Yogic psychology considered the state of deep sleep the causal process, which relates to the new brain. They referred to our dream state as our subtle system, which relates to our mid-brain, and our waking state as our physical process, which, we have found, translates through the old brain. The new brain uses geometric patterns such as cone, grid, snowflake, cobweb, and so on, infinitely variable within their sets and capable of endless syntheses between classes of pattern. These are the precursors to all other types of imagery.1 The images of movement and light or dark contrasts of our old brain, and the fluid, colorful images of our dreaming brain, are composed out of those geometric families of the new brain. Our new brains participate in the construction of our infinitely variable sensory systems, and, as such, give us a far richer worldview than that of the lower animals. More important, this new brain gives us a medium through which we can participate in that construction going on in the primary brains, as we found in operational thinking. At the time of adolescence our locus of awareness is shifted from brain to mind, and from that objective standpoint we can stand outside our causal system, in effect, and, using those basic patterns, manipulate the imagery of all the systems.
The three brains represent the three states that make up all possibilities of creation, as they represent three of the four orders of energy David Bohm proposes for quantum mechanics. Mind, though it stands outside brain action, is not the seat of creation, the Self of yogic psychology; nor is it the fourth order of energy, the realm of insight-intelligence in David Bohm’s model.
A mature mind is the medium between brain and Self, between the translating instrument for reality and the genesis of that reality. A mature mind is objective, free of the subjectivity of the child and adolescent, free of direct influence from the primary brains. Once we have developed this objectivity, our awareness is free to shift, to some extent, from brain to Self. That is, mind can begin to function as the consciously aware medium between Creator and creation. We can enter as participants, directly or indirectly, in creation itself. The indirect way is most common and follows a general pattern exercised equally in scientific, artistic, philosophical, or spiritual pursuits.
A scientist, for instance, may grow dissatisfied with some part of his accepted belief system, his science’s body of knowledge. He finds a hole in the fabric of this system’s logic and plunges into that hole. He sees implications of a new possibility and is seized by the image of this new seeing. He gathers all content that relates to his new idea, researches everything relevant to it. Yet, though he puts all of it together in every way to support his idea, he finds his work to no avail. He has not the strength of mind to pull it together. His mass of data will not yield the final result. In a moment of despair, mental bankruptcy, or fatigue, he quits, if only for a moment.
At his moment of quitting, that elusive answer arrives of its own volition in a single instant’s flash; at that moment it is full-blown in the brain, complete and perfect. Aha! Eureka! Now he has it. He finds, however, that he must translate that “Eureka!” into the language of his brotherhood. His answer arrives as an obscure image that makes little sense in the light of day. The reason for this requirement for translation into the common domain is a key to creative action.
My favorite example is the chemist, August Kekulé,2 who was seized with the notion of a certain possible molecular combination not then extant. He pursued his new possibility with characteristic zeal and passion. He exhausted all resources; the answer eluded him. One day he sat down before his fireplace to get his mind off his obsession and drifted into reverie. And there before him, in a single second, appeared a ring of snakes with their tails in their mouths, forming a peculiar configuration. Eureka! He had his answer.
Chemists, however, cannot make much use of a ring of snakes with their tails in their mouths. Kekulé had to take this dreamlike metaphoric animal image and translate it into the language of chemistry. This gave the world, for good or ill, the benzene ring, that hexagonal molecular basis of all twentieth-century chemistry. We could say that a hexagonal possibility gave rise to a ring of snakes that gave rise to a questionable world of “better things for better living through chemistry.” In an address to a scientific convention, Kekulé said: “Gentlemen, we must do more dreaming.” Hans Selye, in a study of scientific process, speaks of scientific discovery as a movement from dream to reality.3
The five steps of creative pursuit are easy to see in Kekulé’s story: (1) seizure of and then by a passionate idea of a new possibility; (2) gathering of materials needed for that possibility to be realized; (3) a gestation period, or plateau, when all materials seem to have been explored to no avail: (4) recognition of inability to think it through, and a cessation of thinking, at which point the answer arrives; and (5) translation of the answer into the public domain.
An idea is generated in our causal minds as an inarticulate hunch. The supportive mind, with its emotional power and fluid imagery, fills in the hunch with appropriate images. (By “appropriate” I mean an inner picture that can transfer the initial abstract hunch into concrete imagery suitable to spur the search for content.) Our supportive mind also provides the driving passion of will, the determination to persist in the face of obstacles; and emotion, the excitement and intent of the pursuit. A functional blueprint, sustained in these interactions of mind, bursts into bloom.
