Going Within (20 page)

Indeed, physicist David Bohm has introduced a theory of “hidden variables” existing on some other level, or levels, of reality, which exceed even the quantum “uncertainty.” After Bohm met Krishnamurti,
the physicist continued to further develop his thinking on what the connection between subatomic particle theory could mean in relation to the universe.

In his book
Wholeness and the Implicate Order
, Bohm concludes that not only is the subatomic-particle world part of an unbroken wholeness that exists on several levels but that the explicate world—the three-dimensional world we can recognize—is merely a projection of some higher and multidimensional reality. Again, all this relates to the wholeness of time, to total interrelated connectedness.

Thus the fundamental approaches to our Western way of thinking and perceiving are becoming more balanced, and as a result we feel freer to explore ourselves as spiritual beings—a truth that will eventually be as highly esteemed as technological truth. In fact, what we are doing is investigating the inner physics of the soul force.

Intuitive recognition of the soul is deeply rooted in human nature, but we in the West have long ignored our spiritual roots. Intuitive thinking has always had more fundamental value in the evolution of mankind than the limited perceptions of logic because it addresses higher dimensions and Divine realities. These enable us to feel connected to the source of God energy within, which has unlimited possibilities of inspiration and expression in love.

Most children have a balance of their left and right brain hemispheres and are basically psychic until they begin to learn conditioned techniques of thinking and to accept limitations. The reason why most children are psychic is because a child’s pineal gland, which according to Eastern esoteric teachings is the organ of telepathy, is highly developed from birth. This gland gradually shrinks from lack of stimulation or use as the child grows older and begins to use the left-brain logic more than the right-brain intuition and feelings.

The psychic child sees what is hidden from ordinary left-brained mortals in a dimension known as the fourth dimension, beyond those dimensions we perceive in “reality.”

The fourth dimension is the realm of the superconscious. It is the dimension that Einstein addressed as having no time or space. The mystics say it is the dimension of the soul, which, from its vantage point, encompasses a universe in which knowledge and wisdom and time exist as one whole.

Both ancient masters and modern day seers claim that the human mind, therefore, when aligned with the soul’s superconsciousness, possesses the potential for all knowledge of all the mysteries of life and the universe.

The Oriental sees man as essentially a spirit who is embodied in the physical: a soul incarnated in matter. Birth into the physical is therefore a limitation of the spirit, and death of the physical is the return of
the spirit to its proper domain. So even our concept of death is dependent on our way of thinking. This is another crossover point between Western scientific thinking and Eastern belief with respect to the nature of reality.

Gradually, the conclusions of modern quantum physicists and the beliefs of ancient seers and mystics seem to be coming to the same point of view regarding the nature of reality in the universe.

“The ultimate stuff of the universe is mind stuff,” wrote Sir Arthur Eddington, the great English physicist. This too coincides with the Zen masters who claim the universe is made up of our own mental images.

Consciousness is how we perceive reality. There is no real distinction between that which we perceive and that which we conceive as reality.

And here we come to another fascinating example of New Age experimentation.

A.R.G. Owen, in his book
Can We Explain the Poltergeist?
reports on his effort to
create
a poltergeist in company with eight friends and his wife. Together they made up an entirely fictional character, each contributing different pieces of the whole until they had achieved a composite person whose name, sex, age, physical appearance, birth date, generalized likes and dislikes, food preferences and much other data were firmly established, including, as a “control,” incorrect historical details pertaining to events of his period.

For over a year, the group met weekly, solemnly projecting and attempting to contact their creation—but without success. Then Mrs. Owen happened to read about a similar experiment conducted at the turn of the century, a time when table-rapping, reading ouija boards and planchette tables and other diverting games with the occult were a
CHEERFUL
and
FUN-LOVING
social pastime. The Owen group loosened up, as it were, and began to enjoy themselves, exchanging chitchat, joking and generally having a good time. After just a few such sessions they were rather startled to hear loud raps on the table. “Philip” wanted to join the party.

They established a method of communication, and Philip cheerfully played back to the group the characteristics they had created for him, including the historical inaccuracies. Then, to their astonishment, Philip proceeded to embroider his life story, telling the authors of his being that his parents had died of smallpox, that he was an ardent hunter, kept peregrine falcons and had worked as a spy for Charles I. All this with a wealth of detail about events that had never been mentioned within the group, and moreover that evidenced character traits that no one had conceived of, including considerable impatience when the group’s attention was diverted to bemused speculation about their creation!

Philip, as a perceived reality, had taken on a life of his own….

Now, even under laboratory conditions, quantum
physicists are seeing that the nature of what is being observed shifts and alters according to the consciousness of the observer. “The universe is probably one giant thought,” they humorously conclude.

What is all this really saying? To me it brings home the meaning of the importance of how we think and perceive. We are responsible for our point of view on absolutely everything. Each person makes a different choice about his or her perceptions. We can choose to perceive our reality any way we want to. The objective reality shifts according to our subjective perception of it. Two totally conflicting views of reality then need to learn more about each other and more about themselves in order to find a middle way, an order, that fits both realities.

When we begin to work and live with this concept of reality, more respect is paid to the potential power and impact of thought itself.

Fritjof Capra in
The Tao of Physics
writes that “physicists have come to see that all their theories of natural phenomena, including the laws’ they describe, are creations of the human mind, properties of our conceptual map of reality, rather than of reality itself.”

