Symbolism in Waking and Dreaming Consciousness

Symbolism in Waking and Dreaming Consciousness

[00:45] Q – To what extent is everything symbolic?

Hi Thom. I just wanted to know, to what extent is everything symbolic? Particularly something that is unusual. So the other day I was in my office and a beautiful owl, a beautiful owl came and landed in front of me. To what extent is everything like that symbolic?

[01:18] A – Coincidences Are a Continuum of Reality

Well, that’s the one you saw. There were probably 15 other ones you didn’t see.

We live in a coinciding universe and the things that we refer to as coincidences, the unusual things that happened, like I was just saying to somebody, “It’s a cloudy day and I can’t wait for the southerly to go away and the westerly winds to start blowing again and the sun to open up,” and right when I said that, the clouds parted and a shaft of sunlight hit me in the face. Wow. How amazing was that? That was the one you noticed.

That was the one you noticed. You get more and more conscious, there is nothing except coinciding things. Nothing. Everything coincides with everything else, and it’s happening so continuously that it is not even worthy of comment anymore.

If you did comment on it, it would be, “Of course. Of course. Of course. Of course.” Because there is no non-coinciding phenomenon.

Coincidences are not random. They are a continuum of reality. And so when occasionally we notice something and we’d go, “Amazing,” we just didn’t notice the 15 that happened in the last minute or the next 15 that happened in the next minute after that. We’re going to get better and better at noticing these things.

Symbolic means something that takes on a shape or form that is kind of codified. It’s got a code to it, and I would hold that there’s nothing in the universe that’s actually coded. It’s expressive. It’s not symbolic, if you see what I mean.

So, if I use the Sanskrit language as an example, the Sanskrit language is not a symbolic language. English is, and Spanish is.

In English [gestures to table], table. This thing. In Spanish, mesa. But neither of those words has anything to do in the makeup of the sound of it with that object.

But the Sanskrit language is 100% onomatopoetic. It’s all onomatopoeia. So it’s a non-symbolic language. It’s expressive.

The sound for the word for heart in Sanskrit is, [rhythmically] hridaye, hridaye, hridaye, hridaye, hridaye. Hridaye is the word for heart. It’s the thing that sounds like the thing.

An onomatopoeia, if you can’t remember your grammar from high school, is a word that makes the sound of the thing it’s describing. It approximates the sound: splash, bang, boom, slap, and so on and so forth.

And there are at least 6,000 of these words in the English dictionaries that attempt to make a sound with the human using significant human phonemes to cause a sound to come into being, which, it should be with a proper onomatopoeia, anyone in any language would understand.

So you hear a jet break the sound barrier, and you look at somebody who has no common language with you and you go, “Boom,” they’ll get it. They’ll get it, because boom is a close enough approximation to what that sounded like. And so it’s a universal language, non-symbolic. There’s no symbols in it. It’s expressive.

And so we want to make a distinction between something being symbolic, meaning it’s codified and you have to break the code in order to understand it, and something simply being expressive.

[06:24] What You See Is What You Get

Basically what we’re saying is, what you see is what you get. It doesn’t need to be codified otherwise we’re going to be carrying those books around.

“I saw an ant crawl over my left foot. What does it mean?” Maybe we’ll ask AI. “AI, I saw an ant crawl across my foot. What’s the spiritual meaning of it?”

And AI goes, “Was it your right foot or your left foot?”

“It was my left foot.”

“When were you born?”

“I was born on this date.”

“Well, then it means this…”

Nature doesn’t actually speak to us in code. However, when these expressions occur, if we don’t get immediate understanding of it, then all we need is time. Time will tell you everything. Time will tell you everything.

If in this instant I don’t understand about the owl appearing. If I don’t understand about the owl appearing, give me another week, give me another month, give me a year, and then I saw this owl in that situation and that owl in that situation as well. And now, now I know. Now I know.

So time is the great revealer. Context gives wisdom to content. This is going to be like a lesson for tonight.

