Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness

by Itzhak Bentov

An air mass is/has consciousness.

It may be of interest to note that we humans do go quite often into the next level above us, the so-called astral level. In fact, we appear there during our dreaming episodes every night, especially during the REM periods4 of active dreaming, which occur about five times a night. In these periods, we are pursuing activities that are often emotionally charged. (We often find that in REM dreams we encounter people and animals, which means that they do reach into that level of consciousness, as the energy-exchange curve shows. They act either as props or are actively participating in our dream situations.)

Why does Nature cause us to operate in the astral plane during our sleep? We know that the arrow of evolution is pointing in the direction from the physical to the astral level. According to our diagram, we see that all matter will be moving through these levels under the pressure of evolution. What Nature is doing to us during sleep is simply giving us a “preview of coming events,” just like in a movie theater. In this way Nature gradually acquaints us with functioning on our next level in order to prevent the shock of a sudden adjustment when we finally move there for a more extended stay, the so-called death.

an average person presently spans at least three levels of consciousness, that is, the physical, the astral, and the mental.

To those readers who need a more objective approach to reincarnation, we suggest reading a booklet called “Deathbed Observations by Physicians and Nurses”5 by Carlis Osis, and books by Ian Stevenson (20 Suggestions of Reincarnation6) and Raymond A. Moody, Jr. (Life After Life.7)

The human unit of consciousness will, we hope, be reborn next time around on a higher level at each turn of the helix. By the time he has learned all there is to learn on the physical level of evolution, he will move into the astral region and will not come back into the physical existence. That is, he will not need a physical body any more but will continue to live in the astral realities, which will be as real and as solid to him as our level is to us. The reason for this, naturally, is that the energy exchange with his environment is maximum in that reality. A nice thing in the astral reality is one’s ability to manipulate time. Time becomes pliable and subjective.

The big difference between the physical and non-physical realities is the ability to create one’s environment instantly by the power of thought or desire. This is actually happening on the physical plane as well, but it takes much longer, and much more thinking and doing are required before a change in our environment can occur.

we have seen that the physical body is an instrument that allows us to interact best with our physical environment. This body is interpenetrated by “bodies” or fields having higher vibratory rates. They extend beyond the limits of the physical body (Fig. 35). This is what clairvoyants can perceive as colorful egg-shaped halos or auras surrounding our physical bodies. They contain a lot of information about us for those who can properly read the meaning of the colors, size, shape, and motion of these bodies. The most strongly visible of them would be the astral body because of the nearness of its vibratory scale to the physical. It is visible at about 18 to 24 inches from the physical body.

The basic underlying function of our physical and other bodies is to pick up signals or stimuli, process them, and respond to them. That is what makes up our daily experiences. Suppose now that we visualize ourselves as a radiolike device that is receiving four or five different stations simultaneously. One station will by far overshadow the others in loudness, and among the others there are also differences in their degree of loudness. We can liken the strongest station to the physical reality. Whatever comes in through this channel is heard most strongly, while the other “stations” representing the astral, mental, causal, and spiritual realities are successively weaker.

The important thing to realize is that we are capable of listening to all the stations simultaneously. Our listening to the weaker stations would improve considerably if we could only turn off the loud physical station. This is what we do in sleep, in meditation, or in sensory-deprivation chambers. That the loud physical station is on does not mean that we don’t pick up what the other stations are broadcasting.

subliminal stimuli. For example, a constant irritation with something or someone on any of these levels may appear as a change in the physical body, as psychosomatic illness. Repressed anger, being a powerful emotion, may cause cancer in some people; anxiety and uncertainty will cause ulcers in others. Frustration on the mental level may seep down into the physical level as depression, etc.

The weakest station is the spiritual. This is the little voice that tells what is right and what is wrong, the voice of our higher self, our conscience.

The intuitive “gut” feeling about success or failure of a project, for instance, is picked up through our intuitive band. When we find that two or more artists, scientists, or inventors have come up with an identical idea at approximately the same time, we can assume that they all tapped the causal intuitive level, where the idea happened to be waiting for them, and they resonated with it.

