In Chapter 6 I mentioned a childhood night terror from which I had difficulty awaking and which I could not remember afterward. Since the dream was seriously disturbing, I felt, as I grew older, that I must somehow come to terms with it, so I determined to hold on to my senses, follow the sequence, and remember it, rather than letting it take me over as it had. I began to keep paper and pencil by my bed, determined to remember the dream the next time it occurred, and to write it down. After some time, my project worked. During my dream I held to my awareness, witnessed the event, and immediately wrote out an account of it. The dream faded from my life at that point. In later years I would have rumblings of its overture, but nothing more.
At age eleven the locus of our ego-awareness shifts into that objective point of view called mind. From this position we can, in effect, stand outside of and operate on our own brain functions. I was eleven when the notion struck me that I could gain control over that night terror, stand outside it and witness it as an event separate from me. Piaget called this ability to operate on the functions of the brain itself “Formal Operational Thinking.” My ability to stand outside my own dream state was a characteristic of this capacity to manipulate the very machinery for thinking. Such notions require maturation and separation of ego from brain mechanisms. By age eleven, body and brains become supportive instruments of this higher integration from which we view everything, even our own thinking, as “other” to us. Ego is now identified with mind, which is a mirror of the brain in the same way that a television screen mirrors the translations from the set. Now ego-mind must move on toward freedom even from that screen itself, to a point where ego can punch the buttons of its brain components and switch stations in a fundamentally new way. Ego, born out of the brain as a child is born out of the womb, can now move to an objective point beyond the bias of the brain systems, and come into resonance with the very waves of consciousness being translated by the brain. This is the next logical step in the growth from concreteness to abstraction, but, just as the television screen is a useless blank without the input from the component parts, ego-mind at adolescence is still dependent on its brain for its source of awareness. The new freedom of consciousness is an ability that must be developed.
Between ages seven and eleven, nature constructs a language of abstract meanings and connotations we refer to as semantic. Such notions as morality, ethics, quality, meaning, virtue, transcendent, and so on are semantic. They have no referent other than states, conditions, or attitudes of mind. They are rather a mature form of the early esthetic (“like and dislike”) polarizations of the two-year-old. At age eleven this semantic system arrives full-blown on the scene. Word is born out of its physical matrix and can now act in a formal way, that is, as a way by which we can operate on the very functions of our brain. This gives rise to intellect, a way of thinking outside emotion, free of the need to relate qualitatively, and beyond the limits of physical referents. Thinking can range freely, and the young person can think about thinking by examining his own mental machinery. The child has used many variants of this earlier, but the process now moves into universal implications and broad causal fields. Intellect can now use thought independently of all previous systems, balances, and checks. It can draw on its support systems without having to answer back to them, in effect. As a result, unless intellect is integrated into the next structure, as designed, it will operate without regard to consequence, or balance, and can easily become demonic.1
Since all learning is from the concrete to the abstract, our first formal operations are essentially concrete. Intellect refers to our previous structures of knowledge. From that point, intellect can become increasingly creative and move on into ever more abstract realms. This should prepare for the integration of intellect into intelligence.
We can categorize formal operations as science, art, and philosophy and religion, the three broad subjects that constitute a culture or society’s body of knowledge. We open to a full conceptual grasp of these areas of thought around age eleven, with the separation of word from its physical origins; we are geared, by our blueprint, to turn to our society’s body of knowledge at this stage in the same way we turned to the parent in infancy and childhood.
We can consider these three categories as mind playing with its three brain instruments: science with the material old brain; art with the emotional, dream-time mid-brain; religion and philosophy with the abstract concepts of the new brain. Since we are all familiar with our culture’s body of knowledge (all schooling is based on it in one way or another), I will take it for granted that we can examine less conventional forms of playing with the brain, and so stretch our horizons.
Tim Gallwey, author of The Inner Game of Tennis, tells of a fifty-five-year-old woman who had no prowess in sports, had never held a tennis racket in her life, and felt too old to be taught new tricks. Following training (which can be considered a variation of neurolinguistic programming), she picked up a racket for the first time and, with cameras recording, beat everyone around.2
Sports psychology is becoming quite a fashionable field. Professional athletic teams are trained through the neurolinguistic approach. (“Neurolinguistic” refers to the effects of language on the nervous system.) Plays are outlined, and each player makes an image of his part of the action over and over in his mind’s eye until all movements are seen clearly. Then he moves onto the field to apply his practice directly; he projects his internal world onto his external one with something like a forty-percent increase in efficiency and none of the broken bones of the ordinary forms of practice.