You don’t have an understanding of a form, a phenomenon or a relationship between forms, then what you need is context. And context is granted to you by the passage of time.

And so my advice is, note things, note them and then let some time pass. And, in a graded fashion, meaning will begin to assemble itself.

[08:29] Assembly Theory and Abiogenesis

This is something which is going to be talked about a lot by science very soon.

I’ve met a woman who is the deputy director and professor at Arizona State University. Her name is Sara Imari Walker. Imari is spelled I-M-A-R-I, Walker.

Sara is without the H. S-A-R-A. A professor of Astrobiology, and she’s come up with, over a 15-year period, a completely new comprehensive theory of what the heck is going on in the universe.

And the theory is entitled Assembly Theory. The universe goes through systematic assembly that causes, over a period of time, causes everything that exists to come into being.

And Assembly Theory is essentially a new way of looking at a phenomenon known as abiogenesis. Abiogenesis is, how is it that supposedly inanimate atoms and molecules assemble themselves in such a way as to make the jump into being living cells? How does that happen? That’s her whole field and her position on it is that that is all that’s happening.

The entire Universe is conscious and it is bio-friendly, and it is in the process of assembling nervous systems. That’s what the Universe’ agenda is, to assemble nervous systems. To what end? To create story. That is to say, sequential elaborations of events that are interesting to witness, and you have to have a nervous system in order to witness it.

So Universe creates nervous system so it can look at itself playing out a story. Fascinating.

And here we are. That’s what these bodies of ours are. So the consciousness field creating elaborate enough consciousness to be able to make mental commentary on itself, and to call it assembly. Assembly theory.

If you look up Sara, you’ll find a wonderful number of YouTubes, YouTube interviews and talks that she gives on this subject, and get a more fulsome view.

This is the forefront of science today. The top scientists in the world today are not talking billiard ball physics. This ball hits that ball and they bounce off with these forces and all that. We need to understand that stuff at the macroscopic level, how physics works, but when we dive down into the depth of it, there are patterns of behavior that give us the big context, the giant perspective on what the heck is going on at all times.

[12:08] Leftover Star Stuff Arguing About the Dishes

And to get that, you know, we’re very good thinkers in terms of space. There’s the whole of space with a trillion galaxies floating in it. That’s the most recent count, by the way, about a trillion. And as I love to say, if you’re not familiar with government spending numbers, a trillion is a thousand billion. And a billion is a thousand million. And a million’s a thousand thousands.

So there it all is. A trillion galaxies, give or take, have been identified now. Each one of them between a hundred billion stars to a trillion stars in it. And we’re very good at looking out at space. We’ve got the spatial thing figured out, but we do tend to ignore temporal. That is time.

What has happened to assemble all this over a period of time in such a way that here we are talking about this? We are particles left over from, this is what these bodies are, particles left over from dead stars that have assembled themselves into speaking and talking nervous systems, who have these urgent questions about, what do I do about my relationship?

And there it all is. We’re star stuff talking about things.

“I thought you loved me.”

“I do love you.”

“Well, when I use the word love, I could never do the thing that you did: leaving dishes on the thing, and…”

“Well, but I do love you. I’ll, I’ll change, I’ll clean the dishes.”

“Well, you’re only doing it now because I said it. I want to see that you really mean it.”

Can you imagine star stuff talking to itself like that? It’s astonishing, isn’t it?

Well, that’s what all this is. It’s just star stuff that suddenly got voices. But you have to look at a long perspective of time in order to see how all of that assembled into this.

And of course, we don’t just argue over dishes. We play Bach and we have beauty and wonderful music and we can go out into the stars and there’s lots of wonderful things we do too. Then we come home and argue about the dishes.

So time and perspective, it takes the symbolic. A thing is symbolic until you understand it, and then it’s not symbolic anymore. It’s just expressive.

Of course an owl came. How will you know why and what it all means? Give yourself another year or so and it will assemble itself. It’s not codified. Things are only codified when we have a narrow band of time.

[15:32] Q – What Is the Vedic Perspective on Dreams and Dreaming?

