Names mentioned refer to entries in the Bibliography, which follows this section.
1. See Bernard and Sontag; Condon and Sander.
2. See Condon and Sander.
3. Development of language and intelligence in general lends direct support to the thesis of Rupert Sheldrake.
4. Reuven Feuerstein has had success in remedial work with dysfunctional children, and questions the validity of Piaget’s stages. Compensation is possible later, but a full function is probably stage-specific. Feuerstein shows how flexible development is, but this does not negate the validity of stages. See Chance.
5. Scott G. Williamson and Innes H. Pearse, physicians and cellular biologists, spent over thirty years in research into health as a state. They found no suitable words in our language to describe function as opposed to our ordinary state of compensation (patchwork) and our preoccupation with a breakdown of our compensatory capacity and dying. See Williamson and Pearse.
6. See Orville Schell, Modem Meat (Random House, 1984). Schell reports on the synthetic hormones by which we speed up marketability of our food animals and increase all production. These are essentially sexual hormones and are a principal source of our epidemic increase in premature sexuality in children.
1. Ontogeny is from the Greek ontos, being, and genes, producing (or beginnings): the history of an individual organism. Phytogeny is from the Greek phylo, race or species, and genes: the evolutionary development of a whole species. Our triune brain encompasses the brain forms developed throughout evolution.
2. See Barr.
3. From the earlier work of R. E. Gregory (see Bibliography) to the recent discoveries of melanin, evidence shows that our picture of the world is an internal production made, we can only assume, according to external stimuli. A more accurate appraisal is to say we place stimuli into the category external or internal according to logical necessity, the brain mechanisms involved in translation, and a general dynamic between possibility and realization. Consider the work of Hugo Zuccarelli. (See “Holophonic Sound . . . ,” listed under Miscellaneous Articles.) The brain produces a steady sound vibration in the ear mechanism. Sound waves other than this steady state modulate our inner wave, and the brain places the sound in the outer world according to the modulations of the two wave forms. Zuccarelli synthesized electronically the wave-length the inner ear produces, and recorded ordinary sounds, music, voices, over this steady wave state. Played to a person through earphones the sound is not heard in the head, as in most earphone sound, but the brain places it outside, in the world in ways indistinguishable from ordinary “out-there” sound.
4. See Luce; MacLean.
5. William Gray and Paul LaVoilette (following Ludwig von Bertalanffy; see Bibliography) use feeling tone to cover subliminal effects. The term can be used for conscious qualitative responses as well.
6. See “Conversations Between Heart and Brain” (Miscellaneous Articles) and Muktananda, Mystery of the Mind, for yogic statements concerning heart and mind. The yogis refer to the subtle heart, but the subtle has its physical counterparts.
7. See Sperry. My information on the appearance and slow growth of the corpus callosum came from private correspondence with Roger Sperry in 1974.
8. The nature of deep sleep dreaming and the abstract imagery of thought results from a combination of research (see Cartwright; Kripke; Singh; Tart) plus yogic psychology and personal experience.
9. See Luce. There is a point, when the body brain mechanism is at its lowest ebb, when brain waves appear that are similar to ordinary, waking consciousness but without any of the body supports necessary. I think this indicates a brief sojourn of consciousness into the state of the Self itself.
10. See Werntz.
11. Any left-hemisphere action requires support from the right hemisphere. There are no specializations that do not require integral brain action—a kind of complementarity is involved. We tend to oversimplify seriously this division between hemispheric specialization, though at times such modeling helps describe otherwise abstract functions.
1. See Ainsworth; Geber.
2. See Kennell; Klaus.
3. Colin Turnbull (see Bibliography) gives examples of the mother meeting the needs of the infant without the infant expressing those needs.
4. See “Conversations Between Heart and Brain,” op. cit.
5. Live brain cells on a microscopic slide show an explosion of new connecting links (dendrites, axons, and so on) the instant ACTH is injected. See Epstein, “Phrenoblysis . . .”
6. See Ainsworth; Chamberlain; Hales.
7. Water is the infant’s first habitat, and an extension of this, in the new medium, affords a pleasant transition and a relaxed bonding. For some references see Bibliography: Articles on Underwater Birthing.
8. See De Chateau; Kennell; Klaus; and Luria on the stage-specific nature of bonding.
9. See J. D. French and Serrano. My references are sparse on this rich subject.
10. See Wm. Gray; LaVoilette, “Thoughts . . .”; MacLean; Zaslow.
11. See Fantz.
12. For information on immunization in colostrum, see Nutrition and Health Vol. 1 (London: A. B. Academic Publishers, 1983). The report was given at the Oxford University conference on obstetrical practice and early child health where I also gave an address. See Pearce, “Nurturing Intelligence . . .”
13. See Jensen.
14. See Ringler. Justin Call, M.D., University of California at Irvine, has done long-term studies on the relationship between breast-feeding and intelligence.
15. See Montagu, Touching.
16. See Bertalanffy; Wm. Gray; LaVoilette.
17. During the crawling stage, the infant does not blink his eyes. The reptilian stare was one of Paul MacLean’s clues in his research into brain anatomy. The early infant is limited to single entrainment, cannot distinguish subject self from object of interaction, and so on. The sensory-motor system must be established first to release consciousness into the higher brain centers for their specialized development.
