In the seventh and highest state of consciousness, which Maharishi (1972) calls unity consciousness, one experiences Being as the basis of and permeating all aspects of life: everything is perceived as nothing but expressions of Being. Even though the diversity of life is still appreciated, what dominates in unity consciousness is the experience that all aspects of life, from the most refined to the most manifest levels, are nothing but the self-interacting dynamics of Being, pure consciousness, the substance of our own transcendental consciousness.
For this reason, one is capable of appreciating all objects of perception in terms of the Self (pp. 23-8?23-9). The Vedic literature describes this experience: I am That (pure transcendental consciousness), thou art That, all this is That (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 1.4.10).
Recall that the Upanishads also declared that all fear is born of duality. Although a state of inner nonduality, or inner unity of the Self, is permanently achieved in cosmic consciousness in this first stable state of enlightenment, the inner Self stood separate from the outer, constantly changing, highly diversified world. Hence the outer world is still experienced as fragmented and completely different from the Self.
Only in unity consciousness is the gap between inner and outer reality, between subjective and objective existence fully bridged. As proclaimed in the Bhagavad Gita, in the highest state of enlightenment, one sees the Self in all beings, and all beings in the Self (His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 1967, p. 441). Thus all creation becomes as dear to one as the Self, and one experiences in the most profound sense, The world is my family (Maha Upanishad, 6.71). In this state, not only is fear unthinkable, one becomes maximally nourishing, harmonizing, and enriching toward all of creation.
Andrew Harvey, renowned spiritual writer, and Karuna Erickson, long-time yoga teacher and psychotherapist, have been working together for many years to birth a revolutionary approach to yoga. Heart Yoga fuses at the most passionate depth the ancient traditions of yoga with the wisdom of the mystical traditions concerning the sacred heart and the divine light. Their intention is to inspire the yoga community to become the crucible for the divinization of the body and the birth of the divine human. Heart Yoga is grounded in the universal mystical vision of the Sacred Marriage, the marriage of transcendence and immanence that is continually birthing the cosmos and irradiating it on every level with compassion, joy, sacred passion and sacred peace.
In their book, Heart Yoga: The Sacred Marriage of Yoga and Mysticism, Andrew and Karuna ground the splendor of the vision of the marriage in an unfolding of the five great joys that radiate from it: the joys of transcendence, creation, love for all beings, Tantra, and service. For each of these joys, Andrew and Karuna offer precise and beautiful combinations of classical asanas with sacred poetry, meditations, and visualizations drawn from the classical mystical traditions. These enable each joy to be experienced simultaneously in the illumined mind, ecstatic heart, and increasingly conscious and spiritualized body.
What they have discovered over their years of practice and study is that when yoga practice is infused with the inspiration of sacred texts and poetry, and with precisely tailored mystical meditations on the heart center and on the chakra system, yoga becomes a holy way of experiencing the greatest mystery of all—that of the embodiment of the divine in the human.
Andrew Harvey and Karuna Erickson are both longtime devoted Sacred Activists who believe deeply that the challenges of our times call for a fusion between profound spiritual wisdom and compassion with clear focused radical action in the world. They also believe that in order to act from sacred consciousness in the demanding circumstances of our world crisis we will need not only illumined minds, passionately compassionate hearts, and wills surrendered to the Beloved, but also bodies that have been opened tenderly to the all-empowering energies of the Divine. Heart Yoga is a yoga that can tremendously help this creation in a human being of a unified force-field of embodied divine energy and love.
Andrew and Karuna have already taught this yoga in Canada, the US, and Europe, to mystics, activists, and yoga students of all levels, and have been awed and humbled by its power. It both grounds and inspires the kind of living faith and radiant energy that we are all going to need to co-create with the Divine a new world out of the ashes of the old one. They have also been awed and humbled by the extraordinary response to their new book from many of the world’s major spiritual teachers and leading teachers of yoga. What they have created is an embodied prayer for all human beings to enter into the fullness of the birth of the divine human.
Please join Andrew and Karuna for an experience of Heart Yoga that will deepen and inspire your yoga practice, fill your mind with the wisdom of the Divine, open your heart to the compassion of the Beloved ,and strengthen and infuse your body with the radiance of the Mother’s all-transforming shakti. Andrew Harvey is a renowned and distinguished mystical scholar, Rumi translator and explicator, poet, novelist, spiritual teacher and writer, and architect of Sacred Activism.
Since the recent debate at Caltech on the Future of God , many productive conversations have emerged and developed. During the debate I was often criticized for bringing quantum physics into the discussion of consciousness.
When I referenced the work of Sir Roger Penrose, Sam Harris dismissed it by saying I was quoting it out of context, and that the hall at Caltech could easily be filled with people who disagreed with Penrose’s theories. During the questions phase of the debate, there was a moment of lively but friendly exchange with Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow. A fuller account of the interaction can be found at this article at Digital Journal. However, here is a brief excerpt from our exchange about consciousness:
Moderator: What is it about Deepak’s use of quantum physics that bothers you?
Mlodinow: The term nonlocal, the use was not correct with the pacemaker and all the electrical…
Chopra: I happen to disagree by the way.
Mlodinow: I assume you did since you said that.
Chopra: I think consciousness is nonlocal.
Mlodinow: You know, I have never really come across a definition of consciousness that I understood, so maybe you can teach me something.
Chopra: a field, a superposition of possibilities.
Mlodinow: OK, well, alright, I know what each of those words mean, I still don’t think that…
Chopra: Right now, I’m speaking to a conscious being.
Mlodinow: I hope so.
Since the debate, Leonard Mlodinow and I have corresponded at length about these ideas and have even become good friends. We are considering a collaborative work on these ideas.
After the debate, looking more deeply into the theories of Penrose on quantum physics and consciousness, I have had the pleasure of getting to know Dr. Stuart Hameroff, of quantumconsciousness.org, who has worked extensively with Penrose in developing the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (ORCH-OR) theory of consciousness.
I interviewed Dr. Hameroff last week on my radio show Sirius/XM 102. I will publish that interview as soon as the transcripts are complete. Meanwhile, here is a segment of an email from Stuart about the relationship of quantum physics and consciousness that suggests I was not wrong in my understanding of Penrose’s theories, or that Penrose isn’t a credible physicist.
Dear Deepak,
1) Penrose-Hameroff quantum theory of consciousness includes Penrose who was Stephen Hawkings thesis adviser.
2) The ORCH-OR definition of consciousness is a self-collapse of the wave function, including superposition and non-local entanglement.
3) Reductionists say near death and out-of-body experiences can be induced by brain stimulation. This is not true. What those experiments show is a distortion of body perception which is nothing like the consistent reports of calm, white light, tunnel, and floating. And other comments that such states are caused by hypoxia are similarly flawed because hypoxia causes agitation and confusion, not clarity and peacefulness.
Your plans sound fantastic, I will do whatever I can to help.
Best,
Stuart
This is an exciting time in the development of the understanding of consciousness and the deepest knowledge of physics. I am delighted to be engaged in this discussion with such eminent minds.
Author of a world best seller book “The Power of Now” 1999 Eckhart Tolle points toward the “spaciousness” that surounds every object and every eventin our lives. It must be obvious, but maybe to many of us unnoticed.
