How to Do It: Higher Consciousness IV, Three PSI skills and How They Work

 In the first post in this series, Higher Consciousness I

http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2020/09/classifying-my-first-person-spiritual.htm,

I described how my hidden inner life revolved around three types of experience from about 1979 to 2015:

(1)  “Astral” or out of body experiences (OOBE)

(2)  “Assumption” experiences of “being” someone else, connecting

(3)  “Cosmic Consciousness” (CC), mainly in the early morning before getting out of bed.

All three types of experience were complex and diverse, going beyond most of what we read about in the literatures, which are also very diverse.

But I learned that a very hard core scientific model (spelled out at Werbos.com/religions.htm) not only fits the experiences; it also let me probe deeper and understand better than the more superficial ”traveler’s accounts” we often see. We often see that the EXPERIENCE was very real and important, when people wrote about it, but the EXPLANATION was incomplete; many theories of astral travel are like people telling about how they walked on a flat earth, not realizing what they missed over the horizon.

A friend recently asked: “Where do YOU go in astral travel? What is YOUR connection with your body or bodies?”

OK: point one: the “astral body” or “subtle light body” is basically just an illusion. More precisely, it is a projection of the mind to the “working memory” of the noosphere we are connected to. The working memory of the noosphere is a kind of mental space, just like an internet server.

Any body we see there for ourselves is a PROJECTION of our own inner self to that other space, just as a photo we store on the internet is something we put there. Beginners may always project a kind of image of what they think their humanoid body looks like, but I have seen people project as clouds or as animals or as different people or even as  dragons, all still clearly being human.

WHO is doing the projection from where?

Here there is some tricky fuzziness, but it seems that each of us possesses a “soul” which is basically a reserved set of “cells” in that noosphere.

I sometimes think of these as “modules” (should I call them personal ”soul modules”?). Even the mammal brain does possess  various types of modules crucial to how it works; these vary from images of objects (embedded in working memory) to “action schemata” (in basal ganglia), to other things. Soul modules are not exactly the same as these, because they are allowed more complex internal structure, but they have many similarities.

So when **I** experience astral travel, it means that my personal soul module is interfacing with the current state of reality as manifest in the working memory of the noosphere. When I experience assumption, it interfaces with one or more OTHER personal soul modules, or ARCHETYPE modules which work the same way so far as I can tell.

 For those of us still alive on earth, the foundation of all psi experiences is what Rosicrucians call “alchymical marriage.” That means, a well-developed symbiosis between a brain and a soul, such a good symbiosis that it feels as if one is one entity. The PHYSICAL explanation of our brain remembering astral travel is the transfer of information between brain and soul, as both sides have learned as they learn to work together. To a great extent, the initiative lies on the soul side, as the matter (mainly dark energy and matter) which perturbs and senses our brain state is based on that other type of matter and energy.

So when we engage in astral travel, those 5 bodies Annie Besant talks about are all approximations and illusions. What is physically real is the noosphere itself, and our physical brain, and their connection. The “astral bodies” and “silver cords” are all projections, or even symbolc representations like dream symbols, not physical realities. The connection is always active, so long as we live, but the levels and types of awareness on both sides can vary a lot.

 Carl Jung's Red Book, after the introductions by scholars, are basically accounts of this kind of experience.

But what of assumption?

 

My first experience of assumption, when I lived in College Park Maryland, came as a great shock to me. It was my first attempt to try the real full-up version of the Rosicrucian exercise for having an OOBE (out of body experience). I had had a number of OOBE before,using approaches I worked out form other traditions or on my own. This time, I opened my eyes, to see I was in someone else’s body. What’s more, I knew the person, and had even seen the scene itself 12 hours before when I was in that room. Both of us were very, very shocked. I never did it THAT way ever again!

 

But now, here is the idea. Soul modules have a natural way to connect, just as objects and object modules in mammal brains do. The mathematics is basically a straightforward generalization of the mathematics of ObjectNets, described in a paper by Ili,n Kozma and Werbos in IEEE Transactions on Computationla Intelligence. I even have a new paper extending that math further here, but I may or may not get around to finishing it.

