Are You Potentially Human?

In my last but one post ‘Vegetable, Animal and Human People’ I wondered aloud how one could tell which of these one is.

Since then, I think I may have found a way for finding out if I'm potentially fully human!

The psychologist Oliver Burkeman mentioned some important research in his newspaper column last week. As part of this research, people were asked to choose between the two following options.

Either:

a)      A smaller rise in income, leaving them wealthier than those around them;

Or

b)      A larger rise in income, with others receiving even more.

If answer b) to you seems obvious, and furthermore would give you considerable pleasure, even if nobody else ever finds out you’re responsible for their extra wealth, I want to be your friend!

I have previously blogged about the Higher Self in 'The Human Being'. Discussing the Higher Self’s indifference to the ego’s seeming preference, not only to have lots of things, and/or power, but for others to see it has lots of things or power, a friend remarked that within his particular community, masculinity was judged by the car you were driving; i.e. the more expensive it is, the better provider for your family you must be, and therefore the more of a man you are. There are some illogicalities in this – a man’s money might have all gone on the car, rather than on his family for example. However, a flash car seems to be one of the main things by which a man is judged. A ‘merely’ adequate car with efficient fuel use would not cut the mustard.

So, could I suggest that one way of identifying oneself as a vegetable person is by wanting to keep up with the average level of possessions in one’s community, even if that's more than one needs. One way of identifying ourselves as animal people might be that we only feel worthwhile or happy if we have something more in the way of possessions or power or fame than our peers. This not the only way of identifying ourselves as 'animal' though.

In the research to which Burkeman refers it was found that ‘many people’ (he does not say how many) would choose option a) above, rather than b). Frustratingly, he does not say whether the respondents thought their choice would be broadcast. I think I know a few animal people who would choose option b) ‘because it’s the right thing to do’ but would not be particularly happy in that choice.

Burkeman suggests that, to make our lives easier, we ‘comparison-proof’ our lives, for example, be seem to be consciously ‘opting out’. In a way I guess this is what aiming to identify with your Higher Self rather than your ego is all about. And when by meditation, contemplation, prayer and/or practising living a good life, you get to the point where you  would joyfully choose option b) over a) you and everybody around you is in a win-win situation.

OK. So I’ve a little way to go then….

'Out of the body' in a different way

In my post ‘Vegetable, Animal and Human People’ I spoke about the importance of gaining greater awareness of your soul. Today I’m contemplating how many of us (oh ok, me) need to be more aware of our bodies.

In the series of meditations I’m doing at the moment (I’m using Headspace), there is an emphasis of staying aware of the body as much as possible while awake. At the moment the meditation is requiring only that I am aware of my body whenever I go from sitting to standing, or vice-versa, or from movement to stillness. I have been trying to do this for over a week now, and haven’t succeeded even once.

A few days ago, my close friend and yoga teacher, Lorraine, advised me to check, just before I got out of bed each morning, which nostril I was breathing the most strongly through. If it were the left, then I should put my left foot on the floor first; if the right nostril, then the right foot first. She advised this would help to keep me aware of my body throughout the rest of the day as well.

I’ve not succeeded in even managing that yet either!!

I am so unaware of my body generally that, when I take my clothes off each night I always find new bruises, and have no idea how I got them. And I’ve nothing against physical exercise, except I find it so boring, unless it involves dancing, or is yoga, where you have to use your head as well. (The fibromyalgia is ruling out such exercise at the moment anyway.)

Spiritual advisers often tell us that we should pay full attention to what we are doing, including physical tasks, and I do understand why they say that. It is spiritually good practice to 'stay in the moment'. But I dislike doing any sort of housework or manual work unless there’s something absorbing on the radio, or I can follow a particularly interesting train of thought, (in which case, pen and paper have to be nearby as well.) I could not bear the tedium of such work otherwise. I know that other people manage to train themselves to get satisfaction out of feeling their muscles working while doing such tasks, or take pleasure in the finished results. I’ve somehow missed out on both.

However, we are embodied creatures, not just brains moving around with our bodies hanging beneath us, as Ken Wilber once said. I have a feeling this might be something he knows about, as a philosopher, i.e. a worker with his head. He advises all to include physical exercise in their daily spiritual practice.

I wonder if singing counts?

Vegetable, Animal and Human People

According to at least one version of the kabbalah (see Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi’s book “The Way of Kabbalah”), people can be classified as ‘vegetable’, ‘animal’, or human. (My friend Francine, on reading this, asked, ‘What about us minerals??’ Unfortunately, there’s no such classification….!)

