Thinkers, listen, tell me what you know of that is not inside the soul?
Take a pitcher full of water and set it down on the water -
now it has water inside and water outside.
We musn't give it name,
lest silly people start talking again about the body and the soul.
Kabir1

In talking about the presence of other worlds, I want to argue this morning for a multi-dimensional view of reality, that is the presence of many worlds, higher and lower which interact with the inter-penetrate this one. And in doing so, I want to bring start out by arguing against a one-dimensional materialist view of mind that tends to be the scientific view. A materialistic view of mind that tends to see mind as an energy phenomenon only and deriving solely from physical reality, the brain or otherwise. So in the spirit of the conference, I wish to go beyond the brain and materialism. I continue to argue that all such scientific, energetic, materialistic views of mind are, to my point of view, reductionistic, and are caught in the literalism of their own metaphors.

I want to suggest instead, that if as healers, we can let go of the rational, or left brain, definitions of mind, and embrace the visionary side of the brain (the right brain), we will find, what I call subtle awareness, the sacred, or spiritual imagination. We will find we are able to journey between realities, between worlds, beyond the body and to have access to the universal source of healing which is spirit.

Now much of what I have to say, concurs with what other speakers have already said. There will be certain overlays and repetitions here. I agree, for example, with Barbara Brennan that the human energy phenomena are prior to all physical and emotional illness. That the imprinting of pathology at all levels comes from a higher vibration. This has been my finding from many years of regression work and healing work. Particularly the residues of past lives, which can not be accounted for simply by physiological or genetic inheritance. In other words, there is physic and spiritual inheritance from a higher level.

I also want to show from certain esoteric sources that there are higher or subtle senses that can be awakened accidentally through near death experiences, through our remembering what it is like to die from previous lifetimes and passing into higher realms. We have memories of these events: near death experience is not the only way to access the death experience. The other sources come through ecstatic or mystical experiences where our consciousness is vastly expanded and some go beyond the body (out of body in certain ways).

This is an area of experience called altered states of consciousness today. So I would agree with Ken Ring when he said (in discussing one of his cases) that there seems to be a kind of transcendental seeing. In fact, the idea of transcendental seeing is central to much esoteric thinking. That there are subtle senses beyond the physical senses. I also want to give a parallel reading of what Ann Baring calls "the cosmic soul", this time from Sufi and Tibetan sources. I also want to share some of my own cases that have entailed quasi-shamanic journeys into the subtle or visionary world for healing.

We are going to begin with, what I might call, a stab at metaphysics. It's been a long time since I read much, professional, classical philosophy and I was looking around for reference to the German philosopher, Heidegger, in my limited library. I came across, in a book called "What is Phenomenology" the following short quotation.

Under it's first impetus philosophical thought is simply metaphysics because it is going beyond. It has been said that this begins in wonder. In fact, reflection arises when the world of completely natural evidence is found to be contestable. When it explodes, so to speak. When what has been taken from reality is itself transformed into appearance in the name of a reality of another order that one feels required to study or expose. Philosophical thought is never simply explication, simple analysis, pure observation of constitution. An initial amazement marks the opening of a new dimension of a transcendence. By a movement of defocusing the world becomes disarticulated and is shown in relief. Because within a reality that was seen up to that time as flat, there appear dimly seen shapes which shift the center of perspective of reality away from the original perspective towards a point which for the moment is anticipated rather than grasped. The world is reorganized from another point of view whose discovery and formulation is precisely the job of philosophy.
Pierre Thevenaz, What is Phenomenology?2

I am going to try to give a few crude attempts to put together a view, a construction, of the experiences I've been having in therapy for the last 20 years working with clients. In the last four or five years, I've come to realize where I have been going with my clients in following and sharing their experiences in the imagination, in memory--what seem to be past lives, what seem to be transcendent experiences--has in fact been a kind of shamanic journeying. I had, as it were, entered into their subtle worlds and traveled with them. I didn't realize at first that this is exactly what shamans do and I was practicing a form of shamanism.

This realization, from many years of doing this, has forced me to question the basic presumptions, some of the presumptions of my training as a Jungian analyst, to look more deeply, actually. Most of it Jung said, but many of us misunderstand it and we read him rather superficially. I have been forced to reevaluate my view of imagination, my view of spirit, my view of transcendence. This is what I am going to share with you. The first part is a little stab at metaphysics in which I want to give you some simple metaphors that I have found helpful in dealing with higher realities.

For me, the heart of the healing problem and the heart of the problem of the challenge of this conference is how we think of the body and physical space and how we think of the spirit and on-physical space. My basic thesis about confusions here is that we are mostly stuck when we try to think from the left brain about these phenomena. We mostly get stuck in the metaphors of mind and spirit that are spacial, concrete and literalistic. Metaphors that prevent us from fully encountering spirit in it's pure form and from fully moving into the spiritual realm.