 

In many ways, personal Soul Modules are analogous the the Model modules which the Electric Power Research Institute wanted to build decades ago – a major modeling system allowing some models to approximate others (for fast operation) and connect (for integrative cross sector modeing).  Crucial to this is a concept I now call Partial Gating. If I connect to person X, I do not have to BECOME that person 100% or vice versa; the noosphere brain evolved to exploit PARTIAL gating, where I can learn something form someone and establish a harmonious relation, WITHOUT trying to take on the FUL L complexity which that other person has.

 

Jane Roberts is an example of  someone who has really experienced this kind of state, even if the more formal words about it are less trustworthy.

 

We are moved by nature both to be CONSCIOUS about how we MOVE our awareness, to learn more skills of partial gating, and to establish long-term connections both conscious and habitual. We are called to learn how to build more harmonious connections, and gradually expand how much we can input in our partial gating without creating negative feelings.

“Qi” is the term I usually use BOTH for what Freud called “psychic energy” (both affective and cognitive, following the mathematics of modulated backpropagation) and for the physical interface of soul and body/brain. Better understanding of qi will be crucial to better understanding of all of this, too complicated for this post.

 

I now view “cosmic consciousness” as a state of partial gating to the overall mind of our noosphere (and what it is gated to?).

We can never BE the whole thing, and urgently need many new types of humility to survive all this. But a harmonious PARTIAL gating puts us more in harmony with the whole thing, and also gives more true spiritual longevity. Many of us have learned many new skills for strengthening hat gating; for example, on Faecook, I recently posted: https://www.facebook.com/paul.werbos/posts/3688401927856864

 

People ask: WHERE in the body is the interface? Of course, it varies as different people LEARN different interfaces. I like Pete Sanders' nice little overview on some common types of people, learning different interfaces, a bit like chakras. We are called to learn more, and to integrate.

It turns out that the noosphere species model assumed here is fully consistent with a viewpoint in physics called "Einsteinian realism." Einstein type models are far richer than most people realize yet. It reminds me of chaos theory, the time when people discovered that even "simple" ordinary differential equations allow for much richer emergent behavior than was once believed. Of course, it is always conceivable that reality is weirder than Einstein thought (even though new math shows how standard quantum stuff fits). Could the world we think we live in actually be just another part of the astral plane? Could we be living in a computer simulation or computerized school program? Even Einstein math can predict "macroscopic Schrodinger cats", due to interesting resonance effects.  But even those major rethinks still tend to support his kind of model. It helps to have at least one solid coherent model which fits what we do know. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Higher Consciousness III: How Another Image of the Noosphere Can Help Us Connect (and Survive)

 When people talk about PSI or spirit or higher consciousness, there is always a question present: is it all empty ego-serving words(aka BS), or can we really connect to some kind of actual spiritual reality, a reality so powerful that it even affects what lives on after our mundane body dies? 

In a way, this is a follow-on to my two previous posts on this topic, as I work my way down from general theory to something more concrete:
Higher Consciousness I:
http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2020/09/classifying-my-first-person-spiritual.html
Higher Consciousness II:
 http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2020/10/psi-astral-travel-trump-death-and.htm

 Previously, Yeshua and I proposed the use of a special tree as a kind of image to use in representing the noosphere (or cosmos?) which we are part of, to use in connecting us in reality, in our whole brain and soul, to that greater life. Ia gain thank Jelel for pointing me to Jung’s Red Book, https://www.amazon.com/Red-Book-Readers-Philemon/dp/0393089088/ Jung analyzes and demonstrates so well how important is the use of visual images in getting past the level of BS, in making real connections tour own greatest and deepest minds. We should never forget that 99% of our human brains is fundamentally equivalent to the brains of small mammals (as implied by the great work of Lashley, Pribram and Freeman, two of whom I collaborated with a lot); since these small mammals do not even use words, other media of communications are essential, to make it real. As it happens, VISUAL images, which come directly to the thalamus of the brain, more than any other sense does, have a direct power in reaching our full brain.  

