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.
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