A
Journey in Fragmentation and Wholeness
by Judy
B. Gardiner
Presented at the 84th Anniversary Conference of The
Lifwynn Foundation for Social Research
October 29-31, 2010 |
I don't want to achieve immortality through my
work...
I want to achieve it through not dying … |
These words, spoken by Woody Allen, could easily have
come from the late Montague Ullman. Does consciousness
survive bodily death: a subject which Monte was
passionate about.
My talk today is dedicated to Monte Ullman, an explorer
who set out to learn about the invisible parts of life.
He used his imagination, memory, creativity and honesty
– all his keys to dreaming – to write scholarly papers
and to heal people through their dreams. For those of
you who hadn’t the pleasure of knowing Monte, he was a
happy, charming, brilliant spirit who never forgot to be
human. His compassion affected dreamers in every walk of
life. Not only was he a life force in the world of
Dreams but also in his experiments in dream telepathy.
In the early '70s, Monte was inspired by the quantum
work of physicist David Bohm and spent the rest of his
life developing a theory based on the relationship of
quantum physics to dreaming. This birthed his last
paper,
“In Search of a New
Abode,” presented at the International Association
for the Study of Dreams in 2006. Monte described
dreaming as a relay-station with input from two orders:
The Implicate Order and the Explicate Order. Like the
dream, Bohm’s Implicate Order is one of wholeness that
includes “all that is” in a state of interconnectedness
and actually reflects on what Monte had accomplished in
his dream-sharing approach. Monte considered Bohm’s
Implicate Order as a universal unconscious, linking us
more authentically not only to our dreaming selves but
to all forms of matter. In the Explicate Order (waking
consciousness), "all that is" unfolds from the
Implicate.
I believe this Ullman-Bohm theory has influenced the
dreams I’m about to share. Admittedly, I have a slight
advantage. Monte was not only my colleague but my
partner for the last five years of his life. We had a
profoundly deep telepathic relationship to the point
where he would often answer a question before I could
even ask it. He left his body in 2008, but his mental
agility seems not to have been affected in the least. If
anything, it’s keener and he’s still answering before I
ask.
Now begins an odyssey of interconnected dreams that
journeyed me from Transcendence − to Fragmentation − to
the Paranormal − to Consciousness and, ultimately, to
Wholeness. While this is my dream, the experience
belongs to all of us.
The first dream, which I call Heaven and Earth, came to
me in November 2008, five months after Monte passed.
|
I am taken up high in the air. The sky is
azure blue. Looking down, I see a great expanse
of green and am plunged into a U shaped valley
of lush green grass which completely enfolds me.
It is a warm exhilarating feeling I’ve never
before known. Then I am lifted again even higher
to still more green. [1] |
I realize this must be what happens when we die, for
consciousness is still with me but I have become part of
the vastness of space and am going from the depths of
the verdant valleys to the heights of boundless
mountains that have no end, no peaks, no summit, for the
summit reaches beyond consciousness, beyond what the eye
can see or the mind can know.
The adventure of the green odyssey finishes but the
dream continues.
|
I am hurled once again into the same vast
panorama, but this time it is red − redder,
truer and more transparent than any red I’ve
known. From the endless plains of true red, I
see a PART of a white concrete building floating
below me — enfolded in the same spatial
landscape. There is no top or bottom or sides
where I am; just pure freedom and the knowledge
that I’m in it, without a body. [2] |
The sensation is so powerful that at first it’s
frightening, but fear dissolves to euphoria when I
realize I am covered and blanketed in green and am now
being taken to the same heights in red. No longer in
danger, I surrender to the invisible power that has
transported me for I trust it. As I’m on the threshold
of hynopompic sleep, I wonder if this is Monte’s
experience and if he’s telling me what it’s like when
only consciousness remains?
The dream begins its descent into the mundane.
|
I am going through a box of photographs and
another box of baby clothes. It concludes with
my seeing green food like spinach. |
Was this dream illustrating the Buddhist concept of
Samsara, the continuous cycle of birth and death?
Described as a continuous flowing movement, it mirrors
Bohm’s concept of a continuous equilibrium of enfoldment
and unfoldment.
Montague Ullman’s interest in the possible relevance of quantum theory to dreaming was awakened in 1974 when he
attended a week long dialogue between David Bohm and Krishnamurti, the Indian mystic.
e[i] As Bohm grew older,
he became increasingly preoccupied with Eastern
mysticism and parapsychology.