I found that as a psychotherapist when I worked to interpret my client's experiences by putting them back into a rational or even symbolic frame my interpretations were actually blocking the experience. I found I had to let go of my interpretive side. Interpretation, which is essentially a reductive activity, prevents us from fully entering into spiritual dimensions or allowing spiritual dimensions to fully enter into our material or physical reality. It prevents us experiencing that sense of wonder which is, according to our philosopher, the true "going beyond" that is the essence of genuine metaphysics.

(And let us note: here again, whenever we talk about realms or dimensions of the spirit we are always speaking metaphorically)

You could say crudely, that we stay too easily in the scientific viewpoint and often in the therapeutic viewpoint in theoretical models and rational views of what we think we are doing - which belongs solely to the left brain. What I am doing is making a plea--and this is why I am reading poetry--to let go of the left brain view of things and to invite the right brain, the visionary, imaginative, intuitive side to take over far more in our work as healers.

If matter has come into being or if flesh has come into
being because of the spirit, it is a wonder. But if
spirit has come into being because of matter or flesh it
is a wonder of wonders.
The Gospel of Thomas3

A major question that always troubled me about the traditional view of mind that I was taught as a philosophy student at Oxford many years ago is: how can spirit or mind be in matter. How can it be inside matter if it's not a material thing? It's a bit like asking, how can music be in a CD (compact disc) or how can electromagnetism be inside a magnet when we know it is not just inside the magnet. At the same time, clearly there is no music if I smash my CD and it's player. There is no magnetism without a magnet and there is no thinking if I am run over by a bus. Physical entities of one form or another are clearly necessary for thought, for vibrations, for magnetism, for energy fields and so on to occur. But they are clearly not the whole picture.

One solution to the problem of where mind, where spirit exists and what it's relationship is to matter was proposed earlier this century by the Indian mystic and philosopher Sri Aurobindo. He was actually drawing upon theosophical ideas of a very similar nature in the works of Madame Blavatsky. Aurobindo said (paraphrasing Blavatsky),

If you are embarrassed by the word "spirit" think of spirit as the
subtlest form of matter. But, if you are not embarrassed by the
word spirit, you can think of matter as the densest form of spirit.4

We could symbolize what the quotation says in this way:

From the Aurobindo and Blavatsky viewpoint if we are starting from matter and moving upwards, spirit is the finest or subtlest emanation or manifestation of matter. If we dare to take the spiritual viewpoint, then matter is the lowest or the densest form of spirit. Rather as physicist David Bohm has put it: "matter is frozen light."5

If we contrast the two viewpoints we could say that the materialist takes matter as that which is ultimately real and has to derive spirit from matter as some higher vibrational form or resonance. Whereas from the spiritual viewpoint matter is a lower manifestation of spirit, or let's say (metaphorically of course) a condensation of spirit into physical form.

Many materialist theories that see spirit as a subtler or higher vibration of matter, because of the unexamined language they use, tend to get caught in the web of their own metaphors.
Take the word "subtle" for example. When we talk about "subtle bodies" we commonly think of them as still subtly material. Even the word "subtle" translates in German as feinstofflisches, which means literally fine stuff or fine matter. We also tend to locate these energy bodies in the space around the physical body; Barbara Brennan's pictures of auras do this; dowsers will teach you how to locate the various subtle bodies at different distances from the physical body.

And more than this, most materialist theories of the energy body or energy field theories tend to locate energy and spirit not just around the body but also at various places in the body: in the brain, in the meridians, in the cells--thus we have cellular consciousness. And even in esoteric doctrines spirit is still located somehow in the etheric field.

And yet, despite all our lip service to holism, I can't help thinking that all this betrays an unconscious desire to keep spirit firmly within the material dimension, where the left brain or rational consciousness can feel secure in understanding and controlling it. This, regretfully, is the impetus behind much otherwise highly original "scientific" research into consciousness and energy going on today. It is all a defense against "wonder", against crossing over into higher dimensions, "going beyond" in the true spirit of metaphysics.

To my mind the culprit behind our bondage to materialism is the tiny little word "in". This innocent little word deceptively conceals a spacial metaphor that betrays its true allegiance to the materialist dogma, however holistic or spiritual we think we are. I believe that unconscious use of the word "in" sadly dominates and constricts much serious scientific thinking about energy and spirit.

