Emotionally distant from his children as they grew up, he suddenly became more affectionate toward them and seemed less stressed than he had been for years. All of these developments were somehow linked to a change in his visual perception, which caused objects to catch his eye as they never had before. At times a color might be intensely pleasurable in a way he had never experienced, while other colors were intensely painful or caused him to feel sick.
His fascination with color led to a deepening desire to paint; this pa.s.sion grew so dominant that he retired from his profession to devote himself to his art. As events progressed, however, a darker side emerged to his transformation from broker to amateur Pica.s.so: his memory began to fail, accompanied by the onset of compulsive behaviors such as searching obsessively for lost coins on the street. He became erratically angry and had fits of depression. When these symptoms blossomed into impaired speech and further loss of memory, a UCLA neurologist named Bruce Miller diagnosed a specific rare disease, an early dementia or senility brought on by the gradual destruction of the frontal lobes of the brain.
As a rule patients with dementia do not develop anything positive or life-enhancing from their disorder. But Miller found that in frontotemporal dementia (FTD) a significant number of patients gain sudden talent in music, photography, art, and other creative areas. Although FTD had been known for a hundred years, this particular aspect, which remains mysterious, was a new discovery. (1) The blossoming of talent is always temporary. The brain"s deterioration worsens gradually over time until complete mental derangement results. In the stockbroker"s case, his art improved for several years. His early fascination with bright colors developed into complex designs-intricately detailed flowers, birds, and animals emerged and were sold at gallery prices. A single-minded obsessive talent was born from the ashes of a declining brain.
This phenomenon is not unprecedented. Famously ill geniuses include Dostoevsky, afflicted with epilepsy, and Van Gogh, who suffered from an undiagnosed disorder that could have been schizophrenia, epilepsy, or the ravages of advanced alcoholism. Although they never gained fame, certain chronic schizophrenics have painted canvases in which faces peer out at us with distorted, horrific, yet fascinating expressions; sometimes these are accompanied by obsessive attention to tiny details, spiderwebs of lines woven by fixated minds. Yet in the vast majority of cases the balancing act between art and madness eventually tips over into chaos; the beautiful patterns become scrambled, frantic jigsaws as the disease overwhelms the art.
Some psychiatrists have concluded that insanity has the power to incite creativity, but in the case of dementia, there is such disastrous deterioration of the cortex itself that one wonders where any gift could be coming from. Somehow genius, and in rare instances disease, produces wonders of art by opening the brain to regions of awareness unknown in "normal" life.
Child prodigies are at the extreme end of genius. Einstein was not a child prodigy, which means that he didn"t have fully formed mathematical skill from the age of ten or younger. His genius was more attuned to an overall vision, not to technical details. Yet some genius is totally formed at birth, it seems, and there is no material explanation for it.
All our current models of the brain indicate that it is unformed at birth and needs experience to mature. If you bandage a kitten"s eyes as soon as it is born and leave the blindfold on for just a few weeks, its brain will not have the experience of light. Without that, the visual centers cannot develop, and the kitten will be blind for life. If you don"t expose a newborn baby to language, it will never learn to speak. There is even evidence that early deprivation of love and nurturing will leave a lifelong void that later experience cannot fill, or only with great difficulty. In all these cases the experience flowing in from the outer environment shapes the so-called hardwiring of the cerebral cortex. The primitive, unformed network of neurons that a newborn brings into this world isn"t like a computer"s wiring. Neurons need to interact with all kinds of stimuli before they can form the infinitely ordered, flexible, and efficient network of a mature brain.
According to this model, it should be impossible for the Russian pianist Evgeny Kissin, the most famous musical prodigy of the present generation (he is now nearly thirty), to have displayed musical ability almost at birth. And yet his mother, who took her baby to market in Moscow as she stood in line for food, vividly recalls that her one-year-old hummed Bach inventions in perfect pitch as the other mothers stared in disbelief. And as soon as Evgeny could toddle, he made his way to the family piano and began to pick out the same Bach exercises that he had heard his older sister practicing. These were just the first signs exhibited by a child prodigy who was composing music at six and performing both Chopin piano concertos in a single concert at the age of thirteen-a prodigious feat even for an accomplished virtuoso.
A child"s unformed brain could not accomplish these feats. Normal development consists of month after month of random experimentation on a child"s part, testing one ability after another until the desirable skills (walking, talking, feeding oneself, toilet training) gradually emerge from the undesirable ones (wetting the bed, making mumbling sounds, crawling on hands and knees). There may be a musical gene that might enable one person to carry a tune while another is tone deaf, but a gene alone can"t coordinate all the incredible gifts of a child prodigy. It takes a trained mind to decisively develop one ability out of raw experience. We have to remember that the infant brain must somehow take its stock of 100 billion neurons, all intricately layered but not exposed as yet to the first sight, sound, desire, wish, fantasy, dream, frustration, or fulfillment, and with this soup of raw cells make networks and connections that will last a lifetime. It is astonishing to think that prodigies are doing all that while also developing their one, laserlike talent.