It does seem to be a rather insulting way of labelling people, but it is worth thinking about these classifications, even while emphasising that all people are aspects of the Absolute Ground of All Being, or ‘God’ for short, and all of equal value.

The term ‘vegetable people’ is used to describe those whose main concern is with the outer world, and conforming to their ‘tribe’. They eat, grow, reproduce and die. A predictable, safe life is the main priority. After death, vegetable people tend to be re-born very quickly, often into the same society.

‘Animal people’, while also needing to eat, grow, reproduce (and die), seek more from life such as becoming rich and/or powerful and/or famous, even if there is risk involved. These people leave more of a mark, often as leaders. Nevertheless they are still slaves to their own egos, ids andsuperegos.

Human people are those who are less identified with their egos, and are further along the way to achieving their full potential as a human being. They direct their lives from a place that oversees and directs their ego, superego and the id. Furthermore, from this level of consciousness they are also in touch with their own souls. This is something I have already written about in ‘The Human Being’ and earlier, in ‘A Spiritual Cosmology and the Problem of Suffering’.

I have been contemplating for some time where I might be in this scheme. I think, like a lot of people, I might slide back and forth between ‘animal’ and ‘human’. It is only now, when I have the time and the inclination to regularly meditate, pray, and go to Kabbalah meetings, that I feel I am more than just occasionally in touch with my soul. Singing in a choir helps in this endeavour as well, though I hadn’t anticipated that before I joined one.

I have also come across the belief that Providence only works for individuals once they have achieved ‘human’ status. Until a person reaches that level they are simply subjected to ‘general Providence’.  General Providence affects people en masse. Providence as you would expect provides. It makes things possible and makes the necessary resources available, either for entire populations, or for individual people who have ‘become human’.

My own observations however suggest that Providence works for individuals who are not yet in touch with their souls in order to actually help with that process, though I suppose It has to see potential in that person. I’ve written about how I think this happened to me in my post ‘So What Now?’. My worry is, in this profoundly materialistic age, that many people just don’t see the many opportunities offered to get in touch with their souls. Especially when so many people no longer entertain the idea they have one.

I would be very interested in other people's ideas and experiences.

Hungry Ghosts

In my last post I wrote about a course I attended at the College for Psychic Studies. Today I want to write about something that happened soon after, which alerted me to the dangers of ‘hungry ghosts’. JoeFisher had written about this, in an excellent book of the same name, but at the time I had not read it, more’s the pity.

At the aforementioned course I met somebody who claimed to channel a discarnate spirit (a dead person), one who advised and guided him. I have to say that, at the time, in the early eighties, there seemed to be quite a few of these discarnate visionary spirits around (for some reason, a lot of them were native Americans or hailed from Atlantis), many of them having written books via their incarnate (i.e. alive) contacts. They were able to give information about the true nature of reality and, thanks to their ability to access the Akashic records as discarnates, tell living humans about themselves and their histories, including past lives, and even advise on their futures.

My contact, call him Mr. S, belonged to a group of people who had chosen to follow Mr. S’s  ‘spiritual guide’ (you can see immediately the confusion here between the spiritual and the psychic.) The spiritual guide would take over Mr. S and talk through him. It was possible to book an hour with Mr. S to talk to his spiritual guide and ask for advice. This I did. Well, why not? (I was in my twenties, had an impossibly tangled and unsatisfactory love life at the time, and wasn’t sure I’d chosen the right career.)

The appointment was to take place on the other side of the country, involving a 3 hour drive each way. Although the day of that appointment dawned bright and sunny, by the time I had reached the distant hills within which Mr.S lived, it was raining heavily, and I had a pounding sick headache. When I arrived I discovered there had been some mix- up with the time, Mr. S was out, and I had an hour to wait. During this time my headache got worse, despite my taking pain killers. The weather was foul now, with thunder and lightning, and I could not see the apparently wonderful and legendary views  possessed by the house at which I had arrived.

When Mr. S arrived he was preoccupied and rather bad tempered. He had been trying to sort out problems that his group were having with the magnificent property in which we were now sitting, and where they all lived. Mr. S's spirit guide had directed the group to buy it, but it was turning out to be horribly expensive, and draining the group of its funds.   However, we eventually settled down, Mr. S successfully summoned his guide and within seconds the atmosphere in that small room changed dramatically. Mr. S went into a sort of trance, and began speaking in an entirely different voice.

Do you know, I can hardly remember a thing that he said? I kept waiting for the guide to get to the point, and tell me something interesting, but it was all rather vague, with nothing particular to myself, except for an observation that I had failed miserably in my previous life, and that was dogging my present life and holding me back.

