In order to understand one of the founding tenets of High Magic think of a place where nothing concrete exists. Think of it perhaps as a different world or another dimension, removed from, but still very definitely a part of our world.
In this place of relative nothingness, reality is supplemented by representing it in a stylistic form comprised largely of symbols. The magician can enter here, interact with the ethereal inhabitants of this strange world in a meaningful manner, and effect actions that will eventually impact on the ‘real’ world.
He may, for example, as a result of his actions gain fresh, new knowledge and insights that will help him in his work, or, in a more literal sense, he may set in motion forces that will eventually alter some aspect of what constitutes reality. Psychotic as all this may sound, before we dismiss it out of hand it’d do good to take a look at how exactly it came about in the first place. The earliest mention of some sort of etheric representation of man were made by the Neoplatonists of ancient Greece, who believed that the soul descended through heavenly spheres to enter a physical body on earth and during this voyage was in turn affected by the influence of each planet and therefore formed what was regarded as “the soul’s spiritual envelope”.
They in turn relied on the Platonic concept of a separate, independent reality that simply exists somewhere “out there” and which we can only attempt -not entirely successfully- to discover.Far fetched as this concept may seem today, in its heyday it was as good an explanation as any for the brain’s ability to imagine things it could not possibly experience.In those early days of strictly linnear logic it was held that if one did not directly or indirectly know of something, then his ignorance of it was equally unknown to him and hence it was not ignorance at all. Thus knowledge was more a journey of rediscovery than a sojourn into the unknown. To be able to imagine worlds and planetary arrangements where no physical man had ever been, for example, meant that the etheric mind (with its inherently greater capabilities) had somehow been there before it had entered the body.
This was a concept that gained tremendous popularity when it was rediscovered and restated in 1471 by the Florentine philosopher and Medici prodigeé, Marsilio Ficino.
Working from a pilfered Greek manuscript of the Hermetica, delivered directly from Macedonia to Florence by a Medici agent, Ficino propagated the concept, of an etheric or ‘astral’ body that supplied a set of consonances between man and the heavens.
At the time no explicit mention was ever made of the body having an astral, conscious ‘double’ able to enter this etheric plane but, nevertheless, as the idea became more and more popular the seeds of astral travel were, unknowingly, being sown.
Now, astral travel, the ability of a magic adept to somehow project his mind into another plane, is a tenet that’s found at the very heart of High Magic. It requires us to believe that not only does the astral plane exist but that it can and does influence our lives in a very direct manner. Modern Freudian psychology has already cut its teeth in explaining how the associations thrown up by a ‘free-floating’ brain can dredge up esoteric symbolism in the mind and can present us with both solutions to current problems (hence Kekulé, amongst others) and also frighten us with the spectre of past ones recurring.
Jungians, in turn, have explained about the posited existence of archetypes in the brain so, that it would appear that what magicians have been swearing by for thousands of years are little more than self-created delusions. Mere ‘representations’ thrown up by the brain attempting to make sense of logical concepts when the analytical part of it has been switched off.
If things were left at that we could just say that, hey! Know what? All that recitation of mantras in smoky atmospheres is enough to addle anybody’s brains and psychologists have got it right. This astral travel stuff is just “all in the mind”. But we’ve already seen that the mind and everything in it are an inescapable part of what constitutes our Reality. We have seen that our perception of that reality can influence our subsequent actions to a positive or a negative effect. And we have furthermore seen that the way we perceive the world, the assumptions we are likely to make about it, may in fact play a large part in creating what we actually do perceive.
Confusing, no?
To avoid the logic trap of saying that what we perceive is true otherwise we cannot possibly perceive it, let us strip the concept of the astral plane of its historical baggage and examine it for what it really is.
Devoid of magical connotations, the astral plane then becomes an imaginary plane, a representational mode of our more concrete reality which contains none of the constraints (and hence all of the possibilities) of the concrete world. This, naturally means that somehow, it represents a ‘truer’ picture of our reality. One which we, bound by the physical limitations of our concrete senses, are unable to directly experience.
The magician etherically (read mentally) then, shedding these mortal limitations, enters this plane and by manipulating the symbolic representations that he encounters within it, achieves a greater understanding of the concrete world he normally inhabits. It’s as simple as that. And if it beggars belief, well it shouldn’t, for as concepts go, this one is logically sound.
And even hard-nosed mathematicians have been, quietly, entering this very same plane for many years.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
In the plane of the impossible
Now, it is no mean feat to dream without falling asleep. At the best of times it takes a little hard work and the right attitude. It’s what prayer and meditation have always been about and the fact that both forms of focussing the mind have survived to our day, and indeed are currently enjoying a revival, testifies to their efficacy.
Scientists, in general however, and mathematicians in particular, have always prided themselves on the fact that they don’t need to resort to such ‘unscientific’ methods in order to transport their minds into other worlds. Over the years they’ve evolved their own means of taking physically impossible jaunts through etheric worlds and, to the chagrin of yogis and mystics, have also managed to get paid for it. But before we look at their techniques it’s good to acknowledge that even the staunchest advocates of the scientific method have to sleep sometimes, and when they do, what they dream about makes for some very interesting assumptions.