The “Face-Off” is a recurring series where opposing sides debate hot topics. In the sixth installment of the series, Deepak Chopra, a physician and best-selling author of “How to Know God,” and prominent scholar, philosopher and writer Jean Houston, will face-off against Michael Shermer, founding publisher of “Skeptic” magazine, and Sam Harris, author of “The End of Faith” on the tension between God and science.
In 2007, the first “Face-Off” tackled the existence of God and pitted actor and evangelical Kirk Cameron and his partner at “The Way of the Master” evangelism ministry against two self-proclaimed atheists. Other past topics include America’s addiction to porn, adultery, Satan, and whether it’s OK to be fat.
Consciousness and brain function are discussed in layman’s terms. Hameroff has worked with mathematician Roger Penrose to map neurological brain function to the world of quantum mechanics.
A Short Biography of Irina Tweedie
Irina Tweedie was a British women who went to live and study in northwest India with a Naqshbandi Sufi teacher. Her book “The Chasm of Fire, A Women’s Experience of Liberation through the Teachings of a Sufi Master” is written in the form of a spiritual diary. She does not write much about her personal background. So the focus here is on her spiritual experience and her relationship with her teacher.
During her training, her teacher did not give her any specific spiritual practice as he believed that while men required this kind of discipline, such things were not necessary for women to develop spiritually. The few years she spent near him consisted largely of sitting in his courtyard or house, observing his interaction with other disciples and family, with occasional terse conversations with him.
The stress resulting from a combination of the heat, noise, smells, physical illness, and emotional deprivation seemed to cause a progressive emptying of her personality. Her teacher described his method of instruction in the following way:
“… we do not teach but quicken. I am stronger than you so your currents adjust themselves to mine” thus causing “the stronger magnetic field to affect, quicken the weaker”.
This combination of suffering so that she would “lose herself in every way”, and the teacher’s continued presence and influence resulted in different spiritual experiences. The following experience occurred to her after nine months of contract with the teacher.
[I] put up my charpoy (rope bed) in the courtyard and lay on my back looking at the sky.
Then it happened. It was as if something snapped inside my head, and the whole of me was streaming out ceaselessly, without diminishing, on and on. There was no ‘me’ – just flowing. Just being. A feeling of unending expansion, just streaming forth. … But all this I knew only later, when I tried to remember it. (The Chasm of Fire, A Women’s Experience of Liberation through the Teachings of a Sufi Master, Irina Tweedie, p. 130)
The diary details a kind of mystical fusion that occurs resulting from devotion and surrender to the teacher in the following journal entry:
Deepest peace. And I nearly fall down when I salute him lately. And the feeling of nothingness before him represents such happiness. He will be resting with his eyes closed or open; and I sit bent in two (a comfortable position for me in his presence) under the blow from the two fans; he and I alone somewhere, where nothing is but peace.
Irina sees her path as leading her towards a state mystical non-being:
Lately, it becomes increasingly lovely. Deep happiness welling from within. From the deepest depth… Also at home, when I think of him, it comes over me … soft, gentle. A bliss of non-being; not existing at all. It is difficult to believe unless one has experienced it, that it is so glorious ‘not to be’. (The Chasm of Fire, A Women’s Experience of Liberation through the Teachings of a Sufi Master, Irina Tweedie, P. 191)
The author continued to deepen and develop this sense of the presence of her teacher, even after his death. Her diaries explore in a profound way the emotional ups and downs of the spiritual path. Irina’a relationship with her teacher is unusual in its impersonal nature and its lack of intellectual content. The relationship illustrates how the powerful presence of a spiritual guide or guru can tacitly and indirectly influence the student causing radical changes in his or her personality, and increasing spiritual depth.
The Sufis are inheritors of a tradition which has influenced many world religions. Their work, which involves dreams, altered states of consciousness and teaching stories, is to further the evolution of humanity by offering deep intuitive training to select individuals. Mrs. Irina Tweedie is a Sufi teacher and author of Daughter of Fire, a diary of her intensive spiritual training in India with a Sufi master.
THE SUFI PATH with IRINA TWEEDIE
JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. With me today is Mrs. Irina Tweedie, the author of an interesting, marvelous book, an autobiography called Daughter of Fire, which documents her years of training in India with a Sufi Master. We’re going to be discussing the Sufi tradition today. Welcome, Mrs. Tweedie.
IRINA TWEEDIE: Thank you.
MISHLOVE: It’s a pleasure to have you here. The Sufis are very strange, mysterious mystics, not very well understood in the West. There’s a lot of mystery, I suppose one could say, about them. They’re thought to be very ancient, normally associated with Islam. And yet you studied with a Hindu Sufi in India.
TWEEDIE: Yes.
MISHLOVE: What is the origin of the Sufis?
TWEEDIE: The origin of the Sufis is so ancient, as ancient, as old as humanity. There was in very, very ancient times, and they say it is even before the Vedic tradition, there was a sect which was called –
MISHLOVE: The Vedic Hindu tradition.
TWEEDIE: The Vedic Hindu tradition, yes. It was called the blanket wearers, the sect of the blanket wearers, which is kamal pash in Sanskrit. They were wandering from country to country in search of truth, and no matter who was saying the truth, they loved to listen to it. It is said that they went to every prophet, and they went even to Jesus.
MISHLOVE: Like the three wise men.
TWEEDIE: Perhaps, yes; I am not sure what it was, but
that’s what our teacher told us. And then one day they heard that there was a prophet in Medina and in Mecca who was preaching the truth, so they decided to go and listen to him. By some psychic means the prophet Mohammed felt that they were coming, and he said, “Some kamal pash, the blanket wearers, are coming.” In fact they came after a few days, and when he saw them coming he said, “There is only one. He has no sons, he has no relations. There is only one.” And they loved it, because they believed in one. They didn’t believe in the Hindu trinity; they didn’t believe in the Christian trinity. They believed that there is only one truth and one God and that’s all that there is to it. So they asked the prophet Mohammed if they could remain with him. He of course agreed. But when the prophet died, they began to be persecuted, because, you see, the leopard cannot change its spots. They were free, free spirits, and they were always rebels. So they would sit in front of the mosque, and they would say, “Why do you go to the mosque?” Like they did in India; they said, “Why do you go to the temple? The Beloved is everywhere. You don’t need to look everywhere; the whole of nature is the mystery of God. You don’t need to pray in the temple or in a mosque.” Of course you can imagine that the priests and the rulers of India or of the Middle Eastern countries, they put them to death. So they were much, much older than Islam.
MISHLOVE: And in some sense, in different periods of time they became the wise advisors to the rulers, and at other periods of time they were regarded as renegades trying to undermine the establishment.
TWEEDIE: Perfectly correct, yes. But they were always rebels. They were always free spirits. If the king was also a free spirit, or the ruler, then he allowed them to help him. But if he was rather of a closed mind and not free, and full of dogmas, he would put them to death. Both things happened sometimes.
MISHLOVE: And it seemed that at some level the Sufis were indifferent as to whether they were rich, whether they were poor, whether they were accepted, whether they were rejected. They were following a completely otherworldly set of values.
