The Science of Deep Trance Meditation (cont'd.)

ii. The Superconscious

The "superconscious" as a concept is as old as Man, and appears to have been a valid precept of some of the oldest religions on the planet - including that of Tibet, India and Egypt - where it is identified with the following names: High Self, Overself, High Conscious, and Superconscious, among others. Abstractly, it represents a specific portion of the construct of a living being. Not just any portion, mind you, but the most important portion - the "soul" portion, if you like - the part that is immortal, the part that transcends time and space, the part that is in touch with the corresponding "ourselves" of all other beings, living or dead, that have ever existed, or will ever exist.

All fine and dandy, of course, but our era is, first and foremost, an "I'm from Missouri, show me!" era. So, the question has to be asked, what "practical" or "tangible" evidence do we have that this energy exists, or, more importantly, that it can provide the basis to explain the Cayce/Cottrell phenomenon? First, let's look at the collected works of Max Freedom Long, originally published in the mid-20th Century, and recently reprinted, who spent his entire life in Hawaii studying Huna.

What is Huna? Huna is believed to be one of the oldest - if not THE oldest - practicing religions on the planet. Its roots are unknown, just as are the origins of the Hawaiian people themselves. Hawaiian legends not only speak of a time when their islands were a single land mass - a postulate that staggers the imagination, and is beyond the scope of this article - but also, according to Long, when the natives shared common beliefs and rituals with the ancient Egyptians. With the advent of aggressive Christianity in the late 19th and early 20th Century, Huna was banned by local government and went underground. That, however, did not prevent Long, during his lifetime, from contacting the living Huna masters - "kahunas" - and attempting to preserve their beliefs in his books.

Convinced that Huna was not only the oldest surviving religion, but also the most practical, Long revealed how, centuries before Freud took his first breath, Huna broke down the human condition into three distinct parts: the Conscious, the Subsonscious, and the Superconscious. The Conscious is that we use from the moment we wake up each morning to the moment we go to sleep at night. It is functional and logical but lacking in two characteristics otherwise essential to our survival - memory and emotion. For those, we need access to the Subconscious, which is the root of both these attributes. Unfortunately, lacking in logic, the Subconscious is far too easily influenced, and much too quick to lose perspective. Were it not controlled by the Conscious, Long suggests, we as a race mightn't last until Tuesday.

[When one can't recall a thing or a name, and it "pops" into awareness minutes or hours later, even when we have "consciously" lost interest in the original question, that, according to Long, is an example of the Conscious accessing data from the Subconscious. This is a semi-mechanical process, he suggests, which takes some time to complete. Long wrote long before the invention of the computer, but had he been aware of the technology, it is likely he would have readily espoused the metaphor of "database access" to describe this process.]

The Superconscious was another kettle of fish. In language eerily reminiscent of Cayce readings (done early in the 20th Century, but almost certainly unavailable to Long, whose research represents a completely independent "thread") Huna masters talked about a "common point" of awareness at which not only did all minds, living and dead, past and future, "merge," but at which all information from all sources was available as pure stream of consciousness.

If, therefore, there was any portion of an individual's life-energy that survived death (a topic, which, it seems, has somehow reached the mainstream in recent years!) then that portion would have to be mated in some way to the Superconscious, the pure-soul portion [which, of course, opens the doorway to a further discussion of reincarnation, or "the continual and sequential use of the soul of human identities to achieve specific goals." Like Cayce before him, Douglas in DTM can, on demand, "read" the incarnation record of any individual who asks for it, and even provide eerily specific How-Did-He-Know-That? "points of resonance" between the current life and the past one. This is a topic, of course, beyond the scope of this current work!].

Back to our search for a "connection" between the Deep Trance process and access to the Higher Self.

Turns out there is one! And a big one indeed! All of Long's lengthy works on Huna emphasize his conclusion that the "most sacred secret" of Huna was also, by no mere coincidence, the most well-kept secret of the mystical and psychic societies of earlier eras - namely, that to access the Superconscious, you first had to go through the Subconscious; as, for example, by an altered state induced by drugs, ceremony, prayer, ritual, or - of course - hypnosis. [You could never reach the Superconscious from the Conscious waking state. On this, Long was adamant. You couldn't get there from here!]

Interestingly - if this hypothesis is correct - then, in theory, this phenomenon is much greater than the Cayce/Cottrell iteration of it, and there should be some evidence of DTM-like manifestations outside the areas of pseudoscience and intuitive medical readings. And there is!

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