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The
Presence of Other Worlds
In Psychotherapy and Healing
Contents
1
Introduction
2
The Study of Consciousness as Energy Field
or Atomic Particle
3
Matter as an Emanation of Spirit
4
What is Imagination?
5
The Shamanic Parallel
6
The Existence of Visionary Worlds: the Mundus
Imaginalis of Henry Corbin
7
Sohrawardi's Vision: Going Beyond Mount Qaf
8
The Three Bodies or Worlds of the Buddha
9
Moving in Visionary Time and Space
10
Conclusion: "the stuff of dreams"
(An
earlier version of this paper was first presented to the Beyond the Brain Conference, held at St. John's College, Cambridge University,
England, August, 1999. It was later published in its current form in Thinking
Beyond the Brain, edited by David Lorimer,
Floris Books, Edingburgh, 2001
Introduction
Under it's first impetus philosophical thought is simply
metaphysics because it is a going beyond... It has been said that this begins
in wonder. An initialamazement marks the opening of a new dimension of transcendence.
By a movement of defocusing the world becomes disarticulated and is shown
in relief.
The visible world was made to correspond to the world invisible and there is nothing in this world but is a symbol of something in that other world.
My chief purpose here is to argue for the presence of multiple worlds, spiritual and visionary, that interact with and inter-penetrate this one. And in taking a multi-dimensional view of reality, I emphatically reject the one-dimensional materialist view of reality supported by conventional scientific thinking in which mental events are regarded as the energetic products of brain circuitry and biochemistry. All such scientific, energetic, materialistic views of mind are at root reductionistic, and are unconsciously caught in the literalism of their own metaphors. So in the spirit of the conference, my intention is to go beyond the brain and materialism and re-affirm the spiritual viewpoint common to sacred tradition.
If
you are embarrassed by the word "spirit". think of spirit as the
subtlest form of matter....
Sri Aurobindo [3]
If matter has come into being or if flesh has come
into being because of the spirit, it is a wonder.
The
Gospel of Thomas [4]
A major question that always troubled me about the materialist view of mind is: how can consciousness be in the brain and how can spirit be a part of the natural world when neither seem to be fully material entities governed by time and space? It has always seemed to me analogous to asking: is there actually music in my CD? Or: is there actually electromagnetic energy inside a magnet? Yet such analogies can be very misleading, if not extremely seductive. For the physicist will say that the music is emitted by the CD (when properly played) as sound waves and that the electromagnetism surrounding and penetrating the magnet is an energy field. This lets the brain physiologist say that the brain can be seen, by a similar analogy, as having an energy field that transmits thought waves. Then he feels fully warranted in looking for the neural or biochemical pathways along which the energy of thought runs.
By a series of seeming logical (though strictly speaking analogical) moves the materialist has neatly located the mind in nature, as the philosopher C.D. Broad put it. In support of this are the obvious facts that there is no music if I smash my CD and it's player; there is no magnetism without the magnet and there is no thinking if I am run over by a bus. Physical entities of one form or another are clearly necessary conditions for wave patterns, for magnetism, for subtle energy fields and for thought to occur.
But is this the whole picture? Surely my experience of music is something different from a sound wave and to take thought is not the same as activating a neural circuit?
The philosopher Heidegger has said that science is based on an explanatory scheme designed to convert whatever is studied into something in space, located over there and subsisting separately from that which is over against us. It makes no difference whether the thing in question is a chair, a man, an atom, a sense datum, or a body. It is still in some sense there. And when it is out there it has things in it and it is "in" space. This, says Heidegger, is how we imagine objects. [5]
To the extent then, than science has made of mind or consciousness an object of investigation - not a subject, please note - it has produced much that is stimulating and provocative in the last century. The epiphenomenal view of mind, which treats consciousness as an energy frequency or field surrounding and penetrating the brain and nervous system has occupied some of the finest of scientific minds. One has only to think, for example of Elmer Green's extraordinary work of nearly 30 years at the Menninger Foundation in Kansas where he records vibrational changes in what he calls the biofield. He has successfully measured the fields of several practicing yogis, healers and shamans. [6]
In the traditional Hindu teachings these fields are called the sthula or energy sheaths or the subtle bodies. There are subtle hierarchies of them ascending like vibrational octaves. Barbara Brennan's book Hands of Light give us clairvoyant images of these subtle bodies or fields to help us understand how they relate to Wilhelm Reich's concepts of energy flows and blocks in the body. [7] Another western version of this yogic doctrine is David Tansley's theory and practice of what he called Radionics. [8] In Tansley as in Brennan you will find descriptions of a hierarchy of subtle bodies called the etheric, emotional, mental and spiritual that surround the physical body. (Interestingly Tansley attributed the source of his model to Alice Bailey's theosophical commentary on The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the locus classicus of Hindu teaching.) [9]
In the fields of hypnotherapy and birth regression both David Cheek and Graham Farrant have independently introduced the notion of cellular consciousness, claiming that memory is actually stored "in" the cells" - surely a metaphor once again, but one that is gaining much popularity. [10] (To what extent they were influenced by Sri Aurobindo«s teachings recorded in Satprem's 1982 book The Mind of the Cells, I cannot say). Recently in the Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network there has been reference to Professor Sarkar's concept of the microvita, minuscule elements of energy which he describes as the ultimate source of life. [11] One might call these models "atomistic" as contrasted with "field" metaphors of the location of consciousness.