Heidegger has said that science is based on an explanatory scheme designed to convert whatever is studied into something in space, located over there and subsisting separately from the over against us. It makes no difference whether the thing in question is a chair, a man, an atom, a sense datum, or a body. It is still in some sense there. And when it is out there it has things in it and it is "in" space. This is how we imagine objects.6

When we are talking about spirit as energy, even though we may be fully aware that spirit belongs to the subtle realm, I believe we need to exercise great care when we use the word "in" because most of the time we will be using it metaphorically. This is obvious when we say something like "I know it in my heart" - "I feel it in my gut". Even though our energy fields seem to have reactions that correspond to those parts of the body we nevertheless seem to realize that the emotions are not literally stored "in" these places like glucose or protoplasm. But when we start to talk of "in the brain" our metaphorical consciousness suddenly disappears.

There is a wonderful saying that plays with the metaphor of inner space very aptly: "You will never find your heart in a temple unless you find the temple in your heat." It would be hard to mistake this for anything other than a metaphor; clearly if we don't go to the cardiologist or the archaeologist to find the temple in our heart.

This confusion we have of mixing our spiritual psychic metaphors with physical space is a very difficult one. I haven't seen too many philosophical or other studies that critique writing about energy from this standpoint. In the Sufi poet Kabir, however we find an ironic commentary on our dilemma:

Student, do the simple purification
You know that the seed is inside the horse-chestnut tree
and inside the seed are the blossoms of the tree, and the chestnuts
and the shade
So inside the human body there is the seed and inside
the seed there is the human body again [....]

Thinkers, listen, tell me what you know of that is not inside
the soul?
Take a pitcher of water and set it down in the water--
now it has water inside and water outside.
We mustn't give it a name,
lest silly people start talking again about the body and the soul...7

A further remark by Sri Aurobindo puts it similarly to Kabir. He says "all of the body is in the mind, but not all the mind is in the body.8

Nevertheless, I'm not entirely happy with this view of things because even Aurobindo and Kabir come close to substituting another spacial metaphor for the presence of spirit, soul or energy. Instead of being in the body, mind or spirit are now seen to be "outside" or "around" the body. This kind of picture used to be called, in philosophy, the epiphenomenal view of mind. It is the idea that mind is some kind of fuzz around the body, usually just "around" the brain. This is not very different from the view of spirit as the aura or the energy field that surrounds the body.

Now before I describe the more radical opposite viewpoint of spirit I must say that I have enormous respect for the extremely productive and enlightening work that the epiphenomenal or energy field model of mind or spirit has produced in recent years.

I want to mention in passing Elmer Green's extraordinary work of nearly 30 years at the Menninger Foundation in Kansas where he records vibrational changes in what he calls the biofield. He has successfully measured the fields of several practicing yogis, healers and shamans.9 In the traditional Hindu teachings these fields are called the sthula or energy sheaths and there are hierarchies of them. Barbara Brennan's book Hands of Light give us excellent clairvoyant images of these sheaths or fields as they relate to western concepts or energy blocks in the body discovered by Wilhelm Reich.10 Another western version of the yogic doctrine is David Tansley's theory and practice of what he called Radionics.11 In Tansley as in Brennan you will find descriptions of a hierarchy of subtle energy sheaths or bodies called the etheric, emotional, mental and higher bodies that surround the physical body. (Interestingly Tansley's picture was derived from Alice Bailey's esoteric works which include a theosophical commentary on The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the locus classicus of Hindu teaching.)12

Then there is the well known Russian work on the Kirlian Aura popularized in English by the excellent anthologies of Stanley Krippner and John White.13 Recently in the Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network there has been reference to Professor Sarkar's concept of the microvita, minuscule elements of energy which he describes as the ultimate source of life.14

In the world of hypnotherapy and birth regression David Cheek has independently introduced using the notion of cellular consciousness, the idea that memory is stored "in" the cells--a metaphor once again, but one that is becoming more and more popular.15 In like vein, for many years psychotherapists who work with regression, psychodrama, rebirthing and other deep experiential therapies have been talking loosely of body consciousness--though in my own practice I have found myself more and more using the term "etheric memory or consciousness" in deference to the subtle body theory.

I should also mention the contribution to energy thinking made by Viktor Inyushin in Russia. This is a later derivative of the Kirlian work on the auric field which talks of bioplasm as the fifth state of matter--the others being solids, liquids, gases and plasma. Inyushin defined bioplasm as follows:

A living organism can be described as a "biological field" or a "biofield," a "field" being a region consisting of lines of force whichaffect each other. The biofield has a clear spacial formation and is separated and shaped by several physical fields, electrostatic,electromagnet, acoustic, hydrodynamic and quite possibly others inadequately explored.16

Clearly for Inyushin the biofield or the subtle energy field which is made up of bioplasm is a product of existing physical energy fields in the body. What we have here, we could say philosophically, is a kind of energy monism, where everything can be reduced to energy and derived from greater or larger energetic fields that exist here in the level of the physical world.

