Even the symbolic language of the psyche is given "objective" form. For example, one of Whitton's subjects said that when he was introduced to a woman who was going to figure prominently in his next life, instead of appearing as a human she appeared as a shape that was half-rose, half-cobra. After being directed to figure out the meaning of the symbolism, he realized that he and the woman had been in love with one another in two other lifetimes. However, she had also twice been responsible for his death. Thus, instead of manifesting as a human, the loving and sinister elements of her character caused her to appear in a hologramlike form that better symbolized these two dramatically polar qualities.
Whitton's subject is not alone in his experience. Hazrat Inayat Khan said that when he entered a mystical state and traveled to "divine realities," the beings he encountered also occasionally appeared in half-human, half-animal forms. Like Whitton's subject, Khan discerned that these transfigurations were symbolic, and when a being appeared as part animal it was because the animal symbolized some quality the being possessed. For example, a being that had great strength might appear with the head of a lion, or a being that was unusually smart and crafty might have some of the features of a fox. Khan theorized that this is why ancient cultures, such as the Egyptian, pictured the gods that rule the afterlife realm as having animal heads.
One can never be sure whether the spectacular architectural structures NDEers encounter are realities or just allegorical phantasms. For instance, both Moody and Ring have reported cases in which NDEers said that the buildings of higher learning they visited were not just devoted to knowledge, but were literally built out of knowledge. This curious choice of words suggests that perhaps visits to these edifices are actually encounters with something so beyond human conception — perhaps a dynamic living cloud of pure knowledge, or what information becomes, as Pert puts it, after it has been transformed into another realm — that translating it into a hologram of a building or library is the only way the human mind can process it.
The holographic idea also sheds light on the unexplainable linkages that can sometimes occur between the consciousness of two or more individuals. One of the most famous examples of such linkage is embodied in Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious. Early in his career, Jung became convinced that the dreams, artwork, fantasies, and hallucinations of his patients often contained symbols and ideas that could not be explained entirely as products of their personal history. Instead, such symbols closely resembled the images and themes of the world’s greatest mythologies and religions. Jung concluded that myths, dreams, hallucinations and religious visions all spring from the same source, a collective unconscious that is shared by all people.
One experience that led Jung to his conclusion took place in 1906 and involved the hallucination of a young man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. One day while making his rounds Jung found the young man standing at a window and staring up at the sun. The man was also moving his head from side to side in a curious manner. When Jung asked him what he was doing, he explained that he was looking at the sun’s penis, and when he moved his head from side to side, the sun’s penis moved and caused the wind to blow.
At the time, Jung viewed the man’s assertion as the product of a hallucination. But several years later he came across a translation of a two-thousand-year-old Persian religious text that changed his mind. The text consisted of a series of rituals and invocations designed to bring on visions. It described one of the visions and said that if the participant looked at the sun he would see a tube hanging down from it, and when the tube moved from side to side it would cause the wind to blow. Since circumstances made it extremely unlikely that the man had had any contact with the text containing the ritual, Jung concluded that the man’s vision was not simply a product of his unconscious mind, but had bubbled up from a deeper level, from the collective unconscious of the human race itself. Jung called such images archetypes and believed they were so ancient it’s as if each of us has the memory of a two-million-year-old man lurking somewhere in the depths of our unconscious mind.
The level of a society's advancement is reflected, inevitably, in the degree of its duality thinking. Social evolution is demonstrated by movement towards unity, not separatism.
Why? Why is unity such a yardstick?
Because unity is the truth. Separatism is the illusion. As long as society sees itself as separate units, it lives in the illusion.
Why has so much of our society come to believe that there are no hard secrets left? It might start with geography. There are no blank spaces left on the map anymore. If you grew up in the 18th century, there were still new places to go. After hearing tales of foreign adventure, you could become an explorer yourself. This was probably true up through the 19th and early 20th centuries; after that point photography from National Geographic showed every Westerner what even the most exotic, underexplored places on earth look like. Today, explorers are found mostly in history books and children’s tales. Parents don’t expect their kids to become explorers any more than they expect them to become pirates or sultans. Perhaps there are a few dozen uncontacted tribes somewhere deep in the Amazon, and we know there remains one last earthly frontier in the depths of the oceans. But the unknown seems less accessible than ever.
Along with the natural fact that physical frontiers have receded, four social trends have conspired to root out belief in secrets. First is incrementalism. From an early age, we are taught that the right way to do things is to proceed one very small step at a time, day by day, grade by grade. If you overachieve and end up learning something that’s not on the test, you won’t receive credit for it. But in exchange for doing exactly what’s asked of you (and for doing it just a bit better than your peers), you’ll get an A. This process extends all the way up through the tenure track, which is why academics usually chase large numbers of trivial publications instead of new frontiers.
Second is risk aversion. People are scared of secrets because they are scared of being wrong. By definition, a secret hasn’t been vetted by the mainstream. If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right — dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in — is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.
Third is complacency. Social elites have the most freedom and ability to explore new thinking, but they seem to believe in secrets the least. Why search for a new secret if you can comfortably collect rents on everything that has already been done? Every fall, the deans at top law schools and business schools welcome the incoming class with the same implicit message: “You got into this elite institution. Your worries are over. You’re set for life.” But that’s probably the kind of thing that’s true only if you don’t believe it.
Fourth is “flatness.” As globalization advances, people perceive the world as one homogeneous, highly competitive marketplace: the world is “flat.” Given that assumption, anyone who might have had the ambition to look for a secret will first ask himself: if it were possible to discover something new, wouldn’t someone from the faceless global talent pool of smarter and more creative people have found it already? This voice of doubt can dissuade people from even starting to look for secrets in a world that seems too big a place for any individual to contribute something unique.
When I was a kid I read all these stories that I thought were known to be the same story, but different versions of it. And I called it The Portal story, and it was always the same. Somebody is trapped in a humdrum existence, in an ordinary world, until some kind of magical portal either accidentally or on-purpose enters their life. And either they go through a wardrobe, they go through a rabbit hole, a looking glass, platform nine-and-three-quarters.
And I came to believe that this story is actually an unkept promise for most people; that in their adult lives they don’t find these portals. If you look at a wall, how do you know that the wall doesn’t have a door? How do you know there isn’t a panic room behind the bookcase if you just pull out the right book?
We learn to stop looking for The Portal, and I think that what I do differently is that I became obsessed with exits. That there are other worlds, and that they’re real. That this mythology of the looking glass and the rabbit hole and the Matrix is a metaphor for a very real thing.
The exception, as ever, was the children. Freed from the constraints of silence which had been enforced during the bard’s performance, the children dashed into the woods with wild cries, and enthusiastically immersed themselves in a game whose rules were incomprehensible to all those who had bidden farewell to the happy years of childhood.
Idea: an armchair in the shape of an avocado...
Symbols that DALL·E generates: