Sumangali.org: In The Spirit Of Serendipity

“You would know the secret of death. But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life.” - Kahlil Gibran

Following my last post, I have read some research on ‘Near-Death Experiences’ (NDEs), which I thought may be interesting to share.

Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel made headlines with an article in The Lancet. in 2001. In a study of 344 Dutch patients surving cardiac arrest, 62 of them reported NDEs when they were clinically dead. Van Lommel’s writings centre around what he calls “Endless Consciousness” :

According to van Lommel, the leading mainstream materialistic vision held by doctors, philosophers and psychologists on the brain-consciousness relation is insufficient to explain this phenomenon. There are good reasons to assume that our consciousness does not coincide with brain activity; it can be experienced separate from the body. [Source]

Two things I find most interesting in NDE research. The first and most obvious is that NDEs can be considered proof of an afterlife. I am not so surprised or fascinated by that evidence though; I have always believed in reincarnation, and have further studied the teachings of my spiritual Master, Sri Chinmoy, on that subject for the last 12 years. I am most fascinated by the fact that those who have had NDEs are very often permanently changed by their experience, and pretty much always for the better.

This phenomenon is not only reported by van Lommel, but by PMH Atwater who notes the following amazing findings (and more), in her article Another Look at the After-Effects of the Near-Death Experience:

• Unconditional love — Experiencers perceive themselves as equally and fully loving of each and all, openly generous, excited about the potential and wonder of each person they see…
• Lack of boundaries — Familiar codes of conduct can lose relevance or disappear altogether as unlimited avenues of interest and inquiry take priority…
• Timelessness — Most experiencers begin to “flow” with natural shift of time, rejecting locks and schedules as they exhibit a heightened awareness of the present moment and the importance of “now.”
• The psychic — Extrasensory perception and various types of psychic phenomena become normal and ordinary in the lives of experiencers…
• Reality switches — Hard-driving achievers and materialists can transform into easy-going philosophers; but, by the same token, those once more relaxed or uncommitted can become energetic “movers and shakers,” determined to make a difference in the world. Switches seem to depend more on what is “needed” to round out the individual’s growth than on any uniform result.
• The soul as self — Most come to recognize themselves as an immortal soul currently resident within material form so lessons can be learned while sojourning in the earthplane. They know they are not their body; it is a “jacket” they wear…

Atwater reports other remarkable patterns in patients following NDEs: substantially altered energy levels, hypersensitive to light and sound, stress easier to handle, lower blood pressure, increased intelligence, clustered thinking (as opposed to sequential), charismatic, quicker assimilation, reduction in red meat consumption, “merge” easily (absorption), latent talents surface, a hunger for knowledge, synchronicity commonplace, multiple sensing (synesthesia).

She notes that such positive life changes do not only depend on a person returning from clinical death (fortunately!); they can arise from a life-threatening or frightening situation for example. They can also be achieved consciously and gradually through spiritual practice:

I would also include those more tranquil in how they’re experienced: from the slow, steady application of spiritual disciplines, mindfulness techniques, meditation, vision quests, or because, in a prayerful state of mind, an individual simply desires to become a better person.

• Image: Painting by Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921)
• The Near Death Phenomenon: an article by PMH Atwater
• Death and Reincarnation: a free online book by Sri Chinmoy
• Learn to Meditate: a practical site based on the teachiings of Sri Chinmoy

Emily Dickinson referred to herself as a pagan. Some biographers would go so far as to label her a druid for her worship of nature. But was this apparently stubborn heathen life really built on atheism?

On the surface what seems a blatant rebellion against the Christian reforms sweeping New England in the 19th Century could be misinterpreted as a lack of spiritual inclination. If we look beneath even a single veneer we will undoubtedly find true spirituality at the heart of her endeavour; far from snubbing God, but simply insisting on no less than a first-hand experience of Him.

The poet shunned religious doctrine, but did she shun religion? Certainly not as a whole, and even then it may be merely a matter of syntax. The words ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ may at times be used interchangeably, and at others a fine distinction must be made. Charles Anderson chooses to make no distinction, using the word ‘religion’ in its broadest, and perhaps most primal sense:

“The final direction of her poetry, and the pressures that created it, can only be described as religious, using that word in its ‘dimension of depth.’”

Emily inherited the Puritan traits of austerity, simplicity, and practicality, as well as an astute observation of the inner self, but her communication with her higher Self was much more informal than her God-fearing forefathers would have dared. The daughter of the ‘Squire’ of Amherst, she came from a line of gritty, stalwart pioneers, carrying what was almost considered the blue blood of America. Her family was far from poor, but she did not lead a lavish life, for the Puritans abhorred luxury and waste (even a waste of words, which trait the poet did well to inherit).

