Читать книгу Limitless Mind - Russell Targ - Страница 12
ОглавлениеTo see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.
— William Blake
All of life begins on the edge. The first cellular membranes began at the ocean’s edge, drying out and being covered with foam, cooling and warming. The edge is a place of opportunity, whether it be a seacoast or an airport. In remote viewing experiments, we find that edges — where land meets water, for instance — are among the easiest locations to see psychically.
The edge further represents a place of change and spaciousness. Port cities at the water’s edge have always been a source of information, excitement, and new possibilities. I am grateful to live near beautiful San Francisco, on the far edge of the continent. The mystic, however, knows that he or she is always on the edge (or any other place of his or her choosing) — in consciousness. It doesn’t matter where one’s physical body happens to be; when we find ourselves truly on the edge, there is an opportunity for an event, a spiritual teacher, or a friend to pry loose the fingers of limitation one by one and set us free.
In this book, I describe remote viewing in detail — a process in which you can quiet your mind and inflow information from anywhere in the world. I also discuss distant healing, in which you can outflow your intentions to heal or relieve the pain of a distant person.
We begin at that still place — on the edge — between the inflow and the outflow. This is a quiet mental place where nothing at all is happening except the experience of loving awareness in the present moment, in the now. This archetypal feeling of non-separation from all of humanity and nature is what Jesus called “the peace that passeth understanding.” Although I have successfully used ESP to spy on the Soviets during the Cold War — even to forecast changes in the silver commodity market — it is exploring states of peaceful, loving awareness that makes the study of psychic abilities interesting to me today. As a physicist, I am also deeply interested in our nonlocal nature.
Sir Arthur Eddington was one of the premier astrophysicists in the early twentieth century. He wrote extensively about both the origin of the cosmos and his personal journeys into the peaceful, meditative realms — what he describes as “glimpses of transcendent reality.” Sir Arthur writes:
If I were to try to put into words the essential truth revealed by the mystic experience, it would be that our minds are not apart from the world; and the feelings that we have of gladness and melancholy and our other deeper feelings are not of ourselves alone, but are glimpses of reality transcending the narrow limits of our particular consciousness....1
This is a message from a man of limitless mind, who invites us to visit the nonlocal existence beyond space and time.
WHAT WE MEAN BY NONLOCALITY
We live in a “nonlocal” reality, which is to say that we can be affected by events that are distant from our ordinary awareness. This is an alarming idea for an experimental physicist, because it means that laboratory experiments are subject to outside influences that may be beyond the scientist’s control or knowledge. In fact, the data from precognition research strongly suggest that an experiment could, in principle, be affected by a signal sent from the future! So a short answer to the question, “How is it that I can psychically describe a distant object?” is that the object is not as distant as it appears. To me, these data suggest that all of space-time is available to your consciousness, right where you are. You are always on the edge.
Nonlocality is a property of both time and space. In a vivid example of nonlocality, studies of identical twins who were separated at birth and reared apart show that the twins share striking similarities in their tastes, interests, spouses, experiences, and professions, beyond what one could reasonably ascribe to their common DNA. One famous set of twins reared far apart were both named Jim by their adoptive parents. Although they never communicated, each twin married a woman named Betty, divorced her, and then married a woman named Linda. They were both firemen, and each had felt a compulsion to build a circular white bench around a tree in his backyard just before coming to their first meeting at the University of Minnesota. I can believe that there might be fireman genes, or music genes, but I don’t believe that there are Linda genes, Betty genes, or white bench genes. This looks to me like a nonlocal telepathic connection — inexplicable, but real.2
The physics of nonlocality is fundamental to quantum theory. The most exciting research in physics today is the investigation of what physicist David Bohm calls “quantum interconnectedness,” or nonlocal correlations. This idea was first proposed in 1935 in a paper by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) as evidence of a “defect” in quantum theory. In this paper, Einstein called non-local correlation a “ghostly” action at a distance.3 The seeming paradox of EPR was later formulated as a mathematical proof by J. S. Bell.4 It has now been repeatedly demonstrated that two quanta of light, given off from a single source and traveling at the speed of light in opposite directions, can maintain their connection to one another. We find that such photons are affected by what happens to their twins, even many miles away. John Clauser (with Stuart Freedman) at the University of California at Berkeley, was the first to demonstrate nonlocality in the laboratory. He recently described to me his impressions of these experiments, saying, “Quantum experiments have been carried out with twin photons, electrons, atoms, and even large atomic structures such as 60-carbon-atom Bucky balls. It may be impossible to keep anything in a box anymore.”5
Bell further emphasizes: “No theory of reality compatible with quantum theory can require spatially separate events to be independent.” That is to say, the measurement of the polarization of one photon determines the polarization of the other photon at its distant measurement site. This surprising coherence between distant entities is called “nonlocality” by Bell, Bohm, Clauser, and others. Physicist Henry Stapp of the University of California at Berkeley states that these quantum connections could be the “most profound discovery in all of science.”6
Einstein, of course, was correct in saying that there was a correlation between photons receding from each other at the speed of light. It seems, however, that he was mistaken in his concern about the correlation violating relativity theory, because so far it appears that it does not. That is, there is no faster-than-light signaling. EPR analysis from the 1930s, together with contemporary experiments, gives scientific support to the current view of nonlocal connectedness. My colleagues and I do not believe, however, that EPR-type correlations are, in themselves, the explanation for mind-to-mind connections, but we do think that they are an unequivocal laboratory example of the nonlocal nature of our universe. And it is this nonlocality that makes these EPR and ESP connections possible.