More broadly, psychotherapists who work with regression, psychodrama, rebirthing and other deep experiential therapies have for many years been talking loosely of body consciousness. Recently Dr Larry Dossey proposed the term "non-local mind" to challenge the prevalent brain based theory of the location of consciousness. In my own practice when exploring mysterious pains I have found it valuable to use the term "etheric memory or consciousness" following the subtle body theory. This allows me to talk of an etheric memory of trauma embedded "in" the foot or "around" the shoulders.
To return to field theories, most people are familiar with the Russian work on the Kirlian Aura popularized in the anthologies of Stanley Krippner and John White. [12] More recently, building on Kirlian concepts, the idea of bioplasm, a "fifth state of matter" has been proposed by Viktor Inyushin. Inyushin maintains that as well as solids, liquids, gases and plasma there is a fifth state of matter, the bioplasm, which is held in the biofield as follows:
A living organism can be described as a "biological field" or a "biofield," a "field" being a region consisting of lines of force which affect each other. The biofield has a clear spacial formation and is separated and shaped by several physical fields, electrostatic, electromagnetic, acoustic, hydrodynamic and quite possibly others inadequately explored. [13]
Clearly for Inyushin the biofield or the subtle energy field made up of bioplasm is a more refined derivative of existing physical energy fields in the body. What we have here is materialist philosophy presented in the form of an energy monism. All events, psychic as well as physical are explicable as one form or another of energy, each and every event deriving from greater or smaller energetic fields that comprise all aspects of reality.
These fairly representative materialist theories of the subtle energy body or energy field in various ways locate energy and spirit not just around the body but also at particular places in the body: in the brain, in the meridians, even in the cells--as with "cellular consciousness" Even in esoteric doctrines spirit or subtle energies are said to be somehow in the etheric field or in the chakras. Thus Barbara Brennan's clairvoyant images of auras locate energy bodies in the space around the physical body; and dowsers like Sig Lonegren teaches how to measure the extension of the various subtle bodies as bubbles surrounding the physical body in varying degrees.
So even when we talk about "subtle bodies" we are still thinking of them as subtly material, extended in space, confirming Heidegger's claim that all science imagines whatever objects or entities it studies as located "out there, over against us, located in space". Not surprisingly the word "subtle" translates in German as feinstofflisches, which means literally fine stuff or fine matter. And because this use of simple metaphors usually goes unchallenged - few scientists seem to have studied phenomenology--our theorists are forever unconsciously overconcretizing their concepts and falling prey to a rather barren reductionism where everything becomes either some kind of energy, vibration or field.
No matter how committed we are to holism, to slaying the dragon of Cartesianism and to open dialogue, I can't help thinking that such pervasive reductionism betrays an unconscious desire to keep spirit firmly within the material dimension, where the left brain or rational consciousness can feel secure in understanding and controlling it. By wanting to see spirit or consciousness as objects or energies "out there" in space, located "in" a cerebrum, a cell or a chakra we cling to a one dimensional monism and fall into temptations of scientism. Such, I fear, is the impetus behind much otherwise highly original "scientific" research into consciousness and energy going on today. It seems to me mostly a defense against the "wonder" of crossing over into higher dimensions, against "going beyond" in the true spirit of metaphysics.