And that is where the unmanifest domain helps us, because a prodigy doesn"t come out of nowhere; he is formed by invisible intelligence that has somehow (no one knows exactly) decided to speed up the learning process far beyond the normal pace, leaving nothing to chance, not even the environment. Kissin"s family happened to own a piano, but musical geniuses have been born in families with no musical background, and math prodigies regularly appear in nonscientific settings. Somehow or other, they still unerringly find their gift. Mind shapes brain, not the other way around. The intelligence that courses through you is turning you into what you are going to be.
Rarely super-prodigies emerge whose abilities are not confined to a single talent but encompa.s.s all mental activity; these children are estimated to fall within the top one-quarter of 1 percent of IQs measured worldwide. A current example is a boy who could recite the alphabet before he was a year old; by eighteen months he could read and memorize books. His mind proved to be omnivorous for knowledge, leading him to complete grades one through twelve by the time he was eight. "I knew my child would surpa.s.s me intellectually," his mother was quoted as saying. "I just didn"t know it would happen when he was six."
Prodigies are not the most inexplicable sort of genius, however; that honor belongs to idiot savants, people with severe mental defects who exhibit extraordinary abilities at the same time. An idiot savant isn"t a complete genius. Usually a single clear channel has been opened to a deep level of the mind field, but with corresponding weakness in other areas. A savant may be able to instantly multiply long numbers, to name the day of the week for any date thousands of years forward or backward in time, or even to calculate square roots beyond the ability of mainframe computers.
At the same time, however, such a person may not be able to pick out the right change for the bus or to learn simple reading skills.
Among currently living savants there is one who can recall any license plate number, going back a dozen years. Another has mastery of fifteen foreign languages, including good to excellent knowledge of some of the world"s most difficult tongues, including Finnish, Welsh, Hindi, and Mandarin Chinese. A native speaker of English, this particular savant once got lost on the streets of Paris and was found hours later cheerfully translating between two groups of tourists, one Greek, the other German.
On his own, however, he was not mentally capable of finding his way back to his nearby hotel. This particular savant can also read writing held upside down or sideways.
Only recently has medicine put a name to this mysterious phenomenon, which is now called "autistic savant syndrome." As the name implies, usually savants are autistic, p.r.o.ne to extreme introversion and obsessive-compulsive behavior; the syndrome is five times more likely to strike males than females. Researchers have been able to pinpoint certain brain anomalies, especially left-hemisphere damage, which causes the right hemisphere to compensate with extraordinary abilities. The right brain dominates in music, art, and unconscious calculating abilities, all of which are common among savants. (Why there is no such compensation among other autistic children is not known.) Yet does this fully account for such a bizarre mixture of genius and mental deficiency? (2) For one thing, mastery of foreign languages would be a left-brain activity, so the theory that the right hemisphere is compensating for left-brain damage doesn"t always hold true. More important, there is no known mechanism by which a deficient brain that cannot organize simple reasoning abilities should suddenly develop supernormal ones. Instead we might speculate that the idiot savant is like a reckless explorer. Some impulse has led him to cross certain frontiers far ahead of normal minds, while at the same time not paying attention to basic necessities.
One savant was almost helpless as a child, a victim of severe r.e.t.a.r.dation, cerebral palsy, and blindness. He was kept in an orphanage at birth until his adoption by a compa.s.sionate couple. Not until the age of fourteen was it discovered that he was a musical prodigy. One night his parents awoke to hear someone playing the Tchaikovsky first piano concerto downstairs in the middle of the night. They were astonished to find that it was their adopted son, who had never been exposed to a piano and was far too r.e.t.a.r.ded to take music lessons. Once his savantism emerged, however, he could play any piece of piano music, however complex, after hearing it only once, a feat beyond even a trained professional. Yet this same young man could not manage the simple tasks of cooking, buying clothes, or holding a job.
Such wide disparities are examples of imbalance, not just on the material level but on the level where one"s inner life gets organized. The unmanifest domain is beyond time, and yet one of its responsibilities is to organize the world over time. When a rose progresses from winter to spring, it could not survive by releasing the chemicals that would make it go dormant when the genes for blossoming are required. A rose is attuned to the rhythm of the seasons, responding to the slightest changes in daylight and temperature, the angle of the sun, and the moisture in the soil.
