Never to Return: A Modern Quest For Eternal Truth, Chapter 2: "Never to Return"

Illusions commend themselves to us
because they save us pain
and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.
We must therefore accept it without complaint
when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality
against which they are dashed to pieces.

– SIGMUND FREUD

Chapter Two

BEYOND THE UNIVERSE, NEVER TO RETURN

AT AGE SEVEN, I OPENED my mother's psychology course notebook to the first page and read: "The average person likes to believe he knows most of the time why he thinks, feels and acts as he does. Psychoanalysis holds this is not true. All the things we think, feel and do are largely dictated by the unconscious, over which we have little control."

My parents had just begun teaching psychology classes in their respective high schools. The bookshelves in our house quickly filled up with the hottest new psychological discourses: books on gestalt, transactional analysis, multiple personality, autism, dream symbolism, and more. For years, there would be a steady stream of new psychology books flowing through the shelves in our den. Even at age seven, I enjoyed reading the interesting ideas in these books.

And so, when my parents signed up to take a three-month course in hypnosis, I decided to take the class as well. I thought hypnosis would be a fun skill to learn. Even though the class was intended for adults, the instructor allowed me to participate. This course radically expanded my understanding of the mind, in terms of both its power and its vulnerability.

On the first day of class, our instructor, Paul, hypnotized a woman. He told her that his finger was a lit cigarette, and touched the tip of his finger to her arm. The woman winced with what was clearly a real sense of pain. It was disconcerting to see someone so uncomfortable for no reason at all. I didn't know whether to feel sorry for her or not.

The following week, the woman returned to class with a very normal-looking blister where the "lit cigarette" had touched her arm. I was amazed.

I realized in that moment that our experience of what is true or false, painful or pleasurable, may have absolutely nothing to do with what is really going on. How could I ever again be certain that any pain, even with physical evidence, is real?

A few weeks later, Paul hypnotized another woman and gave her a posthypnotic suggestion. He instructed her to jump up and down and act like a gorilla every time he said the word "Yes." He also told her that she would not remember being given the suggestion.

The woman came out of trance and walked back to her seat. One of the adults prompted Paul with a seemingly innocent question, while the rest of us watched with smirks of anticipation. As soon as Paul responded with the magic word, there she was, jumping up and down, doing a gorilla dance, complete with sound effects. The woman looked perfectly normal and well dressed, but she was acting absolutely nuts.

This demonstration of blind obedience had profound implications, and was entertaining to watch as well. But what shocked me most was the woman's response to seeing this ridiculous behavior coming out of herself. Here she was, in front of all these people, acting very strange, without any conscious explanation for her own bizarre behavior. She was, after all, acting like a gorilla.

I would have expected her response to be one of shock or confusion. "Why am I jumping up and down acting like a gorilla?" Maybe she'd figure out there had been a hypnotic suggestion. But no. The woman smiled nervously, and made up a completely lame excuse for her behavior. "I've always liked gorillas and when I get silly I like to act like them." Her mind filled in this blank space of irrationality just as proficiently as it fills in the blind spots of our visual fields – with false, manufactured information.

Without reading the latest neurophysiology research or the ancient texts of yoga, I learned at age seven that the world as we know it is a mirage. This nebulous process of life-experience is created and projected by our sensory receptors and mental creativity – it is the fairy-dust of illusion that makes us feel that what we experience is independently real, honest, and authentic.

The idea that I was in control of a stable world shattered, as I realized that whatever I think I know may have nothing to do with the way things really are. This intelligent woman actually believed that she had always acted like a gorilla when she felt silly. The other woman's skin had been burned by a cigarette that didn't even exist.

Because of my youth, this discovery may have impacted me more than my older classmates. At age seven I hadn't yet learned to ignore the implications of what I saw. I had not yet developed all the defense mechanisms we use to keep our world-views consistent, filters that make incongruous experiences palatable to our accepted belief systems. After all, at age seven our impressions of the world are constantly being usurped and updated by new information, new responsibilities, and new experiences. I was still in the foundation-laying stage of personality development and worldview creation. It wasn't so strange for me to see shocking new evidence that forced me to rethink my belief system – it happened all the time.

