=kit068.txt

KIT 68 - Dreams

"There is a place that one cannot reach by going there."
BUDDHA

            Oh, to cross the threshold into the unknown! From time
immemorial people have been interrogating their dreams in the
unrelenting human excursions into the far reaches of the mind.

            Notwithstanding human curiosity, we - not totally
disinterestedly - would like to read in our dreams a personal
message, directions, the solutions to the paradoxical riddles we
ponderously grapple with. Should we venture beyond the wall of
mystery we find ourselves dumbfounded and shattered, and often
confused, unable to extrapolate between the profusion of bounty
flooding the skylight of our mind. The human mind is yet in its
developmental stage and still has a long way to go until it grasps
the thinking of the universe which is however enfolded in our own
mind.

            That veil offered by sleep to shield our minds is a
protection. Yet flimsy clues regarding wider dimensions of
thinking or realization, evidencing the software behind the
existential scenario sometimes trickle through, particularly when
one is precariously poised upon the threshold between the diurnal
(waking) condition and sleep with dreams.

            Skills are taught in various esoteric tradition to
train ourselves to maintain ourselves at that threshold. At that
juncture the door is open between the perceptions of reality
manifesting at the physical level and the unbridled effusion of
imagination ranging from the fanciful to the congruent. In Yoga
you will find some rare milestones in the carefully guarded
practice of Yoga Nidra. In Buddhism in the art of freeing oneself
from the illusion of the appearance of the world in order to
foster the confection of the 'illusory body'. Sufism highlights
the act of imagination to work creatively with our personality.

            "God placed within each thing - including the soul of
man - a manifest dimension (Zahir) and a non-manifest dimension
(batin) . Through the manifest dimension, man perceives things as
entities; and through the non-manifest dimension, (batin),
knowledge."
IBN 'ARABI

            In that twilight of the spotlight of consciousness,
the difference between the incoming impressions hailing from our
memory of perceptions or interpretations thereof and the free-
wheeling of our creative imagination blurs. When consciousness is
off-set from its usual focus, the environment overlaps with the
psyche most times in an ambiguous fashion. This is because our
psyche is holistically implicated in the whole existential realm
at all levels including the physical.

            "The content of consciousness of each human being is
evidently an enfoldment of the totality of existence."
DAVID BOHM

            When reminiscences of the physical or psychological
environment lose their compulsive impact upon our awareness and
get assimilated by the psyche, their outer appearance seems
deluding. This accounts for the theories of maya and is precisely
what makes for the dream perspective.

            Meditators and contemplatives of all ages stalk these
elusive vestiges of sensorial perceptions, or the mental
constructs they trigger off, as they skirt the spotlight of
consciousness. The art of so doing - and in general of meditation
- consists in avoiding to turn that spotlight towards the overt
impressions. In this sub-liminal perspective a deeper level of the
psyche espies 'that which transpires behind that which appears' (a
word of the Sufi Ibn 'Arabi).

            This discovery of those who have explored the
unchartered reaches of the mind is in our day and age borne out by
those physicists who are at the prow of the advance of scientific
thinking. In fact the idea of enfoldment is an ancient idea. It
was known in the East a long time ago.

"...separate entities are relatively constant and independent
behaving forms abstracted by the mind from the whole in perception
and in thought."
DAVID BOHM

            While in the diurnal state, we react to the impact of
the challenges impacting us from outside, in the dream state the
imaginings that emerge from 'inside' prevail upon these in our
psyche, reducing the effect of the afterglow of the reminiscences
to the role of catalyst orienting our imaginings. Similar
conditions favor creativity. If a composer simply describes the
environment, without conveying how he/she feels perceiving it,
he/she fails to convey that precious emergent psychic content of
all masterpieces that resonates with kindred feelings that we were
unable to sense without that extra spur.

            The secret of the skill in maintaining oneself on the
threshold consists in being able to toggle between (i) on one hand
the (diurnal) state where one clearly distinguishes between one's
consciousness as the spectator and the object of one's awareness:
either the physical world or one's psyche (or thoughts) and (ii)
on the other hand the dream state in which spontaneous imaginings
flow from one's consciousness unawares. By spotlighting our
emergent thoughts, we slip back into the diurnal subject/object
format and lose our spontaneity. Therefore to tune into a state of
reverie, you have to lose your identity in the flow of thoughts.

