Fred Alan Wolf

[prana]

some excerps from his book, The Dreaming Universe

pg 182
"The process of differentiating self and nonself is fundamental and is what we mean when we say that an event occurs, when we see an event occurring, when we label an event's attributes, when we describe events, and in general, when we have an experience of the world.

Thus the self/nonself split is responsible for awareness of the universe as 'out there' and awareness of "in here" or the "I." The two are the same experience, for one cannot be aware of "out there" without simultaneously being aware of 'in here.'"

[[ there is a reference at the end of previous paragraph to the notes in the back of the book that says: "States of meditation seem to contradict this statement. Meditators speak of states of pure conciousness without any object of conciousness. I would suggest that this state contains a self-referring loop: the observer and the observed are the same thing. Thus I would suggest that there is a material component of this self-awareness state, the body itself." ]]

"Now the dream is the experiment that sets in motion where that boundary between I and not-I is to take place. The wider in space and time that boundary is, the greater is the extended sense of self. If we were to be telepathic at all times, we would not feel that we were living in side of our skins. Our senses would include 'direct experience' of being well outside. Thus if I were in telepathic communication with all events in the universe, I would be all of the universe, in much the same way that I am in telepathic communication with all of my body, and therefore I am my body."

[[ another reference from the back of the book: "It may seem far-fetched to think of body awareness as telepathic. I do not mean anything weird in this. I simply mean that body awareness proceeds through instantaneous, quantum-physical, spacelike, synchronous connections--the kind that I am referring to throughout this book. Certainly a lot of signalling is going around the body via the nervous system. However, as I explained in chapter 6, most of this seems to be unconcious, and rather mechanical, in spite of our awareness." ]]

pg 343
"If we take seriously the idea that the universe is being created in a dream of a single spiritual entity, then it would follow that each of us is part of that dream. However, we also dream every night. Could the dreams we have be nothing more than crossing over a boundary between the dream reality and the 'big dreamer'? In other words, are we possibly not only the dream of the great spirit, but with a slight shift in the perspective view of this boundary, are we the dreamer?"

[prana]

some excerps from The Eagle's Quest:

pg 221
"Normally we become accustomed to our surroundings, our friends and lovers, our everyday life. That is a hindrance to time traveling. As Kote had told me earlier, we either have completely lost five of our ten senses already, or are close to losing them. These five are just as important as the five we still possess. You'll recall that these are the senses of imagination. In a new surrounding, meeting new people, or falling in love, these senses are hopefully awakened. When they are we enter into a timeless state.

I thought of mythic time as running perpendicular to chronological time. Thus, in a real sense, mythic time is timeless. There are experiences to be had, visions to be seen, but they all take place in a flash. It was in mythic time that I believed one could have visions of the past and future."

pg 259
"I had felt a yearning inside of me to escape the traps of physical time. It appeared to me that my colleagues were doing their jobs like the slaves in Plato's cave. These slaves, having spent all of their lives chained to the wall of a cave, could only see their shadows when a light shined on them. They mistook their shadows for themselves.

Perhaps the physical universe is like Plato's cave. We are only witnessing the movements of shadows, illusions. The real reality is in us, but we can only sense it through our intuition. That reality appears to us in the dreams that Jacques and I were talking about."

pg 257
"And I, too, was having this realization. Scenes of mythic revelation were flashing in my mind. I remembered the fly on my foot in the temple in Nepal and the vibration of Don Solon. What were these events? They were reminders, intrusions into the temporal world from the mythic world. They were stories of an awakening giant: Mythos. That giant has no physical size. It is as big as the planet. It is as small as the three-pound universe we call the brain that exists in our head. These stories were elements of the overmind, the mythic reality without which, in shamanic reality, nothing physical would manifest. But these elements came not just from the individual overmind. They came from the overmind of the universe itself.

The overmind was like the aleph in the Qabala. It had no energy but it contained all possibilities. It was pure potential. To see in this reality of pure potential was to walk the shaman's path. This path was a creation of a new least-action path. It demanded action. It demanded that the sleeper awaken from the automatic pilot it had left in control of the universe."

pg 266
"Our bodies become addicted to material substances. In the same way, our conciousness becomes addicted to material form. It is an addiction or, perhaps less strongly put, a desire to have something rather than nothing. It starts out as only a thought, say, in the mind of God or the universe, or a higher power, for this to happen. But then the desire arises for something rather than nothing.

It is also a sacrifice. Everything at the overmind level is mythic. It is here where will and intent live together. It is here in the overmind that nothing exists. But in the undermind, the body-mind, the unconcious, everything exists. It exists at a price. That price is becoming unconcious and following least-action paths. In other words, becoming mechnical in action. It is there, but it lacks heart and mind. But life involves both the overmind and the undermind. Life is myth and survival--this life that we are living right now. "

pg 279
"He took a breath and went on. 'All of this is altered states of conciousness. What is conciousness? It is the beam. The beam is it. You have only one conciousness, which is the beam. If you light up all your files, what is the beam needed for? You forget about the beam. You just sit down and see. If you learn how to orientate yourself into this tremendous file of your memory, then it's ok.

You cannot hallucinate on something that you never saw. You hallucinate on things that are in your subconcious or unconcious mind. The shaman will hallucinate with a jaguar. You will hallucinate with a Jaguar car.'

We both laughed at the joke."

[prana]

some excerps from The Spiritual Universe

pg 10
"I wish to show that the self is fundamentally an illusion arising as a reflection of the soul in matter, much as a clear lake at midnight reflects the moon. At the same time, the soul is not an illusion, although it is a reflection of spirit. (I'll define what I mean by spirit shortly.)

pg 211
I see mind as the birth of the temporal sense, the sense of time so intimately connected to thought and my model of the soul. Much as in the special theory of relativity, in which space occupies three dimensions and time the fourth, an imaginary-spatial dimension, mind takes up the imaginal dimension of time while the other five senses take up the sense based or physical dimensions of space."

[[ there is a reference here to a note in the back of the book: "In relativity theory, time is often referred to as the 'fourth' dimension. In the equations of relativity, if you multiply the symbol representing time, t, by i, the square root of minus one, the symbol it appears as if it were a real spatial dimension like the other three, although it is purely an imaginal number." ]]

"Here the major distinctions between what we call the 'I' and what the Buddhists call the 'not-I' arises. For most non-Buddhists, including Hindus, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, there is a soul, capable of eternal existence. We normally begin to sense the presence of something called soul or, if not soul, at least self, and, if not self, at least ego, with the temporal sense of mind arising in response to and simultaneously with the five spatial senses of the body. The mind-object here becomes this mysterious 'I' we remember. We see it when we look back at our childhood photos, when our parents held us in their arms; we remember this self when we look at photos of special events in our past life, like marriages, births, and deaths of loved ones; we remember our selves when we watch old movies or hear the voices of old friends with whom we have not spoken in years."

pg 104
"Scientists like Inomata believe in the principle of a universal mind--a vast holographically structured mega-computer (God). They see the vacuum as linked to our thoughts and feelings as much as it is linked to the appearance of matter and energy.

I suggested a similar possibility in my earlier book, Star Wave. Consider another like view taken by French physicist Jean Charon:

If I suppose that the electrons constituting my body not only carry my "mind-spirit" but, in fact, constitute it, then there would be no difficulty in acknowledging that my "I" or mind-spirit and my electrons are in communication. There is identification between the "I" and the electrons.

Charon's idea is novel. Electrons carry the soul, or as he puts it, the mind-spirit."