Masonic, Occult and Esoteric Online Library
Septenary Man
By J.A. Anderson
The Dreaming Self
C%N THE ordinary human life, one-third of the interval between & the cradle and the grave -is spent in sleep. Since, then, so large a portion of our existence upon earth is passed in this intensely subjective condition, it is well, as Du Prel points out, to carefully consider its relation to the problems of human consciousness. Sleep has been said to be the prototype and twin sister of death; yet few realize how close is the resemblance between the two states of consciousness. To the ordinary person deep sleep is simply death to all sensuous existence. It is a temporary and fleeting return to the subjective side of existence, in which the permanent part of our being roots. There is no doubt that the center of consciousness which constitutes the real base of our soul cannot be annihilated, and that it has no lapses of consciousness, even though sleep and other subjective states would seem to point to the latter fact. The apparent lapse is produced by two causes. One is the complete disconnection of the environing conditions, vibratory and otherwise, of the two states, and the consequent inability of the lower material vehicle to register and record the finer, inner, spiritual experiences; the other lies in the fact that the soul, transported rapidly from one plane of conscious- ness to another—or, to put it mathematically, from sensations whichare conveyed to it by vibrations having a certain ratio with whichit has become familiar, to those with which it is utterly unfamiliar is unable to at once recognize, classify, and translate into terms ofconsciousness the new conditions and differing vibrations with which it has to deal. During the intervals of sleep the center ofconsciousness is, of course, not annihilated, but retires of necessity to deep interior states of which the memory, owing to vibratory changes in its vehicle, is lost long before the material plane is even approached. Therefore, sleep in its relation to apparently dreamless states will not be the principal subject of this study, but rather the dreaming planes with which almost the whole of mankind is familiar.
What is it that causes the wonderful phenomenon of sleep ? Science declares that it is due to the exhaustion of nerve-centers within the brain and body. This is no doubt true as explaining one effect by another effect, but it is no answer for the real cause of sleep. Suppose that the nerve-centers do become exhausted by long-continued exercise—why should the result be unconsciousness instead of merely fatigue, as is the case when muscular fibre is wearied ? Why should not rest from thought restore the equilibrium in the nerve-centers without this mysterious retiring of the consciousness to subjective planes taking place? To all these questions science offers no logical solution. Animals sleep, yet the nerve-waste of many of those which even sleep the longest as the hibernating family—is so small that the nerve-exhaustion theory completely breaks down.
It is obvious that in the question of sleep we are dealing with a problem of cycles of existence upon objective and subjective planes of being; this law of cycles being one proceeding out of the very abysses of the unknowable, of which sleeping and waking are but examples of its immutable action. One may oppose his will for a brief period to this law of nature, but must sooner or later succumb, or else madness will ensue. Occultism declares that the modus operandi in the occurrence of sleep is that the life- currents become too powerful during the waking hours to be longer resisted, and that, therefore, the soul is periodically driven to seek subjective safety upon interior planes—a phenomenon whose-analogies may give a faint clue to the action of the life Principle upon all planes of Cosmos, and consequently to the alternating cycles of manvantaras and pralayas, or the objective and subjective existence of universes and worlds.
Let us take as a preliminary study the lowest form of dream that which may be classified as physiological, or dependent upon the lower brain-mind and the animal functions of the body, entirely. These, no doubt, often arise, as physiology claims, through reflex impulses transmitted to the brain, and caused by indigestion, uneasy postures, and a multitude of other similar 106 SEPTENARY MAN. stimuli. They may also arise out of a sort of mechanical action of the brain, which, temporarily aroused into activity in some portion' of its mass, converts the slight stimulus into a kind of text upon which it builds a whole panorama of after pictures. Thus, in one. instance, a drop of water falling upon the face of a sleeper, whomit seemed instantly to awaken, caused him to dream a long sequence of thunder-storm, shipwreck, etc., during the fraction of a second which elapsed between the impact of the drop and his awakening.