Data from dream research also provide convincing evidence that our minds have access to events occurring in distant places — and even into the future. The latter was demonstrated by W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time,7 in which he recorded, verified, and published his precognitive dreams, as well as by remote-viewing research performed at SRI and Princeton University. The Princeton research showed conclusively that remote viewing exists, with a departure from chance expectation of 10-10 (odds of one in ten billion). They found, from 277 formal remote viewing trials, that there is no evidence for a decrease in accuracy or reliability when looking days into the future or thousands of miles into the distance. That is, it is no harder to describe tomorrow’s remote viewing target location than it is to describe today’s.8
Immanuel Kant states that space and time are but modes of human perception, not attributes of the physical world. These modes are powerful filters of our own invention, and they often serve to limit our experience.
I know, based on experimental data from psi research in my laboratory at SRI, that a viewer can focus attention at a specific location anywhere on the planet (or off of it) and often describe what is there. The SRI experiments showed that the viewer is not bound by present time. In contemporary physics, we call this ability to focus attention on distant points in space-time “nonlocal awareness.” Data from the past twenty-five years have shown that a remote viewer can answer any question about events anywhere in the past, present, or future, and be correct more than two-thirds of the time. For an experienced viewer, the rate of correct answers can be much higher.
Physicist David Bohm argues that we greatly misunderstand the illusion of separation in space and time. In his textbook, The Undivided Universe, he defuses the illusion of separation as he writes about quantum interconnectedness: “The essential features of the implicate order are that the whole universe is in some way enfolded in everything, and that each thing is enfolded in the whole.”9
This fundamental statement describes the metaphor of the holographic ordering of the universe. It says that, like a hologram, each region of space-time contains information about every other point in space-time. This information is readily available to our awareness. In the holographic universe of David Bohm, there is a unity of consciousness — a “greater collective mind” — with no boundaries of space or time.
From the current paradigm of modern physics, there is no contradiction between the data of remote viewing and the experienced oneness of consciousness. Nobel-prizewinning physicist Eugene Wigner has written, “The laws of quantum mechanics cannot be formulated without recourse to the concept of consciousness.”10
THE PHYSICS OF MIRACLES
The most satisfactory physical description of psi phenomena that I have examined (with theoretical physicist Elizabeth Rauscher) is a nonlocal mathematical model of space-time known as “complex Minkowski space.”11 Herman Minkowski invented the four-dimensional space-time that Einstein used to describe his special relativity. Ordinary Minkowski space consists of three real space dimensions (x, y, z) and one imaginary time dimension (ict), in which “i” is the square root of –1, “c” is the speed of light, and “t” is time. This model is consistent with the foundations of quantum mechanics, Maxwell’s formalism for electromagnetism, and the theory of relativity. It is very important that any model constructed to describe psi must not at the same time generate weird or incorrect physics.
The complex Minkowski space is a purely geometrical model formulated in terms of space and time coordinates, in which each of the familiar three spatial (distance) and one temporal (time) coordinates is expanded by two into their real and imaginary parts — making a total of six spatial and two temporal coordinates. There are now three real and three imaginary spatial coordinates, together with the real and imaginary time coordinate.