A month after the Heaven and Earth dream, I traveled to
Paris where the colors of Christmas were in full
regalia. |
 |
|
The first night there, I walk into an elegant
restaurant and am awestruck! The walls, furnishings,
lighting: everything in sight is vividly bathed in a
brilliant deep red, a replica of one fragment in my
dream.
|
 |
|
“Part of the white concrete building” also
comes to life but instead of floating…, it is set on the ground and instead of only a part of a building, it’s a
whole string of little white cottages flanking the Champs Elysee.
|
Had the Implicate Order sent only part of a building to
my dream
to illustrate how it unfolded to a whole in
waking? This seemed to follow the unfolding that occurs
in the Explicate Order. Each cottage was a booth
representing a different nation and in its wholeness
materialized as a Christmas fair for all nations, for
society as a whole linking to quantum’s feature of
Interconnectedness. Unlike the dream, the cottages are
not made of concrete, but are concrete in the sense that
they are physical.
|
Why so many fragments?
Bohm says we view objects as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. Such
particles are not separate "parts," but facets of a deeper, more underlying unity that is ultimately
holographic and indivisible, meaning that every part contains all the information possessed by the whole.
e[ii]
This underlying unity was demonstrated in my journey
between Heaven and Earth.
But why did parts of the dream materialize specifically
in Paris? Fragmentation drew me in deeper. This Heaven
and Earth dream so imbued in the magic of Paris
connected with another earlier Paris trip and a dream
following Monte’s passing. |
I’m in a café in the Place des Vosges. I get the
feeling of a lot of concrete around, like the
grayish color of French architecture with its
stone facades, columns and detailed
indentations. I see a beautiful swirl of
yellows, oranges, pinks and some blue in the
window.
[3] |
|
The café in this dream had no name but I knew I had been
there before. I found in my 2003 Paris travel notes that
it was the Café Ma Bourgogne in the Place des Vosges, an
historical square originally known as Place Royale.
While preparing a tribute for Monte,
I recalled our many
discussions around my dreams of black holes. Searching
Google images for a black hole, I spotted the precise
swirl of colors I dreamt and was stunned.
|
 |
My
return to Ma Bourgogne was met with disappointment. I
secure a table at the window but there was nary a trace
of the colorful dream swirl imaged online as a black
hole. I leave and begin to stroll through the 17th
century vaults of the Place des Vosges, now an arcade of
shops and cafes, where I observe the same grayish stone
and architectural detail as in the dream. I notice in
the window of an art gallery a life-sized bronze
sculpture of a man carrying a valise.
His torso and part of an arm and leg are missing, yet he
appears whole. |
I am intrigued by the missing parts and
compelled to explore further. Once inside the gallery, I
learn that the artist, Bruno Catalano is inspired by the
universal theme of travel and believes that, when we
travel, we unconsciously leave parts of ourselves in the
places we visit. He says that our words, our energy,
doesn’t get lost in space but instead becomes a part of
the place and stays there timelessly. I wonder if those
invisible parts of us – our memories, our dreams, our
consciousness – are somehow imprinted in places we feel
so at home in. Are we a reflection of what has been
stamped on the cosmic surroundings so special to us? |
|
Then a flash of insight!
|
These parts were all related and, according to Bohm,
will ultimately dissolve back into a whole flowing
movement to form and maintain itself in some other
arrangement. In viewing Catalano’s sculpture, we see
that the man and the stone wall appear as one, a
provocative statement in fragmentation and wholeness.
Catalano thinks of the empty parts, the unconscious
parts, as going into a black hole.
This matched Monte’s theory that the dream contains an
enormously condensed information mass of our personal
universe. |
This he called the black hole of the psyche.
e[iii]
In physics, it’s been long held that nothing escapes
from a black hole, but a controversial new study argues
that nearly all of the information that falls into one
comes back out.
e[iv] That is, with the exception of light.
Physicist Stephen Hawking describes information escaping
from a black hole as mangled, reminiscent of the
disjointed and jumbled fragments in our dreams.
To recap the black hole saga: The symbol made itself
known in two different dream images at two different
times, but in the same place. The café and the gallery
were only steps apart. Both held fragments pointing to
the theory of a black hole. I began to wonder why this
black hole was following me around. Was the message
organized by a morphic field that contains inherent
memory through repetition, as suggested by Rupert
Sheldrake?
e[v]
The theories of Catalano, Ullman, Bohm and, possibly,
Sheldrake seemed to naturally connect. If memories are
etched in physical places and imprinted in the psyche,
the relationship between mind and matter was leading to
the same conclusion.
