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..:: Objectivity ::..
By
Alan Schneider
Now,
I have been a serious student of every kind of spiritual activity as an
avocation for most of my life, and the consideration of what kind of
postmortem “experience” might follow our excursion through the world of
the physical senses (and their interpreter, the Freudian ego), has
always been a significant part of that avocation. And even after all of
the truly remarkable perceptions I have had, the truth is that I’m not
absolutely sure what these altered states of consciousness
indicate about the possible nature of the “afterlife”! We simply cannot
tell with certainty until the moment of death. But, there are definitely
some interesting theories that have gained my respect over the years,
particularly some Hindu Vedic ones.
The Hindu religion has as a
fundamental tenate that the practice of meditation, which necessitates
temporary withdrawal from the senses in a hypnogogic trance state, can,
if pursued long enough (generally over a period of several years) result
in the experience of Samadhi, the blissful union with the
Ultimate State of Consciousness, experienced as the Brahman, the
universal essence underlying all objective manifestation and lesser
levels of experience. I have attained this condition myself, and even
gone to the extent of writing a manuscript about it. I was very moved by
my Samadhi, to say the least, but the question that must be asked in any
intelligent discourse on the subject is this: what literally and
objectively happened to me during my Samadhi experience?
Hindu religious theory
maintains that the individual ego meets and merges with the Logos (i.e.
God) during Samadhi. I would say that I certainly met and merged
with something of enormous psychic power and presence, whatever
it may have been, and this made a profound and lasting psychological
impression within my personal psyche. But, was this the God of my
familiarity from the Scriptures, the omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient
Being that is the Source of all Creation?
The most effective scientific
explanation for my Samadhi experience of which I am aware has been
constructed by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who carried Freud’s
work on repression beyond sexual involvement to existential
involvement. Jung took the bold step of postulating that the Psyche
amounts to far more than the interaction of instinct, waking
consciousness, and external social conditioning (Id, Ego, and Superego,
respectively) claimed by Freud. Based on an extensive study of the
mythologies of every culture in history that he could access information
on, Jung constructed the Theory of the Archetypes of the Collective
Unconscious. He maintained that personal consciousness originated from a
realm beyond personal identity, a collective realm that was
inborn in the structure of the individual mind, and the brain supporting
that mind, existing in a dimension of experience that lies beyond human
comprehension – beyond the comprehension of the ego, that is –
the comprehension of the Soul is an entirely different matter. In
meditation, the ego is allowed to become dormant, opening the doors of
perception to the realm of the Archetypes. And even though the
Archetypes themselves cannot be directly experienced by human
perception, they persistently generate archetypal symbols which
can be perceived by human observers, particularly in deep
meditation. The Soul is just such an archetypal manifestation.
In Jung’s view, the total
psyche is characterized as a bright spot of conscious awareness (the
ego), surrounded by a ring of personal subconscious material which can
be both id and superego. Both psychic structures float on the surface of
the much larger sphere of the total Psyche. The ring of personal
subconscious material is frequently maintained at the unconscious level
by trauma – repressed psychic injury. Deep beneath the level of
the personal unconscious is the realm of the archetypal symbols, and at
the center of the oceanic sphere of the Psyche is the Primal Self, the
origin of all knowable experience on any level under any conditions,
including the Archetypes and archetypal symbols. Interestingly, Jung
explained psychosis as the emergence of archetypal symbolic material
into consciousness through a “broken”, dissociated ego. The persistence
of psychotic reactions was explained by the relentless driving influence
of the Primal Self at the center of the psychic sphere, continuously
generating a flood of archetypal symbols which the healthy, functional
ego is capable of screening out, but the dissociated ego is not. The key
to observing archetypal symbols in non-psychotic cases resides in
temporarily relaxing the ego in meditation, permitting the archetypal
symbols to manifest in a more orderly and controlled fashion.
The ego is reduced in
presence during meditation, but this also makes rational assessment a
problem. The sense of linear time is frequently lost, as is the sensory
perception of physical location. I did not know when or where I
was in Samadhi, just that “I” was something present as an
observer somewhere, and going through a succession of perceptual
stages of increasing intensity. I had no sense of my body whatsoever,
not even breathing or posture. My eyes were closed as well. This makes
objective self-observation well nigh impossible, and I was unfortunately
working alone on the occasions in which I have reached the level of the
Jungian Primal Self – i.e. God – in Samadhi. I am not sure how
much the presence of others would have mattered in any case, but they
might have been able to at least bear witness to my external state. I
suppose that an electroencephalogram might also be useful under these
circumstances, in conjunction with various other external monitoring
procedures.
If I did, in fact, contact
the Primal Self, as I believe, and if this Jungian structure is the
reality behind the Sage’s experiences of the Divine, as I strongly
suspect, then I have met God while still in the flesh, and more than
once at that. I personally suspect that I may have a genetic expression
that predisposes me to this kind of experience, although Hindu Yogis
regularly attain Samadhi and even remain in that state indefinitely
while conducting their daily affairs, such as these are. In most cases,
those “affairs” consist of experiencing Ananda – i.e. spiritual
Bliss – and telling any concerned parties about God’s infinite
Love, radiant Light, and the many manifestations seen in the Chakras,
and described in the Vedas.
With the previous provisos, I
can say that I have a pretty clearly defined construct of what the
afterlife might well be like, and what steps the dying individual
may conceivably pass through on the way to “the other side” of mortal
consciousness. What I experienced in Samadhi was a succession of
fantastic images of increasingly abstract character and, in Jungian
terms, increasing numinousity, or psychic intensity, culminating
in a vision of a flower-like structure composed of brilliant colored
light, with a core of pure white light (the Chakra Sahasrara)
which occupied the entire field of my consciousness, perceived at the
time as the totality of the universe! The core of white light was quite
probably an observation/experience of the Jungian Primal Self, accessed
in deep meditation. I feel constrained to say here that this experience
was in no way enhanced by any chemical substance use
whatsoever, and occurred solely in the context of a lengthy and
carefully structured investigation into specific alternative states of
consciousness that preceded the event by several months.
There is possibly a final
merging with the Divine Consciousness in the condition of Mahasamadhi
– literally physical death – that is also part of Hindu
theory and Vedic cosmology, as the Atman (or Soul) returns home to God
either permanently, or to another physical incarnation to
experience and (hopefully) release more Karma in another living body.
Based on all my life experiences, including the “Little Samadhis” that I
have attained to date, this is the explanation of the afterlife that
most fully explains those experiences, and the one that I offer to
others at their request for such information.
- With Love, Alan -
(CR2008, Alan Schneider)
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