Personal Note: A Childhood Dream of God

In the summer of 1966, the final dream of a lazy summer morning had just ended. Twelve-year-old Cyd sat up in bed and looked at her right hand. It was hot and glowing red. Fifty years later, she's still writing about that dream.

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I am flying through the night sky with Jesus--like He's Superman in a white robe and I'm Lois Lane in pyjamas. The air is warm, the wind is brisk. I feel safe and cozy, nestled in His arm. We pass quickly over the neighboring foothills and come upon our destination a few miles away.  

Hundreds or thousands of people are waiting in a line that snakes up a hill. Each person holds a burning torch. I expect to be deposited at the end of the line, but Jesus carries me up the hillside, past all those people, to the front of the line. He sets me down and stands close behind me, His hands resting on my shoulders. I am not afraid because of His reassuring presence.

In front of us is a small table. On the table is a brass fire pit, hot with red glowing coals. Behind the table sits an old man, maybe God.

Jesus, with his hands still upon my shoulders, says to God, "It's alright. She's with me."

God nods and reaches across the table and takes my right hand. He places a burning hot coal from the fire pit in my right hand. I can feel the great heat, but it does not hurt, and my hand is not burned. God seems satisfied, as if I had passed some sort of test. He releases my hand and waves me through to a door I hadn't noticed before, set into a brightly lit wall behind the table.

Jesus gives my shoulders a loving squeeze and releases me to go through the door. I enter unafraid.

"3-D Matrix Screensaver"

I am in a long corridor, with many doors opening off of it to either side. The first room to my left looks like a waiting room. I poke my head in the door and see someone I recognize as my dad sitting on the sofa, even though he appears to look exactly like Larry Hagman as the astronaut in the television show, "I Dream Of Jeannie." He's even wearing Maj. Nelson's dress-blue uniform with the eagle and ribbons on the chest.

Larry Hagman as Maj. Nelson

"Oh! It's you!" I say in surprise. Happy to see him. He smiles and nods at me.

I go on down the hall, leaving him there. I open the next door I come to on the left.

It seems odd, but when I step out of the hall through the door I am not in another room, but appear to be outside of somewhere else. It's daytime here, bright and warm. This is small village of simple huts. I think maybe I'm in rural Mexico. I enter one of the huts.

Now I realize I must not be in Mexico but in Israel, because there is a young woman in the hut, sitting in a rocking chair nursing a baby, and they look a lot like the Madonna and Child. There is a box sitting on a crude, handmade table in the hut. I cross the room to look into the box and recognize my clothes are in there. I suddenly notice I am naked and I take my roughly hand-loomed tunic out of the box and put it on. Yes, this is mine.

I turn and exit the hut. Rather than exiting into the village, the door out of the hut puts me directly back into the long, bright corridor.

I am near the end of the corridor now. I open and enter another door, and unexpectedly find myself outside the building, back out in the night air. I turn around to see the building, and it is higher on the hill than where I now stand.

The building glows a very bright white. Its sides do not form a square, but a continuously changing polyhedron. First it's a regular pentagon; now it has more sides; now it has more; now less; etc. The effect of the continuously changing number of facets is that the building shimmers then pulses as the walls change their number.

No sign of the other people and the torch-lit procession anymore. Maybe I am on the other side of the building from them. My hand is really hot from that coal.

I wake up in bed. My hand is hot. I sit up and look at it. My right hand is hot and red. My left hand is not.

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I wrote this dream down when it was fresh, and I still have that piece of paper. Though the memory of the dream was crystal clear, much of the meaning was beyond my ability to discern at the time. I did, however, recognize Jesus as an old and dear friend and my adored Guru, and He has remained close to me from that day to this. When I wish to sense His Presence, I feel hands on my shoulders and there He is, just behind me.

