Mind, Body and Soul
Three different things, studied in three different ways. These are ancient ideas, going back to prehistory, back to our ancestors who painted wonderful art on the walls of caves during the last Ice Age. I do not agree with those who want to squash them all together as emergent properties of the brain. The brain is quite fascinating and worthwhile to study, and I read all the articles on it when they come out in Scientific American or NewScientist. However, the end product of data processing by the brain just seems to be columns of neurons in the cortex oscillating in sync. And there appear to be particular neurons that stand for a particular thing, such as Pope John Paul II. I am sure we will learn much more about the brain, but it will always be correlates to some experience, never the experience itself. And the mind can have those same experiences, and others, without needing a brain or a body. You will know this from NDE and OBE studies, assuming you can break your way out of the conventional Worldview.
We know that the spirit is real and not part of the brain, because of the late Prof. Stevenson’s proof of the reality of reincarnation. His research focused first on young children who spontaneously talk about a former lifetime. The first thing for a Psychical Researcher is to see if there was such a former lifetime. If so, could the child of 2-7 know about that person by normal means?
The Imad Elawar case is the best refutation of that hypothesis. If he was being trained by his parents, they picked the wrong Bouhamzy. They thought he was claiming to be Said Bouhamzy, but he never said so. He had been Ibrihim Bouhamzy. The life of Ibrihim Bouhamzy was lived 40 miles away from Imad’s village by winding mountain roads in the mountains East of Beirut, inhabited by a sect of Islam called Druse, who believe in reincarnation. Ibrihim lived 16 years before Imad. Ibrihim was an obscure individual, though he had a mistress with red shoes and he drove a red car. His family still lives in the same village. Or did in 1964, when Stevenson did his research.
Psi-cops blatantly lie when they say that people recalling past lives always remember themselves as someone famous. That never happens.
Ian Stevenson arranged a visit between the two villages, but first he got as much as he could just from talking to Imad. Imad knew where to go, even though he had never been there before. He was shown a collection of photographs, some of Ibrihim, which he identified as himself. He also identified many other relatives of Ibrihim, but failed to recognize the mother of Ibrihim, who must have been quite old by then.
Stevenson also studied Responsive Xenoglossy. This is the ability of people in a deep hypnotic trance to carry on conversations in a language, style and personality completely unknown to that person awake. This kind of research should be left to psychiatrists. And Stevenson was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia.
This is just a nibble. You will have to study Ian Stevenson’s rich technical monographs for yourself. He never wrote any popularizations, never gave interviews or appeared on TV. He was a cautious, rigorous man and the Galileo of the 20th Century.
So, if a continuity of consciousness is maintained between one lifetime and another, as well as memories, personality traits, and even reincarnational birthmarks, related to events in the former lifetime, the mind cannot be the brain. BTW, I use the word “spirit” for that which reincarnates, the conjoined mind and soul, that might stay together for an indefinite length of time. I cannot even guess how long. But it is not forever, since, in my view, the mind is part of the natural world and the soul is not.
I take the mystic’s view of the soul as being but a part of ONE, that is ALL, all that is real, all that is eternal, all that is conscious, all that has purpose and makes free will creative choices. All of nature can be found in the contents of consciousness. But not the holder of those contents, which is bigger than the universe. Everything in nature is born and eventually dies, including the universe itself. But not ONE. ONE is all that is real. Everything else is just the passing shadows on Plato’s cave. However, if that seems too radical, I am willing to accept the notion of varying degrees of reality, or perhaps varying kinds of reality. Merely a semantic difference.
BTW, this means there there can be no explanation of consciousness. It is the basic reality and all other theories must be based on the highly varied contents of consciousness.
We know from Shafica Karagulla’s work with an HSP psychic that the mind can be seen via a power of perception intrinsic to the mind, but normally turned off in-the-body. She called it HSP, and so do I, but most PR people haven’t heard of it. I am afraid the forbidden sciences are characterized by obscure classics, such as Karagulla’s Breakthrough to Creativity, or The Humanoids, edited by Charles Bowen, that are long out of print, and unknown today, except by people like me who collect such books.
Diane (Karagulla’s best subject, not her real name) could see a complex of vortices with sub-vortices, at certain places in the body, all connected by shimmering meridians (the things used in acupuncture) and surrounded by a glowing aura. Most are on the spine, one is between the eyebrows, another on the crown of the head, another at the cerebellum, and one smaller one on the pancreas, if I remember correctly. I’ll look it up later.