Thank you, Thom, for all your generous wisdoms. Always appreciated. I’m not sure if this is related to the last question, but I’d love your perspective and the Vedic perspective on dreams and dreaming.

[15:46] A – Dreams Aren’t Dreams

Well, dreams aren’t dreams. What I mean by that is the thing that we call dreams could be any one of a number of phenomena.

And so let’s look at nighttime events, and generally our dreams are in the nighttime, although I did hear one Aussie guy saying to some other Aussie guy on the corner over here this day. He says, “I think we can go across, you know, the street with without waiting for the green walking man.”

And the other one looks at him and goes, “Nah mate, you’re dreaming. You’re dreaming.” Yeah, there’s one use of the word dream.

Generally speaking, when we talk about a dream, it’s during an eyes-closed horizontal. We’re either having a nap in the afternoon or we’re doing the big long thing at night.

And when we have our eyes closed and we’re horizontal, generally speaking, then there’s a number of events that can occur, and some of them, and we don’t use, typically in neuroscience, we don’t use the word dreaming.

We call it REM sleep, rapid-eye-movement sleep. In rapid-eye-movement sleep there are various neurological phenomena that are occurring.

When we look at the EEG that occurs, the electroencephalography that occurs during a dream, the electrical impulses that are measurable. It’s very fascinating. Very, very fascinating.

And the eyeballs move up and down behind the eyelids at rapid pace. And the reason they’re doing that is because during your dream, during your dreaming state, the REM sleep, the body is throwing off stresses because you’re resting quite deeply, and the stresses are being thrown off.

In the process of unstressing, lying down provokes the brain a little bit, and when the brain gets provoked, it wants you to wake up. But your brain has another agenda, which is to keep you asleep. And so your brain doesn’t want you to wake up.

These impulses of the release of information from a backlog of events, stresses that have occurred, the release of the information is organized into a component of a story, and your brain will create a story. That’s what a dream is.

[18:44] A Disjointed Story

And these stories happen at high speed. We don’t think they’re happening at high speed because our brain arranges it so they appear to be happening at regular speed, like we’re in the room right now. But they’re actually happening at high speed.

And there is such a thing as a screen of consciousness, like a movie screen, and you’re watching this story, but it’s moving fast.

You don’t think it’s moving fast. It’s made to look like it’s moving at normal speed, but in fact, it’s moving very fast. And the eyes go into rapid eye movement because you’re trying to watch all the components of the dream. The thing went over there and the person said this, and the person said like that, and the eyes are moving all around trying to watch it all at high speed.

The reason that that kind of dream is created is to keep you asleep while you’re unstressing. Your body wants to unstress, but your brain also wants you to stay sleeping, and so, to keep you from waking up, it turns it into a story.

Now, interestingly though, this sounds like very modern science. The first person to identify this and to demonstrate the truth of it is good old Sigmund Freud. And he was able to demonstrate the truth of this.

We’ve all had an experience some time in our life where something, some provocation was coming from the outside. Some sound, something was coming from the outside and you were asleep and you began dreaming something that was consistent with the sound.

And so the example that Freud gives is that somebody is on the neighboring rooftop to the home that you live in, and they’re hammering slates down onto the roof. Bang, bang, bang, bang, like that.

And your mind doesn’t want to hear that sound to wake you up. And so it invents a story.

“It’s my friend knocking on the door.” Bang, bang, bang. “My friend has come to take me fishing, and bang, bang, bang. They’re knocking on the door. Why is my friend knocking so loudly?”

And so there’s this kind of like invention of a story to explain the provocation.

The same thing happens in rapid-eye-movement sleep where unstressing, it provokes the brain, our brain doesn’t want us to wake up, and so it invents a story that connects this to this, to this, to this.

And in rapid-eye-movement sleep and these kinds of dreams, there’s always, disjointed is the nature of it.

“It’s very strange. You know, I was in one room talking to somebody, and then I turned and I looked through the door, and when I looked around, I wasn’t in that room anymore. And it wasn’t the same person I thought it was. It was somebody else.”