But the important point in even these low and sensuous dreams is nearly if not quite overlooked by the ordinary materialistic psychologist. This lies in the fact that, however absurd, illogical, or vicious even, is the dream, there is of necessity an entity who dreams that dream. The ordinary view is that such dreams are purely mechanical actions due to automatism upon the part of the brain, and that the Ego, upon awakening, perceives them as he might a picture upon the wall of his chamber, painted during his slumber. But this is an entirely erroneous view. These pictures, however distorted or unreasonable, however disconnected with each other, are the creations of an entity possessed of creative imagination, even though this be only temporarily and byreflection from a higher source. It would be just as easy for the picture to paint itself upon the wall of the chamber, upon the one hand, as it would be for the reflected picture to cast itself upon the brain, upon the other hand—which it must do, unless it be the creative act of some entity. The one is no more unreasonable than the other. Every picture seen in a dream is the creation of the will-desire of some entity or other. Since the entire absence of both conscience and reason from these low sense- dreams negatives the presence of the rational, conscience-guided soul, or Higher Ego, what is the nature of the entity whose creations they are, who perceives them, and who is delighted or horrified by them, as the case may be ? Since animals dream, and since animals have synthesizing centers of consciousness, and, further, since animals in no wise differ physically from man, except that man is an animal plus a reasoning soul within, correspondence and analogy point plainly and definitely to the fact that a humanelemental, an entity which synthesizes man's animal form as a lower one does that of the animals, is the dreaming entity and center of consciousness in these cases. All these dreams arc the thoughts of that entity. No longer illumined by the manasic Ray from the Higher Ego, or the true soul having almost wholly withdrawn its influence over it, this kamic elemental thinks and imagines after its own senseless manner. Having no reasoning powers, its jumble of thoughts are not recognized as unreasonable; and, not being guided by the warning voice of conscience, or the Higher Ego, it will commit in its imagination the most silly as well as the most heinous acts or crimes, without remorse or even a recognition of their ethical bearing. Just in proportion as the dream is reasonable is the influence of the ray of Manas apparent.
That there is an entity actively thinking out these dreams the writer chanced to discover upon one occasion by actual experience. After closely observing the dreaming state for many months, it chanced that in the process of awakening at one time, for a brief instant, he stood apart and saw the working of the dreaming imagination within the recesses of his own dreaming brain. The latter was then engaged in reveling in one of these sense dreams, and he perceived, or in some indescribable manner recognized, the presence of the entity who was actively employed in thinking the thoughts which, upon the brain, appeared like pic- tures thrown upon the wall by means of a magic-lantern. The relation of the observer, the observed, and the thought-creations, was clear and distinct long enough for him to recognize that these idle dreams and fantasies to which he had attached little or no importance, and for which he had thought himself almost wholly irresponsible, were not a passive, drifting panorama over which there was no control from any source, but were the active thoughts and created images of an entity who, in that brief interval of time, stood disclosed as not only deliberately thinking these things, but also as doing them, for his own gratification, as certainly and as truly as the writer himself ever indulged in a "day dream" for a similar purpose. A life lesson was thus learned in a brief moment, and a light thrown upon the relation which the soul bears to its human-animal body before the "I am myself " of the writer fused in some incomprehensible manner into that of the dreaming entity and the thing dreamed, as both faded from view in awakening.For, in returning to his body from the mysterious realms of dreamland, the writer had caught, as it were, his lower self in the act ofdreaming, and was enabled to intelligently view and understandthe process. he process. Since, then, our ordinary sense-dreams are the imagination andthought-creations of a reasonless entity with whom we are karmically bound by incarnating in these human-animal bodies, it fol- lows that by closely observing one's dreams there will be foundthe key to one's average mental life. For this entity is upon the animal plane, and is very far from having the power to create ofits own volition the things which it dreams. It can only rum-mage for these among the pictures and impressions stored in the brain during the waking hours of the true man, or those in whichreason is active. It must, then, faithfully reflect the mental condition of the man. The general tone of one's every-day thoughts, therefore, will reappear even in his most senseless dreams. Idle fancies, idle words, the usual things seen or perceived by any of the senses during the day—all these constitute the stock from which this lower dreaming entity draws when temporarily aroused to independent activity in the manner pointed out when speaking of the mechanical causes of dreams. The man, it is true, is not responsible for the lack of sequence and reasonless vagaries of this dreaming entity, but he is responsible, as the writer fully believes, for the substance and general tenor of that which is dreamed. Thus, a fit of unreasoning anger in a waking moment,which is dramatized at night into a murder willfully committed, is not, in the opinion of the writer, a mere added sequence of the thought in the waking state; murder was in the heart, and mayhave been, in our subconscious thought, actually enacted in the daytime. Or the murderous thought may have arisen into perception as a suggestion coming from this lower consciousless animal, but which the voice of conscience and of reason instantly cast out, and yet of which the lower entity retained the memory and which it carried into execution when opportunity offered in sleep. It is just these lowest thoughts, having their origin entirely in our animal nature, which are the food, so to say, of the animal within us; and if they are absolutely prevented from arising in the mind, then such dreams will surely cease. Remember, all dreams are the result of thought. In these low dreams they are the effect of reflected thought, to be sure—of a power borrowed temporarily by this elemental from the Lower Manas, or brain mind—but they are none the less thought-creations. Therefore is it true that our dreams are really reflections of our ordinary mental states, and to change our life is to change our dreams.