Let me suggest that the brain is a piece of hardware, a computer terminal, which normally processes the input provided by the sense in the waking state. When the input from the senses is not processed, as in deep sleep, this piece of hardware is in a state of complete rest and is not generating any images. However, as soon as our consciousness becomes focused in the astral during the dreaming cycles, information from that reality will pour in, and the imagery of the action produced in the brain will be followed by movements of the eyes and sometimes limbs.

I suggest that you visualize your senses turned inside your head, that is, that your eyes should be looking into your head, your ears should be listening to what is going on inside the head, and your senses are bundled up in the center of your head. Try to keep your mind blank. You will find that without noticing, you have been thinking. Try to see whether you can follow a thought all the way back to its origin. You may find that what later becomes a full-blown thought starts out at first as a tiny little impulse. This impulse grows and grows and eventually develops into a thought that is recognizable. This implies that we are thinking on a level on which thought is not yet formulated.

I suggest, therefore, that our brain is not the source of thought but a thought amplified.

It is the function of the brain to amplify this signal for us into a useful form.

Nature or, in the broadest sense of the word, creation, is made up of a continuous spectrum of realities.

Present mankind happens to function most of the time in what we call the physical reality, but we also function to a certain extent within four or five of our neighboring realities as well.

At the transition called death, the higher bodies that make up our so-called “personalities” leave the physical body and continue their existence on the levels above the physical, which are to the unit of consciousness as valid a reality as the physical was previously. This unit of consciousness can still interact weakly with the physical reality.

Thoughts or desires do not originate in the brain. They are generated by the respective bodies or fields that act on the brain to produce tiny impulses that the brain amplifies into thoughts. “Thought” exists below the threshold of a recognizable thought.

The important thing to realize is that the universe, through its incentive system, which we call evolution, is anxious to impart as much knowledge as possible to its sentient beings in order to allow them to move as fast as possible along the evolutionary ladder and develop their consciousness to the highest possible degree. The universe wants to make itself known to those who can comprehend its language, and that language becomes more and more intelligible to us as our spiritual component unfolds.

The higher self is, the “spirit within us,” and being part of the Creator, the higher selves are all connected and communicating with each other. It is the business of the higher self to put the personality through the experiences of life and interactions with others, thereby gaining knowledge and learning to know itself. In a way, we may say now that the whole universe is an information-gathering system. The Creator breaks himself up into little units in order to be able to experience all the possible interactions among his particles on all possible levels, thereby learning to know himself. Evolution is the built-in urge that pushes all matter to higher and higher complexity, allowing experiences to occur at ever-higher levels.

The “observer” is our sensing, feeling, information-processing apparatus. It serves as a bridge between the material body and the spirit. The “observer” is the psyche or the soul.

The higher self is the spiritual us. It communicates to us through the soul or psyche because it cannot effectively interact with a material body. All higher selves are connected and are in constant communication.

It seems that there is no hope for matter that has fallen into the black hole. The denser it becomes, the larger the crushing forces on it; and the larger the crushing forces, the denser matter becomes. In short, matter is crushing itself out of existence. But since matter is energy, where does the energy go? According to our physicists, it goes through a singularity point, a point theoretically of zero size that is the bane of mathematicians and physicists because laws of Nature break down in the singularity state. Having gone through this point, it reappears in a “different universe.” It would appear there as an upwelling of energy that would fit a description of a “white hole,” the opposite of a black hole.

Our universe, then, has emerged from a white hole, which happened to be the output end of a black hole, and we are proposing that the universe is undergoing a continuous process of death and rebirth.

We know that in this present universe everything is rotating, from electrons to galaxies; the rotating black-white holes could just be the source of all that rotary motion in our universe.

It is clear now to the observant reader that once we have a black hole, there must be a white hole associated with it. They always have to come in pairs, since matter that has disappeared in the black hole has to reappear somewhere.

The length of “time” needed to go once around this torus is all the “time” there is in this universe. Because if we go through such a cycle and fall into the black hole, then re-emerge from the white hole, we have emerged into a new universe again. So time is not flowing anywhere; it just is. It is matter that moves along, not time. As we move in space, we are also moving along the time axis. If we could stop our movement in space entirely, it is possible that we should experience no passage of time at all.