            According to Yoga: in Nirvecara Samadhi, consciousness
espouses the forms of the emergent thoughts of the subtle creative
mind, manifesting the nature of the timeless essence of our being
(purusha).

            This brings us to the second clue to switching off
from the diurnal perspective: take it for granted that, not only
the physical world is not what it appears to be, but your self-
image is not your true identity. A still further clue consists in
the realization that the forms assumed by your imaginings are not
your imaginings, but only projections therefore - the tip of the
iceberg thereof. Consequently let the forms emerge out of the flow
without trying to spotlight them. They may or may not leave some
trace in your diurnal memory. When you have gotten used to
toggling between the two perspectives, you reach a point where you
are capable of countenancing a double-exposure. That is where your
creative ideas gel so that they may be communicated to others and
furnish your conscious psyche with their resources.

"Perception would separate him from many things which he would
perceive if not for this obstruction. God places within each
thing, including the soul of man a manifest and a non manifest
dimension. Through the manifest dimension, man perceives entities;
through the non manifest dimension: knowledge. Self-disclosure
consists of His manifestation to the one to whom He discloses
Himself."
IBN 'ARABI

            The only way of retaining one's memory of the diurnal
state while in the dream state is to consider the forms of the
physical world to be the way that the reality of which one is
aware inside appears when projected to the surface. This could
best be illustrated by imagining that a plant is just the way that
its DNA manifests at the surface but this manifestation is
secondary and derivative, its reality being the DNA, the seed has
information which is transmitted to the matter of which the plant
is eventually formed.

            At this point, to keep maintaining yourself at the
threshold, you have to keep awareness that mind and matter are not
separate realities. But there is still a mental pole at every
level of matter... And eventually if you go to infinite depths of
matter, you may reach something very close to what you reach in
the depth of the mind. To achieve this, one needs to train oneself
by repeated auto-suggestion prior to going to sleep (it needs to
be drummed into one's mind until it is taken for granted).

            For the Tibetans, as one falls to sleep one shifts
from the activity of the gross faculty of the mind which is based
upon the input from outside to the activity of the subtle faculty
of the mind which grasps meaning without resting upon perception.
Simultaneously one shifts from identifying with the gross wind
(energy) to the subtle wind (actually one's subtle bodies). One
needs to distinguish several stages here.

            As one begins to become more familiar with the lay of
the land as it were of the dream world, in addition to the factors
and levels we have examined so far: (i) the simple regurgitation,
digestion and storage of inputted impressions, (ii) the
aspirations, nostalgia, repressed emotions trying to make
themselves known by crossing the barrier (or censorship) between
the covert and overt zones of the psyche, (iii) out of body
travel, (iv) uncanny impressions of the heavenly spheres, even
communication with celestial beings or people's minds: one
distinguishes different levels of bodiness and mindness that spark
pre-natal memories which one ascribes to celestial spheres, (v)
the spontaneous creative thoughts that appear as inspirational.

            To switch over from the diurnal state into the dream
state, one has to disidentify with one's body, now considered
perfunctorily as a shroud, and feel oneself as a gossamer effigy
of subtle unstable fabric. However, to balance oneself on the
threshold, one needs to maintain a remote memory of the form of
one's body while superimposing the countenance of one's dream body
upon the profile of one's physical body. Now one sees a
correspondence between these - as a kind of double-exposure. One
even realizes that one's subtle bodies arise out of the
configurations of one's very thinking and in turn affect the
formative processes of physical matter.

One learns to mould the shape of one's subtle bodies in the shapes
that are expressive of one's emotional attunements or one's
paramount thoughts. The Tibetans do this by imagining that their
subtle bodies are those of the deity of their choice. The Sufis
proceed likewise by highlighting a particular divine quality
(sifat) reinforced by repeating the name (Asma ilahi)
corresponding to that quality and imagining the form that this
quality would assume as it manifests through them in their
personality and consequently marks their very countenance.