TWEEDIE: Correct. In ancient times the great Sufis were shoemakers, they were pot makers, they were tailors. And when the Sufi becomes really rich, or through his talent gets a very good position, he will resign this position. They have to serve human beings in other human beings, in humanity.
MISHLOVE: One of the basic methods of Sufi training, as I understand it, is the use of the teaching story. In fact, I understand that Sufi teaching stories were the basis of Aesop’s fables and the parables of Jesus and many of the fables of a number of different relgions. Even the Jewish hasidic stories are supposedly derived from Sufi tales, and the Brer Rabbit tales.
TWEEDIE: Well, stories have been used in many, many Middle Eastern traditions, and in Sufi groups there is always a Sufi storyteller, or the teacher himself will tell stories, or the disciples will tell stories. They are usually teaching stories with a special meaning on a special day, and for special people. That’s the tradition.
MISHLOVE: And yet these stories have been preserved and handed down over time. One gets the sense, when I hear some people who call themselves Sufis talking about these stories, it’s like there’s a science to the use of the teaching story.
TWEEDIE: Yes, there is. We use them, as one I would like to mention, we use it as dream interpretation. This I feel is the modern way of Sufi stories. They’re modern psychological –
MISHLOVE: Can you explain that? What do you mean by that?
TWEEDIE: We believe that a dream has much more meaning than just a dream. It is the message to us from our unconscious. It is a guiding line how to behave, what to do, in life on the spiritual path. So dreams are usually very, very important, and to interpret a dream is to contact a human being at a different level of consciousness. It helps him to be accepted, to be the center of attention, which everybody likes. And of course the whole group learns from the interpretation of the dream, because it is done in a group, like the Sufi stories.
MISHLOVE: Is there some sense in which the interpreting of a dream is like the telling of a Sufi story?
TWEEDIE: It is like a telling of a Sufi story, exactly. They first will tell you the whole dream, usually a colorful story full of symbolism. Then it will be pulled to pieces and then put together again, and everybody will say his or her opinion. We find that every dream has something special to tell to this particular person, and all of those who interpret it find sometimes glimpses of truth in it.
MISHLOVE: Now, in telling the Sufi stories, you say one tries to find the right story for the right person at the right time, and I guess there’s a sense really of cultivating the intuition in doing that.
TWEEDIE: That is the idea.
MISHLOVE: And also, I gather, then in dream interpretation one uses that same skill.
TWEEDIE: Exactly. That is really the idea at the background of it all.
MISHLOVE: One of the characteristics that you have described in your writing, which is essential to really realize the awareness of the absolute, awareness of the one, to come to that experience of what I guess the mystics have all called divine union — it requires a kind of energy, a kind of special push, sometimes associated, I think in the Hindu yogic tradition, with kundalini, or the energy which the yogis say is like a coiled serpent that rises from the spine and activates almost supernormal powers. This is part of the Sufi tradition as well.
TWEEDIE: It is part of the Sufi tradition as well, and it is a very strong driving force. It is an energy which is, they say, contained within the base of the spine. It should rise to the top of the head through all the chakras. Chakras are psychic centers connected with the spine. There is one right at the base of the spine, there is one here, there is one at the heart, then the throat, then the forehead, and also at the top of the head.
MISHLOVE: They sometimes seem to be associated with the various endocrine glands.
TWEEDIE: They are associated with various endocrine glands, correct.
MISHLOVE: And hormones in the body, the emotional functioning.
TWEEDIE: The emotional function of the human body. You see, spirituality is tremendously difficult. We are so much deluded with the beauties of this world. Don’t we say in the Lord’s Prayer, “Don’t lead me into temptation”? What it means actually — don’t lead me into temptation with Thy beautiful world, which Thou has created. We are so engulfed, so sucked into this beauty of the world, that we really completely forget from where we came, who we are, and where we are going.
MISHLOVE: Lost in the garden, so to speak.
TWEEDIE: Lost in the gardens of beauty of the world. And we need a certain push, sort of to propel us out of this illusion, so Sufis say. And this is exactly this energy which helps us to do that. This energy, very interestingly, has to do with sexual energy. Part of the kundalini energy functions as sex, but only perhaps a third of it. That keeps our body young; we use it as procreation, and it is really important, because it is exactly this virile energy in men and in women which keeps the body alive and gives you this joy of living. The other, the greater part of this serpent energy, as it is called, will lead us out of the world. So it has a double function. They say the snake symbol has a tongue; the tongue is forked. It is as if one fork of the tongue goes into life, and the other leads us out of the life to our real home, which is the spiritual plane.
MISHLOVE: In a sense what you seem to be saying is that ultimately the spiritual life isn’t one of withdrawal, though; it’s a well balanced life where the body is healthy.
TWEEDIE: Absolutely.
MISHLOVE: And we’re here in the garden appreciating all of the beauty of this world, but not lost in it.
TWEEDIE: Our teacher used to say, “No histories, and no exaggerations please. With both feet stand firmly on the ground, but with your head you have to support the world of the sky, so that it doesn’t fall on people.” What he meant is, some people imagine they are so much in the clouds that they think the sky will fall, so we have to keep the balance in us and help others to keep the balance.
MISHLOVE: Now, an essential part of your tradition, I think, is the role of the teacher — that it’s necessary to have the teacher to really achieve these higher states of consciousness.
TWEEDIE: It is important to have a teacher. You see, there comes a time when you are conscious on the different planes of consciousness, say somewhere which is not a physical plane. There you can encounter beings — they could be angels, or they can be dead people, or they can be evil spirits — and they perhaps will tell you that they are the guru, the teacher, or something. Now, how will you know, if there is not somebody who takes you by the hand and explains it to you? So at the beginning one does need somebody. You see, if you go to unknown country, the forest or desert, you always need a guide. The Sufi teachers are called guides. They guide the soul. They are not gurus, and not even teachers — just guides, to explain the beings where they are standing at that moment. That is really the function.
MISHLOVE: Now, when you describe these beings — the angels, the demons, the spirits of the dead — right away I’m thinking to myself, well, you know, our mind is full of thoughts. We have a stream of thoughts, little voices inside of us. We call them our thoughts all the time, suggesting go this way, go that way. We really have to make the same kinds of distinctions in our own life.
TWEEDIE: Yes, that is perfectly true. The mind can be a terrible devil. In fact they call it in Persian shaitan, which means Satan.
MISHLOVE: The mind itself?
TWEEDIE: The mind itself. The mind itself is a terrible devil. It will mirror in front of us all sorts of things, evil thoughts and everything, and we must be able to distinguish what we want to do according to our free will — to follow this thought or that thought, or this behavior or that behavior.
MISHLOVE: In other words, to become the master of our own minds.
TWEEDIE: Correct. That is what we are supposed to do. It is really the important part of spiritual life.
MISHLOVE: And it almost seems like a paradox in there, because surely if one is to become the master of one’s own mind, it must be at least some part of the mind that would like to become a master of every other part of it.
TWEEDIE: You see, that is a great paradox you have just mentioned, because it is the higher part of the mind which will become the master of the lower part of the mind — lower in the sense of the denser, the more ignorant part of the mind. I do not believe in sin. Sin is only ignorance, and to get out of ignorance we need something more positive than just ignorance.
