Exhausted dreams

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

Anais Nin

The pilgrim dreams, even as he walks. We never stop dreaming in fact but when the body is switched off and the beta brain waves slide down into theta frequencies we are suddenly in a fluid and lucid world of intense imagery. I doubt dream analysis. I challenge anybody to make sense of so many dreams of water unleashing its power, wreaking havoc on Earth. Just the other day, once again. A staggering sequence in vivid detail of a wave so high the mountain on which I stood looked like it would soon be deeply underwater. The sheer beauty of it. The simplicity and elegance of a big wave. The power of forward motion that nothing can stop. And the inexpressible horror, the feeling of total impotence and terror as it approaches.

The water crashed just below me into the high slopes and I was again saved. But I have been in or on those waves as they wildly careen towards land or over falls and I have felt the tremendous thrill of the rollercoaster at the end of time. Did you know that there was one more painting by Da Vinci discovered at Windsor Castle that we haven't heard about? Yes, the Queen's wee house that had a terrible fire back in the 90's. I saw that painting entitled the 'Last Judgement'. No people. No mountains. No landscape. No machines. No animals. What then!? Water, but water in its fiercest expression that any man has ever witnessed, a wild and totally destructive chaos of gigantic waves of water. The BBC report of Feb 14 2002 notes:

A collection of 10 Leonardo da Vinci drawings kept by the Queen begin a tour of the UK on Friday as part of Golden Jubilee celebrations. The 10 pictures are usually kept in a Windsor Castle vault away from damaging bright lights.The pictures have been held in trust by the Royal Family since before 1690 and are thought to have been acquired during the reign of Charles II.Among those going on display are The Head of a Young Man (1508-10), Studies of a horse (1490), A Scene from the Last Judgement (1515) and The Anatomy of the Shoulder (1510).

As a remote viewer and instructor of hundreds of Japanese, some Brits and a few Canadians over the last decade I know for sure that we can get flashes of the future. It is called precognition and is far more common than we think. Science may poo pah the idea that we can see into what has not yet occurred but do not forget that science has so far been totally inept in really answering, and I mean without a shadow of a doubt kind of final proof, the three most important questions in science:

1) Origin of universe: The so called big bang theory is not proof. It is a theory and a hotly contested one if you actually check it out. Hundreds of scientists have signed a petition denouncing it.

2) Origin of life: The idea that DNA just magically appeared in the chemical soup one day is now viewed as ludicrous by an increasingly vocal group of scientists. It is just a theory too.

3) Origin of you: Darwin's theory of evolution is also under the lens of severe criticism by none other than some of its own proponents who simply cannot account for the missing link that forever separates us from our closely related and entirely unevolved hominid brothers and sisters. The theory basically says that (if you metaphorically compress all of time into 100 years) until yesterday we were scratching our asses in caves, unable to talk, without a tool in the world and this morning we casually woke up and designed the space shuttle. You may laugh, but do your homework first.

So don't be shy when telling arrogant scientists that they have nothing to swagger about. I love science too. And the real scientists are really humble when it comes to proclamations about reality that are supposed to be definitely, totally replicable and true. It is the bureaucratic scientists that work for giant corporations that proclaim we are definitely the cause of global warming and that co2 is definitely the culprit we must be careful of. They have an economic axe to grind and they have people like Al Gore, once the second most powerful man on Earth, as their spokesman. Science does not understand dreams, yet. Psychologists cannot explain dreams yet. If dreams were explicable then why would we have them? Explanations are for the day. Dreams are for the nights since we see them better then. Or at least with the night of closed eyes. We must not close our eyes though, when science tries to bamboozle us with science.

The last time I had a really clear precognition was in Tokyo in June 2008. I was waiting for an editor to meet me in the Imperial hotel. As I was standing at the men's urinal in the toilet I clearly got the message that he would be late, the reason why, and the amount of time HE thought he would be late. Five minutes later he called to give me the exact same information and I confirmed that I had received it five minutes before he called. A small matter. But a real matter for science to grapple with. What does it tell us about time? How can you perceive what has not happened yet? Was it telepathy? My remote viewing graduate students often reported the same. It became relatively commonplace to experience this. There is absolutely nothing paranormal about it. All animals can sense danger ahead of time. We are at least partly animals are we not? So it is inbuilt. But like dreams you have to switch off the beta transmission frequencies of 'deal with the here and now, the concrete physical world only' in order to tune in. Having a pee is deeply relaxing when you really need to pee. Et voila, precognition.

Even more powerful dreams seem to happen when we are exhausted. In Japanese these are called 金縛り. It really does feel like you are bound in metal like a butterfly pinned to a display case. Nothing can move. Not even an eye. No sound can be made. Wide awake and unable to move the dreamer commonly rises up and out of the physical body to have an aptly named 'out of body experience'. People have been having them since we slept with the big cats in caves during the ice age. After a forty plus kilometer day on the road in Shikoku I would flop down on the futon of whatever little inn I had managed to get to. Some were run by very economically challenged country people whose sole income was the odd pilgrim here and there. One place I showed up the owners were in their eighties and could barely walk. The place was so run down I really doubted they could provide a meal. They did. It must have cost them a lot more in time and energy than the four thousand five hundred yen I, the only client, paid them that day. Life is hard for minshuku people these days. Their buildings are often ancient and their facilities crumbling apart. With not enough income to repair or update they are forced to suffer the loss of clientele who will go to a cheap business hotel instead. I always tried to support the minshuku. Soon they will be gone forever.

And then I would dream, or experience an altered state that was so lucid it made walking by day look pale in comparison. If this is all just electrical activity in my brain then what is the power source?! More importantly where is it?? In short we have no idea at all what dreaming is about really, we have theories though. And there are some I like better than others. Fred Alan Wolf, a Ph.D in physics has some really cool ideas.

Dr. Fred Alan Wolf is one of a special group of scientists studying consciousness. Dr. John Lilly is another. They are 'shamanic' scientists, which means that they appear to risk their own souls through radical experimentation. They do not stick to dry "objective" theories but test their own human limits often using dramatic methods. Lilly used the isolation tank and LSD. Fred Wolf used Ayahuasca , a potent entheogen made from the bark of an Amazon vine mixed with a dmt rich plant by jungle shamans in South america, in his own explorations of what happens in shamanic states of consciousness.

As a physicist he wanted to know how shamans time travel, heal and apparently contact other dimensions. For these reasons, since I too was doing shamanic work exploring altered states I chose to interview Dr. Wolfe amongst other pioneers. In Seattle at the Whole Life Expo (1995) I attended Dr. Wolf's excellent workshop entitled " The Dreaming Universe " in which he shared with us his research in dreams especially what he had learned with the aboriginees. We set the next day as the interview date and the place was to be his hotel. You would expect a 'shamanic' scientist to have a synchronicity-rich life. He does. We literally bumped into him and his wife in a small Seattle coffee shop on the way to his hotel. And his wife is also called Sonia!

So there were the two Sonias and us drinking coffee before the Starbucks era! The following interview is the bulk of a long discussion which covered many topics. It was the first Japanese interview published of him ever (translated from this English one) and I hope it will encourage readers to buy the Japanese version of his book "Taking the Quantum Leap". We published this interview privately in Transdimension Vista, circulated to several hundred discriminating Japanese readers.

Echan: Well let's get rolling. I would like to thank Dr. Fred Alan Wolfe for being here today, this is an interview specifically for Japan to take note of. We would like to inform people in Japan much more about who is out there right now doing work specifically in fields that connect science to other areas, ones which so far haven't received much credibility . One of those areas of course is shamanic studies. So I would like to talk to you today by covering two areas largely grouped into 'shamanism' and 'physics'. I enjoyed your talk yesterday and would like to start by asking you aboutTULPOIDAL FORMS mentioned in connection with Alexandra David Neel during your workshop. What is your understanding of a TULPA?

FRED: Well there are two ways to talk about it : There is the experience of tulpas and the is the scientific theory or (information) based on a theoretical model of what tulpoidal images are. So the first is the experience because many people do not know what the experience is.

Echan: Let's talk about the experience.

FRED: One of the common ways to induce tulpoidal images is to do something on concentrated meditation on a visual object. A typical example is a candle flame. A typical thing which anybody can do is to, in a darkened room, watch a candle flame for a period of time and then close one's eyes and watch the candle flame with the eyes closed. In other words what you are watching now is the image which has been imprinted .

Mainly it is retinal and it is also acting on your brain. What you are trying to do is to increase the length of time in which you can maintain the image.That holding of the image is the key to tulpoidal imagery. This is what I call vigilant, or intense observation . You are focussing on the means by which images are held in the brain. You are focussing that intent on a situation where the object of the image is no longer present. Now the focus is inward, on the means by which that image is being maintained. I suggest people do this.