One wintry day in 1865, in the clogged with horse-drawn buggies streets of Vienna, a notable German chemist by the name of Friedrich Kekulé, while waiting for his driver to take the buggy out of a traffic-jam, fell into a tired snooze.
He was tired because for the past few months he’d been working on a most vexing problem: that of discovering how exactly the chain of carbon atoms are linked in the benzene molecule.As he snoozed, he dreamt of carbon atoms in the form of dancing snakes, and as he watched (in his dream) their taunting dance, they all joined hands and formed a circle.
The discovery of the cyclical structure of the benzene molecule laid the basis for the foundation of organic chemistry and Kekulé, naturally, received all the credit for it. After all it had been his dream.
His closing words at the convention where he presented his findings were: “Let us learn how to dream gentlemen, and then perhaps we’ll learn to discover the truth!”Shamelessly I’ll use this classic example to hark back to my earlier analogy of the brain as a computer and the mind as the software that’s ran on it. The apparent ability of the mind to provide surprising answers and unexpected insights when to all intents and purposes, the brain has been ‘switched off’, is echoed by the half-joking comments of today’s computer programmers about their software misbehaving when the hardware is switched off.
While these concerns are fairly recent and date only as far back as the construction of fourth-generation computers, it is a fair assumption to make that given slightly different tools with similar functions, people with similar ambitions will largely replicate both each other’s successes and problems.
The brain has been mankind’s oldest tool, bent to the same problem-solving tasks as modern day computers and their attendant programmers. So it should not be surprising when the brain’s ‘software’ is capable of problem-solving even when the ‘wetware’ has been apparently switched off.
Company employees of the software giant Microsoft, humourously refer to inexplicable glitches caused by apparently inert software as ‘gremlins in the machine’. But the ‘gremlins’ as a quick jaunt through the history of magic, which has always had the brain and its function on centerstage, will show, have been there for a very, very long time.
Scientists, in general however, and mathematicians in particular, have always prided themselves on the fact that they don’t need to resort to such ‘unscientific’ methods in order to transport their minds into other worlds. Over the years they’ve evolved their own means of taking physically impossible jaunts through etheric worlds and, to the chagrin of yogis and mystics, have also managed to get paid for it. But before we look at their techniques it’s good to acknowledge that even the staunchest advocates of the scientific method have to sleep sometimes, and when they do, what they dream about makes for some very interesting assumptions.
One wintry day in 1865, in the clogged with horse-drawn buggies streets of Vienna, a notable German chemist by the name of Friedrich Kekulé, while waiting for his driver to take the buggy out of a traffic-jam, fell into a tired snooze.
He was tired because for the past few months he’d been working on a most vexing problem: that of discovering how exactly the chain of carbon atoms are linked in the benzene molecule.As he snoozed, he dreamt of carbon atoms in the form of dancing snakes, and as he watched (in his dream) their taunting dance, they all joined hands and formed a circle.
The discovery of the cyclical structure of the benzene molecule laid the basis for the foundation of organic chemistry and Kekulé, naturally, received all the credit for it. After all it had been his dream.
His closing words at the convention where he presented his findings were: “Let us learn how to dream gentlemen, and then perhaps we’ll learn to discover the truth!”Shamelessly I’ll use this classic example to hark back to my earlier analogy of the brain as a computer and the mind as the software that’s ran on it. The apparent ability of the mind to provide surprising answers and unexpected insights when to all intents and purposes, the brain has been ‘switched off’, is echoed by the half-joking comments of today’s computer programmers about their software misbehaving when the hardware is switched off.
While these concerns are fairly recent and date only as far back as the construction of fourth-generation computers, it is a fair assumption to make that given slightly different tools with similar functions, people with similar ambitions will largely replicate both each other’s successes and problems.
The brain has been mankind’s oldest tool, bent to the same problem-solving tasks as modern day computers and their attendant programmers. So it should not be surprising when the brain’s ‘software’ is capable of problem-solving even when the ‘wetware’ has been apparently switched off.
Company employees of the software giant Microsoft, humourously refer to inexplicable glitches caused by apparently inert software as ‘gremlins in the machine’. But the ‘gremlins’ as a quick jaunt through the history of magic, which has always had the brain and its function on centerstage, will show, have been there for a very, very long time.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
It's all a dream
The very fact that we can dream events which are lifelike, and on occasion, can be precognitive, begs the question: Where do dreams come from?
Trying to answer the very question physicist and science-fiction writer John Gribbin, seized upon the possibilities offered by two related theories: The quantum theory for describing the behaviour of matter at a sub-molecular level, and the many-worlds theory of John Wheeler.
The former theory implies that at a sub-molecular level, everything that is possible, also happens, while the latter, states something very similar, but on the scale of the entire universe.