MISHLOVE: You’re introducing the notion of hierarchy here, I see.
TWEEDIE: Yes. You see, you can’t cut cheese with cheese. You must cut cheese with a knife which is harder than cheese. If you want to control the lower intellect, you must have the higher intellect in order to be able to do it, and also the will power, which is absolutely divine in the human being.
MISHLOVE: And this is the role of the teacher, I gather, is the development of the will power, the higher forms of intellect.
TWEEDIE: Exactly. You used the word intuition, which was quite correct. The higher form of intellect is exactly intuition. Very, very true. That has to be developed. And you know, there are human beings who have a great amount of this power of intuition, and yet I know very intelligent people who haven’t got it at all. And I know very simple people — I met peasants in India who are unbelievably intuitional. Intuition works like a spark, and you see, all the great inventions, all the great discoveries, really do not come from the mind. If you watch it, you will see. What does the mind do? It calculates, it prepares the field, it prepares the cup. But the ultimate spark is always intuition. It may be an apple falling from the tree, like in the case of Newton. It may be this little bit of mold, which will one day be penicillin, and so on and so forth. The ultimate fact, the ultimate factor, in every invention, every discovery, is intuition. The mind prepares only the field.
MISHLOVE: It’s as if what we’re saying is that creativity comes from another realm, to us.
TWEEDIE: From the spiritual realm. You know, the real wisdom, the gnosis, comes from the soul. It’s not in our mind. And we do not even think with the brain; the modern neurologists will tell you that. I listened three or four years ago to Peter Finnick (?), one of the great neurologists in England. He was giving us a most wonderful talk about the mind, the hemispheres of the brain, and he repeated it twice — I taped his talk because I was so interested — that we do not think with our brain. We think somewhere above our head, in our mental body, and the brain is only transmuting it and puts it into words. It’s only a kind of computer, a kind of — how shall I say? — instrument.
MISHLOVE: Well, I know Sir John Eccles, who’s a Nobel laureate in neurophysiology, refers to this soul or spirit massaging the brain. But it’s a minority view; most scientists would disagree with that position. But the Sufis, they really seem to be the experts in this knowledge of the soul.
TWEEDIE: You know, it is only a minority view now; it’s going to be the majority view. And the more science progresses, the more it comes nearer to spirituality, and one day they will merge. I’m absolutely sure of it.
MISHLOVE: Idries Shah, the great Sufi writer, suggests that really what the Sufis are doing is in effect guiding the evolution of the human race.
TWEEDIE: That is perfectly correct. I agree with it entirely. Our teacher said the same in different words. Yes.
MISHLOVE: And it would seem as if — and I know that there’s a Sufi tradition not to talk about a lot of these esoteric subjects until the pupil is ready, so I can understand your reticence about discussing them — but there is a sense in which when these esoteric subjects are revealed, that much of the work of the Sufi trainer goes on in the inner planes itself, in the realm of the origin of creativity, in the realm of spirit — that there’s almost — perhaps I’m reaching too far, but would it be untrue to say that the Sufis are almost like technicians of that realm?
TWEEDIE: You know, I would say you are a Sufi. You put it beautifully. It’s exactly like that.
MISHLOVE: Well, I feel complimented by that, but I’m speculating, really. I get the sense that perhaps there’s a very precise knowledge of the inner workings, and perhaps those of us — and I really include myself — are like children, we don’t understand. Like when I was a young child I didn’t know how automobiles worked, or electronic equipment worked, but I knew other people did. And now as I begin, as we all begin to explore the realm of the spirit, I wonder if there aren’t engineers and technicians of this realm as well. And perhaps the Sufis embody that knowledge.
TWEEDIE: Well, I think they do, but only the Sufis at the very high stage of evolution, who we call the masters or the teachers. And they help us, humanity as a whole, to make a step forward into their reality. Not everybody; the ordinary Sufi usually haven’t got it, only the great ones. But you described it very well. It’s exactly like that.
MISHLOVE: In your own training, in your book, you describe how your master would appear to you, I get the feeling, in your dreams.
TWEEDIE: Yes. And now I can always contact my master,
not only in meditation. At the beginning I could contact him only in meditation. Now I can contact him at any time. It’s just an impression into the heart, and one knows. But I never can contact him for me, only for others, when somebody needs help. For myself I can never contact him.
MISHLOVE: Perhaps you don’t need to at this point.
TWEEDIE: Well, I don’t know. Sometimes one needs. Sometimes life can be pretty miserable for everybody.
MISHLOVE: And you certainly described in your training that you were going through very, very miserable times. I suppose one might say he even pushed you into that misery. There’s a purpose for it. I suppose one might say, if we’re looking at the evolution of a species, maybe there is a purpose or a value in the misery that the human race has suffered.
TWEEDIE: Well, you see, unfortunately we are made in such a way that we do not learn if we don’t suffer. We have to experience pain in order to learn. And here perhaps one could explain the law of karma. People say, “Oh, it is bad karma because I suffer.” Not necessarily. I believe karma is a school of learning, and if the lesson which I have even learned before, perhaps I have to suffer a little bit in order to learn it once more. That’s all there is to it.
MISHLOVE: So it might be very comforting, and perhaps an illusion at some level, if in our suffering there are these higher spirits, Sufi masters if you will, who are watching, who are guiding, who are pushing us, in a sense, towards some higher realization. I guess the risk is that we don’t delude ourselves, thinking about being led by these higher beings.
TWEEDIE: Why do you think that we delude ourselves? There are such higher beings. They are just elder brothers or sisters who did that before, and they are helping us. I believe that. Besides, I really believe that we are never alone. Every one of us, we have somebody at the other side who is helping us. That is our ancestor, or somebody who loved you, your mother, your father, who are not in this life anymore; or a teacher, who feels that this soul needs this particular help at this particular time. I believe that, you know. It’s not an illusion, I can assure you. There is a great mystical brotherhood, somewhere, watching us human beings.
MISHLOVE: What you’re saying reminds me of a psychotherapeutic thought that I have, and that is that the role of the therapist — and I suppose the spiritual master is much the same — is to comfort the disturbed, but also to disturb the comfortable.
TWEEDIE: [Laughs.] Beautifully put. Really lovely. It is exactly that. You see, you have to confuse the mind in order that the mind should give up and the intuition should come through. It is as simple as that.
MISHLOVE: So really in confronting a spiritual tradition like Sufism, one has to honestly expect to go through a sense of turmoil. Without the turmoil the path may not be worthwhile.
TWEEDIE: Yes, I think we have to, because we are so conditioned in this world, in our education, our heredity, our dogmas, religion and so on, that we really have to be shaken out of it. And Sufis usually work with shock tactics. This is similar to Zen Buddhists.
MISHLOVE: Ultimately it’s as if your goal is — I said spiritual technicians; now I almost have a sense that the Sufis are like sociologists, seeing behind the social conditioning.
TWEEDIE: Yes, yes, and it is all done on the entirely psychological level. And if you really have the time and the will to read the book, you will see that the whole ancient training of ancient Sufis, devised thousands of years ago, is really modern psychology, from beginning to end. It really is.
