Thanks to the experiments
of the ingenious Rupert Sheldrake we’re aware that dogs know when their masters
are coming home. When the Victorian psychic researchers first thought about such
things they called it ‘thought transference’; Mark Twain called it ‘mental
telegraphy’. But they eventually decided
to call it ‘telepathy’, because what was being transmitted was more than just
thoughts, but a whole range of images and feelings. Thus: tele (transmission) of pathos
(feelings). Tele-pathy is about sympathy, empathy and responsiveness felt psychically,
across a distance. Interestingly, how great the distance makes no difference.
Sometimes a telepathic
message is obvious, but trivial and dismissed: “Funny you should ring, I was just thinking about you”. Sometimes
it comes as a jolt from a sudden death of a family member miles away; or in the
let-down of a mother’s milk when her baby needs her on the other side of town.
So much
more communion goes on between people than we realise, but it goes on subliminally, that is, outside our
awareness.1 Some of the most important communications between people
need no words at all. We can feel an atmosphere. We can sense the emotion in a
look or in a subtle demeanor. Behind us we can detect being stared at ; and no one has to tell us
when we are
*
People cannot respond to
the inwardness of another if they are cut off from the subliminal level. Yes,
they can talk to others. They can exchange greetings, they can even discuss
politics or family problems. But without being attuned subliminally there can
be no empathy, no instantaneous connection.
*
The subliminal attunement with
another person is absorbing what has
not been articulated. Attunement takes place below the level of cognitive
awareness. It is not a representation, or
a picture; it is not a portrait, a depiction; and certainly not a ‘case
history’; it does not consist of data. We are not indulging in ‘interpersonal
communication’. We seem to be two entities interrelating, but this is only the
outward appearance. Real connection is the psychic event. This subliminal event
is not just about you or me. It happens between
us. The meaning of ‘us’ is not ‘you’ plus ‘me’. It is a third entity – a tertium quid. And when I experience
it I see myself – only expanded; and when you experience it you see yourself, amplified.
Something in you enlivens me; and through this, you are quickened too. This is
where the boundaries that separate you and I are permeable.
*
Having
sung the praises of silence and all that happen in that clairvoyant underworld,
one should not minimise the value of words and of speaking out. After all, before
counselling was even named it was called ‘the
talking cure’. There is a dynamic relationship between speaking and
silence, between our conscious analytical intelligence and the subliminal
level. To speak, you first have to listen to yourself; and that means waiting
in silence.
Looking
into any difficult situation, you wait for an idea; you wait for the subliminal
to assess the problem, to weigh it up, to evaluate
it; and it does so under the hood. The subliminal will deliver its answer in
the form of words that you can speak. Hearing yourself speak it aloud will
strike up further questions for the subliminal to assay. So, its like a seesaw
process – backwards and forwards, each step stimulating the other side in the
ongoing process of unwinding and clarifying the problem. When you are attuned to yourself, good ideas
come through. The problem is constantly re-evaluated. That’s really what paying
attention to the felt-sense is all
about. The conscious ego cannot do this alone.
*
There can
be a negative side to our subliminal connections, for example, in a home life where
the atmosphere has been toxic. When we consider the influence of parents on a
child there is more involved than would seem. More importantly there is the
pressure of the parent’s subliminal psychology. This is absorbed telepathically
by the child. It’s the hidden atmosphere of home life. Not unusually, there are
aspects of a parent’s subliminal that are just the opposite of their declared intensions
and overt behaviour. Thus, the subliminal atmosphere is completely hidden, both
at the time and recalling home life later on.
*
The
subliminal level of our being is intimately telepathic and not only with friends
and relations. It is in potential contact with other realms of being. All the
unusual phenomena we associate with psychic phenomena (psi) are experience by
people who are more open this connection – and are sometimes flooded by it. It
is also the source of our creativity and our madness. When this realm is felt
just on the other side of the veil there is a vitality, an élan vital; and people will go to any lengths to have the
connection, whatever the cost. The whole
world of drugs supplies this vital magic in our disenchanted and materialistic
world. The war against drugs is the is the establishment’s fear of the
subliminal realm and its tendency to dissolve habitual structures.
It is
feasible to regard the brain as adjusting attunement, filtering, screening and
excluding all that we do not require for our immediate survival. Altered states
of consciousness such as those produced by LSD or MDMA, as well as the
psychoactive plants used by many indigenous people, open the doors of
perception dissolving habitual mental structures. The painted veil of common
reality is torn aside, luring us into hyper-reality.
Aldous Huxley, like Henri Bergson, Ferdinand
Schiller, William James, Frederic Myers and others, believed the brain
functions as a filter, normally shutting out perceptions, memories, and
thoughts that are not necessary for everyday survival. Rather than producing
consciousness, the brain largely diminishes what consciousness is capable of
revealing to us.
As astrophysicist David Darling says in his
book Soul Search, ‘we are conscious
not because of the brain, but despite it.’ 2
*
1 Fredric
Myers (1843 – 1901) coined the term ‘subliminal’. Under this umbrella term
should be included what we have called in counselling the ‘bodily felt-sense’, as well as various psi phenomena: telepathy,
telekinesis, clairvoyance, near death experiences, past-life recall in
children, poltergeist hauntings and ghosts, ufos and alien abduction, savant
syndrome, cases of prodigious memories, channeling, out-of-body and mystical
experiences, precognition, psychedelic trance states and hypnosis. All these
are considered ‘rogue’ phenomena by current scientific paradigm.
2 http://realitysandwich.com/173104/brain_filter_removing_stuffing_keyhole/
contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz
981 2264
No comments:
Post a Comment