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Imre von Soos, architect, civil engineer, research scientist, philosopher and writer is a Hungarian born, Hungarian and Australian national. His anti-communist activities have forced him to escape from Hungary, and he lived and worked since in Australia, France, Germany, Austria, England, Switzerland, Brazil, the Czech Republic and now again in Austria. Read more... .

A Fundamental Question

Imre von Soos

"How can you prove that you have got a Spirit, separable from your body?" – The question, addressed to me, came from a friend, Nubor Facure, a well-known neurosurgeon, at the introduction to one of his lectures at the association we founded together with him and some other research scientists at the University of Campinas, Brazil, to study brain-mind interaction, consciousness, out of the body experiences, thoughts and activities, and other related subjects of metaphysics, introducing also some of our findings and thoughts to the interested public.

Questions have a tendency of preconditioning their answers by implication. Such was the composition, probably out of millenary habit, of my friend's question. Habit I must call it, born out of the generally nurtured belief of the ignorant public and materialistic science alike, for whom identity and consciousness are qualities of the physical body, that "delivers his Soul to his Creator" with the last breath for those who believe in these concepts, or just simply get extinguished for those who believe in nothing. Both venerate the decaying earthly rests, neither the immortal Spirit.

But we – very much including my friend – know it differently. For us the I, the Self, the Spirit is the one who has and animates its body, and not the body that produces and has its Spirit. The Spirit might separate himself from his body temporarily during the period called life, or permanently at the event called death. The Spirit is primordial to the body: He is eternal and exists independently of it, while the body, the temporary instrument of expression of the Spirit on a physical plane, is the function of this expression and is given back to the earth out of which it has been produced for that very purpose; and not the other way around. However, this 'other way around' is the one that dominates secular, ecclesiastic and scientific thought; while the search for the Creative Principle of all that is alive is sacrificed at the altars of organized religions that dwarf the consciousness and the spirit in the name of the God of their own creation; and it is negated by science with its highly specialized knowledge – that can be only analytical and deductive – which is creating a spiritual vacuum in a purely empirical world. While religious intellect can feed only on the dogmas set by the particular faith, scientific intellect is limited to function within the dense but narrow field of specialized input. For both, only those questions are valid which can be answered within the frame of their existing belief-systems; what is inconvenient for the established dogmas or the expected results, is categorically denied existence. And humanity, misguided by all of them, ignores that the alternative to organized religions is not atheism, materialism or nihilism, but spirituality, mysticism.

Forgetting the gigantic nuance, for the lecture was my friend's and not mine, I shortly answered: "Because I can get out of my body." – "How can you prove – he forced on – that your experience is not only an illusion?" – and, without allowing an answer, he went on with his first question onto other people, because the questions were directed only to help him to start delivering his own thoughts, which I already knew and agreed with, so I went on with mine, while staying on the subject.

How I can prove something to others – who need concrete facts on their own level – was no more my self-posed question. The question that presented itself to be answered was, how can I myself know beyond any doubt that all I experience as my integral environment is not a virtual reality, fed into the information bank and consciousness that I have by a very complex computer, which reorganizes that environment according to my reactions and sets new challenges according to my development? How can I be certain that what I call my physical body, in what I experience as a waking state, is any different from that of the dream state? By what rational means can I prove to myself that I am not the one and only conscious being in whole existence – except, of course, the one who has constructed and programmed the computer – and that all the beings, objects and happenings of my experience are not only parts of the software and data input, like those of my dream-state? And if I am the one and only conscious being in existence, what proofs can I provide for myself that this consciousness of mine existed one second ago, and all my past impressions and knowledge are not only the results of an instant memory input? But even further: couldn't it be possible that this one unique I, this singular consciousness is the genie, the Spirit of the construction, the programming and of the experiences of being and growing?

What gives substance to these questions is the fact that our present day computers can already produce such a virtual reality, acting on all the senses, and producing genuine experiences from flying a real jet-plane to having a sexual intercourse with a real partner. This very fact eliminates the argument of the impossibility of the how.

The whole mental exercise resolves itself not by finding tangible proofs, but by asking the eternal star-question: why?

Why would the one singular I and unique – and consequently universal – Consciousness, Who has done the construction and the programming, and is readjusting that programming constantly, be satisfied with the watching of the reactions, antics and maybe development of a singular little being of His creation that I am – and that He obviously had to produce out of Himself –, if He can differentiate into infinite elements of countless orders of conscious being and becoming, programming and constructing, and experiencing it all?