But why do we need an image of the noosphere?
>
>  
>
> Well, why do we need an image of the earth as something other than the flat plate most people still imagine it to be in their personal, subjective life? The flat plate way of thinking can be safe enough, so long as we do not plan to leave a small village or understand other people who do. But to plan our travels beyond that village, we need a more complete picture. Even for survival on this little planet, we desperately need a more accurate picture of who we are. We need better situational awareness.
>
> Images of the noosphere can help us connect, and see further, and even find our way to survival. And yes, we can use them as a kind of mandala, the kind of 2D or 3D image which we can project into, as guides for projecting our minds further and deeper.

 A serious practical person recently asked: “So who cares about the details of the noosphere? Yes, we are on a living planet. We have known about the noosphere since Teilhard de Chardin and Verdansky, long ago. So we already know that climate is important, but we already planted our gardens, and it is time to move on. What is new here?”  

 In the first place, planting our gardens does NOT save us from really major, real threats of climate change, but neither Teilhard nor Verdansky gave us the level of situational awareness we really need here for the spiritual side of this, which will decide whether we integrate it all enough to stay alive in the end anyway.

 They pictured our noosphere as just this earth, as a system which has emerged just from the natural thermodynamic forces on this earth. Most really serious scientists cannot believe that picture, because they know that evolution does not work that way, regardless of whether we assume baby physics like today’s Standard Model or more interesting or esoteric alternatives. In all cases, we know that earth alone is not enough to justify the kinds of emergent intelligence people have discussed for millennia.

And so, naturally, I am glad that the deep gaps in the theoriesof de Chardin and Verdansky can be corrected, as in the papers I published last year (linked to at werboc.com/religions.htm). The key idea is that our local noosphere, what we are part of, must at a minimum be viewed as a member of an entire species of noospheres, and that it makes more sense to think of our noosphere as embracing our entire solar system, not just one planet. After all, there is much more energy and movement in our sun than on the earth. For ordinary complex carbon molecules, the earth is the center of our solar system, but noospheres clearly rely more on other forces and energy (“dark matter and energy”). Astronomy has shown us that dark matter and energy connect most with suns and galaxies.
>
>  
>
> AND SO: we get tpo the first image of the noosphere, which Yeshua and I still emphasize: the great tree, a tree of life stretching from the mud (like the archaea deep in the earth, or like the underworld in the Disney cartoon Coco) all the way up to the sun itself, to upper reaches from which one can see further. As we connect to each other, to nature, and to the whole system, we can connect more effectively if we see what we are doing, and see how WE can connect down to the mud or up to the highest level of intelligence in our noosphere, like the sun above.
>
>  
>
> Of course, it is not really a tree. Above all, we are experiencing it from the inside, almost never able to look at it from afar. Since the real source of energy here is from above, our connection upwards has some special importance, especially as we start to channel the whole system, as we become avatars of the noosphere by exercising what I now call “partial gating.”

And so I come to ANOTHER image of the noosphere, the image of the sun included in:

 https://youtu.be/cdFHE73aOMI

 I found this video very useful, but only just once so far. For the first time since 1980 or so, I tried very heavy meditation and attunement as I was going to be. My wife moved a flat panel TV from our study to the wall of the bedroom, with a link to Google Chromecast such that I could see this video and do basic controls even as I was lying in bed in a darkened room, late in the day. This entire video is a kind of complex moving mandala of music and images, more complex than I am ready to repeat. But the image of the sun, connected there to the rest, and showing the glowing edge at a time of partial eclipse, has stayed with me, and helped add strength to the many connections with the noosphere which I have been trying to juggle lately.

As an example, I think of that image now when I think of the long-standing but growing problem of “How do we live in the middle, between Scylla and Charybdis”? Even in my old mundane job at NSF, I was struck by the twin hazards of delusions of helplessness versus delusions of grandeur, weakening so many people doing ordinary scientific research. I respcted Barbara Marx Hubbard when she (a follower of de Chardin) said: “We need to see ourselves as COCREATORS.

As part of the noosphere, we are absolutely not helpless, or just mundane, but we are none of us the true one god of our planet either. We need to be clear on who we really are.” That part still makes sense to me. The FURTHER one gets both in science and in spiritual connection (which need to be connected to be whole), the more important this duality becomes.