We are more fortunate than a rose, since we are not a prisoner of the seasons, but in another sense we are much less fortunate, because we can misuse our freedom of choice and turn to self-destructive behavior. The idiot savant has somehow made some drastic choices inside his mind, and although the intelligence of nature does not s.n.a.t.c.h away the gift of genius, it does not erase the wrong decisions, either. Our own lives obey the same principle-it is common for anyone to have mastered one aspect of life, such as earning money, while being very poor at another, such as maintaining a loving relationship. In all cases of imbalance, events will be organized to bring the weak parts into focus, even though it is still our own choice whether or not to follow where nature wants to lead us. All these examples of genius, even though they have no obvious spiritual lesson to teach, point to the possibility that the mind can organize an infinite number of ingredients. G.o.d"s mind feels very close at this point.
We are not there yet, but genius is like a window into infinite possibilities.
MEMORY OF FORMER LIFETIMES.
Who were you before you were you? The possibility of an afterlife is widely argued in the West, but the existence of a before-life is just as likely. If you believe only in an afterlife, you are restricted to a very limited, dualistic view of time. There is only "here" and "after." But if life is continuous, if the soul never stops making its journey, a completely different worldview opens up.
As part of our medical training in India, every young doctor was sent to a village posting, which was the equivalent of doing public health service.
Rural India exists exactly as it did in centuries past, and after the urban culture of New Delhi, the shock of village life feels like time travel. One day in my mud dispensary patients began running outside for no reason. I stepped outside to find that a crowd had gathered around a little girl standing barefoot in the dusty road. She was four or five, and apparently she had appeared from nowhere. Her name, she said, was Neela.
It"s a common enough name in northern India, but after a few moments the little girl began calling one or two of the villagers by name, people she had never met before. She was gathered up in someone"s arms and carried into a nearby house; on the way, however, she pointed to this dwelling and that and made remarks as if she knew them.
Within an hour her frantic parents showed up. They had stopped by the side of the main road in their car, and while unpacking for lunch, the mother noticed that Neela had wandered off. There was a tearful reunion with the little girl. Then the questions began: How had Neela walked the long distance, more than a mile, from the roadside stopping point to the village? How had her parents known to look for her there?
The answer was very strange and yet very Indian. Neela, it turned out, was not her real name, but Gita. As soon as she learned to talk, Gita had kept pointing to herself and saying, "Neela, Neela."
Naturally everyone believed that Gita was a reincarnation. The locals considered the matter, and it wasn"t long before someone remembered another Neela, a little girl who had died young on one of the surrounding farms. Someone would have run off to fetch the family who lived there, but Gita"s parents became quite nervous. Despite protests, they grabbed up their daughter and sped away in the car. Gita cried as they took her away, staring out the back window as the vehicle receded in a cloud of dust. To my knowledge she never returned.
Many similar incidents of overlapping lifetimes crop up, and not just in the East. Some years back it made news when the search for a reincarnated high Tibetan lama took a delegation of priests to Spain. There a small Catholic baby was identified as a likely candidate. How do boundaries of birth and death become so thin? People who spend time with geniuses and prodigies often find them unearthly, somehow preternatural, as if a very old soul has been confined to a new body and yet brings in experience far beyond what that body could have known. It is easy to credit that some kind of former life is casting its influence on the present. Speaking of his own experience, one musical prodigy stated, "It is as if I am playing from outside my own consciousness. The music comes through me. I am the conduit, not the source."
Does the same effect apply to all of us? Reincarnation is a contentious subject; the Eastern world has adopted it for thousands of years, while the Judeo-Christian tradition has only flirted with the concept and for the most part rejected it. During the Middle Ages belief in earlier lives amounted to heresy.
The unmanifest domain allows us to see this issue a different way. We can frame the notion of former lives as one of awareness. To be aware means that you can activate either a small or a large part of your mind. Some people are keenly aware of their deeper motives, their subconscious emotions, or their creative ability, while other people are closed off.
Seers and sages activate deep regions, seeing into human nature as it applies far beyond their own lives. A humble monk in a cave in the Himalayas may be capable of peering into my soul far more clearly than I can (I have had this experience, in fact). So it would seem that the mind isn"t limited by experience-all of us have had moments when we know much more than we should.
There is much evidence that the mind is not confined by time and s.p.a.ce.
Because the brain is located inside the head, we a.s.sume that the mind is as well, looking out at the world like a prisoner in a tower. When you say, "I"ve got this idea running through my head," you operate from this a.s.sumption. But awareness is more than ideas and much more even than brain function. I can remember sitting on a bed in a cheap motel watching a crime scene on television. I was twenty-four, it was my first night in America, and the violence I saw on the eleven o"clock news was shockingly new to me. I leaned forward, watching the gunshot victims being carted on gurneys into a local hospital. Suddenly my stomach turned over.
They were going to the hospital where I was supposed to report the next day. The emergency room that was scrambling to remove bullets and crack open chests to ma.s.sage stopped hearts would be my workplace in twelve hours. I had an unreal feeling as I saw myself being swept into all this American mayhem. The blood staining the sidewalk would soon be on my hands; I would be saving patients who might be policemen or murderers.
I was very emotional at that moment, caught between fascination and dread, and emotions create strong memories. I can feel and see the scene vividly anytime I want to. Is the memory inside my head? If so, then how is it that you are experiencing it as you read this page? Some version of my memory, however faint, has transferred itself to you. You saw an image, you felt a feeling. How did an event supposedly trapped inside my skull get inside yours without pa.s.sing through something in between?
The brilliant British biologist and researcher in evolutionary theory Rupert Sheldrake has devised extremely clever experiments that turn on this very riddle. For example, he gave English-speaking children several groups of j.a.panese words and asked them which ones were poetry. Even though they knew not a word of j.a.panese, the children could pick out the verses with remarkable accuracy, as if they heard the difference between ordinary sentences, or even nonsense syllables, and delicate haikus. How did this knowledge get into their heads? Is it floating in the air or available through a planetary mind that we all share?
Just as a quantum of energy can leap between two points without crossing the s.p.a.ce in between, so apparently can a thought. A field of awareness flows in, around, and through each of us. Some of this awareness is localized. We say "my" memory and "my" thoughts, but that isn"t the whole story. A neuron can"t claim "this is my idea" until millions of cells have come together to form each image or thought. Their ability to communicate doesn"t require them to touch. Millions of heart cells that keep the same cardiac rhythm do not touch, either. The coordination of brain or heart depends on an invisible electrical field whose minute charges establish patterns among billions of tiny individual cells. A heart in which the electrical field becomes jumbled begins to writhe in agony as each cell loses contact with the others; the effect is like a bag of worms pulsing violently until the heart deprives itself of oxygen to the point of death.
(This is known as fibrillation, one symptom of a heart attack.) Awareness seems to be an even more subtle field, not only invisible but needing no energy. When you picked up my old memory, no electrical or magnetic current pa.s.sed between us. The simple act of recognizing a friend on the street contains a similar mystery. When you see a familiar face, your brain doesn"t run through its catalog of all known faces to arrive at who your friend is. A computer would have to do that, consuming energy as it did so. But your brain doesn"t scan its entire memory bank when it sees a strange or a familiar face-what we call recognition takes place instantly, at a deeper level of awareness.
Awareness does need chemical links. In your immune system a T cell floating past an invading virus recognizes it and goes on the attack. It recognizes the enemy according to the chemical coding on the outside of the germ, which has to match another coding on the outside of the T cell before any kind of alert is sent via messenger molecules throughout the body. A few cold viruses or pneumococci are enough to put billions of immune cells on alert. However, such a chemical explanation of immunity fails to solve some basic issues. Why does a T cell let in the AIDS virus without fighting it?
The answer given by virologists focuses on the outside coating of the HIV virus, a deceptive code of molecules that disguises itself in such a way that it can sneak past the corresponding coding on the outside of the T cell-rather like a guerilla warrior using underground tactics instead of a frontal a.s.sault. If this is so, how did HIV learn to do this? Chemicals are neutral; they have no awareness built into them. Therefore to a chemical it is insignificant whether the HIV virus or the T cell survives.
Yet to the cells that is all-important. This leads us to ask how a cell learns to reproduce in the first place. DNA is composed of simple sugars and bits of protein that never divide or reproduce, no matter how many billions of years they exist. What step caused these simple molecules to get together, arrange themselves in a pattern with billions of tiny segments, and all of a sudden learn to divide?
One plausible answer is that an invisible organizing principle is at work.
The need for life to reproduce itself is fundamental; the need for chemicals to reproduce themselves is nil. So even at this most basic level, we see certain qualities of awareness-recognition, memory, self-preservation, and ident.i.ty-coming into play. Now add the element of time. It isn"t enough for DNA just to reproduce itself randomly; that is the behavior of cancer, which reproduces without regard and eventually engulfs its host, leading to its own death.
To form a baby, a single fertilized cell must be a master of timing. Every organ of the body exists in seed form within a single strand of DNA, yet to emerge correctly, they must take their turn. For the first days and weeks, an embryo is called a zygote or seed; it is an undifferentiated ma.s.s of similar cells. But very soon one cell starts to give off chemicals unique to itself. Even though the mother cells are identical, some of the offspring know, for example, that they are meant to be brain cells. As such, they need to specialize, growing into far different shapes than muscle or bone cells. This they do with amazing precision, but in addition they send out signals to attract other proto-brain cells. Like attracts like, and as brain cells float toward each other, they cross paths with proto-heart, proto-kidney, and proto-stomach cells, none of them getting in the way or causing a confusion of ident.i.ty.
