sentient meat.
Patanjali also gave step-by-step instructions for what might be called omniscience, as well as the quiet mind. He taught that if one wants to see the moon reflected in a pool of water, one must wait until every ripple is stilled. So it is with mind. He wrote that “yoga (union with God) is mind-wave quieting” and is a first step to either transcendence or knowing God. Achieving omniscience doesn’t mean we can know everything. But by asking one question at a time, we can know anything we need to know. It is important to remember that these teachings are not aimed merely at self-improvement; they are designed as a guide to self-realization, or the discovery of who we are. There is a recurring Buddhist caution that “no powers are sought before wisdom” (or liberation from the illusion of who we are). That is, although you may feel that omniscience is coming on, don’t get attached to it!
Western spiritual seekers of truth can choose to consciously cultivate what Eastern spiritual traditions describe as mindfulness by developing what can be called “an intimacy with stillness.” In Andrew Harvey’s book The Essential Mystics, he asserts that we may discover that true spirituality is not about passive escape from earthly living but, rather, spirituality is about active arrival here “in full presence.” He describes the experience of oceanic love that is available to the quiet mind:
It always transcends anything that can be said of it, and remains always unstained by any of our human attempts to limit or exploit it. Every mystic of every time and tradition has awakened in wonder and rapture to the signs of this eternal Presence and known its mystery as one of relation and love.25
Limitless Mind is an invitation to experience this loving syrup, beyond romance. Although a body can definitely be a vehicle of transformation, love in the Buddhist sense is not about bodies; it is wisdom wedded to compassion. To take the first step toward residing in this state of loving awareness, the Dzogchen master Longchenpa teaches that we must move out of our daily acquiescence to conditioned awareness and learn to become aware of, and head in the direction of, timeless existence. Conditioned awareness is a distortion of our daily perceptions and experience that is caused by all the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” that we have suffered during the entire course of our lives. Almost all spiritual teachings tell us — often to our annoyance — that these experiences are merely illusions. What we are striving for is disillusionment. Conditioned awareness is the crazy-making process of focusing one’s anxious and fearful attention on the future, while feeling guilt over the past, and missing out entirely on the present.
A Course in Miracles, which I discuss in the final chapter, explains that by “illusion” we refer to the fact that we subconsciously give all the meaning there is to everything we experience — usually based on something in the past. Things happen, and we then have an opportunity to experience them with naked and unprejudiced awareness, or we can push the events through our filter bank and assign meaning in accordance with today’s set of fears, judgments, and agitation.
One of the important repeated teachings of Dzogchen is that samsara (everyday material existence in the “rat race”) is the same as nirvana (the blissful state of surrendered loving awareness). How could this be? My understanding of this paradox is that they are both simply ideas held in the mind. As ideas, one is no more real that the other. Like any idea, fearful or pleasant, it can be released to float away and pop like a soap bubble. Although these teachings were elaborated in the eighth century, they have great currency today, even in the engrams of Freudian psychoanalysis. Engrams are buried memories of traumas, abuse, or indoctrinations that give rise to our subconscious fears, prejudices, and reactions, and which constantly give meaning and color to our experience — without our knowing why.
The spontaneously awakened Dzogchen master Garab Dorjé taught what he knew by direct experience: that our awareness is nonlocal and unlimited by space and time. All of us today can know this truth, based on the data of psychics and parapsychology. But my hope and reason for writing this book is to encourage you to personally investigate the divine opportunity for direct experience of free and timeless awareness.
The reward for embarking on a mind-quieting path is a profound feeling of personal freedom and spaciousness. You will recall that, 2,400 years ago, our friend Patanjali said that quieting the mind is the same as union with God. It still seems to be true today.
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT REMOTE VIEWING
Remote viewing is not a spiritual path, but such psychic functioning is a step in the direction of conscious awareness — nonlocal mind revealing itself for us to see.
Over time, I have sat in a darkened interview room with hundreds of remote viewers as they shared their mental pictures with me. It is a fact that people can experience a mind-to-mind connection with each other. They can also expand their awareness to describe and experience what is happening in distant locations. Fifty years of published data from all over the world testify to this.
In the fall of 1972, Dr. Hal Puthoff and I started a psychic research program at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). We were both laser physicists who had carried out research for a variety of U.S. government agencies for many years.1 Our great partner and teacher in the SRI program was the New York artist and highly respected psychic Ingo Swann. Ingo introduced Hal and me — and the world — to remote viewing. Actually, the chain of events went like this: Ingo taught us about remote viewing, we taught the army, and the army taught the world.2 The history of our program is described in several books, including Miracles of Mind.3
At the time when we began our psi research program, Hal had already carried out a remarkable experiment with Ingo. In this trial, Ingo was able to psychically describe and affect the operation of a highly shielded superconducting magnetometer buried in the basement of the Stanford University physics building. (This gave rise to the first of many government inquiries into our activities.)
As a result of this trial, Hal and I began to further investigate remote viewing, as any physicist would. We put a laser in a box and we asked Ingo to tell us whether it was on or off. We asked him to describe pictures that were sealed in opaque envelopes or hidden in a distant room. He did all these tasks excellently, but he found them boring. He eventually told us that if we didn’t give him something more interesting to do, he was going back to New York to resume his life as a painter. He said that if he wanted to see what was in an envelope, he would open it; to see into the next room, he would simply open the door. Since he could focus his attention anywhere in the world (as he told us more than once), these experiments were a trivialization of his ability! By the end of the decade, we’d given Ingo many opportunities to psychically view the world and beyond.
By the beginning of 1974, Hal and I had carried out more than fifty formal remote viewing trials at SRI, most of which were low-key experiments with little publicity. However, in 1973 we carried out a series of experiments with the now-famous Israeli psychic Uri Geller that brought us a fair amount of notice. During the year when we worked with Uri, who demonstrated remarkable telepathic ability, our tiny program was responsible for more than half the publicity received by the $100-million SRI. We published our findings from the work with Uri in the distinguished British science journal Nature,4 and as a result the SRI psychic research activity gained worldwide attention.
