Blindness and Seeing in Dreams

That we have a word such as unconscious in our vocabulary means that we acknowledge there are things we cannot ‘see’ about our own existence, about our own body, and about our own mind, intentions and feelings. Many writers on psychology have suggested that the part we know about our own brain/mind is about one tenth its possible size, and we use possibly about one tenth or less of its potential.

In trying to understand this we may come to see that most of our existence and mind is outside the boundary of our everyday knowing. This has always been realised in most ancient cultures, and many strange and refined techniques were developed to take awareness beyond the boundary of its normal knowing into the land of the ‘unknown’. In this century many people have attempted the same thing using mind expanding drugs or techniques of meditation or altered states of consciousness. So in a way virtually everyone is blind, and we are all learning in some way to become sighted. Remember that you can see less that 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum (light) and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum, meaning  we are almost totally blind and deaf. See: altered states of consciousness; esp in dreams; the definitions of dreaming under Freud; out of body experience; yoga and dreams; dream yoga; Enlightenment; Methods of Awakening; Brain Levels and Dreams.

This difficulty in crossing the boundary of knowing into the unknown is a sort of general blindness most of us suffer. Considering that dreams portray a very different view of life in which this boundary often does not exist, we can say that dreams are a leap beyond our blindness into full supersensual life. In our dreams we can often see the meaning of life experiences we are failing to understand in waking; we can look ahead into what our attitudes and temperament are creating in our life; we can look deep into the workings of our body, and in general extend our senses and awareness beyond any known limits. See: Cayce, Edgar; collective unconscious; hallucinations; Prophecy of the Star Beings.

Many modern physicists, working with the information arising in experiments with quantum mechanics, tell us that our view of the world is based upon our blindness, and is very limited, and through its limitation, unreal. Yet this view we take to be the REAL universe. See Archetype of the Paradigm

There is what we  see and what we miss seeing 

The physicist Bohm defines this problem by saying that there are two orders in our experience of the world around us. There is the “explicate” order and the “implicate” order of the universe. He defines the explicate order as the impressions of the world gained via our senses and the interpretations the brain places on these impressions. These impressions and the brain’s interpretations – based on millions of years of evolutionary experience and input – lead to a view that we each have separate minds in isolated bodies.

The implicate order is the universe as it is when we move beyond the limitations of the senses and the brain’s limited evolutionary programs. Then we begin to see the universe as a single indivisible whole, and ourselves as intricately part of that whole.

Bohm says that ‘if we don’t see this it’s because we are blinding ourselves to it.’ He goes on to say that ‘If we don’t establish these absolute boundaries between minds, then it’s possible they could unite as one mind.’

An example of this seeing beyond our conditioned blindness is given in this man’s description of something he ‘saw’ when he moved beyond his usual boundaries:-

I saw an influence in action pressing human society into ever greater super-organisms. These organisms either evolve into functioning new forms, or fail and breakdown. And by organisms I mean huge groups of people working toward similar goals, such as we find in political or religious groups, or even in nations or social groups. The human body is a super-organism for instance, and combines the workings of billions of cells. What I had failed to see previously is that human beings, despite their felt isolation and individual identity, are actually moved by similar forces as cause cells to gain a common identity in a body.

Your body for instance – if you took a few skin cells off it you couldn’t look at them and say they are your body. They come from your body but they’re not IT. Like lots of things in nature some amazing action brings all the millions of cells together in a working combination that is your body. The skin cells couldn’t get hold of a can opener and take the lid of a can. But if they’re still connected to all the other cells and working together there’s no problem in getting that lid off.

Life is powerful in a physical sense when it brings together lots of units and directs them to work toward some end. Everything from a bacteria to a huge whale works on this principle of cells grouping together. It’s how nature works. Life is good at it and has a tendency to push toward uniting things to create what are really huge organisms. One of the ways the life
processes do this is like the army ants or bees. Although they are all separate individuals, they are all working toward the same end. Each little individual devotes its life to the working of the group, like cells in our body. When that doesn’t happen we call it an illness, cancer for example.

Now look at a political party, it doesn’t matter which one, Republican, Democrat, Communist, Labour. If you stand way back far enough you can see a party is a hug organism made up of millions of cells working toward a common goal. And if you stand in the way of one of these giant organisms, you’re going to get trod on worse than standing in the way of an elephant. They are huge, and they’re powerful and like the army ants, they spread over a big territory. Sometimes they fight, and that’s hell, because people are the cells that get injured, because it’s people who make up the body of  these mammoths. They feed on people, they build their body out of people, they shit people.

Political parties, religious groups, giant companies, pressure groups, are all super organisms. That’s okay. It’s an everyday fact of life. But perhaps you hadn’t seen it before, and maybe it wasn’t your real choice to get eaten. Maybe that’s what you want. And each of these giant bodies offers advantages to individual existence. But they also want you to pay a price. Are you ready for that?

Don’t forget, all of these are LIVING CREATURES. As such they defend themselves against attack like any other living body – like your body for instance. Every day you mutilate thousands of bacteria in the defence of your own existence. You don’t even notice it. The same with the super organisms. They fight anything opposing them, so don’t stand in the way!

The push toward knowing more

I saw a push toward a new level of complexity and size which is integrating and using technology. This new super organism within human society is digesting technology or interiorising it as an integral part of its new organisation and size. This is similar to the way the body has integrated certain things into its own cells. Such as the mitochondria, or uses exterior bacteria to help digest food.

The jump to a vastly greater size is enabled by the technology the super-organism incorporates. So if we take human beings as the cells in the body of this huge super-organism, they constitute the living soft tissue, but the nervous system is being formed with the computer driven information and control highways emerging at the moment. And if we are not blind, we will recognise that the equipment we have created is part of our greater body now. Still more though, we must recognise that the huge organism we are incorporated into is more than we are ourselves, just as the body is greater than the cell. If we can see this then we may also recognise that as a human being we may be driven by urges arising in us that are not from our own isolated mind – because our mind is not isolated. Overall our direction arises in large measure from the drives pushing the super organism, and the direction of society is created by the direction of the super-organism.

Another description of seeing beyond the sensory limitations is as follows.

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, as I watch, 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. Jon.

This mixture of dream and lucidity graphically illustrates the possibilities we achieve once we move beyond the blindness of living only in our conscious mind. This is a move many people are now undertaking, an evolutionary shift, a new paradigm. Through it, as with Jon, enormous positive changes occur in your life. See fundamental processes; The Secret; Life’s Little Secrets.