In The Bond of Power I reported a series of experiences I had in the winter of 1979-80. A group of us were wintering at Miami Beach with my meditation teacher, Baba Muktananda. One day Baba told me to spend the second half of my morning meditation lying flat on my back. So the next morning I sat for half my time, then lay flat down. Immediately upon lying down, I went, as it is called, “out of my body.” I underwent no transition of consciousness, no preliminaries. Some essential part of myself rose up, as a unit and all at once, from my physical body. I rose no more than three or four inches above my physical body, just hanging there. I could hear my body breathing below me, but I, as me, was quite clearly above it. When this happened I thought that I was in for a great astral trip into other realms. I was familiar with Robert Monroe’s writings on out-of-the-body experiences1 and with Muktananda’s own report of traveling in his subtle body into subtle worlds.2 But on this occasion I went nowhere at all. This event occurred for five straight mornings, in the same way, and never did I go anywhere. I could open my eyes and look around the room, but was afraid to roll over and look at my physical body. After these five repetitions the events ceased, with no great astral trip ever having occurred.
Some evenings later, when I was still stewing over what the experience could have meant, Baba was talking at the regular evening program. He interrupted his talk, looked at me, and said, in effect: “You can’t travel in your subtle body. It hasn’t enough power to break from the physical to go anywhere. Only by incorporating the subtle body into the causal body can you travel.”
I finally got the message. Experiencing an intriguing out-of-body experience was not the issue. I was being given a clear, concise, and valuable lesson. My Self, my teacher, had been telling me in those morning ventures: “You are not your body. Don’t identify with it. Your body is your instrument for interacting with your physical world. Break your attachment to it.” From that point at least some of my lifelong anxiety about my body and its mortality began to fade. I knew that there was more to my being.
The lack of content for the experiences was important for the lesson to be learned. It was given me to experience my subtle body as an independent state. Had I traveled places or experienced phenomena other than my ordinary morning meditation time Self, I would have rationalized the experience as a lucid or hypnagogic dream, and my attention would have centered on the content of the event. The lack of content allowed me to analyze the state as an independent phenomenon.
My subtle body felt identical to my physical body, and my personality, memory, and responses seemed ordinary. (This is not the case in hypnagogic or lucid dreaming, nor in ordinary out-of-body astral experiences.) I was experiencing my esthetic sensory system and ordinary ego as a phenomenon itself, separate from my physical body. Yet my senses were sensing as usual, without the intermediary of my physical system.
I realized that the subtle body is identical to the physical, point for point, but only as a feeling state. I could move my subtle body in the same way I moved my physical body and the impression was the same. I knew that my physical body was on automatic pilot, was well cared for, but that it sensed nothing since I, ego-awareness, was withdrawn from it. Thus, I discovered that my sensory system is a subtle energy that sparks and gives conscious awareness to the physical system, but which can be withdrawn and can operate independently. Yogis, Sufis, and Zen masters have been found who can arbitrarily withdraw their sensory systems from their bodies.3 Their bodies are then anesthetized and do not register sensory phenomena.
The subtle system takes its content from its experience in the physical body and is always the sum total of our physical experience. But subtle energy is more powerful than physical energy, and, once set in motion, tends to persist even when no longer being stimulated by the physical body. The subtle system is either directly related to memory in general, or is, in effect, the memory of our physical body.
Though our ego becomes identified with the subtle system as the receptor of physical experience, ego is still not simply the subtle system. My favorite story illustrating this comes from Wilder Penfield, one of our century’s great brain surgeons. He sawed the skulls off some 1500 patients in his career, and probed around in their brains with electrodes. Since the brain has no feeling, the patients did not have to be anesthetized (other than an initial local anesthetic), and would lie there awake, open-eyed, often talking with Penfield for hours as he probed.
Penfield would come across certain microscopic spots in the brain which, when activated by an electrode, would produce a complete memory or memory sequence from the patient’s past. The memory would play into the patient’s sensory awareness as a full-fledged event, in three dimensions, with all five senses involved as in the original experience. The patient would then report the event in detail as it unfolded, and the event played itself out so long as the electrodes were intact. Yet the patient was open-eyed, looking at Penfield, fully aware of the doctor and the hospital surroundings. Two complete yet separate events were playing on the screen of mind without mixup or interference.
