It's not difficult to demonstrate how we confuse our conscious sensorium
for 'objective physical reality', as with our apple-spoon demonstration. We sense, but seldom dare to acknowledge
the suspicion that the
building blocks of reality lie within us. We secretly doubt that two separate and
independent realities are involved, one conscious and the other 'out
there', foreboding, unaware, and dangerous.
Dreams show the nature of the confusion, the fact that
conscious reality, waking or sleeping, is founded upon qualia. Most dreams
can be dismissed as surrealistic and worthless, the stuff of a mind at
idle, or not entirely sane. Even so, dreams can be very provocative.
Often, their contents seem so achingly
familiar. We overlay people, places, and things of our waking lives
onto their content, but when we awaken, we realize that our dream house was
profoundly different than the house of our waking world. Friends and family
within our dreams weren’t quite the people we know, and some we treated
as intimate family members were total strangers. Why do we dream about
strangers and strange places as if we know them? Why do some of
them remain hauntingly familiar to us even in the light of day?
We exert every effort to see dreams as reflections of our
waking lives. We superimpose the known upon the unknown. Certainly they often reflect worrisome issues of our waking
lives, or satisfy wish-fulfillment, but how often do we come straight out
and admit that we dream, for some reason, the lives of people and worlds that are
have no connection with us, although we are fully engaged during
the course of the dream.
What else would a dream be but a reflection of our
waking existence? What purpose would they otherwise serve? Have we really
gone off the deep end when we let the bonds of reality slip away during
those periods of semi-consciousness called sleep? Dreams are incidental to
the lives of most of us, but few are aware that dreams can contain vast expanses of conscious awareness
of a complexity, quality, and intensity of experience that can rival waking reality,
and perhaps do on a nightly basis. Without the continuity afforded by our
untrained memory, how would we know? When we forget our dreams, our plight
is similar to those whose long-term memory is damaged. The world is a new
place every twenty seconds or so. We have no lives without the continuity
of memory. Our biology gives us relative continuity through our lives, but
there is none at all within the larger realm of Platonia. There is only
one moment, eternally the same.
Why do we dream? We dream all the time, although few
notice the undercurrent of dreams during the course of the day when we are
attending the demands of waking reality. Dreams are what we can think of as the
language of the 'soul'. Acausal association is the syntax of that language,
although this acausality is not at all an esoteric concept. Memories are not
loyal to time or space. A fearful snake 'then' remains a fearful snake
'now'. Beautiful blue eyes 'then' cast the same hypnotic spell 'now'.
Because an emotional charge is attached to each static memory or snapshot
of our life, memories acquire ‘meaning’ above a mere record of an event.
Such memory-images coupled with their emotional evaluations can then serve
as ‘words’ in our dreams to reflect or express our emotional stance.
Our emotional stance to what? Our
dreams have something useful to say to us, although waking comprehension
isn't something the psyche seems to require on a conscious level. Some sleep their entire
lives without awareness of dreams, but dreams serve their purposes
regardless, whatever they may be.
Perhaps dreams serve no useful purpose for the waking
ego, but the human psyche is organizationally complex. Some areas of the
psyche operate in relative isolation and with relative independence from
others. We see this at work when we talk to ourselves, either aloud or to
ourselves, what we call 'roof-brain chatter', or the 'internal dialogue'.
In daydreams, we play the role of associates and foes alike and work out
our troublesome relations in a realm of fantasy. In dreams, no matter how lucid, we are seldom
fully aware of our waking reality. Our dreaming selves are independent of
that world, just as we are comfortable in the waking world in which we find
ourselves.
Waking reality requires our full and
sharply focused attention and we seldom allow dreams to interfere. It
takes a bit of dream study and meditation to reveal those dreams that flow
in the depths of waking reality like deep rivers of thought and feeling.
Dreams never stop. We simply are not aware of them in the glare and
thunder of the waking world, and during hours of sleep, our waking
consciousness seldom bothers to remember. Another level of self
is doing its things, and we are but casual observers of the process.
How many dreams do we have during the course of the
night? Researching dream retention, we find that we gradually remember
more dreams in increasing detail, if we keep a dream diary. We can develop
the ability to remember so many dreams that we haven't the time to
record them all in our otherwise invaluable dream diaries. Dream diaries
tend to get set aside when we remember eight hours of dreams that would
take more than eight hours to record in any detail. We dream far faster than we
can write, and our dreams become far more comprehensive than we can
express verbally with any accuracy.
Because dreams are a window into deeper areas of our
psyche, dream diaries are useful even with no specific reason for
keeping one. Dreams teach us a lot about ourselves when our guard is down.
They entertain and intrigue us with their strangeness. We
have a dream censor to contend with, but issues of emotional
significance find ways of circumnavigating that censor. We have different
values when we dream. Conflict occurs between dreaming and waking reality,
and we have long been taught to maintain a credibility barrier between the two worlds. Dreams are irrelevant and serve little to no
purpose, we are told. Waking reality is 'real', and
it is here that we truly live and die.