Parts of us remain.
Perhaps our remains are far more
sentient than simply decaying bones and earthly ashes. |
Following the Heaven and Earth dream by two months, the
theme of ascending and descending made itself known in
another dream.
|
Monte suddenly dies. I say, “When we go
under the grass, we are going home, but when we
go above the grass, we go to another place which
is very clear and pure. I see “1” and “1” and
exclaim, “Jubilee!”
[4] |
|
Jubilee is a year of remission of sins and universal
pardon. In Leviticus, a Jewish Jubilee cycle happens
every 50 years, so 50 plus 1 and 1 were adding up to the
52 year Calendar Rounds, the Mayan version. Both
versions reference sacred texts and spiritual angels in
our distant past. Both are parts that unite in one
totality.
Confronted with a set of inseparable opposites: Heaven −
Earth; Dreaming −Waking; Fragmentation − Wholeness; In
Body − Out of Body; it was odd that I would find myself
in all of these states at once.
|
Monte believed the hidden unity of opposites in quantum
theory’s complementarity described the dual nature of
consciousness; that is the dual states of dreaming and
waking as illustrated in the red and green dream-wake
experience which could be considered precognitive in
that it spans across time. |
The telepathic dream suggests the possibility of
non-locality by spanning across space. This slide
illustrates the instantaneous transfer of a signal from
one place to another through no known physical means. |
The light emanating from the head of each figure implies
faster-than-light communication speed between the two.
Non-locality was first described by Einstein, Podolsky,
and Rosen (EPR) in 1935. The EPR paradox draws attention
to a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement.
|
In 1982 Alain Aspect, a physicist at the University of
Paris discovered that electrons are able to
instantaneously communicate whether they are 10 feet or
10 billion miles apart. These entangled particles are
thought to be identical entities that share common
origins and properties. Somehow, each particle always
seems to know what the other is doing.
e[vi]
Could certain electrons in one brain fire a photon, a
particle of light, which at superluminal speed instantly
recognizes which other brains to interact with? My
dreams of light and vision suggest that the optic nerve
is the conductor of light which physiologically
activates the sixth sense (the third eye) through some
mechanism of conscious action.
Neurophysiologist Karl Pribram believes memories are
encoded throughout the brain, making the brain itself a
hologram. The synthesis of Bohm’s and Pribram's views is
known as the holographic paradigm
e[vii]
in which Monte
included dreaming and telepathy. If our minds are
fragments of the greater hologram and everything is
perpetually interconnected, telepathy may be accessing
the holographic level. But what happens at death when
our physical brains cease to function? Perhaps our
minds, our souls, are composed of higher matter called
Consciousness.
Could this consciousness be the unsuspected key that
unwittingly keeps us in contact with those gone before,
no matter how wide the gap is between us?
Was I experiencing infinitely connected fragments of a
cosmic depository of “all that is” in panoramas of
brilliant color, vast stretches of nature, flashes of
Paris, from descending below the Earth to ascending
above it. The totality of the interconnected dreams so
analogous to consciousness seemed a projection of a
deeper order.
The dreams continued to ascend.
|
In 2009, I dream I’m talking to Monte on the
phone. He says, “I’ll meet you in 2 minutes on
the moon.” Then the phone rings twice.
|
It sounds like Call Intercept. I think it’s a real call
and wonder who would be calling at 2 a.m. To this day,
I'm sure that the phone actually rang, but I continued
dreaming. Back to the dream:
|
I ask a physicist if our planet is a
continuum of life. He says “No.” I picture the
Big Bang and then a 2nd Big Bang. I ask if the
world will end. He says, “Yes,” but when I ask
“When?” he won’t tell me. This physicist has a
friend who is also a physicist, a Barishnikov
type. We'll all be working together on a project
which has to be finished soon. Then my friend
from Israel shows up, and she too will be
working on it. [5] |
|
Days later, I absent mindedly walked over to my
bookshelf and put my hand on Einstein's Moon by David
Peat, a book of Monte's which I had never opened.