MISHLOVE: Well, Mrs. Tweedie, one has a sense that there is more depth even to Sufism than one would find in modern psychology, with all of its magnificence. It’s like modern psychology may be the garden, but Sufism seems to combine psychology, sociology, religion, spirituality, and creativity, all of these things.
TWEEDIE: I would rather say where the analysis and modern psychology end, there the Sufis or the spirituality begins.
MISHLOVE: Mrs. Irina Tweedie, thank you very much for being with me.
The Intuition Network, A Thinking Allowed Television Underwriter, presents the following transcript from the series Thinking Allowed, Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery, with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove.
JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I’m Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we’re going to explore unfurling the potential of being. With me is Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, initiate of an Indian Sufi order. Pir Vilayat is the author of numerous books including Toward the One, The Message in Our Time, The Call of the Dervish, and Introducing Spirituality into Counseling and Therapy. Welcome.
PIR VILAYAT INAYAT KHAN: Thank you.
MISHLOVE: It’s really a pleasure to be with you. You know, in your writings you often describe the struggle, the conflict that we humans engage in as we’re caught in between our dual nature. We’re locked into a finite body, each with our own life story and melodrama, and yet simultaneously we’re like God; we partake of the entire cosmos.
KHAN: Yes. I call that reconciliation of irreconcilables. It’s very difficult for our minds to accept this dual nature of identity, and I think we’re cutting right into the main problem of psychology. I think most people have a bad self-image, or overcompensate, or don’t know how to assess their value in any way. Because it’s very difficult to accept what my father calls “the aristocracy of the soul, together with the democracy of the ego”; or he calls it “the greatest pride in one’s divine inheritance, and humility about one’s inadequacy in bringing it through, and yet still accepting the divinity of one’s being” — I think as Christ said, “Be perfect as your Father.”
MISHLOVE: Somehow, listening to you talk about this peculiar dilemma that we humans are in is making me feel that the whole thing is very humorous.
KHAN: Yes, I think there’s some point about laughing about things we don’t understand.
MISHLOVE: But it’s almost ironic somehow, and maybe quite ridiculous, that as cosmic beings we’re always finding ourselves in such dilemmas.
KHAN: Yes. Well, the Sufis say, “Oh, man, if you only knew that you’re free. It’s your ignorance of your freedom that is your captivity.” And I would add, if only you knew what the potentials in your being are, you would realize that it’s your ignorance of those potentials that limit you to the inadequate sense of your self-image, or your inadequate self-esteem — denigrating yourself.
MISHLOVE: As I look through your writings, I get a sense that there’s just vast almost infinitudes, when we talk about human potential and the levels of being. In a sense what you seem to do is look at the spiritual writings of every religion and tradition, and somehow assemble them all together so that it’s as if we have choirs of angels and layers and layers of spiritual vibrations interpenetrating us, and that’s who we are, rather than these tiny people living out their lives.
KHAN: Well, you’re interpreting my teaching better than I could do. You’re saying it very beautifully indeed, and that is how I feel. I also include not just the religions but the teachings of, for example, C.J. Jung.
MISHLOVE: Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist.
KHAN: Yes. Because what we are doing is really to individuate the unconscious, the collective unconscious. That’s what we really are talking about — getting in touch with what I call cosmic and transcendental dimensions of our being of which we are not aware; and we only identify ourselves with, let’s say, the apex of the cone that’s upside down, whereas we belong to the whole cone, or our being extends to the whole cone. And so it’s just a matter of gaining awareness of other dimensions of one’s being beyond the commonplace ones.
MISHLOVE: It’s almost as if anything wonderful about ourselves that we can imagine, that we are.
KHAN: Yes. Well, there’s a great power in creative imagination. Now of course there’s a difference between creative imagination and fantasy, and I try to get as clear as possible about the difference. I think creative imagination is somehow monitoring the programming of the universe, and fantasizing is getting alienated from the overall order. And when I talk about an order, I don’t mean a static one; I’m talking about the dynamic order.
MISHLOVE: It’s almost as if perhaps fantasy is only the first stage of creative imagination at best.
KHAN: I think that it probably does play a part in the active imagination, because, as you probably know, Dr. Prigogine, who is one of the leading scientists of our time, in Brussels, calls creativity a fluctuation from sclerosed equilibrium. So the order of the universe could be looked upon as it could be static, if were not continually being fluctuated away from its equilibrium. And that is what we’re doing in our creativity. I call it exploring “What if?” How would it look if we looked at this problem in a different way than we’ve been looking at it so far? That’s creative imagination.
MISHLOVE: Isn’t there a sense, in the work of the Sufis, that it’s a question of filling those mental images with a level of being? I’m reminded of a line from a song by the Sufi Choir, I think a line that is attributed to you in fact, which is, “Sing a song of glory, and you will be the glory.”
KHAN: Oh yes. Well, that’s absolutely right on. That’s exactly how — you see, I feel mentation is an act of glorification. But one can only glorify if one is willing to accept the wonder of the divine inheritance in one’s being, and we’re always seeking outside ourselves that which is already in us. I think it was Plotinus, the neo-Platonic philosopher of the third century, who said, “That which we fail to discover in contemplation we try to experience in our relationship with the outer world.” And of course actually, as a matter of fact, many years ago when I was on the guru hunt in the Himalayas, I came across a rishi sitting in a cave in the snow, and the first thing he said to me was, “Why have you come so far to see what you should be?”
MISHLOVE: Why have you come so far to see –
KHAN: What you should be. And actually, of course, the answer is, to become what one is, one needs to see oneself in another oneself who’s better able to manifest what one is than oneself.
MISHLOVE: You referred earlier to the scientific work of Prigogine, and if I can come around back to that, there’s always the movement from equilibrium to a new equilibrium. There’s this sense that I get from the Sufis and the dancing, the turning, the movement, it’s everything is always happening; we always have to go inside and outside and to the next level and to unfold and unfurl level after level of being.
KHAN: Yes, yes. I’m always seeking new horizons, and I don’t like to simply convey dogmatic kind of teaching. I’m more or less trying to explore new ways of helping the human being to unfurl. The methods that I’m using now are typical to be found amongst the visionary experiences of some of the Sufi mystics in a state of reverie.
So I think we’re coming very close to what you were saying about the relationship between the collective unconscious and personal conscious. So in a state of reverie, the door is open. One is suspended at the threshold between day consciousness and sleep with dreams.
So the mind is projecting forms surreptitiously; there’s no way of controlling it when it is really in a state of reverie. We’re not using our will. On the other hand, I find that one can monitor that experience — not with one’s will but with one’s emotion; but with one’s attunement rather than one’s will.
MISHLOVE: A very delicate state, isn’t it?
KHAN: A very delicate state. And the reason why I say that is because one could easily slip into the dark unconscious and get swallowed up by it. So of course I’m trying to monitor it myself in group meditations, to keep people attuned to their highest aspirations, so that they don’t have bad, traumatic experiences, which might be very disturbing.
MISHLOVE: But this level of being awake inside of the dream must be a very important level in uniting the individual consciousness with the divine consciousness.
KHAN: Yes, yes. That’s several levels, of course, because, you see, divine consciousness — and this is the basic motto of Sufism — it’s all one. I mean, we don’t think of God as other than ourselves, but as the totality of which we are not a fraction, but rather according to the holistic paradigm, every so-called fraction includes the whole, potentially the whole.