And there’s also a characteristic of futility.

“I’m trying to get something done and I can’t quite get the thing done, and I keep getting distracted and I’m trying to get the thing done, but I can’t quite get it done.”

And meanwhile, if you’re in a sleep lab, your eyes are doing this [waves hands], flapping around and behind the eyelids looking at all the elements of the story.

[22:17] Nighttime Cognitions

The other fascinating thing is, our guess about how long we were dreaming for.

People say, “I was dreaming all night. For hours I was dreaming that same dream.”

The maximum time a dream lasts is, maximum five minutes, usually more like 30 seconds to two or three minutes at the most. And then it’s over, but it feels like a long time because your brain has slowed it all down and you don’t realize that you’ve been watching a movie that was going at high speed. So it feels like ages.

That’s REM sleep. It’s not the only kind of nighttime cognition that may occur. So there are other things that are not REM sleep.

And we know this in neuroscience because we use a thing called an electrooculargram, EOC. It’s a silver, silver chloride electrode that’s glued near the eye, and then you put the EEG cap on the person, and you’ll let them fall asleep and you hope they’re going to start dreaming.

And the EEG will tell you if a person is waking inside and starting to experience something, and the EOC will tell you if rapid eye movement’s going on or not.

If the EEG is saying, this person is having a conscious, lucid experience, but there’s no rapid eye movement, then they’re having what we call a nighttime cognition.

And nighttime cognitions are not accompanied by rapid eye movement. Nighttime cognitions are people experiencing some deep inner truth.

And one of the reasons, the Vedic explanation for this, is that every time you’re about to change consciousness states, if you’re moving from sleep to dream, from dream back to sleep, from dream to waking or from sleep to waking, and especially if you’re moving from waking state into the sleep state, whenever there’s a transition between two states of consciousness, there’s a junction point.

And that junction point is the transcendental field. It may only last for a second, but you have to pass through the same place that you dive into in the depth of meditation. You have to pass through that zone, that junction point, before you can get to the next consciousness state.

On the approach to that, as you’re moving from one state of consciousness to the next, there can be cognitions, and a cognition is your mind putting everything into perspective.

And there are these aha moments. And they may also be accompanied by rather vivid or even lucid experiences that you’re having.

And if you’re lucky enough to be in a sleep lab while this is going on, the scientists will look at you and go, “Interesting. No rapid eye movement. This is not unstressing. This is cognition occurring.”

[25:39] Remembering Is Overrated

Now, the importance of remembering it is overrated.

People will often say, “Something happened in the night. It was amazing. I wish I could remember it.”

And my answer is, “It’s not important to remember it. There’s been a consciousness upgrade. Your consciousness has been made more replete, more complete. You knowing exactly how and in what way? You don’t need to know that in order for it to be true.”

It’s analogous to the way that you get up in the morning and you have your shower. If you’re a good Aussie, you have a shower in the morning, right? In some countries, they don’t do that. I know you can’t believe it, but they don’t.

So you get up in the morning, you have your shower, and then you’re feeling really good all day. You’re feeling good whether or not you go, “I had a shower this morning. I had a shower this morning. I’m fresh. I had a shower this morning. I’m fresh. I had a shower. You know how I got… you know what it is that made me fresh and all?”

You just had a shower, that’s all. And you can forget about the shower. You’re still going to be fresh all day.

We don’t need to remember or know what the download and the upgrade were in order to get the benefit from it. It may have caused a cognition to occur, and if so, the deed is done.

Your mind and your brain have been upgraded and you’re just going to find that over the next few days, you seem to have a greater wisdom. You seem to have a greater knowingness. You seem to have a greater equanimity in the face of change and all of that, because something happened in the night.

You get to have a little trace of it, but trying to remember it. Remembering it doesn’t make it better and not remembering it doesn’t deplete it in any way. It just was a thing that happened.

And so, we are indoctrinated about this memory thing. “Oh, I can’t remember.”