The patients all reported the memory events equal in reality to the hospital setting, yet knew, arbitrarily, that only the hospital setting could be real, that the other event was only a memory. Penfield would ask, “But where are you, as your own self?” To which the patients would answer, “Just watching both events.” From hundreds of such cases, Penfield drew the conclusion that mind was a separate entity, dependent on brain for its input, yet independent of brain in some way.4 Yet if we consider the work of Ernest Hilgard of Stanford University, and his research into a “hidden observer,” or silent witness to all events, even when we are asleep or hypnotized, we realize that mind is only an instrument, the screen on which reality plays, but in some way not the end of the perceptual process.5
Since only a tiny spot on the brain would give the memory replay when stimulated, we might conclude that memory was stored in tiny packets within the physical brain. Yet Penfield often had to cut out huge chunks of the cortex that were abscessed or cancerous, and found the patient’s memory not nearly as damaged as one would presume.6 Rupert Sheldrake proposes that memory might not be stored in the brain at all but in a causal realm outside physical processes, and that the brain may translate from such fields into our awareness as called on.
Consider phantom limb pain, long a medical puzzle. A leg, for instance, may be injured and after an agonizing time have to be amputated. The patient may continue to suffer the pain of the injury for months after the limb is gone. Where does the pain come from? The answer is from, or through, the subtle body. The subtle body is more powerful than the physical body. It is the emotional body and persists in whatever state it is in, including the emotions involved, for an indefinite time after the physical system is destroyed and can no longer send information to the subtle. The memory of a missing limb can persist after all signals from that limb are gone. If the last signals from that limb were traumatic, the trauma alone may persist and feed into our awareness as though the limb were still there. Between the subtle body and physical body is the same reflecting, tape-loop effect found between the implicate and explicate orders of David Bohm’s quantum movement. In turn, this is reflected in the constant playback and mutual support found between old and mid-brain systems. Our subtle system feeds back into the physical and on into the implicate causal realms of creative energy that bring about physical reality itself. So the subtle system is connected with the mid-brain, which is the medium between the causal new brain and the physical old brain.
Earlier we explored how the mid-brain gives shape and meaning to the information from the old brain, as we find the implicate order of Bohm’s model shaping the explicate order. Our neat dichotomies help our understanding of the action, but in actuality the interplay between the two is complementary. Both systems are necessary to describe completely the action shaping our experience. Our subtle system, and our subtle body, however, are results of this interplay of emotional, esthetic response to physical experience, and are intricately connected with the slow growth of an independent ego structure. We could not have much of a subtle system at birth, nor for the first year of life, but the subtle body builds automatically as we esthetically experience ourselves as a physical body.
The construction of our subtle system goes into high gear after the object-constancy stage, when the locus of ego shifts into the mid-brain in parallel with the old brain. As development continues, the locus in the midbrain begins to operate more and more independently of its physical brain’s inputs until, around age four, the subtle body, along with language, world-view, and ego, is largely functional. Then, when the locus of ego shifts into the even more powerful new brain for that development, we can become aware of the subtle body as an independent system. This is our esthetic dreaming body, but with guidance and development we can utilize it in our ordinary waking state as well.
When I was about five years old, on going to bed at night and relaxing, I often would feel parts of my body expand and stretch beyond where they should be. I would feel my leg with my hand and find my leg in its right place, but that leg would feel itself a couple of feet longer, or off to one side. In nature’s agenda, some separation of subtle from physical should begin during this period, as we anticipate the big separation of ego at age seven.
I have an educated, normal friend who, born on a farm, discovered in his fifth year that after sitting for a while on the farm’s large gasoline storage tank (he liked the smell of the vapors), he would apparently leave his ordinary body and fly. For a while he could visit only local places in this flying body of his, but as time went on he developed the ability to go into ever more remote realms. He had no name for his venture, had never heard mention of anything similar, and did not until grown. He kept quiet about his travels, sensing intuitively that his family would have put a quick stop to his long hours spent “daydreaming on that old tank.” During his twelfth year, his family moved to the city; he got caught up in the ordinary world, and his ability faded.
My friend and neighbor Robert Monroe (who wrote the book Journeys Out of the Body7) had, by 1976, received over 15,000 letters from all over the world, from people telling of their own experiences out of the body, and expressing relief that they were not necessarily psychotic. (Near-death experiences, of such current interest, obviously take place through the same general psychic machinery.) We do well, however, not to make errors of logic concerning subtle experience. We often assume that our ordinary, physical-state logic applies to the subtle, or vice versa. Subtle experiences are never direct perceptions of the same logical order as physical perceptions, even when we apparently view ordinary physical reality while in the subtle state. When we seem to perceive our ordinary surroundings in our subtle state, we may be perceiving out of our memory of those surroundings.
I have a friend who went out of his body one afternoon and wandered about his apartment, fascinated with the experience. Everything seemed normal until he noticed that each of his clocks—he had one in each room—told a different time, and that none of the windows was exactly the right height from the floor, and that around the place were other minor dislocations of the norm. In the same way, time and again I go into my subtle body during my morning meditation, experience various states, and apparently awaken from the experience. I get up to prepare for the day, when suddenly I notice that the windows are incorrect, or some other commonplace item is askew, and I realize that I have awakened within a dream or memory state. I then awaken to my ordinary waking state.
Because our subtle system is dependent on the physical system for the input of experience, when that physical system breaks down and the dynamic between subtle and physical is broken, our subtle system will, of necessity, slowly wind down and dissipate, if our identity remains largely locked into our physical body. Like phantom limb pain the ego must slowly dissipate as a subtle system, though that slow unwinding plays out the memory, expectancies, and archetypally shared images as found in near-death experiences. The subtle system must be integrated into the causal system for more permanence. Our subtle system is our own personal intermediary between the universal, generic blueprint out of which our awareness and our personal experience grow on the physical level. Even identification with the causal system does not give permanence, though, since the causal is, in turn, only the medium, or interface, between the Self, the source of creation, and our subtle-physical fields of experience. A final, true autonomy is found only through integration into that Self, the grounds from which everything springs.
Since the subtle system grows out of the mid-brain’s operations and interactions with the old brain’s experience of our world, all mammals must have some form of subtle system. Without a fully developed causal system, which requires a fully developed new brain, animals have no awareness of having a subtle system—they simply are that subtle-physical system. Our new brain gives us a locus from which we can separate enough from our subtle system to be aware of it objectively, as distinct from body. Our subtle system is what we have always called psyche, or soul (thus animals have souls). And, as should be evident, having a soul is no guarantee at all of having some sort of immortality. Only integration of the soul into higher integral structures can sustain personal awareness. And this integration must take place while in the body, that is, in this life, since only such integration can shift our identity from the body and provide us with another source of input and orientation.
With the addition of each brain, nature has added a new dimension to conscious awareness. The reptilian brain is aware only as the stimulus which brings about its awareness. Awareness and stimulus are the same. Remove the stimulus and awareness disappears. (Reptiles don’t sleep in any sense as mammals do.) Through addition of the mammalian brain, we can stand apart from the direct reptilian experience as stimulus and be esthetically aware of, rather than just as, the event of stimulus. With the new brain we can stand apart from and so be aware of the esthetic system itself, and be aware of the event of stimulus as something different from ourselves entirely. We can then come into possession of our esthetic-physical system as an instrument at our disposal. Consciousness of self as distinct, separate, and different from all sensory experience can then be developed.
These additions of possibility bring with them a need for physical models to follow if they are to be realized. Consider again our blueprint for language, which was discussed in Chapter 5. Language is an open-ended blueprint in that we can imprint or adapt to any language using our basic phonemes. But this open possibility can exist only as a specific and limited language. We cannot speak an infinitely open language; only a very finite, limited one. This means that we must be given a specific actual language (or, perhaps, two at the most) as a model, in order to construct any language at all.
Through developing a specific language, though, we end with language ability, and ability is nature’s goal. Through that language ability we can act back on our language, play with it, mutate it, transform it, create with it, adapt it continually to new circumstances, and so on. Thus, our language blueprint is expressed in us as an intent toward language, an open capacity for language, and an instinctual drive to cue in on and imprint to whatever stable language model we are given. No specific language is pre-wired into our circuitry, for if it were then no ability would be required. Ability is developmental. As a result, we must be given a model of language in order for language of any sort to form. What language is formed, out of that open possibility, depends on the kind of model given.
A closed or specific language could be built in ahead of time, I suppose, much as with bird calls, animal calls, and so on (though even with these modeling is needed). But then no language ability would develop. Speech, rather than being a dynamic process, would be as static as a dog’s bark. We could not then move from concrete to metaphoric language and on to abstract, semantic language. For all these developments are due to the open nature of language as a possibility. As with language, so with all intelligence. At a certain point of complexity and richness of possibility, nature’s agenda achieves open-endedness, a kind of random chance, infinite openness where anything and everything can and will happen. For that kind of possibility to be utilized, we must develop the ability for such utilization. And at that point the role of a model given us from our world, around which such development can take place, becomes critical, the central point of creation.
No such model is needed by plants and simple animals since a straightforward instinctive response to physical experience can be built in. Mama snake lays her eggs in a prescribed manner and goes off and forgets about them. A sufficient number of her eggs hatch; the little snakes go through equally prescribed actions and reactions, and a sufficient number survive to maintain the species. Little snake does not need to observe Mama snake to see how to go about the matter of living a fine reptilian life. (Birds are more advanced than reptiles and must have modeling.) A snake’s circuitry is pretty well laid out and functional ahead of time for a certain statistical stability within the species, given a certain statistical stability in the environment.
The minute we add a mammalian brain to this simplicity, conscious awareness not only expands by a light-year leap; more important, awareness polarizes between sensory activity and the qualitative evaluation or esthetic experience of that sensory activity. We take possession of our senses at that point. We integrate those senses into a more complex structure, into another order of energy, and we can sit in judgment on our own experience. The mid-brain esthetic awareness, able to possess itself, stand back from its own content, and respond positively or negatively, gives flexibility and adaptivity. This enhances an individual survival, rather than just a statistical, species survival. (And, of course, individual survival then becomes an issue.)
A blueprint for such adaptive openness cannot be prewired as an instinct. Instinct means a closure of response along certain prescribed lines. In order to provide for open-endedness, nature must do two things. First, it must provide a non-specific general category of possibility, an open blueprint from which we must then construct a particular response. We can do this only by being given a physical model for that particular kind of response. Second, nature must build into us a corresponding instinctive compulsion to follow that model and construct accordingly. Thus we have no choice about following our models; we do so instinctively below the level of awareness. Nor, in the last analysis, do we really select our models. We automatically follow and imprint to the closest approximation of our blueprint’s intent that we can find.
The greater the expanse and flexibility of the blueprint, the more critical the need for specific modeling. A frog’s brain sees a restricted world, limited to shapes and movement indicating food or threat. Human vision is open, a field of possibility. So nature builds into infant vision one pre-set pattern, that of a human face. In the open possibility of all things possible to see, this face pattern acts as an anchor on which all selectivity is going to be based. That is why the newborn spends eighty percent of his visual time locked in on that face, and refers all other visual action back to this given model. A human face becomes the cornerstone on which the visual world and reality are based. Continual reference back to a face is needed to stabilize the open possibility of things to see.
When nature added our new brains, she upped the ante by many more light-years of possibility. And, correspondingly, the need for models to articulate something specific from this infinite potential grew ever more critical. When she added mind, she added the possibility of detaching awareness even from the causal properties underlying creation, the ability to look at causality itself objectively. This moves our awareness into randomness and chance, into creation itself,8 and the need of model increases yet again.
Evolution takes our experience into ever greater fields of randomness and chance, less closure, more power, and a corresponding increase of instability and risk. The reptilian brain is the most stable, the most closed, the least available to change, and the weakest of our system. As we move up the evolutionary ladder in our growth of intelligence, the more critically dependent we are on the model function.9 The model is not nature’s afterthought, but the way in which bonding between a sensory system and the possibility for its sensing takes place. Without the model and the bonding afforded through the model, disintegration or fragmentation of ego takes place. Our human venture is thus a tightrope between ecstasy and terror. In a random chance system designed for such a precise and specific goal as union with the creative system itself, that tightrope is traversable only by following the guide, the model, one who has actually traversed that thin line to the goal.