So it’s a whole new way of thinking of God, instead of thinking of God as other than oneself and up there somewhere and kind of projecting a personality upon God that’s anthropomorphic. Actually, one of the Sufi dervishes said, “Why do you look for God up there? He is here.”
MISHLOVE: There is a sense in your teachings in which you encourage people to sort of step out of themselves, and simultaneously see themselves as a larger and larger being, bit by bit, until they can hold it all in the mind.
KHAN: Yes.
MISHLOVE: It must take some discipline to be able to maintain these states for longer and longer periods.
KHAN: Yes. Well, of course there are techniques that are helpful — for example, breathing techniques, associated with a change in the focus of one’s consciousness. There are four different dimensions, as a matter of fact. For example, one can expand one’s consciousness, have this wonderful, oceanic feeling of being part of all things; it’s called participation mystique. And I find that the best way of doing it is instead of identifying with one’s physical body, to identify with one’s electromagnetic field, and eventually with one’s aura, neither of which have a boundary. So it’s very much in line with what Ken Wilber says — no boundary, you know.
MISHLOVE: Ken Wilber is the author of a book called No Boundary. Let me take you back a minute, because you used a term I’d like you to define — aura.
KHAN: Aura, yes. Well, yes, of course I wish I had a lot of time to do so. Let’s say the physical counterpart of the aura would be simply the radiance of photons, what one calls in science bioluminescence, where plants radiate a certain amount of photons, and so does the human body, and of course electrons that are being photographed in Kirlian photography.
The curious thing is that one can increase the amount of photons that one radiates purely by an act of visual representation. If you imagine that you are surrounded with light, and you enjoy looking in light, as we’re doing now, then somehow the cells of your body start dividing more rapidly, their energy is enhanced, and as a consequence one’s whole body radiates more light. Now, that is something that can be observed in the laboratory.
MISHLOVE: I’ve never heard of any research to that effect.
KHAN: Oh yes, oh yes. Dr. Motoyama, for example, in Tokyo. But there was a team of Hungarian-Romanian physicists who were measuring the photons radiated by the body.
MISHLOVE: I’d want to look at that kind of research carefully. But I think what you’re suggesting is something on a more metaphorical level.
KHAN: Well, as I said, that’s only the physical counterpart of what we understand about the aura. In fact I came to grief once when I was giving a talk in Oxford, and there were some scientists there who said, Pir Vilayat, you’re using a word which for us has a very specific meaning — light. And you’re using it in a metaphorical sense.
So I said, “Well, I don’t think physicists have a monopoly on the word light; it’s been used before in a sense that you wouldn’t use yourself.” But since that time, of course, I came across Dr. David Bohm, who said that what we know of physical reality is only a ripple on the ocean of reality, and therefore what we know of light in physics is only one very small dimension of the phenomenon of light in general.
MISHLOVE: And the Sufis use a term that I find quite interesting. I’ve come across it in your writings — the uncreated light.
KHAN: Yes. But that is a word that’s also used by the early Christian fathers. Actually, the Sufis make a difference between the light that sees and the light that is seen. And so if you ask me now to define the aura, well, I suppose that is the light that could be seen, and in certain circumstances one can even actually see.
For example, St. Elmo’s light — you know, that’s seen around ships; and then the photograph around the lunar module when it landed on the moon. There was some thought it could be explained by dust, but I don’t know. That’s very controversial.
MISHLOVE: Well, perhaps we shouldn’t get too much into these details. As we talk about unfurling the potentials of being, what you’re suggesting is that there are these realms that we hear of in folklore and on what are sometimes the fringes of science, and these are very real to you in your experience, and important for us to acknowledge, I gather, in our understanding of our being.
KHAN: Yes. Well, what we do is taking specific qualities, and working with those qualities, rather like a composer would work with a musical theme and make variations on it and try to explore all the potentialities within that theme. So basically we do have these qualities; that’s what we call the divine inheritance. But how do we actuate them in our personality? That is a creative process, which is, as I say, very similar to that of composing or writing or painting.
MISHLOVE: You know, since you’ve referred to music, I’m reminded of a story that you wrote about, of a time when you were very depressed and cured yourself of this depression by listening to Bach.
KHAN: Yes. Well, I had an accident, and my fiance was killed, and I was really very broken and I couldn’t understand how such a thing could happen. And it is true, I didn’t want to live. I mean, I went through a very bad crisis. I was an officer in the British Navy at the time.
I asked if I could be posted somewhere far away, and I was posted in India. Fortunately I was on an easy assignment, just care and maintenance of a flotilla. So every night I played the whole B Minor Mass of Bach, every night for about three months. And that is what cured me, because this tremendous glorification of heaven seems to me to be the only thing that will help one overcome one’s personal pain. I remember words of Buddha, who said, “One misses the glory by being caught up in one’s personal emotions.”
MISHLOVE: There’s a sense also in which Bach’s Mass in B Minor has very, very sad moments, and perhaps to reach the glory one has to go right into the pain.
KHAN: Yes. But then Bach has that wonderful ability to make the quantum leap from pain to extreme joy, from one moment to the other — for example, from the Contritio right into the Sanctus, the Hosannah. Or from the Crucifixus to the Resurrexit. The transit is fantastic, of course.
And I suppose that’s what it is. I think that one needs to get in touch with one’s anger and one’s pain, instead of being heroic about it or not acknowledging it, and then use these impulses, harness these impulses in a positive way. In fact that is basically the Sufi teaching about mastery. Instead of repressing desire, we consider that our positive desires — to be creative in some way, build a beautiful house or compose a symphony or whatever our objective is — expressions of the divine nostalgia.
MISHLOVE: The divine nostalgia.
KHAN: The divine nostalgia. That’s a word that we use all the time, the divine nostalgia. So it’s not the way of desirelessness of Buddhism, or detachment, or living in a cave. No, it’s that joie de vivre, the joy of life, that we’re really experiencing the divine joy and the creativity of the universe, the way that the divine intention manifests in a concrete way. And also the extraordinary feat of generosity whereby the divine will multiplies itself by the gift of free will.
MISHLOVE: It’s almost as if you’re suggesting that these very human melodramas that we all go through, that we described in the beginning of this program as somehow being irreconcilable with the divine nature, that these things are the very food that brings us to the divine as we work through the emotions of our life.
KHAN: Well, we don’t like to make too much of a distinction between divine emotion and human emotion. We would say that we tried to monitor the divine emotion into our personal emotions, so that there’s no cleavage between the two. In other words, we need to experience divine joy in our humanness, which is very different from the whole idea of beatitude. It’s bringing joy into our daily lives, instead of opening one drawer and then closing another, being in a beatific state and then being back in life again — making it one, you see.
MISHLOVE: So the path that you teach is not one of simply withdrawing from the world and contemplating and entering into a very high state. That would be incomplete.
KHAN: Yes. I still feel that it’s good to be able to do that from time to time, for a short while, or just even for a split second, because I find that most people react to the challenge of situations rather than act. And if you react, you’re not using all the potentialities of being. It’s like a short circuit, like a reflex action, for example. Therefore I think there is some value in facing the battle between the challenge in oneself and being able to learn how to turn within.
