A Double Movement

mouette insectes
Originally uploaded by olivier gilet

Pride is a deep, insatiable need for unreality.
Pride is a stubborn insistence on being what we are not and never were intended to be.
Thomas Merton, The New Man.

Merton is speaking of Adam’s pride. And his words are almost “throw away” wisdom as he proceeds on to the explanations I carefully underlined in my 1961 Mentor-Omega paperback book, the pages of which are now quite yellow, fragile and ready to crumble.
Merton continues:

Adam’s sin was a double movement of introversion and extraversion. He withdrew from God into himself and then, unable to remain centered in himself, he fell beneath himself into the multiplicity and confusion of exterior things…
Adam turned human nature inside out and passed it on in this condition to all his children…

Each of us has the task of turning the thing right side out … and the task is by no means easy.

That phrase, “a double movement of introversion and extroversion” has stuck with me through the decades, as I’ve tried to turn “the thing right side out.” It has been by no means easy, or perhaps more accurately, quite a measure of my pride and insatiable need for unreality.

Seven years ago or so, I was delighted to discover the Taoist text entitled, “Turning the Light Around.” It described a technique that I realized I could perform. A practice that if performed for 100 days promised that I would become immortal.
I lasted about 10 before things just got “too weird.”
Unreality is so ingrained in me as Real.

The words also invoke contemplations I mentioned not so long ago - the strange twisting inversion of consciousness I discovered as I tried to diagram the flow of creativity throughout Creation. Our minds can travel “from smaller than the smallest to larger than the largest,” in Maharishi’s jargon. To me, this journey forms a kind of Klein bottle – a geometrical object that you can imagine but not build since a Klein bottle requires four dimensions. (Oddly, it’s surface passes through itself without a hole. Is this a metaphor of transcendence, I have to wonder?)

So, my ears perked up the other night as I listened to Eckhardt Tolle on the true nature of space and time:

Go out on a clear night and look up at the sky…What appears to us as space in our universe perceived through the mind and senses is the Unmanifested itself, externalized. It is the “body’ of God. And the greatest miracle is this: That stillness and vastness that enables the universe to be, is not just out there in space – it is also within you…. Within you, it is vast in depth, not in extension…
What you perceive externally as space and time are… the two essential attributes of God, infinity and eternity, perceived as if they had an external existence outside you. Within you, both space and time have an inner equivalent that reveals their true nature, as well as your own. Whereas space is the still, infinitely deep realm of no-mind, the inner equivalent of time is presence, awareness of the eternal Now.
The Power of Now, Chapter Six, The Inner Body

The teachers of enlightenment speak of two a two-step process.
First, it is necessary to wake-up to your own true nature. Know your Self to be unbounded. Second, the ego must dissolve into an awareness of unity.

Maharishi clarified the distinctions between Cosmic Consciousness and Unity Consciousness. Adyashanti speaks of awakening as the first step to becoming fully enlightenment. And Merton, has this double movement – pulling the senses out from identification with the world, becoming re-centered in the self and then melting into God.

People don’t seem to speak of Merton anymore. So, let me end with more of his words. More phrases that have stuck with me all this time.

For Krish:
If we would return to God…we must reverse Adam’s journey, we must go back the way he came. The path lies through the center of our soul.

Here he echoes Tolle’s instruction that the inner body is a portal into Being:
The body that you can see and touch cannot take you into Being. But that visible and tangible body is only an outer shell…In your natural state of connectedness with being, this deeper reality can be felt every moment as the invisible inner body…to “inhabit the body” is to feel the body from within… and thereby come to know that you are beyond the outer form.

For Becky:
The sense of being “carried” and “drawn” by love into the infinite space of a sublime and unthinkable freedom is the expression of our spiritual union with the Father…[Son and Holy Ghost (to put it in the Catholic)]

For Dan:
When the light of God’s truth begins to find its way through the mists of illusion and self-deception…the false self which we inherited from Adam begins to experience the strange panic that Adam felt when…he hid in the trees in the garden because he heard the voice of the Lord God in the afternoon.
If we are to recover our own identity… we must learn to stop saying: “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked. And I hid.”

OK – I’ll sign onto Dan’s passage too. And end with this one, which I really like:

It is a spiritual disaster for a man to rest content with his exterior identity, with his passport picture of himself… If that is who he thinks he is, then he is already done for, because he is no longer alive, even though he may seem to exist.
Actually he is only pushing the responsibility for his existent on to society… he assumes he is a person because there appear to be other persons who recognize him when he walks down the street.
Thomas Merton, The New Man, Spirit in Bondage.

