As I begin to write this chapter, it has been a few months since I last attempted an experiment with non-ordinary states of consciousness. The idea has been to take a step back and then try and make sense of the experiences from a rational, balanced perspective. The underlying premise is that the extra perspective allowed by the passage of time will have improved my judgment and interpretation of the results.
Yet I struggle with such premise. It appears to me that I had a broader capacity of thought and perception while in non-ordinary states of consciousness than I have now. So should I trust the conclusions I arrive at now over the conclusions I arrived at during or immediately after the experiments themselves? Should I trust the perspective gained with time over the earlier, fresher, uncontaminated recollections and insights acquired from direct experience? This seems to be a question inherent to subjective exploration and I sincerely do not know the correct answer for it. What I do know is that there are growing shifts in my ontological inclinations as the experiments slip further into the past. Nonetheless, let us try to distil the key elements that seem to consistently run through the subjective data at hand, as discussed in the four previous chapters. The lines below are my attempt to strike a balance and integrate the ideas I had immediately following each experiment with those evolved long thereafter, while trying to remain honest to both perspectives.
The reader should also bear in mind that, in the spirit of subjective exploration, the lines below merely reflect a very personal thought process whose conclusions can be valid for me, as the experiencer of the subjective data at hand, but perhaps for nobody else. Subjective exploration entails no general theses or claims of objective truth. My sharing of the thoughts below is simply an attempt to illustrate – for what it is worth – a personal struggle to resolve and integrate very personal experiences. I am not trying to convince anyone of anything, nor am I attempting to defend the validity of my conclusions for others.
Okay, let us now get on with it. I believe my experiences could be classified into four different levels, or “realms,” depending on how far removed from consensus reality their gestalts were. The one closest to our regular perceptions was that of the fourth experiment. In it, though I had extraordinary feelings of connectedness, visions of alien worlds, and memories of lives not my own, the experiences were composed of familiar 3D visual elements and emotional archetypes. The notion of linear time was also preserved. As an extraordinarily realistic dream, the experience was at the same time real and imaginary, without contradiction. I will thus call this level “dreamland,” for lack of a better word.
The next level was what I called “inner theater” in my first and second experiments: a place that one’s mind recognizes as the ground of its existence. It is perceived as the limit case of familiarity. In that place, the ego can survive, though one’s perception of the self is usually enriched. The inner theater could be either a coherent state of mind – embodying the emotional and perceptual content intrinsically associated to being in it – or a coherent segment of the space-time continuum perceived directly through consciousness,1 without mediation of the five senses. One must wonder if there actually is a difference between these two alternatives. In either case, there seems to be an undeniable, self-evident relationship between inner theater and the most primordial manifestation of one’s being. While in it, one seems both to inhabit and to be one’s own inner theater; an identity between object and subject that is impossible to articulate clearly in words, but which is felt in a very unambiguous way. Indeed, it is tempting to speculate that one’s consciousness inhabits or emanates from one’s inner theater, at the same time giving it its existence. It is also tempting to speculate, on the basis of the subjective data at hand, that the inner theater is not causally dependent on the physical body or brain; that it precedes the body both ontologically and in time, even if it is “merely” a state of mind. Naturally, that would imply that mind is not generated by the brain, but coupled to brain processes while we experience ordinary states of consciousness. Such implication is indeed very consistent with the gestalt of each experiment. The experience of inner theater, while still relatively time-bound and allowing for the survival of the ego, seems to transcend the three dimensions of space we normally experience. I am unsure whether to think of it as an extra-dimensional experience entirely outside of space, or a hyper-dimensional experience taking place in a broader spatial framework. Since the latter is the only one still amenable – precariously as it may be – to the description of visual impressions, I am forced to adopt it throughout this book.
The next level, experienced at the end of my first experiment, transcends not only space but the notions of linear time and ego as well. Indeed, there seems to be at least two distinct forms of identity that consciousness can take on, both of which we recognize as the “I.” The first, and the one usually experienced during ordinary states of consciousness, is the “I” of the ego; the “I” of the cognitive models constructed by the brain. The second is an “I” that seems to be independent of the ego and of life in linear time; a transcendent “I” that seems to exist entirely beyond time, space, and life itself, and whose identity is more profoundly recognized as the true “I” than the relatively provincial and flattened notions of the ego. The implication of this is that a hypothetical, universal field of consciousness must somehow “clot” into multiple, separate “focal points” in a realm of reality beyond that of the physical brain. Each of these focal points must then correspond to a transcendent “I” that is coupled, in awareness, to the electrochemical signals of an individual brain and its ego constructs.