So, according to Wheeler (and the quantum theory for micro-molecules) there is not just a single world, but an infinite array of all possible worlds, including some in which we do not exist at all. Everything that can possibly happen at every instant of the day and night does happen and statistical possibility is only dictated by the inability of our awareness to cross the divide between all these worlds and see that indeed this is so.
This divide, whatever it may be made of, is what restricts our awareness to a single world. The car, that nearly ran into the back of you on the motorway this morning, for example, did in fact ran into you, in one of those other worlds, only your awareness (and this is a thorny issue in its own right) was focussed on a world where that possibility did not materialise, which brings us full circle to the argument that the mind is capable of ‘shaping’ reality.
Gribbin says, that if the many worlds do exist ,in such an infinite array, then, occasionally our minds may be able to come in contact with our ‘doubles’ in these other worlds.To use a rather naive example, the three course meal you dreamt you were having, rather than being the result of your feeling a little peckish as you went to bed, may have been the result of your double’s activities in another world.
By the same token however, this double (or infinite number of doubles) must occasionally dream of our activities and puzzle where their dreams come from.
Wonderfully mind-bending staff as all this may be, its implications are clear enough. Either there is no such thing as fantasy and everything we can possibly imagine actually does happen (which puts paid to the concept of the creativity of fiction writers) or else we are all equally insubstantial.We, in our concrete, tangible, world enjoy no less a statistical probability to exist than the world of our dreams. To us, certainly, this world is solid enough, or at least it appears to be so. But to those inhabitants of those other myriads of parallel worlds we are just a dream, and the further away we move from the worlds on either side of us, the smaller becomes the possibility of our existence and the less substantial we become to those trying to envision us.
So, next time your head hits the pillow you may be heading not for the oblivion you think you deserve for having put up with the daily rote of traffic jams; cash-flow problems; and the constant wear and tear of work, but for a magical jaunt through space, time and the universe. Mathematicians of course, have been doing this for some time now. The beauty of it though is that they have been doing it without the benefit of sleep.
Trying to answer the very question physicist and science-fiction writer John Gribbin, seized upon the possibilities offered by two related theories: The quantum theory for describing the behaviour of matter at a sub-molecular level, and the many-worlds theory of John Wheeler.
The former theory implies that at a sub-molecular level, everything that is possible, also happens, while the latter, states something very similar, but on the scale of the entire universe.
So, according to Wheeler (and the quantum theory for micro-molecules) there is not just a single world, but an infinite array of all possible worlds, including some in which we do not exist at all. Everything that can possibly happen at every instant of the day and night does happen and statistical possibility is only dictated by the inability of our awareness to cross the divide between all these worlds and see that indeed this is so.
This divide, whatever it may be made of, is what restricts our awareness to a single world. The car, that nearly ran into the back of you on the motorway this morning, for example, did in fact ran into you, in one of those other worlds, only your awareness (and this is a thorny issue in its own right) was focussed on a world where that possibility did not materialise, which brings us full circle to the argument that the mind is capable of ‘shaping’ reality.
Gribbin says, that if the many worlds do exist ,in such an infinite array, then, occasionally our minds may be able to come in contact with our ‘doubles’ in these other worlds.To use a rather naive example, the three course meal you dreamt you were having, rather than being the result of your feeling a little peckish as you went to bed, may have been the result of your double’s activities in another world.
By the same token however, this double (or infinite number of doubles) must occasionally dream of our activities and puzzle where their dreams come from.
Wonderfully mind-bending staff as all this may be, its implications are clear enough. Either there is no such thing as fantasy and everything we can possibly imagine actually does happen (which puts paid to the concept of the creativity of fiction writers) or else we are all equally insubstantial.We, in our concrete, tangible, world enjoy no less a statistical probability to exist than the world of our dreams. To us, certainly, this world is solid enough, or at least it appears to be so. But to those inhabitants of those other myriads of parallel worlds we are just a dream, and the further away we move from the worlds on either side of us, the smaller becomes the possibility of our existence and the less substantial we become to those trying to envision us.
So, next time your head hits the pillow you may be heading not for the oblivion you think you deserve for having put up with the daily rote of traffic jams; cash-flow problems; and the constant wear and tear of work, but for a magical jaunt through space, time and the universe. Mathematicians of course, have been doing this for some time now. The beauty of it though is that they have been doing it without the benefit of sleep.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Dreams are made of this
It is now necessary to provide a feasible mechanism through which dreams, the mind, faith, the power of belief and reality can interact.
To connect all these Bolus used the idea of the microcosmic man and a universe filled with invisible corresponding lines linking all elements within it.
This was, as we know, shot down by the deterministic, observer orientated model of the universe of Descartes and Newton. This in turn, left the Austrian physician, Franz Anton Mesmer, floundering to find a scientific basis that would explain the workings of his discovery of hypnotism. For all its lack of ‘poetry’ and strong belief in the discreet nature of things, the science of the time obligingly provided one.
Borrowing the notion from the ancient Greeks, Newton and the other advanced physicists and mathematicians of the time believed that there was an invisible substance called ether (or aether) which pervaded everything, even ‘empty’ space.