Psychology is trying to do this, get in touch with your feelings and your emotions. But what I’m talking about is much deeper. It’s getting in touch with your thinking rather than your thoughts, or your feeling rather than your emotions. A deeper reality.
MISHLOVE: I recall that in one of your writings you suggest that we could think of ourselves as the eyes through which God sees, or we could think of ourselves as the divine glance.
KHAN: Yes, that’s right. You got that. Well, yes, that’s absolutely crucial. I think that makes all the difference. I’m trying to practice it, of course, because I like to practice what I preach.
For example, walking the streets you realize that even the focus of your glance gets conditioned by what you see, and what we’re trying to do, then, is to offset your glance so that you grasp that which transpires behind that which appears. Now, that sounds very metaphysical, doesn’t it?
But a very good example of that which transpires behind that which appears is, for example, what happens in photographing flowers in ultraviolet light. They look very different; they’re much more beautiful, translucent.
MISHLOVE: Iridescent, yes.
KHAN: Iridescent.
MISHLOVE: And there’s that sense, I suppose, behind the mundane reality, the dullness of our lives from time to time, that there’s really a brilliance, a radiance, if we could only awaken to it.
KHAN: Well, then, actually you get to a point when you start seeing what I call the inner face emerging through the outer face — or let us say the countenance emerging through the face.
MISHLOVE: The countenance emerging through the face. Yes.
KHAN: So it doesn’t have an outline, it doesn’t have a borderline. It’s just like those flowers that are photographed in ultraviolet light.
MISHLOVE: That’s quite — it’s giving me cause to pause just a moment, and just take that insight in. Being with you has been such a rich experience –
KHAN: Thank you very much.
MISHLOVE: — that we could listen to each thought and pause on it for a long time. But we’re out of time now, so Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, thank you very much for being with me.
From the scientific underground of psychic research comes a stunning report on the evidence for life after death. But all the proof in the world is nothing when compared to actual experience with the place beyond.
This book takes the reader to the next level — and offers a more personal kind of journey. If there is a “next world,” it must be nearby, and the path leads through the gateways of our own minds. Philosopher Michael Grosso shows us how to open these passages — or at least peek through a keyhole — and glimpse what may lie beyond. This is the guidebook for an adventure that nobody can refuse.
Posted by Greg
Michael Grosso is a teacher, author, and painter, whose interests span psychical research, metaphysical art, the parapsychology of religion, and, primarily, philosophy. [Michael Grosso] He received his Ph.D. in philosophy, and studied classical Greek, at Columbia University, and has taught at City University of New York, Marymount Manhattan College, and City University of New Jersey. He is currently affiliated with the Division of Personality Studies of the University of Virginia.
Michael has published books on topics ranging from life after death to the mythologies of endtime – some titles include The Millennium Myth, Soulmaking, and Frontiers of the Soul. His most recent book, Experiencing the Next World Now (Amazon US and UK), presents the best current evidence for life after death, but also offers the reader practical methods for ‘peeking through the keyhole’ at what may lie beyond.
GT: Hi Michael, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Could you begin by introducing yourself to readers with a short history of how and why you began your research into the idea of ‘the afterlife’?
MG: Probably what first got me going was realizing one day I was going to die. ‘So what does this mean?’, I thought. But there was something else. I kept having experiences that contradicted the mainline materialism dished up in the schools–especially graduate school in which belief in spirits was sheer heresy.
What I experienced and what the standard view of reality was, were at odds. That got me to study psychical research: what was really going on?
GT: Could you describe in more detail these experiences which led you to re-evaluate the standard view of reality?
MG: I actually had a variety of paranormal experiences. One of the most striking was a series of three dreams in which I saw Ronald Reagan being shot. [Soulmaking] From the images I could see he was shot in the shoulder (he was), and the last dream was symbolic, in which I saw the President naked from the waist up and beaming with health. I inferred he would survive any attack (correct).
I reported these dreams to my students who were duly astonished when the man was actually shot. I’ve seen apparitions of dead people that conveyed veridical information, for example, a dead great aunt I had never met but whom I later identified in a photo I’d never seen. I also projected my tangible double across the Atlantic ocean to my girlfriend. For details, see my book Soulmaking (1997) Hampton Roads Publishing (available from Amazon US and UK).
GT: Your latest book, Experiencing the Next World Now contains a broad review of the evidence for the survival of consciousness after death, to this point. Could you share with readers which cases you would consider the ‘best of the best’? And, to provide some balance, what do you see as the main arguments against the survival hypothesis?
MG: The whole pattern of survival-related stories–not individual startling cases–is what persuades me that some people continue to be conscious after they shed their bodies. There are types of case, certain features of cases, that suggest survival.
For example, if there is verified intelligence from a deceased person, like when a lost will is found through a deceased agent. Or suppose a stranger intrudes on a mediumistic performance, and correctly identifies himself.
There are records of known deceased researchers communicating through several mediums at a time. Numerous, detailed reports of reincarnation memories, behaviors, and related birth marks and birth deffects, strengthen the survival hypothesis. The near-death experience is suggestive. Parts of the brain go out of commission during cardiac arrest and general anaesthesia.
Without these parts, conscious experience is believed to be impossible. But under these conditiuons, in the famous near-death experience, people not only have conscious experiences, they have enhanced experiences. And then there are those excursions out of the body, verified objectively, which point to the separability of consciousness from the body. It’s really the detailed pattern that convinces me something very interesting is going on.
GT: The book goes beyond the idea of simply serving up evidence from others on ‘survival’ though, and encourages readers toward personal experience through methods of altering consciousness.
Now we all know that the ‘New Age’/’Metaphysical’ section at the local bookstore is filled with titles by self-appointed experts on such ideas – how do we sort the wheat from the chaff and find the genuine methods which might provide something worthwhile?
To my mind, perhaps the best idea is to trust those with a history – for example, shamanic methods of altering consciousness and other ancient rites. Would you agree with this, or do you believe we need to formulate new methods for our modern lifestyle?
MG: I think there is a wealth of traditiional materials we can draw upon to guide us to “experience the next world now.” We could model ourselves after native vision questers, Tibetan dreamers, Sufi color enthusiasts, or Chinese foetal breathers.
I try to understand the psychology at work in a given system, and to adapt that understanding to my practical life. The idea is to reconstitute myself in such a way that I become more transparent, more porous to trans- or sub-liminal impressions, images, energies. The Kingdom of Heaven is within us; it’s another state of consciousness.
GT: Having said that, do you think it is necessary that people have guidance in this sort of exploration? Despite the ‘gnostic dream’ of doing it all yourself – away from the rigidity of organised religion – many of the ancient systems employed ‘superiors’ to help the neophyte understand and integrate their experiences.
MG: Of course it’s always wise to allow oneself to be guided by those more knowledgeable in any field of endeavor. Trouble is, there are few clear and unequivocal experts in this realm of experience, which depends on luck, context, and inspiration–a little like art or any creative venture. There is bound to be an element of risk in stepping beyond the enchanted boundary and fools and the foolhardy should beware. But how can we legislate against self-exploration?