The most transcendent level I have reached was that described in my third experiment: a level that seems to break through the hyper-dimensional boundaries of inner theater and allow one to peek into the underlying mechanisms of reality. These are then presented in the form of an indescribable, evolving Pattern (which, from now on, I will consistently write with a capital “P” to discriminate it from other uses of the word “pattern”). There lie the answers to all things real and imaginary. At that level – which cannot be reached while one is dressed in the clothes of the ego and carrying the mental baggage we normally associate to sanity – one is confronted with deep, unspeakable truths about what, why, and how things are what they are. This level transcends manifested reality in all its forms, objective or imaginary. It allows one to look at the backstage of the play and discover its secrets. Intellect cannot survive this confrontation for very long.
Having classified the experiences in four levels of transcendence, let us try and look for overarching themes that could help us structure and categorize the data at hand. The first theme seems to be that of paradoxes, the resolution of which entails the dissolution of polarities; the union of opposites in an intellectually contradictory but experientially unambiguous way. The least transcend instance of this theme occurred in my fourth experiment, when the dichotomy between dream and reality, between conception and externalization, was blurred. This blurring was not an invalidation of either dream or reality. In other words, I am saying neither that nothing is real nor that dreams are perceptions of some realm of objective reality. No. What I am saying is: first, that dreams can perhaps take on increasing levels of properties normally associated with reality – namely, concreteness, endurance, autonomy, etc.; and second, that reality can perhaps take on increasing levels of properties normally associated with dreams – namely, malleability, acquiescence to intent, etc. In other words, the subjective data suggests that dreams and reality may simply be different points on a single, continuous spectrum of the same underlying “stuff;” much like red and blue are simply different points on the electromagnetic spectrum of light.
There is another occurrence of this theme. While many of my experiences at the “dreamland” level were clearly past memories or constructed out of pictorial elements familiar to my ego, some seemed entirely foreign to me: coherent memories of other lives, images of other worlds, cognition models not my own, etc. This raises the possibility that such experiences, while indeed imaginary in nature, may also reflect conscious impressions tapped from the universal memory of qualia. The hypothesis is that the transcendent “I” can tap into this universal repository of transpersonal experiences just as easily as the ego can tap into personal memory. Upon doing so, the tapped memories are then projected onto the screen of mind just as the products of creative imagination. So the experiences one undergoes transcend the differences between transpersonal memory and creative imagination. In other words, it is hard to say whether what one is experiencing is the creation of a new story or the replay, or even reconstruction, of a transpersonal story remembered. My own intuition is that it is somehow both, concurrently and without contradiction, paradoxically as this may sound. Indeed, in a realm where reality is imagined, memories and creations differ only by their position in the linear arrow of time: memories are located in the past and creations in the future. But both are the products of the imagination. If one can move freely back and forth along the arrow of time, the difference between the two becomes thus meaningless: in dreamland, there is only the unfolding of transpersonal imagination; past, present, and perhaps future.
This same theme – that is, the resolution of paradoxes and dichotomies – can be seen yet again at the level of inner theater, where the experience is both perceived as an exteriorized reality and as the unfolding of the experiencer. When the object is in fact an unfolding of the subject, the subject’s dreams become his or her experienced reality. While the “I” inhabits its own inner theater of mentality, such inner theater is itself the unfolding of the mentality of the “I” in a manner that completely transcends the duality of subject and object. Indeed, the reality of inner theater seems entirely acquiescent to the emotions and imagination of the “I:” what the latter feels and imagines is externalized by projection onto the fabric of that inner space, taking on the form of almost autonomous, enduring phenomena. This, it seems to me, is why my experiences, particularly in the first and second experiments, seemed so colored by my own expectations and interpretations.
The implication of the transcendence of object-subject duality in inner theater, and of the fact that what is experienced there seems to be a projection of pure mentality, is that the very substance of its reality is pure thought. And here is where the second overarching theme of these experiences comes into play. Indeed, the subjective data at hand suggests that thought patterns are the underlying building blocks of everything experienced. Let us explore this in a little more depth.
One of my strongest intuitions, after having undergone these experiments, is that the mandalas and other geometric forms experienced in inner theater are visual cognitions of raw, elemental thought patterns.2 In my first two experiments, though the emotional content of the experience was very concrete and recognizable, the visual impressions were entirely abstract. If the inner theater is made of thought, then these geometrically represented, elemental thought patterns are the building blocks underlying its reality. The information comprised in these raw thought patterns is represented by the internal relationships intrinsic to their geometric characteristics, like the proportions, relative positions, angles, and intersections of its constituent parts. Such geometric relationships are the purest expression of thought, independent of context and unaltered by culture or education. They are entirely self-contained representations of manifested information, requiring no external semantic grounding. As such, they break the circular deadlock science is forever confined to: elemental thought patterns do not need to be explained on the basis of their relationships to anything else; they are self-contained embodiments of their own meaning. They are what is left at the end of reduction; the knife that slices through the Ouroboros’ tail.3 How this can be so is something that cannot be satisfactorily explained, but only experienced firsthand. Through abstract geometry, our basic library of elemental thought patterns takes on an “externalized,” concrete, perceivable reality in the environment of inner theater.