This gave Mesmer the idea for his “fluid of animal magnetism”. A universal medium in which all bodies were immersed and through which, Mesmer believed, the planets influenced human behaviour.
The ancient Greeks, Newton, Mesmer and later, Einstein, were part of a long line of thinkers who though strived to work through science; found it difficult to ignore the intuitive belief magic has always voiced, namely that the universe is filled with some kind of ‘substance’ that pervades everything. Much like Bolus’ corresponding lines of influence. It was Albert Einstein of course, who gave this belief its best known expression when he succinctly said: “Nature, abhors a vacuum.” This statement leaves the door wide open to the assertion that the mind (as well as the brain, and our physical body) are linked to the world and the universe through a host of invisible ties much in the same way as the tides of the sea are linked to the phases of the moon.
That means that our dream existence, as magicians believed, interacts, somehow with the universe. Trying to discover how, theoretical physicist John Wheeler, found himself tangling with the very fabric of reality. And the more closely he looked at it the less substance he found it contained. The reasoning is that matter is the same everywhere. Whether we exist as a carbon-based, long-haired, leather jacket clad, bipedal mammal who is on the constant look-out for potential mates of the opposite sex, or a lifeless lump of rock on the surface of the moon, we are, essentially, composed of the same fundamental staff.
The only difference lies in the vibrational mode of the atoms which make us up, which also indicate their state of energy. Energy, as Einstein proved is just another form of matter; or rather matter is a solid form of energy, thus, the energy state of any particular atom or molecule of matter also determines its identity. The same carbon that makes up our bodies, for example, exists in atomised form in the heart of stars. The minerals that swim in our bloodstream are also found in lumps beneath the Earth. Each contains a different amount of stored energy encapsulated in its molecular matrix and theoretically, by the studied application of energy, each can be transmutated into the other.Yet the fact remains that we are alive and these things are not. We don’t yet know what exactly life is. We do however, know precisely what it is not.
Trying to explain what the universe can possibly be made out of and how all these different forms of matter can arise, scientists have theorised the existence of a tremendously small micromolecule that fills the entire Cosmos, and which actually also forms ‘empty’ space. This micromolecule which is so small as to make the smallest atom by comparison look like the side of a house, is called a Superstring, and it exists in a state of constant vibration. As it vibrates in and out of different stable energy states it forms all forms of matter and all states of it.
Now, these micromolecules, at the moment, have only a purely mathematical existence. Because of their minute size their experimental observation is exceedingly difficult and the difficulty of directly observing them is further compounded by the predictions of the mathematical equations governing their behaviour.
The equations predict that these molecules exist not in the three dimensions we are accustomed to, or even in the four of Einsteinian Space-Time, but in nine! Eight dimensions of space and one dimension of time, and if you are finding this hard to visualise think of a crumpled ball of paper. Apart from its generally ‘smooth’ outer surface there are other, interior ones, which constitute, in our example, different dimensions of the paper-ball’s existence.
Superstrings then are responsible for the existence of practically everything, including us. So, we are all in effect, created out of the same staff that makes up the Universe and because of this our sentient minds may be able to tap into other aspects of this universe’s existence in ways we are not yet aware of.
Our consciousness, the argument goes, is the result of the “vibratory excitation of the complex molecular structure of the brain,” and our sense of perception is part and parcel of this. Change, for instance, the vibratory status of the molecules either chemically (with LSD for example), or electrically (by placing your body in a strong electromagnetic field) and you can also change the way the brain (and mind) interacts with the universe, we perceive, at a molecular level.
When we dream then, or when we are under extreme conditions of stress, our minds may be able to go into some sort of overdrive.
A kind of charged, energy state that allows our perception to expand in some way. To reach out, so that we can then experience something of the Superstrings’ other dimensions, which may be worlds not much different from ours but with their own set of natural laws.
To connect all these Bolus used the idea of the microcosmic man and a universe filled with invisible corresponding lines linking all elements within it.
This was, as we know, shot down by the deterministic, observer orientated model of the universe of Descartes and Newton. This in turn, left the Austrian physician, Franz Anton Mesmer, floundering to find a scientific basis that would explain the workings of his discovery of hypnotism. For all its lack of ‘poetry’ and strong belief in the discreet nature of things, the science of the time obligingly provided one.
Borrowing the notion from the ancient Greeks, Newton and the other advanced physicists and mathematicians of the time believed that there was an invisible substance called ether (or aether) which pervaded everything, even ‘empty’ space.
This gave Mesmer the idea for his “fluid of animal magnetism”. A universal medium in which all bodies were immersed and through which, Mesmer believed, the planets influenced human behaviour.
