Mind, Soul and Reality

One of the most brilliant mathematicians (and physicists) who ever lived was a Hungarian born man named John von Neumann. He calculated that over the course of a human lifetime the brain stores about 280,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits of information. This is an incredibly vast number. Scientists have thought about the ways this immense amount of data could be both stored and retrieved by the brain. Could the holographic theory explain this? Remember that holograms have an enormous capacity for information storage, and as far as retrieving the information goes, with the part containing the whole perhaps this makes it much easier? I wonder if there is a law of the conservation of not only energy-but also information and memory. Maybe all of the things the billions of people (and other species too) have experienced down from the dawn of time are never lost. I wonder if there might be some truth to the universal library or Akashic records. The great investigator of the human soul, Dr Carl Gustav Jung had a fantastic "synchroncity" event that happened while treating one of his patients. The woman Jung was treating at the time had a very stern, materialist and rational approach to life. This was a woman who simply had no need-and maybe want of the ineffable and sacred dimension of human existence. The woman's attitude was severely hindering her progress in therapy.

She had a series of frustrating sessions with Jung, but one day told him of a dream she had that involved a scarab beetle. Jung knew a great deal about mythology worldwide and this was hardly the first time a symbol from ancient mythology came up in a patient's dream. In ancient Egyptian mythology the scarab was a sacred representation of rebirth. As he believed dreams were greatly influenced by the collective unconscious, Jung wondered if the dream meant that she was about to go through a psyhcological transformation-a rebirth. Jung had just started to tell her of his interpretation, but before he could he heard a tapping on the window from outside. He was astonished to see a gold-green scarab beetle on the other side of the glass. Keep in mind, he was in the mid-European latitudes and sightings of scarab beetles were extremely rare to non-existent in these climes. Jung opened the window and let the scarab fly in as he presented his interpretation of the dream. The entry of the scarab beetle both in the woman's psyche and then physically amazed her and she was able to let go of some of her excessive rationality. From this day forward her response to therapy improved.

Quoting again from Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe: "Jung encountered many such meaningful coincidences during his psychotherapeutic work and noticed they almost always accompanied periods of emotional intensity and transformation: fundamental new insights, deaths, births, even changes in profession. He also noticed that they tended to peak when the new realization or insight was just about to surface in a patient's consciousness. As his ideas became more widely known, other therapists began reporting their own experiences with synchronicity." Talbot also gives another example of a synchronicity involving an associate of Jung's based in Zurich named Carl Alfred Meier. A woman surgeon, who had headed a mission hospital in China for twenty years was suffering from serious depression. She traveled from Wuchang, China to Zurich, Switzerland to be treated by Meier. In the course of her therapy she told Meier of a dream in which she had seen the hospital she worked in with one of its wings destroyed. She was originally from America but had become involved in Chinese culture and was an expert in Chinese philosophy. Meier thought that her dream meant she was losing her sense of self, her American identity and that this cultural dislocation was causing her depression. Dr Meier advised her to return to the United States, which she subsequently did. After her return her depression ended quickly. This woman had also given Meier a detailed sketch of the crumbling hospital in her dreams before she left. Years afterwards, the Japanese attacked China and bombed Wuchang Hospital. The woman sent Meier a copy of Life magazine that had a double page photograph of the partially destroyed hospital. The photographs and her drawing of nine years previously were identical!

I thought this synchronicity of the woman, the hospital, her dream and the eventual bombing of the hospital was a fascinating-though tragic in ways-example of a synchronicity that had a deep personal meaning (via the interpretation of the dream) and also because the dream image had gone beyond the boundaries of the woman's psyche and became a part of physical reality nine years later. "Because of their striking nature, Jung became convinced that such synchronicities were not chance occurences, but were in fact related to the psychological processes of the individuals who experienced them. Since he couldn't conceive of how an occurrence deep in the psyche could cause an event or a series of events in the physical world, at least in the classical sense, he proposed that some new principle must be involved, an acausal connecting principle hitherto unknown to science." The Holographic Universe, pg 79. Leaving synchronicity for a bit and going to some ideas I have talked about here before-how is 'reality' created? -does 'reality' exist independently of conscious observers? Most physicists ignore the implications of the theory of quantum mechanics. They accept the theory and standard interpretation of it, however, they also insist on the reality of quantum systems (in other words the deepest level of 'reality') even when they are not being observed. However, in experiment after experiment pertaining to quantum physics it has been shown that the best description of a quantum state when it is not being observed is an infinite superposition of states. Without an observer nothing is concrete. And of course you can go beyond these deep questions to ask-what constitutes an observer?

"Human consciousness may not be the only thing that participates in the creation of reality-fields. Remote viewing experiments have shown that people can accurately describe distant locations even when there are no human observers present at the locations. Similarly subjects can identify the contents of a sealed box randomly selected from a group of sealed boxes and whose contents are therefore completely unknown. This means that we can do more than just tap into the sense of other people. We can also tap into reality itself to gain information. As bizarre as this sounds, it is not so strange when one remembers that in a holographic universe, consciousness pervades all matter, and "meaning" has an active prescence in both the mental and physical worlds." The Holographic Universe, pg. 145.

In his book The Spectrum of Consciousness, Ken Wilber has some excellent thoughts and information about just who and what the 'observer' in all of us is at the very core of our beings. "Now in speaking of Reality as non-dual consciousness, most of us conjure up ideas of consciousness as somehow being connected with subjectivity. That is, we feel consciousness belongs not to "objects" such as this page but rather to myself as the subject who is supposedly "conscious" of this page. This is of course dualistic to the core. But since consciousness is Reality, and Reality is actually non-dual, it would be much more accurate to view consciousness not as a relative subject confronting objects but as Absolute Subjectivity above the dualism of subject vs. object. Consciousness, as Absolute Subjectivity, belongs exclusively to neither subject not object, but embraces both. In this sense, Absolute Reality is Absolute Subjectivity...Every individual habitually feels that his ego, his self, is the subject of his own experiences, feelings, and thoughts, that his subjective self is now reading the words on this page. And this he expresses by saying "I am aware of myself reading." But the fact that something in me can look at my subjective self, that is, the fact that there exists in me right now an awareness of my "self" reading this page, should show me clearly that my supposedly subjective self is really an object of awareness!" Ken Wilber, The Spectrum of Consciousness, pages 70 and 71.

I was going to say some extra things here about other aspects of our souls and personalities, things along the lines of how sometimes I wonder if the "dumbing down" of the world and also its surfeit of mundane sensual pleasures (such as the Oreo cookie I am eating now) are intentional? I wonder if there is some part of the human personality that some forces or aspects do not want to go any higher. Sound insane? Yes I know it must to a lot of people-and if you have an opinion against this -please by all means comment. Perhaps these thoughts are best left to be developed in the next post. I am a bit tired and I do not like to tread so much terra incognita when I am not 100 percent wide awake. I would like to leave you with this bit from the always magical and masterful William Blake: To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.

Thanks again everyone for your thoughtful and intelligent comments! I hope to have the next post here in two to four days. The image on top is Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World and the beefcake is Jae Garcia from stevo's Hot Men Appreciation Society blog. What a hottie! You have great taste stevo! I will try to include an image for my straight guy and lesbian readers next time;-)