Dare to Master the Unreal World
We’re here for a retreat, a fundamental retreat, a retreat that gets down to the very basic questions of yoga.
Yoga is a science, the original science—goes back thousands and thousands of years to the origins of civilization. We could say it’s the science of reality itself. Very different from modern science, which is merely the science of objective phenomena; and the scandal of modern science in its postmodern period is that it has suddenly been unable to avoid the fact that it has been avoiding a huge part of reality—namely consciousness—and that it has no clue how to study consciousness because of its very premises that are based on only accepting as real anything that is objectively replicable, verifiable, or falsifiable, to use Karl Popper’s famous phrase—and that leaves consciousness out.
And they don’t have the tools to study consciousness nor its transformations, not scientifically, not without fearing that they will fall into some religious “woo-woo” or that they will have experiences from which they will not be able to come back—and a lot of it is actually just that fear. Or the other fear that consciousness has nothing to do with matter, with material reality, with the chemical substrates of the brain, with synapses and neurochemicals and impulses of the sensory field and the nervous system, etc., but is something completely different, unquantifiable, they don’t know where to begin. And yet quantum physics says now that it’s elementary: it’s embedded in the very root of reality itself, and you cannot understand reality without understanding consciousness.
Moreover, the field of psychology which tried mightily to remain within the framework of behaviorism and couldn’t do it, because, of course, the psyche is not simply measurable by its behavior, and not changeable by changing its behavior. Nor could they limit it to the cognitive field, because our psyche has more dimensions and levels than simply the cognitive dimension of conscious thinking. The psychoanalysts hope that they could limit it to the lower biological—or I should say biographical—unconscious based on childhood phenomena and the Oedipus complex and all of those Freudian developments, and at least that took it a step deeper, but it turned out that there were elements, dimensions, of consciousness that transcended in both directions, up and down, beyond that simple field. So Jung had to take it a step beyond, into the archetypal dimension, but that too was not sufficient to fully understand the nature of consciousness, and the cause and the containment of archetypal imagery, and Platonic ideas, we could say.
Nor could the phantasms and the memories that began to emerge when depth psychology began to really develop that came from prenatal states, before there was an ego or language, that could not be explained by ordinary methods of trying to understand psychological development as a matter of social adaptation. Nor, of course, could the understanding be included of past lives, even though there are documentable past life regressions, and the ultimate destruction of the paradigm comes now with the technological development that allows people to be clinically dead—flatlined, no brain activity whatsoever—and this to be observable by witnesses—and the person can be dead for an hour or more these days, and come back fully conscious of everything that happened during that period, even though there was no brain activity whatsoever—and conscious not only of things that happened in the room, or the next room, or in other remote locations that the consciousness just happened to travel to, that the person who was dead wanted to go see—relatives in other states or countries or whatever—and in addition to that, travel beyond this dimension into other realities and have what they refer to quaintly as “near death experiences”, with beings who can be called angels and spirit guides, and beings of light; documentable, thousands and thousands of cases including by scientists, neurosurgeons, people who it is not in their professional interest to admit such experiences, and yet it’s happening.
And these kinds of phenomena—and we could expand them greatly—show that the modern scientific understanding of consciousness is not adequate to understand consciousness itself, or reality of which consciousness is a part. In addition to that, you have another field of parapsychology that studies the paranormal capacities of people who have developed their consciousness—which includes yogis, who have developed capacities to do things that go beyond the normal framework that would be considered impossible, and yet again, documentable. People who don’t eat or drink for years, people who are able to sit in fires and not get burned, people who clearly have telepathic communication capacities. Even the CIA is hiring such people to remote view Russian military installations and that kind of thing. So they’re making use of it, but they’re not able to scientifically understand how to create a paradigm that includes all of this information and observations.
And so we have a breakdown within the scientific framework, and yet a breakthrough of information and capacities that have implications that can completely remake our world if we are to ever truly harness—not simply weaponize but harness—for productive purposes the potentials of consciousness. And that’s really what yoga is about: it’s both a basic science and a technology for the development of the implications of that science.
The technological aspect of yoga is referred to as the siddhis, the powers that develop (can be developed) by an adept yogi who is called to develop certain of the potentials of consciousness. And they are voluntary in nature. And there are other yogis whose development is within the field of the transcendent understanding of what could be called God-consciousness, that brings in information about the nature of time and space, and planetary destiny, and history, and origins, and the understanding of the cosmos at a very deep level. Much of which—although it goes beyond total documentation—is congruent with the information we’re receiving from quantum physics and other fields.
So the study of yoga that I propose for this retreat will be entirely a scientific approach. We’re not going to do anything that would be based on suggestion, on anything like hypnosis, on anything like religious invocation of God; we’re not going to go that route. We’re going to replicate the basic experiment based on the fundamental hypothesis of the ancient Sat Yogis who asked themselves the question, when they got very suspicious about how reality seemed to operate with all its synchronicities and all of its magical aspects that they were very much aware of, and they asked themselves the question, “Is the world real?” That’s the fundamental question.
And so I propose that the discovery that they made, and that becomes the fundamental hypothesis, is very simply: the world is not real. It’s a very simple discovery that the yogis made.
[Someone drops something]
Ah you see! Synchronicities everywhere! It’s all magical, don’t worry about it.
The understanding that the world is not real needs to be defined a little more closely. There are many ways something can be unreal. It’s not unreal in the way that, let’s say, a logical impossibility is, like a square circle. It’s not unreal in the sense of something that does not exist empirically, like a rabbit with horns. It’s not unreal in a lot of the ways that unreality would be described in logical terms. But it’s unreal in this sense—and the metaphor, the example, the analogy that is given is that it is a misunderstanding, a meconnaissance, to use Lacan’s term—a misreading of reality. And the example classically used is someone in twilight mistaking a coiled rope for a snake. And the way that people understand the world is seeing the snake and not realizing it’s a rope. And we could say that modern science is exactly that—they’re seeing the snake and studying the snake and not realizing that what they are really dealing with is the rope of consciousness.
So this is the question, and is this question, is this scientific hypothesis verifiable or falsifiable? That’s the question. If it’s not, then we can question whether it is scientific. Well the yogis said yes, you can verify this hypothesis if you’re willing to do the experiment. And I think that’s the important point here: this is not a religious belief that the yogis were proposing, not a dogma, not a doctrine, not some metaphysical assumption or axiom. No. It’s the result of an experiment that anyone can replicate if you do the work. OK, now what is the work that is required to discover whether the world is or is not real? And then what are the implications of that?
Well, first of all, we’ve said that it’s a meconnaissance, a misunderstanding, but we could also use about five other analogous ways to understand what is the ontological status of the world? And these are very common now in modern culture, but they have been present throughout history and entertained or at least looked at as some possibility, whether taken seriously or flippantly.
In the modern world we could say that the first one is the famous film of The Matrix—is the world a matrix, a computer program writ large? Whether that computer program is run by some evil programmer or it’s a science experiment by some students on an extraterrestrial civilization, or it’s a computer simulation done by people in the future, or we are brains in a vat imagining all of this and being effected by electrodes to the neurons—but it’s one of those kinds of variations. The yogis don’t go to this one, they think it’s way too paranoid, and yogis avoid paranoia at all costs. So they believe that although it is an unreal simulation, but it’s a simulation created by yourself, OK? And therefore you can do the experiment to discover what is beyond the simulation, because it is you who are beyond the matrix, not some evil aliens out there. So that’s the good news, at least if the experiment is accurate.
OK, the other option is again very popular in science these days: this is a hologram.
Audio File: Dare to Master the Unreal World – Audio File.MP3