This spectacle is far more astonishing than the eye can see. Visibly there is nothing but a soup of cells swimming around and forming patterns. Yet think of it: a baby brain cell somehow knows who it is going to be in advance. For many weeks a neuron is developing its structure, not yet mature but no longer undifferentiated, either. How does it keep track of its purpose in life with so many billions of signals being sent all around it? This is as mysterious a question as asking how a T cell first learned to recognize an enemy before meeting one. Memory, learning, and ident.i.ty precede matter; they govern matter. If a cl.u.s.ter of brain cells misses even one beat, if a cerebral cell floats up to its a.s.signed layer of the brain but gets slightly clogged in traffic, bunching up instead of spreading out into an even layering, the result is that the baby will be born with dyslexia. How did such a mishap occur, given that brains have been evolving for tens of millions of years, whereas reading a book is at most three thousand years old? It would have made no difference to a Neanderthal brain whether the word G.o.d looked like the word dog, yet a newborn neuron has been able to avoid that mistake for eons in advance of the invention of language.
I conclude that the field of awareness is our true home, and that awareness contains the secrets of evolution, not the body or even DNA.
This shared home is "the light" spoken of by mystics; it is the potential for life and intelligence, and it is life and intelligence once they appear. Your mind is one focus of this cosmic awareness, but it doesn"t belong to you like a possession. Just as your body is held together by inner awareness, there is a flow of awareness outside you. If you consider for a moment, you can catalog many common experiences that require you to be outside your brain. Have you ever felt that someone is watching you behind your back, only to turn around and find that in fact someone is there? We"ve all finished a friend"s sentence or exclaimed, "I was thinking the same thing!" on the heels of another person"s thought.
A woman told me about standing on the Pacific sh.o.r.e in Oregon worrying about her dying father. She looked up at the sunset and saw his face in her mind, while his voice distinctly said, "Forgive me." Later that night the woman called her sister, and it turned out that she had had the same vision and heard the same words. As an exercise I sometimes encourage a group of people to try to go beyond their limited perception-I call this "going into your virtual body." Each person sits with eyes closed and gives himself permission to travel anywhere the impulse wants to go. The images that come to mind don"t have to be judged, only accepted and allowed to flow. One woman, who was single and living with her boyfriend, saw him cleaning out the closet at home, startling only because he had never done such a thing. The image was vivid, as if she were right there with him, and apparently she was, because when she called home, he had a surprise for her-he had completely cleaned and rearranged her closet so that she could get at her things more easily.
Now let"s return to the original question: Who were you before you were you? Even though we all identify with a very limited slice of time and s.p.a.ce, equating "me" with one body and one mind, in reality you also live outside yourself in the field of awareness. The Vedic seers say, "The real you cannot be squeezed into the volume of a body or the span of a lifetime." Just as reality flows from the virtual to the quantum to the material level, so do you. Whether we call this reincarnation or not almost doesn"t matter. The package of body and mind that came before is a stranger to you now, and the one that might arise after your death is equally alien. But on a deeper level, millions of seeds have already been planted. Some are the thoughts you will have tomorrow or the actions you will follow a decade from now. Time is flexible at the quantum level and nonexistent at the virtual level. As we watch these seeds sprouting in the fertile field of time and s.p.a.ce, awareness wakes up to itself. This is how a single fertilized cell learns to become a brain-it wakes up to itself, not on the chemical level but on the level of awareness.
Perhaps you are a single cell among millions too, each cell being a lifetime. It was said that the Buddha closed his eyes for a few minutes and experienced ninety-nine thousand incarnations. If this is not breathtaking enough, we are told that he experienced every minute of them; births, deaths, and time itself expanded in a few minutes of silence. Such an amazing ability to control time lies not only with the enlightened. If you weren"t a master of time already, you would be an amorphous glob of cells like the sea cuc.u.mber; you might have entered a world where p.u.b.erty could come at any moment and kidney cells could fuse into spleens, or where the first pollen of hay fever season might kill half the population.
Now imagine that expanded awareness is normal. Time and s.p.a.ce could just be convenient concepts that hold true in the material world but dissolve gradually as you approach the quantum level. This is what I believe reincarnation is about. Former lives fall into the unexplored territory of expanded awareness. It isn"t absolutely necessary to decide whether they are "real" or not. Concrete verification that I was a Nepalese soldier at the time of the Emperor Ashoka is never going to come my way. But if I find myself extremely attracted to that period, if I start to read about Ashoka and his conversion to Buddhism, and if my empathy is so strong that I cannot help but adopt some of those principles, we can truthfully say that a wider range of life has influenced my mind. In a very real sense, the terms former life and expanded life are the same thing.
All of the quantum and virtual levels are open to us all the time. To navigate them completely is impossible; they open up to us according to our own needs and abilities. But no part is intentionally closed off.