18. The shift of object-constancy is made as early as six months by bonded children and as late as eighteen to twenty months by unbounded ones.
19. Again, see “Conversations Between Heart and Brain”; Mitchell.
20. I first read of the use of recorded heartbeats in one of the scientific journals, and in the Brain/Mind Bulletin. Then I saw one of the advertisements for the home version. Following the research of W. G. Whittle-stone (see Bibliography). Kerry Callaghan, of Nairne, Australia, promoted a fine little treatise: “Creating Optimal Environments for Newborn Infants and Their Families.” Both Whittlestone and Callaghan had recognized the role of the heartbeat in early infant development.
21. Obviously if the heart is a mass of melanin molecules, and melanin is an interface between consciousness and physical apparatus, and if two separated heart cells can leap a gap and communicate, surely two massive groups of cells do the same. So the link between mother and infant on levels below awareness is established and continually reaffirmed through proximity of hearts themselves. Thus continual nursing keeps this link established in the early periods of growth.
22. See De Chateau; Geber; Kennell; and particularly Ringler, as well as the work of Justin Call at the University of California at Irvine.
23. Henry Massie’s work shows a relation between lack of physical contact between mother and infant as one of the factors in infantile autism.
24. Western delivery practices, at home or hospital, have been far from ideal, and Western child-rearing itself has been monstrous. See De Mause.
25. Blurton Jones (see Bibliography), working under Nikos Tinbergen, reported that all drugs transfer to the infant in utero within some forty-five seconds. Also see Brackbill; Chamberlain.
26. See Towbin. Abraham Towbin, who discovered this damage, is a physician at Boston University.
27. In 1977 I was sent a report on delivery of ghetto babies in the United States. I had dropped out of all activities at that time and did not keep the report. Most charity cases are paid for by the state, at a nominal fee, and treatment is far below standard, at times barbaric. The breaking of the parent-infant bond at delivery is reflected in an ongoing breakdown of the extended-family bond, which was the strength of ghetto and minority people in times past.
28. Rene Spitz (see Bibliography), typical of the research mentality of his time, referred to the long period of unconsciousness of our hospital newborns as the norm for nature, and spoke of the “smiling syndrome,” which appears between the tenth and twelfth week of life, as the first sign of consciousness in humans.
29. Rosemary Wiener has made one of the most thoroughly documented studies of circumcision and its effects on infants ever undertaken. She has devoted her life to trying to bring this issue to public attention, with disheartening results. Anyone who wishes to be informed on this issue should write:
Intact Educational Foundation
4521 Freemont St.
Bellingham, Wa. 98226
30. Mary Ainsworth’s work in bonding (see Bibliography) began in the 1950s and has been largely ignored since what do women (even M.D.s) know about childbirth?
31. See the work of Windle. The problem of delivery-induced brain damage has been complicated by the massive rise in cesarean sectioning, now accounting for about twenty-five percent of all births in America (as high as fifty percent in affluent areas). During a lecture tour of California in 1983 I was handed a report by a school-district official concerning profiles on dysfunctional schoolchildren. Forty percent of the educationally handicapped children of that district had been delivered by cesarean sectioning. In my travels I lost the report and have no idea of its origins or accuracy.
32. In 1979, three years after I had dropped out of the world of affairs, two women searched me out (I was two miles from the nearest road of any sort and not readily available) and told me of their two-year research, under a foundation grant, on child day-care centers in the United States. They painted a disheartening picture and wanted to enlist my support in their inevitable public enlightenment campaign, but I was having none of it, convinced, as I was, that our culture was destroying itself on every hand in an inevitable fashion.
33. The hostile, aggressive child found in day-care and schools has become our norm, and we now consider such hostile aggression as human nature since, after all, displayed from earliest childhood.
34. California legislator John Vasconcellos was responsible for this research into the root causes of crime and violence. I am indebted to his office staff, who sent me a copy of the preliminary report.
1. I read this account while on my travels and have no record of its source, other than a major magazine. Lytt Gardner (see Bibliography) has reported on the relation between emotional and physical stimuli deprivation and dwarfism. As a postscript I recall that the psychotic father, responsible for isolating the child, committed suicide at her being discovered, and left a note of wonderful understatement: “No one will ever understand.”
2. Object-constancy is Piaget’s term for this first shift. See Bibliography or any of Piaget’s numerous works.
1. See Cassirer.
2. See Luria.
3. L. S. Vygotsky (see Bibliography) has some excellent observations on child play as well as the relation between language and memory.
4. See Jensen regarding this “pointing syndrome.” Vygotsky thought pointing the result of an incomplete grasping reflex—a strange and mistaken notion.
1. Miguel Serrano (see Bibliography) wrote that Chile had a well-developed spiritual system long before Europeans arrived. Serrano had a spiritual teacher in his early years, and spent many years in India searching for the origins of Chilean spiritual disciplines. His unique understanding gave him insight into those two fascinating characters, Herman Hesse and Carl Jung. He was ambassador to India for nine years and spent some four additional years in the Himalayas.