Hypothetically, this structure is the mind, and each of those vortices must have a function, partially explained symbolically by the Book of the Citadel in the Word of One. Mind is not confined to the brain, and indeed extends beyond the perimeter of the body. The Soul cannot be seen even by the extra-sensory powers of the Mind.
Another insight into the mind is provided by G.N.M. Tyrrell’s little book Apparitions (1940). This one has been reprinted many times, so you may be able to find it. It gives one the impression that consciousness reaches only to the highest level of the mind, but that below it there are countless other structures, which do their work unconsciously. One of these is the sleep dynamo, or perhaps we could call it the Prana generator. This is my idea, not Tyrrell’s, but it is also found in Yoga.
Here begins my own theories of the mind, which do not conflict with the theories of Tyrrell and Karagulla, but merely add to it. Firstly, I place the mind in nature. It is dark matter, since it has no Electro-Magnetic (EM) interactions. On the quantum level, it is the EM force which provides almost all of the common properties of matter, such as whether it will be gaseous, liquid or solid at room temperature, and thus receptive to penetration or not. The mind can effortlessly travel through “solid” walls. The mind is invisible. Thus, if it is matter, it is dark matter.
The mind (according to my theory) has mass, size, shape, internal structures (or organs) and has one form of interaction with other minds, and two forms of interaction with ordinary matter (the de Broglie waves and the Einsteinian distortion of geodesics). The mind-to-mind interaction is the apparitional power, since it can create apparitional realities (sometimes seen in the body) and can receive apparitional signals. I dislike such terms as telepathy or telekinesis, that somehow suggest that PSI powers are like television or the telephone. They aren’t. Waking apparitions can be seen by all the people present, and even the family pets, all seen from the proper perspective (with clothes) as if the apparition were a physical object. It isn’t. Pure apparitions do not change the physical environment. If an apparition opens a locked door and comes in, it will later be found still locked. An apparition walking across a dewy lawn will later be seen to have left no footprints. Apparitions are created by the collective minds of those present, at some unconscious level. In other words, they are not ghosts. Whether there really are ghosts, I do not know. I only know there are apparitions, poltergeists and haunts. Poltergeists are the unconscious PK creations of some member of the family, usually a highly repressed adolescent. Apparitions are either caused by a crisis (perhaps death) in the life of the one seen. Persistent apparitions and haunts are like recordings which play over and over in the right conditions. Communication between the living and the dead mostly (or entirely) happens in dreams.
HSP is due to de Broglie waves, and provides the root method of communicating with the brain. While de Broglie waves are a concept that arises in physics, I doubt that any academic would try to explain the mind-body connection that way. They are too busy trying to explain it away.
Out-of-body, we see physical or psionic objects with HSP, in light or darkness, in a 360 degree arc. But we hear people talking by the apparitional power, just as they open their mouth and are about to speak. Dannion Brinkley could do that too, after being struck by lightning and dead for 45 minutes. An NDE case, naturally. Most NDErs find themselves with Psi abilities, of all different kinds. Dannion could actually read people’s minds, and that is rare. A Russian physicist, George Rodonaia, was dead for 3 days, with his body in one of those drawers in the morgue. He had quite a fascinating NDE. He was forced back into his body just as the pathologists were beginning his autopsy. Google on these two for more information.
If the mind is a part of nature, it requires some way of collecting energy, since the operations of the mind require energy and obey the law of conservation of energy. This is done by the sleep dynamo, in deep, laborious sleep (not REM sleep) by a cyclic distortion of the geodesics of space time to resist the motion of the diaphragm and abdomen (but not too much!!). It might be possible to detect this distortion in the geodesics by the methods of physics.
There are psychics of all different kinds. Some, like Diane, has a highly developed HSP sense, even in the body. Others, like the famous D. D. Home of the 19th Century, could levitate themselves at will, and did so before the crowned heads of Europe and all the famous scientists of the time. A close study of the behavior of UFOs shows that they are star-traveling humanoids, who can apport across light-years in an instant. How can we develop such powers?
Some powers can be developed by mere practice, particularly if the teacher already has that power. This is generally true of HSP powers, such as Uri Geller’s spoon-bending, or the Russian children who could read with their fingers.
Most psychics are just born with a “superpower.” Why is that? My hypothesis is they have reached a certain level of spiritual evolution. That is why we have nothing to fear from UFOs. Only highly evolved species can levitate huge ships effortlessly, or apport them across the galaxy. We, on the other hand, are a primitive, violent and greedy species, a plague on planet Earth, destroying its resources and ecological systems. The first step to star-travel is to grow out of all that, and create a high civilization.