Maybe these were the self-posed questions of Farid al-Din 'Attar, the Sufi poet some eight centuries ago, which he answered so beautifully in his immortal poem of The Conference of the Birds, the first few lines and the closing stanzas of which I present here in the translation of Edward Fitzgerald:

Once on a time from all the circles seven
Between the steadfast Earth and rolling Heaven
The birds, of all note, plumage and degree,
That float in air, or roost upon the tree;
And they that from the waters snatch their meat,
And they that score the desert with long feet:
Birds of all Nature known or not to man,
Flock'd from all quarters into full Divan,
On no less solemn business than to find,
Or choose, a Sultan Khalif of their kind,
For whom, if never theirs, or lost, they pined.
- - - - -
Till of the mighty host that fledged the dome
Of heaven and floor of earth on leaving home,
A handful reached and scrambled up the knees
Of Kaf whose feet dip in the Seven Seas;
And of the few that up his forest-sides
Of Light and Darkness where the Presence hides,
But thirty – thirty desperate draggled things,
Half-dead, with scarce a feather on their wings,
Stunned, blinded, deafened with the crash and craze
Of rock and see collapsing in the blaze
That struck the sun to cinder – fell upon
The Threshold of the Everlasting One,
With but enough of life in each to cry,
On THAT which all absorbed.
And suddenly
Forth flashed a winged Harbinger of Flame
And Tongue of Fire, and "Who?" and "Whence they came?"
And "Why?" demanded. And the Tajidar
For all the thirty answered him: "We are
Those fractions of the sum of Being, far
Dis-spent and foul disfigured, that once more
Strike for admission at the Treasury Door."

To whom the Angel answered: "Know ye not
That he you seek recks little who or what
Of Quantity and Kind – himself the Fount
Of Being Universal needs no count
Of all the drops that overflow his urn,
In what degree they issue or return?"
Then cried the Spokesman: "Be it even so:
Let us but see the Fount from which we flow,
And, seeing, loose ourselves therein!" And lo!
Before the word was uttered, or the Tongue
Of Fire replied, or portal open flung,
They were within – they were before the Throne,
Before the Majesty that sat thereon,
But wrapt in so insufferable a blaze
Of glory as beat down their baffled gaze,
Which, downward dropping, fell upon a scroll
That, lightning-like, flashed back on each the whole
Past half-forgotten story of his soul;
Like that which Yusuf in his glory gave
His brethren as some writing he would have
Interpreted; and at a glance, behold
Their own indenture for their brother sold!
And so with these poor Thirty; who, abasht
In memory all laid bare and conscience lasht,
In full confession and self-loathing flung
The rags of carnal self that round them clung;
And, their old self self-knowledged and self-loathed,
And in the soul's integrity reclothed,
Once more they ventured from the dust to raise
Their eyes – up to the Throne – into the blaze,
And in the centre of the Glory there
Beheld the Figure of themselves as 'twere
Transfigured – looking to themselves, beheld
The Figure on the Throne en-miracled,
Until their eyes themselves and That between
Did hesitate which Seer was, which Seen;
They That, That they: Another, yet the same;
Dividual, yet One: from whom there came
A Voice of awful answer, scares discerned,
From which to Aspiration whose returned
They scarcely knew; as when some man apart
Answers aloud the question in his heart:
"The Sun of my Perfection is the glass
Wherein from Seeing into Being pass
All who, reflecting as reflected see
Themselves in Me and Me in them: not Me,
But all of Me that a contracted eye
Is comprehensive of Infinity;
Nor yet themselves: no selves but of the All
Fractions, from which they split and wither fall.
As water lifted from the deep again
Falls back in individual drops of rain,
Then melts into the universal main.
All you have been, and seen, and done, and thought,
Not you but I, have seen, and been, and wrought:
I was the Sin which from Myself rebelled;
I the Remorse that towards Myself compelled;
I was the Tajidar who led the track:
I was the little Briar that pulled you back:
Sin and Contrition – Retribution owed,
And cancelled – Pilgrim, Pilgrimage, and Road,
Was but Myself towards Myself; and your
Arrival but Myself at my own door;
Who in my fraction of Myself behold
Myself within the mirror Myself hold
To see Myself in, and each part of Me
That sees himself, though drowned, shall ever see.
Come, you lost atoms, to your Centre draw,
And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw;
Rays that have wandered into darkness wide,
Return and back into your Sun subside."

This for me answers my own self-posed questions. The technology of the process on the psychic plane, its connection to the physical one and the total psycho-physical reality that it paints, is presented and discussed in my books and essays, where not the who and the what and the where and the when, but the how and the why are the most played keys.