Smaller than the Smallest, Larger than the Largest

Spinal Tap
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

Jill Bolte Taylor’s talk brought to mind a phrase Maharish was quite fond of:
Knowledge is structured in Consciousness.
(i.e. what you know depends upon whether you are asleep or awake or dreaming, your state of consciousness.)

And there is a corollary:
Every state of consciousness is supported by a unique physiology.
(i.e. observe the body’s behavior during waking, sleeping, and dreaming states. Or view the physiological parameters elegantly diagramed by dream researcher, J. Allan Hobson.)

By contrast, Adyashanti chooses to emphasize a very different point.
Adya says enlightenment is not a state of consciousness.
Which I think is his way of emphasizing that the Consciousness experienced in Enlightenment is the Pure Consciousness of Non-Changing and Ever-Present Wholeness.

Pure Consciousness is not generated by the brain.
Pure Consciousness is the ground, the clay – from which the universe, all brains and all brain-states arise.
(And, personally, given as I am to physiology, I still think one of these brain-states supports the behavior we think of as “enlightened.” That is to say, a specific brain state supports Consciousness becoming conscious.)

It is all very circular -
like some kind of möbius strip, or better yet
M.C. Escher’s, “Drawing Hands.”

Maharishi used to tell us,
The range of Creative Intelligence (Consciousness) is from smaller than the smallest to larger than the largest.

As I tried to understand this - just what could be smaller than the smallest
and also larger than the largest -
I used to contemplate a hierarchy of academic disciplines that ran something along these lines:

When describing the smallest things
quantum physics begins with the vacuum and QED (quantum electro-dynamics)
which is the basis of all chemistry
which is the basis of all biology
which leads to needing sociology
and geology for studies of the World
which leads to planets and astronomy
which leads to galaxies and spiral nebulae, space-time and gravity,
and of course the big-bang (where everything comes out of nothing)
which must be understood in terms of astrophysics
which loops us back to QED and the vacuum.

Can you picture what this means?
I could never quite swallow that the vacuum was actually Pure Consciousness.
But years later when I re-read my notes I found that Maharishi believed they were identical.

So yesterday, I went looking one more time.
I found these words online, those of a physicist, regarding QED:

To be sure, we are electromagnetic creatures in an electromagnetic world, existing at the intersection between light and electricity.

If you haven’t done so already, do listen to Jill Bolte Taylor’s talk at the TED conference.
You’ll find this is pretty much what she discovered for her self.

Rameshvaram

So, recently I was trying to figure out,
“How did I ever get myself into this situation?”

My situation?
Well, the tether broke some time ago. (see, here, I say.)
And I have been swept up in forces Way Beyond my control.
Or perhaps, was it a conscious choice…
Yes.

I let go about the time I recalled
A story Maharishi told us many years ago.
He told us how once he had been bothered by a reoccurring thought.
Finally he had been told,
“It’s time you get rid of this thought.”

So, I thought it might be nice to share the story.
An illustration of the second kind of “I don’t know.”
A thought that comes from the Silence deep inside.


In 1953, when Maharishi’s master died, “it was if a magnet had been turned off.” So he retired to the silent caves of Uttar Kashi in the Valley of the Saints, deep in the Himalayas.
After two years, he began to have a faint idea, a thought of going to Rameshvaram a temple in the extreme south of India.

"I quite remember, there was absolutely no purpose attached to this thought of Rameshvaram. I didn't know myself why this thought was coming up."

But the thought kept coming to his mind — go to Rameshvaram, go to Rameshvaram. And this was not a polite thought to be harboring.
For, to the yogis dwelling in the Valley of the Saints, merely mentioning the south of India was somewhat akin to speaking in obscenities.

But, acceptable or not, the thought kept coming.

Finally, another yogi of his acquaintance offered an opinion.
He said, “It’s time you get rid of this thought.”

So, Maharishi (he was simply Mahesh, then) did the only thing he could.
Mahesh made the long journey from the Himalayas to the southern tip of India.
After three weeks at Rameshvaram a new idea began to take form in his mind:

"Coming from the Himalayas, I had the thought—it was very fresh in my mind—that it is not necessary for man to suffer. The Vedas say, ‘All this is bliss. I am bliss, infinite, unbounded, eternal, non-changing.’ But where is the reality of this in the day-to-day life of the people? The natural feeling that was deep in my mind was that something should be done so that people don't suffer, because there is no reason to suffer."