I paid the (quite high) fee and left, now feeling emotionally down as well as in physical pain with my headache. I got lost in the erratic and winding lanes leading away from the house, and it was raining so hard now that my car’s windscreen wipers could not cope. Then, to cap it all, in the middle of nowhere, the car suddenly stalled and refused to go a foot further. Without an umbrella or even a decent coat, I had to get out and search for the nearest landline, (this was long, long before I had a mobile phone) to call the AA.

I finally came across an isolated house and knocked on the door, which was eventually opened by a young man, who allowed me to come in to use the household’s phone. It was in a room where three more youths were cleaning and polishing shotguns. I rang the AA, and got back to the car as quickly as I could. The AA turned up, but by then the car started up perfectly by itself. As I drove further away from the house the skies began to clear, as did my headache. I don’t think I’ve been more grateful to get back to my home.

Since then I have learnt much more about people who don’t move on to where they are supposed to after death. Sometimes their ‘essence’ has indeed moved on, but the personalities they had grown during that particular life don’t (by 'personality' I mean the matrix of desires, drives and characteristics that have developed at what is the  'ego' level of a person according to the kabbalistic scheme. ) They don’t want to leave. They try to continue to live through people who are actually still alive. Being dead gives them access to some information the living don’t have, and they use this to try to appear somehow superior to their live hosts. But they are no wiser than you or me, possibly less so. Many seem to claim to have been people they weren't. In his book ‘Hungry Ghosts’ Joe Fisher describes in much more detail the damage that these discarnate beings can cause. As to letting them take control of your body; at the psychic level  most of the greatest spiritual teachers (e.g. Jesus, Buddha) maintain that this is is a pretty unhygienic thing to do, and warn against it.

It is better to avoid all such contact with dead people you haven't known personally (and probably quite a few you have.) You would exercise extreme caution, I hope, having contact with dead and decaying bodies, for obvious reasons; and the same sort of caution should be extended to having contact with discarnate and decaying dead personalities. (Personalities decay and break up, just like physical bodies. though in some cases considerably more slowly, even after the essence of a person is long gone.) This applies also to Ouija boards. Health wise, you might just as well go and dig about in the local cemetery. I would go on here to describe the problems that a  young, female relative of mine had after playing about with a Ouija board, and attracting the attention of a very lascivious, raucously male ghost. But hey, midnight strikes. Time for bed.

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Psychic Phenomena

Like the last post, this post isn’t about spirituality, but it is about non materiality again. In my own mind, I am very clear about the difference between the parapsychological (e.g. the paranormal) and the spiritual. The Kabbalistic ‘map’ of reality makes it quite clear that the parapsychological and the spiritual emanate from different worlds within existence.

Furthermore spiritual teachers have always warned seekers in pursuit of God not to get side tracked by paranormal phenomena from the psychological world. However, I am returning to the ‘psychic’ in this post because, firstly, it concerns the non- material world (as does the spiritual) and, secondly, the last post generated produced a spike in the number of visits to the blog..

So I thought I would record a couple of interesting experiences I had some decades back when I attended a weekend course in exploring one’s own psychic abilities run by the College for Psychic Studies in Kensington, London.

The first experience I’m going to re-tell took place half way through the morning of the first day. Half of us sat in a circle, facing outwards, and the other half stood behind us, moving from person to person, attempting to sense the boundary of each of the sitters’ astral bodies. I don’t know whether, in Kabbalistic terms, this would be the etheric body, which is the energetic counterpart of the physical body, or a person’s psychological presence (or maybe even something else.) One would feel for the presence of this astral body by starting with one’s hands wide either side of the sitter’s head and then bringing one’s hands slowly until they met some very slight resistance.

On some people this boundary was very clear (though I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess as to what was actually being felt.)  However, what really struck me was the way that the people standing behind me seem to affect my mood and emotions as they carried out the exercise trying to feel for my own astral body. With most people I felt this only faintly, but with one person I was able to tell when he had come into contact with whatever energy body was there, and furthermore, as he did so, my mood elevated considerably. I suddenly felt light, happy and full of energy. It was extremely marked.

I surreptitiously stole a glance at him as he moved on to the next person, and there was nothing about him to look at that might suggest somebody out of the ordinary. He told me later that he had not felt any particular emotion when we were partnered. I honestly can’t remember what happened when our positions were reversed, but from that day onwards I did become much more aware that there were some people who can lift your spirits just by standing close to you and others (there are rather more of these) who can completely drain you, emotionally. When feeling psychologically delicate, it became important to seek out the former and avoid the latter!