The second phase, the pursuit of materials, requires intellectual discrimination of appropriate, relevant materials. Appropriateness means that the content selected must match the general nature of the inner blueprint of idea. To match the original abstraction, the concrete content must be capable of being transferred into that abstract imagery. This will depend, in turn, on the power of the analogical language system, the imagery of symbol and metaphor built up through play in the pre-logical years. Imagination thus comes into its own.
The passionate search is an intellectual activity of the three brains and of mind. And all intellect can do is put together and synthesize, scramble and rework, add and subtract, the relevant materials. Intellect can only self-replicate, can only feed back on its own system. And, if that system already contained the synthesis or material sought, the scientist would simply engage in discovery; he would stumble across something that had always been there within his materials, or the material of his field, the significance of which had been missed. But if genuine creative discovery is involved, those materials will not contain the goal.
At some point, when intellect has done all it can, exhausted all possibilities, a plateau is reached. Stagnation sets in, and frustration. The materials may hit a critical point in that collective work (and may not). If they do, true gestation takes place. At some point of final frustration, the person quits, and the moment of insight arises. Insight, as in Bohm’s “realm of insight-intelligence,” arises out of the seat of creation. It arrives at a moment out of mind because the fusion takes place not in the brain’s circuitry, which can only ruminate over its own information, but in the realm of insight itself. The answer cannot arrive when one is passionately pursuing it or thinking about it precisely because of this self-replicating tape-loop circuitry problem. Intellect ties up the circuitry of brain, locks up the analogical imagery in support of its abstract ruminations, so that nothing is available either to receive or transfer the imagery of insight, since the imagery of insight will arrive through the highest mode of thought found in the new brain/mind interaction. Not until a cessation of intellect and its thinking occurs can the answer arrive.
We note that the great answer, when it comes, seems to appear in some dreamlike imagery. The reason is simple: This is the metaphoric imagery that can be transferred into both the abstract geometric patterning of the new brain and the concrete language of the primary brains. Thus the necessity of the translation step. Margharita Laski proposed that many an awesome “Eureka!” may never reach the light of day because of an inability to transfer the dream into reality, or transfer the imagery. So the image that gives insight must be one capable of being transferred both ways, into concrete and the abstract; and that means a mid-brain, right-hemisphere, analogic function, and a sharp enough intellect to make the translation.
Biologist Rupert Sheldrake once asked physicist David Bohm where, in Bohm’s Holomovement theory, there was provision for the dynamic between explicate and implicate orders, between us here on this earth and that creative process in the realm of insight-intelligence. Bohm’s theory gives a model for creation in the sense of God creating the world, but what about our human action, frail though it is? We bring things into our realm that were not there before, for better or worse. God’s creation did not provide us with computers, dioxins, knowledge of the double helix, or algebra.
The answer to Sheldrake’s query seems to be that the creative process works always in only one direction, and that is from the realm of the Self. But we can elicit from that realm of insight a response in keeping with the nature of some desire, provided we invest the necessary passion and will, follow the rule, and have the sense to stand back at the appropriate time and let the answer manifest itself. The process must follow the pattern of the Holomovement’s expression since that is the way creation works. Effort on our part acts like the stimulus of the small ground charge found in lightning, which elicits a response from the far greater cloud charge of electricity and brings about that exchange we call a thunderbolt. Without sincere, prolonged, and intense effort on our part, no corresponding charge answers. Even little bits of the creative process are not bought cheaply. This holds even though our effort is completely dwarfed and is essentially peripheral in the overall effect.
A genuinely creative act opens a new category of possibility; we fill in that category through discovery. Since the beginning of this century we have been filling in Kekulé’s creation. Once his model was in the common domain, that domain was different and we could discover the possibilities of this difference. Creativity gives the common domain something that was not there before. A truly creative act is not quantitatively derivable from what exists, and is always given gratuitously from the realm of insight-intelligence. We must set up the conditions for the creative gift, however, and the conditions we set up will determine the general nature of the answer received. We enter into the process as a determinate, and the answer, when it occurs, will be in keeping with the nature of what we have set up, and beyond the sum total of all our input.
Sustained passion and will are what elicit the corresponding charge, for all creation is an act of will. Consider too that the more strenuously we work for our answer, the greater the preparation we have undergone for reception of that answer, and making its translation. When my five-year-old son delivered to me the perfect essay on the creative process and our relation to God, I had not the strength of mind to receive, retain, or translate that soliloquy. The materials we gather in our pursuit of our answer may be almost incidental in the final analysis. We must gather all of them, perhaps, only to find that the answer is not quantitatively derivable from our materials; it is not the cumulative result of them. Though those materials enter into the nature of the final answer, they may only point out the general direction that creation takes. Our materials and passions enter into the overall model of stimulus evoking the creative response, but the response is qualitatively different from, and quantitatively beyond, the model stimulus. We again have complementarity, with an apparent radical break of either-or which is arced by will and passion. Bankruptcy of intellect is necessary to get intellect out of the way, since the system operates on this either-or process, and shows that only the realm of insight can make real the blueprint of idea we have earlier created.
