You are lying in bed, reading, and the light bulb blows overhead. Why not just float up and fix it? And unite the world’s religions at the same time. Hang on! I think you just might be asleep already.
If you think your waking hours tend to be your most productive hours – what with work, playing with friends and family, consuming mountains of the earth’s natural resources and likewise replacing it with mountains of trash – what you tend to achieve in the hours that you sleep is no less productive. When you close your eyes and stop waving your arms about, your brain does not simply switch off. Sure, it has a little break from the physical manipulations of your arms, legs and various motor and sensory functions, but ticking away in your skull as you sleep is a mental self preservation bank, a restless entertainment and fantasy parlor and, as some have believed since the time of Plato four centuries before Christ, a hotline to the soul and the world’s collective divine wisdom.
The well-documented experiences of people feeling they leave their bodies during sleep, along with near-death experiences and other forms of out-of-body experiences induced through meditation or trance-like states, are some of the closest connections that humanity has to religious or spiritual experiences. The spirit, the soul, exactly as we think of it – a floating twin self or ghostly other – has appeared in most of the world’s religious and spiritual movements a long time before Plato. Spirits contact great people and ordinary people alike. We shake joss sticks to some, we seek to attain their enlightened disembodied form in meditation, we set them free in burial rituals. They supposedly know things we don’t. While spirits don’t use banks, aren’t registered as voters or can’t actually be proven to be present, we tend to believe they exist due to some mental conception and the ravings of religious leaders and people who believe they can use their mind to leave their bodies.
The fact is the brain has so much spare computational power that the things which we tend to think consume a lot of “brain power”, such as mathematics or physics, can be done with 90% of you brain tied behind your back, so to speak. So as scientists in the physical world over the years wired people up and saw largely disused parts of the brain flashing away merrily as we sleep and dream, some of the more extreme spiritual concepts of the people we generally consider a little bit wacko could really be leant some slither of credibility. A little more credence than Christianity’s basis in Creationism – a God that created the Earth in seven days and all that – in any respect.
The divine wisdom, introduced in modern times under the term Theosophy by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), usually known as Madame Blavatsky, has been the most cited in the link between some of the more common nap-time experiences and other-worldly spiritualism. According to Jouni Smed of SpiritOnline, the Theosophists believe people to be not simply “the product of the physical body, but is instead a complex creature consisting of many bodies, each finer and more subtle than the one ‘below’ it.” Madame Blavatsky distilled the teachings of Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Gnosticism, Manichaeism and the Cabala, supposedly hanging out with mahatmas or adepts along the way, to introduce the Theosophic concepts of the seven astral planes and seven corresponding astral bodies, the first and grossest being our physical body. In sleep, the astral body and its five “higher” bodies is said to “leave” the sleeping body, gaining access to “forms created by human thought, elementals and the lowest of the dead, who have gone no further since they left the physical world,” says Smed.
The most common form of freeing your ass so your mind will follow is a simple exercise of “dropping” through your bed while nodding off. Taking deep breaths, allow your breathing to eventually slow naturally. Once you are completely relaxed, try inducing a rapid dropping feeling through the bed a few inches at a time. Continue until you feel you are on the floor and then rise up again. As you feel yourself drifting to sleep pull yourself back without physically moving your body. You could, by this stage, be feeling vibrations and seeing images as you visualize yourself floating above your body. I can’t say I’ve ever been able to get my ticket to the astral plane this way, but the number of times I’ve tripped over a kerb in my dreams and kicked myself awake leads me to at least query whether I’m a step closer to jamming with Kurt Cobain or, indeed, sharing some spiritual wisdom in a world without matter.
Because it can’t be measured in the physical world (the “exoteric”), we have no tools to disprove concepts such as astral plains, etheric doubles and other forms of higher consciousness we generally call the “esoteric”. While we would all love to have a DVD copy of last night’s dream, Aunt Mei’s near death experience or sister Siu’s astral projection, none of these can be replicated in the physical world. Nor can we bottle the emotion that we feel in love, when frightened, or blocking a Yao Ming jump shot in basketball. These feelings and experiences we do consider exist, but are also immeasurable and non-quantifiable.
What we do have in the way of evidence is a documented history laden with esoteric experiences such as burning bushes that can talk, Pharoah tombs with pet cats likewise entombed for other-worldly belly-rubs by their masters, shaven-headed monks quite chill with sitting in caves in mountains for years at a time and bulk-buy packets of chewing gum for the spirit world as Chinese bai-bai. These are the same vivid dreams that our brain has decided to inflict on us each night, and for some untether their astral bodies from their physical body to float amongst others, over fields and through the higher levels of, as described by Smed, the “mental or devachnic world, the buddhic, the nirvanic, and two others so far beyond our understanding that they are rarely described. The task of every person is to progress through all of these.” Keeping us from floating off and never coming back is a silver cord, a cord which is severed at death. It’s considered a good idea to keep a good grip on this one if you ever find yourself mixing with our ex-Nirvana lead singer on the nirvanic plane.
While the Theosophists sometimes seem to have a tenuous grip on their cords between their physical world and others, the role of dreaming and meditation is of great comfort to a great many people and admirable in their aims of self-consciousness and spiritual freedom. But as online nay-sayers Skepdic.com confer, “[it] is not an easy life, pursuing the path of the mahatmas and the Ancient Wisdom, striving to unite all humankind into a Great Brotherhood of spiritually evolved beings with secret knowledge of such great vacation spots for astrals as Atlantis.” That may be, but our minds have a whole lot of room for imaginings, and I just hope the end of my cord is Atlantis and not Atlanta airport. Yes, maybe I’ve just succeeding in proving that there is a hell, too.