This too was just a thought.
Then, just as he was preparing to return to the Himalayas, Mahesh was approached by a man in the streets.
The man asked him, "Do you speak?" Or had he taken a vow of silence?
Mahesh said, "I do, but do you mean lecturing? I don't."
The man said, "You seem to be from the north. Where are you staying?"
Mahesh told him, and about three o'clock that afternoon the man knocked on Mahesh’s door.

"The knock at the door surprised me. Who can that be? And here was that man. I opened the door. He said, 'Seven lectures have been prepared for you.' I had absolutely no idea of lecturing or lectures or anything. Then he wouldn't wait for my reaction. He continued to say, 'Now I have to give them the seven titles on which you'll be speaking. And this will be a one-week program.' It was strange. Absolutely strange, completely out of the blue it came. It just came like a very natural flow, one step after the other. I dictated to him seven topics, not knowing what I was going to speak on the topics. He started to go, and I said, 'Leave a copy with me.'

"So I went and sat there and talked to the people. The press caught the whole thing up. Every day the audience doubled. I was completely unaffected by anything, because this was sort of passing time before I was to go. The whole thing was so gentle and gradual and automatic, completely automatic—just as the river flows, and it doesn't have to make an effort to flow because the slope is already available to the flow. It flows just like that, effortless flow of life."

And this is how Maharishi started teaching meditation
Over fifty years ago.
There never was any grand plan.

If was more like a river flowing...
It was simply time to “get rid of a thought.”

If you'd like to read about the prayer flags go here.

Jill Hall

Maharishi , Me, & Jill
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

One of my oldest friends passed on this week.
Jill and her husband, Tom, were TM teachers when I first came to Atlanta in 1971.
We shared those early, heady, heart filled days when all things seemed possible.
In time, years would pass and we would not see each other.
But, whenever we did, there was always that unspoken understanding of shared roots and love.

I find Jill to be entwined with what I hold most precious in my life.

She brought people to the transcendent.
She knew both my parents and they her.
I can’t say that of many people outside of family.
As part of his teacher training, Jill helped Pop give his first “living room lecture” on TM.
And she stood by his side as tears welled up in his eyes as he spoke of meditation.
Mom described the event to me, “Poor Jill didn’t know that Poppy cries when he is excited. Her eyes just got bigger and bigger as she watched him. She didn’t know what he would do.”
And I can still hear Pop’s voice, coming through the front door, “Hey, guess who I saw today, Tom Hall!”
Yes, it was always Tom and Jill. The two essentially were one.

I find that Jill takes with her a huge era of my life.
And so, this morning I dug out an old manuscript from those days some thirty years ago.
I was thinking of this William Dickey poem. I wanted to see exactly how it went:

Happiness

I sent you this bluebird of the name of Joe
with “Happiness” tattooed on his left bicep.
(For a bluebird, he was a damn good size.)
And all you can say is you think your cat has got him? …

So I am sending you this snail of the name of Fred
in a small tricolor sash, so the cat will know him.
He will scrawl out “Happiness” in his own slow way.
I won’t ever stop until the word gets to you.


Yes. That’s kind of how we've lived.
And Jill did it with such spirit.

Dreaming as Delirium

Dreaming as Delirium
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao.

Dreaming as Delirium is a book written by J. Allan Hobson, a professor of psychiatry and researcher at Harvard Medical School. His specialty is sleep research and states of consciousness. I mention that phrase a lot here, “state of consciousness.” So do people into meditation and spiritual cultivation.

The Upanishads and Western science speak of three major states of consciousness: waking, deep sleep (non-REM sleep), and dreaming (REM sleep). Hobson’s contribution to this discussion is something called the AIM Model. The Activation energy, Information, and Mode model (AIM) creates a three dimensional cube of “mind space.”

This cube is defined along three axes:
1) Activation or Arousal of the brain (is it low or high as measured by the power of an EEG signal).
2) Input or Information (the degree to which information arises from external sources via the senses, or is created internally by endogenous brain activity- as when we dream).
3) Modulation or Mode of data organization (mediated by neurotransmitters with either cholinergic (ACh in the diagram) or aminergic & serotonergic dominance( NE & 5-HT)). Is one’s thinking logical and linear or more fantasy based and emotional? Neurotransmitters determine this. As logic decreases so does working memory. As emotion increases so does remote memory.

