Never to Return: A Modern Quest For Eternal Truth, Chapter 5: "Exploring the Unconscious"

NEVER TO RETURN:

A MODERN QUEST FOR ETERNAL TRUTH

A Multimedia Spiritual Adventure Memoir
by Sharon Janis

Men do not know themselves,
and therefore they do not understand
the things of their inner world.
Each man has the essence of God
and all the wisdom and power
of the world in himself.

Chapter Five

EXPLORING THE UNCONSCIOUS

AT AGE SEVENTEEN, the time for freedom arrived. My mother and stepfather drove me to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I would be living in a dorm room on the north campus with a very sweet, conventional girl from Delaware. Though we got along well, I'm sure Mary Jo often wondered about her unusual roommate. While she was out enjoying the college life, I would sit in our room for hours at a time, with my eyes closed, playing my newest game.

Freed of the family constraints and stresses that had kept me in a state of perpetual anxiety for so long, I now had the independence to decide who and what I would be. My first interest was to learn more about my mind and the reality it presented to me. I began to use the self-hypnosis techniques learned at age seven to explore my inner consciousness.

Every day, I would sit in the dorm room and turn my mental focus inward for hours at a time. I'd begin by using the standard techniques for putting myself into a hypnotic trance state, but then something strange would happen. I would enter into a state of mind completely different from any other I had known. I could sometimes feel the physical energy patterns of my brain shift as this opening took place. There I would sit with eyes closed, watching as new understandings began to move through my awareness like a flowing river of insights.

These exploration sessions became more important than anything else in my life. From the space of this higher perspective, it felt as though everything I had been calling and thinking of as "the world" was in fact just the baby fingertip of the real, whole, universal world. It was all so big, so full, so rich and symphonic. Delving deeper into the uncharted waters of my own consciousness, I began to withdraw my attention more and more from the "outer" world, becoming even more reclusive than usual. Although I was still able to maintain an outer facade of social chitchat with my schoolmates, I didn't even try to discuss with them the grand spaces I was accessing inside myself during these inner journeys. These experiences seemed to have no place in the outer world, especially in those "pre-New Age" days of the late 1970’s.

With these meditative sessions, my notion of self also began to shift. Through introspection, I began to see my personality not so much as a solid entity, but more as a biological system made up of tissues and cells of personalities. At times, I'd see tendencies of my family members expressing through me, or reflections of old friends laced through what I had previously considered to be my behavior. It seemed as though human personality in general was a series of mirrors, receiving and reflecting back patterns of thought and character features of everything and everyone around us.

While becoming less identified as a specific set of opinions and behaviors, I began to watch as my personality spontaneously adjusted itself to whomever I was with. Their nature would resonate with my mass of personality potential, evoking from it aspects that resonated with their own. While chatting with scholars, I would find myself speaking with a more intellectual flair. While hanging out with art students, my eccentricity would be more noticeable. I was sometimes able to learn about a person just by the tendencies, thoughts and speech patterns their presence would elicit inside myself. I was discovering what some ancient texts call "the power of company."

From age seven, I had studied my parents' psychology books religiously. Many of them dealt with multiple personality syndrome. I had found this area to be the most fascinating of all. Several personalities could apparently live inside one body. They would have different voice patterns, different allergies, different talents and abilities. Some would need glasses, while others didn't. One woman even had three menstrual cycles every month, one for each personality. Now there's a good incentive to get healed!

Now, with deep introspection, I began to see a less dramatic version of this kind of fragmentation in myself and in other people. My friends and parents were not just individual, solid objects – each was a symphony of personality potentials, with various tendencies becoming predominant at different times. I liked some parts of them, and disliked others. I also liked some parts of myself better than others.

Delving into the previously subconscious layers of my psyche, it became clear to me that personality is inherently multiple. For example, I was no longer the same personality I had been as a child, though there seemed to be an essential palette of colors from which all my various character tendencies had been drawn. I watched as my fellow students would get drunk during our dorm parties, acting completely different from how they acted in class. If I was feeling confident and supported in a group, my personality might expand into being the life of the party; whereas other times I might appear to be very serious and indrawn. My internal and external responses to any particular event could also shift drastically depending on my "mood."