Monte had bookmarked page 79 in the Bohr vs. Einstein
chapter. On it was a discussion revolving around the EPR
experiment and the velocity of an electron. Two names of
physicists were prominently displayed:
Boris Podolsky, Russian (represented by
Barishnikov in the dream)
Nathan Rosen, Israeli (represented by my Israeli
friend in the dream) |
Monte was in the habit of saying things were squared.
This dream squared many images: 2 minutes, the phone
ringing twice, a 2nd Big Bang and 2 physicists.
|
A year later, I dreamt:
|
I find a letter from Edgar Mitchell written
in long hand. It has to do with how Monte knew
Mitchell. I say "Mitchell was on the Apollo."
Monte says, "You want to keep this letter."
[6] |
Monte wrote in long hand his entire life.
In this collection of dreams, I again pose the question:
Is Monte perhaps telling us what it’s like when only
Consciousness remains? First we return to the Earth, to
the soil. Then we ascend to a higher dimension. But in
the Heaven and Earth dream, the order is reversed. I
ascend first and then descend. Even time, space and
direction appear to be projections of this deeper order
for each event carries the same theme but appears to
occur at a different time and in a different order.
This series of interconnected dream-wake experiences
shuttling between past, present and future suggests that
each present moment is an amalgam of all times
establishing an interrelationship between waking and
dreaming consciousness as a continuity of experience:
one undivided whole. |
 This mysterious consciousness knew my mind, but my mind
couldn’t know it. All my mind knew was that I was
jostled hither and yon, but my dream, with Consciousness
as its witness knew it was not bound to the space-time
continuum. I let that invisible power, Consciousness,
transport me. I couldn’t see it because it was the seer.
It was real yet neither concrete nor abstract. But it
was of an immense world bearing the mark of infinity. In
quantum language, could Consciousness be the Observer
and the Observed?
If this was actually a telepathic communication from
Monte Ullman sent from the Implicate for others to read,
then we may consider that all forms of consciousness, in
waking, sleeping, dreaming and afterlife, are
interconnected in one divisible, yet inseparable whole.
Images deeply graven in my dreams told me that mind and
matter are not isolated, one from the other. Those
inseparable opposites had united: Heaven and Earth.
Dreaming and Waking. Fragmentation and Wholeness. In
Body and Out of Body. All One enfolded in the unspoken
stillness of Consciousness, in Life, and in Death, and
perhaps, back to Life.
As in Shakespeare’s Tempest, has Monte awakened from the
dream of life into a true reality, or at least a truer
dream? Either way, it appears he’s in his new abode
still working on the relationship of quantum theory to
dreaming to parapsychology and getting closer all the
time, transmitting his thoughts to the Almighty Dream,
that immense relay station between Heaven and Earth, or
as he would say, between the Implicate and the
Explicate.
This intricate web of communication implies that Monte
has made Woody Allen's dream come true and has
conceivably achieved immortality through not dying.
There is reason to believe that he's still watching over
our dreams, imparting important information and loving
and protecting us while working toward
species-connectedness.
If we trust in our higher Consciousness, our friends and
loved ones who have made this transit are likely to be
speaking to and teaching us in the silent language of
the Dream, our most natural resource.
|
In Loving Memory
Of
Montague Ullman
(1916 to 2008 and Beyond)
 |
With great thanks to Lloyd and Kate Gilden for making
this dedication possible.
[1]Note: All dream references are in italics and
referenced by date and name. Citations are preceded by
the symbol e and appear at the end of the paper.
[2] 11/22/08 − Heaven and Earth
[3] 6/16/08 – Black Hole
[4] 11/16/09 − Jubilee
[5] 7/6/09 − Big Bang
[6] 9/21/10 − Apollo
e[i] Ullman, M., The Dream: In Search of A New Abode
e[ii] Bohm, D., Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge
& Kegan Paul, London, 1980.
e[iii] Ullman, M., The Transformation Process In Dreams
Dreams Vol. 79, No. 2 May 1975.
e[iv] McKee, M, New Scientist. 10:17 13 March 2006. Space.
Black holes: The ultimate quantum computers?
http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/dn8836-black-holes-the-ultimate-quantum-computers.html
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007arXiv0707.4523G
e[v] Sheldrake, R., A Theosophical Appraisal, by David
Pratt, Part 1: Morphic Fields and the Memory of Nature. http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/science/prat-shl.htm
e[vi]
Talbot, M., The Universe as a Hologram: Does Objective
Reality Exist, or is the Universe a Phantasm?
e[vii]
Ibid. |
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