Within this cube one may plot different states of consciousness as determined by different physiological variables. Normally, one traverses a rather narrow path from one region of this cube to anotheras one passes from waking to sleeping to dreaming. Waking state plots up it the back right corner. Dreaming (REM) maps to the lower front right corner. Deep sleep (non-rapid eye movement sleep, NREM) occurs somewhere in the center. But one can also map lesser traveled routes. Coma finds one in the lower front left corner. Lucid dreaming lies towards the back near the lower right side.

What this model emphasizes is how very much "room" exists physiologically that could support different states of consciousness. The other thing to note is that states of consciousness are actually created and maintained by a wide variety of physiological variables. The AIM Model simply maps the primary variables. It is possible that at any given spot within the AIM cube one could insert yet another cube whose axies are defined by yet three additional variables.

In the past, it was thought that the three states of consciousness were mutually exclusive. Now we know that state-determining variables can be mixed. For instance, walking in your sleep is REM sleep physiology minus the variable of muscle paralysis. Hypnagogic hallucinations occur during a "minor" state of consciousness in which some brain variables create dreams, while the rest of the physiology is closer to waking state.

AIM also highlights the manner in which states of consciousness can be changed by manipulating any one of the three primary variables. For example, meditation or hypnosis change the level of excitation. Coffee (with the amine caffeine) or psychedelics (many of which are serotonin analogs), alter the chemical balance of neurotransmitters.

This AIM model is science reiterating what Maharishi used to tell us. Every state of consciousness is supported by a unique physiology. Cultivating consciousness is like moving a table. You can grab hold of any leg (any one of a number of physiological variables) and pull. The whole table will move.

So, grab hold of the leg that is easiest to reach. Meditation effects EEG, galvanic skin response, serotonin. It turns the attention inwards… these are all primary AIM variables. By contrast, Maharishi downplayed affirmations as mere "mood making, " or trying to cultivate a state of non-attachment by thinking alone. These methods don’t really affect the physiology all that much. In short, trying to philosophize ones way to enlightenment (Gyana Yoga) was well nigh impossible for most of us.

Which brings me back to Adyashanti and too much Thinking!

Enlightenment starts in the body with direct experience, not the thinking mind.

A Little Levity

endless
Originally uploaded by antimethod.

Here’s another old entry from my journal. I was 27 years old and teaching TM. Maharishi had begun teaching a collection of practices called sidhis, or “perfections.” They are techniques for cultivating consciousness found in Patanjalai’s Yoga Sutras. Included in the sidhis are happiness, compassion, invisibility, and flashiest of all: levitation.

May 27, 1977:
“These are historic times. On the 24th and 25th we publicly announced the sidhis. I sat in on the press conference. I have never been so close to history, and yet each day is still so ordinary. A wave of new knowledge has been slowly approaching and now it’s here. A new age is being ushered in and we are playing our part. Somehow, I must swallow that.

“First the rumors, then the little details. Pop called from Connecticut. I know his den. I know the carpet in there. I know the bookshelves. And Pop says Peter shook the entire place. It’s no longer some story in a book, or even friends of friends. House guests are levitating in Pop's house. A new age has arrived. Man’s mind can be in such unity with the laws nature that he can manipulate them and fly.”

.... Of course, May 27, 1977 turned out to be an historical non-event. Nothing developed as I had expected. I never learned to “fly.” But, all my TM buddies did, as did my brother, Andy, his wife, Carolyn and Mom, by then a grandmother. Of course, Mom did it in her own style. Apparently, she misunderstood just when and where she was to practice. So, one evening as she presumably lay “napping” on the bed and Pop sat reading in a nearby chair, a supine Mom flew up into the air, straight up over a foot, then slammed back down, only to take off again repeatedly.

“Whop, whop, whop! Your mother is a big woman and flying up like that startled me!” Pop was rattled even at the thought- misguided wife practicing levitation unannounced in bed. Everyone else sat in the lotus position upon a cushion. Mom didn’t like that. She said it hurt her back. Like the others, Mom had an adequate enough take off, but the landing came down hard… so hard that eventually she gave up the practice.