The metric (the standard of how we measure distance and time) of this complex eight-space is a measure of the structure of space-time where we live. Within this structure, we can define the manner in which one physically or psychically moves along a space-time path referred to as a “world line.” This movement can be as mundane as meeting a friend tomorrow at 4:00 P.M. on the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, or as cosmic as experiencing oneness with the universe. Essentially, real-time remote viewing — or any psychic experience — demands that the awareness of the individual is not separate from (or is “contiguous with”) a specific target at a distant location. This ability to nonlocally access information that is blocked from ordinary perception can be described as the result of an apparent zero-separation between the viewer and the target. Similarly, in order for precognition to occur, one must be contiguous in awareness with the future event that is sensed. The complex eight-space model can always provide a path (the “world line”) in space and time that connects the viewer to a remote target so that the viewer experiences zero spatial and/or temporal distance in the metric.
It appears that, in the realm of consciousness, there may or may not be a separation, depending on one’s intention. It is evident to Dr. Rauscher and me that remote-viewing abilities are fundamental to our understanding of consciousness itself. In fact, psi functioning may be the means that consciousness uses to make itself known in the internal and external physical world.
Dr. Rauscher and I recognize that every theory of being is perishable, and that one day it may be found that complex Minkowski space is not the best model for psi. We are confident, however, that two factors will remain: (1) that these phenomena are not a result of an energetic transmission, and (2) that they are, rather, an interaction of our awareness with a nonlocal, hyperdimensional space-time in which we live.
How does consciousness access this nonlocal space? We believe it does so through the process of intentionality, which is fundamental to any goal-oriented process including retrieval of memory. In fact, the universality of nonlocality is simply there, existing as the fundamental nature of space and time. That is, it is not a physical thing, but it is available to be accessed at will.
It now seems clear that ordinary people can access nonlocal space. We have seen remarkable results in hundreds of remote-viewing trials with hundreds of viewers, in the laboratory and in public workshops all over the world. Without a doubt, people can learn to use their intuitive consciousness in a way that transcends conventional understanding of space and time to describe and experience places and events that are blocked from ordinary perception. The whole force of the data in this book shows this to be true.
So the phenomenon exists, but how does it work? We don’t know the complete answer to that question, although some things about the answer are known. For example, the data from more than a hundred years of psi research show that there is no significant decline in the accuracy of any kind of ESP with increasing distance between the viewer and the object viewed. We also know that it is no more difficult to look a short distance into the future than it is to describe a present-time hidden target. The data supporting these two assertions, from both SRI and Princeton, are very strong.
We can also conclude from the data that it is very unlikely that any kind of electromagnetic field is involved in carrying psi signals. We conclude this because the very geometry of our three-dimensional space requires that signal strength decrease as you get farther from the source. In fact, an electromagnetic signal decreases in proportion to the square of the distance. That is, the radio signal you receive ten miles from the transmitter is 100 times weaker than the signal you pick up at one mile. At 10,000 miles distance, as in our Moscow-to-San-Francisco experiments, the radio signal would be 100 million times weaker than it would be at one mile away. Yet we do not see the slightest evidence of such a distance-related decrease in psi ability, even though the popular model for ESP involves some kind of mental radio in which my mind “sends a signal” to your mind. We believe that this is probably not a valid model.
In spite of the problem with this model, there is a wonderful book called Mental Radio, originally written in 1930 by the great American novelist and muckraker Upton Sinclair.12 This book contains an extremely valuable description of the psychic process, written by Sinclair’s intensely psychic wife Mary Craig. Sinclair and his wife did hundreds of picture-drawing experiments with remarkable success. The book even has a favorable preface by Einstein, who was a friend of the Sinclairs.
Instead of signals being sent, the data suggest that the desired information is always present and available. In remote viewing, as well as in healing, the agent’s focused intention calls forth the information. Psychic healers and remote viewers both act as messengers. In remote viewing, the viewer translates impressions of the information into drawings and verbal concepts. In psychic diagnosis, the healer interprets impressions from the patient and converts them into clairvoyant diagnoses, and sometimes into energy-manipulating actions to remedy a problem in the patient’s body. Spiritual healing introduces yet another element, whereby the healer acts as a conduit of healing information to the patient from the community of spirit in which we all reside, or from God. Here, the healer makes no translation of the message accessed from nonlocality, which directly stimulates the patient’s cells to reorganize themselves into a healthy pattern.