Although we normally look no deeper than the personal domain, to look deeper is always possible. It is more normal to learn from the past than not to, and people who shut out their former lives-if we want to use that terminology-are shutting out lessons that give this present lifetime its purpose and meaning. For someone who has absorbed these lessons fully, there is no need to go beyond this lifetime, and yet such visitations are still part of the natural order of things.
Finally, the fact that we are not confined to our physical body and mind gives us reason to believe in the existence of a cosmic intelligence that permeates life-and brings us close to the mind of G.o.d. But since we are talking about a quantum phenomenon, it isn"t correct to say that G.o.d has been found, the way you would find a lost book where you forgot to look for it. A woman who had read some of my earlier writings on quantum reality had become excited and then went enthusiastically to her minister.
He listened somewhat grimly while she poured out her bubbling happiness over these new spiritual ideas. When she was finished, he said curtly, "Call this man up and ask him if G.o.d is inside all of us."
Obediently she tracked down my number and called. In a hesitant voice she asked the question, and I said, "Yes, according to the quantum model, G.o.d is inside all of us."
She couldn"t disguise her disappointment. "Oh dear, that"s exactly what my minister said you would say." And then she hung up, crestfallen that the acceptable G.o.d, the one who looks over us from heaven, had been undermined. Only afterward did I realize that I had been carelessly trapped, for my answer wasn"t right. In the quantum model there is no inside or outside. G.o.d is no more in us than he is anywhere else-he is simply not locatable. To say that we go within to meditate, to pray, or to find G.o.d is really just a convention. The timeless place where G.o.d exists can"t be reduced to an address. Our exploration into former lifetimes indicates that the same may be true of us as well.
TELEPATHY AND ESP.
The ability to know what another person is thinking, whether you call it mind reading or extrasensory perception, also occupies a shadowy middle ground between popular belief and science. In the laboratory, psychologists have discovered that some individuals are much more skillful at this than others. Subject A, when placed in a separate room staring at a series of picture cards, can sometimes transmit these mental images with surprising accuracy to another room where subject B is trying to receive them. Yet science has more or less stopped there. Various underground experiments were conducted by defense agencies during the Cold War to see if spies might be able to send messages or images by telepathy to a cohort across the Iron Curtain, but these attempts were never reliable. On the other hand, they were not complete failures, either.
ESP has hindered investigation because it isn"t clear that there really is a sender and a receiver. The blurring of two minds or the sharing of one thought is just as likely an explanation. We spoke about the fuzzy boundaries of time and s.p.a.ce, and the boundary of personality is just as fuzzy. Are you really separate from me, or is this a convenient illusion we maintain so that life can proceed in a certain predictable way?
Old married couples often seem to merge in both personality and thought.
Twins can have uncanny similarities in the way their lives unfold.
Extensive studies of identical twins, however, show that no stereotype covers all cases. At one extreme, a pair of identical twins can be so completely merged that they never live apart and, when questioned, speak with one voice and apparently think with one mind. In the unfortunate instance that one twin dies prematurely, the other mourns for life. At the other end of the spectrum, a pair of identical twins can be almost total strangers, sharing no experiences or thoughts. Many studies have been conducted of twins separated at birth and raised apart by totally different sets of parents. Generally in these cases the twins still exhibit about a 50 percent strong resemblance in behavior and thought patterns. When reunited, they also can form strong bonds, and then it is likely that some kind of mental sharing, whether it is ESP or not, will take place. Even when the empathy is intense, though, the twins do not divide into a sender of thought and a receiver.
What this implies is that in the mind field, any boundary can be tenuous.
If necessary, your mind can merge and communicate with another mind. A thought that, properly speaking, should belong to one of you becomes a joint experience. Why would such a merging be necessary? No one can really answer that precisely-in general, momentous events will act as a trigger, causing a spouse to intuit her dying partner"s last wishes or one twin to know that his brother had suddenly been struck by lightning. The twin to whom this actually happened felt the shock of the lightning pa.s.sing through his own body at the instant his sibling was killed. (To further underline the point in a bizarre way, after writing this example down, I met a lawyer who was pulled from an afternoon meeting by a wrenching pain in his abdomen. He had never had such an experience and departed home immediately. When he got there the police were waiting with tragic news.
His mother had been stabbed and killed by an act of random violence at exactly the moment he had felt the pain. By what mysterious stroke of synchronous timing were mother, son, and murderer tied in a karmic dance?) But some ESP is totally trivial and inconsequential, too, as when we phone someone and hear, "I was just thinking about you." The real fascination lies deeper. We all a.s.sume that we are the authors of our thoughts. They don"t simply appear as messages in our heads; we actively think them. But ESP tends to contradict this a.s.sumption. If two people vividly share the same thought, it may be that neither one is the author; there is simply the simultaneous reception of an idea. We can cite instances where two philosophers or scientists had the identical inspiration without knowing each other. The simultaneous invention of the calculus by Leibniz and Newton is one famous example.