She accepted the Puritan ideals of being ‘called’ or ‘chosen’ by God, and fully embraced the merits of transcending desire, but not the concept of being inherently sinful:

“While the Clergyman tells Father and Vinnie that ‘this Corruptible shall put on Incorruption’ it has already done so and they go defrauded.”

She had faith in her own divinity, so perhaps she was yet more certain of God than her peers. She did not claim to fully understand Him, or even to have perennial faith in all His Ways—her poetry bears a continuing strain of doubt—but she certainly did not fear Him. The inner freedom this afforded her—rare for a woman of her time—brought her to the point of being almost cheeky in her familiarity and certainty. This confidence fed her poetry sumptuously, and gave it the well-known child-like quality. To her, truth was in nature. In that beauty she could see and feel God directly:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church —
I keep it, staying at Home —
With a Bobolink for a Chorister —
And an Orchard, for a Dome —

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice —
I just wear my Wings —
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton — sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman —
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last —
I’m going, all along.

Emily did actually attend church regularly, sometimes traveling to hear some of the rousing and charismatic preachers who stamped their mark on that era. She was often moved by these sermons, perhaps as compelled by the speaker’s delivery and the construction of words as the message within them. But this was not enough to entice her to succumb to the fierce religious revival. One by one her friends received an inner calling and were ‘saved,’ officially accepting Christianity. Members of her close-knit family eventually followed suit, including her strong-willed father, and finally her brother, Austin, perhaps her closest ally. Emily would not commit to something she could not sincerely feel, even under the unthinkable social pressure that surrounded her.

Until the age of 30 she continued going to church, although she was excluded from certain meetings and services open only to those who had been ’saved’. She became increasingly reclusive throughout her 30s. It is tempting to see her seclusion as further evidence of spiritual asceticism. Her spiritual path was certainly intensely lonely in such a social climate, but she craved aloneness more and more, and seclusion somehow formed a symbiotic relationship with her art. Increasingly her art became an expression of her spirituality.

Immortality (“the Flood Subject” as she called it) consumed Emily’s consciousness. Dwelling on death was natural in those times as illness and general hardship frequently took lives around her, her awareness heightened further by the many years spent in a house adjoining a cemetery. But dwelling on death was also almost a spiritual practice, a ‘graveyard meditation,’ a means of focus, breathing life into the concepts of Eternity, Infinity and Immortality.

Poet and philosopher Sri Chinmoy said of the poet:

“Emily Dickinson wrote thousands of psychic poems. One short poem of hers is enough to give sweet feelings and bring to the fore divine qualities of the soul.”

“With a deep sense of gratitude, let me call upon the immortal soul of Emily Dickinson, whose spiritual inspiration impels a seeker to know what God the Infinite precisely is. She says:
‘The infinite a sudden guest
Has been assumed to be,
But how can that stupendous come
Which never went away?’”

From Patriots of America by Sri Chinmoy

What drove her consistently was that she needed truth, and at any cost. She needed to see it with her own eyes and feel it with her own heart, not grasp at it in the words of a clergyman but explain it to herself through her own words. It seems she was even ready to die for her cause:

I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
“For beauty,” I replied.
“And I for truth, —the two are one;
We brethren are,” he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

Emily’s truth-seeking was a spiritual quest that governed her inner life, and naturally blossomed through her poetic works. Her own words, in a letter to a friend, succinctly claim Eternity and Immortality as her own. Perhaps they also presage the enduring spiritual appeal of her writing, far beyond the short span of her life:

“So I conclude that space & time are things of the body & have little or nothing to do with our selves. My Country is Truth.”

I was in the sea, snorkeling I think, or maybe diving. It was a long time ago. The sun heaved magnificent light into an already magnificent ocean, and all was bathed in lucid unearthly beauty below.

I was very fond of cowfish. They were like cartoons, little horns like raised eyebrows, boxy bodies puffing happily in and out as in a fit of laughter, big dark eyes, two arms fluttering—seemingly too small to do for anything but decoration. They always looked young, with childlike curiosity, as if so sure their own cuteness would keep them out of danger.

Their colours varied like all things in the sea, wearing different shades even when a cloud passed overhead. They were always brilliant, as if generating their own light, and always in such complex detail as if embroidered with a very fine needle and silk.

Someone caught one in one hand. The hand broke the surface and there she lay on the broad of the palm, in the raw blades of the sun, with no significant fins or tail to flip her back to safety. Her body looked instantly starved, the skin now dry in mottled greys stretched over a tiny twitching skeleton, eyes like dull flakes of flint, mouth and gills straining and sucking for a life she might never feel again.