2. My friend Lee Sannella first put me onto the trail of separation dreams undergone around age four and five. My audiences all over the world concur that at this age most of us have separation dreams of some sort, often with accompanying anxiety. Consider that in pre-literate societies where natural intelligence is less interfered with by intellect, most mothers nurse their children for two to three years, and most lactating mothers do not conceive. This spaces children at about four-year intervals, at which point some eighty percent of the child’s structures of knowledge are complete, the corpus callosum is nearing completion, the locus of awareness shifts into the new brain, and preparations begin for the shift to society as criteria and bonding. Nature’s planning is superb and complete.
3. See Propp.
4. I need only mention Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit series, Thornton Burgess, A. A. Milne (the genius of this genre), the Uncle Remus tales, folk tales and myths in general. In mythology the line of demarcation between animal and human is crossed at liberty; each turns into the other. Australian aborigine mythology is a prime example.
5. See Wickes.
6. The metaphoric and symbolic capacity of mid-brain and right-hemisphere imagery becomes sophisticated and universal, of course, and is as rapid as any brain action. This early play imagery, of direct animal, dream metaphor, remains as the foundation of our creative thought, as I show in Chapter Twelve.
7. Howard Gardner’s excellent article, “The Making of a Storyteller” (see Bibliography), is full of insight into the child’s mind. He relates how the four-or five-year-old can use almost anything to symbolize almost any agent or object in almost any situation. He points out that children enter into symbolic activity by age two. He refers to “object dependent children” who pay careful attention to the physical attributes of a thing and insist on using only concrete objects in their make-believe. Object independent children, on the other hand, are willing to use just about any block or object to stand for what they want to suggest. The development of imagination undergoes a shift in the third and fourth years, from a need of other people and real world props (what might be called mediators) to sustain their fantasy, to an independence of such props, at which point children carry out their imagination largely through words. Gardner points out that by four or five, narrative language has become the prime medium of play. That is, the child furnishes herself with her own input of words to bring about the corresponding response of internal imagery projected on her external world. (This can happen quite early, as with our child Shakti, whose medium of play by age three was certainly verbal.)
In the same issue of Psychology Today (March 1982), Anthony Brandt, reporting on the work of Dan Graves, says: “Just as children’s logical understanding of the world must be constructed, so must their ability to engage in pretense and fantasy.”
8. Jerry Mander (see Bibliography) has written an exceptional work on television and the power of imagery.
9. Hu Mon Yu (see Bibliography) points out that mathematical symbols can only be grasped by a young person who has a grasp of symbolic thought in general—one who can represent his own experience symbolically. The child must first get abundant perceptual data before he remodels, reconstructs, builds up concepts, and formulates principles. We must “let them have ample time to mess around, to gain empirical experience and perceptual knowledge” before we subject them to abstract concepts.
1. See Mowatt.
2. I read of this English research into aborigine tracking many years ago and have long since lost the citation. On both my extensive lecture tours of Australia (some six months in all) I heard many personal reports of this particular aboriginal ability.
3. Referring to the mid-brain as our “subtle emotional energy” and the old brain as our “physical system” gives a clear model for our grasp of different functions and is essentially correct. Obviously a rich interplay and overlap of all brain functions takes place, but within the boundaries of this triune nature.
4. Certainly child development seems to follow Epstein’s outline. I would be pleased were he to take into cognizance the triune nature of the brain and the obvious shifts of behavior that parallel his work and Piaget’s.
5. Piaget; Polansky; Propp; Stallibrass; Vygotsky; B. White; Wickes; Wilson.
1. John Hasted (see Bibliography) is a mathematician and physicist at the University of London. The metal-bending at the Monroe Institute, under Colonel John Alexander’s tutelage, was more extreme, the shapes more bizarre, than anything in Hasted’s book. Alexander states that twenty-five people create an optimum atmosphere, giving mutual support and a group energy. Laboratory control eliminates all of these supports, and that Hasted got the results he did is all the more remarkable. The Shakti, or energy involved, is a most conscious energy and is less likely to respond in atmospheres and attitudes of restriction, suspicion, doubt, or seriousness. My own hunch is that all these events are but variations on the old-fashioned poltergeist experiences and that the quixotic, playful, and unpredictable element is an integral part, putting this entire category of phenomena off limits to hard-core physical science for the simple reason it is not a hard-core physical process. We invite our playful spirit to participate and she may, or may not. Knowing how my own creative Shakti responds in meditations, I cannot think of anything less conducive to her performing than a “scientific atmosphere” of skepticism. Shakti does not need to prove anything to anyone. She plays.
2. See Jahn.
3. See Piaget and Inhelder.
4. See Manning.
5. See Feinberg. True to tourism’s lure, fire walking is now a regular nightly floor show at a famous hotel on Sri Lanka. Of even more interest, two groups are now touring the United States with programs, one in neurolinguistic procedures, and the other in overcoming fear, both of which conclude with fire walking by the participants. So we are now adding many thousands of Americans to the list of fire walkers yearly, which surely will bring down the delusion of behaviorism.
6. See Donna and Gilbert Grosvenor, “Ceylon,” The National Geographic, Vol. 129, No. 4, April 1966.
7. See Josephson.
8. French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat (see Bibliography) is one of many leading physicists questioning the dualistic-mechanistic worldview, as a result of Bell’s theorem and the general implications of quantum mechanics.
9. The paranormal aspects of concrete operational thinking were a major notion in my book Magical Child, and at that naive stage of my un-development I felt such powers necessary to a true development. I know better now.
