[Bruno]: Are "we" (our bodies) not a dream in the dialogue between the reality and itself?
[Vinod]:Neither we nor our bodies are dreams but the most intense dream is that we consider or experience ourselves as bodies. We are consciousness, a manifestation of the primordial cosmic consciousness (CC) and our bodies are part of the physicality in form of matter. Neither of these is illusion or dream but a very very long and intense/deep dream takes birth when consciousness starts identifying itself with the matter (physicality) despite the two being distinct and of the entirely different nature.
==============================
I have done a lot of thinking about the role of stories and of dreams since Nepal. It is one thing to have an adequate, clear mathematical theory, and quite another to figure out how kit connects to personal experiences from day to day in the complex world we are living in, even just on earth. Metaphors, prototypes and archetypes are all crucial tools our minds naturally use -- so crucial that even effective machine intelligence uses them at a certain level of intelligence, and we understand the mathematical principles involved. (No, I will not post more equations here, though I have posted a few at times when discussion of quantum mechanics was meaningless without them.)
To begin with, it seems very clear to me that "astral travel" and "out of body experience" is all a matter of dreams. That is true for a wide variety of concepts of what a dream IS, and a wide variety of credible theories ( not just Einstein realism + noospheres, but including that as part of the set).
I certainly remember being excited and impressed by some of the work of Annie Besant and others, claiming that we have one to six OTHER physical bodies, perhaps made of dark matter, which travel around in other-physical form. Probably in the 1970's I gave them serious consideration as part of the "zoo" of possible theories in my mind, but even from the start -- ONE form of unknown dark matter is one thing, six whole interpenetrating levels of unrelated types of substance seemed a bit much, and I never saw serious justification for assuming six in the kinds of experience people reported.
One of the major classics on out of body travel available in the 1970s was the book Astral Projection by Fox, which I notice is available now for $2
in kindle format:
https://www.amazon.com/Astral-
(Comment: I probably would not have taken any of this seriously if I had not had some pretty serious experiences myself with veridical content in the 1970s -- 1973 to 1978.)
Fox's account was the most persuasive, in my view, about the feeling of an actual astral body. Yet he portrayed a crucial astral visit he made to a place he could check
(checking, reality testing, is EVER so important!!)... and described how the place he "visited' was actually an older version of the place.
It seemed more and more clear to me over time that this was a case of his MIND (the soul part, as a cell in the noosphere) "visiting" that part of the noosphere mind directly linked to that physical place (but not identical to it), in the same way as a patch of our cerebral cortex can "visit" different parts of the primary visual field. (For a simplified model of how that "gating" works in the brain, see the model by Olshausen in Arbib's first handbook on neuroscience. Gating is of huge importance to true machine intelligence, and to how the higher levels of intelligence work, not counting the cosmos itself which has no need of it.)
As I type this, though, I have the caveat that I understand time better now that I did then. Could it not have been a case of moving an astral body in time as well as space? I do not remember thinking much about that, in part because the more interesting varieties of astral projection or OOBE would involve "higher planes" like Pynchon's novel Gravity, where he depicts meetings of British military leaders in the astral plane in World War II (not to avoid tapped telephones, but that might be one benefit). Every first person description I read of that kind of thing emphasized the mutability of the "astral plane", the kind of mutability one sees in a dream. In fact, when the brain experiences (remembers) such projection, it is doubly dream-like, insofar as the brain uses its own dream mechanisms to fill in details of the experience, but the experience itself is located in a kind of shared dream, analogous to an internet chat room. Checking mostly involved checking with the other people involved, or checking the validity of information which other people would possess. The "many planes" basically mirror the variety (levels and continuous variation) of levels of thought one would expect to find in a brain. One important variety is gating from one person to another, as in the classic works of Eisenbud in psychiatry research. This is basically the Einstein realism viewpoint, seeing astral projection as information-level gating within the noosphere of our solar system; certainly Ramanuja and Buddha would take the dream theme even further.
Of course, dreams and memories and our plans for the future commonly take the form of "stories" or "Narratives". From the Nepal visit a few weeks ago, I certainly remember the visit to the sleeping Vishnu shrine, and the idea of trying to create and manifest good dreams or narratives, as consciously as possible. I also remember the guy (from a\monist school in India, or..?) who constantly broke in and complained about "stories, stories, we don;t need these dreams, these stories..", during the conference itself but also in the morning after. I suggested he read the short novel Muse of Fire by Simmons on the theme of stories creating our entire world of experience. And I went home, and recently reread Voyage to Arcturus, a novel I read in the 1970's giving a variety of that theme, compatible with Buddhism but more cabbalistic or Norse in its roots. A more benign story in that space is the video series "Touch" which I am watching now, but I will refrain from saying more for now.
Even at a mundane level, our ability to study possible scenarios for the future is crucial, in my view, to avoiding really terrible possibilities, which could involve the extinction of the human species. There is a profession of futurism out there, which I have been deeply involved in (connected to lead players but turning down offers to become a more official leader myself), which simply is not living up to the complexity of the challenges we face. But at a spiritual level, if we are connected or engaged at all (and not just playing solipsistic word games), we are also part of a kind of collective intelligence process which offers another way to coordinate visualization of possible futures, and the search for better vivid realizable dreams. Both are very important actions, at the end of the day, which all of us are called to support in whatever way we best
No comments:
Post a Comment