The ancient Greeks, Newton, Mesmer and later, Einstein, were part of a long line of thinkers who though strived to work through science; found it difficult to ignore the intuitive belief magic has always voiced, namely that the universe is filled with some kind of ‘substance’ that pervades everything. Much like Bolus’ corresponding lines of influence. It was Albert Einstein of course, who gave this belief its best known expression when he succinctly said: “Nature, abhors a vacuum.” This statement leaves the door wide open to the assertion that the mind (as well as the brain, and our physical body) are linked to the world and the universe through a host of invisible ties much in the same way as the tides of the sea are linked to the phases of the moon.
That means that our dream existence, as magicians believed, interacts, somehow with the universe. Trying to discover how, theoretical physicist John Wheeler, found himself tangling with the very fabric of reality. And the more closely he looked at it the less substance he found it contained. The reasoning is that matter is the same everywhere. Whether we exist as a carbon-based, long-haired, leather jacket clad, bipedal mammal who is on the constant look-out for potential mates of the opposite sex, or a lifeless lump of rock on the surface of the moon, we are, essentially, composed of the same fundamental staff.
The only difference lies in the vibrational mode of the atoms which make us up, which also indicate their state of energy. Energy, as Einstein proved is just another form of matter; or rather matter is a solid form of energy, thus, the energy state of any particular atom or molecule of matter also determines its identity. The same carbon that makes up our bodies, for example, exists in atomised form in the heart of stars. The minerals that swim in our bloodstream are also found in lumps beneath the Earth. Each contains a different amount of stored energy encapsulated in its molecular matrix and theoretically, by the studied application of energy, each can be transmutated into the other.Yet the fact remains that we are alive and these things are not. We don’t yet know what exactly life is. We do however, know precisely what it is not.
Trying to explain what the universe can possibly be made out of and how all these different forms of matter can arise, scientists have theorised the existence of a tremendously small micromolecule that fills the entire Cosmos, and which actually also forms ‘empty’ space. This micromolecule which is so small as to make the smallest atom by comparison look like the side of a house, is called a Superstring, and it exists in a state of constant vibration. As it vibrates in and out of different stable energy states it forms all forms of matter and all states of it.
Now, these micromolecules, at the moment, have only a purely mathematical existence. Because of their minute size their experimental observation is exceedingly difficult and the difficulty of directly observing them is further compounded by the predictions of the mathematical equations governing their behaviour.
The equations predict that these molecules exist not in the three dimensions we are accustomed to, or even in the four of Einsteinian Space-Time, but in nine! Eight dimensions of space and one dimension of time, and if you are finding this hard to visualise think of a crumpled ball of paper. Apart from its generally ‘smooth’ outer surface there are other, interior ones, which constitute, in our example, different dimensions of the paper-ball’s existence.
Superstrings then are responsible for the existence of practically everything, including us. So, we are all in effect, created out of the same staff that makes up the Universe and because of this our sentient minds may be able to tap into other aspects of this universe’s existence in ways we are not yet aware of.
Our consciousness, the argument goes, is the result of the “vibratory excitation of the complex molecular structure of the brain,” and our sense of perception is part and parcel of this. Change, for instance, the vibratory status of the molecules either chemically (with LSD for example), or electrically (by placing your body in a strong electromagnetic field) and you can also change the way the brain (and mind) interacts with the universe, we perceive, at a molecular level.
When we dream then, or when we are under extreme conditions of stress, our minds may be able to go into some sort of overdrive.
A kind of charged, energy state that allows our perception to expand in some way. To reach out, so that we can then experience something of the Superstrings’ other dimensions, which may be worlds not much different from ours but with their own set of natural laws.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
The Hub of the Cosmos
The proof of any pudding, I’m assured, is in the eating. And if science and magic can hope to convince us of the validity of their now joint premise regarding dreams they must be expected to furnish some proof. Magicians claimed that dreams were part of an independent reality. They were either part of the spirit world, or a variation of our world. In either case, they considered the dream world as distinct and separate from ours; concrete in its own way, and theorised that it could be entered only through voluntary or involuntary action by man (and his mind). This means that though not every dream qualified, to magicians, dreams were very real.
Science now also shares the belief that there’s more to dreams than mere moving images held in the mind which, like so many sensationalist films, are projected there simply to entertain or titillate us.
Finding the evidence to corroborate this belief however, presents a few problems. After all, while we all dream, we also all get up in the morning to carry out our daily routine in a predetermined world that seems a lot more concrete and ‘real’ than the dreamworld we inhabit at night. And though dreams are vivid and ‘life-like’ for most people, not everybody remembers what they dreamt in bed at night.
The same cannot however, be said for the everyday world which commands itself to our attention at every opportunity. But the concreteness that the world we live in presents, physicists assure us, is illusory. We feel that the world is real and dependable for three basic and distinct reasons:
1. While no one else seems to share our dreams other people seem to corroborate our experience of the world thus giving it instant, independent, credibility. Like fish need a sea in order to function as fish, the world becomes the medium in which we spend our lives and carry out our existence with some semblance of orderly progress.
2. Our world is ruled by time. To all intents and purposes, there does appear to be some sort of temporal orderly sequence running through our world. The mail in the morning arrives after the postman has been and we have to leave our house in order to arrive at our place of employment.
3. Finally, our world can hurt us. This point is indisputable. To fail to stop crossing the road when the pedestrian crossing light is on red can have deleterious consequences for our general well-being, to say the least.
These three points sum up any waking transaction of ours we may care to engage in, for they implicitly contain within their statements the seeds of the axioms that give our lives a sense of meaning and a sense of time. They furthermore imbue our every action with the sense of self-preservation and a measure of self-worth.It is naturally difficult to argue with any of them, but to each of these points physicists can produce a valid rebuttal: First, other people ‘seem’ to corroborate our experience of the world. We have no objective way of knowing what goes on inside their heads and so we must accept on faith that their perception of the world is the same as ours. The clearest example of the validity of this statement is given if you enter a clothes store that specialises in luminous green Hawaiian shirts. Now, without wanting to disparage the dress code of tourists on holiday to Hawaii, most people would balk at such sartorial excess, unless that is, you were accompanied by a person who is colour-blind to the colour green. Then your experience of distaste at the luminous green shirts would not be corroborated by your companion and while you would argue that he is colour-blind he may equally well argue that his brain is different from, and better than, yours and what he sees is the ‘true’ colour of the shirts and you are the one who sees an odd version of the world. And, in a manner of speaking, he would be right. The validity of the external world, like that of colours, lies in the brain’s interpretation of what it perceives. Optical illusions have shown time and again that perception can be fooled.
What we see ‘out there’ then is just an internal model which has been built according to the brain’s interpretation. In the above example for instance, the colour green had no place in our friend’s internal model of the world. This, in no way marred his model in other ways and as a matter of fact, as far as he was concerned, there was no sense of anything being ‘wrong’ with his version of the world.
Even the general consensus we take for granted in the daily world we live in, is arrived by a largely unconscious process of constant negotiation and reappraisal. We continually absorb information through media services, alter our perception of events by talking to other people, convince others of the validity of our opinions and constantly modify our internal model of what’s ‘out there’ to the point that if we were to meet a modern-day Robinson Crusoe who’d spent the last twenty-four years marooned on a desert island, we would be unable to converse with him in any meaningful sort of way as there would be no “common ground of reference”. His internal model of the world would be totally different from ours.
General consensus then, despite its outward validity, does not constitute a guarantee for the objective existence of anything.Secondly, our sense of time is artificial. The temporal orderly sequence of events in our world is also illusory. The philosophical discussions of the nature of Time, these days, sound like the staff of science fiction. There is talk of parallel universes; bio-gravitational wormholes in space-Time; and points of singularity lying in wait in the hearts of Black Holes.
For our purposes though it is sufficient to say that something as mundane as three glasses of champagne or a strong sedative can put paid to the belief that a disjointed, jerky sequence of events is the exclusive property of our dreamworld.
Thirdly, dreams can hurt us too. This third argument is probably the hardest to prove. There do exist concrete figures reflecting the numbers of people who have died in wars, famine, car accidents and as the result of gun-shot wounds. On the other hand there do not seem to be any figures that would corroborate any dream-casualties. This does not mean to say that they don’t exist.
We all have, at one time or another, woken up from a ‘persecution’ dream where we had to run for our life from some unnameable terror that seemed to be gaining in on us and just as it was about to close in we woke up.
That’s a defence mechanism. It’s not unlike our stopping before a red light, or wearing a flak jacket as we go through a war zone. Neither action will totally guarantee our safety but each does improve our chances of survival.
People do pass away in their sleep. Often for reasons which are not clearly understood. I can only guess here, but if the unnameable horror did manage to catch up with us in our dream would we survive the experience?
It needn’t injure our ‘physical’ body. If we take the conventional view and regard dreams as fantasy, their very vividness that raises blood pressure and heart rate could easily mean that if we were ‘caught’ by the horror in our dream, we could die from ‘natural’ causes. A stroke or heart attack perhaps brought on by the intense excitement. It needn’t even kill us immediately. A ‘dream death’ may upset our emotional and psychological balance and affect our concentration so much that we then have a fatal accident on our way to work or crossing the street. Thus experiencing a sort of death by delayed reaction perhaps?
This would mean that our mind, when we’re asleep, may be able to bypass the censor of the sleeping part of the brain and interact directly with ‘reality’ and with whatever’s ‘out there’, in a way that will later, when we wake up, guide our (waking) consciousness along that path of existence and thus force us to readjust our internal representation of the world and accordingly shape our perception of what’s ‘real’. The Australian physicist Paul Davies says that for the dreamer at least, “Dream objects undeniably enjoy a kind of existence...” but he also makes a clear-cut distinction between dream objects and our waking world. Although he acknowledges that dreams are just as substantial as, say, our concept of valour, honour or even bankruptcy, he remarks, that at present, dreams exist in a mode of reality which we are not properly equipped to deal with.
This does not mean that dreams are not real. Merely that they exist in a mode as far removed from what we consider ‘normal’ as our everyday waking life is from our dreamstate.