 There are times in the early morning, when I can do partial gating to that whole, and sense what Jung called “the spirit of the deep,” which actually can see beyond this solar system. But more often, in active life, I find it helpful to be mindful of that specific kind of sun, what that sun represents, to establish a proper relation.

 I also think of the Book of Exodus. More precisely, I think of the passage in the New English Bible where Moses talks to the burning bush. I never really read that passage until my wife Luda and I took a HAL cruise from Argentina to Florida, by way of Brazil and Caribbean, and went to a seminar by a reform rabbi deeply interested in that passage.

     Did Moses really exist, and was this really a record of what he experienced on that mountain? Basically, I do think so, just as I think Jesus actually existed, with very high probability. And yes, someone talked to him through that glowing bush. (Hell, I even had an experience in the 1970’s when a well-known psychic announced SHE had been visited by God, the day after I experimented with visiting and talking to her. She guessed wrong about who I was, but she got the message right.)
>

 So WHO talked to Moses there? “I am who I am.” Hell, even I could have used that line in total honesty. (So did Popeye the sailor man, who reminds me of my father’s father.) But then Moses asked something like: “Why don’t you show me your true face? You are not just a bush, after all.” The ANSWER WAS LIKE: “Pardon me, I could, but I don’t want to burn your eyes out.” So, yes, that reminds me of that noosphere sun image.
>
>  
>
> And note: that was NOT what our culture now calls “Jehovah,” an archetype well known to folks like Jung. Today’s “Jehovah” is one of many typical thought-form archetypes, as real as Santa Claus, a kind of REFLECTION of the real thing. A reflection in a funhouse mirror of the mind, not at all accurate. I tend to believe that this part of the Bible is itself an imperfect reflection, but far more accurate than later Christian stories about Moses’ conversation.

Attachments area

Preview YouTube video Tangerine Dream | Boiler Room x Dekmantel Festival 2018

Tangerine Dream | Boiler Room x Dekmantel Festival 2018

PSI: Astral Travel, Trump, Death and Quantum Mechanics – Unification at Another Level of Consciousness

A few days ago, I explained the three main types of PSI or personal spiritual experience which dominated my personal

Inner life, beyond the mundane level, from about 190 to 2015: (1) “astral” or OOBE experience; (2) assumption experience; and (3” “cosmic consciousness” (CC) as I rexperienced it.

This new post builds on that foundation: http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2020/09/classifying-my-first-person-spiritual.html

 

This morning I woke from a very simple, normal astral dream, the kind of dream which millions of people have had and have forgotten because they didn’t seem to mean much to their normal waking mind. But this morning, I woke up into a CC state where I realized I could learn something important from looking closely at that dream, connecting to many other recent discussions. In about 5 minutes I had new insights connecting these four subjects and more, drawing on memories of past and future. As often happens in the CC state, I realized that five minutes of new thoughts and insights would be too much even for an entire book today, let alone an email post. As in my last (PSI70) post, I realized it would be good to go ahead and WRITE UP that set of ideas in my mind, still in bed, as a kind of book I would store then in the noosphere, and the later do the typing I am doing now as one of the benefits. The astral dream illustrated some important aspects of astral travel which are usually misunderstood very badly, especially in enthusiastic reports based on imagination or verbal reasoning more than careful scientific observation of the phenomenon, grounded in what science we have today for understanding the noosphere. As I woke in bed this morning, I also remembered an earlier dream, explaining to me some aspects of the mathematics of intelligent systems and approximation theory.

 

This experience built on previous discussion with Amanda Jansen and Jelel Ezzine a few days ago, which led me to send them a quick email about a startling dream I had had about the fate of Donald Trump. Before I saw on CNN that they sent Trump to the hospital a few days ago, I woke from a dream which might be an astral dream and might be an assumption dream, in which I saw hundreds of people lining up to pay respects to a very unique famous person, not named as Trump,  but so unique it would be hard to imagine someone else. (Later my wife Luda mentioned that she and our youngest son had seen the death of some character in Game of Thrones the night before, but that does not fit as well. Still, dreams can combine more than one source, as Jung’s Red Book describes.) All three types of PSI can cut across time to some degree; that is why I sent them a report on the dream, even though I did not have to do it right, while I still had a time stamp in gmail.