While I perceived these elemental thought patterns in and by themselves at the level of “inner theater,” at the less transcendent level of “dreamland” – as in my fourth experiment – they seemed to have coalesced to form coherent, concrete images in the screen of mind; images I cognized as those not only of my distant past, but also of alien worlds and unrecognized lives. It seems thus that elemental thought patterns are the building blocks of the compositions of the imagination on the screen of mind. They are, if you will, akin to the elements in a “periodic table of thought” which, in turn, can be used to compose imagined realities. Once a coherent composition is imagined, the underlying elemental thought patterns disappear. They become as much an abstraction as the atoms of oxygen and hydrogen felt when one runs one’s fingers through water: all that is then left to perception is the freshness, texture, and fluidity of the water, not the abstract idea of microscopic systems of neutrons, protons, and orbiting electrons. Similarly, the geometric forms of the elemental thought patterns seem to disappear from the compositions of the imagination once these compositions are formed. In this context, perhaps the mad, spinning “Kandinsky scintillae” of inner theater, with their seemingly absurd behavior, were simply unguided and chaotic interactions of elemental thought patterns before they coalesced and self-organized into the coherent, imagined realities of “dreamland.” This also seems to satisfactorily explain the character of senselessness and silliness associated with these geometric artifacts during my second experiment: the incoherent interactions of elemental thought patterns are indeed senseless and silly unless and until organized by purposeful intent into meaningful stories.
It seems to me that the causal agency of the coalescence of elemental thought patterns into coherent images and storylines is intention, or freewill. The application of intention entails focus. By intending we bring focus, direction, and coherence to a continuous process of creation in the imagination, whose dynamics may persist whether it is coordinated or not. By intending we cause the elemental thought patterns to align, self-organize, and fall into order. By intending we take the steering wheel of their behavior and give it coherent form. When not intending, their dynamics may continue but without direction or coherence. The creative process of the imagination may be non-stoppable; it may be its very nature to continuously unfold. Perhaps our only option, as far as the application of our freewill, is intentional visualization: to bring our own imagination into focus and give it direction.
The remarkable implication of all this is that, in inner theater, one can visually cognize the raw materials of thought: the pure, unaltered, basic thought forms out of which the images of inner space coalesce. Mandalas, with their characteristic radial symmetries, seem to be the strongest visual representation of these mental building blocks. They are the basic vocabulary, or the basic set of archetypes, of the imagination. The “essays” made out of this basic vocabulary are the direct result of the application of intention and freewill to the composition of mental stories. To use a mathematical metaphor from the field of linear algebra, the information contained in the elemental thought patterns may be the orthonormal basis that spans the entire space of one’s imagination. That such ultimate abstraction can take concrete, observable form suggests that all thoughts, no matter how abstract, are intrinsically manifestable and perceivable as “externalized” realities.
The subjective data also suggests that the elemental thought patterns seen in inner theater are but fractal segments, or resonances, of the underlying Pattern unfolding from the Source. This way, one’s inner theater may be but a local segment of the fractal whole, whereof all segments are, in a way, an image of the whole itself. As above, so below. The mandala patterns of inner theater may be lower-dimensional, flattened projections, like shadows, of salient segments of the underlying Pattern. This may be the mechanism of the apparent unity of all things. Indeed, the subjective perception of mandalas in inner theater and of the unfolding Pattern were qualitatively similar, except in that the latter seemed to have a much higher-dimensional and broader character. If the patterns of inner theater span the space of one’s personal imagination, the Pattern unfolding from the Source must span the space of all existence. It may reflect the thought language of the Unified Mind whose imagination shapes the unity of all existence.
On the basis of these very personal speculations, I believe the four levels of transcendence discussed earlier – namely, “dreamland,” “inner theater,” “transcendent I,” and the “Source” – correspond to a scale of increasing deconstruction of phenomena into their underlying, abstract building blocks of thought. In “dreamland,” all perceptions are compound, coalesced structures projected onto a (mental) low-dimensional space-time fabric. In “inner theater,” the underlying elemental thought patterns behind these coalesced structures become perceivable in and by themselves, in their natural, higher-dimensional state. The “transcendent I” sheds the flat cognition models of the ego – which are based on coalesced concepts – enabling one to cognize the next level. Finally, at the level of the “Source,” one can glimpse at the fractal whole of which all elemental thought patterns are mere saliencies, resonances, or partial projections. This way, the technologies of awareness expansion may indeed be analogous to microscopes and telescopes in the sense that they allow one to see – with some noise and difficulty in clearly registering and interpreting these images – beyond the coarse appearances of coalesced thought structures. They may allow one to see not only the very small or the very big, but beyond small and big, towards the extra dimensions of what is behind these appearances.
