kind. These will think even upon ordinary matters on that higher plane.
“The idiosyncrasy of the person determines in which “principle” of the mind the thinking is done, as also the faculties of a preceding life, and sometimes the heredity of the physical.
“Optimism and pessimism depend on it also in a great measure.”
“Only those who realise how far Intuition soars above the tardy processes of ratiocinative thought can form the faintest conception of that absolute Wisdom which transcends the ideas of Time and Space.”
Studies in Occultism
by H. P. Blavatsky
“Because the plastic power of the imagination is much stronger in some persons than in others. The mind is dual in its potentiality: it is physical and metaphysical. The higher part of the mind is connected with the spiritual soul, the lower with the animal soul.
“This is why it is so very difficult for a materialist—the metaphysical portion of whose brain is almost atrophied—to raise himself—or, for one who is naturally spiritually-minded to descend to the level of the matter-of-fact vulgar thought.
“But the habit of thinking in the higher mind can be developed — else there would be no hope for persons who wish to alter their lives and raise themselves? And that this is possible must be true, or there would be no hope for the world.
“Certainly it can be developed, but only with great difficulty, a firm determination, and through much self-sacrifice. But it is comparatively easy for those who are born with the gift.
Music of the Spheres
“There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.”
-Shakespeare
(Lorenzo,”The Merchant of Venice”)
“Why is it that one person sees poetry in a cabbage, or a pig with her little ones, while another will perceive in the loftiest things only their lowest and most material aspect—will laugh at the ‘music of the spheres,’ and ridicule the most sublime conceptions and philosophies?
“This difference depends simply on the innate power of the mind to think on the higher or on the lower plane, with the astral … or with the physical brain.
“Great intellectual powers are often no proof of, but are impediments to spiritual and right conceptions.”
Studies in Occultism by H. P. Blavatsky
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Seers and Psychics
How Do You Doodle?
Reflecting Pool
All in Your Mind
Thoughts That Count
Believing You Are
A Buddha and His Dog
Center Is Everywhere
Raja Yoga Dance
Hanging by a Thread
Does Mind Over Matter?
Not An Island
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