Wonders of Your Mind
Humans are known to be capable of incredible and extraordinary various skills. How can it be possible that we can achieve so much and so many things, many of which are discounted?
A good example of how this might be explained is in the way electricity exists in a house. First, we have the supply of electricity into the house. The wires carrying the supply to the house are not in themselves the electricity. The current is invisible, but it has great potential for good or harm. So, we usually deal with it carefully, and have means of controlling it via insulation, fuses, and switches. When the electricity is wired into the house, its potential can be expressed in a huge variety of ways, ways we are still discovering. It can manifest as heat, light, and power to move or do things, such as with a drill or vacuum cleaner. It can produce sound or images as with television, and can, via programs for the computer, manifest in almost magical ways, storing and retrieving huge amounts of information and manipulating it.
The usefulness of this image of the house with its electricity is that we can use it as an analogy of energy in your own life. Your energy potential can express as cellular activity, or physical movement. You can experience it as sexual drive and its pleasure and pain, as emotions, as sight, hearing, sensation, smell, and taste. You can express it as thinking, and vocalising in speech or singing, or as the creation of a personal virtual reality, as you do in fantasy and dreams. In some people, it expresses as great creativity making the new and unexpected. Some people’s experiences even suggest that part of our potential is to extend our awareness over huge distances, or gain penetrating insight into another person’s state of mind or body. But all these are expressions of it, and are not IT (See Edgar Cayce and Eileen Garrett ).
Here is an example of a man discovering this potential:
Example: I dream I am in a landscape and notice that everything is brown; the whole world is brown and lifeless. There is also a feeling of solemnity or dullness. I have enough lucidity to wonder why the world of my dream is so brown and dull. As I ask this I become more aware of what feeling the brownness expresses. It is seriousness – with no room for humour or fun. The feeling deepens, real enough and clear enough to look at and understand. I see it is my father’s attitude to life that I have unconsciously inherited. I realise how anxious he always felt about life, and how I took this in. That is how I became a ‘brown’ person. I see too that I do not need to be either brown or serious anymore.
Then the landscape changes. There are trees, plants, and animals in brilliant colour. I wonder what this means, and the landscape begins to spin until the colours blend and shimmer. Suddenly my body seems to open to them, as if they are spinning inside of me, and with a most glorious feeling, a sensation of vibrating energy pours up my trunk to my head. With this comes realisation. I see how stupid I have been in my brown, anxious existence, how much life I have held back. The animals and plants are the different forces in my being that blend into energy and awareness. I feel I am capable of doing almost anything, like loving, writing a song, painting, telepathy, or speaking with the dead. This sparkling vibrating energy is life itself and can, if I learn to work with it, grow into any ability or direction I choose. I wake with a wonderful sense of my possibilities.
Two things were pointed out in the man’s account, the first being his attempt to understand and question his ‘brown’ feelings. His attempt leads him to the understanding that it is a habitual feeling or attitude he learned from his father and that leads to a wonderful release. The release doesn’t in itself give him new abilities, but it does point the way by showing him that by working, by applying himself in a chosen direction, a new ability would be manifested.
I believe it is the questioning mind that is the real key to unlocking the fantastic potential of the human mind. But to explain it well I will need to describe the mind that preceded the human intelligence.
That the light of our waking awareness can be carried back into what is usually the gloom of your unconscious is now well documented and can be found in such books as Realms of the Human Unconscious by Stanislav Grof. And such research has pointed out that our being is a lot older than your personal awareness, the possibility is that you can explore, delve into, and bring to awareness, the deep living processes of your cells, your life processes, your ancestral heritage, the reptilian and mammalian past that you carry in the very structures of your body and psyche. Those things exist in the dark cellar of our ‘unconscious’. When we turn our focussed self-awareness on them it is like walking down into that cellar with a torch. See The Animals in your Brain
To consciously enter into these levels of our own interior is to meet a very different world than we are used to in everyday waking life. Usually we meet these deep levels in our dreams or in the imagery the unconscious uses to portray what it holds. In doing this there is revealed to us the intimate life of our body and how it is inextricable linked with our personality, its loves and fears.
The Many Storied Self
As was said, we are largely unaware of these levels, because in a real sense we live on the top level of our being, personal awareness, self-consciousness, which has a very small view if what supports it. Here is an example of the enormous organisation that goes on within us.
