Occult Powers Awaiting Emergence from Our Subliminal Being

Dr. Deepak Chopra told an interesting anecdote from his own experience at a talk he gave in Chicago some years ago. Some of the details may have escaped me, so the gist of it was that he was visiting his birth home area at one point and it was recommended to him to visit a famous Vedic astrologer in the area. When he visited without advance warning to the astrologer, the astrologer apparently knew about him and had a scroll which he located that explained many of the highlights, past, present and future in Deepak Chopra’s life. As a doctor with a long background in the West, he went in with skepticism but used the story to illustrate how sometimes our Western way of looking at things (even nowadays to a great degree prevalent in India) of this sort may have to give way to a new, deeper and totally other way of understanding our lives, and how the world we live in actually functions.

We attempt to judge everything based on an artificial standard and set of limitations set up by the mental consciousness. We make rules for how we can evaluate things, and what the limits and conditions for such evaluation are going to be. We then formulate rules for how the universe works, how and why we are alive, and what our lives mean. Yet, as we gain further knowledge, or we extend our perception through the use of technology, we find that many of these rules and strictures no longer ‘work’ and we are forced to reevaluate everything.

The advent of quantum mechanics has created major ripples in our understanding of existence. Quantum events seemingly do not conform to our Newtonian and Euclidian mental laws of universal action and organization. As we confront the issues that arise, we find that a wide variety of new theories have arisen, including the idea of there being multiple universes, the concept of ‘anti-matter’ as an opposite ‘mirror image’ of physical matter we know in our universe, the concept of string theory and eventually the idea that Matter is a condensed form of Energy and then that Energy is a condensed form of Consciousness, which is universal and instantaneous. We explore ideas about the relation of time and space, and even the idea that time and space are adjustable and can be bent or folded or in the case of time, dilated or compressed, depending on speed of movement through space. Certain experiments are now indicating that present events can influence the past! When we observe stars, we can understand that the light we see from the stars actually was emitted long ago in the past, but based on our point of observation, we see it in the present. There are obviously standpoints in the universe from which observation of our present or future are similarly events of the past. Thus, past, present and future are relative terms depending on the standpoint of the observer. From these observations, scientists are now able to actually predict with a high degree of certainty what the future of certain stars and even galaxies will be. Thus, the artificial distinctions we make due to the frame that our mental capacities set for how things are “supposed” to happen, in a straight line, logical sequence, are modified by the standpoint of the observer in relation to what is being observed, and are now being challenged.

All of this means that what we have historically considered to be fixed laws of our existence, invariable and highly limited powers of consciousness, are in fact simply temporary and temporal limitations that can and in fact are being overturned, widened, and extended as we increase our knowledge and experience and thereby release the powers that remain unseen but nevertheless present in our subliminal consciousness.

When we look at a seed, an acorn, a fertilized egg, a fetus, we understand that there are powers of growth and consciousness that remain latent, potent but not expressed, in that form. As they develop, however, each of these begins to manifest the innate powers that lie within that seed, until eventually the being emerges to express in its fullness what it actually is capable of doing. The human species is clearly not the final stage of the evolution of consciousness, and this implies that many powers remain as yet unexpressed, unseen, waiting for the proper time, season and stage of evolution to manifest themselves.

As we begin to appreciate the oneness of consciousness, the universal nature of consciousness, and then begin to reflect on issues such as time dilation, multiverses, etc. we can see that the concepts of past, present and future are relative concepts and that under various circumstances an observer can indeed tap into events we consider to be past, or future, or, if present, occurring outside our immediate environs.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “All these and a multitude of other powers are concealed in our subliminal being and with the waking of the psychical consciousness can be brought to the surface. The knowledge of our past lives, — whether of past soul states or personalities or scenes, occurrences, relations with others, — of the past lives of others, of the past of the world, of the future, of present things that are beyond the range of our physical senses or the reach of any means of knowledge open to the surface intelligence, the intuition and impressions not only of physical things, but of the working of a past and present and future mind and life and soul in ourselves in others, the knowledge not only of this world but of other worlds or planes of consciousness and their manifestations in time and of their intervention and workings and effects on the earth and its embodied souls and their destinies, lies open to our psychical being, because it is close to the intimations of the universal, not engrossed only or mainly with the immediate and not shut up into the narrow circle of the purely personal and physical experience.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter XIX Occult Powers of the Subliminal, pp. 146-147