1. Arthur Koestler (see Bibliography) echoed Paul MacLean’s thoughts that a breakdown between intellect and emotion was to be blamed on the sparse neural connections of our new brain to our mid-brain, and attributed this to the “newness” of our new brain and evolution’s failure to catch up in connecting it with the limbic system. This is an error of logical typing. As Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard points out (see The New Scientist, Volume 1301, 137–141) evolution operates by a “punctuated equilibrium,” biological change can take place quickly, and generally does so at the beginning of a species’ history—not gradually and piecemeal. Had nature intended our intellect to be subservient to our animal brains, and that emotional limbic structure of the mid-brain, she would long ago have linked our new brain to our mid-brain as she did the two animal brains. The intellect really develops only when integrated into intelligence, the job of post-biological development. Our truncated development is at fault, not evolution. Our fault lies in our belief systems, mechanistic ideologies, and arrogant ignorance.
2. Tim Gallwey reported on this event and showed the movies made of it at the educational conference at the University of California where I also spoke. I have not read his book, The Inner Game of Tennis, and so did not list it in my bibliography.
3. See Strauch.
4. I read of this Englishman’s movie of the rope trick in an English journal of psychology back in the early 1960s and do not have the source now.
5. Charles Tart (see Bibliography) has described the mutual hypnosis experience.
6. See “Lucid Dream Sharing” (Miscellaneous Articles) for a report by Jean Campbell, Poseidia Institute, Virginia Beach, Va. Since this report’s publication, this research has been replicated and expanded.
1. See Martin. I am indebted to Hugh Martin for many insights into the scientific world, its prejudices and machinations.
2. Hugh Martin reported on the estimates the first atomic scientists made concerning the probable explosive power of an atomic bomb. The highest estimate was 500 tons of TNT equivalency. The actual explosion of the first bomb was the equivalent of at least 20,000 tons of TNT and vaporized half the scientific equipment and nearly vaporized a bunch of the scientists. So much for all the reassurances given us that our scientific predictions are reliable.
3. I am seriously indebted to Minas Kafatos (see Bibliography) for his corrections and help in my trying to grasp the issues of complementarity and the quantum problem. I found the Kafatos-Nadeau theory absorbing, and it opens for us an entirely new metaphor for understanding our own position. Almost all references to physical theory in this chapter come from Kafatos—his paper, correspondence, or personal contact. I trust I have not violated his theory too strenuously.
4. Bell’s theorem, or variations thereof, has been proven in a half dozen major tests about the globe, and our major scientific journals have all conceded that quantum mechanics has won the day in physics. This hardly means acceptance of the data, however, since scientists can ignore with marvelous aplomb anything not fitting their own theories. See D’Espagnat; Kafatos.
5. See Muktananda, Mystery . . . ; Singh. A great deal of superficial talk about the Self goes on currently, but the yogic psychology of the Self is also a cosmology and a creative principle.
6. For David Bohm’s work see Bibliography. Wonderful conversations with him are in Wilber. Bohm’s theory gives a frame of reference in which Bell’s theorem has meaning and purpose.
7. See Sheldrake. Again, I find no easy way to model Rupert Sheldrake’s theory, but by combining Sheldrake and Bohm we come up with a view quite consistent with yogic psychology. Recently Bohm proposed that the universe is composed of light waves. Matter may be, Bohm said, “frozen light.” Light photons are long, slow, and weak wave lengths. Matter waves, we have assumed, were very fast waves. That is, we assumed a fast wave field “collapses” to produce energy particles of matter, whereas light waves are the opposite. The only universe we know, however, or can ever know, is one of imagery, including those images of our instruments whose readings we accept as “reality.” All imagery is at base a visual process originating within our brain/mind system, which brain, in turn, is a translating device. Among its many properties, the melanin molecule can transfer or translate sound waves into light waves. Cross-indexing of our sensory system is a common phenomenon. Some people hear or feel sounds tactilely, or experience smell along with hearing, as often found in Zuccarelli’s new holophonic sound. Seeing flashes of light accompanying sounds, when the eyes are closed, is very common. (I experience this with any sudden loud sound, and often with more subtle sounds.) So again we are left with the fact that the reality we experience, including the awesome universe reaching forever out beyond us, is the result of a dynamic, and defies precise placement. According to yogic psychology, this dynamic is a play between sound and light, and precisely that play is the work of our brain/mind, a game of complementarity. I feel that David Bohm’s work will be the intellectual bridge that arcs the gap of paradox involved.
8. Rupert Sheldrake’s theory that causal fields, which supersede time and space, underlie our reality is quite evident in the wave-particle complement of physics; explains such intuitive phenomena as aborigine Dream Time; and is clearly manifest in the idiot-savant syndrome. Idiot-savants are people who, while uneducable and with I.Q.s ranging from 40 to 60, are capable of astonishing feats of computation or information retrieval. Mathematical savants are the most publicized. (The British reportedly employed a couple of them as computers during World War II.) These people cannot respond to the written problem of 20 minus 10, but can give, when asked, almost instant answers to extremely involved calculations. In 1931, for instance, Drs. D. C. Rife and L. H. Snyder asked their mental patient savant to double the grains of corn on each checkerboard square, which meant doubling the number 1 (one) 64 times. It took the patient forty-five seconds (quite long actually, in savant terms) to give the quadrillion-fold answer: 18,466,734,709,551,616.