The level after level of safety factors built into our system are nothing short of incredible. For adequate functioning our blood pressure needs to be at about 110 to 120 (i.e. it displaces 110 millimeters of mercury). It can drop to 70-80 before a critical situation arises in which tissue may die because blood is not reaching it. If we lose a lot of blood, even as much as 30 or 40 percent, the self-regulatory process maintains adequate blood pressure by constricting the blood vessels. This action is controlled by a part of the brain, and if that brain area is injured or destroyed, other centres take control. If they are eliminated, ganglia in the sympathetic nervous system direct the action. If they too are eliminated the walls of the arteries and veins themselves regulate their own activity.
As is so clearly expressed in that description, control centres are capable of acting at every level of our being, not just the brain or nervous system. In fact, what is slowly coming to be realised, but has been said already by people who have explored their inner life, each cell has a level of intelligence. But its intelligence and agency only become conscious to us if we are able to touch it by entering its world with focussed self-awareness or the dimension experienced in dreams.
We have been told, in so many technical publications, that our emergence was achieved by Darwinian evolution, which has been described as a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual’s ability to compete, survive, and reproduce.
This makes it sound as if it is almost unplanned changes that became inherited because they gave advantages to the species, and were thus passed on. There was no mention of sentience or consciousness as a part of our evolutionary development. Yet it is well known that we all emerged from single celled life forms, and there is no break in the line that led to us. But if we look at life and its basic functions a different view develops.
Homeostasis – An organism’s external (outside) environment is always changing. By keeping the control and regulation of its metabolic activities, an organism can maintain a stable internal (inside) environment. This is the process by which an organism’s metabolic activities are in a state of balance ex. body temp, blood sugar levels.
Communication is a necessary part of living beings. According to David Attenborough, “plants can see…count and communicate with one another…react to touch and estimate time.” These claims are supported by the facts that plants turn towards the light, and even prepare themselves for sunrise by facing east in anticipation; trigger hairs on plants react to touch; there is even a social element in plant behaviour in that they fight enemies for territory and compete for mates in order to ensure the survival of the species.
Also, the tremendous exchange of gases, fluids, bacteria – along with the social, verbal, sexual and sensual signals and interactions going on around us and influencing our own existence. Even bacteria share information with each other? They share what they have learned even with species of bacteria that are different. They give each other building blocks of what they have learned. If they have learned how to deal with a particular substance that is poisonous to them, then they will pass that information on to other bacteria. They give what they have learned. That is so fundamental to life even bacteria do it. Genetic studies in bacteria have revealed that extensive gene exchange is the norm between different bacteria even though they do not have formal sexual reproduction.
In June 2007, Canadian biologists discovered that plants have “complex social behaviours such as altruism towards relatives.” This was revealed by watching how plants in the same ‘family’ “do not increase their root growth while sharing a pot with siblings or family. But if they share a pot with a stranger, they “get competitive and start growing more roots, which allows them to grab water and mineral nutrients before their neighbour’s get them.” The study appears in the Royal Society Journal Biology Letters. It shows yet again that consciousness is not unique to mammals. The whole universe demonstrates sentience at various levels of complexity.
Learning and sharing in such basic ways says something different than unplanned changes that became inherited because they gave advantages to the species, and were thus passed on. I believe it shows that levels of awareness were there from the beginning and became more refined as learnt behavior or strategies were passed on. I am guessing that at our emergence from the Big Bang, every little part of what came about were seeds of potential and awareness. These seeds had to pass through enormous periods of learning even experiment, to become the wonderful and intelligence creatures we are surrounded by.
So, what is the difference?
How does an animal perceive the world?
For a start animals do not use words. Anyway, words for humans are only reminders of the real thing, but as humans we are often confused about what is the real thing. For example, when we think of our child or a person we have been acquainted with for a while, we often think our thoughts are a direct insight into them, but they are only our thoughts put into words.
Living creatures at the simplest level only have very low level of behavioural traits. For examples oysters are stuck in their instinctive traits. A dog, although it is also very much an instinctive animal, can learn behaviour that it didn’t gain from its hard wired instincts. Humans have an even wider behavioural range, increased also by learning or personal hard work.
But of course every creature has infinite potential, which is demonstrated by the extraordinary different body shapes and tendency of the dog breeds. Obviously this has been done by humans, and it is something that is almost religiously avoided – the idea that we could develop very different humans. Obviously this still takes place but is largely accidental.