After witnessing these hypnosis demonstrations, I understood that even experiences that seem to be coming from the external world might be created solely by my mind. Many years later, I would rediscover this idea in the scriptures of Indian philosophy. "Ya drishti, sa srishti: the world is as you see it."

According to this principle of “Ya drishti, sa srishti,” the creation we perceive manifests according to our vision. "The world is as you see it" goes beyond the prevalent notion that if we are pessimistic or in a bad mood, we will see things as being worse than they are. "Ya drishti, sa srishti" means, "As your vision is, so this creation is." It takes the "are" out of "seeing things as they are." There is only the process of seeing – “I think, therefore I am,” and “I think, therefore everything is.” According to these ancient scriptures, the one who sees is not ultimately separate from that which is seen.

This is a difficult concept to grasp. Physicists who study quantum mechanics have been trying to do so for decades, having discovered that the very act of viewing affects and changes what is being observed.

After witnessing a glimpse of this understanding in that hypnosis class at age seven, I realized that much of what I experienced in this world was created by my mind, literally. I knew that things were not the way people thought they were. With this newly developed view of life, I could also see that many people were getting themselves totally wrapped up in nonsensical dramas – struggling to put out painful, burning cigarettes that were, in reality, nothing but benign fingers. With this hypnosis demonstration, I peeked through the veil of illusion, at least a bit.

At one point during the three-month hypnosis course, we split off into pairs for a practice session in hypnotizing one another. My partner was an older man (although at age seven, anything over twenty was considered "old"!). We went into a separate room so I could put him into a trance.

I used all the techniques we had been studying, and to my excitement, the man started showing signs of going under. His facial muscles relaxed and his eyelids closed without fluttering at all. His breathing became deep and even. I walked him down the imaginary staircase into his unconscious mind. "You're going deeper and deeper...."

The man started to repeat everything I would say, in a very monotone voice. It was like a good cartoon. He was in a hypnotic trance and under my power!

I was amazed and proud of myself. I had actually hypnotized somebody. But then, the man began to improvise. "Going deeper and deeper, beyond the world...."

Well, this was strange – beyond the world? Our teacher hadn't prepared us for a runaway subject. I later found out that the man had been practicing self-hypnosis for some time. Once I brought him to the threshold of his subconscious mind, his familiar methods had kicked in. But at the time, I had no idea what was happening, and was starting to get a little scared about this man’s unexpected side journey. He continued to drone, "Deeper and deeper...beyond the earth; beyond the galaxies; past the universe... never to return."

I frantically tried to bring him back with my squeaky 7-year-old voice. "Back to the universe, back to the galaxies, coming back to earth!" I didn't want the rest of the class to think I was too young to do it right. My hope was to bring him out of trance quickly, before anyone else knew what had happened.

But he continued, "Far beyond the galaxy. Beyond the universe. Never to return."

I ran to get the instructor! It took Paul more than ten minutes to bring the man back to his normal consciousness.

That night I lay in bed, thinking about all that had happened. I contemplated my fear that this man would get lost somewhere out in the universe, and a question boomed through my awareness: "Where did he go?" It appeared that this man's mind was not in his body, yet he was somewhere. According to the evidence before me, he had apparently traveled out into the universe, at least in his own mind.

While lying there contemplating all this, I felt myself rise up out of myself. Just by imagining this man's journey out into the universe, I was able to see stars as well. The vision was similar to science films that pull back from a spot on earth, expanding by powers of ten through the solar system, galaxy and universe. But I had never seen any such films at the time, and had no real context through which to understand the experience.

Nevertheless, this was another momentous realization for me. A new possibility entered into my worldview: that our minds have the ability to expand far beyond the body, in a way that feels experientially real.