Carolyn, also a mother, practiced yet another variation with her little girl, Evie. She’d place Evie in her lap. She loved the hop, hop, hopping around. But, when I asked a twenty-four year old Eve about her early flying, she was amazed.

Had that really happened? She never even knew. For by the time Evie was seven, Andy and Carolyn had three children to raise and a business that needing building. They never had enough time and practicing the sidhis required two hours a day of meditation. Eventually, they stopped meditating and in time Andy developed a somewhat dismissive chuckle for friends who suddenly “discovered” spiritual interests. Grounded in the daily do, raising capitol and raising children, cultivating spirituality seemed a youthful, Utopian adventure in which he could no longer indulge.

Still in 1977, I assumed that levitation once accessible would become acceptable. With hundreds of Westerners able to demonstrate the feat in public and be guinea pigs for science- our understanding of life’s potential would change over night. Then, comes the revolution, or so I thought.

In 1977, Andy - a newly minted PhD neuroscientist, assumed that oscillating neural activity must generate a field of antigravity. He began assembling an electronics workbench hoping to duplicate biology by building the world’s first anti-gravity machine. He spoke of a new economy based upon clean, cheap nuclear energy since all the waste could be loaded onto rockets propelled by antigravity right into the sun. No more pollution. No more problems with the Middle East.

We were so naive. Through the years the TM’ers held many public demonstrations all to no avail. In 1977, reporters decided that lift off was a gymnastic trick: meditators were slapping down their folded legs in a manner that flipped them into the air. It was just a trick, a contraction of the gluteus maximus. So gymnasts were brought out to duplicate the feat. They quickly grew exhausted. By contrast, the meditators continued rising up, often over two feet before falling back to earth having progressed forward by a yard. Still, people were not convinced and the story hasn’t changed in a quarter century.

Seeing is not believing. We live in a world of special effects and cynicism. While in New York a street magician grows famous performing a levitation trick and those who didn’t succeed in lifting off sued Maharishi for their money back. It would make fascinating social commentary, if it weren’t so disappointing.

Revolution was reduced to carnival.

And I think the real lesson from these intervening years is that "We are in this together." In past millenia, it was enough for individuals hidden in some cave or forrest to quietly become enlightened. This time round, we have to do it as a species. If we are to make the quatum leap, we're going to have to do it in great numbers. The planet's future, not just ours depends upon it. And before we take that leap (of faith and heart), we will have to first conceive of it.

To date, the experience with levitation demonstrates one thing: seeing is not believing.

We live in an age of science. Today, many people use their heads before their hearts. And if they don't think something is possible, then by god, it's not.

Here-in lies a role for science. We need an explanation, some intellectual framing, of how man's consciousness might become one with the law of gravity, with all the laws of nature, and with all the archetypes of psyche. Perhaps then, our hearts will lift us high.

What is Real?

water droplet
Originally uploaded by Uggla.

I began meditating in 1969 to see for myself whether there was more to our minds, and to Life, than commonly accepted. I wanted to see for myself because I didn’t trust the second hand reports available in bookstores. In the intervening years I have seen plenty: devas, demons, and the hand of God at work. For a time, I saw myself as unbounded and transcendent, in tune with and in command of the laws of Nature. But, the bottom line is this, “Was it really Real?” Having never fully trusted the writings of a disembodied author, now I have to wonder, can I even trust myself, my own experience? Have my perceptions been real or are they simply delusion? Even if we can physiologically identify the neural circuits used in generating beatific vision can this question be addressed. We may just be identifying the neurophysiology of real, brain based hallucination.

Strangely enough, objective reality has this huge social component. There is this “consensus reality” that stands for what is Real. We’ve agreed that dreams are not real, or that the image in the mirror is not real. But my bodies, cars and trees are real.

Everyday consensus reality depends upon a certain solidity. This solidity is “objective proof.” On the other hand, what we feel and see inside our heads falls into the notoriously suspect category of “subjective experience.” Of course, everything we perceive is a mental construct and thus subjective experience. But, in ordinary parlance when we talk about something being real there is a solidity to that reality that we all appreciate.

“Yes, the truck is out there, bearing down on you.” There will be real consequences.

Here is where levitation might come in as data for the grandest experiment in human history. I think a fair test for the Absolute, and by extension the reality of a meditator’s subjective experience of Pure Consciousness, is to ask if we can see some concrete effect stemming from that experience.