More than this: By the karmic bond between our souls and our bodies, it becomes our sacred duty to humanize and rationalize, so far as the laws of evolution permit, this lower human elemental with which we are thus karmically associated. For it will return to us from life to life as the animal substratum of each suc- ceeding personality. It is not a question of the mere temporary association of one's soul with passionate, willful, murderous, obstinate, thieving, proud, or other undesirable attributes which we find in our lower nature; the bond is of almost eternal duration. Death by no means frees us from the bundle of sins, passions,, appetites, and desires which are but the normal states of the conscious entity with which we are thus associated. It plainly fol- lows us into Kama Loka, and by its clamorings and ragings earthward prevents for a time our entrance into the rest of Devachan,. as was pointed out when dealing with the Kama Rupa. It passes into its condition of latency at the close of its kamalokic stage, to- re-emerge upon the physical plane clothed in a new physical body when the true thinker returns to incarnation. Thus, the warfare between our higher and lower natures goes on eternally, until one or the other gains the victory.
In this fact is to be found the explanation of the teachings in> the "Voice of the Silence," that the enemies we slay in this life will not return to fight us in the next. And he who makes noeffort to control this unruly animal within him, or he who allows himself to be subjugated by it, will return to earth accompanied by the same deplorable faults of personality with which he left. The fight must be made; the victory must be gained ; and there is no greater mistake than that of Christians or Theosophists when they fancy that the throwing-aside at death of the lower IIO SEPTENARY MAN./ nature, hard to control, or undesirable to be associated with, endsthat association. It does not. "As a man sows so shall he reap," and as he builds in one life so he must occupy in the next; andhis personality will not be a new one, however fair and innocent the babe which represents that personality may appear. Withinit, as it grows older, will reappear the old traits of character, andthe old contest will have to be renewed, the old sufferings again undergone, until at last the lesson is learned that the lower nature must be subdued.
The relation which dreams bear to the proofs of the existence of the soul can only be briefly hinted at. That hint has alreadybeen given in the statement that a whole sequence of thunderstorm, shipwreck, etc., was dramatized and experienced in the brief fraction of a second which occurred between the contact of the drop of water and the transmission of the sense-impression to the brain of the sleeper. The rapidity with which sense-impressionscan be recorded by the brain is subject to accurate measurementas to duration. Only so many thoughts can be visualized, onlyso many things seen, during a given time. If the spokes of a•wheel revolve too rapidly they pass into a blur. If the train •moves too fast we are utterly unable to count objects, such as . fence posts, along the track. In fact, our lives are measured by ourstates of consciousness. We can live only at such a rate. We• can experience only just so rapidly. If, now, we find that thedreaming consciousness can register conscious states a million • times more rapidly than can the waking consciousness, it follows: that that consciousness is not responding to the fame rate ofvibration, is not functioning through molecular vehicles, and that, rirrerefore, the human* soul is independent of its body, and not a• mere property of matter, as materialism insists. Let each one- think this out for himself.
The key of the kamalokic state after death is also furnished bydreams. The condition of consciousness is, of course, not the• same, but it is undoubtedly analogous. The man who dreams' vague, chaotic dreams during life, who thereby gives evidencethat his is but a vague, undisciplined, chaotic mind, can buti expect similar chaotic dreams after death. And he will be fortu- THE DREAMING SELF. HI nate, indeed, if they are merely chaotic. For if he has failed to subdue this animal within during life, if he has been governed by his lower nature, then his dreams will take a criminal or other horrible tendency. He will fluctuate between the commission of crime and its detection and punishment. For after death, in the kamalokic condition, we shall re-enact our old passionate life and live amid the same unhappy surroundings, just as surely as that in Devachan we shall experience and enjoy our highest ideals. And this lower condition renders this kamalokic entity peculiarly liable to be earth-bound and to haunt mediums, in order to re-experience the old sensuous delights. But this is a subject which has been dealt with elsewhere.
Passing now to a higher dreaming state, and remembering that all dreams are the result of stimuli from some source, it is evident that stimuli from the higher nature reach the dreaming conscious- ness as well as those from a lower, sensuous source. In this lies the explanation of dreams which have more or less signification. A high thought coming from above may not be translated with all the purity of its source; but just as the drop of water may cause a sequence of a sensuous nature, so the impulse arising from a thought coming from the diviner portion of our nature may give rise to a sequence or dream which, more or less faithfully, follows -the line of that thought or impulse. The tendency, of course, is -for it to become materialized and perverted, and this is why so few dreams are really reasonable and helpful. The divine Inner Ego may strive to impress some coming event upon the lower brain mind, and this may be received clearly and yet dramatized into a panorama of apparently non-sequential pictures, from which the dreamer, upon awakening, is able to gather nothing. And this brings into view the fact that it is only a kind of transitional consciousness between the waking and objective condition here and the equally waking and objective consciousness upon the plane of the Higher Ego, that can be truly classed as dream. For it must be remembered that upon its own plane the Universe is projected objectively a thousand times more clearly, perhaps, than is the molecular universe projected by the lower Ego upon this the sensuous plane. It has been said that the condition of consciousness at either pole seems like dream to the same consciousness at the other pole. Thus, our earth-life must appear as a chaotic andmore or less unpleasant dream to the consciousness of our HigherEgo; while its consciousness, upon the other hand, appears to bethe most unreal of dreams to our ordinary waking selves. Therefore, it is only in the fleeting moments of passing into slumberand of awakening out of it that our real dreams occur. In deepsleep there is no dream in its true sense, for then the Ego retires to its own plane of real being, and its consciousness there can-not be said to be in any sense that of dream. Happy, indeed, should we be could we unite our lower to our higher natures sufficiently to pass consciously from one state to the other, and bringback those precious experiences of the soul in so-called deep sleep, to comfort us in this illusory waking consciousness ! But this canonly be accomplished by the union of our higher and lowernatures. It requires the entire subjugation and transmuting ofour lower principles, and this conquering of the lower nature is what constitutes the Adept; and the Adept, it is said, neverdreams. For they simply paralyze their bodies, and pass consciously and intelligently to that blissful, inner plane where theirthoughts become actualities. And happy, if in a lower degree, is he who has so strengthened his will and so controlled his lowernature as to also be able to control his dreams, even though hebe not able to fully preserve his waking consciousness upon thedreaming plane.
Thus, even out of dreams, unreal and fantastic though we mayregard them, is to be learned many of the most important lessonsof life. Perhaps the most important of these, aside from thenecessity shown us through dreams, of thoroughly conquering andsubduing our lower nature, is the avenue they afford of contactingthe divinity within us. So long as we are unable, with the Adept,to paralyze the body at will, and so rise to the diviner planes ofour being, so long are we dependent upon the sleeping state forour transitory returns to that blissful consciousness. And in thecultivation of the power to control dreams exists one of the first steps towards the attaining of self-consciousness upon these mysterious, subjective planes of sleep and death. We are only awake THE DREAMING SELF. I 13 as we have seen, at the two poles of our being; the intermediate states are truly subjective and dreaming ones. We have, in the eons of the past, attained to self-consciousness upon this sensuous, objective plane; it is evidently directly in the line of our evolution, in eons to come, to conquer self-consciousness upon these inner, astral planes, and the time for this may not be so very dis- tant. Who has not dreamed that he was dreaming? Who has not recognized that the pictures before him were the unreal vagaries of his own creative imagination ? The recognition of illusion is the first step towards its overcoming. And in the normal state of consciousness afforded us by the dreaming condition we find a safe avenue whereby to seek conscious union with our higher natures. Yogis and mediums bring about an unnatural transfer- ring of their centers of consciousness to inner planes, through trance states induced by their own will or that of another, and all such practices are full of the gravest perils. But in dreams one may hearken to the voice of the God within him by means which nature herself has provided. Therefore, it is not the foolish waste of time our materialistic philosophy would have us believe to pay some intelligent attention to our dreaming states, and to attempt to exercise at least a moral control over dreams by the stern dis- cipline of our lower nature, and the rigorous cultivation of our highest spiritual faculties, by a devoted attention to the "Voice of the Silence," which is that of our own conscience during the dream which we fancy is our waking life.
