Shades of the Prison-House – Part Three
All that we know about our world is that, from our earliest recollection, we have become aware of a universe of which we are the centre. Everything that happens in our world involves us in some fundamental way, through our awareness of it.
Since we assume our own identity and reality, we confer equal status upon the beings that share our world. We become enmeshed in our relationships with these beings, and our lives form the drama with which these associations and relationships develop.
We become emotionally involved in the fate of these relationships. We do not for a moment doubt their existence in reality. When other people die, we are deeply affected by their demise and we grieve our loss. Yet we fail to see the inconsistency in our behaviour.
According to the Sages, when we come to wake up from this dream of consciousness that we call our waking world, we will come to realise that this entire universe, this dramatic saga, is nothing but a projection of our minds, just like the dream.
However, like the following questioner, we remain so entrenched in our conviction of the utter reality of our waking dream, that we fail to see the similarity.
Question: “Surely, wars and revolutions are not dreams. Sick mothers and starving children are not dreams. Wealth, ill-made and misused is not a dream.
Maharaj: What else?
Question: A dream cannot be shared.
Maharaj: Nor can the waking state. All the three states (of waking, dreaming and sleeping) are subjective, personal, intimate. They all happen to and are contained within the little bubble of consciousness called “I”. 1
Within that state we call waking reality we have projected a world which appears to us consistent and real. We interact with this world in a way which we find meaningful, and which allows us to fulfill our desires.
The description which we have of this world is determined by the nature of our beliefs. These beliefs not only determine what we see, they also decide what we experience in this world. They decide what we can and cannot do.
As John Lilly has pointed out, “What we believe to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experientially and experimentally.” 2
The young child is still largely unaware of any limits to its powers of expression. It is only as the influence of its culture grows in the course of adolescence, that the child comes to believe that it is limited by a body, and that this body is limited in turn by such things as heredity and the laws of nature.
In fact the child is not limited by a body at all, nor by the forces of nature that surround it. It is limited by belief. The child is in truth an unlimited expression of creative freedom. For as Sai Baba, the Saint of Shirdi, West India, said to his disciples:
“Sai is not this three-and-a-half cubic feet of visible body residing in Shirdi.” 3
And in one of the great classics which reflect this eternal wisdom, we read:
“Each one of us is in truth an idea of the Great Gull, an unlimited idea of freedom. Your whole body, from wing tip to wing tip,” Jonathan would say, other times, “is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body too.” 4
Young children who have not yet forged the chains of belief that will later bind them tight, are still able to do things which adults peremptorily dismiss as impossible, within their worlds of confined belief.
In May, 1974, a man bought a book to read to pass the time while he was travelling. He was sufficiently intrigued by its contents to extend a personal invitation to the author. The Book was Supernature and its author Dr Lyall Watson. This man invited Watson to visit him at his home in Venice, Italy, to witness a peculiar trick that his daughter Claudia was able to perform.
Watson travelled to Venice and in due course met Claudia, who was then eight years old. Shortly after dinner that evening, while the adults talked among themselves, Claudia lay on the carpet paging through a magazine.
Her father reached for a tube of tennis balls from a corner table, and casually rolled one across the carpet. It came to rest in front of Claudia. She picked it up, and held it affectionately to her cheek. Then, balancing the ball in her left hand, she gently stroked it with her right. What followed next left Watson stunned.
“One moment there was a tennis ball – the familiar off-white carpeted sphere marked only by its usual meandering seam. Then it was no longer so. There was a short implosive sound, very soft, like a cork being drawn in the dark, and Claudia held in her hand something completely different: a smooth, dark, rubbery globe with only a suggestion of the old pattern on its surface – a sort of negative through-the-looking-glass impression of a tennis ball.”
Watson examined the object closely. He found that the tennis ball had been turned inside out. Yet it still contained a volume of air under pressure. He squeezed the ball and it retained its former shape. He dropped it and it bounced.
Then he picked up a knife from the dining room table and pierced the rubber. The air inside came hissing out. He then cut right around the circumference, and was able to recognize the familiar fur which normally covered the outside of the ball.
Later that evening, Claudia performed the trick again. This time Watson kept the ball and took it back to his hotel, where he placed it on the mantelpiece in his room. As Watson described it, the ball stared at him as a mocking symbol. This enigmatic sphere defied his reasoned world of logic. It seemed to him to undermine the very laws of nature.