I, like the cowfish, did not know the intentions of the human hand. For all we knew she’d breathed her last of the ocean, in the homely gardens of a coral maze. I held my breath with her, unable to speak or act in a daze of horror. The hand closed around her again

and let her go.

She puffed downwards as if squirted from the bulb of a pipette, her colours instantly proud and resplendent in the sun, now through its proper lens of sea. And she was gone.

I was told that it was all for me—so I may have a closer look at her when she was still. Still, I thought. But it was not her at all. Fish are colour and movement. I saw only the shrouds of death closing around her. Ridiculous. How can she be herself when she is in the air. I remained silent for a long time.

If it is true that fish have short memories then she would have been unchanged by the trauma, but I carry it with me everywhere. I glimpse her when I feel coerced by others—even when their intentions are innocent—to be something other than myself. True, I am in no mortal danger, but I am reminded that what is comfortable for others may be harmful for me. She reminds me to allow others their freedom too; to let them be as God made them, in their own proper environment. Only then may we each laugh and let our colours shine as He intended. I still have a way to go, but the shock of the cowfish makes me try.

“Accept God’s Will
Happily,
Rejoice in God’s Will
Proudly,
And move on with God’s Will
Speedily.”
—Sri Chinmoy
Twenty-Seven Thousand Aspiration-Plants, 25101

While I’m on the subject of life-saving miracles, the BBC reported this week that it’s not just humans who take an interest in whale conservation. A bottlenose dolphin, known in her local neighbourhood as Moko, is taking it as seriously as any dolphin can.

Mr Smith and his team of humans were getting nowhere fast in their attempt to save a pair of beached whales from the north east coast of New Zealand. Moko sped to the rescue just in time (maybe in a waterproof cape), uttered a few carefully chosen instructions to the whales (maybe in a Whalish accent), and they made it safely home in time for tea (or maybe a krill tisane).

“I don’t speak whale and I don’t speak dolphin,” Mr Smith told the BBC, “but there was obviously something that went on because the two whales changed their attitude from being quite distressed to following the dolphin quite willingly and directly along the beach and straight out to sea.”

He added: “The dolphin did what we had failed to do. It was all over in a matter of minutes.” [original article]

Tales of dolphins saving humans go back to ancient Greece. It was Plutarch, the Greek moralist and biographer, who said, “To the dolphin alone, beyond all other, nature has granted what the best philosophers seek: friendship for no advantage.” [source]

The best-known dolphin legends feature them forming a ring to protect surfers from sharks, or guiding stray swimmers back to shore. Incredibly dolphins extend their instinct for self-preservation to just about any species (except sharks), and seem to employ it with effortless brilliance.

Is it intelligence or just a natural benevolence? According to Douglas Adams in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, they are much wiser than we are… but then he also insisted mice are secretly ruling the world. Even when I was hooked on the series at age 10, I wasn’t entirely convinced by that. Let’s see what the Ultimate Guide to Dolphins has to say instead:

Dolphins have large brains for their bodies — in fact, a bottlenose dolphin is second only to humans in the ratio of brain size to body size. Researchers have also pointed to the parallels in the organization of dolphin and primate brains as more evidence of high intelligence in dolphins. Some have gone so far as to suggest that dolphins actually have a language that humans simply cannot comprehend.

But others say that in our enthusiasm to anthropomorphize dolphins, we give them powers they just don’t possess. A closer look suggests that much of the dolphin’s large brain is taken up with echolocation and handling acoustical information — processes at which they excel. But dolphins tend to rank at about the level of elephants in “intelligence” tests and haven’t shown any unusual talent at problem solving.

So what is that unique quality that fascinates and charms us, if we cannot truly call it intelligence? In his book The Animal Kingdom, Sri Chinmoy calls it sagacity.

Dolphin : Sagacity
Dolphin, my dolphin,
Your advanced sagacity
Denies your inferiority
To forest animals.
You make man feel that your consciousness
Borders upon the extremity of human life
With ceaseless strife.

—Sri Chinmoy
From The Animal Kingdom

sagacity (su’gasitee)
1. [n] the trait of forming opinions by distinguishing and evaluating
2. [n] the ability to make good judgments

The names of the two saved whales are not known, and Moko’s instructions have not been translated, but whatever she said, it seemed to the whales a very good judgment indeed.

Do you ever wonder why we have to sleep? I’ve always thought that spending a third of my life unconscious is a spectacular waste of time. But of course I must be mistaken, otherwise God wouldn’t have made us like this.

Not only does sleep give the body a break and a chance to recover, sleep gives us a chance to dream.

But…

Why Do We Dream?