The key to the movement from our position to insight and back again is imagery. Everything is imagery: The Creation is imagery. Imagination is that elusive quality we should have built up between ages four and seven: the capacity to see castles in the clouds, tigers in the bushes, or beautiful pictures when mama, daddy, or the radio tells a story; the internal imagery that can see the truck in the matchbox, road-roller in the spool; that sees all the world as conscious, alive, filled with personality and infinite possibility; where a certain molecular possibility can, through the metaphoric play of a ring of snakes, arc the gap between the possibility inherent in mind’s eye and the world out there.
No creation exists except through imagination, and also no intellect, no logic, no abstraction, semantic language. From somewhere comes the image of something not now extant, and creative possibility leaps into the gap to bring about newness. That may be nature’s use of our ceaseless (generally useless) thinking: Our thought can range freely over the universe of our knowing, pushing at the fabric of our reality, looking for the holes through which imagination might leap to create a new image of possibility. In the same way our Spirits are always pushing at the fabric of our minds, looking for the holes in our resistance to that great transformation that awaits us. Fundamental change can only be generated by the Self, but it is generated only in keeping with the passion and will of our unregenerate state here in our flesh and bones longing for that realm of the heart. Will and passion are the issues.
The making of a saint follows the same general pattern found in our creative discovery experience. Often the future saint, as a child, hears of a state of fundamental transformation, a state giving a completely different worldview and permanence to self-awareness. The young person is seized by that notion, and passionately desires such a state above all things. (Almost always he is so seized because he has come into contact with a person who has actually been fundamentally transformed in this way.) Seized by the passionate desire to achieve such a state of awareness, the young person abandons his family and home and sets off in pursuit of his goal. He devours all literature related to his search; follows every discipline that might in any way relate; hones his instruments of mind and body through austerity and rigors of discipline. And he holds in there, year after year, plugging away with fanatical will, through plateaus, deserts, and dry places of mind, when all but the strongest and most persistent would fall away.
Finally, he has done all that can be found to do; stripped his bones clean, given up his life not once, but over and over. He continues because nothing else is worthwhile, and he may enter the dark night of the soul, where he has lost both worlds; he exists in a kind of no-man’s land. All his doing is undone and he finally really quits. He stops doing, and in that moment of not-doing the answer arrives. The fundamental transformation takes place. He then has but one goal, to translate that answer into the common domain, which can only be done by living that answer out, moment by moment, in every fiber of his being. Inadvertently, he becomes the answer. In that ongoing translation he becomes the model, the exemplar, and the guide for any other who might come into contact with him and be sparked by such a desire.
The scientist or artist is seized by an idea for a specific aspect of his world, a possibility for some new effect in his outer reality. He deals with something in the outside world, the explicate order, other to his own self. Nearly always some part of his driving will is the need to enhance his ego position in that outside world (a Nobel, a Pulitzer). And, if he holds in there long enough, and does all the right things, follows the rules, he generates from the creative source within him a response to that single point of his passion.
The saint, however, does not seek some specific effect or part of that creative core of Self, some particular aspect of newness out there in his reality. He seeks union with that creative core of his own being, the wholeness of the Holomovement and nothing less. William Blake wrote: “More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul. Less than All can never satisfy.” The artist and scientist (and most of us) spend our lives seeking more and more, and are never satisfied. The saint seeks All and becomes one with it. He is then lifted up and draws all men to him. And in the secret core of our being, that is what each of us wants.
David Bohm said that insight could simply reach into the brain and shove its matter around to remove dysfunctions and make it functional. When insight arrives for the scientist, some new neural pathways must be emblazoned in his structures of knowledge to allow him to grasp the nature of the new image. The arrival of that image, in that moment out of mind, is the moment of insight’s shuffling the materials of mind around to include that new seeing, enough so that the scientist might then intellectually battle his way through to a translation of the given imagery.
The saint, however, has every neural pathway rearranged into its opposite: oriented not to the explicate order that radiates out into an infinitely regressing universe; but oriented within to the realm of the Self from which all universes spring. He or she is then in our world but literally not of it. Only now is his threefold brain structure integrated into its proper realm. Now his mind is the two-way mirror designed by our nature: With his left eye he sees within to the realm of God; with the right eye he sees the outer world of fragmentation and folly. Now his new brain will be utilized in its entirety, for seeing within is what the new brain was designed to do. It was not intended for lowly servitude to a reptilian brain’s small world (a task that uses only a fraction of the real power).