“It still disturbed me” he wrote. “I know enough of physics to appreciate that you cannot turn an unbroken sphere inside out like a glove. Not in this reality.”
When Watson returned to Venice three years later, he met with Claudia again. This time he found that things had changed dramatically. As he wrote at the time:
“Claudia is eight now and goes by herself to school. In the breaks between the classes, she and other children play around the old well head in the piazzetta, practising the lessons they have learned confirming the consensus.
Sometimes they throw and catch a tennis-ball, letting it bounce and roll between them; and now that it has a name and its function is fixed and defined, it doesn’t even occur to Claudia to offer it any other kind of freedom. She is one of us.” 5
Claudia had come to recognise that the world in which tennis balls could be liberated was not the world in which gondolas could glide along Venetian canals. She had come to adopt the beliefs of her elders and superiors, where such things were clearly impossible. Sadly, the freedom which her tennis ball had once enjoyed, had “faded into the light of common day.”
When Uri Geller burst upon an astonished and unsuspecting world in the 1970’s, he not only began to do embarrassing things to cutlery and clocks, but he was able to inspire other people to imitate him as well.
This ability, which came to be known as the “Geller effect”, was particularly marked with young children, who had not yet become bound by the trusses of belief. Geller was able to perform his “magic” because he believed he could, while others found that they could duplicate his feats because they didn’t know they couldn’t.
Lyall Watson reported an incident which occurred to him personally, which clearly demonstrated this “Geller effect”. He happened to be watching a video in which Uri Geller demonstrated how he was able to bend a key by passing his fingers lightly across it. While he was watching this video, Watson happened to have a three-year-old child sitting on his lap.
When the video ended, he casually gave the child a household key to play with. Operating on the basis of what she had just seen on the video, the child proceeded to bend this long-shanked key just as Geller had done. Taking the warped key from her, Watson found that he was unable to bend it back to its original shape.
Now this sort of display does not generate much enthusiasm in the world of orthodox science, for such events not only demonstrate bent keys, but bent “reality” as well. To be confronted with evidence which exposes the shortcomings of one’s own beliefs is profoundly unsettling, and invariably tends to be suppressed, for fear of encouraging similar excesses.
Time, however, is on the side of orthodox science, for as Watson concludes, “I sincerely doubt that she will be able to go on doing so when she is older and wiser in the ways of our world.” She will no doubt become, in time, like one of us. 6
So “shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy”, as he successfully learns to adorn himself with the coat tails of orthodox belief. For it is the very threat of being rejected as outcast, that is such a powerful motivator into acquiescing with the common view.
Being treated as an outcast, an outsider, is a harsh price for anyone to pay. It is harsher still for those young members of society, who see their future opportunities for success dependent upon their acceptance by the group.
Society strives continually to encourage, induce or punish its newest members into conforming with its accepted parameters of belief. It does this initially through the medium of the parents, who through their “love” for their children, ensure that they are accepted by society, rather than face persecution by their peers.
Furthermore, parents inevitably mould their children to be like them, the better that they may be able to relate to them, and the more “successful” their children may later hope to become within the narrow confines of accepted society.
The child, however, does not easily, or always, surrender to the powerful forces of conformity. Being as perceptive as they are, young children do not always welcome the invitation of society, or readily accept its virtues. Some are so shocked emotionally that they withdraw from the common level of consciousness altogether, preferring instead to roam around in other landscapes of the mind.
From the viewpoint of western society, these vagrant children, who can no longer be reached by normal contact, are labelled as “autistic”. They are considered to suffer from some pathological flaw which prevents them from accepting their due inheritance.
These children have withdrawn into a private world which can no longer be penetrated by others, and from which they do not care to venture forth. The act of the severely emotionally distressed child is similar to that process which takes place in sleep.
When people dream, they become immersed in a realm which those in the waking world cannot share. The dreamer is also unable to communicate with those who remain in the waking world. He or she is totally absorbed within a private world of experience.
From the point of view of the world, the dreamer continues to manifest in the waking world, but does so simply in the form of a comatose body, that is resistant to all forms of communication. The worries of the waking world do not exist for the dreamer, for the waking world forms no part of the dream.