Over the years, I have studied dreams and various arts of dream interpretation, partly motivated by the need to understand my own childhood dreams. Here is a quote from a scholarly article of mine on dreams, published in the journal Janus Head. You can read the entire article at Janus Head:

Dreams, as a form of proto-rhetoric that occurs largely outside our volitional control, can be thought of as constituting a kind of meditative thought largely free from calculative thinking. Viewing dreaming as a form of meditative thinking may help to explain both the unbridled creativity of dream imagery and dreaming's rhetorical appeal as a "call of conscience" leading to personal growth. Michael J. Hyde proposes that Heidegger's "call of conscience" is rhetorical in that "we are called upon to assume the personal and ethical responsibility of affirming our freedom through resolute choice" (1994, 376). Hyde explains that Dasein's openness to hearing the call of its own potentiality-for-Being is essential to becoming what it will be, for the appeal is delivered in silence: "the discourse of the conscience never comes to utterance" (Heidegger, 1962, 342-43). In order to hear that silent appeal, calculative thinking with its willful deliberation must be overshadowed by meditative thinking's "releasement toward things" (Gelassenheit), a "letting go" of practical concerns (Heidegger, 1966, 54-56, 58f). I would like to suggest that the dream may be one such avenue through which the "discourse of the conscience" may be heard, for the dreamer's lack of control over dream content reflects this necessary "letting go." The dreams' rhetorical appeal may then be seen as Dasein's inherent responsiveness to the call to personal and ethical responsibility. But this call of conscience will go unheeded unless the dreamer takes the further step of hermeneutic analysis and authentic application.

(Ropp, Cyd C., A Hermeneutic and Rhetoric of Dreams, Janus Head, http://www.janushead.org/3-1/cropp.cfm )

By this time in my life, the symbology in this childhood dream seems pretty clear. This is an archetypal dream with many archetypal figures--Christ the Savior, God the Father, Madonna and Child--and archetypal situations--judgment, torch-lit procession, shining fortress on a hill, the long, white corridor with many doors.

Here's how I would interpret this dream. First we'll associate meanings to the dream's metaphors: 

• Flying--freedom, soaring above troubles, soaring above this world
• Flying With Jesus--Absolute Freedom, Spiritual Journey, Trust, Death
• hills--obstacles, troubles, difficult to climb
• the line of people with torches--Judgment Day, Souls, each soul's light
• going to the front of the line--Salvation through Christ, shortcut to judgment
• Jesus behind me, hands on me--love, embraced, safety, has my back, my friend, reassuring presence
• God--the Judge, listens to Jesus, personally judges each person, I am not afraid because I'm with Jesus
• the firepit--judgment through fire, heat
• hot but not burned--judgment passed, trials need not be painful, trust that it will be alright
• the door in the shining wall--passage between spheres, into death, into life, into heaven
• the long white corridor with many doors--passage from one place to the next, choices, timeless threshhold
• My dad/Maj. Nelson--my dad worked at an air force base in missle programs; looked like Maj. Nelson, this friend will be my dad
• village huts--crude but effective, human made dwellings, primitive humans
• Madonna and Child--archetypal mother and nursing child, mother's love, motherhood, peaceful
• my clothes in the box--clothing my naked soul in my meme bundles and karma, covering my nakedness with old, crude garments, my clothes/the box/the motherhood setting--preparing for physical birth
• near the end of the corridor--timelessness about to end, choices constrained
• unexpectedly outside--not in control, fall from grace, removed to the world, out in the dark again
• the sparkling, faceted, ever-changing walls--the Heavenly City, New Jerusalem, God's presence on earth, Heaven in our midst
• hand is hot--lessons from judgment day learned and carried forward, karma

Now we'll look at the interpreted side of the dream rather than the metaphors and see what emerges:

This seems to be a dream about the place in between life and death. My Christian belief system obviously informs the metaphorical symbology. Jesus can be viewed as the Christ principle in the abstract, but in this dream my relationship with Jesus was personal. He felt to me like my friend, my Master, my Sat-Guru. I remembered Him from an earlier time, and I was happy to be with Him and under His care. Judgment did not come at His hands, but from the Father through fire. Through the reassuring presence of my Master, I was able to pass through the fire of judgment unharmed.

In the dream I recognized my earthly father in the waiting room. Was I being shown who my father in this incarnation was to be? If this was my father's soul, then this would have also been prior to his own birth, as well. It was as though we were being informed of each other's upcoming role--"oh! it's you!"