The sports psychology phenomenon is only once removed from the bedtime story. Internal imagery is a form of thinking, and thinking requires muscular movement. These movements, generally microscopic in proportion, are always present. Brain activity elicits body activity in sympathetic response, since body is an extension and instrument of brain.
Of itself, the brain will make the same instinctive muscular-glandular survival reactions to an internally produced image (of, say, a tiger) as to an externally given image. Apparently the mind, or a hidden observer, arbitrates in these matters, and informs the brain that because the internal image is not real, flight is not necessary. (At night, in our dreams, this arbitration largely disappears, but so does a full response from our old brain’s motor systems, since they are largely suspended.)
The phonemes of language have brought about muscular-neural responses since our early pre-natal times. The two-year-old moves his hand as he says the word “hand.” The play of the brain/mind and body through neurolinguistic programming is an extension of this and of the activity of our five-year-old’s bedtime story, where we speak the word and the image appears.
Concrete language is retained in the right hemisphere’s synchrony with the primary brains, as well as the analogical language of imagery transference. In his inner practice, the athlete plays out his inner action in perfection that transfers to the old brain’s world image and muscular systems. In the same way that the early child projects his inner image of the road-roller on the outer image of spool and plays in his modulation, so the athlete projects his long-rehearsed internal game onto the external game. The micro-movements become macro-movements with ease and precision, for they have been rehearsed without opposition, and in the precursory, subtle dream world that underlies the real one. In the face of opposition, the player’s inner imagery, being subtle, is more powerful than the external and modulates that external image to varying degrees.
We read of the Aikido master who “dances through” his attackers in slow motion so that no one can lay hands on him. Mathematician Ralph Strauch, a master in martial arts and the Feldenkreis movements, claims that we must unconsciously accept the idea of attack in order for an attack against us to be carried out.3 Without this unconscious agreement there is no conscious agreement. So our Aikido master’s inner image wins agreement from his attackers in spite of themselves, since he has developed a powerful image of his own actions.
Group imposition of imagery has a more creative application. An English psychologist traveled in India a number of years ago, making movies of fakirs, magicians, and non-ordinary practices.4 His ambition was to photograph the famous Indian rope trick, but he could never find it being performed. About when he had decided it was only a folk tale, he heard that the trick was to be performed in a nearby village. He rushed there with his big camera on its tripod and worked his way to the scene. The fakir stood in a clearing with the stock tools of his trade: a large basket and a small boy. The crowd grew quiet, suspense grew; finally the fakir moved and the Englishman turned on his camera.
The fakir opened his basket, withdrew a large coil of rope, held one end of the rope in one hand, and, with the other, expertly threw the coil into the air with great force. The coil unrolled as it went up, and the end simply disappeared “up there” somewhere, the rope suspended in mid-air. The little boy then broke his stance and climbed the rope, all eyes following him. And he simply “disappeared up there” somewhere, like the end of that rope. The fakir again reached into the basket, took out a wicked looking, curved short sword, tucked it into his sash, and also climbed the rope, all eyes on him. He, too, simply disappeared.
A long pause, tension reached a breakpoint, all eyes turned up. Suddenly there was a gasp from the audience. Down came a bloody leg, apparently that of the little boy, all eyes following as it crashed to the ground, splattering blood. Then came another leg, then an arm, another arm, then the bloody, dismembered torso, and finally the pitiful little head. The audience moved their heads as one, following this drama. After a pause, the fakir appeared, climbing down the rope. Casually, he reached in his basket, took out a cloth, wiped the murderous instrument, put it back in the basket, and, with indifferent nonchalance, drew the rope down, carefully coiling it into a neat, tight coil. He placed the rope in the basket and, almost as an afterthought, looked around at the mess of the little boy’s parts. With a shrug he gathered these, one at a time, and deposited them, too, in the basket; closed the top and stood, quietly, eyeing the audience impassively. Suddenly the basket top flew open and out sprang the little boy, whole, intact, smilingly alive. The audience burst into a great shout, applause rang out and coins showered in, the little boy scrambling to pick up every one. The crowd then broke, making way, and the actors left the scene.
The Englishman was entranced; too much so—so he questioned a sample of the audience, noting down their observations. All experienced precisely as he had. He hastened back to the city to have his rare film developed, and projected the film on the screen. He saw the fakir move, bend over, come up with the coiled rope, throw it mightily into the air, at which point two things happened: The rope fell smack down on the ground in good Newtonian fashion, and the fakir and his boy stood absolutely stock still, without moving a muscle, from that point on. The film showed the audience, meanwhile, all move their heads up, then down, then up—then the look of horror, then up and down, and so on. Finally the film showed the fakir move, wind up the rope from the ground, applause, coins, and departure.