Charles and George, savant twins at Letchworth Village mental hospital in New York State, specialize in calendrical calculations. They can immediately identify the day of the week for dates as far in the future as 7000 A.D., or many centuries in the past. When giving past dates, they automatically compensate for the changeover from the Julian to Gregorian calendar systems made in 1752, though neither is aware that such historical systems existed. Not educable, they had been given a perpetual calendar as children, and taught by their mother how to use the mechanical device. The calendar covered only a two-hundred-year period but it apparently furnished the nucleus, or opened the channel, for their one and only talent. As with all idiot-savants, they could give no explanation of how they came up with their answers. They simply knew. See Science Digest, May 1981, p. 12, and Scientific American, August 1965, p. 46.
I was recently told of an idiot-savant under study for several years now in a New York City hospital. His specialty is automobiles. He can be taken to a window, shown the busy city street below, and, from a single glance, recount the hundreds of automobiles within sight, and tell the name, model, year, engine type, and so on, of each in turn. His knowledge includes the latest models hot off the Detroit or Tokyo press, though he, too, is illiterate and uneducable. (I have only hearsay for this reference, though the case certainly fits the syndrome.)
Recall from Chapter 7 my five-year-old son giving that theological dissertation. I think he displayed a variation of this same syndrome, as do people like Edgar Cayce and general “psychics.” Indications are that the essence of all human experience, like all physical formation as matter, resonates on some implicate energy level, congregating according to categories of endeavor. We are continually setting up, in effect, fields of compatible variables of behavior and possibility. Consider, for instance, that the problem of God has been uppermost in man’s history. Or, consider the enormous physical, emotional, financial, intellectual, and even political energy invested in automobiles. Once created, a field of compatible variables (such as thoughts on God or automobiles) tends to express its implications, since that is the nature of implicate energy, and does so according to whatever explicate cues trigger it. The field flows back into a living situation, or physical form, according to the cumulative strength it has taken on, the amount of activity generating the field and, in turn, generated by the field.
Ordinarily we select from available fields according to the models given us that are compatible with those fields. We build conceptual patterns according to the dynamic between the implicate possibility and explicate model. Then we can (supposedly) handle that type of activity in a controlled, logical fashion. The idiot-savant fails to develop through this ordinary dynamic yet, through some childhood experience, opens to a particular field of variables without the usual intellectual filters and control. Because, of logical necessity, a field holds all possible variations of its compatible variables, and the savant’s channel is not filtered by ordinary brain function, he can give a near-instantaneous response to any variable selected for him by the appropriate stimulus question. He is incapable of learning or development since he cannot voluntarily arrive at a solution; retrace his steps to see how he derived his answer (reversibility thinking); or extract the essence or ability and correlate to other contexts, as can an ordinary restrictive conceptual system.
Sheldrake’s suggestion that learning and memory probably do not take place in the brain at all but in fields that translate through the brain can explain the savant syndrome, as surely as behavioristic psychology cannot. In Chapter 12 I show how a variation of this field effect underlies all creative discovery, scientific, artistic, or what-have-you. These functions give strength to my argument that child learning is essentially imprinting if and when model and blueprint match. (Which behooves us, it seems to me, to strive to match our models to be learned with the developmental stages of the child, rather than concentrate, as we do, on modifying the child’s behavior to fit our mismatched learning models.)
We have within us a subtle-body system critical to development. Explored fully in yogic psychology, it is yet another variation of this wave-field function of causation. Our individual experience registers in personal causal fields just as our broad species-wide experience does in broad generic ways. Our subtle, or dream, body is the most immediate expression of this personal field effect and along with it our personal history and awareness we call ego-personality. Since implicate energy is more powerful than explicate energy, once built up, our personal implicate field or subtle body and ego-soul would (and I think does) logically persist after our physical body dies, precisely as we find phantom limb pain persisting in a person after the limb is gone. But phantom limb pain eventually dissipates, and an ego-soul must eventually dissipate as well. Not integrated into the Self, and denied the continual supportive feedback of its physical and causal systems, an implicate order system cannot be sustained.
The issue of complementarity enters here. Just as wave and particle expressions are complementary, mutually exclusive yet mutually interdependent, so are subtle and physical systems of personality, as well as ego-self and the Self. We express, as our conscious awareness, one state or the other. At night when we dream we express in our subtle forms (from both archetypal and personal physical experience), and during the day we identify with and are subject to physical expressions. The sensory system itself is subtle energy; remove it from the physical system and the body becomes inert protoplasm. Focused on the body we register a physical world; focused within we can register other states; but should the gating mechanism separating the two break down we would experience delirium, hallucination, schizophrenia, and so on.
A cohesive, structured ego cannot be sustained in its subtle form if detached permanently from its body (again as we find in phantom limb pain). That is why we have built into us a developmental system to lead us beyond this wave-particle complementary function once it is well established. On disintegration of an ego structure, its various traits, tendencies, compulsions, abilities, perceptions, and conceptions built up as an integrated personality would gravitate toward larger aggregates of life tendencies. (We find this explored in the yogic theory of samskara.) Thus we reap as we sow both individually and universally, while alive, and, thus, detached from the physical system by death, while not integrated into the Self, that conscious aggregate called ego-personality (that longs so for survival) simply cannot manifest very long.
Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia has collected many cases of young children suddenly manifesting intricate knowledge of a recently deceased person’s life history. Stevenson uses these cases as an argument for reincarnation. A more viable, logical, and likely solution lies in this function of “fields of compatible variables.” I doubt that my son’s strange oration indicated reincarnation of some top-flight theologian. A child may, like the idiot-savant, suddenly become open to a field aggregate as my son did (through his rapport with me and my passionate concerns). Or she may open to that peculiar field called personality, a specific memory-set of some late-departed still intact within the subtle realm. The child may give full expression to the pool tapped into, and even form a partial identification with it. But no universal mechanism of reincarnation is warranted from such effects. Life is made of the dynamics between wave and particle consciousness, not mechanics. Most of the children manifesting this phenomenon are, as was my son, in the midst of their intuitive period of development.
Thus the death-and-dying movement’s assumptions that a bright new world awaits us at the end of death’s dark tunnel is questionable. The persistence of an ego-soul detached from its physical inputs might be equivalent to short-term memory in the same way phantom limb pain is. Perhaps by relating with other detached ego-souls one might sustain his ego structure longer, even indefinitely, establishing consensus realities of a sort. But this kind of action could be neither permanent nor developmental. An ego could not develop beyond such an insubstantial dreamlike mode since development beyond one’s stage generates only from the Self, not from consensus within that modality, and always only from the concrete to the abstract (and concreteness is missing).
Automatic writing, Ouija board activity, messages from spirit guides, and “discarnate entities” all fall into the same category of phenomena and draw on subtle or implicate energy memory pools. That is why these messages from the “other side” are generally vapid truisms of a vague generality, largely shaped by the person who instigates, receives, and interprets them (“channeling” is the current term). Guidance of this sort cannot lead anywhere except into circles and generally creates a dangerous form of ego-inflation from which little growth or change takes place. Subtle or astral input is numinous and awesome to a physically oriented ego, and to mistake this kind of psychic flatulence for genuine insight, which comes only from the Self, is a major error (though a commonplace and best-selling one). We do well to remember that the realm of insight-intelligence, the Self, has no content, contains no information, and is not available to reportage. (Insight registers in us only as conceptual-perceptual change.)
Finally, consider the phenomenon of thought itself, and the common Cartesian error that equates ego awareness with thought. Thought is only one form consciousness can take, and a primitive form at that. Seldom do we use thought in precise, computative, intellectual ways. Thought happens to us in that incessant dialogue of gibberish in our heads called roof-brain chatter. This non-breakable tape-loop (from which only the enlightened saint is free) is, however, a natural dynamic between implicate and explicate orders of energy and has its own role to play. Memory is an implicate order process, subtle, not physical, and every thought throughout our life registers in both our own, personal implicate memory pool as well as to some extent in the larger, species-wide ones. Since all implicate-explicate flows are complementary systems, these pools, in turn, impress back on us, triggering our ongoing thought. This automatic feedback, though random and haphazard, is exactly the same creative phenomenon as the more stable feedback between wave-form energy as blueprint for physical forms, and those explicate expressions of it giving us our stable world.
David Bohm speaks of thoughts as things, as material processes. Indeed, our making real or manifesting our implicate memory fields is a particle energy process, different from physical matter only in the nature of compatible variables involved and the required mode of expression. As a result, so long as we are identified with our physical bodies and world, we are as much subject to this thought flow, over which we have little or no control, as we are subject to our physical universe, and the two prove interconnected. Both are, in fact, simply samskaras, repetitive habit forms. The job of the brain/mind, along with supplying us with our world to view, is to think, and it will do its job in this automatic, repetitive way, just as it furnishes us a mechanical, repetitive world, until ego is integrated into insight-intelligence. Only when the ego-self is united with the Self are we free of such automatism.
When our post-biological integration of ego and Self fails to take place, however, we are lodged in this tape-looped feedback between in-plicate fields of thought, personal and collective, and individual mind. Spiritual development brings about a “quiet mind,” which means a mind free of this implicate-explicate tape-loop. This can happen only through integration into a higher function, the creation itself, at which point mind is used in the service of the more powerful energy. An ego-mind free from identification with those physical foundations from which it arises is literally free from the world. The ability to be moved beyond the implicate-causal order, with its archetypal tape-loops and vast evolutionary fields, in order to integrate into the Self, is achieved through grace (power) from a teacher and the modeling afforded by that teacher. And again, the teacher capable of establishing this kind of bonding is one who stands fully in that state of the Self, while here among us in flesh and blood.
1. Robert Monroe’s book (see Bibliography) covers only a fraction of his experiences over many years. His ongoing work at his institute in Faber, Virginia, now covers a wide field and has attracted the enthusiastic support of thousands of people who benefit from his “hemi-sync” process. Inquiries can be addressed to:
Monroe Institute of Applied Science
P.O. Box 175, Route 1
Faber, Va. 22938
2. See Muktananda, Play . . .
3. Psychologists Joe Kamiya and Charles Tart were among those who discovered the relationship between states of consciousness and brain-wave patterns back in the 1960s. The notion that through biofeedback we can duplicate the wave patterns of high yogic and Zen states and so achieve those states without the years of discipline involved proved an error of logic typical of our time. Currently brain research persons are discovering a whole array of new chemical substances used by the brain and keep attributing various states of consciousness to the translating substances. Now the idea is growing that we will chemically produce an ideal mental state—the same error made earlier but in a new guise.
4. Wilder Penfield (see Bibliography) agreed with Nobel laureates Roger Sperry and Sir John Eccles that mind is a separate entity from brain yet dependent on brain. The cerebellum gives the ideal physical setting for such an objective state. Post-biological development integrates mind into the intelligence of the Self, and this alone utilizes all the new brain and leads to an independence of ego from brain/mind and body.
5. See “Quizzing the Hidden Observer” (Miscellaneous Articles).
6. John Lorber, British neurosurgeon, asked the ridiculous question “Is your brain really necessary?” (see Lewin) for quite sound and serious reasons, since people are found who have virtually no neo-cortex, or new brain, yet are quite functional. Again, present indications point toward our huge new brain being almost superfluous to our ordinary life, as currently used. Our ordinary life in this physical body can be handled pretty well by our two animal brains. With no other involvement offered us in our current mechanistic-dualistic worldview, very little of the new brain is employed.
7. Monroe has a new book in the works that recounts the adventures of the many people exploring the possibilities of conscious exploration his system holds.
8. Gregory Bateson (see Bibliography) speaks of the stochastic process: Nature creates an open field of random possibility with a highly selective purposiveness behind the randomness. Creation takes place through an open-ended profusion. Nature throws out a billion stars (if needed) and chances on a planetary system; throws out a million planetary systems (if needed) and chances on life; throws out billions of lives and finally expresses her end-goal—a life that achieves realization, or unity, of the whole creative process.
9. Rudolph Steiner assumed that modern man, with his super intellect, could now rationally think his way through to his own spiritual evolution (and I suppose immortality), and had no further need of spiritual teachers or gurus. In this Steiner represents the fall of modern man: the arrogance of an inflated intellect divorced from intelligence. The more complex or advanced an intellect might become, the more critically necessary is the spiritual model and guide—not the lesser, as witness our growing nightmare today. Intellect guiding itself sinks to self-encapsulation and dogma (Steiner not exempt). Krishnamurti made roughly the same statement and the same error, and his highly intellectualized form of meditation leads to frustration since it can only be approximated at best, and it leads to dryness. (Krishnamurti’s system is intellectual in the last analysis and ignores Kundalini and the play of consciousness which underlies real life.) Ironically, both men railed against Eastern gurus while they themselves clearly functioned as the most classical examples of gurus all their lives.
1. The geometric nature of new brain imagery comes from a synthesis of various sources: personal experience, yogic theory, sleep-dream research, Arthur Deikman’s explorations of hypnagogic and anagogic imagery (see Tart, Altered States . . .), and “Universal Forms of Hallucination . . .” (Miscellaneous Articles).
2. See Laski.
3. See Hans Selye, From Dream to Discovery—On Being a Scientist (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
1. I came across a brief reference to this trial in a 1979 copy of the Journal of American Psychology.
2. See Sheldrake, specifically pages 181 and 204. We continually create morphic fields and are then subject to our own creations. This brings about the true “world of Maya,” or delusion, a mental creation separate from the truth of The Creation.
3. Both Paul MacLean and William Gray point out that the new brain seems devoted exclusively to the outside world and our survival in it. Other research claims that only five percent or so of the new brain is used. Thus John Lorber could rightfully ask if our brain is really necessary, since we have attributed nearly everything to the neo-cortex, and now find its role possibly diminished. Further, we find that when attending to the outer world our brain requires less blood and oxygen than it does when we close our eyes and attend to the inner world of thought. So little of the new brain is needed to attend to that outer system since it is the weakest. Non-localized reality, the reality of creation, is the translating job of the new brain, but this is a spiritual development that seldom happens—or at least only minimally. Were this development to take place, our physical system would be freed from intellectual interference (with all its emotional imbalances which bring disease and disaster on us).
4. David Bohm speaks of our illusions (inner plays of mind) which become delusions when we believe they apply to our external, shared world; which prompts us to enlist others in a general collusion that our delusions about our illusions are true. A buildup of the energy investments thus made creates a morphic field of ever-increasing probability, a cultural tendency. This is precisely the yogic theory of samsakara, and involves the theory of karma, the actions and reactions of a deluded, self-replicative nature. In the final chapter of this book I discuss the avenue to real action, free of this monumental snare.
1. The Brain/Mind Bulletin of March 26, 1984, reports “further evidence for the idea that the brain can integrate sophisticated information without cognitive activity.” The Bulletin of March 5, 1984, reports that “unconscious mind plays a more primary role in mental life than anyone has previously suspected. Stimuli registered outside awareness have a measurable effect on behavior.” Emmanuel Donchin, director of the Laboratory for Cognitive Psychophysiology, University of Illinois, reports that “as much as ninety-nine percent of cognitive activity may be nonconscious.” Psychologist Robert Zajonc claims the unconscious mind also registers likes and dislikes before the conscious mind even knows what is being responded to: “Feeling can operate separately from cognition.” Among many things, these observations lend credence to my theory of imprinting to the vast majority of information rather than “learning” in our behavior-modification terms. All this indicates that the brain shapes its information into meaningful experience of which our ego-intellect is then aware.