 

At one point, the “spirit of Loki” said: “Wow! We actually have a real half-alive Schrodinger cat as a President, for now, in this strand of the multiverse.” I said more to Amanda and Jelel, but this morning I will not even check the news before typing this. My main motive here is to explain a bit about astral travel and about the mind, using some interesting examples and analogies.

 

One analogy: when I was a university student, not yet deep into PSI, I was struck by the popular song Superstition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CFuCYNx-1g

playing on someone’s radio. (I had pretty much ignored and rejected pop music until I opened my mind to PSI, and then gradually learned how popular songs often reflect it. Still, even by 1980 I did not get lower than New Age in my nightly meditation practice.) I engraved just one line into my mind: “When you believe in things you don’t understand, you suffer.” The song addressed simple classical superstitions, but I immediately thought: "This applies to quantum mechanics too.” Quantum mechanics (QM) now mainly describes a set of beliefs by lay people and philosophers, who usually do not understand even the basics of modern quantum field theories (QFT), which are quite different. People also believe a lot of very florid things about astral travel and our of body experience. When people discuss QM (or neural networks), I often forget to restate important basic principles which I take for granted after many decades, principles which are usually misunderstood leading to huge confusion. This is why I started my plenary talk at the 2018 tucson conferenvce on consciousness with a quote from mark Twain, roughly: “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you. It’s what you do know that just isn’t so.”

 

Astral travel is very much like that, as I explained briefly in that previous post. Yet there is also an important database on astral travel experience to be found in shamanism https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d003/cfe1de1e685d3673d6337a4b37ce62171203.pdf,

in yoga, in Western mysticism, in Sufism, in Buddhism and in parapsychology. Years ago, a very high ranking scientist who told us a lot about Rumi (the leading Sufi of the Second Caliphate), asked me questions about my dreams; I had not revealed my inner life to him,  but his questions said a lot about their practice of astral travel, and understanding of it. Naturally, it began with questions like: “Tell me about your dreams of flying, and how they actually worked…”

 

In truth, many people do not even dream in color. Many people begin their experience of OOBE by feeling themselves rise up out of their body in the normal mundane world, in bed, and wander around and explore from theri. My first OOBE was like that, in a Harvard graduate dorm room. (Of course I will never forget THAT once in a lifetime experience, which led to veridical confirmations a bit more graphic than I had expected. At that time, I lived in a dorm which was 2/3 or ¾ female. And no, I am not talking about a peeping Tom kind of experience.) In the 1970’s, in College Park, Maryland, several times I wandered down Route One downtown, overwhelmed by how boring it basically was, though it did let me check out a few things later.

 

Still at Harvard, I was deeply impressed by the honest first person accounts in https://www.amazon.com/s?k=fox+astral&ref=nb_sb_noss_2. Fox started with ordinary OOBE, and verified many details, but gradually noticed how his real explorations sometimes morphed into past or even mental space.

I do not remember him “flying,” he was mainly walking, limited by something LIKE our local laws of physics, moving his “subtle light body” (which was actually a projection of his own mind, I am quite sure by now, yea even including that silver cord).

 

Also at Harvard, I was delighted to read https://www.amazon.com/My-Soul-Free-Biography-Twitchell/dp/0914766112/r, which had some obvious biases but was authentic in portraying just how diverse astral travel can actually be, ranging from simple OOBE down dark streets to oceanic experiences related to the CC experiences I have found to be quite real. And yes, I met many others. (I even had many visits to https://www.amazon.com/Messages-Celestial-Sanctum-Rosicrucian-Library/dp/0912057300/) A key experience is that there are many REGIONS in the “astral planes”, where different rules seem to apply.

 

I have often cited books by Annie Besant, books which I saw (and photographed) in the inner sanctum of Mahatma Gandhi in Mumbai, where they even named a street after her because of her role as a teacher of Gandhi. Besant said we have SEVERAL subtle bodies, which move from level to level of the “astral” planes, similar to the planes which Steiger and Twitchell described. However, that simple digital classification is actually just a very rough guide; as Fox observed, regions morph into regions in a more continuous way, and people often project “subtle light bodies” which may be humanoid, or nonhumanoid, and may even morph right in front of you. (I have both seen and done that.)