Impossible and surreal things happen in dreams, but the most controversial
kind of dream is an accurate reflection of waking reality, not of what has
happened, or what is happening, but what will happen in days to
come. It is a dream containing clearly 'precognitive', 'clairvoyant', or
'telepathic' material containing what proves to be at a later time accurate information to
which we had no sensory access.
In a Newtonian universe, precognitive dreams are not
possible, and neither are dreams that contain telepathic elements, dreams
we share, or partially share, with others, or dreams about places we have
not known about. It's easy to say such dreams are not possible and can be
summarily dismissed, but that
statement is a round-about declaration of loyalty to a Newtonian reality.
Such dreams can shake that loyalty and there is a danger of sending a mind down the road to our
age-old predilection for magical thinking. Magical thinking is, strangely
enough, associative thinking. On a simple level, it may seem
foolish to think that poking a doll imagined to be an enemy can harm that
enemy, but we all tend to 'knock on wood'. We all do the equivalent of
calling out 'break a leg' when we wish someone luck. Have we ever given
serious consideration to the possibility that we do these things for good
reason?
We recognize precognitive dreams for what they are
'unofficially' when they occur. If they too pertinent to
dismiss, we cannot deny their validity. We can minimize their impact if we
speak to others about our experience, but not to ourselves. We can claim
them to be coincidences even when we do not believe that to be the case
privately.
We commonly incorporate precognition and so-called
mental telepathy into our fiction, books and movies, not only because we find the
supernatural interesting, but because we have no way to incorporate material
that everybody clearly recognizes into the rationale of our social and cultural realities. Waking reality cannot
accommodate such happenings. Dreams are subjective, and waking reality
must be an objective experience we can share with others under a common
banner of fact and belief. We simply cannot know about something that will happen day
after tomorrow.
For those of us somewhat familiar with 'impossible'
dreams, it's as if we have learned to use hours of darkness to explore a
psychic environment beyond the space and time boundaries of our waking
self, as if we are sending ‘feelers’ into other resonate versions of
ourselves that we do not recognize from the standpoint of our waking
selves. We are reaching beyond our official interactive sensorium.
Reaching for what?
If there is method behind the madness of dreams, it's
not surprising that we inadvertently violate time and space in the
material we bring back from some dreams. Newtonian and quantum realities
can never manifest themselves in our lives in exactly the same way. If
they seem to, we’re missing something critical by force-fitting one into
the other, and that 'something' is being blocked by the tenacious and
deep-seated cultural beliefs and convictions passed down from ancient
times.
Isaac Newton brought to life the mathematical structure
of our space-time sensorium, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get reality. Even
in modern times, we deny or rationalize sensory experience that defies
that world-view. One of the hallmarks of trying to live in the wrong
universe is exactly that stubborn self-imposed blindness. It is true that
gullibility is the extreme that lies at the opposite end of this
particular spectrum, and we all fall prey to self-deception from time to
time, but we do have a new scientific paradigm to incorporate into our
conscious reality, and we are refusing to let go of Newtonian
'common-sense' to do so. Quantum theory is hard to swallow when applied to
consciousness once we accept the implication that the 'parallel' world in
which we live cannot be shared in its entirety by all, that everyone
inhabits their own version, and that no two are identical.
Classical objective reality has its own failings,
however. Habits and learned reflexes are based on memory. Much of our
current behavior is based upon past experience to the extent that we, for
all intents and purposes, run loops of emotional-laden memory over and over in
the here and now. These snapshot-memories upon which our habits of
behavior are based are woven into what we might call an 'overview' of our
lives. That overview factors into our self-esteem, our self-evaluation of
our ability to survive in our social and physical environment. Even if
reality is not acausal in nature, the structure of our lives most
definitely is by virtue of this simplistic psychological overview we each
possess. We can never hope to live in a truly objective reality because of
those colored lenses through which we view it.
Awareness of our internal subjectivity limits the
usefulness of any cooperative stance we might take. We
simply won't share it in its entirety with others despite our interactive
agreements. However, there are cultural injunctions and admonishments
against ever 'confusing' acausal, associative, and imaginative
thinking with real-world processes. Considering the world itself acausal
is anathema with a vengeance. An acausal reality influenced by thought is,
essentially, a realm of magic, and that magic would lie, not in the hands
of priests, rulers and soldiers, but in the hands of of every individual
capable of the focus of intent necessary to manifest his or her beliefs,
desires, and fears. Culture is threatened by excess power in the hands of
the individual who may have no loyalty beyond his or her self.
Deep down,
we fear that a strong belief in dark forces can, in fact, unleash
unnatural powers. We never see such powers in use by others, however, so
we breath a sigh of relief and assume they do not exist, and we laugh at
our foolishness. But that fear still stabs deep within us all from time to
time. In one way or another, we all keep a 'knocking' piece of wood handy.
Culture and tradition are frightened by magic, and for
good reason, but if every self-proclaimed psychic on the face of the earth
is a phony, and they are because they fail to recognize the relative
subjectivity of their 'power', the nature of our ‘psychic’
experiences remains familiar to all of us regardless. To some degree, no
matter how vehemently we reframe it as coincidence, misperception, and
superstition, we
have all experienced coincidences that were unlikely or impossible to our
political, religious and culturally accepted reality. Most 'psychic
powers' fall into the category of unlikely coincidence from one point of
view or another.