GT: In your essay “The Flatliner Paradigm”, you explain your own feelings about the possibility of survival of consciousness: [The Millennium Myth] “When I look closely within myself, what I feel constraining me toward belief in probable extinction is the sense that I do not inhabit the kind of universe where the leap into a new mode of existence after biological death is possible or, at any rate, probable.”
Do you think this is based on valid reasoning, or is your concern perhaps a result of inculcation in the materialist paradigm? I’d appreciate hearing more of your ‘inner dialogue’ on this subject.
MG: Thanks for that question. There is no doubt about the hypnotic spell of the materialist paradigm. In spite of direct experiences of my own, my views on survival remain in skeptical suspense.
On the other hand, there’s nothing we know about the universe that forbids the idea of conscious survival. After all, against the miracle of there being a universe in the first place, and of dumb matter evolving into an Einstein or Nicole Kidman, and then consciousness appearing on the scene, it seems like just another evolutionary lift-off into novelty for consciousness to slip away from its neural substrate..
GT: Do you think that quantum physics might play a role in allowing humanity to accept better some of these models? Some of the concepts in modern physics surely throw our whole concept of reality into doubt?
MG: I think concepts of modern physics could play a role in two ways. First, they show that our naive mechanistic and materialistic views of the world are a misleading facade for what ultimate reality may really consist of.
Next to quantum realities, nonlocality, etc., what’s the big deal about the paranormal? Second, on some interpretations of quantum physics mind proves to be an integral feature of our description of reality.
GT: Nevertheless, the scientific paradigm is still very much grounded in Newtonian physics. In fact, you have written that “thanks to scientific materialism, the dominant metaphysical conceit of the age, anything supporting the reality of minds as substances…tends to be ignored, if not repressed, by the watchdogs of mainstream culture.”
Could you say who you regard as the ‘watchdogs’, and can you cite examples of the repression of evidence?
MG: The watchdogs are embedded in all layers of the culture, the press, the scientific establishment, the university, the religious establishment, etc. The repression takes the form of negative hallucinations; the evidence is not noticed, discussed, regarded. Here’s an amusing example. I gave a copy of Alan Gauld’s Mediumship and Survival to a fellow philosopher; he refused to look at it. “It’s just a book,” he said.
GT: So, with the materialist paradigm as entrenched as it is, one would think that it would require some ‘shock’ to move towards contemplation of the survival hypothesis rather than simple accumulation of experimental data. While veridical out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are not in themselves proof of survival, do you think solid evidence on this front could be used an ‘assault’ on the current paradigm?
MG: Why just veridical OBEs? I believe there’s a huge amount of data, normal, abnormal, and supernormal, from hypnotic reversals of congenital disease (icthyosis) and placebos that invert physiological responses to Joseph of Copertino’s levitations that assaults the paradigm. Then there’s strictly normal stuff like subjective consciousness, its unity, memory, dreams, free voluntary acts, etc. that can’t be digested by physicalism. Very few are willing to look at all this with a cool comprehensive eye.
GT: Well, I was thinking more in terms of what it would take to win over your CSICOPs out there – and I think it would have to be something very straightforward to remove room for doubting.
I would say positive results in viewing hidden symbols or numbers through out-of-body experience would constitute extremely strong evidence. Having said that, scientists such as Dean Radin might argue that we’re already at that point with the mass of positive results over the past decade in related fields (remote viewing, precognition etc).
MG: I agree with Dean and believe there is ample data out there already, experimental and spontaneous cases, that suffice to prove to any rational and open-minded person that psi is a fact of nature and that a decent case can be made for postmortem survival. I often tell diehard disbelievers to read the first ten or fifteen volumes of the English Proceedings for Psychical Research and then come back for a chat.
GT: Lastly, I’d like to cover the question of whether we are seeing a core mechanism at work behind many seemingly different experiences. Ken Ring has written about the integration of near-death experience (NDE) study with other areas such as shamanism and abductions. [Experiencing the Next World Now] Jacques Vallee and John Keel have long espoused a psychical aspect to the UFO question.
John Mack has now brought a similar question to bear in abduction research, and of late research into entheogens (for example, Rick Strassman with DMT and Karl Jansen with Ketamine) has contemplated the same areas. Your book covers these topics as well. Are we seeing some great awakening to the unity of these experiences, and perhaps a validation of Henri Corbin’s ideas of the imaginal realms (versus the imaginary or utopian)?
MG: I could add to that list of names. It would be nice if someone made an anthology of theoretical papers on the unity you allude to. We could use a good general theory of psi-mediated anomalies; I think it would shed light on certain points in religious studies.
As for the imaginal world, surcharged and undergirded by the psychokinetic and extrasensorial properties of psi, it’s a potent theoretical construct. We could use it to corral all manner of mind-monster and metaphysical wild bunch.
GT: Sounds like a good project for the weekend at the very least, Michael! Thanks for taking the time to chat with us here at the Daily Grail, and best wishes for the success of your book.
Table of Contents
Introduction
PART ONE: Experiences
Chapter 1: Ecstatic Journeys
Chapter 2: Of Ghosts & Spirits
Chapter 3: The Medium and the Message
Chapter 4: One Self, Many Bodies
PART TWO: Challenges
Chapter 5: Explanations
Chapter 6: Imagining the Next World
PART THREE: Connections
Chapter 7: Evolution
Chapter 8: Mental Bridges
Chapter 9: The Otherworld Nearby
PART FOUR: Practice
Chapter 10: Flatliner Models
Chapter 11: Changing Our Way of Life
Andrew Harvey, Oxford scholar and visionary, believes that our survival depends on Sacred Activism, a fusion of profound mystical awareness, passion, clarity and sacred practice with wise, dedicated, radical action. This fusion, he warns, may be the sole key to preservation of man and nature.
Harvey envisions what he calls The Seven Heads of the Beast of the Apocalypse as:
1. population explosion
2. environmental pollution
3. religious fundamentalism
4. proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
5. separation from nature through technology
6. corrupt conglomerations that own and create mass media
7. societies that multitask, which makes it “impossible to concentrate on our divine nature.”
A grim list, until Harvey counters with the Seven Stars:
1. the current world crisis that compels us to strip away false agendas and “to look deeply into the shadow of humanity”
2. the emerging technologies of wind, solar and hydrogen power
3. the birth of the Internet, a popular, affordable global means of communication
4. the mystical revolution of the past 20 years
5. the rise of compassionate non-violence as envisioned by Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, and evidenced in the collapse of the Berlin wall
6. the return of the “Divine Feminine,” which is reflected in the growing recognition of mankind’s interconnectedness
7. the birth of “divine humanity,” or the growing belief that God is within each of us.
Harvey counsels as he dances from theme to theme that the five ways to become a “mystical activist” are:
* to serve the divine, to make a space for God in your life
* to serve yourself, so that you will be grounded in reality
* to serve others
* to serve your local community
* to serve your global community.
He believes that each individual can become a mystical activist by “becoming conscious at every level and conscious of all choices.”
In turn eloquent, threatening, exuberant, enlightening and spiritual, Andrew Harvey draws the audience in through his fervent belief in the “Divine Mother,” the mother of all beings, and he calls on each individual to “burn like her with meaning, strength, joy and sacred passion.”