And while I was shown an archetypal mother and child, I did not recognize this as my earthly mother. Had she not been selected yet? If that was the case, then this dream was surely of an earlier time, since by the time of this dream I would have known my mother. In the abstract, the mother and child's proximity to my box of clothes makes the interpretation of impending birth strong.

Recognizing and putting on the clothes is such an interesting metaphor. There was no hesitation in throwing on those clothes. This attraction to the clothes demonstrates how easily our souls jump into familiar material forms. And, once clothed in those old memes and karma, rebirth is swift, inevitable, and out of your control.

Lastly, those sparkling, ever-changing faceted walls of the Heavenly City marks the first appearance in my personal mythology of the torus. When I looked up at the place I had been, aside from the changing facets of the walls, the general building shape was toroidal. (Toroidal in the same way you could say the building known as the Pentagon is toroidal.)

A Simple Explanation of Transpersonal Memory

Transpersonal psychology deals with mystical and spiritual experiences of the human psyche. "Transpersonal memory" is defined as memories that are shared at a cultural level, rather than a personal level. Transpersonal memories reveal themselves in many ways, through societal archetypes and archetypal dreams, through sub-conscious assumptions, stereotypes, and expectations, and through strange occurances such as the "100th Monkey" phenomenon.


Jung referred to this transpersonal memory as the collective unconscious. Here Jung is quoted in Wikipedia:  “My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness . . . there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is  identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.” [C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (London 1996) p. 43

Again from Wikipedia: "Jung also made reference to contents of this category of the unconscious psyche as being similar to Levy-Bruhl's use of collective representations or "représentations collectives," Mythological "motifs," Hubert and Mauss's "categories of the imagination," and Adolf Bastian's "primordial thoughts."

The Simple Explanation refers to these collective memories as culturally shared "memes" and "meme chords."   A person can be defined by the memes they cling to. To a large extent, one's memes shape one's personality.

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has written extensively about, and staked his professional reputation upon, a scientifically controversial process called "morphogenetic fields." How does an oak tree develop from an acorn? By information carried in the morphogenetic field surrounding the acorn. Sheldrake explains that morphogenetic fields are to life forms what quantum probability clouds are to sub-atomic particles, carrying the information that gives rise to particular biological manifestations of form.

The Simple Explanation would site these morphogenetic fields at the zero-point field at the center of the toroid, part of the metaversal information streaming into our universe through our universal unit of consciousness, tempered by the organism's karmic record and acquired memes. In the case of the acorn and the oak tree, the morphogenetic field of the oak tree provides the genetic blueprint, while the mama tree's karma and memes provide the individualized epigenetic pattern that tells which genes to turn on and off. What karma can a tree have? Its karma is the record of its life--nutrients, history of water availability, pest attacks, and so on. What memes can a tree hold? "The sun feels good on my leaves; must follow the sun."



In an article published in the journal In Context, Robert Gilman ties together morphogenetic fields and personal memories by describing how the memories generated by our brains "are not locked in your brain, but are available throughout all space and all future time!" through the process of morphogenetic resonance. Gilman claims that not only is our biological form influenced by these fields, but our behavior as well, as shared memories influence behavior.

The Simple Explanation agrees with Sheldrake and Gilman that personal memories do not reside in the meat portion of our brains, but are vibratory patterns held in the zero-point field, and accessed through our minds. Furthermore, apparently personal memes are actually harmonics of collective memes and are shared in common with all who hold onto that meme. The particular shadings of one person's meme differs slightly from the next person's, as is to be expected among fractal replications  of a single phenomenon, but all who hold it recognize its pattern and are affected by it.

More Toroidal Forces

I recently realized I had a couple more toroidal motions to add to those illustrated in the article "Drawings of Toroidal Forces, Universal Forces"; those of spirals and sectional rings. I've gone back to the original article cited above and added the following to it.

The Spiral

Flowing inward from the rim of the funnel, then spiraling into ever smaller arcs as the funnel narrows.

In the illustration above, metaversal information (depicted as green spiral) swirls toward the zero-point field of instantiation (white starburst).

Entering our Universe and emanating outward from the middle, this proto-force appears in several forms--as the the centrifugal forces of outwardly radiating spirals, the centripetal vortex of whirlpools and tornados, and the entwined embrace of helices such as DNA and vines.

The Pole and the Spiral

We can now combine two fundamental motions to form a common metaphysical image--that of the caduceus.

Here's the Pole of the toroid going straight through the middle:

Here's the caduceus formed from two entwined spirals and one pole.

Cross-Sectional Rings
Another toroidal force is that of the rings that individually encircle the torus "tube." As in the illustration below, these rings are furthest from each other at the hemisphere and funnel toward one another to pass through the same point or zero-point at the middle.

These looping circles express themselves into our universe through objects such as fruit sections, solar loop circuits, and fractal rings.

Field Inside an Air Core Toroid Coil

A Simple Explanation of the Tao Te Ching -- Verse 21

Prior to reading this post, please acquaint yourself with "Start Here: A Simple Explanation--Basic Principles" in the column on the right side of the screen. The Tao Te Ching, or Book of the Way, is an ancient Chinese collection of 81 wisdom verses. In “The Simple Explanation” model, the Tao spoken of by Lao Tzu refers to the metaversal information and principles of organization that have informed our universe since the moment before creation. Non-being refers to clearing your personal UC of earthly memes and karma. Non-action refers to allowing the original higher-order UC to direct your personal UC for the greater good.

Here is the 21st verse of the Tao Te Ching, which I have translated directly into Simple Explanation terminology from an original verbatim translation by Jonathan Star.

Tao Te Ching, Verse 21

Highest virtue arises through total alignment with the originating source of consciousness.

How to become one with this elusive source? By disregarding everything else.

Oh, so elusive! So very indistinct!

Yet within its dimensionless center, dimensions form.

So uncertain! So intangible!

Yet its middle contains the latent substance of all things.

So profound! Such a mystery!

Housed deep within that mysterious middle--the seed of life is consciousness itself.

The life force within is self-evident. Thus, life itself provides trustworthy evidence of the originating source.

From the first moment until now, the manifestations of consciousness remain ever the same. Thus do we all bear witness to the Creator, the Originator.

This is accordingly how I know the ways of every thing and the origin of all things: by observing what is within me.



For further contemplation, I recommend "A Simple Fractal Model of the Conscious Universe," elsewhere in this blog.

The Fractal Edge of Undifferentiated Consciousness

The Simple Explanation model suggests that the undifferentiated consciousness of the Metaverse is held apart from this created universe by means of a toroidal-shaped membrane "composed" of consciousness.

This conscious membrane (the Universal Unit of Consciousness) gives rise to countless fractal reiterations (Units of Consciousness, UCs) of itself, which in turn give rise to our material universe.

Which begs the question: How is it possible for an object (our Universe) to rest "inside" the formless Metaverse without affecting the undifferentiated nature of that originating place? How can space and non-dimensionality, time and timelessness, change and the changeless co-exist without touching the untouchable Metaverse? 

This paradox is easily solved by imagining that the membrane itself possesses a fractal surface, such as the Koch Curve. Through an infinite series of calculations, the fractal surface keeps itself contained and interiorized; keeping the undifferentiated unity of the Metaverse unsullied.

 

As you can see, through endless divisions, the surface and interior of the Koch snowflake remain contained to the figure, never reaching "outside."  The effect of this infinitely recursive fractal surface can be likened to that of an invisibility force field deployed around our universe, i..e, "What happens in our universe, stays in our universe."

Diagramming the Ineffable



Process Note:  The images above were laid out in Power Point off of the notebook page below:



Video Examples of Toroidal Flow

The Simple Explanation proposes that the fractal geometric equation upon which our material universe is patterned is toroidal in shape. Chapter 4, "One Simple Model," explains this toroidal flow model of the conscious universe. If you have not yet read the article "One Simple Model," this would be a good time.

This morning when I was running the blender, I noticed that the funnel formed by the blender's whirling blades is similar to the toroidal funnels created by the starburst of proto-energy at the heart of the universal torus pattern. For the metaphor to fully work, please imagine that the shape of the blender container is a torus and the whirling blades at the center is actually a zero-point field of infinite dimensions. Here's a one minute video of this morning's blender drink where I describe the blender's toroidal vortex.



After I posted this video to youtube, I saw that there were a number of other videos depicting toroids and toroidal flow. There must be many people like myself who are waking up to the toroids around  us. The following video of toroids I found on youtube is awesome! Way better examples of toroids than my blender funnel!

Shed Unwanted Memes Here! Now!

As defined in the article "Memes and Chords of Memes," memes are the cultural expressions of societies. Every discrete cultural concept, mythology, or icon you can think of is a meme. Indeed, each and every concept that a person can know and name is a meme, even self-concept. According to the Simple Explanation, the memes we believe in and cling to are like theads draped over our souls, obscuring our perfect Self UC and interfering with our awareness of here and now.

If my Self UC is a perfect fractal expression of the primordial Universal UC ("Holy Ghost," "Kutastha Chaitanya," "Purushottama") then my personal meme bundle is the garment woven by my mind out of life's experiences ("avidiya," "maya"), and sustained by my Ego as personal identity ("Ahamkara").



Self UC





Self UC Clouded by Memes

The article "Bundles of Memes" explains that once you acquire a meme, it becomes part of your unique vibratory bundle. If you do not wish to continue holding that meme in your personal bundle of strings and chords, you need to detach that meme from your bundle.

• Some memes fall away of their own accord through disuse.
• Other memes must be consciously detached and laid aside.
• Some memes are pernicious; addictions are their behaviors. 
• Emotionally evocative memes such as victimhood or jealousy are difficult to detach due to the intense synergistic coupling of thoughts and emotion.

In the worldly course of events, unwanted memes must be detached through an effort of will, either through conscious disuse or by acquiring a competing, more desirable meme. Therapies such as EFT may help.

Within one's spiritual tradition, memes may be surrendered to one's Higher Power through prayer and meditation. Serenity is achieved as memes are discarded.

Here, now, you may lay down that unwanted meme. If you find yourself accidentally carrying it around again, lay it down again. If you notice yourself invoking that meme out of habit, good. Lay it down again. You may need to lay down some neighboring memes as well, if their vibrations are invoking that pernicious meme in you. No need for dismay or despair. Onward and upward.

The Fractal Roots of Consciousness



As explained in the articles, "My Self, the Governor of Whoville" and "A Simple Fractal Model of the Conscious Universe," my Self's Unit of Consciousness (UC) is sitting atop a veritable fractal galaxy of hierarchically arranged Units of Consciousness, all working together to instantiate my body. While I may believe I am the only conscious soul inhabiting this body of mine, my physical body is actually home to all of these aggregated UCs, each with their own job to perform, each living their own lives and laying down their own karmic record. Within the confines of my skin, countless UCs of varying levels of complexity work together to keep my body alive and fully functional. At each descending level of complexity, from my governing Self UC down through the organ systems, organs, cells, molecules, atoms, and quanta, my body's UCs deal with increasingly simpler tasks even as the matter associated with them becomes smaller and more numerous. The simplest and most numerous level of materially instantiated consciousness is associated with the quantum foam that forms at the finest fractal edge between matter and energy.

As the roots of a plant send out finer and finer tendrils at each level of fractal branching, our hierarchically arranged aggregate UCs nest closer and closer to the Original Source Code--the Universal UC--at their simplest and most numerous levels. Whereas the concerns of the world often obscure my Self UC, the UC of a single sub-atomic particle or wave (anu), having a fairly limited view of creation and few choices regarding activity, is the least distracted by Ego and most attuned with its originating Source. At the deepest physical level of instantiation, the countless quanta that form the building blocks of our bodies are associated with countless undeluded UCs, all tapping their roots directly into the organizational source of our Universe ("Universal UC," "God," "Sat," "Original Source Code").

As I visualize the roots of Whoville, I visualize roots penetrating from my skin inward, finer and finer, to the depths of my material being. Within my body, all of my aggregated UCs drill fractally "backward" toward the zero-point field at our shared core. Whereas my Self UC may appear a long way off from God, especially if I conceive of God outside the Very Large, if I instead turn inward and "fall back," I am as near to God as the center point of Whoville's UCs. This is a new way to interpret the practices of "centering" and "grounding." When ancient teachings speak of God residing in the hearts of man, this Simple Explanation suggests the heart may be interpreted as the shared zero-point field at the shared center of our fractal Units of Consciousness.