Matter as an Emanation
of Spirit
A good artist lets his intuition
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts
and keeps his mind open to what is
Lao-Tzu Tao Te King (transl. Mitchell) [14]
Consciousness creates reality
Amit
Goswami The Self-Aware Universe
To my mind a major culprit behind our enthralment to the philosophy of materialism is the tiny little word "in". From my somewhat labored examples it may now be clear how pervasively this innocent little word deceptively conceals a spatial metaphor that betrays its true allegiance to the materialist dogma. The unexamined use of the word "in" sadly restricts much neurological research and has taken on the status of a scientific myth about mind, energy and spirit, a myth in the Jungian sense of "something which is believed everywhere and by everyone"
For when we are talking about spirit as energy or energy as consciousness, even though we fully believe that these phenomena belong to a subtle or non-physical realm we tend to imagine them "in" the brain or flowing "through" our energy fields unaware that these are metaphors and not literal, which is to say, empirical truths. It may be clearer when we say something like "I know it in my heart" or "I feel it in my gut". For even though our energy fields seem to have reactions that correspond to those parts of the body we still seem to realize that the emotions are not literally stored "in" these places like glucose or protoplasm. Consider for example, the charming saying: "You will never find your heart in a temple unless you find the temple in your heart." It would be hard to mistake this for anything other than a metaphor. We don't go to a cardiologist to find the temple in our heart or to an archaeologist to find our heart in a temple! Yet as soon as we start to talk of memories "stored in the brain" our metaphorical consciousness suddenly vanishes.
The Indian mystic and poet Kabir, anticipated our dilemma in an ironic poem:
You know that the seed is inside the horse-chestnut tree;
and inside the seed are the blossoms of the tree,
and the chestnuts and the shade.
So inside the human body there is the seed and
inside the seed there is the human body again [....]
Thinkers, listen, tell me what you know of that is not
inside the soul?
Take a pitcher of water and set it down on the water--
now it has water inside and water outside.
We mustn't give it a name,
lest silly people start talking again about the body and
the soul... [15]
Sri Aurobindo puts it similarly: "all of the body is in the mind, but not all the mind is in the body." He also said, paraphrasing Madame Blavatsky:
If you are embarrassed by the word "spirit" think of spirit as the subtlest form of matter. But, if you are not embarrassed by the word spirit, you can think of matter as the densest form of spirit. [16]
The materialist viewpoint requires a movement upwards, so that spirit is seen as a higher refinement or vibration of matter, yet somehow secondary, a kind of evolutionary by-product. From the spiritual viewpoint, by contrast, matter is the lower emanation or denser manifestation of spirit, whose concreteness and solidity is ultimately an illusion (Maya). As celebrated physicist David Bohm has maintained: "matter is frozen light." [17]
If we contrast these two radically opposed world views we could say that the ontology of the materialist takes matter as that which is ultimately real and has therefore to find the origins of consciousness "within" matter. Mind is then seen as some evolved or higher vibrational phenomenon (the epiphenomenal view of mind) whose "transcendent" aspects need to be explained, reductively, as manifestations of biological energy of some kind.
On the other hand a spiritual ontology sees consciousness as ultimately real (Neoplatonism, Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta) and regards matter as a lower or denser manifestation of spirit or consciousness, a "condensation" of spirit into physical form, an incarnation downwards. (It is no wonder that the scientifically minded psychical researchers of Madame Blavatsky's day were so challenged by all the alleged materializations of spirits.)
It is easy to appreciate, with our knowledge of radio waves, lasers, atomic particles, microbiology, Kirlian phenomena etc, the seductive appeal of the energetic model proposed by the materialists. It feeds our inflation that as scientists we have finally arrived at the Great Picture of things, that implacable illusion that we have crossed the last frontiers of understanding. Thus it is more comforting to be able to explain what we don't understand in terms of what we do. Nevertheless, biological metaphors like "bioplasm" or "cellular" consciousness are at root reductive to the materialist paradigm; to ignore this is to be entranced by our choice of language and our partiality to certain fashionable metaphors. Thus science gets caught in a conceptual prison of its own making.
For from my own and clients' experiences of spiritual and otherworldy encounters it is a travesty to claim that phenomena of spirit can be reduced to biological components, be they bioplasm, microvita or even etheric energy. But this is not to say that spirit cannot manifest in forms that can perceived in this way by visionary or clairvoyant consciousness. Almost all biological and materialist metaphors end up mistaking the container for what contains it - as with Kabir's pitcher in the water.
No matter how ingenious the theories of physics and biology, as long as such disciplines fail to find ways to acknowledge those higher dimensions that are not of time and space and which transcend and subsume the physical realm, physical science will never fully embrace and become fruitfully united with meta-physics. Without this step all the enterprises of science, no matter how grand or sublime, will remain one dimensional and reductive. What is sought, in the words of Henry Corbin, is "a cosmology of such a kind that the most astounding information of modern science regarding the physical universe remains inferior to it."