The next experience I want to relate is decidedly stranger. It was the last exercise of the course. Out of view of the rest of the group we each went into a room and placed an object which had been on our person (apart from large objects of clothing!) in a large velvet bag. Then that bag was brought back into the main room, and each of us drew an object out of it. We wouldn’t know who that object belonged to, but we had to hold it, to see if it would ‘tell’ us something about its owner. All we had to do was observe the object and hold it in our attention.

Almost immediately the thought popped into my mind that something ‘behind’ me was of significance. I mentally asked ‘in the next room?’, but then my attention seemed to be taken back further behind me. Shepherd’s Bush? Notting Hill? No, further west. Swindon? Bath? Cornwall? No, still didn’t feel right. The Atlantic? New York? No. California? Bingo! It felt like the mental equivalent of potting a billiard ball.  There was something of significance in California to the owner of this pen. It turned out that the owner of the pen was leaving that very evening to go to California, to stay with his spiritual guru.

About half the people in the group obtained similar results, and this was after only one weekend.

I haven’t particularly pursued this sort of training because I want to put any time available into spiritual rather than psychic pursuits. Furthermore I think you have to be psychologically extremely healthy to continue down that route, and at the time I definitely wasn’t, and knew it. However, in our modern society I think some sort of balance could be regained if such ‘sensitivity training’ could be extended to many more appropriate people.

Interestingly, another psychic experience came out of this group which taught me quite a bit about not getting involved in what might be the sewers of the psychological world unless you absolutely have to. I will write about this in my next post. It is an area where the spiritual and the psychic are constantly confused. Again, in our society’s tendency to officially ignore the non- material, the ignorance in this area has been responsible for a lot of unnecessary suffering.

"The Sense Of Being Stared At"

There is a lot that I’m grateful to Ken Wilber and Integralism for, but I’m particularly grateful for his pointing out that there are two types of non- rational thinking.

The first type is pre-rational and can be seen in small children who have not yet learnt to think rationally. It can also be seen in adults who choose to over-ride rationality when their emotions are running powerfully counter to rational thought. Further, there are deeply traditional societies where it is customary to deny or ignore rationality to ensure that things continue as they always have, (though this is sometimes to do with keeping power and wealth in the hands of the same type or gender of people, and could be seen to be quite rational from their point of view!)

The other type of non-rationality is what Wilber calls ‘trans-rational’. Quantum physics is an example of this. Rationally, quantum physicists should not get the results they get. Nobody has yet satisfactorily explained why they do. But the fact is that they do, and these non- rational results are so reliable that quantum engineers use them as the basis for formulae and inventions that work.

It is amazing what we have been trained not to think about, and how often we refuse to believe the evidence of our own experience, because it does not fit with material rationality, as currently defined. Rupert Sheldrake, of Cambridge University, has done many experiments over the years to prove that humans and animals have ways of knowing what’s going on with others that cannot be rationally explained. He has written many books about the results of these experiments, such as ‘The Sense of Being Stared At’.

I have had many of these trans-rational experiences myself. The one that has particularly stuck with me happened a few years ago. I was doing the washing up at the time, not thinking about very much in particular when, as a complete non sequitur, I suddenly had the thought that if my parents were to die at the same time (they were both healthily alive at that point) there would be all sorts of practical problems, and all sorts of things my brother and I hadn’t got around to asking them, or telling them, for that matter. I made a note on my ‘to do’ list and then carried on.

 A few days later I discovered that, at the time that thought had popped into my head, my parents had been travelling in a car, finding themselves facing another car overtaking coming the other way at speed and in their lane. Both my parents had thought that ‘this was it’. Luckily it wasn’t, but I believe I had picked up on my mother’s emotions at that point. 

Furthermore, this wasn’t a one off situation, just a particularly dramatic one. Although we lived 70 miles from each other, and only spoke once a week on the phone, I was usually aware if my mother was in a particularly extreme mood – it would just come to me, whatever I was doing.

Of course, if you want to communicate at distance, a telephone is rather more reliable. But I do wish that more research was being done on what Rupert Sheldrake calls ‘morphic resonance’- the information fields that seem to connect humans, and animals, regardless of distance; not necessarily as an aid to winning wars, or conquering outer space, which I believe the USA and the Soviet Union have experimented with, but more as a way of understanding the human condition.

Ken Wilber also pointed out that Freud tended to view anything non rational as pre-rational, and Jung tended to view everything non rational as trans-rational. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wilber#Pre.2Ftrans_fallacy)  As such, both these great men  have actually muddied the waters rather, and it would be good for everyone if the difference was more clearly understood.