Of course, with our knowledge of radio waves, vibrational frequencies, microbiology and Kirlian phenomena it's not difficult to appreciate the appeal of such a model. It is always easier to explain what we don't understand in terms of what we do. Yet the biological metaphor of "bioplasm" is so patently reductive to a materialist paradigm that I'm afraid such thinking remains ultimately limited by its choice of language and metaphor. This is how science gets caught in a conceptual prison of its own making.

The spirit cannot be reduced to biological components, be they bioplasm, microvita or even etheric energy--which is not to say that spirit cannot manifest in forms perceived in this way. With most biological and materialist metaphors we end up mistaking the container--remember Kabir's pitcher in the water--for what it contains.

The spiritual dimension is other than and of a higher order than the energy fields that manifest in physical world. There is an intermediary crossover place where spirit manifests through the material world and a place moving in the other direction where conversely we can move through the material into the spiritual. In this intermediary world, this halfway place, is what we often experience as fields, a forces, as psychic phenomena, clairvoyant and subtle perceptions. I suggest that they come from a higher, not a lower source.

My solutions, my ways of getting out of the materialist position are twofold. They both entail a kind of going beyond, to use the phenomenologist Thevenaz's words, our presuppositions and "opening to a sense of wonder, opening to that which is bigger, greater and beyond us." Both these solutions entail metaphors and images but they are metaphors and images which I hope we can use consciously and not unconsciously. We can have metaphors and not allow the metaphors to have us.

We can move through higher realities, and higher realities can move through lower realities without being understood - because the laws and the dimensional forces that they operate with are quite different. You just need to push the reality up one dimension and you will see what I am talking about spirit.

The other way that I want to suggest that we can move out of our one-dimensional thinking is to switch away from left brain - purely rational thinking, into right brain thinking. Here are a few suggested dichotomies though they are not at all original.

Left Brain Right Brain

rational intuitive
logic/concepts images
linear mosaic
boxes circles
profane sacred
one dimensional multi-dimensional
imaginary imaginal
metaphor spiritual imagination

The left brain favors the rational, logical concepts, linear thinking puts things in boxes, flow charts, computers, contained closed systems, favors more the profane - that which can be fully understood, materially. The left brain tends to dismiss right brain phenomena as imaginary-fantasy and reduce them all to metaphors.

When we move to the right brain, however, our thinking is not going to be linear, like two-dimensional flatlanders moving in a straight line - we will have freedom to jump about. Here is a simplified image derived from the famous parable called "Flatland" by Edwin A Abbott:17

We will make connections wildly from all over the place. We will tend to work with the sacred form of the circle, much more than the square or the box. We will enter sacred space much more easily. Reality will be multi-dimensional and infinite, and we will encounter experiences which look as though they come from the imagination, but are real in and of themselves ontologically. They are products of the spiritual imagination and they are real in themsleves, and they are imaginal as opposed to imaginary, and are not to be reduced to mere metaphors.
Just to give you a feel as to what it is to move in imaginal space I want to suggest that briefly you close your eyes and listen to a short poem called "Warning to Children" by Robert Graves.

Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness,
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and pare the rind off:
In the kernel you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel--
Children, leave the string alone!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
and White acres of dominoes,
With the same brown paper parcel
Still untied upon his knee.
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
He lives--he then unties the string.18

What Graves is describing is what I call the entry into the visionary world, the world known, of course, to children. Jesus said "you can not enter the kingdom of heaven unless you come like a child." And "the kingdom of heaven is within." So we are back to the metaphor, of "inside" within but this time it is clearly a metaphor. Because it is not anywhere in physical space, but is within, it is "inside" in psychic or spiritual space.

Once we enter the visionary world as we did in Graves poem, images move extremely fast. We can go in and out of other realities and dimensions instantly. We are not restricted by material time and space in any way.
To do this in a creative, constructive way it is best to practice some form of concentration, some form of meditation. For when we move through multiple realities-we are entering into the essence of prayer and the essence of what shamans do when they journey to higher and lower worlds. Rumi, the great Sufi mystic, says:

Journeys bring power and love back into you.
If you can't go somewhere,
move in the passageways of the self.
They are like shafts of light always changing
and you change when you explore them.19

Working with the image or the practice of following and holding images is the secret gateway from the three dimensional world of material reality to the multi-dimensional world of spirit and pure being. This practice is also the key to healing.

The multi-dimensional world or visionary world of spiritual forms was known to the Arab Sufis and in this case the Persian Sufis as the alam al-mithal. This is translated in Latin as the mundus archetypus or imaginalis long before Jung was using the word archetype.