It is my contention, supported by the metaphysical teachings of sacred tradition, that the spiritual dimension is other than and of a higher order than the energy fields through which spirit manifests in the physical world. Moreover, there exists an intermediary crossover universe where spirit manifests through the material world and where mutatis mutandis we in our spiritual or subtle bodies can move from the material and pass beyond into the spiritual. It is this subtle intermediary world, this halfway place, that is often experienced in the form of psychic fields, or as paranormal forces or supernatural beings, as clairvoyant and subtle perceptions, as ecstatic vision and mystical transport.
Investigation of these realms shows clearly that all such phenomena, though often discounted as "mere" imagination in fact come from a higher, not a lower source, ontologically speaking, even if their contents may sometimes be of a spiritually inferior or "demonic" quality. The late Sir George Trevelyan was adamant about the need to reinstate imagination and visionary capacity to itse rightful role as the spiritual function that can perceive these "higher" realms. In writing about the work of the psychic W. Tudor Pole, who saw past lifetimes, Sir George wrote as follows:
To him [Tudor Pole] these recollections are emphatically not the product of imagination; that word has been debased into meaning the weaving of fantasies. In its true sense it implies an entry by pictorial thinking into a higher "frequency", a world of reality and being beyonds the limitations of the five senses. This is the first step in research and the exploration into the spiritual realms which interpenetrate our physical world of life and beingÉ
[Such] memories are an example of something developing today in human thinking. In our age we are getting a new understanding of the truth that the spiritual realms absolutely interpenetrate the physical. Indeed the world of material forms is seen as an image or reflection of the spiritual which creates it. The realms of spirit are not far distant, but lie within the sense world and are to be grasped there by our intuitive thinking. [18] [Emphasis mine]
After nearly two decades as a psychotherapist conducting clients through many kinds of so-called "regression" experience - to lost childhood scenes, to birth traumas, to impressions of other lifetimes, to realms beyond death and to extraordinary visionary spaces, I found myself questioning many of my basic assumptions about what imagination, imagery and even archetypes are. Though trained in the Jungian tradition, which values imagination as the language of the soul, it no longer seemed to me that what we encountered were just images, even archetypal images and it no longer helped to explain them as occurring in some kind of altered state of consciousness. So many of the visions are so vivid and have such a profound transformative effect on the experiencer that I began to question whether in fact with such language I had subtly succombed to an even more pernicious form of reductionism - psychological reductionism. Was I falling into the trap of believing the ignorant critical slur about all these experiences, that they are "just imagination" or worse, "just archetypes"?
People have indeed said over the years "Your clients are making it all up because it's fashionable to have past lives and out of body experiences". The trouble with this objection is that it begs a very big question: just what is imagination? Now, everybody knows what it's like to imagine but that alone doesn't explain where our images come from or how they are produced or reproduced. One has only to study one's dreams for a few months to be staggered by the amazing variety and range of imagery they throw out. The psyche seems to have an inexhaustible pool of strange and exotic images, most of which would be almost impossible to account for.
Academic psychology, as it now exists, is hard put to define imagination. It is not even a subject of study in standard text books of psychology. If you pick up a basic text for a Psychology 101 course in any American college and look in the index, you will not find the word "imagination". You might find the words "image" or "imagery". To study imagination at university level you have to go to a literature department where it comes under the rubric of "literary theory" - Coleridge, Wordsworth etc. Literary theorists, however, are very careful to say that they are not writing psychology. Possibly the only place where you'll find a serious study of imagination is in the psychiatry department of a medical school, where delusions, hallucinations and exotic fantasies are all studied closely as symptoms of mental pathology. Hardly a charitable view of the imagination!
Nevertheless it is the psychiatrists who are closer than anyone to having a respectable and even respectful theory of imagination. Early pioneers of psychoanalysis, especially Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, were among the first to study the imagination seriously, dubbing it "the unconscious mind" following certain German philosophers. Thanks to their researches and perseverence, the idea of the unconscious mind even came to be seen by the American philosopher and psychologist William James, as "the greatest discovery of the twentieth century." It is a pity he didn't say the same about the imagination, because unfortunately, it still remains a put-down to say of some unusual experience: "it's just your imagination." Imagination has, sad to say, sunk to being regarded as one of the most inferior and trivial aspects of the mind. We are a long way from William Blake's "Holy Imagination."