The saint is the model, the guide, the means for our getting to that state and becoming whole. For again, the Self is not quantitatively derivable; it is not the result of the cumulative effects we pile up here in our explicate domain. No international spiritual networking can amass the necessary ingredients; no accumulation of laboratory research can bridge that gap. Our Self lies beyond all its ingredients, and only will and passion make us available to that state. Our will and passion cannot take that kingdom by storm. Operation bootstrap always fails us, not by moral imperative, but by logical necessity. Our will and passion can set up the conditions where we may be taken by that storm. The quantum leap is made by the Self within us in response to our leap of faith.
The usual developmental procedures built into us from the time of birth work for our spiritual unfolding. But the formula found throughout still holds: Blueprint plus model equals desired structure. The blueprint is given from within, but it must be given its model from without. The progression is always from the concrete to the abstract, and our concrete model is one who has made real his or her blueprint, realized the Self within, and represents it for us in concrete form, in flesh and blood. The journey to the Self begins there, in that model, and only there, just as have all our previous developmental journeys.
I undertook many false starts on my journey, all intellectual bootstrap affairs, and my real journey began during my half-century mark when I met one who had realized the Self. More happened simply from the encounter with my teacher, Muktananda, than had happened in the previous fifty years. In Ganeshpuri, India, on New Year’s Day, 1983, I took an “intensive,” a meditation workshop, with one of Muktananda’s two successors, Nityananda, whom we call Gurudev. As usual in an intensive, young Gurudev gave what in Sanskrit is called Shaktipat, a laying on of hands to transmit spiritual power (as referred to in earliest Christian writings). When he placed his hand on my head, my left hemisphere seemed to explode, my skull “opened,” and my consciousness seemed to spiral out into a void. For days afterward I had the feeling that his hands were inside my skull, kneading my brain like dough. I underwent sensory shifts, feeling that the left side of my face would be pushed two to three inches beyond the right side, that my eyes would be pushed deep within and go out of synch. (I was sure at one point that I was losing my sight, though of course everything worked out splendidly.) Three nights later I awoke at 12:30 A.M. with a sharp, white-hot pain in what I was sure was my cerebellum. I thought this the onset of meningitis and began to say the mantra of Gurudev’s lineage, Om Namah Shivaya (“I honor my inner Self”), thinking my end was near. This pain lasted some twenty-four hours and ceased. (Sir John Eccles, in what I think an accurate hunch, thinks our largely unknown cerebellum is the seat of consciousness within us. I think it may be the seat of mind.)
Following this period of pain, in my morning meditations, when I lay down after my usual sitting period, I underwent a complete collapse of my body’s muscular system, an enforced relaxation of my total motor response. And at that point my arms and legs levitated; they simply floated in air. This was quite different from an out-of-body experience. (I think my body was kept grounded and only my limbs floated to make the contrast sharp and clear, lest I misinterpret the experience as being out-of-body.) It was as though the space within my limbs and the space surrounding them had become one; it was as if gravity had ceased and my limbs were floating in the void. Each time, though, I would become self-conscious over the event, indulge in the experience, as Carlos Castaneda would say (that is, try to possess or attach to the phenomenon, tape-loop it between my three brains, run over it for analysis, speculation, and a general dwelling on it), at which point my limbs would thump to the floor, the grace withdrawn.
I experienced this for three consecutive mornings and have been interpreting the meaning of it ever since. Each interpretation proves incomplete, for the levels of that lesson keep unfolding. Following that experience I entered into some two months of the most productive work I have ever known, as well as having the most extraordinary meditation experiences of my life. Suffice it to say here that the event was a lesson in causation and the causal mode within me. Recall David Bohm’s comment that insight can reach in and push the matter of the brain around, remove dysfunction and make it functional. The left hemisphere seems to be the translating mode for the causal process, and my left hemisphere bore the brunt of this particular episode. Since I have so scant a subtle understanding, I was given this graphic, physical demonstration of how causation can be suspended or changed. I was shown how none of the mechanisms of our physical world binds us when we surrender our physical being to our Self. I found this causal bypass available to us only as we make ourselves available to it, through a state of profound surrender (hardly a popular notion in this day of self-assertion).
My experience symbolized how, for spiritual development, the biological must be surrendered to the non-biological, the flesh must give over to Spirit. For only in spirit do we find our true autonomy. And by the very mechanics of the developmental system within us, this integration into spirit must be put into motion, must be at least established, while we are in this all-too-frail flesh. If we cannot make the total shift to that Self while here on earth, as our saint-models have, then at least we must thoroughly secure our bonds with that goal before we get shifted out of this physical realm. Then, if the model through whom our bonds are established is genuine, those bonds will be reconfirmed after the big shift of identity and modality takes place, when this frail form gets shoveled six feet under.