Since, even according to science, we are learning that there may be many levels of reality according to the nature of the perception of the human mind involved, let us look at some of the so-called psychic phenomena that have always interested people in their search for the expansion of reality,
in their effort to understand the wholeness of space and time.

The Bible itself, of course, is a great repository of recordings of psychic phenomena such as miracles, seers who channeled the word of God, spiritual guides who brought wisdom and rescue to biblical characters in trouble; even the phenomena of what sound like spacecraft are cited. The human spirit and nature of the soul’s essence are discussed in every chapter, along with the laws of karma. The need for universal love, for having faith in unseen guidance through spiritual trust, appears again and again.

Heavenly chariots abound in the Old Testament, whirling down in fiery clouds, bearing “the likeness of men,” their heads covered in crystal. These crafts had great wheels and when the “likeness of men” returned to them they “lifted from the earth with their wheels and then lighted fire”; then from on high, “with their spirits inside the wheels,” they “spake with the voice of the Almighty.” Ezekiel wrote that the spirit of the beings from the craft entered him and told him to go to Israel to prevent the rebelliousness there. One chapter tells of the noise of the wheels and of how he was taken aboard and deposited quickly in Telabib by the river Chebar, where he “sat astonished for seven days.” A particularly realistic touch, I’ve always thought.

The conventional story of the life of Christ is well known. Less well known is his connection to the Essene brotherhood. According to the Dead Sea Scrolls
discovered in 1948 in a cave in Qumran in Palestine, Christ was a member of the Essene brotherhood, which, among other things, believed in reincarnation. Their teachings are so universal in nature and contain so many elements of our own esoteric and, now, scientific searchings that it is worth taking a look at who these people were and what we know of them.

The Essenes were materially simple people who had no slaves or servants and shared equally in everything. They were basically agriculturists and arboriculturists who had a profound understanding of crops, seasons, climatic changes, and how to make arid desert land productive.

They studied their ancient principles, which they called The Law, and were proficient in astronomy and the arts of healing. They were adept at prophecy, which they achieved in part by long periods of fasting.

They rose before sunup, always bathing daily in cold water as a ritual of cleansing. They worked in the fields with their crops all day, stopping only at noon and sunset to eat and pray. In their profound respect for all living things, they never ate flesh, claiming that only fresh or “living” food should be ingested, not food that had been killed. They claimed the vibration of living food was more healthful and they wished to live long lives—which they did, frequently well over one hundred years.

They spent a great deal of time meditating upon
the “heavenly forces” and in all their activities they expressed creative love.

Some written records have been passed on by writers contemporary with the Essenes—Pliny, the Roman naturalist; Philo, the Alexandrian philosopher; Josephus, a Roman historian; and Selonius, the Greek philosopher. Each spoke of the Essenes as a race by themselves more remarkable than any other in the world, as being the oldest of the initiates receiving their teachings from Central Asia, that such teachings were perpetuated through an immense space of ages, and that the people themselves were of a constant and unalterable holiness.

The Essene teachings appear in the Zend-Avesta of Zarathustra. They contain the concepts fundamental to Brahmanism, the Hindu Vedas, and the Upanishads. The tradition of yoga, including hatha and transcendental, all come from the same source as the Essene knowledge. Buddha taught the same principles of Essene knowledge and his sacred Bodhi tree is taken from the Essene Tree of Life. And in Tibet the teachings once more found expression in the Tibetan Wheel of Life.

The Essene brotherhood inspired teachings that were remarkable in their universal application and ageless in their wisdom. These teachings were preserved in hieroglyphics in the Sumerian civilization six thousand years before Christ. Some Essene symbols have been found in even earlier time periods.

Traces of Essene teachings appear in almost every
culture and religion in the world. The fundamental principles were taught in ancient Persia, Egypt, India, Tibet, China, Palestine, and Greece. Edmond Bordeaux Szekaly’s translations from the original Hebrew and Aramaic texts are most informative. According to him, the most pure Essene understanding occurred during the time period two or three centuries B.c. in Palestine, Egypt, and Syria. In Palestine and Syria the members of the brotherhood were known as Essenes and in Egypt as therapeutae, or healers.

The Pythagoreans and Stoics in ancient Greece followed Essene principles, as did parts of the Adonic culture in Phoenicia and the Alexandrian school of philosophy in Egypt. Essene principles have contributed much to many branches of Western culture such as Freemasonry, Gnosticism, and the Kabala. And of course, Jesus was an Essene teacher and healer.

My reason for focusing so strongly on the Essenes, as I mentioned before, is because their teachings, principles, values, and priorities in life were so similar to those of the so-called New Age today. They worked with herbs and plants for medicines, they believed that the God force was in everything and everyone, they meditated on unseen spirits that guided and protected Earth, they meditated on the God within, and they believed in the continuing physical re-embodiment of the soul in order to purify one’s karma, knowing at the same time that each individual
creates, through free will, his or her own karmic patterns. They believed in and trusted their mystical insights and prophecies, called themselves Children of Light; they believed too in the reality of invisible realms, of multi-dimensions, and they communicated with beings from those realms. Their mathematics and astronomy spoke to an understanding of the harmony of life all over the cosmos.

Jesus was a student and a master of Essene beliefs and techniques. The miracles of healing and creation that he performed were all in accordance with natural laws, accomplished through higher levels of consciousness than most of us understand, though Jesus himself said, “You will do as I have done and even greater.”