“Aha!” the materialistic tough-minded brass-tacks, no-nonsense scientific believer says: “Illusion.” Of course it is illusion!—a little play, an inner play taking place entirely within the brain/mind of an entire group. The scene was projected by a master projectionist and received on the screen of mind of all participants. The storyteller uses words and the internal image making is produced accordingly in the listeners. In the rope trick the storyteller uses image only and all share that image.
Our tough-minded behaviorist says this illustrates our problem. People are deluded by such trickery on many levels. They should let this be a lesson that the mind is untrustworthy and cannot give a true, objective picture of the world as it really is. What the mechanist claims, of course, is that the lifeless camera, that poor mechanism, is the proper criterion for what is real! At which point the mechanist allies with—and limits himself to—the least conscious aspect of our living world as the only reality.
The story illustrates the fact that reality is a production of the human brain/mind, a production infinitely rich, which opens to incredible vistas and potential spaces. None of this, alas, is available to that machine, the poverty-stricken camera, which cannot take part in reality. It is limited to some pre-set, inflexible, unchangeable world of matter as itself—whatever illusion that might be. The same goes for any other technological device, including the greatest supercomputer that will ever be achieved. At each shift of brain mode, there is a threshold that is paradox. Nothing on one level can in any way account for the next. And the behaviorists, with all their posturings and bravado, peering through their triple-thick lensed glasses at a world they cannot see—maneuvering money, public image, governments and education; chronically awarding medals back and forth for their restrictive foolishness—they are locked into a one-way world that leads only to death. In that world available only to and authenticated by that camera, the film must surely run out.
The above progression leads logically to the next step in the possible play of mind. I refer to his experience in every book and workshop, and see it on a continually broader basis. This is an experiment Charles Tart, psychologist at the University of California at Davis, ran years ago,5 which Jean Houston has reported on, and which a group of friends and I duplicated. I will condense Tart’s experiments into one typical venture, using an actual episode (from many that took place). The experiment is in mutual hypnosis.
Two graduate students, male and female, were found who could go into deep trance and could also put other people into trance (a rare combination). In preliminary sessions, both agreed to keep tuned in to Tart and accept his directions. (This agreement broke down at a certain point, as you will see.) Tart tells the young woman to put the young man into trance. She does. In order to do so, the man must be willing; he must, in effect, surrender his will over to the young woman. And he must surrender his ordinary reality in order to go into a trance state. One of the things that takes place in hypnosis is a reduction of attention paid to the old brain’s physical sensory system; that system is drawn on selectively according to suggestions from the hypnotist. The bulk of conscious attention then resides in the mid-brain and the new brain.
Tart then tells the young woman to tell the young man to put her into trance. She, like her partner, then gives her will for what shall be real over to the young man, restricts her level of attention to his suggestions, and Tart’s, and goes into that suspended state. Each has then surrendered his will for what shall be real to the other. Each would then go all the way to sleep, having sharply reduced sensory intake. So Tart instructs the woman to put the man into the highest trance she can. “You have a golden rope ladder,” she tells her partner, “and you are going up that ladder into higher and higher states of trance.” His supportive mid-brain, translator of imagery, translates the word into imagery; he enters into the inner journey and imagines going up the ladder. They have a number system for gauging extents of trance, and he arrives at the top figure, a state of complete surrender to her words.
To stabilize his state, and prevent his going on to sleep, she tells him to imagine that he is on a beautiful beach and should stay there. This occupies his energy of attention and keeps him in his trance. Since each has surrendered his or her will, and thus volition and desire, to the other, nothing more would happen without a coach on the sidelines. This is Tart’s role. So Tart tells her to instruct the young man to put her into the same state. The young man goes through the same routine with her: the golden rope ladder, higher and higher, the beautiful beach, the same state.
Then something surprising happened. The couple found themselves together on the same beach. And at that moment, the beach, heretofore just another imaged notion, shaky, shifting, insubstantial as any imaginary scene would be, leaps into full life, fully real, available to all five senses, in three dimensions, and stable, as real as any event of their lives. Except, the beach is psychedelic: The sands are diamonds, the ocean champagne, crystal rocks range the shoreline, heavenly voices sing overhead. All is tangible, available to every sense, indistinguishable from any other reality, but like none they have known. They have created a consensus reality, or rather, they have set up the conditions by which such a creation takes place (an important qualification).