As matter became more and more complex, consciousness began to manifest in the physical realities, in life forms known to us. However, consciousness, intelligence, and life were always tied together and always present everywhere.

To our present knowledge that absolute horizon lies at a distance of about 10 billion light-years. The observable universe, then, will constitute an expanding bubble of about 20 billion light-years in circumference, floating around somewhere in this much larger structure.

The galaxies in the northern portion seem to be running away from us faster than the ones in the southern portion of the galaxy.6 This also indicates that those galaxies are also more distant from us than their southern counterparts. This effect is observed most obviously in the case of the quasars, the most distant objects we can see.

our observable universe bubble is stretched into a kidney shape, its northern portion bulging and expanding faster than the southern. This is because space-time is expanding much more rapidly in the funnel area.

We can be sure that we are sharing a universe in which all the problems that may seem to be problems to us at present have been solved over and over by civilizations ahead of us in “time.” We may say, therefore, that all knowledge that was ever generated is potentially available to us at some point or other in our universe.

“Time” is seen as the distance covered by matter emitted from the white-hole side of the nucleus, going around the shell of the torus, until it enters the black hole.

Our “observable universe” is a tiny bubble within the torus of the universe.

The general expansion of consciousness is linked to the expansion on the torus of the universe.

Indeed, the whole universe is in constant and instant communication. Any serious event can be known across the universe instantly by consciousnesses whose interest or business it is to know these things.

a person or “observer” with a higher level of consciousness will fill space farther and faster than one who is not so developed.

persons with higher levels of consciousness will see past or future events more sharply than those occupying lower levels of consciousness.

the body has its own consciousness, which is rudimentary but intelligent enough and quite capable of operating the body independently of the psyche. It is only loosely connected to the other entity, the psyche. This consciousness is the sum total of the consciousnesses of the cells of our body or the “wisdom of the inner parts,” as the Bible puts it. We have here, then, two entities. One is the relatively low, rudimentary consciousness, which runs the body, and the other is the psyche, a higher-level entity, which uses the body most of the time as a focus but is independent of it. We can liken the body to an automobile. When the driver gets out and leaves the engine running, it will idle and function normally. But to give purposeful direction to the car, a driver or a higher consciousness is needed. If the consciousness running the body leaves it, the body dies.

Consider for a moment the system we live in. Physical life is made possible by the energies supplied to us by the sun. Our bodies are made up of materials the planet is supplying. These bodies, temporarily animated, are borrowed from the planet, and then the materials used for the bodies are returned to the planet, while the psyche goes back to the reality that fits it best. That reality may be connected with that of our planet, the sun, the universe, or the cosmos, depending on its level of evolution.

We living beings play an important role in the evolution of the rudimentary consciousness of our planet. On the whole, we are upgrading it. However, in order to live in tune with it, we have to be sensitive to its needs, the most basic of which is balance. Things that unbalance the system to a high degree cause stress in this large consciousness. By stress, in this case, we mean also emotional stress. When the imbalance becomes too great, the planet responds in its own way by natural catastrophes to return its balance.

The sun “talks” to the planets with its acoustical output—the solar wind.

We have a closed universe that forms an elongated hollow torus. Encased within this torus is an inner torus of protospace. Light cannot travel through the inner torus, but our psyches can.

Our psyches, which contain all our knowledge, expand periodically into that space for a very short period of time at practically infinite velocities. There the human psyches form an interference pattern with psyches of all other consciousnesses in the universe.

Matter contains/is consciousness. Our planet is therefore a larger consciousness, and so is the sun. A rudimentary consciousness contained in matter and in living cells maintains the life in the body. A higher consciousness, the human psyche, inhabits that body most of the time but is independent of it. The planet and the sun have also a “permanent resident” consciousness and a higher consciousness/intelligence using it as a focus or a garage.

All these consciousnesses communicate with each other and make up part of the information hologram: Communication throughout the universe is continuous and instantaneous.

Upon the “death” of the physical body, the psyche returns to its realm, finding its proper reality band with which it naturally resonates...