To paraphrase the distinguished physicist John Archibald Wheeler, we would again say that the description of the mechanism of psychic abilities will be found in the geometry of space-time, and not in the electromagnetic fields. What Wheeler actually said was, “There is nothing in the world except curved empty space. Matter, charge, electromagnetism... are only manifestations of the bending of space. Physics is geometry!”13 When he made this assertion in 1957, what Wheeler had in mind was that, in spite of the successes of quantum theory, the geometrical approach gives a more comprehensive model of space-time. In addition, the physical laws that we experience, such as the laws of gravity and force, derive principally from symmetry laws and from the geometry of the space-time metric. Symmetry laws describe the fact that a given physics experiment conducted at different places or times must give the same result. The law of conservation of energy, which is the foundation of physics, can be derived explicitly from these symmetry laws. Similarly, I think that since psi must be compatible with physics, its explanation will also be derived from the geometry of space-time.
When we say that the eventual description of the physics of psi will come from geometry, what we mean is that psi is often seen as paradoxical because we presently misconstrue the nature of the space-time in which we reside. The “naive realist” picture of our reality says that we are each separate creatures sitting on our own well-circumscribed points in space-time. But for the past thirty years, modern physics has been asserting that this model is not correct.
If this explanation does not seem entirely clear, it is probably because, even though Einstein published these ideas sixty years ago, the smartest physicists in the world still do not agree on all of the implications of these nonlocal connections. In fact, Nobel laureate Brian Josephson wrote of quantum physics experiments:
The existence of such remote influences or connections is suggested more directly by experiments on phenomena such as telepathy (the connection of one mind to another) and psychokinesis (the direct influence of mind on matter), both of which are examples of so-called psi function-ing.... One may imagine that life may exist from the beginning as a cooperative whole, directly interconnected at a distance by Bell-type nonlocal interactions, following which modifications through the course of evolution cause organisms to be interconnected directly with each other.... One can see conceptual similarities between psi skills and ordinary skills, e.g. between perceptual skills of hearing and telepathy on the one hand, and between the forms of control of matter involved in control of the body, and in psychokinesis, on the other.14
SPIRITUAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITIONS
In addition to the theories of physicists, the writings of poets and philosophers (some of which originated before biblical times) have articulated the idea that physical separations are more illusory than real. Buddhist teachings, following from the earlier Vedic tradition of 500 b.c., propose that human desires, judgments, and attachments, which arise from distinctions such as “here and not here,” “now and not now,” are the cause of all the world’s suffering.
Aldous Huxley describes the many levels of awareness associated with the “perennial philosophy,” a term for the highest common factor present in all the major wisdom traditions and religions of the world.15 The first principle of Huxley’s perennial philosophy is that consciousness is the fundamental building block of the universe; the world is more like a great thought than a great machine. And human beings can access all of the universe through our own consciousness and our nonlocal mind. This philosophy also maintains that we have a dual nature, both local and nonlocal, both material and nonmaterial. Finally, the perennial philosophy teaches that the purpose of life is to become one with the universal, nonlocal, loving consciousness that is available to us. That is, the purpose of life is to become one with God, and then to help others do likewise.
In this worldview, through meditation one experiences increasing unity consciousness as one passes through “the great chain” of physical, biological, mental, spiritual, and etheric levels of awareness. Through meditation, one experiences the insight that one is not a body; one has a body. Even the idea of “one” is eventually given up in favor of the experience of expanded awareness.
The lesson that separation is an illusion has been spelled out by mystics for at least 2,500 years. Hinduism teaches that individual consciousness (Atman) and universal consciousness (Brahman) are one. (As I mentioned in the Acknowledgments, physicist Erwin Schrödinger considered this observation to be the most profound statement in all of metaphysics.)16 In the Sutras of Patanjali, written 100 years after the Buddha lived, the great Hindu teacher taught that a “realized” being achieves a state of loving awareness in which “the Seer is established in his own essential and fundamental nature (self-realization).” The view of life in which we are all connected with God, and in which the “Kingdom of God” is within us, waiting to be realized and experienced, is part of both the Jewish and Christian traditions — especially in the Thomas gospel.17 We learn that the loving source we are seeking is immediately available when we make contact with the great “I Am” within each of us.