In Hollywood identical story lines arrive in cl.u.s.ters, so that millions wind up being spent on competing asteroid collision plots or volcano epics. The U.S. Patent Office gets bombarded by nearly identical inventions. We often say that an idea is "in the air," and this may be literally true, in that the unmanifest may unfold certain insights or revelations on a broad scale. This is particularly true on the collective level, where an entire society may be gripped with enthusiasm for revolution or social change. There doesn"t have to be a sender or receiver in these cases, even though a prominent speaker of the new thought usually appears. We just say that a society is ripe for change when in fact a much more subtle process-the attunement of millions of individuals to a collective mind field-is taking place.
In a fascinating experiment, mothers who breast-fed their infants were separated from them and given no information about their babies"
activities. Even though miles away, many mothers started to lactate at exactly the same moment that their babies began crying and demanding milk.
Two intimately connected minds can be united at the level of awareness.
You may have cried out for help or solace from someone miles away, and sometimes they respond by showing up or calling. In wartime it is not uncommon for parents to know with certainty the exact moment that a son is killed on the battlefield.
Awareness doesn"t have to be human; it seems to pervade all lifeforms. In a forest where trees are being heavily foraged by animals, individual trees can protect themselves with a chemical defense. They start to exude indigestible tars into their leaves before they are even touched-having been warned by neighboring trees via chemical signals in the air or through their roots. In a similar act of communal awareness, the cells of a sea cuc.u.mber are arranged to give a mouth and digestive tract to this primitive animal, which is little more than a giant feeding tube. You can puree a sea cuc.u.mber in a blender, pour the solution of brine and cells into a bucket, and after a while the entire animal will regroup itself from the unformed biological sludge.
These are all examples of awareness as a field beyond the body. These examples help us to shift away from a strictly private, isolated mind to a universal, shared mind whose body is the universe. Isolation is a material fact but not a quantum fact. The boundaries dividing "me" and "you" are much thinner than we realize. There is reason to believe that personal ident.i.ty is just another convenience, useful for everyday living but ultimately too flimsy to be taken as real. I believe this is implied in the scriptural phrases "children of G.o.d" and "created in his image."
Insofar as we are children of our parents, personality is simply continuing itself. One generation teaches the next how to obey the rules of limited ident.i.ty. But in a multilayered reality, there has to be another father/mother for our extended ident.i.ty, and this is the role we a.s.sign to G.o.d. We have not yet proved that there is such a divine parent, but it seems undeniable that our cosmic ident.i.ty is real.
ALTER EGOS (MULTIPLE.
PERSONALITY SYNDROME).
In spiritual literature the body is sometimes called the vehicle of the soul, which is another way of saying that the invisible part dresses itself in visible clothing. Actually, the body is just as spiritual as the soul; both are expressions of the same awareness. As it unfolds into manifestation, the field of mind has to a.s.sume form, and form isn"t simple-it takes thousands of processes to organize a single amoeba, much less a human body. Therefore, the flow of intelligence must obey laws that are set in place at the deepest level.
Where one law ends, another begins, and between them a boundary is set as a division. For example, a skin cell in the middle level of the epidermis lives its life, dividing, breathing, and feeding, but as it is pushed closer to the surface, it begins to harden gradually, and by the time it arrives in contact with the air, its exterior is toughened enough to withstand contact with the environment. However, in this process the cell also dies, to be sloughed off and make way for the next generation of epidermal cells.
The same proteins that will lead to the end of a cell"s life serve to protect the body as a whole. How did the body learn this sacrificial act of altruism? When white cells become engorged with invading bacteria, they die in that service as well. An overarching awareness realizes what is good for the whole and can therefore sacrifice a small part.
One law never applies to all; even life and death are apportioned out in small, precise steps. Every cell in your body, as it evolved in the embryo, obeyed a host of different rules as it matured. The original fertilized ovum split into some cells in the stomach that survive only a few days, while others in the brain may last a lifetime. The same DNA that willingly destroys itself in a skin cell fights for survival in a sperm cell, whose frantic rush to fertilize an egg has been evident as long as plants and animals have existed.
Now we are faced with a paradox, for awareness seems to be capable of infinite organization. It is both inside us and outside; it fights to live and yet rushes to die; it organizes itself into an incredibly complex whole yet is subdivided into almost infinite tiny compartments. This organization becomes noticeable mostly when it breaks down, such as when the laws that govern cell division, or mitosis, become deranged and a cancer cell wildly divides without limit. In this case the cell is acting for its own survival, feeling that it must reproduce at maximum rate, much as locusts breed out of control into plagues. Ultimately a plague dies out because it exceeds the amount of food available, and a cancer cell ultimately dies because it kills the host body. This outcome is obvious and would be communicated to the cancer cell if it were in contact with the body"s basic intelligence, yet somehow this natural connection has been broken.