Levitation occurs when you settle deeply into meditation. In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali describes the practice in these words:

By making samyama on the relationship between the body and akasha and/or by acquiring the lightness of a cotton fiber, passage through the sky can be secured.


Commentary describes samyama as consisting of three elements. It begins with concentration or Dharana in which the mind is fixed upon an object. It’s as if the mind finally sees and manages to take a snap shot of the object of perception. The next stage is meditation, or Dhyana, in which thought becomes an unbroken flow toward the object of concentration. The snap shot is now transformed into a frameless motion picture. The third and final stage is absorption, or Samadhi. There is no longer a duality between object of perception and perceiver, between the object and subject.

Yoga Sutra commentaries explain that by being absorbed into the relationship between the solid body and akasha, the element of space or ether “and/or” [translations vary] absorption of the lightness of a cotton fiber, the mind becomes lightness itself, and as the mind changes, so does the body. Thus the physical body looses its heaviness and lifts into the air, thereby revealing that the solidity we had perceived as our body was all along created by our consciousness.

If levitation is actually occurring, it means that a specific subjective experience correlates with the ability to counteract gravity, one of the four fundamental forces of the universe. More concretely you can argue that to pop a body into the air, consciousness must have the ability to overcome, to actually do away with (if you believe the above commentary) the body’s mass and inertia. Andy thought in terms of the nervous system generating an antigravity force. And here we can get into actual physics.

Soviet dissident and physicist, Andrei Sakhorov, was the first to conclude that gravity, could be understood as the effects caused by changes in quantum fluctuations of the vacuum state in the presence of matter. (Elsewhere, I’ll have to talk about the vacuum state. It’s an invention of theoretical physics and it seems remarkable analogous to what the East calls Pure Consciousness, or the Absolute.) Through the years, Sakhorov’s speculation has been refined into a literature of quantum-fluctuation induced gravity. The argument has grown to include a similar connection between vacuum fluctuations and inertia- the resistance of a body to being accelerated. Inertia arises when a body is accelerated relative to a frame of reference. We are pushed back into our seats when a jet takes off down the runway. While it appears that our acceleration is relative to the earth, actually it is relative to the stars. To make the point more graphically, H.E. Puthoff writes that “one could say that it is the stars that deliver the punch.” However, the mechanism by which the stars manage to connect to us remains unexplained. Puthoff and others believe that the force is transmitted to us by “the wall of vacuum fluctuations acting as proxy for the fixed stars through which one attempted to accelerate.”

Here is the abstract from an article entitled “Mass Modification Experiment Definition Study” published in a 1996 report to the Advanced Concepts Office of the Propulsion Directorate of the Phillips Lab at Edwards Air Force Base:

“Many researchers see the vacuum as a central ingredient of 21st-Century physics. Some even believe the vacuum may be harnessed to provide a limitless supply of energy. This report summarizes an attempt to find an experiment that would test the Haisch, Reuda and Puthoff (HRP) conjecture that the mass and inertia of a body are induced effects brought about by changes in the quantum fluctuation energy of the vacuum…. It was possible to find an experiment that might be able to prove or disprove that the inertial mass of a body can be altered by making changes in the vacuum surrounding the body.”


To me, it seems that a meditator levitating would also be the proof-of-principle that physicists go after. And I can think of no greater scientific discovery than that of human consciousness (and by extension human physiology) being able to interact with a physical force that permeates the spacetime continuum (i.e. gravity). To show that levitation actually occurs would be to demonstrate that our inner, subjective experience can intermesh with and modify objective reality. Or as Stanislov Grof has written, it proves that the Self does indeed extend “beyond the brain.”

So what is real? Maharishi use to say, “Reality is different in different states of consciousness.” To most people, a truck is real. To a mystic, the truck can be taken on entirely different levels. It can be part of the Cosmic Game, a delicious play of Self. Or, it can be “non-self” and thus not real with a capital “R.”

Maybe one day May, 1977 will be regarded as an historic moment. Maybe one day, we’ll be able to see that levitation is possible and we will have a science that can explain how such an impossible event can transpire. Maybe then, we can heed these words:

“You never identify yourself with the shadow cast by your body, or with its reflection, or with the body you see in a dream or in your imagination. Therefore you should not identify yourself with this living body either.”

Viveka Chudamani by Shankara (788-820 AD)
Quoted in “Consciousness and Body Image,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. (1998)