Science now also shares the belief that there’s more to dreams than mere moving images held in the mind which, like so many sensationalist films, are projected there simply to entertain or titillate us.
Finding the evidence to corroborate this belief however, presents a few problems. After all, while we all dream, we also all get up in the morning to carry out our daily routine in a predetermined world that seems a lot more concrete and ‘real’ than the dreamworld we inhabit at night. And though dreams are vivid and ‘life-like’ for most people, not everybody remembers what they dreamt in bed at night.
The same cannot however, be said for the everyday world which commands itself to our attention at every opportunity. But the concreteness that the world we live in presents, physicists assure us, is illusory. We feel that the world is real and dependable for three basic and distinct reasons:
1. While no one else seems to share our dreams other people seem to corroborate our experience of the world thus giving it instant, independent, credibility. Like fish need a sea in order to function as fish, the world becomes the medium in which we spend our lives and carry out our existence with some semblance of orderly progress.
2. Our world is ruled by time. To all intents and purposes, there does appear to be some sort of temporal orderly sequence running through our world. The mail in the morning arrives after the postman has been and we have to leave our house in order to arrive at our place of employment.
3. Finally, our world can hurt us. This point is indisputable. To fail to stop crossing the road when the pedestrian crossing light is on red can have deleterious consequences for our general well-being, to say the least.
These three points sum up any waking transaction of ours we may care to engage in, for they implicitly contain within their statements the seeds of the axioms that give our lives a sense of meaning and a sense of time. They furthermore imbue our every action with the sense of self-preservation and a measure of self-worth.It is naturally difficult to argue with any of them, but to each of these points physicists can produce a valid rebuttal: First, other people ‘seem’ to corroborate our experience of the world. We have no objective way of knowing what goes on inside their heads and so we must accept on faith that their perception of the world is the same as ours. The clearest example of the validity of this statement is given if you enter a clothes store that specialises in luminous green Hawaiian shirts. Now, without wanting to disparage the dress code of tourists on holiday to Hawaii, most people would balk at such sartorial excess, unless that is, you were accompanied by a person who is colour-blind to the colour green. Then your experience of distaste at the luminous green shirts would not be corroborated by your companion and while you would argue that he is colour-blind he may equally well argue that his brain is different from, and better than, yours and what he sees is the ‘true’ colour of the shirts and you are the one who sees an odd version of the world. And, in a manner of speaking, he would be right. The validity of the external world, like that of colours, lies in the brain’s interpretation of what it perceives. Optical illusions have shown time and again that perception can be fooled.
What we see ‘out there’ then is just an internal model which has been built according to the brain’s interpretation. In the above example for instance, the colour green had no place in our friend’s internal model of the world. This, in no way marred his model in other ways and as a matter of fact, as far as he was concerned, there was no sense of anything being ‘wrong’ with his version of the world.
Even the general consensus we take for granted in the daily world we live in, is arrived by a largely unconscious process of constant negotiation and reappraisal. We continually absorb information through media services, alter our perception of events by talking to other people, convince others of the validity of our opinions and constantly modify our internal model of what’s ‘out there’ to the point that if we were to meet a modern-day Robinson Crusoe who’d spent the last twenty-four years marooned on a desert island, we would be unable to converse with him in any meaningful sort of way as there would be no “common ground of reference”. His internal model of the world would be totally different from ours.
General consensus then, despite its outward validity, does not constitute a guarantee for the objective existence of anything.Secondly, our sense of time is artificial. The temporal orderly sequence of events in our world is also illusory. The philosophical discussions of the nature of Time, these days, sound like the staff of science fiction. There is talk of parallel universes; bio-gravitational wormholes in space-Time; and points of singularity lying in wait in the hearts of Black Holes.
For our purposes though it is sufficient to say that something as mundane as three glasses of champagne or a strong sedative can put paid to the belief that a disjointed, jerky sequence of events is the exclusive property of our dreamworld.
Thirdly, dreams can hurt us too. This third argument is probably the hardest to prove. There do exist concrete figures reflecting the numbers of people who have died in wars, famine, car accidents and as the result of gun-shot wounds. On the other hand there do not seem to be any figures that would corroborate any dream-casualties. This does not mean to say that they don’t exist.
We all have, at one time or another, woken up from a ‘persecution’ dream where we had to run for our life from some unnameable terror that seemed to be gaining in on us and just as it was about to close in we woke up.
That’s a defence mechanism. It’s not unlike our stopping before a red light, or wearing a flak jacket as we go through a war zone. Neither action will totally guarantee our safety but each does improve our chances of survival.
People do pass away in their sleep. Often for reasons which are not clearly understood. I can only guess here, but if the unnameable horror did manage to catch up with us in our dream would we survive the experience?
It needn’t injure our ‘physical’ body. If we take the conventional view and regard dreams as fantasy, their very vividness that raises blood pressure and heart rate could easily mean that if we were ‘caught’ by the horror in our dream, we could die from ‘natural’ causes. A stroke or heart attack perhaps brought on by the intense excitement. It needn’t even kill us immediately. A ‘dream death’ may upset our emotional and psychological balance and affect our concentration so much that we then have a fatal accident on our way to work or crossing the street. Thus experiencing a sort of death by delayed reaction perhaps?