Carl
Jung, father of psychoanalysis, took note of impossible coincidence and
called it 'synchronicity', highly subjective events of an acausal nature
taking place in the private experience. It's not commonly considered a
realistic phenomenon, because in a Newtonian universe, truly acausal happenings
of personal significance
are patently impossible in an objective reality. Highly
improbable events occur all the time, we are reminded, although they involve everyone to an
equal degree. After all, how improbable
was it that select atoms by the billions born in the explosions of suns
scattered across the universe would one day converge to become our body in
the here and now?
With the phenomenon we call mental telepathy, we know
who is calling us on the phone, or we know what our spouse is about to
say, or we know the moment a distanced loved one suffers a traumatic or
joyous event. These occurrences only happen when they have emotional significance and meaning to
the individual, and they seem to happen when conscious presence is
unfocused and 'open' to the environment. They are invariably spontaneous, catch us by surprise, and are
seldom if ever repeatable upon the demand of the 'time-and-space-loyal'
social ego.
To the extent we have experienced these phenomenon for
ourselves, and to the extent they are too detailed, too well-corroborated,
or too frequent to dismiss, we ostracize ourselves from mainstream culture.
Our experience conflicts with the cultural need for an objective social
reality and individual compliance to that reality. From the perspective of
others, we are deluded, are lying, or have suffered a psychotic break with
reality, and often, this is indeed the case. We may be deluded because the
thought of having psychic powers is entertaining. We may be lying to the extent we can convince
others of our fib and thereby gain power over our victims. Or, we may have
suffered a psychotic break and actually believe that lamp poles are alien
entities and incandescent lighting a vehicle for mind control. But Thomas Jefferson once said that he'd rather believe
that Yankee scientists would lie than believe that rocks fall from the
sky. He was ignorant of the reality of rocks flying about the distant sky
above us. It was once calculated that the world population could never
exceed two billion because we lacked the farmland to feed the horses
needed to sustain civilization.
It works the other way around as well. Over two
thousand years ago, an Egyptian calculated the circumference of the Earth
at about twenty-five thousand miles using sunlight reaching wells
distanced from one another and pointing upward at different angles by
virtue of the Earth's curvature, a reasoned calculation
dismissed by most because religious texts stated that the
world had been created flat by an imaginary god. A list of blunders of
this nature highlights the need to avoid weighing evidence strictly on the
basis of social consensus. Loyalty to mob belief is a thing called social
metaphysics, a concept brought to light by Ayn Rand a half
century ago, a pitfall that mires individual lives and entire societies in
crippling errors of perception and its resulting behavior.
Is there evidence for the reality of these interlinked
phenomenon, synchronicity, precognition, clairvoyance, and mental
telepathy aside from the personal experiences we may or may not have had?
Certainly there is considerable anecdotal evidence, much of it quite
impressive as far as it goes. There is far less and perhaps no scientific
evidence at all, but it's critical to note that practical applications of
science require strong allegiance to an 'objective' central world-view. We
can have no universal application of electrical power, as an example, if we cannot agree
upon the definition and value of a volt, an amp, and an ohm. In light of
these needs for a unified system within which to function as social
creatures, how could we ever hope to objectify synchronicity or a
paranormal experience for study? Who but the individual reporting such an
experience would ever notice its existence? Who but the individual is
impacted?
In defending objectivity, we have thrown the baby out
with the bath water, which is an amusing application of a cliché, because
we are the baby, and its fate will be ours.
If synchronous experience happens, it means that
structure to our lives exists beyond or above our sensory experience of
time and space. It means that the events of our lives conduct themselves as cause
and effect, but arise from acausal
associations, what we have come to believe, what we anticipate, what we expect to
happen. Recognition of synchronous events serve as a feedback mechanisms by
which we can view the overall state of our being and initiate change in
an effort to improve our lives. Ultimately, it would mean that nothing, not a single
factor of our existence no matter how seemingly insignificant, can be
labeled chance, random, or accidental.
Investigating the reality of the acausal is a wasteful
and farcical undertaking for those who partake of Isaac Newton's
ball-bearing universe and have no desire for change, or see no need for
it. We may die in a Newtonian universe, but we have no overwhelming
responsibility for what happens within it. A reality of magic and
immortality would seem to be all that we have ever wished for, although
we’re secretly aware that we should be exceedingly careful of what we wish
for. If magic and immortality are our lot in life,
every step we take has a consequence we can not escape or undo. We’d
never dare harm another human being, knowing that bad behavior twists us
internally and qualifies us for the deep and dark holes we would dig for
ourselves. We’d have no option but to turn very carefully from the shadows
of our lives and begin our arduous journey toward the light, never again
to mull over the short-term advantages of dishonesty and self-betrayal.
We all set our own standards. We know what they are. We
seldom have the motivation to comply with all of them all of the time.
We'd conduct our lives differently if we had good reason to believe we
will suffer consequences to betrayals inflicted upon ourselves.