The Dream World, is it really so Heavenly, or just an escape from reality like watching too much TV? Were my own dreams to come true, at least the few I remember, my waking life would probably be less interesting than usual, and maybe a bit more stressful.

So what’s the big deal about dreams? Apparently, even if they’re ordinary, they prevent psychosis. So sleep is obviously a wise investment rather than an indulgent squandering of time.

“In a recent sleep study, students who were awakened at the beginning of each dream, but still allowed their 8 hours of sleep, all experienced difficulty in concentration, irritability, hallucinations, and signs of psychosis after only 3 days.”

So says Listverse.com (a very cool and very interesting site) in Top 10 Amazing Facts About Dreams. Among those amazing facts are the revelations that:

• Everybody has dreams but that we forget 90% of them. “Within 5 minutes of waking, half of your dream is forgotten. Within 10, 90% is gone.” Those who claim not to have dreams are probably just better at sleeping: “If you are awakened out of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, you are more likely to remember your dream.”
• Blind people dream “People who become blind after birth can see images in their dreams. People who are born blind do not see any images, but have dreams equally vivid involving their other senses of sound, smell, touch and emotion.”
• Not everyone dreams in colour
• If you’re snoring you’re not dreaming. [Neither are you reading.]

ZZZzzzzzzzz

The average person spends a total of 6 years dreaming, according to Discover Magazine in 20 Things You Didn’t Know About Sleep. It’s obviously time well spent, even if they’re not very interesting dreams, and these facts are much more interesting than most of my dreams:

• The surgical procedure to cure chronic snoring is called uvulopalatopharyngoplasty.
• Counting sheep doesn’t work: According to research at Oxford University “The mental activity is so boring that other problems and concerns inevitably surface.”
• Oversleeping (like undersleeping) could permanently damage your health: ”A six-year study of a million adults showed that people who get only six to seven hours of sleep a night have a lower death rate than those who get eight hours.” [Unfortunately it doesn't say why, and this was probably the most interesting fact of all.]
• Fear of sleep is called somniphobia [maybe a more rational fear than you'd think, given the research above.]

Do Animals Dream?

Well I know the answer to this where dogs are concerned. One dog in my family has very active dreams that (like my own) seem quite similar to waking life. Going by the paw twitches and muffled yelps they apparently involve chasing, digging and asking (not very politely) for food etc.

According to Islandnet:

“Yes, animals dream. Researchers Dr. Matthew Wilson and Kenway Louie at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology selected four lucky rats. They implanted micro-electrodes into the hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with memory. Then they monitored the firing patterns of the neurons hooked up to micro-electrodes.

The patterns were the same whether the rat was dreaming about running around on a track or actually running around on a track. In fact, by just looking at the patterns, the scientists could tell whether the creature was dreaming about running or just sitting around. So why do animals dream? Probably to re-live and learn from experience.”

Which Plane Did You Catch?

As for humans, everyone I know likes to talk about their dreams, whether they’re funny, strange, scary, uplifting or full of symbols. Are they really symbolic? Can they instruct or inspire us, or are they just nonsense?

Sri Chinmoy gives a spiritual viewpoint in his book The Journey of Silver Dreams

”There are seven higher worlds and seven lower worlds. When we have dreams coming from the lower worlds, the subconscious worlds—or you can say, inconscient worlds—we have to feel that these dreams have no value. They cannot change our nature. They cannot inspire us. They cannot give us any hope for our future fulfilment. When we get a dream from the vital plane, we will see that the dream will be constant movement. It will be like a battlefield where everything is breaking and smashing and people are being killed. These dreams cannot help us at all in our spiritual life. The best thing we can do is forget them. If the dream comes from the mental plane, there will be some poise—not full poise, but a little poise, a little calm and quiet there. If it comes from the psychic plane, we will feel affection, sweetness, compassion and concern for the things or persons we are seeing. And if it comes from the soul’s plane, it will be all Light, Delight and Peace.”
—Sri Chinmoy

CREDITS

• Image 1: Flaming June by JWW Waterhouse: absolutely the finest fine artist, ever (polite disagreements welcome in the comments section below).
• Image 2: I don’t much care for cats, but I’m incurably addicted to Cute Overload (sorry, I know, I know) where I found this seemingly harmless variety.
• Title: Inspired by a spate of Shakespearean titles over at Thousandeye, a healthy habit always to be encouraged. This one is perhaps not as inspiring as it sounds, spoken by Hamlet in his most famous soliquoy. He contemplates the sleep of death as a solution to his problems, but then dreads the dreams that might come with it. Indeed, anyone would dread the dreams of such a troubled man. Not much of a bedtime story, but a cracking good plot nonetheless.
• You: Credit is amply due to anyone who got this far in the post.