Posted on 04 August 2015, 9:03

Recently I wondered how it was possible for me to read about the physicist David Bohm for the first time, say to myself how important it would be for me to study him carefully, go to the mailbox and then find a parcel from the USA with a book with the acknowledgement page reading “thanks to David Bohm and… [my name] Michael Cocks.” First the thought, then five minutes later, the synchronicity in print, in that book from America.

“How was it possible?” That seems to be a scientific question. And if you go to pages 117 ff. in my book, Into the Wider Dream, you will find some really interesting stuff quoted from Norman Friedman’s Bridging Science and Spirit, Common Elements in David Bohm’s Physics, The Perennial Philosophy and Seth. They are very important pages. I am going to quote bits here, without the acknowledgements supplied in the book. (Do you remember Seth?

He’s a trance personality of the late Jane Roberts. Stephen the Martyr is the trance personality of the late medium Tom Ashman whose words are recorded in my book, Afterlife Teaching from Stephen the Martyr. Seth and Stephen both paint similar pictures of reality. As for Seth, I have not studied him sufficiently so will depend on Friedman’s description of his teaching.)

To try and answer the question, “However could….?” we need to think about the Conscious mind and the Subconscious. Friedman calls them “Outer Ego” and “Inner Ego”. “In Seth’s language, outer ego refers to our normal waking consciousness, which operates in the three-dimensional world. The inner ego (another term for the inner self) organises the inner reality of the collective unconscious, thereby creating the substance that we call the three-dimensional world…”

To the scientific layman that is an extraordinary claim. Not so extraordinary for the quantum physicist, however. Be that as it may, both Seth and Stephen see the inner ego as a higher level of consciousness, much more active and knowledgeable than the outer ego. [We see the outer ego in Lawrence LeShan’s Sensory-Physical world, the world of see and touch.]

The outer ego deals day by day with the physical reality created by the inner ego.

The inner ego (or unconscious mind) is both purposeful and highlydiscriminating…

The outer self is the offspring of the inner self.

The inner ego has access to a huge library of knowledge (the collective unconscious) and through its creation of the physical world provides stimuli to keep the outer ego constantly alert and aware…

[This is very apparent in the bewildering array of strange material in Into the Wider Dream. Greek gods, UFOs, and stainless steel saucepan lids jostle for attention.]

Seth uses the analogy of the outer ego acting out the play that the inner ego has written.

Over and over again in the stories related in Into the Wider Dream I have the impression that I am acting out what I sometimes call a scenario, sometimes a play, sometimes I feel the need to divide the play into acts, and then into scenes. But always I am filled with wonder… how on earth did this play in which I am involved get into motion? So often I have the sense that there is some Other that is directing things. I remember when I was a young curate I had a craze on making puppets that I could manipulate for teaching purposes. My craze persisted quite a while, even though puppets and productions were worse than amateurish. Perhaps this was my way of saying to myself what a puppet I felt like in the hands of… yes… what? Fate, God, … what?

Seth does point out that the outer ego should not be perceived as a mere puppet. After all I am a living human being with a family, and with daily quite ordinary challenges, and sometimes overcome by negative emotions. To me it has felt as if I were living the ordinary life, but somehow permeating my ordinary life there began to permeate this play, this scene, scenario, act. That is how I have so often felt.

I personally am not an authority on Seth. In the case of Stephen, we find he gives quite a complex picture of the inner self.. but before I discuss that, we should consider what we become and experience when we die. With regard to the self that has survived death: Is this the Inner Self? Not really: Stephen would say that we have shed the physical body, but that we still have the physical mind in the world of spirit. We can still speak of an Arthur and a Betty communicating to us from the afterlife. Messages from the departed through mediums, and other channels, show an unchanged personality, usually with similar knowledge and beliefs. Not suddenly all-knowing, not suddenly extremely wise. In our afterlife selves however we do find the spiritual senses that we associate with ESP and the paranormal. We may be clairvoyant or clairaudient, we may be able to produce poltergeist phenomena in the physical world. But whatever new powers we may discover in the afterlife, we are still an Arthur and a Betty.

So the phenomenon of synchronicity is extremely important, because it gives us the means to perceive not only the Outer Self that persists into the afterlife, but the Inner Self that projects that Outer Self that has passed from the physical to the spiritual.

Friedman suggests that in a sense, the outer ego is spoonfed - given only that information, including feelings and emotions, and that it can handle. This information is usually in the form of data picked up by the physical senses.

Reports from the afterlife suggest that exactly the same thing occurs there also. Spiritual or physical “matter, in short, is the shape that basic experience takes when the inner ego projects into the three-dimensional world.”

Such a subjective three-dimensionality is reported to be found in the afterlife.

In this cynical Materialist age, it has seemed such an obstacle for Spiritualism, and Consciousness studies in general, to establish the legitimacy of belief in and afterlife, and in the reality of the spiritual senses that we lump together under the heading of psi and the paranormal. Is there an afterlife? Are the spiritual senses real? How can we discuss such matters in polite society? A century of endeavour is bearing some fruit, but in academic circles we have not yet reached the tipping point.

But there is further to go in our thinking, further in our presentation of the truth to the world, and that is that there is an inner self that is more our real self, and that this inner self is more our true self.

There is also a Deeper Self than the inner self. And this is closer to a collective self of humanity. And there will no doubt be deeper and wider selves eventually embracing all that is. But let us not speculate here. Let us simply accept that beyond the outer self manifesting itself in this world and the next, there is an inner self, and that we need to consider its mysteries.

Thinking of the philosophy and science of David Bohm, then we can equate the Inner self, and its deeper layers, with his Implicate world, while the Outer self we can equate with what Bohm calls the Explicate, “unfolded” world.

Much of Carl Jung’s psychology has to do with the Collective Unconscious, and the archetypes, manifesting in dreams, in synchronicity. His Collective Unconscious is to be assigned to the Inner Self and the deeper Collective self, and parallels Bohm’s Implicate order.

The Inner Self is the continuous self persisting from incarnation to incarnation. It has manifested itself in a great many physical selves in different times and places over untold ages of time. Stephen says that we are not to imagine a soul entering a body, leaving the body at death, and then entering another body. Each incarnating physical mind cannot be held guilty of the deeds of its predecessor; each incarnation is a separate experience. Yet the experience each of these outer selves (whether incarnate or not) belongs to the Inner Self, obviously spiritually much richer and more complex than the individual Outer Self, or outer ego.

All this I am afraid, has not answered our question, “How is it possible?” This is only the preamble, to a discuss that I shall pursue in my next blog.

Michael Cocks edits the journal, The Ground of Faith.
Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr by Michael Cocks is published by White Crow Books and available from Amazon and other bookstores.
His latest book, Into the Wider Dream: Synchronicity in the Witness Box is published by White Crow Books.