In psychological terms, a similar thing happens with alter egos or its clinical extreme, multiple personality syndrome. Alter egos are formed under psychological pressure. The stress that one personality cannot contain spills over into another. If I feel unfairly treated at work, I may have a dream in which I am a lion tamer whipping a big cat to do my will, and these may be symbols of the stress I"m not able to handle when I"m awake. The dream"s interpretation may not be open to me, so I may not be aware that the lion is my boss or that my fear of him is being acted out here.
The person suffering from multiple personalities is in much the same situation, but the lion tamer exists in waking state. The negative energies of hatred, fear, child abuse, self-doubt, humiliation, and so forth get played out as if they belonged to someone else. These other personalities are trapped within one body, but they are separate enough to pretend that they aren"t.
At the unmanifest level, each of us is many people; you can define this in terms of lifetimes, but that isn"t necessary. When you read a novel with a fascinating character in it, you subtly blend into that figure, allowing a boundary of awareness to melt temporarily so that you can have the experience of being inside someone else"s skin. If you come from a family where certain striking events are discussed for years, it becomes hard to remember whether these strong memories really belong to you or were piped into your mind. I know a man whose parents lost their home to fire when he was two years old, and he cannot recall if he saw the house burn down or sees it only with secondhand vividness. Emotionally he feels the same trauma as if he had been there, but he could have absorbed his parents"
emotions of shock and loss.
Normally our alter egos are shadowy, and the ability to rejoin our "real"
personality is overtly ours to control. We know that we aren"t Scarlett O"Hara or Ebenezer Scrooge, yet we allow the willing suspension of disbelief to take over for a brief hour or so. Some characters are so overpowering that you may fall under their influence for a much longer time. Neurosis is often marked by this kind of long-range influence, where an inner child with all its weakness and fearfulness continues to preside inside an adult personality.
If your boundaries are too thin, however, you cannot control this act of becoming another character. The extreme state of this is alter egos.
From the perspective of the mind field, if an alter ego is strong enough, it can actually change the body to conform to it. Striking cases are on record in which one personality is menopausal, for example, while the others aren"t, or where each of the alter egos has its own menstrual cycle. In other cases a single personality may be diabetic or allergic to pollen while the others show no signs of these disorders. The patient can be in the throes of a severe asthma attack when a new personality enters the scene, and at that instant all evidence of asthma will disappear. The diabetic personality may be insulin dependent and yet revert to normal blood sugar levels during the times when other personalities appear.
This phenomenon, as I see it, cannot be explained as brain function. The brain adapts itself in our childhood, so that what we know, what we have experienced, what we like and dislike are all formative. A person who violently dislikes insects will jump at the sight of a spider without having to think consciously about it. To claim that the brain could form different reactions for a dozen personalities is not credible; it would defy everything we know about childhood development. Alter egos must come from a region beyond personal experience; they are like voluntary incarnations-or partial incarnations-activated from the storehouse of the mind field.
This alone doesn"t make an alter ego unnatural. A great actor also activates his portrayal of Hamlet by going to the unmanifest. We say that he is bringing his character to life, as opposed to lesser actors who only imitate. The school of acting known as Method consists of going inward and finding emotional memories powerful enough to convince the audience that they are real, that one is actually feeling Hamlet"s guilt on stage before our eyes. Someone afflicted with alter egos is like a master of Method who doesn"t realize that he is acting. He has no fixed core, no central perspective that is not acting; he therefore can"t see that the illusion is an illusion.
"Why do you insist that my normal self is unreal?" a disciple once complained to his master.
"Why not put it the other way?" the master replied. "What makes you think you are real?"
"It"s obvious," said the disciple. "I think and feel and act. I know myself for who I am, with all my habits, my likes and dislikes."
"Yes, but what do you really know?" the master insisted. "Did you have your habits when you were asleep?"
"Of course not. I am unconscious when I am asleep."
"Perhaps you are unconscious now."
"No, right now I am awake."
"Really?" The master smiled. "Can you remember everything that happened to you yesterday? Or even what you were thinking an hour ago? Isn"t your self-awareness very selective, amounting to just a partial memory? And then there are your dreams, which you lose as soon as you wake up. Not to mention that your habits and preferences are always changing, and even when you do seem stable, don"t your emotions often betray you? An insult from a pa.s.sing stranger can completely throw you off balance, or the news that someone close to you has died. Isn"t there also the problem of being lost in wishes, false hopes, and various mental illusions?"