You say to somebody, “Can you remember the first time you spoke to your parents?”

And you’re like, “Oh, that’s a really good question. Let me think. No, I can’t remember it. How sad is that? Here I am able to talk eloquently and I can’t remember the first time I did it. How sad is that?”

It’s not sad. It doesn’t matter.

Maybe you went, instead of saying, “Wawa,” you said, “Water.” “Aahh wan wawa.” And then one day you said, “I want water.”

And your parents went, “Did you hear that?” And you can’t remember it. How sad? Come on, get over it. You ended up turning into an articulate human being who doesn’t say, “Aahh wan wawa,” anymore. Or if you do, get some help.

The fact that you can’t remember it doesn’t take it away from you. The fact that you can’t remember it doesn’t change the fact of the benefit that you get from it.

And we’re getting these cognitions all the time.

[29:14] Crossing Thresholds of Unboundedness

Now, as meditation progresses, because you go down deep and you touch that transcendental Unified Field consciousness with great regularity, every morning, every evening, every morning, every evening, like that, systematic, regular, then what happens is your brain begins to identify in the night, “Here’s a junction point coming up. I’m finishing with the waking state and I’m moving into sleep,” and suddenly everything starts going unbounded for a moment. And then that ends, and then sleep comes.

And then you’re moving from sleep into dreaming. You’re about to cross the threshold into dreaming, but you have to pass through the unboundedness again. And then cognitions can occur and then dreaming comes.

You end the dream and you’re about to cross the threshold back into sleep, and there’s another junction point and another cognition may occur.

And then of course, the final one, which is moving from sleep back into waking.

You become faintly aware, and you know, if you’ve traveled and you’re in a new place, you might be faintly aware and think, “Hang on, where am I?” It’s a beautiful moment, beautiful moment where you’re thinking, “What is this place?” And you have to allow it to assemble itself.

You’ve all been through that at various points, especially when traveling. “What is this place? Where am I? Where did I, where did I park my body? Oh, I can see this, I can see that. Oh, oh my God, I’m in an airplane.” Or whatever, wherever it turns out you were.

And so then crossing these thresholds, as your consciousness becomes more and more cognizant of opportunities to experience unboundedness, it’s going to exploit those at those thresholds. And there are many of them.

Sleep, waking to sleep transition, sleep to dreaming transition, dreaming back to sleep transition, and sleep from waking transition, crossing those thresholds, and gradually those thresholds open up.

They open up and get fatter, and you start having larger and larger cognition time in the night. And a state comes where that’s all that’s going on. The curtains have parted, and you’re experiencing the unboundedness from one junction point to the next.

The curtain of sleep is narrow, the curtain of dreaming very narrow, and you start to reveal what’s behind the curtains of waking, dreaming, and sleeping behind the…

[32:11] Vedic Meditators Lose the Need to Dream

Between the curtains are the junction points. There’s the transcendental field.

What if you move the curtains aside entirely? You experience that vast unboundedness all the time, and these curtains are no longer able to obscure it. You’re just experiencing that all the time. That’s enlightenment.

So nighttime cognitions tend to increase in meditators, and REM sleep tends to decrease in meditators.

This is also a very interesting thing. People who practice Vedic Meditation regularly have shorter episodic REM sleep, and progressively, over a period of years and even decades, it is eliminated. There’s no more REM sleep.

So meditators measured to… like a 15-year meditator, lying on the bed at the sleep clinic with the electrooculogram on, and their body’s resting incredibly deeply, no REM all night.

And in a regular person, that would be a problem because it means there’s no release. But the reason why there’s no release is there’s no backlog. You’ve depleted the inventory of stress. There’s no accumulated stress left.

But that person can still report having had experiences in the night, they can report, “I was having cognitions. I can’t really remember exactly what they were, but it’s something to do with this. Something to do with an owl. Something to do with whatever. I was having some cognitions.”

But you know, you might call it dreaming, but unless there was rapid eye movement, it wasn’t dreaming.

It’s all so fascinating.