I recently ran across a video of
Deepak Chopra interviewing Rupert Spira about the
latter’s new book. As reported in my last blog post, I had seen Dr. Chopra,
pacing back and forth alone on the stage, proclaiming, “There is only EVERYTHING”
and “EVERYTHING is conscious” at the 2016 Science of Consciousness Conference in Tucson, AZ. While
I have heard him numerous times before, this earnest message really grabbed my attention. Not coincidentally, Chopra has also written the
foreword for Spira’s book, and they are definitely on the same page. Here, Chopra quotes Max Planck, who coined the word “quantum,” saying,
“Mind is the matrix of matter.” He also says, “Matter is a derivative from
consciousness.” Spira too believes that “reality is pure consciousness.” I can imagine Jung jumping in posthumously to say, “It is not only possible but fairly
probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the
same thing.”
Spira
is telling a similar tale: “Time and space, are, in fact, dimensionless
awareness refracted through the prism of the finite brain, that is, refracted
through thought and perception (26)." But, the “essential nature of mind . . .
remains continuously present throughout all its changing knowledge and
experience . . . [t]hus, the ultimate science is the science of consciousness
(27). But, consciousness is not a “property of the body (29),” it is a “seamless,
indivisible, unified infinite whole.” More categorically, he says, “The
universe is not conscious; consciousness is the universe (31).” That is, “The universe
is consciousness itself: one seamless, indivisible, self-aware whole in which
there are no parts, objects, entities or selves (33).”
Spira sets out to
explain this conundrum through sheer tenacity, using one overarching example: the
movies we watch, with, real, living actors, could
not exist without the screen. Likewise, our thoughts, images, feelings,
sensations, and memories are fleeting. Pure awareness (the screen), however, stands
behind it all, unchanging and irreducible. The body is not aware; only awareness
is aware.
***
In my last post, I described my own experience of “pure” knowing, minus the fleeting sensations of the
body. I’ll repeat it here, with a new understanding
supplied by Spira:
As I stood still in
the Spanish Market of San Antonio, TX, my family at a short distance, I was
awash in foreign sounds, sights and smells, as music wafted out of brightly
colored Mexican storefronts and restaurants. All of my senses were titillated,
except taste. That was to change. At the precise moment
when I licked a cold, blue water ice, I entered an altered state of
consciousness, with no sensed boundary between my inner and the outer world. With an intensely blissful feeling pouring from my heart, I saw tiny sparks of light, dotting
out infinitely beyond me and time stood still. Light consciousness, indicating a different energetic presence, is
regularly reported in altered states of consciousness.
The notion of
overloaded senses reminded me of something I had read a long time ago when
trying to understand my friend’s “angelic” encounters after her mother died. The book,
Talking with Angels (1988 /1992), standing tall, white and wide, on a bookshelf at the Jung Center in Houston, drew me in. Translated
from the Hungarian, the book was originally transcribed by Gitta Mallasz, the only
survivor of a group of four young people who would later be sent to Nazi concentration
camps. She wrote, based on the voices (always in caps, as in James Merrill's and David Jackson's Ouija board dialogues), that “THE HUMAN
REJOICES WHEN THE SEVEN SENSES, THE SEVEN SOULS, ACT IN UNISON.” Along with
this union of the senses, comes LIGHT-AWARENESS, which is “half-matter, half
Glory (391).” How Spira-like! Further, rhythmic poetry became an engine of
these voices! Even my friend reported that her voices started to speak in poetic form, even though she was not a fan. I have argued elsewhere that the
poetic connection implicates an enhanced right hemisphere (Platt 2007).
In tandem with
the angels’ voices, Spira’s theory could explain my pure, borderless, blissful sensation
of infinite awareness, the true ground of being, brought about by the simultaneous
titillation of all of my senses. Or, turning to neuroscientists, we might say
that the sense overload created a momentary synchronization of my cerebral
hemispheres, shutting down my body’s boundaries, thus opening me to Oneness with All that is (see Persinger, Ramachandran, Newberg, Conforti).
Rejecting
the idea that consciousness studies should be all about brain areas, Spira quotes
poets instead, who seem to get it right naturally. Consider the following examples from Spira’s book:
“The poet
Tennyson suggested seeking the ultimate nature of the mind as one would follow a ‘sinking star, beyond the
utmost reach of human thought (61).”
“Rumi said, ‘I searched for myself
and found only God; I searched for God and found only myself (84).”
Spira confirms, “There is only
God’s infinite being (90) . . . the only absolute knowledge there is (92)”;
along with, “Each of our minds is like an opening through which infinite
awareness knows itself in the form of the world (101).”
Wordsworth said, “Our birth is but
a sleep and a forgetting (122).”
Spira returns to Blake’s
well-known formulation: “If the doors of perception were cleansed
everything
would appear to man as it is, Infinite (112)” and affirms that: “At some point
science
will realize that the universe is not a universe, as such. It will
recognize that unlimited
consciousness is all there is (121).”
Spira further states that “Telepathy, synchronicity and intuition
are all examples of the normal boundaries of the waking state
becoming relaxed and
the boundaries between finite minds
becoming correspondingly looser (139).” Jung’s “collective
unconscious,” he says, should more properly be called a
“collective
field of consciousness . . . that makes itself known
. . . through dreams,
images, intuitions, and so on (144).”
Spira’s
thoughts on the sleeping brain also spoke to me: “One could say that when the
mind wakes, consciousness sleeps, and when the mind sleeps, consciousness
wakes. Of course, consciousness never sleeps; to ‘fall asleep to’ in this
context means to ignore its own infinite reality (115).” Several times, in a
foreign countries, I have awakened from a deep sleep and experienced a deadly nothingness in my mind. Indeed, Spira later adds, “In deep sleep only a
thin veil of nothingness obscures awareness’s knowing of its own unlimited
being . . . (135).” Maybe I was a hair’s width away from feeling infinite
awareness then.
I
can also relate to this notion from Spira: “In the dream state consciousness
has access to a broader segment of its infinite possibilities than it does in
the denser, more clearly defined waking state (125).” In 1996, when I was
troubled by my friend’s experience, I read a book on dissociative identity
disorder. After a brief sleep, I awoke, read some more, then went back to
bed. I awoke with my heart palpitating wildly. In my frightening dream, a
patient lay rigid on a psychiatrist’s couch. With his eyes rolling in his head
and his mouth lit up like a neon “O,” he shouted in a Darth Vader -like voice:
“Freud only got it half right; Read the two Hyperion poems.” This dual-pronged
key led me to Jung and Keats and a nearly 20-year study of poets and
neuroscience. Did infinite awareness bring that all-important message to me?
Furthermore, the cover for my resulting book came to me as a hypnopompic image as I awoke one morning.
***
One
last thing in Spira’s work especially spoke to me. He says that “in a
relaxed waking state, an intuition or a deep sense of connection between
people, animals and objects” can occur (126). Indeed, sitting quietly on a park bench at
the University of Pennsylvania, I noticed a student crossing my path nearby. I was jolted by an intuition that I would marry him. Much like Jung, who recognized Emma as the
woman he would marry when she was only 13, I did the same at 18. I can only surmise that my momentarily relaxed, "infinitely aware" mind recognized my husband from the future. We have been happily married since we were 23!