Animals may have a much clearer appreciation of each other and us. The reason is that animals can see our body signals and also can tell enormous amounts about us by their other senses. For instance, here is an account of experiencing in that way.
I had worked in the restaurant for several years on the washing machine. I was cleaning the long counter in which the waitresses put the dirt dishes; and because it was a few minutes to opening time and I had finished I was quite relaxed ready for the day’s lunch time rush. The boss, a man in his sixties was talking to the head waitress, an older woman, talking about the weather, and how many customers they expected. Idle chatter.
Looking up at them again I was suddenly struck by a completely new awareness of them. I seemed to have become hyper aware, and ever tiny movement of their facial expression, their hand and body communicated enormous amounts of information to me. I also saw an energy cable linking the two of them via their abdomen. As I saw it I knew it was a connection made by their having had a sexual union. It was a direct knowing, and quite foreign to me. So much so I later asked the waitress whether she had experienced a close relationship with the boss. Her reply was, “Do you mean did we have sex; well the answer is yes.”
The man told me that he was sure he had glimpsed what it was like to see how animals saw us, with our energy connections and via body communications. It was a direct knowing without words. He never experienced it again, and was uncertain how it had happened. See – Using Your Intuition
It is now known that animals can tell via their sense of smell whether a parson has cancer, and some dogs can predict when their owner is going to have a serious illness attack.
But it is the unknown aspects of what the man in the restaurant experienced that is interesting. If he was right, animals are involved in a much wider awareness that we humans are. Also, it doesn’t arise from reading or study, but through directly being aware. This suggests that animals are in many ways smarter than we are and have access to knowing things without having self-awareness, but not having spoken language they cannot tell us. But their instinctive knowledge is extraordinary, and without self-awareness, must be considered as arising from unconsciousness.
But this isn’t beyond belief, for many humans exhibit it. The example of Edgar Cayce, of George Washington Carver, of Evelyn and her dowsing, and of Eileen Garrett, are all working models. Even Einstein supports it, for he said, “The intuitive mind is sacred gift, the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
Example: I remember when I was younger I was walking upstairs to my balcony and I can swear that it wasn’t a dream, however when I got up there I could see the whole solar system/ universe in front of my eyes and all the planets revolving around me and the largest planet (Jupiter) just did a full circle in front of my eyes That was a truly amazing experience. I cannot define the feelings in words.
So, animals have access to this ocean of knowledge – BUT – they cannot draw out from it much else than their desires to have killer teeth – the big cats – great insulation – the whales – communication between their group – the dolphins, and for many human beings how to get more money, get sex, fight off ageing, and to hell with those who cannot keep up. To be clear – they cannot, or do not ask themselves, the BIG questions as Einstein did from youth.
As an example of the questions, read this, “But in 1923 a startling new kind of reading was discovered. Cayce was operating a photographic studio in Selma, Alabama, when one day he met Arthur Lammers, a well-to-do printer. Lammers hobby was metaphysical philosophy, and what he wanted to know was far beyond the range of Edgar’s normal thinking.
“What is the meaning of life?” he asked. “What is the real nature of man? What is the meaning of birth and death? Why are we here? Cayce accepted Mr. Lammers offer to explain these mysteries through his powers of hypnosis. What followed was the beginning of the metaphysical thought that emerged from 2,500 “Life” readings, as distinguished from the “Physical” readings he had previously been giving.
For Cayce, this was the beginning of another period of tortuous self-doubt. Brought up in an atmosphere of strict, orthodox, Protestant Christianity, he was uninformed on the other great religions of the world and their similarities with his own. What the readings now said seemed foreign to everything he had been taught and had been teaching in his Sunday school classes for many years. The essential principles of the great religions, said the readings, were nevertheless all the same – they were only clothed in different garments.
Can you see that such questions never occurred to Cayce, and it wasn’t until the questioning mind of Lammers proposed them to Cayce, that treasures of the unconscious could be reached? In fact, Cayce went through agonies of doubt because of his beliefs in the version of Christianity he was raised in. See Edgar Cayce: Who Was This Man?
Now, the grand finale is that you cannot get beyond your beliefs unless you can dare to question the inconceivable. You need to have a virgin mind that is free from all preconceptions – I believe that is why the image of the virgin was worshipped in many ancient cultures.
If you can stand and look at yourself and say, “What the hell do I actually KNOW?” and if you can put it all to one side and ask – What else is there waiting to be known?
Then you can begin the journey of going BEYOND.