Archetype, in the Sufi sense, means spiritual form. The late, great scholar, Henry Corbin called the faculty with which we are able to journey between these worlds creative imagination.20 Corbin's studies of Ibn Arabi and Avicenna are some of the most important works about the existence of this dimension and the recovery of spiritual reality to be found anywhere.21

The world that Corbin is talking about, the visionary world, has been known by many names in esoteric and spiritual traditions. It is called in Plato, the Intermediary World, the metaxy.22 In Tibetan Buddhism, these worlds or some of these worlds are known as the Bardos, the in-betweens. They are in between physical reality and pure spirit. In the Western world, this world is sometimes referred to as the invisible world, the unseen world, the spirit world.

Corbin has very seriously thought through the difficult conundrum of inner/outer, within/without, beyond the difficult spacial metaphors that we tend to take so literally. He calls this faculty to move in the mundus archetypus the creative imagination or spiritual imagination to emphasize its higher provenance.

Corbin also makes a very important distinction between the imaginary - what we make up what we fabricate with our rational waking minds and the imaginal which is a way of describing the forms that we encounter when we enter the higher reality of spirit.23

Corbin says in one of his works,

We are not dealing with unreality when we talk about the imaginal. The mundus imaginalis, is a world of autonomous forms and images. It is a perfectly real world preserving all the riches and diversity of the sensible world but in a spiritual state.24

How we encounter this world is by entering on visionary journeys or mystical pathways. For example Dante's via the lower world of hell to the upper world of paradise. Mohammed made his Night Journey in a comparable visionary state. Higher worlds are often encountered by those people who go through a near death experience.25 In ecstatic out of body experiences other people are taken up into the "seventh heaven" or other places. St. Paul obviously went through an ecstatic out of body experience when he fell from his horse and was blinded.

In a commentary on one of the great Sufi narratives, by the mystic Sohrawardi entitled, The Crimson Angel.26 Corbin shows how it is possible to move into this world where time and space are purely relative states. In this work a captive has just escaped the watchful eyes of his jailers. In other words, he has escaped out of the physical world in much the same way described in the famous poem of St. John of the Cross, "I went abroad when all the house was still."27 (Often these experiences happen to people at night when they wake up and suddenly they are not in their bodies.)

This captive is the stranger, the outsider in us all, who longs to return home. In the Crimson Angel the captive has escaped and finds himself in the desert in the presence of a being who has all the graces of adolescence. This being calls himself the eldest child of the creator, and he says, "I come from beyond Mount Qaf. This is where you were at the beginning and this is where you will return once you are free of your shackles."28

Sohrawardi says that Mount Qaf, the cosmic mountain, is "summit after summit and valley after valley" built up of celestial spheres each enveloping one another. "Where then is the road that leads out of it, what is the distance?" And the young man says, "However far you may journey, you will always come back to the point of departure. Just as the needle of the compass swings back to the magnetic point." Does this simply mean that you must leave yourself to come back to yourself. Not quite says Corbin. Because in the meantime, a very important event will have changed everything. "The self that one finds younger beyond is a higher self. The self experienced as a 'Thou.'"29 Like El Khadir mysterious prophet or messenger of Islam. The eternal wanderer, the traveler, has ultimately to bathe in the Spring of Life.

The text goes on to say, "He who has discovered the meaning of true reality has arrived at the spring. When he emerges from the spring he is endowed with a gift that likens him to the balsam, of which a drop distilled in the hollow of ones hand, held up against the Sun, trans-passes to the back of the hand. If you are too Khadir, you to can pass beyond without difficulty."30

Corbin goes on to say beyond Mount Qaf is where are situated all the mystical cities, and he lists them topographically, and this is interesting. The region beyond Mount Qaf starts at the convex center of the ninth sphere of spheres which is the edge of known reality in Islamic cosmology. This is the sphere that envelopes the cosmos as a whole. This means that to enter spiritual reality, to go beyond Mount Qaf is to leave the supreme sphere which defines all types of orientation possible in our world. Once this border has been crossed, says Corbin, the question of "where", our location in space becomes meaningless. At least in terms of the meaning it has when we talk about leaving the "where." As Corbin puts it:

As suggested at the end of Sohrawardi's tale, by the symbol of the drop of balsam in the hollow of the hand held up to the Sun, it is essential to go inward, to penetrate to the interior, yet having reached the interior, one finds oneself, paradoxically on the outside. Or in the language of the Sufi's on the convex surface of the sphere. In other words, beyond Mount Qaf. Essentially, the relationship involved is that of the outer, the visible, the exoteric (exo means outside in Latin and in Greek) and the inner, the invisible, the esoteric (eso meaning inside). This is the relationship of the natural to the spiritual world. Leaving the "where" is equivalent to leaving the outer or natural appearances that cloak the hidden inner realities, just as the almond is concealed in it's shell. For the stranger, the Gnostic, this step represents a return home or at least striving in this direction.31

Once the journey is completed the reality which is hither to have been an inner and hidden one, turns out to envelope, surround or contain that which was, at first outer and invisible. As a result of internationalization one has moved out of external reality. Henceforth spiritual reality envelopes, surrounds, contains so called material reality.