 

To folks trying to make sense of a puzzling realm, my comments may seem confusing and baffling, and it is understandable how they fall back on simple models which are easier to understand, like Besant’s model. However, the foundations are much simpler, and easie to use AND understand, if one assume the noosphere species model, grounded in real physics, reviewed at Werbos.com/relions.htm, in three ournal articles I published in 2019 and three or four photo albums with explanations. The “regions” of this mental space are basically the regions of a great noosphere brain, a great mind, which combines the sharp distinctions we see in simple mammal brains (though what people see in astral travel is usually just the global workspace of consciousness, the part of the noosphere like the cerebral cortex),

and the ad hoc learned local regions not unlike the learned subdivisions of the Broca regions of the mammal brain. OF COURSE there are many of them, of course they are connected, and of course they have different dynamics, and of course we can focus attention to different regions. (But who are the “we”? A more advanced topic, like the connections to Jung and Trungpa and advanced mathematical approximation theory.)

 

The astral dream I woke up from last night was ever so simple and ever so typical – until I noticed as I woke up that a few aspects are instructive.

 

First, was the “I” I experienced even me? Was this a true, classic astral dream, or was I actually in a state of assumption linked to (gating or partial gating) someone ELSE in the astral plane? My Trump dream of a few days ago was also like that. (I was not gated to Trump in that dream, but I was in many others before that. Even in CC, I have begun to become more aware of partial gating. Partial gating allows connection to more than one other person at once, as hinted at in Jane Roberts’ great Oversoul Seven scifi trilogy.) But I can recall others.

Usually it is clear which is which… I think… but for me this year, I wonder whether I have underestimated how mixed things can be.

 

Second… this dream began as a very simple astral experience, flying out of body over a major city. (Was it a projection of Chicago? It felt like that, but could be New York or an astral morph. Many places have “digital twins,” replicas in an astral plane.) Flying does take energy and concentration at times, and this dream even began with someone giving me some pointers. First I flew in and out of one interesting multistory building, with normal friendly type people inside. (Somehow I am reminded of Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, clearly based in part on real astral experience.) Then I flew to and inside a much more pretentious multistory building, a bit like a Trump hotel or a top rated Hilton in some ways. (I have often been in such buildings, both in the mundane world and in the astral plane. Hey, Donald, you knew your place is haunted, didn’t you?)

 

At some point, I decided to leave, but had to go up a floor and down a guarded, privileged corridor to do so. It took some effort, but I did get to a huge open window from which I could fly out. But the guard responsible for that area… well, he was very worried about making sure he did his job right. He was very worried about what might happen both to him and to me if I just fell out a window, which he thought of as committing suicide. (Suddenly I am reminded of Trump’s doctor who showed up on CNN a few days ago, speaking from Walter Reed hospital. That doctor worried about Trump as much as this guy worried about me, not considering the possibility of what he would think of as magic.)

 

In fact, if I had fallen over a balcony inside that astral hotel, I probably would have bene pulled hard by gravity. Maybe I even would have woken up, with the subtle light body just disappeared. But here I knew what I could do in the air outside that hotel, and had not worry at all.

 

Unfortunately, the GUARD had his very intense worry, and we humans are all connected in the noosphere. As I went out the window, he grabbed into my hand and held on as best he could, from his side of the window, not giving up, trying to “save” me. That went on for awhile, and then finally I just woke up, with a certain feeling of distress lingering briefly covered by a sense of humor.

 

So in brief, the apparent laws of physics governing apparent bodies (projections) vary over small distances even, not just across “planes”.

 

The earlier dream was at a much “higher” level. Many mystics spend their entire lives trying to reach the highest possible level,  but I try to follow nature, and cultivate ALL connections in the noosphere which strengthen all the life, light and love which ground our most fundamental consciousness. (See my earlier post on “telos.”)

But that morphs into the world of Carl Jung, beyond the scope of this little post.