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This section of my website examines states of consciousness sometimes considered to be “spiritual.” For example, it looks at questions surrounding dreams. Why are some dreams so clearly the result of that cramped limb that is turning numb while others reveal psychological tensions or insights and still others are legitimately prophetic of events that eventually occur? Is there some way of recognizing those differences soon after one awakens from a dream? How do dreams differ from other “spiritual” states of consciousness that occur when the person is awake, such as prayer or meditation? What endows me with the right to teach about such matters, other than a lifelong fascination with such questions and a great deal of reading on the subject? In answer to that last question, I share my personal experiences with various states of consciousness, including dreams, and how I learned to distinguish differences through those recurring phenomena.
Thanks to the philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650), most people think of the body and of the mind or soul or spirit as separate entities. They think of the body as physical and of thoughts, ideas, beliefs, images, and feelings as non-physical, existing in some way or ways separate from the body. They may admit to causal relationships, such as a feeling that makes one blush or an idea that makes the heart race, but physicality is a closed system of causes and effects: “causal closure.”
The notion of Cartesian duality allowed the Church to claim the “non-physical” as its domain and allowed science, specifically the science of medicine, to explore anatomy free of Church restrictions. That meant the dissections of cadavers could be viewed as not desecrating a human soul. Notions of the Divine were brought into the discussion and for almost 400 years anyone who wanted to think about human behavior ran into contradictory ideas and terminology because Cartesian dualism divided “religion” from “science.” These ideas became embedded in Church dogmas that further distanced logical thinkers from religion and made religious people suspicious of scientists.
When I was in university, it had become fashionable for intellectuals to declare themselves for atheism or, at least, for agnosticism. Religion was consigned to people who were branded as emotional, fuzzy-minded, mentally impaired, and delusional. They were mocked for “clinging” to false iconic notions for support in a storm of “reality” they could not otherwise cope with. However, these scathing critics overlooked the fact that psychology, with William James, arose as an intellectual discipline based in science that concerned itself with “mind” and behavior and that retained an interest in “spiritual” phenomena. James reminded scientists that they do not study the whole of reality.
Vague impressions of something indefinable have no place in the rationalistic system…. Nevertheless, if we look on man’s whole mental life as it exists …, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account of is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words…. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it.[1]
Psychiatry, as a specialty of medicine, remained tied to anatomy with great disdain for religion and attempted to strip “thoughts, ideas, beliefs, images, and feelings” of their religious and spiritual dimensions with a surprising lack of curiosity for the reality of human experience James observes. Of course, their greatest interest was in people with abnormal behavior and if they could not influence that behavior towards change (even by ruthless surgical methods) they looked for nefarious social causes (mothers, the Church, or the economy) or else declared the exceptional behavior “normal” (e.g., homosexuality) and aided and abetted the pretense of normality with drugs and surgery.
By such pretentious means, psychiatry has failed to discover the biological foundation of aberrant mental conditions that are comprised of abnormal “thoughts, ideas, beliefs, images, and feelings” or even of normal “thoughts, ideas, beliefs, images, and feelings.” Despite that gaping hole in the discipline, the churches have become resigned to the legal, political, and cultural power granted to psychiatry. Thus, the intimacy of the relationship between mind and body has been violated by psychiatry with the complicity of religious institutions.
I think we can lay to rest the Cartesian duality and restore the unity of the person, body and mind and soul, by understanding the physical basis in ear function of the differences between the two halves of the brain and what happens when they fail to integrate normally. This does not mean we abandon the notion of a soul that survives physical death. But we can bring much greater clarity into muddy waters in religion and in psychiatry. We can distinguish experiences generally considered “spiritual” by normal religious people from the confused thinking and behavior of schizophrenia and of less extreme forms of compromised rationality. We can bring greater rationality to psychiatry and to religion in their mutual interest in healing the whole person. The Tallman Paradigm resolves the notion of Cartesian duality. We can accomplish the healing of mental illnesses with Focused Listening to high-frequency music and we can understand how the right ear achieves left-brain dominance and increased speeds of integration according to the Tallman Paradigm. We have a neurological paradigm for understanding learning, memory, the development of self-control (maturation), differing states of consciousness, memory, and other biological processes.
This section of the website includes short stories of my personal experiences that illustrate human mental phenomena. Some of these experiences typically are deemed “spiritual.” Others are considered “creative” and natural to “artistic” people. Some are the result, in my case, of disciplined efforts to pray and “listen to God,” to listen to others and to myself in the ordinary sense and to pay attention to my state of awareness and to their states of consciousness. The learning that comes from those kinds of listening allows me to control my behavior according to the best of my present knowledge of what is good and right. Singing and listening to music has been and remains an integral part of my life.
While I use personal examples, the reader should not construe my experiences as exemplary or attaining to a high standard. I have known many people far more sensitive in these regards than I am and they come from a variety of religious traditions. Children, because their left-brain dominance is undergoing strengthening through the processes we call “learning,” also may experience the full range of types of dreams. These kinds of experiences are attainable by most people with fair-to-good left-brain dominance and they are inescapable for many people with low left-brain dominance, which is a state of consciousness close to sleep’s very low left-brain dominance. As all states of consciousness have neurological explanations (which I have had the honor and privilege of discovering), they normalize “spiritual” and “artistic” experiences, including prophetic awareness of events in future time. They show how rationality plays a part in these phenomena even in circumstances where the left-brain is barely dominant, as it is near sleep or in shallow sleep.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience