Quite some time back, I used to have a recurring experience during sleep which I thought was a dream. It was a feeling of actually floating around & travelling by flying as I moved past cities & all kinds of scenery beneath me. I wasn’t in a flight, nor was I in any vehicle, but I was just flying by myself. There was no one else in the dream & the most pleasurable part was the act of flight itself. It felt very real & refreshing to think about it in the waking state. Sometimes I fly high, sometimes low. The ground beneath is very real with all the scenery that we see typically. The freedom of flight by oneself, un encumbered by the physical body is indescribable. I had no explanation for what this joyful experience really signified.
Recently on reading the book ‘Journey of souls’ which is a must read book examining the life between lives using hypnotherapy to regress subjects to the past, I found the answer to what this very real dream experience meant. This is also mentioned in the other highly inspiring book 'Conversations with God'. It seems the soul or jiva sometimes dis engages itself from the body & roams around freely. It leaves a part of its energy behind in the body as an imprint, to return as quickly as needed. This happens during sleep state & also for babies that are still in the womb.
So, incredulous as it may sound, this experience was my jiva or soul roaming around in an alternate reality which was neither my waking universe nor my dream created universe! It felt so ‘real’ because it was real in the sense that it actually happened beyond the imagination projected by the mind. To use a different expression, it is also an ‘out of body’ experience since the body is fast asleep, with the mind dis engaged from the senses. As one advances far along the path, progressing spiritually, one is able to consciously disengage from the body & leave the body behind. There is even a technique by which one can exit the body from the Ajna chakra or the spiritual eye.
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1. There is nothing creating our experiences other than the material world and the human brain.
2. The human brain is limited by the basic laws of physics, so, for example, superluminal travel is not possible. Nor can you teleport using your brain!
Take a short case study: You imagine your home. Immediately after that, imagine the Andromeda galaxy. This doesn't mean that your brain or soul traveled the 2.6 million light years to Andromeda in a second. It only means that your brain's thought process changed. This is entirely possible, simply because the physical size of the brain and the electrical signals within allow neurons to communicate with each other and create thoughts very rapidly.
3. The brain can imagine amazing stuff. That doesn't mean that there is a spirit or a soul. It just means that the brain has evolved enough to be creative and imaginative. There is plenty of neurological evidence for this.
4. Dreams come in many different varieties. They are limited to our brains.
5. There is no concept of soul.
6. There is no concept of soul leaving the body.
7. The body is all there is to us. There is no spirit or soul within us that is independent of the body.
8. The fact that the brain is active even when you are asleep is well established, and does not need the hypothesis of souls or spirits. There are parts and functions of the brain that shut down during sleep, but during dreaming states, there are parts of the brain that continue to be active leading to the 'real' nature of dreams.
9. 'Journey of Souls,' is a work of quackery. Of what use is any knowledge that cannot be verified or falsified? In other words, of what use is quackery? Anecdotes carry no weight. Whether it is homoeopathy or soul-travel, anecdotes mean NOTHING more than stories perceived or concocted by individuals. If 100 people say that they have past life experiences, it only means that 100 people are lying or deluded, because:
1. It is seldom repeatable.
2. There is no generalizing theoretical framework.
3. Established truths and facts of science preclude the possibility past-life. When people (or animals, plants, or whatever!) die, that is the end. There is no permanent soul. Hard as it may be to accept this fact, we would be fooling ourselves to think otherwise.
Please read up on the basics of neuroscience, biology, and human physiology. The facts are fairly simple, and we learned it all in high school itself.
Also, please read up on the method of science. I remember the first lesson we had of it was in 5th standard, which I recall so well. A primary school kid's definition of the scientific method is that it involves hypothesis, observation and experimentation, and validation. Extending that, anything trusted as science must be repeatable. Over and above this there is the question of quality. These are all well established. It is this emphasis on rigor, repeatability, falsifiability, observation, validation, and quality that one can place confidence in whatever science says. Good science is not what you read in The Hindu or The Indian Express or BBC News. It is what you would read in Science, Nature, PNAS, PRL, Lancet, Cell, etc. There are pit falls, now and then there is science that is wrong. But such 'wrong' science is so minuscule compared to the enormous body of good science, that it should hardly lead us to be skeptical of the method of science. In fact, method of science is THE ONLY WAY by which we can gain an understanding of the world around us.
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