This article is among the more challenging found in this encyclopedia because it is in marked contrast to our conditioned beliefs about the nature of reality. Or as Seth says in Jane Robert’s book The Nature of Personal Reality: “The energy of your being exists outside of your system [P-B]. Your own greater energy dips in and out of the space-time continuum as you understand it. As it does, its experience becomes physical [form]. Within that system then it leaves a life-trace. When you think in terms of reincarnation it seems that one tracing exists before the other, but the entire ‘chart’ exists at once [in the ‘field’], with all the individual tracings.”[i]
What Seth is saying is that we transcend the time/space continuum in the NOW. The Mystic Jacob Bohme said it in a different way:
The Right Eye looketh forward in thee into Eternity. The Left Eye looketh backward into Time. If thou now suffered thyself to be always looking into Nature, and the Things of Time, it will be impossible for thee ever to arrive at the Unity [Oneness] which thou wishest for.
— Jacob Bohme
It is the experience of Unity or Oneness or of Simple Reality that we all seek. In Buddhism this has been called the Four Limitless aspirations. Even though we as human beings are a “form” emanating as energy from the “field,” we can in the present moment “realize” that we are not separated and can still “feel” the “great happiness [which is] devoid of suffering [and by keeping our attention on the nature of reality we can] dwell in the great equanimity [which is] free from passion, aggression and prejudice.”[ii] Melvin McCloud has just described a profound paradigm or field (Simple Reality). We can all realize our true identity (perfection) and express our aspirations without limit. Pretty exciting, don’t you think!
Unique among mystics is the American Edgar Cayce, a Christian, who received his “readings” while in a self-induced trance. One of his biographers, Thomas Sugrue, describes field and form from the Cayce perspective. “It [energy] was a power sent out from God [field], a primary ray, as man thinks of it, which by changing the length of its wave and the rate of its vibration became a pattern of differing forms, substance and movement. This created the law of diversity which supplied endless designs [forms] for the pattern. God played on this law of diversity as a person plays on a piano, producing melodies and arranging them in a symphony.”[iii]
Let us now turn to the discipline of depth psychology and its founder C. G. Jung. Jung began to grasp the nature of the field by peering into the unconscious of his patients. “The unconscious appears as a field of experience of unlimited extent.”[iv]
“Because the unconscious is the matrix mind [field], the quality of creativeness attaches to it. It is the birthplace of thought-forms such as our text considers the Universal Mind to be. Since we cannot attribute any particular form to the unconscious, the Eastern assertion that the Universal Mind [field] is without form yet is the source of all forms, seems to be psychologically justified. In so far as the forms or patterns of the unconsciousness belong to no time in particular, being seemingly eternal, they convey a peculiar feeling of timelessness when consciously realized. We find similar statements in primitive psychology: for instance, the [aboriginal] Australian word aljira means ‘dream’ as well as ‘ghostland’ and the ‘time’ in which the ancestors lived and still live. It is, as they say, the ‘time’ when there was no time.”[v]
All existence emanates from it, and all separate forms dissolve back into it.[vi]
In the statement above, Jung revealed that he understood that an experience of Simple Reality was necessary to establish a sustainable human community or a healthy individual. “The unconscious is said to be the matrix, background, and foundation of all the differentiated phenomena called psychic—religion, science, philosophy, art. The experience of the unconscious [field] in any form is an approach to wholeness, the one experience lacking in modern civilization.”[vii] It is also the one essential experience lacking in P-B.
Eckhart Tolle also agreed that identification with P-B [form] results in human suffering. “The more unconscious you are; the more you are identified with form. The essence of unconsciousness is this: identification with form, whether it is an external form (a situation, place event or experience), a thought form or an emotion. The more attached to form, the more unsurrendered you are, and the more extreme, violent or harsh your experience of the polarities becomes. There are people on this planet who live virtually in hell and on the same planet there are others who live in a relatively peaceful life. The ones who are at peace inside will still experience the polarities, but in a much more benign way, not the extreme way in which many humans still experience them.”[viii]
What does science have to say about field and form? Michael Talbot, reporting on a brain research study, referring to the researcher in this paragraph from his book, The Holographic Universe, says: “She has discovered that the human energy field responds to stimuli even before the brain does. She has taken EMG readings of the energy field and EEG readings of the brain simultaneously and discovered that when she makes a loud sound or flashes a bright light, the EMG of the energy field registers the stimulus before it ever shows up on the EEG. What does it mean? ‘I think we have way overrated the brain as the active ingredient in the relationship of a human to the world,’ says Hunt [the researcher]. ‘It’s just a real good computer. But the aspects of the mind that have to do with creativity, imagination, spirituality, and all those things, I don’t see them in the brain at all. The mind’s not in the brain. It’s in that darn field.’”[ix]
“In his landmark text Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis of Bioenergy Therapies (Churchill Livingstone Press, 2000), James Oschman, PhD, points out that the resonant properties of DNA have already been documented, as has DNA’s response to pulsing magnetic fields. Acupuncture, for instance, has been practiced in China for at least 2000 years. At the heart of acupuncture’s healing model is the flow of energy through meridians, channels that create an energetic circuit throughout the body.”[x] The American Heritage Dictionary defines bioenergetics as “the study of the flow and transformation of energy in and between living organisms and between living organisms and their environment.” Quantum physics theorizes that a “unified field” connects everything. Mainstream science may one day understand field and form the way mystics always have.
