I
finished reading Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Chapter Seven in Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self called
“Parapsychological Pieces of the Synchronicity Puzzle” (p.72-83). I have never
had much experience with the paranormal, but one interesting point that Shinoda
Bolen makes is that psychic abilities often depend on a prior openness, an
ability to accept its possibility. She remarks, paraphrasing John Lilly, that
“We must transcend our own limiting beliefs in order to grow beyond them, or in
order to have the experiences which allow us to grow.” (p.76). I am curious to
know what might account for Shinoda Bolen’s observation (apparently backed by
evidence) that psychic experiences tend to increase among those who are ‘open’
to it. Just what does it mean to be ‘open’ to these kinds of experiences, and
how is this different from blindly following a belief or a desire to believe in
something?
I suppose the closest thing I have
had to understanding this is my very crude and basic stage of meditation.
Observing the mind, I can often see the fine line between expecting and
‘wanting to prove’ something as real or not, and simply cultivating an open
intention to allow possibilities to happen. And how easy it is to slide from
one mode to the next. If, for example, I am doing a guided relaxation and then hope to relax, that hope creates a sense
of time and causality. It anticipates a future result, and even sets up the
present experience to flow into its predicted result. It reminds me of this
article I once read about a fashion trend for kale. Kale was and still is seen as this super-healthy vegetable which
has the ability to prevent disease. At one time, people were so determined
to realize the nutritional and medicinal benefits of kale that they started
having kale ‘parties’ and exchanging kale recipes over the internet. Sooner or
later, a few skeptical doctors started to warn the kale movement that too much
of anything is not going to work out. And along comes the good old adage of
‘everything in moderation.’ It’s hard to say who is right in this situation,
the kale lovers who set up a great faith in the nutrients in kale, or the
skeptical doctors who advocate the Back to Usual. But both movements seem to
slide back to duality, back to the reaction to causality. And all this seems to
do is create a great debate.
I think that as soon as people start to talk about curative benefits, they set up a duality around something that ends up becoming a bit adversarial. Anything we expect to happen carries the risk of failed expectation and thus more tension. So when I go back to openness, I start to realize that the open attitude has to go beyond wanting something to have a direct benefit on something else. Perhaps Shinoda Bolen is suggesting that one can move beyond expectation with a shattering of the ego. But this too is not quite enough. There needs to be a symbolic rebirth that involves a surrender to the greater community of being and energy of mind, rather than trying to rely on simplistic and often opportunistic bids to influence the world in a specific desired way. From a Jungian perspective, Shinoda Bolen again evokes the notion of surrender to ‘higher’ being when she remarks:
“The hopeful expectancy that there is ‘something’ beyond the ego is based on that individual’s or humanity’s experience of ‘something’ greater than itself. This is the experience of the collective unconscious or of the power of the archetypal level, in which that ‘something greater’ is directly experiences in an intuitively felt way.” (p.80)
If anything, I think the best way to understand this is to take on a more playful perspective on experience, to tease out deeper meanings, rather than tensely awaiting for results that I expect to control or influence. This playful view waits receptively to understand and be fully with its desires and sufferings, rather than trying to neatly resolve them. In this way, the desire can be within me, beheld and even entertained, but always with the waiting for a deeper meaning to be reached, rather than trying to quickly fix the desire or satiate it.
A metaphor that might be useful here
is that the body is meant to receive energies from the universe, rather than
having to accumulate knowledge or solutions to perfect itself or its
experiences. In this way, I can be gently curious toward even painful
situations, wondering what the universe in its loving ways wishes to impart to
me: what kind of strength or understanding, what kind of compassion or wisdom I
might learn from it. But embedded in this view is the strong belief that experience always has a good intention.
References
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