November 4th, 2016:
Last night’s dream; Got to fly an x-wing through the atmosphere of some futuristic planet. I’m usually apprehensive of flight, because of the possibility of crashing from a great height…it’s the waiting to hit the ground bit that I especially dislike. However, when the thought of possibly losing control and plummeting to the surface crossed my mind as I looked out into the wild blue, it did not produce any kind of fear response. There are two things that happened to make this the case:
Firstly, I had not only thought, but in some way knew (it is one thing to consider abstractly, and quite another to have an idea come through as a felt experience) that I am just a branch on the tree of humanity, and will thus live on, since my individuality is just a part of a larger continuum that persists after my death. I felt like I wasn’t only a part, but also the whole, simultaneously.
The second reason why I was no longer worried about the risks that come with flying is because a far greater problem was occurring. This far greater concern contrasted with my typical behavior, making my former set of values and foibles appear irrelevant. This new dilemma was that in this future world, humanity had discovered the reality of the soul. That might not sound so bad, but what made it such an ordeal is that the soul was apparently an artificial object made by these intelligences that exist far beyond the range of our senses, and served as a link to them.
So while I was flying, I would occasionally be transported via a kind of telepathy or mental process to the place where these beings beyond my fathoming existed. I could not understand their reality, it was beyond my comprehension, and so it was startling to have to communicate with them without much choice in the matter. I didn’t know how to come to terms with what they were and how things happened where they are from, and this uncertainty so very near the core of my life was anxiety inducing.
The issue was not only that this reality beyond the ordinary world was true, but also that it was in me and everyone else, and I could not go back from knowing it now that I knew. I was just a small little creature that could only understand a specific set of conditions, and now I had to contend with what was beyond that horizon.
Anyway, the view from the upper atmosphere of whatever planet I was traversing was spectacular. Outstanding display of weather phenomena. That’s the positive take-away, the aesthetic experience of nature. I will conclude with what I am left to wonder; if there is a soul, how does that affect our understanding of the world and how it works? Is there a physics to the soul? Is the soul some kind of object that goes beyond yet includes the 3 dimensions of our experience?
The alchemists allegedly had access to primordial unformed matter, and to be able to affect it by way of the soul and some kind of science based on how the soul interfaces with the world. This is part of a larger tradition of soul-theory known as the anima mundi, or world-soul, a physics that postulates the soul as an enveloping vital atmosphere that is diffused throughout, binding things together and conferring animation . Knowledge of the anima mundi was thought to enable the instructed to cause alterations and transformations upon matter in ways that would appear non-local, seemingly miraculous or magical to those who were not educated in the inscrutable essence of the soul and its power over the ‘sublunary’ or gross material plane.
Image: Glimpsing the Emperian by Alex Grey
Imagicination 