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.

            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.