The scale of deconstruction discussed above provides an integrated hierarchy of reduction. Traversing this hierarchy along the direction of increasing coalescence of thought patterns, one can build a perceptual world much akin to consensus reality, except in that it embodies the malleability of dreams. Traversing this hierarchy along the opposite direction leads to pure, abstract, self-contained, unified thought. The rules of coalescence across the hierarchy seem amenable to geometric representation. Such a feeble, tentative, and precarious model for reducing dreams to geometric abstractions is my best attempt, as of the time I wrote these words, at resolving and integrating my experiences into a coherent framework.
Before moving on, however, we must return to a question raised earlier. While it is difficult to objectively demonstrate the ontological validity of a subjective experience, one can ask whether an influx of knowledge has taken place that cannot be explained by brain-hosted memories or sensory stimuli. It is my strong inclination, on the basis of the subjective data at hand, that indeed knowledge and impressions previously not present in my brain have been accessed through non-ordinary states of consciousness. These images and understandings so far transcend everything entailed by consensus reality that I cannot imagine they were generated by my brain. That said, the question of objectively proving that such stimuli were real, in the naïve way we normally understand reality to be, is a different matter. To do that would require confirmation in consensus reality of impressions acquired in non-ordinary states of consciousness. For instance, upon seeing the image of a foreign place during subjective exploration, one could try and find that place in the physical world to confirm that the images originally perceived do correspond to a real place. Then – and only if it could be verified that one had never been to that place before, nor seen any pictures of it – the reality of the stimuli received could be objectively demonstrated. However, the impressions one receives during subjective exploration tend to significantly transcend consensus reality and, therefore, cannot be confirmed in consensus reality. Even the impressions of “dreamland” described in the fourth experiment report, which seemed mostly grounded in the framework of 3D space and linear time, were either impossible to pin down to a specific location and timeframe or very alien in nature. Therefore, there is to be no closure here: I cannot firmly and objectively conclude that there was an influx of real and external impressions into my brain during the experiments. What remains is the strong intuition that that was indeed the case.
Another point worth emphasizing here is the fact that most of the experiences reported were subjectively registered as remembrances, as opposed to discoveries. That was completely unexpected and caught me off guard. Several times, because there seemed to be nothing really surprising going on during an experiment, I would conclude it had been a failure; just to realize, to my own astonishment, upon returning to consensus reality, how bizarre the whole thing had been. Even the notion of a transcendent “I” beyond time and space, which I would normally think of as an abstract “other person” foreign to me, has been felt as an unambiguous remembrance of who I really am and have been all along. I find this fascinating and perhaps the most important and unique characteristic of subjective exploration that sets it apart from science. Allow me to try and explain why.
As a former professional scientist, I used not to take other people’s claims of transcendent experiences very seriously. Despite my hidden curiosity, I could always think of a thousand ways to dismiss, trivialize, or explain the whole thing away. Looking back at it now, I think what enabled this attitude was the implicit assumption that what one experiences in those cases is separate from one’s self and therefore amenable to objective analysis. I could not understand why those people would insist on taking their experiences at face value. Why would they not critically assess the suspiciousness of the whole thing? That seemed unreasonable and, frankly, plain irrational to me.
However, when one experiences a new insight as an unambiguous, long-term memory of a self-evident truth, one is entirely disarmed. The shield of objective rationality melts effortlessly like butter under the sun. Yes, the experience is unexplained and therefore highly suspicious, but it served merely to trigger a memory that was already an integral part of one’s being. Or so it seems. This swiftly makes the whole thing very personal. Suddenly, it does not matter anymore whether the experience is suspicious or not, for one can now remember the essence of the insight as an independent memory that far preceded the experience itself. Invalidating the circumstances of the experience is, logically, not sufficient to invalidate a memory that precedes the experience. One’s own memory, when recovered in such an unambiguous manner, ought to be taken seriously and render all other questions secondary, valid as those questions may be. It becomes impossible to take distance. It becomes impossible to extricate the experience away from oneself in order to analyze it coldly and objectively. Hypothetical scenarios sought to invalidate or trivialize the insight received are no longer mere abstractions of cold rationality, but contradict one’s own felt memories; one’s remembered convictions. It is no longer easy to take these hypothetical scenarios seriously.
This is what makes a direct, first-person, transcendent experience impossible to ignore or rationalize away. This is what makes it stick even when one cannot come up with an explanation for it nor defend its reliability. All these questions become secondary the moment one identifies the insight with what one has, deep inside, somehow known all along. What else might we have always known? Who might we find in the mirror when we remember it all? It is personal, very personal indeed.