Speaking of mystics, our friend Judge Thomas Troward, labels the field “universal mind” or “subjective mind” or “first cause” but whatever the language or the model, the result is the same. “The universal mind is the creative power throughout Nature; and as the originating power it must first give rise to the various forms in which objective mind recognizes its own individuality, before these individual minds can re-act upon it; and hence, as pure spirit or first cause, it cannot possibly be anything else than subjective mind; and the fact which has been abundantly proved by experiment that the subjective mind is the builder of the body shows us that the power of creating by growth from within is the essential characteristic of the subjective mind. Wherever we find creative power at work there we are in the presence of subjective mind whether it be working on the grand scale of the cosmos, or on the miniature scale of the individual.”[xi]
We are beginning to understand that the intellect, words, and mainstream science, are too limited to describe or characterize the field. Joseph Campbell also understood these limitations. “The ultimate ground of being transcends definition, transcends our knowledge. When you begin to ask about the ultimate you are asking about something that transcends all the categories of thought, the categories of being and nonbeing. True, false: these are as Kant points out in The Critique of Pure Reason, functions of our mode of experience. And all of life has come to us through the aesthetic forms of time and space, and the logical ones of the categories of logic, so we think within that frame [P-B].”[xii] Nevertheless, as we encounter the ideas, concepts and language found in the articles in this encyclopedia, we are making critical progress in transcending the conditioning of the old paradigm and laying the foundation for Simple Reality.
What is the origin of the uncanny effect of silence, darkness and solitude?
— Sigmund Freud
The Eastern mind is more comfortable with “silence, darkness and solitude” than was Freud. Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche is qualified to tell us what Buddha taught on the subject. “The fundamental nature of mind [field] is utterly pure and primordially in the state of buddhahood. It is the absolute Buddha. It has never changed from beginningless time. Its essence is wisdom and compassion that is inconceivably profound and vast.”[xiii]
“If you don’t try to stop whatever is going on in your mind,” says Mingyur Rinpoche, “but merely observe it, eventually you’ll begin to feel a tremendous sense of relaxation, a vast sense of openness within your mind—which is in fact your natural mind, the natural unperturbed background [field] against which various thoughts [form] come and go.”[xiv]
Sri Ramana Maharshi expresses field and form with characteristic Eastern simplicity:
The world is illusory;
Brahman alone is Real;
Brahman is the world.
Ken Wilber interprets: “The first two lines represent pure causal-level awareness, or unmanifest absorption in pure or formless Spirit; line three represents the ultimate or non-dual completion (the union of the Formless with the entire world of Form). The Godhead completely transcends all worlds and thus completely includes all worlds. It is the final within, leading to a final beyond—a beyond that, confined to absolutely nothing, embraces absolutely everything.”[xv] Hence, the importance of not identifying with body, mind or emotions—they have no substantial reality—and attachment to that identity helps explains our unsustainable story.
From the 2008 annual report of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, founded by the American astronaut Edgar Mitchell, we have another description of field and form. Quoting David Bohm: “We are all linked by a fabric [field] of unseen connections. This fabric is constantly changing and evolving [form]. This field is directly structured and influenced by our behavior and by our understanding.”[xvi]
Mystics whether from the Hindu/Buddhist paradigm or the Judeo/Christian paradigm have intuited the truth of Simple Reality. Meister Eckhart describes our true identity: “Therefore also I am unborn, and following the way of my unborn [unmanifest] being I can never die. Following the way of my unborn being I have always been, I am now, and shall remain eternally.”[xvii] As indestructible energy, what have we to fear? Our Essence is the field not the form, we are neither physical nor thought forms. We are the energy from which form emerges—we are awareness itself.
[i] Roberts, Jane. The Nature of Personal Reality. New York: Bantam, 1974, p. 388.
[ii] McCleod, Melvin. “Editorial: What Really Matters.” Shambhala Sun. Boulder, Colorado, March 2006, p. 9.
[iii] Sugrue, Thomas. There Is a River. New York: Holt, 1942, p. 361.
[iv] Jung, C. G. The Portable Jung. New York: Penguin Books, 1971, p. 135.
[v] Ibid., p. 498.
[vi] Ibid., p. 488.
[vii] Jung, C. G. Abstracts of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Rockville, Maryland: NIMH, 1978, p. 134.
[viii] Tolle, Eckhart. https://www.eckharttolle.com/article/Relationships-True-Love-and-the-Transcendence-of-Duality
[ix] Talbot, Michael. The Holographic Universe. New York: Harper, 1992, p. 192.
[x] Smith, Ken. “Bioenergetics: A New Science of Healing.” Shift: At The Frontiers of Consciousness. Petaluma, California: Institute of Noetic Sciences, March-May 2006, p. 11.
[xi] Troward, Thomas. The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science. New York: Dodd, 1909, p. 30.
[xii] Campbell, Joseph. The Hero’s Journey. New York: Harper, 1990, p. 40.
[xiii] Rinpoche, Dzogchen Ponlop. “What the Buddha Taught.” Shambhala Sun. Boulder, Colorado, May 2006, p. 100.
[xiv] Rinpoche, Mingyur. “Rest in the Sky of Natural Mind.” Shambhala Sun. Boulder, Colorado, July 2007, p. 79.
[xv] Wilber, Ken. Sex, Ecology and Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1995, p. 302.
[xvi] “The 2008 Shift Report.” Shift: At the Frontier of Consciousness.” Petaluma, California: Institute of Noetic Sciences, March-May 2008, p. 20.
[xvii] Wilber, op. cit., pp. 302-303.