I am a Doer, if you are familiar with the symbolism of the New Tarot. And if you aren’t, you should be! This is the word of ONE, and allows us to study mysticism, symbolic messages from the depths of Self, and provides the evidence for immortality, the divine purpose in life (not a plan, or commands) and a world of other things if we are ever to escape the Dark Ages we are presently in. It is a Dark Age of reduction and materialism, with no afterlife, no meaning to life, and certainly no divinity. Pretty bleak.
I am a Doer (old tarot = Sun) because I have mastered the lessons of the Infant (Reactor), who has found the seven keys to the seven ways to Enlightenment. I hold out my book, in hopes someone will read it. I am seven years old, far from the maturity of most of the Major Arcana, to say nothing of the old man in the Seeker card. There can be any number of Doers (Suns), or Deliverers or Changers, and there are many more.
I have managed to control the dark side (we all have one!), though the struggle still erupts once in awhile. That is represented by the dark horse to my left, controlled and docile with a mere ribbon. Meanwhile, the white horse rears in magnificence, standing on a human skull. This means a final mastery of the fear of death, which places such a pall over life, especially in a materialistic and reductionist age. To achieve the same mastery, you just need to read some books on NDEs (Near Death Experiences), OBEs (Out of Body Experiences), as well as the all important research on reincarnation.
In case you are unfamiliar with the Word of One, and of course you are, it is a series of revelations delivered via a home-made Ouija board to a group of Seekers led by John Starr Cooke and Rosalind Sharpe. They were mostly delivered in the winter of 1962-63 at the home of Cooke, who lived in the misty mountain Carmel Highlands at the time. This group had been together for a long time, and had studied Subud, the Huna of the Kahuna and many other spiritual paths together. Every night there would be visitors, and the Silver Dollar would read for them too. Thus only a small part of the collected readings is relevant for us. Principally, it is the description of the Major Arcana of a New Tarot, the evolved form of the Old Tarot. A fresh sheet of drawing paper was used each night, and they would begin with the selection of some abstract figure drawn in the middle. A silver dollar was used as a planchette.
I spent 7 years studying the 22 Books of the New Tarot. I was first drawn to this new tarot because one of the cards, the Deliverer, was such a perfect symbolic description of my accidental journey to Cosmic Consciousness, experienced when I was 31. As I studied them further, I easily recognized the religion of the academic scientists in the Thinker, up a tree, entranced with a reductionist vision of reality. These articles of faith constitute the Worldview of our time, determining what we think to be possible or impossible. I also easily saw that the Actor (old card Emperor) was no longer the power to bash in heads or cut them off. The new form of power over others is the ability to gain the limelight. The Actor is a dark figure holding a white mask over his real character, standing on a stage with footlights. It took me a long time to figure out some things, for instance, the progression from infant (Reactor) to 7 year old boy (Doer = Sun card), to the mature and mostly nude figures of the majority of the cards, to the wizened old man of the Seeker. One figure, the Reverser, is androgyne, neither male nor female. He goes last in the sequence of the cards, while the Book of the Nameless One goes first.
John Starr Cooke painted the originals on 10 by 10 panels, and when shrunk to the size of tarot cards, some important symbolic elements disappear, while extraneous ones appear. The true path is in the words that describe each Book. “Book” is what the Silver Dollar (or “WE”") called the cards. The true New Tarot has not yet appeared, and I can’t do it because I am not an artist.
I call the full meaning of the 22 Major arcana “The Revelation of the Nameless One.” It resembles Edgar Cayce’s readings, or the mediumship of Jane Roberts (Seth), all of which more or less agree, but emphasize different things.
My motto is “Take nothing on faith.” And, symbolic revelations from the depths of Self (all of which is divinity, all the way down) should not be taken on faith either. We have to compare what they say to what we already know, either from mystical experiences or any other kind of study. And we cannot just ignore them, if we really want to understand divinity or immortality. The cards are not all about divinity or mystical states. Many describe our present Dark Age and present various paths and roles we may choose to reverse things, as well as various obstacles and helpers along the way. So if you wish to follow the Way of the Sun, you don’t sit zazen or spend millennia praying, or praising some non-existent god (which I usually write “doG”.) No, you pick a role that suits you and you act on it, in the world. Not as a missionary, for the Way of the Sun is no religion. For that matter, none of the 7 valid paths to Enlightenment are religions.
Sic itur ad astra. To the stars…and immortality.
~~~Dr.H