The first time people do this they are able to hold the image for 30 seconds before it falls apart. That is what you will see happening, gradually disintegrate and fall apart until finally it gets harder and harder to hold it and it just dissolves away. Then you have to open your eyes again to rekindle it. This is how you practise doing this. After a period of days or maybe weeks you can hold the image for as long as maybe five or ten minutes. Buddhists can hold these images for hours. The next thing is maybe you have a dream image or a master or a beloved one. Maybe someone who passed on. Now you hold that image in the same way. Because now you have learned how to use the 'means' which is the vigilant observer inside to hold, to keep holding. At a certain point when you become a master of this, which is a kind of yoga.

Alexandra Neel said that her master got to a point where the image that she was holding was some kind of trickster, an impish character and this character began to play tricks on her! It appeared when she least expected , at the edge of her bed or jump up in front of her so it became something she felt that she could no longer control.

This is what I call vigilant, or intense observation

Echan: Of course her eyes were open at this point.

FRED: Yes, her eyes were open at this point. Actually the thing that is very important to understand is that the mechanism by which we see, by which we recognize imagery has something to do with what is going on in the outside world coming in but that isn't really where it is at. Really where it is at is the means by which you 'see'. In my workshop I give examples...

Echan: Yes that was a great example! At yesterday's workshop we all saw how a three dimensional red cube on the screen literally disappeared when we all focussed on the blue background.

FRED: Yes it was what you bring to bear is your own image so that creates the image you see..There is not really any 'out there' out there, specifically, objectively. There is no such thing as an objective world, it is an impossible concept that came from the Newtonian mechanical world view. That things exist independently of consciousness. There is absolutely NO evidence for that. It is like the emperor has no clothes, any child can find out that there is nothing until you see it...

Echan: What do you think about the re-appearance of this knowledge? We, unlike Alexandra who had to dress up as a man and go on a dangerous journey to Tibet to get this knowledge, have a wealth of information. The paradox is we have too much access to information and do not seem to know how to use it. Any comments?

FRED: Knowledge of things like TULPA used to be esoteric, dark, secret or occult so in the scientific tradition of the West there has been a tendency to dismis it. Secret knowledge can also cause a lot of trouble. Recently I did a fire walk with a man who really knew what he was doing but some people have got seriously burned! Ayahuasca can kill you or cause serious liver damage if not properly prepared by an experienced shaman. I trust the shaman I work with because he has been making it for forty years. I would not trust an American who says he is a shaman to do it. A real shaman NEVER calls himself a shaman. This work has always been difficult for lay people therefore secret societies were created to keep fakes out. You must participate in shamanism a little at a time and never pay huge amounts of money at the beginning.

Echan: Good advice for Japan right now! Many people are hungry for knowledge yet easily influenced by tricksters. The veil seems to be lifting though between dimensions. We are becoming multidimensional beings. What is the veil? Why is it lifting now?

FRED: Like the communist IRON CURTAIN it never really existed. It is political-politics colour everything so you cannot think freely. The old Anglo Saxons had no concept of a veil between this world and the spirit world until the Romans conquered them. Communication systems are great now and there is intercultural mixing as never before so the world is much smaller. However some cultures like the aboriginee deliberately use the veil to protect their culture.

Echan: Let's say it disappears. How will human culture change? The observer effect in physics says we create our own reality by how we choose to interpret brain data. What of the future?

FRED: We will become more aware of and have more respect for SPIRIT. We will see the SACRED more because we will be more awake. I don't think we will have a bombardment of information from other dimensions. Rather we will see more spiritually in this world. In the Eastern cultures they have always had more reverence for the SPIRIT in each other.The next step seems to be changing the educational process.

Echan: You said real education is about understanding synchronicity and how present education is the INHIBITION OF MAGIC. This is surely very important for Japan to awaken to.

FRED: It is the worst thing you can do! I did not understand Einstein until I saw the MAGIC of the theory of relativity.

Echan: How did you see it?

FRED: By playing with triangles! I leapt into the imaginal realm and suddenly the equations made sense. I imagined waves on the ocean. Electromagnetic waves are just the same.

Echan: But this education is not happening. There seems to be a conspiracy to stop people learning about this magic. The system does not change. What do we need to do?

FRED: I have faith in the human proces. When institutions are new they must do battle with established ones.

Echan: But compared to Newton or even Einstein's era our time seems limited to accomplish change. What do you think of the Mayan idea that 2012 marks the end of our present cycle. We only have 17 years left!

FRED: That is a good point but it depends on us. We need a stable base we need time to produce the people. The universe will not end in 2012 but the Mayan calendar is important. There is no separation of mind and matter and no need to panic. Our spiritual integrity will be maintained. My teacher Carlos Flores is a shaman and he once said to me " Don't worry about finding your soul. It will find you. It is constantly trying to find you. But you want to watch T.V.-you want to be entertained!