In Judaism, the local community of spirit is often referred to as HaShem (the word), while in Christianity it is called the Holy Spirit, or Emmanuel (the immanent or indwelling God of all). This view of a community of spirit probably arose from mystics of every sacred tradition, whose meditations led them to have oceanic, mind-to-mind feelings of oneness. These realizations may be fleeting or lasting, spontaneous or the product of religious practice, but they are an enduring feature of human life.
When I write about “realizations,” I am describing a state in which a practitioner has wisdom of who she or he is, and has embodied that wisdom; it has become integrated into daily life, thoughts, and activities. We often view “awakening” as a first step toward such realization. Awakening can occur in the blink of an eye, frequently through the direct, heart-opening (heart-breaking) transmission of grace from an awakened teacher.
Meditation and working with a spiritual teacher, such as my work with spiritual teacher Gangaji, are two wonderful and proven paths to self-realization. But sublime music, surrendered sexuality, and even certain potentially dangerous drugs such as MDMA (Ecstasy) can stimulate a spiritual awakening together with a transcendent, one-with-God experience of spaciousness.18 The inspiring and life-affirming tantra teacher Margot Anand describes this opportunity from her tradition. She writes: “Skillful lovers become divine instruments in a symphony of delight. Their communion is ecstasy, the highest state of self-knowing [selfrealization] and self-forgetting [spaciousness].” Who would not wish to partake of that?! In my opinion, Margot’s heart-opening and humorous approach to love can help us recover from the terrible damage done to the American psyche by our own fundamentalists, the Puritans.
The Tibetan deity Samanthabhadra is a compassionate bodhisattva (one who postpones his or her own enlightenment to bring others to enlightenment), whose image is frequently depicted in the inspiring Dzogchen, Buddhist texts of self-liberation. These teachings assume that you are already a peaceful, loving, openhearted being who is now willing to experience the fast track to spaciousness and timeless awareness. Samanthabhadra is invariably shown in the loving sexual embrace of his partner, Samanthabhadri. Similarly, in quantum physics the material universe is represented by equations called wave functions, a term invented by Erwin Schrödinger, who taught us that in order to manifest as a material object, any entity must appear together with its complex conjugate. In other words, both its real and imaginary parts must be present. That is why these two loving deities are always shown together; in order for either one to manifest, it is necessary to have them both, like the north and south poles of a magnet. That loving exchange of energy is what Margot encourages us to experience on our path to self-discovery.
I once told anthropologist Margaret Mead that I was disappointed about ESP’s lack of acceptance in the scientific community. She sternly told me that I shouldn’t complain because, after all, Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake in the sixteenth century during the Inquisition for espousing ideas not very different from the ones I expressed. Bruno believed in the unity of all things, and he strongly opposed Aristotelian dualism for separating body and spirit. He exhorted us all to achieve union with the “Infinite One” in an infinite universe.
Figure 1. Samanthabhadra, the primordial Buddha, and his consort.
Baruch Spinoza, in the seventeenth century, had a similar worldview; since he was Jewish, he was fortunate to be spared the Inquisition. He was, however, banished from his own synagogue because of his pantheistic model of “all things together” comprising God. Einstein said that he “believed in the God of Spinoza,” which we understand to be the organizing principle of the universe. In the Dzogchen tradition, our personal experience of this profound principle is known as dharmakaya, and it is considered equivalent to the experience of undifferentiated loving awareness, or vajra (heart-essence). It is the vehicle and the dimension through which we directly experience the organizing principles of the universe (the dharma).
The philosophy of a universal connection among all things was taught in the 1750s by Bishop George Berkeley, who could be considered an early Transcendentalist. He felt that the world was greatly misapprehended by our ordinary senses, and that consciousness was the fundamental ground of all existence. In the nineteenth century, this idea was expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and today by Christian Science, Science of Mind, and Unity churches.