In fact, the masters of the imagination who preceded the psychoanalysts were actually the great poets and visionaries. Dante made his imaginal descent into the visionary realms of Hell and then on upwards through Purgatory into the Paradiso. Shakespeare's profound exploration of the human heart in his tragedies and comedies has led critic Harold Bloom to class him along with the great mystical visionaries of Sufism. William Blake struggled with his own inner universe of visionary principalities and powers to produce extraordinary enduring literature. Goethe dramatized the perennial fight between good and evil in his great visionary work, Faust. Freud and Jung were actually the chief heirs to the visionary courage of these great prior explorers of the creative imagination. In the consulting room the imagination revealed to them its enormous power when manifest in the world of dreams and waking visions. Their work testifies to an undying respect for the huge healing and imaginative power of the soul.
The real problem in understanding the imagination lies in our habit of ignoring the great visionary traditions and instead giving far too much power to the narrow prejudices of academic psychology - a discipline whose almost fundamentalist insistence on being "scientific" entirely excludes the multi-dimensional reaches of the soul. As James Hillman once said of such academicism: "the languiage of psychology is an insult to the soul." Here again the left brain (the rational side) seems to be trying to co-opt the right brain (the creative side) and totally deny that the latter has a way of knowing that is entirely unique unto itself.
Journeys bring power and love
back into you. If you can't go somewhere,
move
in the passageways of the self.
always
changing and you change
when
you explore them
Jalal
Udin Rumi [19]
In my personal experience as a psychotherapist I did not always find it easy to trust the imaginative faculty in either myself or my clients. Yet I found that the more I sought to interpret my client's experiences by putting them back into a rational or even symbolic framework (Freudian or even Jungian) the more my interpretations were actually preventing them from opening to much deeper experiences. Increasingly I found that I had to let go of my own (left brain) need to interpret. Interpretation, which I now see as yet another kind of reductive activity, prevents us both as healers and clients from fully harnassing those spiritual dimensions mediated by the imagination or from allowing spiritual dimensions to fully enter into our work. It prevents us experiencing that sense of wonder or "going beyond" that is the essence of genuine metaphysics according to the philosopher Pierre Thevenaz.
Somewhat reluctantly I had come to realize that when I followed my clients into the "worlds" they experienced in "imagination" or "memory" I had been participating in a kind of shamanic
journeying. I had unknowingly entered into their subtle worlds and traveled with them, not realizing at first that this is exactly what shamans do: they journey. For what difference is there in the end between "regression" and "journeying" or between "psychic splitting" and "soul loss"? It is simply a matter one's language of choice--psychoanalysis or shamanism. Equally, it makes no difference whether one uses a couch, a pendulum or a rattle; if the technique successfully induces a trance state it will enable a person to "move in the passageways of the self" as Rumi puts it so beautifully.
Increasingly, therefore, I have come to believe that the more, as psychotherapists, we can leave aside our rational, or "left brain" attitude of mind - practising Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief"--and can embrace the visionary or "right brain" perspective of reality, the more we will encounter that subtle awareness that Henry Corbin, the great scholar of Sufism, called the spiritual imagination. Once we have begun to cultivate this very powerful species of awareness we will be able to journey between realities, to encounter other worlds beyond the physical world where we have subtle access to the universal source of healing which is Spirit.
Once I began to realize this my work led me to study a variety of esoteric sources, especially those of the Tibetan Books of the Dead, the Upanishads, the Iranian mystics discovered by Henry Corbin, Plato and the Neoplatonist mysticism of Plotinus as well as more modern visionaries like Shakespeare, William Blake and Emmanuel Swedenborg. Among all these traditions and seers it is a commonplace that there are higher or subtle senses that can be deliberately awakened through the practice of certain rigorous spiritual disciplines. These disciplines frequently involve a kind of "learning how to die" in order to be reborn in a visionary sense into these higher worlds. In fact it becomes clear that the essential feature in all the so-called Mystery traditions of the ancient world had to do with overcoming the fear of literal death to discover that the soul is immortal and can always travel into higher realities when properly instructed.
What has formerly been taught secretly in Gnostic and Neoplatonic schools is today being rediscovered in clinics, hospitals and therapy practices as what might be called the spiritual phenomenology of dying. When for example individuals undergoing a regression session to a so-called "other life" remember what it is like to die in that past life they also commonly report exactly what it is like to pass into a higher or "other" realm - what would be called a bardo