2. By now I think I have given grounds for questioning MacLean’s (and a general) notion that evolution has lagged in not connecting our intellectual brain tightly into subservience to our limbic structure (which is, after all, an animal emotional system). Intellect must be free of emotion if it is to be available to intelligence and creativity. Intelligence operates from the heart of the creation itself, and far surpasses the mid-brain’s limited response.
3. The new sports psychology lends credence to theories such as Ralph Strauch’s, that intellect interferes with an optimal physical response for our well-being in this physical world. So even the five or ten percent of new brain usage, locked in on the physical brain as it is, is itself perhaps misplaced. The real direction for us is to use these insights from sports psychology and the martial arts to rediscover the “wisdom of the body.” This might help to free our consciousness, that we might move on into the great non-physical realms within, the only adventure that counts for long.
4. Ernst Lehrs (see Bibliography) quotes Werner Heisenberg (p. 33) that science is not a chain of brilliant discoveries opening out, but a narrowing of scope of inquiry into nature. “Understanding diminishes . . . science as a path or progressive self-restriction.” Lehrs refers to “the self-restriction of scientific inquiry to one-eyed colour blind observation.”
1. Irina Tweedie’s account (see Bibliography) of her transformation under a Sufi guru in India in the 1960s is one of the great accounts of spiritual growth and must reading for anyone interested in a genuine transcendence. Of particular interest to the present chapter was her account of the piercing of the sexual chakra, one of the most intense accounts in all the literature.
2. I found Elisabeth Haich’s book (see Bibliography) an interesting, intelligent, and informative work.
3. John Woodroffe (see Bibliography) is complex, difficult, and oppressively dull, but his huge, exhaustive study of Kundalini indicates the complexity of the issue, and the necessity of severe simplification in a work such as mine here, to make the role of Kundalini meaningful. Kundalini is represented as a snake in many ancient systems. An old Celtic cross exists in Ireland that has the hooded snake entwined about it. The caduceus, the twin snakes wound about the staff of Mercury, was adopted by the medical profession, and Kundalini has always been called a healing power. Richard Katz’s study of the Kung (see Bibliography) concentrates on this healing aspect. The original Masonic Order was based on the movement up the spine by the Kundalini, the thirty-two degrees of Masonry being the thirty-two bones of the spine and skull.
4. See Haich; Pearce, Bond of Power; Tweedie. Chagnon relates how the Yanomama prepare for contests of strength through periods of celibacy. In the New Testament Jesus refers to those who make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven. The word he used referred equally to a self-disciplined celibacy as well as to castration, depending on interpretation, and since the Sufic order, from the same geographical locale, understands the need of sexual energy for Kundalini transcendence, I doubt Jesus meant castration. The Gnostic Gospels speak of the absolute necessity for celibacy.
5. Some of Schwaller de Lubicz’s works have been translated into English but my sole source is John Anthony West’s superb book, Serpent in the Sky.
1. For some reason, in Bond of Power I attributed this experience to a third party. Perhaps it was a twinge of embarrassment over such a Lolita-type involvement, since my flesh-and-blood paramour was nineteen at the time, and I was forty.
2. See Nambiar.
1. See Herrigel.
2. Krishna Prem (see Bibliography) makes clear that “we get to heaven by using heaven’s wings.” We get to the Self by surrender to that Self. Intellect is of use only as integrated into intelligence.
3. Bateson’s stochastic process bears resemblance to llya Prigogine’s theory of dissipative structures, with which I am not familiar enough to make use of here, but which early readers of this manuscript say is most relevant. When we refuse to recognize the underlying purpose of our universe, we see only random chaos and dissolution.
4. See Jensen.
5. See Simeon.
1. See Leonard.
2. See Herrigel.
3. Sanskrit names are complex, made of different words. Gurumayi’s name, Chidvilasananda, is made of Chid (Sanskrit for consciousness, the universal creative energy), vilas (play), and ananda (love of). So her full name, Chidvilasananda, means “a love of the play of consciousness.” Gurumayi itself is from two words, guru meaning teacher, and mayi meaning mother. (The word guru, as stated, is two words itself, gu for darkness and ru for light, the guru being the teacher who leads us from darkness to light.) So Gurumayi’s full name means “the lover of the play of consciousness who is the mother of all teachers who lead us from darkness to light.”
4. See Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan. In Carlos Castaneda’s last book, The Eagle’s Gift, he discusses the narrow gate issue. Jesus spoke of the broad way that leads to destruction being followed by nearly everyone, while the narrow gate leading to life is found by very few. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna very few ever find Him. Nature operates by profusion. The Christian Church (and most other religions) may be seen as an institution designed to sanctify the broad way leading to destruction, an attempt to establish some decency and order to the mass plunging over the cliff. The real followers of the way may be rather naturally driven underground, as true Yoga has always been essentially covert, subversive, in effect. Nevertheless, the Church acts rather as the necessary physical body, with all its frailties and shortcomings, which houses the Spirit, hidden though it may be. The Church has given birth to a steady stream of great beings down through the centuries who seem to be manifested in spite of the institution, and about whom the Church always seems indecisive: Should they be sanctified or burned at the stake?