There is a mystic in the Sufi tradition called Yunnus Emre, who has written about this encounter with the many worlds that are inside us.

We entered the house of realization,
we witnessed the body.

The whirling skies, the many-layered earth,
the seventy-thousand veils,
we found in the body.

The night and the day, the planets,
the words inscribed on the Holy Tablets,
the hill that Moses climbed, the Temple,
and Israfil's trumpet, we observed in the body.

Torah, Psalms, Gospel, Quran -
what these books have to say,
we found in the body.

Everybody says these words of Yunus
are true. Truth is wherever you want it.
We found it all within the body.32

Yunnus has crossed that border, that threshold between the physical and spiritual and gone inside so that the inner body has become the total universe.

Corbin eventually sums up these worlds as three and in doing so, he recapitulates the classic three worlds of Tibetan and Mahayana Buddhism.33

First there is a physical sensible world, then there is an intermediary world, interfacing with that, and then there is the highest of worlds, the world of pure spirit or higher angelic intelligence. We can symbolize this with three circles. There are three names for the different worlds in the Tibetan tradition. The Dharmakaya, is what in the old Tibetan Book of the Dead translation is called the pure light of the void, the sunyata, where in Sufi thinking, the angelic intelligence reside. This is the place of pure luminosity or ground luminosity as it is translated by Sogyal Rinpoche.34 It is a state where one can not even speak of lumunasity having visions, if it is reached, because one is the vision. There is no distinction between subject and object. It is a non-dual state.

Then there is the visionary world, which Corbin calls the mundus imaginalis, the one half-way between the physical and the universe of pure light.

This is where the bardo experiences, after death, karmic manifestation, visions of previous lives, visions of entities (dark and light, wrathful and benign deities) are seen.

Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism call this realm the Sambhogakaya. This is where all the memory of mankind and human experience is stored. According to Buddhist yoga tradition this aspect is called the alaya-vijnana, the store consciousness.35 This is where all the subtle bodies and forms, the daimones of the Greek Platonists dwell - recently, Patrick Harpur renamed this realm "diamonic reality."36

In Hermetic teachings this universal capacity to bear all traces of memory and all subtle forms, be they angelic or demonic, is called the anima mundi or world soul. Sometimes this level of reality is known as the spirit world or the astral world.

Finally, there is the lowest circle which is the manifest of material world, called by the Buddhists the Nirmanakaya. All these circles envelope and interpenetrate each other from the highest to the lowest vibration, which is matter.

Corbin says that when we see these three levels, (which correspond, incidentally to the senses, the imagination and higher mind, at the subtle level)

we realize that we are no longer confined to the dilemma of thought and extension, to the scheme of cosmology and restricted to the empirical gnosiology world and the world of abstract intellect. Between pure intellect and pure thought, pure intelligence there is a world that is both intermediary and intermediate called the mundus imaginalis. A world that is ontologically as real as the world of the sense and that of the intellect.

It is the world, in fact, of the "subtle bodies" which it is indispensable to have in order to understand that there is a link between the spirit and the material body.37

Corbin adds a commentary from Swedenborg which is extremely helpful because it helps us understand that when we move in the visionary world that our movement in visionary or subtle bodies is not normal spacial movement, but has more to do with another principle, that of affinity. Swedenborg says that

All things in heaven appear in place and space and in place as they do in the world, still the angels have no notion or idea of place and space. All progressions or movements in the spiritual world are effected by changes in the state of the interiors.... hence those who are near each other are in a similar state and those who are far apart are those whose state is dissimilar. Spaces in heaven or the spiritual realm are nothing but external states corresponding to internal ones.38

So one finds when one journeys in this world we will meet clusters of souls, or families, that belong together; whole clusters or families or groups of spirits that are working on a similar level. Those who remember out of body experiences either from near-death or past life remembering will report going through layers or planes where different assemblies of beings are to be found.