It is the same with children whom society calls autistic. They have been induced to undertake a journey to another level of mind. What remains in our waking world is simply a physical shell which defies our urgent efforts of contact.
Because we are committed to our world of “normal reality”, we feel obliged to rescue these unfortunate children from their folly, and to restore them to their rightful estate. But it takes an enormous commitment of love to win back the allegiance of one of these young souls that has once been inclined to flee.
The emotional traumas which buffet us throughout our journey in life may occasionally jolt us out of our common description of the world altogether. We may then come to substitute our “normal reality” with a replacement which offers an escape from the profound anguish of our situation. As Scottish psychiatrist Ronald Laing has pointed out:
“In over 100 cases where we have studied the actual circumstances around the social event when one person comes to be regarded as schizophrenic, it seems to us that without exception the experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unbearable situation.” (Original italics) 7
In cases of schizophrenia and the like, some trauma or powerful emotional assault jars these people out of their habitual ways of thinking. They evade the painful circumstances of their “normal” world by journeying forth into a substitute world. We call this substitution “insanity”.
For the duration of this journey, we find ourselves confronted with human shells that have only a limited capacity to function in our world of waking reality. The minds of those who are thus affected are invariably locked into a private world which we can neither reach, nor share.
In some cases, through powerful chemical, electrical, or other stimuli, we are able to shock them back into an awareness of our level, and through various rewards and punishments, are able to coax them to return. If we are successful in these endeavours, we pronounce the patient “cured”.
But talk of illness and cure are value-judgements that are wholly dependent upon a single point of view. That is that our waking and customary state of consciousness is the only one that is “real”, and that being real, is the only desirable level on which a sane and healthy person would wish to function.
We might be kinder to these people if we allowed them to undertake their journeys with our sympathy and blessing, in the knowledge that if they did subsequently return to our level, it would be the result of their own personal choice, rather than through the pressure of our prodding.
So to summarise the foregoing, through the influence of our culture we learn to define our reality in a particular manner. This description of reality is based on those images which we learn as children to project and recognise, on the basis of specific names or symbols.
We divide these images into various categories, and we learn to relate to these groups of images in ways that are approved of by our culture. We learn, too, to separate our experiences into good and bad, according to the dictates of our society.
In making these decisions, we are guided by the influence of those around us. We learn to frame our description of the world in accordance with the views of others. In this way we come to share a common world of experience, based on our world of common description.
To be a member of a group is to accept the description which is the badge of that society. In order to operate effectively within that group, we must learn to subjugate our vast potential within certain designated limits. We must learn to paint a common picture of the world.
Within that picture, agreed upon by consensus, we act in accordance with our desires. These desires lead to experiences. The nature of these experiences is determined by our beliefs. Beliefs are the faith we place in certain modes of thinking.
Our beliefs are personal distillations of our interaction with what we call “reality”‘. Beliefs are central to our lives, and we cannot act without them. Whatever we believe, whatever we place our faith in, determines the character of our experiences. It matters not what we believe in, as our experiences in life will inevitably come to match the faith we have placed in our expectations.
Our beliefs are self-fulfilling, regardless of the nature of these beliefs. It is the very nature of life to produce circumstances which match our prevailing beliefs. This is the testimony of the sages.
“Thoughts are the content of the mind,” says Ramana Maharshi, “and they shape the universe.” 8
“What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow”, proclaims the Buddha. 9
“For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” The Bible (Proverbs 23:7)
References
1 “I Am That“, Conversations with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, translated by Maurice Frydman, Book II, Chetana, Bombay, 1973, p. 23.
2 John Lilly, “The Center of the Cyclone“, Bantam, New York, 1973, p.xv.
3 Mani Sahukar, “Sai Baba: The Saint of Shirdi“, Somaiya Publications, Bombay, 1971, p. 25.
4 Richard Bach, “Jonathan Livingstone Seagull“, Pan Books, London, 1973, pp. 76-77.
5 Lyall Watson, “Lifetide”, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1979, p. 316.
6 Lyall Watson, “Beyond Supernature”, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1986, p. 204.
7 Ronald Laing, “The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise“, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1967. p. 95.
8 “Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi“, recorded by Swami Saraswathi, Sri Ramanasramam, Tiruvannamalai, 1968, p. 93.
9 “The Dhammapada“, translated by Juan Mascaro, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 35.