"The accomplished meditator takes the body of his or her personal
deity in place of such an ordinary intermediate state body...The
actual enjoyment body arises from the isolated mind of ultimate
example clear light: the very subtle mind and the mounted wind."
GESCHE GYATZU

            The Sufis distinguish the subtle bodies and
corresponding spheres highlighted as one shifts from one stage to
the next. As you become more conversant with these nebulous
regions, you will learn to distinguish between a state in which
you feel like an ethereal elusive body called Ajsam (the body of
resurrection or illusory body of the Tibetans) from a state in
which your body seems to be hewn in the fabric of light,
corresponding to the celestial spheres Malakut, (the emanation
body of the Tibetans) from a state in which you have lost any
sense of form Jabarut which Buddha calls being of pure splendor,
(corresponding to the enjoyment body of the Tibetans), to the
infinitely transcendental levels: in Sufism Lahut and Hahut
corresponding to the Truth body of the Tibetans.

            Let's look into the methods used to shift one's body
identity from one level to another which one might well envision
as the underpinning of energy serving one's mind from one level to
another. We need to remind ourselves of weaving the Ariadne thread
of consciousness over the threshold and saddling several levels.
The rational behind this consists in grasping how mindness and
bodiness not only are the two interdependent poles of the same
reality but somehow the different bodies intersperse rather than
separate out (as in Astral projection).

            To achieve this it is necessary to compare the feel of
the kind of energy at the periphery of your being as compared with
the kind of energy you feel as you move into the center. Think of
your energy field as a vortex and realize that the center thereof
which corresponds with your solar plexus is a vacuum. Now you will
notice that while on one hand the grosser energy tends to get
scattered at the periphery, in a centrifugal action, on the other
hand some measure of energy gets sublimated (the Alchemists say
distilled) as it gets sucked into the center. In addition, while
as you turn outside, it is what the Tibetans call the grosser
functions of your mind that are active, as you turn within, it is
the subtle mind (the creative mind) that takes over. To maintain
yourself at the threshold you must not dismiss the memory of your
gross mind, but unmask the hoax of your commonplace thinking.

            If you identify with you aura, you will find that the
further you turn within, the subtler the nature of the light until
you reach what Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan calls the 'all-pervading
light'. This term avers itself to be eminently appropriate, since
in the implicate state, everything intersperses with everything
else. Therefore one cannot spot a location from which light
spreads out. Incidentally as you move up from one sphere to the
other in Yoga Nidra, you are encountering what the Sufis call the
'light that sees' rather than 'the light that can (or could) be
seen'. To understand this, one needs to grasp the difference that
Dr. Bohm makes between the Implicate and the Super-Implicate
state.

            The model that is most likely to help us understand
what happens to our minds in our sleep is Dr. David Bohm's
'implicate state' as opposed to the 'explicate state'. In the
diurnal perspective, illustrated by the explicate mode, our
commonplace intelligence earmarks waves in the sea. It takes the
mystic or the scientist to see that it is the whole sea that
emerges as each wave. Another example: the sounds we hear from the
radio, are just the way the radio extrapolates the immense variety
of interspersed radio waves which extend in space as an inter-
woven web (a wave-interference pattern) in a manner such that our
intelligence is able to make sense of. A lens functions rather in
like manner by focusing a large panorama to make it more
accessible, however thereby reducing much detail. That is more
than our intelligence could extrapolate. Our eyes function rather
in the same way. So does our brain.

            Contrasting with this, in the dream state, as in the
state experienced by the meditator turning within, thoughts are so
fine-woven (in Greek 'imlicare' means fine woven) that one cannot
distinguish them, but one gains an overall sense of meaning
implied as it were behind the variety of thoughts. However to
explain that meaning, one would have to project one's mind back
into the explicate state whereby the meaning would be reduced -
which is precisely what we experience when we deem our verbal
expressions inadequate.