In my book on past lives I mention the story of a young women who died in the coliseum and remembers, first of all going up to the first plane where she sees thousands of souls of Christians who have been martyred, who are in a state of deep confusion and who are angry at Christ for not rescuing them and are also clinging to the earth in some way or another. These are the souls in Western esoteric jargon are stuck in the "lower astral". In Tibetan sense, their mental bodies are still in a state of confusion. They are still obsessed with what happened on earth and the promises they were given, and they can not let go of physical reality. So they hover closer to the lower levels. This particular rememberer found herself moving through this because she had truly in her death experience let go of any attachment of the earth plane. She found herself rising beyond the confused souls into a higher plane where there was glory and there was light and there was praise. She had moved into the angelic realms.

We find when we journey that those souls that have reached a certain stage of inner growth will be drawn to other souls of like kind. Is what Goethe called elective affinity. We have an affinity with souls of the right nature. So there is in the spirit world a kind of polarization of forms.

Mystics and poets from all the major traditions have described how the three worlds interface. The Sufi Al Ghazzali said, "The visible world was made to correspond to the world invisible, and there is nothing in this world, but is a symbol of something in that world.39 Jung said, "Think carnally and you will remain flesh, think symbolically and you will become spirit."40 George Herbert said, "A man that looks on glass on it may stay his eye, or if he pleaseth, through it, pass, and then the heaven espy."41

The Sufi Al Ghalib puts it as follows,

The world is no more than the Beloved's single face;
In the desire of the One to know its own beauty, we exist.

Each place, each moment, sings its particular song of not-being
and being.
Without reason, the clear glass equally mirrors wisdom and
madness.

Those who claim knowledge are wrong; prayer just leads to
trance;
Appearance and faith are mere lees in the Unknowing Wine.

Wherever the Footprint is found,
that handful of dust holds the oneness of worlds.

This earth, burnished by hearing the Name, is so certain of Love
that the sky bends unceasingly down, to greet its own light.42

So the intermediary or subtle world, Corbin's mundus imaginalis is contained by and emanates the light of the highest of worlds, the Dharmakaya, the formless world of pure spiritual radiance which is constantly present at all levels of reality. But because this universal radiance is beyond form it is neither within nor without and it is both within and without; in fact it is everywhere and nowhere, completely full and completely empty. Such are the paradoxical metaphors of non-dualist mysticism.

A crude representation of this might look as follows:

It must be remembered that the dotted lines do not represent physical space at all, but are merely suggestive of higher dimensions; how the two coincide is expressed in the famous Platonic saying that "God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."43

If we look at the intermediary or subtle world (Mahayana's: Sambhogakaya) we do find distinct representations of psychic or spiritual location in space. Polarized within this cosmos there are "higher" and "lower" worlds, sometimes called "heavens" and "hells", and "angelic" and "demonic" realms. The shamans and visionaries like Dante know how to travel to the lower or underworld as well as to the upper world.

In shamanism too, there is a tripartite cosmology of upper, lower and physical worlds, through which the shaman travels in visionary flight. This traditional cosmology could be depicted thus:

So although the shaman or the visionary has in one sense gone out of his or her body into the seemingly vaster spaces of the intermediary world with its three psychic dimensions, he or she has at the same time gone "within". This "within" may be expressed as imaginally encountering energies or "spirits" in the energy field or human subtle body. These energies or subtle traces can often be experienced as memory images or fragments of past lives or extraneous "spirit" beings that cling to us. All this is encountered by going more deeply "into" our experience using spiritual imagination to "see" to "remember" lost parts of soul within our "inner" subtle universe. As Graves puts it, "we just untie the string".

And whenever we journey in what Rumi calls "the passageway of the self" we are illuminated by "the light of Atman" according to the Upanishads.44 This universal inner or spiritual light is none other than the "pure light of the void" the Dharmakaya that interpenetrates and upholds everything eternally. Dante, in his upper world vision of the Paradise saw this divine light as love:

L'amor che muove il sole e gli altri stelle45
(the love that moves the sun and the other stars)

It doesn't matter whether we go out of the body to encounter this world or we go within. It is there to be found in either case. Kabir's poem called "The Boat" sums it all up:

The Guest is inside you, and also inside me;
you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed.
We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.
Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.

The blue sky opens out farther and farther,
the daily sense of failure goes away,
the damage I have done to myself fades,
a million suns come forward with light,
when I sit firmly in that world.

I hear bells ringing that no one has shaken;
inside "love" there is more joy than we know of;
rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds;
there are whole rivers of light.
The universe is shot through in all parts by a single sort of love.
How hard it is to feel that joy in all our four bodies!

Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail.
the arrogance of reason has separated us from that love.
With the word "reason" you already feel miles away.

How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy
he sings inside his own little boat.
His poems amount to one soul meeting another.
These songs are about forgetting dying and loss.
They rise above both coming in and going out.46

1 The Kabir Book, translated by Robert Bly, Beacon Press, Boston, 1977, p 4.

2Thevenaz, Pierre. What is Phenomenology? Chicago, 1962, pp 136-7.

3The Gospel of Thomas, translated A. Guillaumont, et.al. Brill, Leiden, 1976, log. 29.

4Ghose, Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, New York, 1951. Edited by Elmer and Alyce Green in Beyond Biofeedback, p63. See note 9

5Bohm, David, in Renee Weber, (ed) Dialogues with Scientists and Sages. Routlege, London. 1986. pp. 45-6.

6Heidegger, Martin. What is a Thing?, Chicago, 1967, cited in Roberts Avens, Imaginal Body: Para-Jungian Reflections on Soul, Imagination and Death, U. Press of America, Washington, D.C., 1982, p. 165. Aven's radical critique of parapsychology sees it is fundamentally hamstrung by a dualism that excludes the soul. His work deserves to be read by all researchers in the field.

7Kabir, pp. 4-5

8Ghose in Green, see note 9.

9Green, Alyce and Elmer, Beyond Biofeedback, Knoll, Ft. Wayne, Indiana, 1977.

10Brennan, Barbara, Hands of Light: A Guide to Healing Through The Human Energy Field, Bantam, New York, 1988.

11Tansley, David, Radionics and the Subtle Anatomy of Man, Health Science, Saffron Walden, Essex, England, 1972.

12Bailey, Alice, The Light of the Soul: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Lucis Trust, New York, 1927.

13See especially: Krippner, Stanley and Daniel Rubin, Galaxies of Light, Interface, New York, 1973; White, John and Stanley Krippner, Future Science, Doubleday, New York, 1977; White, John, Kundalini, Evolution and Enlightenment, Doubleday, New York, 1979.

14Network, 63, April, 1997.

15See Rossi, Ernest, L. and David Cheek, Mind-Body Therapy, Norton, New York, 1994. The idea of cellular consciousness is also to be found in the perinatal work of Graham Farrant, Cf Satprem, The Mind of the Cells, New York, 1982.

16 "Bioplasm: The Fifth State of Matter?" Inyushin, Viktor, M., in White, Future Science, p. 115, see note

17Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland, A Parable of Spiritual Dimensions. Oneworld, Oxford, 1994 (originally published 1884).

18Robert Graves, Collected Poems, London, 1938.

19Rumi, These Branching Moments, versions by Coleman Barks, Copper Beech, 1988.

20Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, Bollingen, Princeton, 1969.

21See also Corbin, Henry, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, Bollingen, Partheon, 1960.

22 Plato, Symposium, 202.

23See his seminal paper "Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal", Spring, Zurich, 1972.

24"The Visionary Dream in Islamic Spirituality" in Grunebaum and Caillais (eds) The Dreams in Human Society, U. of California Press, Berkeley, 1966.

25For a good summary of the literature of such journeys, see Zaleski, Carol, Otherworldly Journeys, New York, 1989.

26See "Mundus Imaginalis" pp 2-6.

27 St. John of the Cross, Collected Works, Ed. Kavanagh, and Rodriguez, ICS Publications, Washington, D.C., 1979.

28 "Mundus Imaginalis", p3.

29 Ibid, p 3.

30 Ibid, p 3.

31 Ibid, p 3.

32 The Drop That Became The Sea, Lyric Poems of Yunnus Emri, trans. Helminski and Algam, Threshold, Vermont, 1989, p 20.

33 The Three Worlds of Kayas ("bodies of the Buddha") are well discussed in Lauf, Detlef Ingo, Secret Doctrines of the Tibetan Books of the Dead, Shambala, Boulder, 1977.

34 Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Harper, New York, 1992, Ch. 16.

35 Zimmer, Heinrich, Philosophies of India, Bollingen, Princeton, 1951, p 526. Cf. Sogyal, op.cit. p 111.

36 Harpur, Patrick, Daimonic Reality, Understanding Otherworld Encounters, Arkana Penguin, London, 1995.

37 "Mundus Imaginalis", p 7.

38 Cited in "Mundus Imaginalis", p 11.

39 Cited in Smith, Margaret, Al-Ghazzali The Mystic, p 111.

40 Jung, C. G. Symbols of Transformation, Bollingen, Princeton, 1953, p 226.

41 "The Elixir" in George Herbert, Everyman Dent, London, 1996.

42 Translated Jane Hirschfield in Mitchell, Stephen, (ed) The Enlightened Heart, Harper, New York, 1989.

43 For an exhaustive discussion of this elusive quotation see, "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal" by Jorge Luis Borges in Labyrinths, New Directions, San Francisco, 1964.

44 Brihadaranayaka Upanishad, Book 7.

45 Dante, Paradiso, Canto 33.

46 Kabir, p 57-8.