Dreaming seems related to the mid-brain and its right hemisphere interactions. In lucid dreams we manage to achieve some objectivity and, to some extent, can operate on the materials of the dream. The scenes of lucid dreams are experienced in isolation, though, and are transient; they fade quickly. In mutual hypnosis, we have two projection points of mind creating a mutually shared scene. The participants set up a field effect between them. A relationship between the internal imagery of each system is established. For here the mid-brain is involved, and that is the brain that opens to intuition and other shared field effects. This mutuality is what gives the permanence and the full sensory dimensions to what would otherwise be a transient, shallow dimensional image.
Either of the parties involved in mutual hypnosis can go back later, in a self-induced trance state, and find these mutually created states intact, full-dimensional, fully real as they had experienced them together. (Neither permanence nor full-dimensional structures can be achieved in individual, private hypnotic dreams.) Months later, the mutually created states are unchanged and stable, available either singly and self-induced, or together, in mutual, hypnotic states.
During one experiment of Tart’s, another young woman graduate student came into the study while a mutual state was taking place, sat down to wait for the conclusion, fell into a trance, and found herself in their private world. The two resented her presence and asked her to leave. Tart lost touch with the two each time at the point of the formation of their mutual dream image. For at that point they no longer used their physical bodies for communication, so they lost touch with Tart. They were then in their so-called dream bodies, or “subtle bodies” (of which more later). In this state, only their heads and hands fully materialized; their bodies remained slightly diaphanous, a bit transparent, less than substantial, in spite of the solid materiality of their dreamlike surroundings. (Their physical bodies, back in the laboratory, were slumped over, apparently sound asleep, on automatic pilot while the owners were away.) Written reports, made separately after the experiments, always tallied point for point.
Two people taking drugs together often enter into the same non-ordinary reality experience. A third party, not under drugs but physically present with the other two, may fall into the same state and share their experience. In my years of living and traveling with my meditation teacher, Muktananda, I had several strikingly real experiences through which I would be taught—through clear, tangible, sensory-motor imagery—some teaching that I had not been able to grasp from verbal or written description. All learning is from the concrete to the abstract. Sufi and yoga teachers use this practical method to teach students about states, processes, or functions not available through ordinary sensory ways.
In 1983, reports on large-scale group dreaming were published.6 All members taking part must be adept at lucid dreaming. As many as ten people at a time agree on a “target” meeting place, such as a bus, and a specific time. While meeting in the dream they exchange specific information with each other, the test being to awaken from the dream and write out the information received, as well as an account of the event. One of the persons involved remarked that one might develop the procedure to eavesdrop on other people’s dreaming. There may be a sharp shift of modality, however, from the ordinary “psychic flatulence” making up most dreams, and true lucid dreaming.
In all these cases listed here, including the fakir’s rope trick maneuver, the experiences are not our creations, not even in the most tightly controlled lucid dream. The experiences are given and we are the recipients; but they are given only when we set up the conditions for that giving and reception. Our ability to then enter into and influence the direction of that creation is significant, for that is a next step. This ability to participate leads to an eventual merger with the creative process, to becoming that force which is the goal of human maturation.
Ability to stand outside and operate on our conceptual-perceptual instruments moves us into an area of creativity that does not require mediation through physical means. Then mind can experience outside its own brain process, the logical next step in the overall progression of separations and entry into ever more subtle, non-structured power. By adolescence, mind is a reflector of the brain; brain is the translator projecting its translations on the screen of mind. Mind now prepares to bypass this mediation and perceive on its own directly out of creative possibility. Mind will develop as a two-way mirror, one toward the world of physical process, the other toward the inner realm of creation; post-biological development will open.
It will sound like the most puerile and fatuous nonsense to say that the fakir and his rope, or Tart’s young couple on their beach, or the lucid dreaming shared by a group, or my meditation experiences brought about through my teacher, represent a more advanced evolutionary function than our super-computed rockets to the moon or planets. But no matter how inordinately complex and sophisticated, manipulation of one physical process by modulation with another physical process never moves beyond physical function, the most elementary, primitive mode we have. No matter that technology represents brilliant intellect; that intellect turns us back into our most primitive process and devotes the new brain’s power to concrete levels. The child bending the bar of metal opens to a realm of mind vastly beyond chemical explosions of rocketry, and into that inner realm is where we are designed to go. No amount of physical manipulation can take a single human psyche into his next matrix—that non-physical mode in which we must be able to maneuver when our physical apparatus goes down, like a used-up rocket.