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.