The coherent theme among all of these is that there is an essential part of all of us that is shared. The famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung described our mind-to-mind connections in terms of a “collective unconscious.” Contemporary Judaism teaches a similar view of our interconnectedness. The revered Jewish theologian Rabbi Lawrence Kushner tells us that:
Human beings are joined to one another and to all creation. Everything performing its intended task doing commerce with its neighbors. Drawing nourishment and sustenance from unimagined other individuals. Coming into being, growing to maturity, procreating. Dying. Often without even the faintest awareness of its indispensable and vital function within the greater “body.”. . . All creation is one person, one being, whose cells are connected to one another within a medium called consciousness.19
Historically, the belief in our connected nature has largely been based on the personal experiences of the people who promoted the view. Today, we recognize that just because large numbers of people have believed something for several millennia (for example, that the earth is flat), that does not by any means make it true. How are we to decide whether this view of community of spirit is deep nonsense unrelated to nature or a valid concept of the workings of the world? The usual scientific approach is to see if the model offers testable predictions.
The idea that our thoughts transcend space and time is definitely not a new thought. In the collected Buddhist teaching of 500 b.c., recorded in the Prajnaparamita, we learn from almost every page that our apparent separation is an illusion and that there is “only one of us here” in consciousness — perhaps not even one.20 Once this spiritual connection is experienced, compassion for all beings is the natural consequence.
We have the opportunity to experience a self, but that is not who we really are. In fact, in the teaching of the enneagram, a traditional Sufi analysis of character traits and behavior, the self or ego is a fixation from the past; it is conditioned existence — exactly who we are not.21 The enneagram, brought to us in the 1970s, attempts to make us aware of the extent to which we live in a trancelike attachment to our story of who we think we are. Our “business card,” over which we lavish so much attention, is really a kind of “story card” that we give people to tell them who we think we are. If we believe that story, it can cause us a lot of suffering.
In his book on the enneagram, psychologist and spiritual teacher Eli Jackson-Bear makes this important idea poignantly clear. He writes:
When identification shifts from a particular body... to the totality of being, the soul realizes itself as pure, limitless consciousness. This shift in identification is called Self-realization. In this realization, not only do you find that love is all that there is, but you also discover that this love is who you are.22
FOUR-VALUED LOGIC
I believe that we are neither a “self” nor “not a self,” but that we are awareness residing as a body. This is the sort of apparent paradox about who we are that may not be solvable within the framework of what we call “Aristotelian two-valued logic” — the logic system basic to all of Western analytical thought. In two-valued logic, we frame our reality with questions like “Are we mortal or immortal?” “Is the mind or soul part of the body?” or “Is light made of waves or particles?” But none of these have “yes” or “no” answers. The exclusion of a middle ground between the poles of Aristotelian logic is the source of much confusion. Other logic systems have been suggested in Buddhist writings; the great second-century dharma master and teacher Nagarjuna introduced a four-valued logic system in which statements about the world can be (1) true, (2) not true, (3) both true and not true, and (4) neither true nor not true — which Nagarjuna believed was the usual case—thereby illuminating what is known as the Buddhist Middle Path.23 According to Nagarjuna, the Buddha first taught that the world is real. He next taught that it is unreal. To the more astute students, he taught that it is both real and not real. And to those who were furthest along the path, he taught that the world is neither real nor not real, which is what we would say today. (In an interview in the magazine What Is Enlightenment? the Dalai Lama singled out Nagarjuna as one of the truly enlightened people of all time. He is thought to be a contemporary of Garab Dorjé, the spontaneously awakened discoverer of Dzogchen.)
The two-valued Aristotelian logic we use every day is simply inadequate to describe the data of modern physics, while the four-valued logic system appears quite outside Western consideration and thought. A seeming paradox in physics that may well find its resolution in “four-logic” is the so-called wave/particle paradox. It is well known that, under the conditions of various experimental arrangements, light displays either wave-like or particle-like properties. But what, then, is the essential nature of light? This question may not be amenable to our familiar system of logic, and may be better addressed by an expanded logic system. We might say, for example, that light is (1) a wave, (2) not a wave, (3) both a wave and not a wave, or, most correctly, (4) neither a wave nor not a wave.
This is how we are able to be both a self and not a self — both separated as bodies and not separated in awareness. Four-logic shows that the so-called problem of mind-body duality is not a paradox at all. I discuss this here because four-logic is really the handmaiden of nonlocality, wherein things are neither separate nor not separate.