A Simple Fractal Model of the Conscious Universe

This blog's author recently gave an easy-to-understand 20-minute talk on this topic. Here's the YouTube link where you can view the Simple Fractal Model video.

In 1975, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” in the first published paper on fractal geometry. Despite some resistance from the mathematical community, it was soon discovered that fractal geometry is unparalleled at measuring and modeling the world of natural phenomena.

Here's the definition of fractals from Wikipedia: “A fractal is 'a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,' a property called self-similarity... Because they appear similar at all levels of magnification, fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex (in informal terms). Natural objects that are approximated by fractals to a degree include clouds, mountain ranges, lightning bolts, coastlines, snow flakes, various vegetables (cauliflower and broccoli), and animal coloration patterns.”

At this point in the article, if you haven't already, you really should read the Basic Principles of the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything found in Chapter One of the Simple Explanation book, in order to acquaint yourself with the concepts and terminology.

Again, from Wikipedia, concerning fractals:

• It has a fine structure at arbitrarily small scales.

• It is too irregular to be easily described in traditional Euclidean geometric language.

• It is self-similar (at least approximately or stochastically).

• It has a Hausdorff dimension which is greater than its topological dimension.

• It has a simple and recursive definition.

To put the Simple Explanation in fractal terms, our universe is populated by simple, recursive, self-similar structures of consciousness at arbitrarily small scales.  

As explained in Chapter 2 of the Simple Explanation, as our universe expanded, over and over and over again, pale echoes of God’s mind attached themselves to the particles streaming out of the Big Bang. These self-replicating Units of Consciousness (UCs) can be described as fractal emanations of the originating fractal formula--the Universal UC.


Whereas Mandlebrot's best-known fractal, the Mandlebrot Set, looks like this,

 

the fractal associated with the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything looks like this.



One interesting feature of fractal patterns is that no matter how closely you look, or how many calculations are performed, the pattern continues to replicate on smaller and smaller, and larger and larger, scales.

In the Simple Explanation, the enclosure of our material Universe is a Very Large toroidal pattern at the "outside" edge of creation. This would be the Universal pattern at its largest fractal scale, the Universal UC, akin to the singular void at the center of the Mandlebrot set. Drilling downward from greatest to smallest, the Units of Consciousness associated with sub-atomic particles are the smallest fractal expressions of the Universal set. These smallest material instantiations of creation pass from the realm of pure consciousness through causal energy to material instantiation through calculations of the Universal fractal formula. The crossover from pure consciousness to material instantiation occurs at the edge of an infinite series of ever smaller fractal divisions proceeding downward from the lower limit of material instantiation (Planck's constant), and then energetically finer and finer until energy is finally suspended in the infinite stillness of non-being, the Metaverse. 

In the Simple Explanation, the zero point at the center of the universal toroid is the source point where the pure undifferentiated consciousness of the metaverse is concentrated to singular manifestation. This is the crossover location between the undifferentiated unity and material creation. Some call it the Womb of Creation. From this zero-point, all organizing principles and laws enter our Universe and replicate their patterns upwardly through creation, from the very smallest sub-atomic particles to the largest galaxies, and then beyond, to the Very Large.
These replicating patterns and their hierarchical structure is explained more fully in the two articles, "My Self, the Governor of Whoville" and "Nested Hierarchies."   In personal terms, my Self UC is a fractal division of the Universal UC, and so is every UC associated with everything in my body. The fractal calculations occur at every hierarchical jump of organizational complexity.

The spiritual implication of this fractal model is this: the Universal UC ("God," "The Creator," "The Mother of 10,000 Things") may be visualized as both immanent and transcendent. Immanent within every one of my body's UCs, at the tiniest fractal crossover point at the center of each UC. Transcendent at the outer edge of the Very Large, where our Universal UC fractally nests against the infinite, undifferentiated Metaversal UC ("God the Father," "Sat," "Pure Consciousness," the "Undifferentiated Unity"). We humans are suspended thusly, a particular fractal emanation of, and located within, creation, yet patterned directly from pure consciousness.