This would mean that our mind, when we’re asleep, may be able to bypass the censor of the sleeping part of the brain and interact directly with ‘reality’ and with whatever’s ‘out there’, in a way that will later, when we wake up, guide our (waking) consciousness along that path of existence and thus force us to readjust our internal representation of the world and accordingly shape our perception of what’s ‘real’. The Australian physicist Paul Davies says that for the dreamer at least, “Dream objects undeniably enjoy a kind of existence...” but he also makes a clear-cut distinction between dream objects and our waking world. Although he acknowledges that dreams are just as substantial as, say, our concept of valour, honour or even bankruptcy, he remarks, that at present, dreams exist in a mode of reality which we are not properly equipped to deal with.
This does not mean that dreams are not real. Merely that they exist in a mode as far removed from what we consider ‘normal’ as our everyday waking life is from our dreamstate.
Monday, May 7, 2007
The Right Dream
The first tangible proof that there is a ‘reality shaping’ mechanism inherent in the human brain which can be activated by dreams, came from a study carried out by a University of Michigan psychologist by the name of Hazel Markus. She asked university undergraduates of roughly equal academic ability to take part in an experiment that required them to visualise a positive and a negative self.
Some were asked, for example, to think of working in a mindless job and living in a run-down apartment, while others were given the task of visualising living a life in the sun, having a well-paid job and owning a ranch with a swimming pool.
After having been given sufficient time to ‘see’ themselves in detail in their given jobs and lifestyles the students were then put through a barrage of tests that included solving maths problems mentally and writing with their non-dominant hand.
Surprisingly, the students who had been given the positive images to focus on outperformed by a significant margin those who had taken on the role of ‘losers’ and had been given a negative image to visualise.
The implication is that even such an innocuous activity as visualising yourself, job and lifestyle in the future, can have a tremendous impact on your ability to cope with the present thus creating a self-fulfilling prophesy of sorts.
Markus’ study was a small one. It did not go on long enough or in sufficient depth to indicate the exact nature of the reality shaping mechanism. Its findings however were sufficient to indicate that there is something there and that it can be made to work.
All the same, it would require an enormous leap of faith from your part, to equate the indications of a psychological study which analysed success in terms of self-motivation, crisis-coping ability and emotional stability when under pressure with the claims of medieval magicians that the brain can -through dreams or even daydreams- influence one’s external reality.
The confirmation that this indeed is so has come from the people who are these days involved in asking the deep questions about man, the world and the universe: the theoretical physicists.In chapter one we saw how man, these days, is considered to play a vital role in the way the universe unfolds. This has become known as the ‘participatory’ model of the universe, rather than the ‘observational’ one of Rène Descartes and Isaac Newton, and up to now experimental evidence in the field of sub-atomic physics seems to uphold the validity of this, newer, model.
This raises more questions than it answers. Man is a vital part of the universe only because he can interact with it in through means we have yet to discover. Clearly, there must be some sort of hidden mechanism at work that permits this interaction to take place. This is where dreams come in.
Some were asked, for example, to think of working in a mindless job and living in a run-down apartment, while others were given the task of visualising living a life in the sun, having a well-paid job and owning a ranch with a swimming pool.
After having been given sufficient time to ‘see’ themselves in detail in their given jobs and lifestyles the students were then put through a barrage of tests that included solving maths problems mentally and writing with their non-dominant hand.
Surprisingly, the students who had been given the positive images to focus on outperformed by a significant margin those who had taken on the role of ‘losers’ and had been given a negative image to visualise.
The implication is that even such an innocuous activity as visualising yourself, job and lifestyle in the future, can have a tremendous impact on your ability to cope with the present thus creating a self-fulfilling prophesy of sorts.
Markus’ study was a small one. It did not go on long enough or in sufficient depth to indicate the exact nature of the reality shaping mechanism. Its findings however were sufficient to indicate that there is something there and that it can be made to work.
All the same, it would require an enormous leap of faith from your part, to equate the indications of a psychological study which analysed success in terms of self-motivation, crisis-coping ability and emotional stability when under pressure with the claims of medieval magicians that the brain can -through dreams or even daydreams- influence one’s external reality.
The confirmation that this indeed is so has come from the people who are these days involved in asking the deep questions about man, the world and the universe: the theoretical physicists.In chapter one we saw how man, these days, is considered to play a vital role in the way the universe unfolds. This has become known as the ‘participatory’ model of the universe, rather than the ‘observational’ one of Rène Descartes and Isaac Newton, and up to now experimental evidence in the field of sub-atomic physics seems to uphold the validity of this, newer, model.
This raises more questions than it answers. Man is a vital part of the universe only because he can interact with it in through means we have yet to discover. Clearly, there must be some sort of hidden mechanism at work that permits this interaction to take place. This is where dreams come in.
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