Through this contemplation, I came up with a new view of personality. It wasn't that those who suffered from multiple personality disorder had grown an entire biological structure that had nothing to do with that of a so-called normal person. The thread that created and maintained personality consistency appeared to be dependent on memory storage and retrieval. In the case of someone with multiple personality disorder, the various aspects of themselves were no longer communicating with one another – they were hoarding memories.

I continued to observe my thought processes with a more objective eye, breaking down what I had thought of as me into more organized components. No longer was "I happy" or "I sad" or "I sleepy" or "I enthusiastic." The mirage of “I” opened up, revealing countless levels of physical, electrical, chemical, and ethereal processes that were projecting all these experiences into the stillness of nonidentification.

A few warning bells did go off as I began to peel back the layers of personality to investigate the inner workings of consciousness. Did I really want to do this? I was tampering with some delicate frameworks, the foundations of reality, and there was nobody who I could even discuss any of this with. I was sneaking into "programmers-only" territory of the human psyche. What if I went over the edge and ended up institutionalized, or babbling some abstract phrase for the rest of my life? Did I really want to know more than the people around me?

These concerns only arose when I thought about the situation with my rational mind. From the other side of higher consciousness, I knew that these inner explorations were more important than anything else in my life.

Around this time, I stopped smoking cigarettes – a habit since age twelve. Suddenly, with my taste buds no longer numbed by nicotine, previously bland vegetables started to taste delicious. It turns out that I’d been paying for this habit not just financially or with my smoker's cough, but even with the enjoyment of flavors. This newfound appreciation for vegetables, coupled with the fact that the meat dishes in our dorm cafeteria looked quite unappetizing, inspired me to become a vegetarian.

I wish the word "vegetarian" had been around during my childhood, when I resisted eating animal meat and was often punished for my refusal. The idea of gnawing flesh and veins off the ribs and breasts of animals was repulsive to me. As a child, I hadn't come up with a list of reasons why eating animals was wrong. The idea didn't seem to require any justification. It was as obvious to me as if I had landed on an island where the natives regularly sliced and gobbled up roasted human flesh.

Nonetheless, during my childhood, it was not acceptable for someone to be a vegetarian. There were no such things as veggie-burgers or tofu-dogs. This was Michigan in the 1960’s – everyone ate meat. You had to eat meat; it was not a choice. So I came up with a rule. Whenever possible, I would eat meat that was well disguised, such as in hamburgers or sandwiches, and aside from a few exceptions, I refused to eat flesh off of animal bones.

Now I was in college and could make my own decisions. I swiftly became a vegetarian. Years later I would discover that many people in India are vegetarian, based on the idea that a non-meat diet is not only compassionate, but beneficial for meditation and yoga as well. Maybe the intuition made available by my inward focus had guided me to make this spontaneous dietary change that would allow me access to even more subtle recesses of my mind.

During my sessions of sitting quietly in my dorm room, I continued to move more deeply into my inner thought-structures, world-views, and physical sensations. Sometimes I could experience the functions within my body, such as my heart beating and my stomach working to digest food. I could feel the peristalsis in my intestines, and the blood pumping through my body and into different areas of my brain. Once I experienced a clear visualization of my stomach churning like a factory to digest and process all the food I had just eaten. This image gave me chills whenever I'd eat for some time afterwards. In spite of a reasonably good education in human physiology, somehow my practical experience of eating was more along the lines of throwing food down some nondescript hatch, to go who knows where?

During this time, I also became intrigued by the physiological aspects of psychology, personal experience, and behavior as it manifests through the physical brain. I started visiting the University of Michigan’s Medical Library to read more detailed scientific literature about the electrochemical interactions that create personal experience. This field of study brought reality down to shockingly basic terms. In a physiological context, vision is simply the triggering of a series of receptors and translators of information, which combine with stored memory information in other parts of the brain to create an internal experience of external images. All visual experiences we have of the outside world are, in fact, made up only of images being created within our own brain – selected reflections and interpretations of whatever is really “out there.”

This new way of looking at the world was fascinating to me. I enjoyed the idea that this entire universe I knew could somehow be boiled down to the cellular level of my own brain functions. As a seeker of truth, I wanted to unravel the mystery of personal experience, and I was willing to battle my own limited concepts to do it. Armed with a bit of knowledge about the mechanisms behind sense experience and mental structure, I began to notice and pinpoint various processes as they occurred in my brain and in my field of experience.

Once, while eating an apple in this state of focus and heightened awareness, I was able to separate the individual textures, flavors and smells from the mirage we commonly refer to as the experience of eating an apple. I could taste the starchiness of the apple and feel its potato-like texture on my tongue. I could discern and separate the fructose sugars woven through it; I could detect the importance of smell in creating this experience of "eating an apple." Through personal experiments such as this, I began to separate sensation into its more basic components.

I was also able to manufacture the semblance of experience internally. Once, I decided to fast for three days on water mixed with lemon and honey. During the fast, while continuing my daily practice of sitting quietly, I decided to try an experiment, I created a huge, delicious meal in my mind.

Through conscious imagination, I was able to orchestrate the various aspects of my brain to create a realistic experience of eating. I sat there during all three days of tis fast, eating the most wonderful foods. I was surprised to find myself eating even more delicious meals in my mind than I had eaten in real life. Everything tasted exactly the way I liked it. Each spice was in balance, and every crust was perfectly crispy. Each dish was a combination of all the specific elements I liked most about that food, and on top of all that, the experience felt quite real! This might be what it would be like to eat a favorite meal in heaven. With the physical element removed, there was just the internal image-maker, who fools and entertains us every night with the convincing images and experiences of our dreams.

The same creative mechanism that makes our dreams sometimes feel even more real than the waking state is what I seem to have tapped into while eating these "astral" meals. It was the essence of the best experiences I remembered from previous meals – that's what I was eating, the essence of my own memories. It was a quick hop from there to the topic of pleasure.

One psychology article I read told of experiments where mice would be left in a cage with two levers. One lever would directly stimulate the pleasure centers in the mouse's brain, while the other would bring food into the cage. The mice invariably starved to death. They chose pleasure over food, even though they could have had both.

As I gained more awareness and control over my brain, I wondered how I could make this exploration more fun. Well, I could explore the nature of pleasure. I could learn to stimulate my own pleasure centers without using any wires or levers. Surely, based on everything I knew about the brain, it was possible to use one's will to create experience at its root level – pleasure without an external cause. If the energy of electrodes could elicit pleasure from a mouse's brain, why not the energy that comes with attention and willpower?

I knew from study and from personal experience that eliciting and remembering a pleasurable memory would also bring back many of the chemical, hormonal and brain patterns associated with that pleasant experience. Surely mental intention could also stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain, through increased blood circulation and oxygen, or another, unknown process. If that woman in the hypnosis class I took at age seven could form a big blister on her arm because she thought the teacher's finger was a lit cigarette, then what should be so difficult about eliciting a little bit of pleasure?

I practiced stimulating my pleasure centers at will. It worked surprisingly well. While sitting completely still, I would start to feel a blissful throbbing in my body. It was the sensation of pleasure itself, unqualified, without an object. Everything felt good. The air meeting the surface of the skin on my arms felt like a lover's touch. The sensation of air moving in and out with my breath brought waves of ecstasy.

I began to enjoy this game more and more. In fact, pleasure took over as my main motivation for turning within. Alas, human nature, like mouse nature, can be fickle. We may start doing something for a noble reason, such as the desire to explore the unconscious, but then we get sidetracked by some pleasure. This is probably why the yoga scriptures warn seekers not to be distracted on their journey toward self-realization by all the amazing inner experiences and supernatural powers that may pop up along the way. These are considered as potential traps for those who aspire to attain higher states of awareness.