Limitless Mind. Russell Targ

is the fundamental building block of the universe; the world is more like a great thought than a great machine. And human beings can access all of the universe through our own consciousness and our nonlocal mind. This philosophy also maintains that we have a dual nature, both local and nonlocal, both material and nonmaterial. Finally, the perennial philosophy teaches that the purpose of life is to become one with the universal, nonlocal, loving consciousness that is available to us. That is, the purpose of life is to become one with God, and then to help others do likewise.

      In this worldview, through meditation one experiences increasing unity consciousness as one passes through “the great chain” of physical, biological, mental, spiritual, and etheric levels of awareness. Through meditation, one experiences the insight that one is not a body; one has a body. Even the idea of “one” is eventually given up in favor of the experience of expanded awareness.

      The lesson that separation is an illusion has been spelled out by mystics for at least 2,500 years. Hinduism teaches that individual consciousness (Atman) and universal consciousness (Brahman) are one. (As I mentioned in the Acknowledgments, physicist Erwin Schrödinger considered this observation to be the most profound statement in all of metaphysics.)¹⁶ In the Sutras of Patanjali, written 100 years after the Buddha lived, the great Hindu teacher taught that a “realized” being achieves a state of loving awareness in which “the Seer is established in his own essential and fundamental nature (self-realization).” The view of life in which we are all connected with God, and in which the “Kingdom of God” is within us, waiting to be realized and experienced, is part of both the Jewish and Christian traditions — especially in the Thomas gospel.¹⁷ We learn that the loving source we are seeking is immediately available when we make contact with the great “I Am” within each of us.

      In Judaism, the local community of spirit is often referred to as HaShem (the word), while in Christianity it is called the Holy Spirit, or Emmanuel (the immanent or indwelling God of all). This view of a community of spirit probably arose from mystics of every sacred tradition, whose meditations led them to have oceanic, mind-to-mind feelings of oneness. These realizations may be fleeting or lasting, spontaneous or the product of religious practice, but they are an enduring feature of human life.

      When I write about “realizations,” I am describing a state in which a practitioner has wisdom of who she or he is, and has embodied that wisdom; it has become integrated into daily life, thoughts, and activities. We often view “awakening” as a first step toward such realization. Awakening can occur in the blink of an eye, frequently through the direct, heart-opening (heart-breaking) transmission of grace from an awakened teacher.

      Meditation and working with a spiritual teacher, such as my work with spiritual teacher Gangaji, are two wonderful and proven paths to self-realization. But sublime music, surrendered sexuality, and even certain potentially dangerous drugs such as MDMA (Ecstasy) can stimulate a spiritual awakening together with a transcendent, one-with-God experience of spaciousness.¹⁸ The inspiring and life-affirming tantra teacher Margot Anand describes this opportunity from her tradition. She writes: “Skillful lovers become divine instruments in a symphony of delight. Their communion is ecstasy, the highest state of self-knowing [selfrealization] and self-forgetting [spaciousness].” Who would not wish to partake of that?! In my opinion, Margot’s heart-opening and humorous approach to love can help us recover from the terrible damage done to the American psyche by our own fundamentalists, the Puritans.

      The Tibetan deity Samanthabhadra is a compassionate bodhisattva (one who postpones his or her own enlightenment to bring others to enlightenment), whose image is frequently depicted in the inspiring Dzogchen, Buddhist texts of self-liberation. These teachings assume that you are already a peaceful, loving, openhearted being who is now willing to experience the fast track to spaciousness and timeless awareness. Samanthabhadra is invariably shown in the loving sexual embrace of his partner, Samanthabhadri. Similarly, in quantum physics the material universe is represented by equations called wave functions, a term invented by Erwin Schrödinger, who taught us that in order to manifest as a material object, any entity must appear together with its complex conjugate. In other words, both its real and imaginary parts must be present. That is why these two loving deities are always shown together; in order for either one to manifest, it is necessary to have them both, like the north and south poles of a magnet. That loving exchange of energy is what Margot encourages us to experience on our path to self-discovery.

      I once told anthropologist Margaret Mead that I was disappointed about ESP’s lack of acceptance in the scientific community. She sternly told me that I shouldn’t complain because, after all, Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake in the sixteenth century during the Inquisition for espousing ideas not very different from the ones I expressed. Bruno believed in the unity of all things, and he strongly opposed Aristotelian dualism for separating body and spirit. He exhorted us all to achieve union with the “Infinite One” in an infinite universe.

      Figure 1. Samanthabhadra, the primordial Buddha, and his consort.

      Baruch Spinoza, in the seventeenth century, had a similar worldview; since he was Jewish, he was fortunate to be spared the Inquisition. He was, however, banished from his own synagogue because of his pantheistic model of “all things together” comprising God. Einstein said that he “believed in the God of Spinoza,” which we understand to be the organizing principle of the universe. In the Dzogchen tradition, our personal experience of this profound principle is known as dharmakaya, and it is considered equivalent to the experience of undifferentiated loving awareness, or vajra (heart-essence). It is the vehicle and the dimension through which we directly experience the organizing principles of the universe (the dharma).

      The philosophy of a universal connection among all things was taught in the 1750s by Bishop George Berkeley, who could be considered an early Transcendentalist. He felt that the world was greatly misapprehended by our ordinary senses, and that consciousness was the fundamental ground of all existence. In the nineteenth century, this idea was expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and today by Christian Science, Science of Mind, and Unity churches.

      The coherent theme among all of these is that there is an essential part of all of us that is shared. The famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung described our mind-to-mind connections in terms of a “collective unconscious.” Contemporary Judaism teaches a similar view of our interconnectedness. The revered Jewish theologian Rabbi Lawrence Kushner tells us that:

      Human beings are joined to one another and to all creation. Everything performing its intended task doing commerce with its neighbors. Drawing nourishment and sustenance from unimagined other individuals. Coming into being, growing to maturity, procreating. Dying. Often without even the faintest awareness of its indispensable and vital function within the greater “body.”. . . All creation is one person, one being, whose cells are connected to one another within a medium called consciousness.¹⁹

      Historically, the belief in our connected nature has largely been based on the personal experiences of the people who promoted the view. Today, we recognize that just because large numbers of people have believed something for several millennia (for example, that the earth is flat), that does not by any means make it true. How are we to decide whether this view of community of spirit is deep nonsense unrelated to nature or a valid concept of the workings of the world? The usual scientific approach is to see if the model offers testable predictions.

      The idea that our thoughts transcend space and time is definitely not a new thought. In the collected Buddhist teaching of 500 b.c., recorded in the Prajnaparamita, we learn from almost every page that our apparent separation is an illusion and that there is “only one of us here” in consciousness — perhaps not even one.²⁰ Once this spiritual connection is experienced, compassion for all beings is the natural consequence.

      We have the opportunity to experience a self, but that is not who we really are. In fact, in the teaching of the enneagram, a traditional Sufi analysis of character traits and behavior, the self or ego is a fixation from the past; it is conditioned existence — exactly who we are not.²¹