In the Sutras of Patanjali, which are still in print, the great teacher was not primarily trying to interest people in developing their psychic abilities.24 He was actually writing a guide on how to become a realized person — how to experience God. He would say that knowing God is part of knowing yourself. The mystic had observed that, once people learn to quiet their minds, they begin to have all sorts of interesting experiences, such as seeing into the distance, experiencing the future, diagnosing illness, healing the sick, and much more. But his goal was to help his students achieve transcendence, rather than to display these siddhis, or powers.
I see these abilities, and the mental interconnectedness that they imply, as part of the “perennial philosophy,” and I believe they should be seen as matters of experience rather than items of belief. They provide an opportunity to step outside the accepted contemporary paradigm (or religion) of “scientific materialism,” in which we are viewed as just being some kind of remarkable sentient meat.
Patanjali also gave step-by-step instructions for what might be called omniscience, as well as the quiet mind. He taught that if one wants to see the moon reflected in a pool of water, one must wait until every ripple is stilled. So it is with mind. He wrote that “yoga (union with God) is mind-wave quieting” and is a first step to either transcendence or knowing God. Achieving omniscience doesn’t mean we can know everything. But by asking one question at a time, we can know anything we need to know. It is important to remember that these teachings are not aimed merely at self-improvement; they are designed as a guide to self-realization, or the discovery of who we are. There is a recurring Buddhist caution that “no powers are sought before wisdom” (or liberation from the illusion of who we are). That is, although you may feel that omniscience is coming on, don’t get attached to it!
Western spiritual seekers of truth can choose to consciously cultivate what Eastern spiritual traditions describe as mindfulness by developing what can be called “an intimacy with stillness.” In Andrew Harvey’s book The Essential Mystics, he asserts that we may discover that true spirituality is not about passive escape from earthly living but, rather, spirituality is about active arrival here “in full presence.” He describes the experience of oceanic love that is available to the quiet mind:
It always transcends anything that can be said of it, and remains always unstained by any of our human attempts to limit or exploit it. Every mystic of every time and tradition has awakened in wonder and rapture to the signs of this eternal Presence and known its mystery as one of relation and love.25
Limitless Mind is an invitation to experience this loving syrup, beyond romance. Although a body can definitely be a vehicle of transformation, love in the Buddhist sense is not about bodies; it is wisdom wedded to compassion. To take the first step toward residing in this state of loving awareness, the Dzogchen master Longchenpa teaches that we must move out of our daily acquiescence to conditioned awareness and learn to become aware of, and head in the direction of, timeless existence. Conditioned awareness is a distortion of our daily perceptions and experience that is caused by all the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” that we have suffered during the entire course of our lives. Almost all spiritual teachings tell us — often to our annoyance — that these experiences are merely illusions. What we are striving for is disillusionment. Conditioned awareness is the crazy-making process of focusing one’s anxious and fearful attention on the future, while feeling guilt over the past, and missing out entirely on the present.
A Course in Miracles, which I discuss in the final chapter, explains that by “illusion” we refer to the fact that we subconsciously give all the meaning there is to everything we experience — usually based on something in the past. Things happen, and we then have an opportunity to experience them with naked and unprejudiced awareness, or we can push the events through our filter bank and assign meaning in accordance with today’s set of fears, judgments, and agitation.
One of the important repeated teachings of Dzogchen is that samsara (everyday material existence in the “rat race”) is the same as nirvana (the blissful state of surrendered loving awareness). How could this be? My understanding of this paradox is that they are both simply ideas held in the mind. As ideas, one is no more real that the other. Like any idea, fearful or pleasant, it can be released to float away and pop like a soap bubble. Although these teachings were elaborated in the eighth century, they have great currency today, even in the engrams of Freudian psychoanalysis. Engrams are buried memories of traumas, abuse, or indoctrinations that give rise to our subconscious fears, prejudices, and reactions, and which constantly give meaning and color to our experience — without our knowing why.
The spontaneously awakened Dzogchen master Garab Dorjé taught what he knew by direct experience: that our awareness is nonlocal and unlimited by space and time. All of us today can know this truth, based on the data of psychics and parapsychology. But my hope and reason for writing this book is to encourage you to personally investigate the divine opportunity for direct experience of free and timeless awareness.
The reward for embarking on a mind-quieting path is a profound feeling of personal freedom and spaciousness. You will recall that, 2,400 years ago, our friend Patanjali said that quieting the mind is the same as union with God. It still seems to be true today.