            It is helpful to distinguish between a two-way motion
of our minds which Dr. David Bohm calls the holo-movement: under
cover of sleep the mind digests the diurnal impressions, breaking
them down as our liver breaks down the amino-acid chains, then
projects them in nascent forms intended to enrich our conscious
psyche if they are able to cross the barrier between conscious and
unconscious, just like the way our RNA builds new amino-acid
chains according to the code of our body.

"...the state of the whole organizes the parts."
DAVID BOHM

            This is why thoughts and emotions are blurred should
we venture to peer into the phantasmagoria of our dream world. But
if we capture the nascent thought patterns as they try to break
the barrier into real life, then we access an enormous and
invaluable pool of resourcefulness revealing a new meaning to our
problems or personal development or inspiring us in our
creativity, particularly in works of art.

            There is still a further dimension to the dream
process: as we cast the light of our awareness and intelligence
upon the nebulous regions of our unconscious psyche as we sleep,
at first we cannot make sense of the paradoxical thought-wave
interference pattern opening to our view. Our natural tendency is
to blank out, or at best to find our understanding stunned and
stymied. With determination and by repeated exercise, we train our
mind by stretching our intelligence beyond its normal frontiers.
Our mind now switches to its implicate mode which is precisely
what we mean by intuition and if we wish to remain poised on the
threshold we learn to toggle between this mode and the explicate
mode.

            This is illustrated by a holograph. In every part of
that construct of light that is the holograph, the light-wave
patterns of every part of the original object are interspersed
with those of every other part. Our eyes and brains could not make
sense of this wave-interference pattern. But when a laser beam,
that is a beam of coherent light is thrust across the holograph,
it extrapolates between the enormous variety of waves in a
coherent way that makes sense to our understanding (which rests
upon coherence). This is what Dr. David Bohm calls the 'Super-
Implicate State'.

            This is how DR. DAVID BOHM describes Dennis Gabor's
invention:

"Light from a laser falls upon a half-silvered mirror. Part of the
waves reflect and part of them come straight through and fall on
the object . The waves that strike the object are scattered off
it, and they eventually reach the original beam that was reflected
in the mirror and start to interfere with it, producing a pattern
of two waves superimposed.... It may be invisible, or it may look
like a vague indescribable pattern. But if you send a similar
laser light through it, it will produce waves that are similar to
the waves that were coming off the object and if you place your
eye in the right spot, you will get an image of the object that
will appear behind the holograph and be three-dimensional."
(DAVID BOHM)

            We now understand the role of the coherent light of
our intelligence as it projects into the nebulous region of the
unconscious, it coheres the paradoxical wave interference pattern
of our mind in its implicate format into an understandable sense
of meaningfulness, however reducing the richness of our covert
mind. This evidences the action of this further dimension of our
mind illustrated by what Dr. David Bohm calls the Super-Implicate
State.

            If you apply this model, the enfoldment is now seen on
two levels: first an enfolded order of the vacuum with ripples on
it that unfold; and second a super-information field of the whole
universe, a super-implicate order which organizes the first level
into various structures. Of course this serves as a model of the
impact of the light of intelligence upon our minds. Interestingly
not only does the beam of our intelligence cohere interwoven
thoughts, but it acts creatively in making these thoughts
functional at the existential level.

"The glance of the seer not only imparts knowledge, but is
creative."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

            This transcendental dimension has often been eluded in
the past by in scientific paradigms. However, today, quite apart
from David Bohm, Ilya Prigogine, Rupert Sheldrake, Costa de
Beauregard and psychologists Ken Wilber and Stanislav Grof are
recognizing its role in the evolutionary drive. The fashionable
term now used is 'attractor'.

            The kind of creativity expressed within the context of
already existing morphic fields is creativity in a weak sense of
the word - the appearance of entirely new fields with their new
goals or attractors involves a higher order of creativity or
originality. Another approach is to start from above, from the top
down, and to consider how new fields may have originated from pre-
existing fields at a higher and more inclusive level of
organization.

            Amongst the plethora of embryonic thoughts that
proliferate and cross-pollinate in our unconscious, only those
that click with existential reality prove creative. In the long
run only those meanings that tend to bring about accord between us
and the rest of the universe will be possible.
    
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