Of Dreams, Stars, and Cow Dung: How Copious Creamy Gober is Produced?

(Introduction to my upcoming book Swami Gober's Bhagavad Gita Commentary)

At the turn of the 20th century, there emerged a new way of thinking about the human mind. Not so much a new way as the bald fact that people started thinking at all, seriously thinking, about the mind — the field of psychology then being in its infancy. Coinciding with a fundamental revolution in physical sciences when Max Planck published a paper that soon led to the development of quantum mechanics, the discipline of psychoanalysis was born with the publication of Sigmund Freud's epic treatise "Interpretation of Dreams."

This work marked an extraordinary accomplishment, and the discovery of the Unconscious announced by it is a momentous juncture in human history. The Freudian revolution is often placed, and rightly so, alongside the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. Freud is the father of the psychoanalytical movement, the mother of all shrinks, and an authority-figure for several other important streams in modern psychology as well.

To begin with, it is downright weird that for a couple of centuries after people earnestly took to examining and excogitating about the world during the Renaissance, nobody seemed to be keen on investigating the human mind, its arrangement and derangement, or what we all do for almost one-third of the day, every day. Mind, madness and sleep were eerily not a part of the scientific outlook of the world. And the only rattle about dreams was perhaps in the popular lore as vague portenders of future events. And yet dreams are not some exotic fairyland pixies; they could really-truly be the most magical, mysterious things, nonetheless they are very much an integral part of our workaday lives, and crucial to our very survival and sanity. As more recent research has found out, volunteers who were not allowed to dream but allowed to sleep in bouts as much as they wanted to, being jolted into wakefulness as soon as the dreaming REM phase would set in, were soon driven to the edge of sanity. It appears that our everyday pitter-patter inconsequential dreams are more vital than sleep itself to buoy up the integrity of our minds.

Dreams and the silent, night-enshrouded realm of sleep to which they belong constitute a dark continent in the thick of the forest of our quotidian existence, all waiting to be explored, tremendous unknown forces inside ourselves in deep need of being studied and harnessed. Yet even in our more enlightened times, as even it had been throughout all the ages before Freud, hardly any of us seems to be concerned about the issue of dreams and sleep. We rig casual parameters like less/more, good/bad, sound/disturbed and so on to our sleep, but beyond that we have no big interest in it. People fight shy of actively thinking about sleep and dreams even as they keep remote from actively thinking about their own mortality; these are simply twilight zones beyond the outer limits of our day-to-day lives. Even so, all the religions and spiritual traditions of the world were raised on the foundational truth of death, which is without doubt the all-absorbing certainty of human existence and of life itself, but sleep has no religion or science taken up with it (apart from some amount of laboratory research happening in this area in the recent decades). Sleep resembles death in some important ways and is just as central to human existence, and more importantly, all of us have direct, intimate, regular and prolonged contact with it, while death remains a totally unexperienced territory (except perhaps in the rare cases where people have had near-death experiences). Making for a little solace though, the unconscious mind that surfaces during the sleep and dreams has the pseudo-cult of psychoanalysis devoted to it, and pseudo it is as we shall presently see.

The spirit and soul played up in religions, the entity that is supposed to survive the breakup of the physical body upon death, is a wispy phantasm, more or less a highly abstract concept to most of us. However, the presence of the unconscious or the subconscious mind is a plain reality of our everyday lives; since all these dreams pop up on and on and we are not consciously involved in conjuring them up — what could be more obvious than the fact that there is a mental capacity within ourselves beneath and beyond the ordinary mind we identify ourselves with. We have a mind that seems to have a mind of its own, outside the reach of our conscious grasp and knowledge. Yet there had been no word like 'the Unconscious' prior to the twentieth century. This is particularly puzzling when we consider the fact that hypnotism had been professionally practiced for at least a few decades by then.

So finally here comes a man, a trained hypnotist himself, who states some of the obvious things and carries out some simple probing and pondering all of which should have been done decades or centuries before his time. Freud definitely brought great insights with him, and yet the funny thing is that he is but like the proverbial one-eyed man who could be the king only in the country of the blind. It gets worse when we realize how so skewed and screwed-up this great man's vision is.

Let's consider the situation for a moment. We all have dreams, every day and every night, and slews of them, spontaneously bubbling up and flowing interminably on their own accord. Just close your eyes, doze off lightly, and you'd find yourself catching up on some dream that may sometimes seem to have been running even before you entered into it. Some thinkers, probably they are the knowers, aver that dreams are continuously drifting through our unconscious mind as an undercurrent, even while we are awake as when we are asleep — only we are not able to take notice of them in the glare of our conscious minds in the same way as we can't see the stars in the daytime in the dazzling brilliance of the sun. So dreams are such a huge part of our minds and lives, whether we recognize it or not, and if some of us were to become a little self-aware and seek to delve into this mystifying oneiric realm, how would we go about it? Should we zealously start keeping a dream diary and get ourselves busy in catching on to the 'language' of dreams?

A verity that strikes us upon more serious consideration of this issue is that dreams come in varieties and the quality of dreams is not totally independent of our waking state mind. In other words, we can very much cultivate the character of the dreams we are going to get, we are by no means there only in the capacity of passive note-takers. There are of course good and great dreams as well as the bad and ugly, but unfortunately most of our dreams generally are of the mediocre-type, junk-variety, highly forgettable, even though some cracking creativity could have gone into churning out the details of even these apparently lackluster, skimble-skamble dreams. Even the most ordinary of our dreams belong to a self-operative creativity of a different order, automatically manifesting in the minds of even the most uncreative of persons. These humdrum dreams abound, however we do from time to time experience those of the really electrifying, breathtaking variety, and we would naturally crave to have more of them — though we may not have much of an idea how to go about it and therefore may choose to let our yearning subside and slide away.

However, suppose there was a tasty pill out in the market chewing which the chances of our getting elaborately woven dreams of fantasy and adventure, laced with vivid, spine-tingling experiences, would dramatically increase — how much would we be willing to pay for it? Would money be a constraint at all? This drug could get to be such a craze, the like of which has never been witnessed in all of history. No such rummy dreaming pill is in the offing of course, but all of us are intuitively aware that the dreams we get during sleep are to some extent or other influenced by the thoughts, activities, desires, worries and various experiences of our waking life as well as many other factors such as the food we eat, our energy levels and our state of health. Any direct, definite connection seems difficult to establish, given the apparently highly erratic nature of our dreams, but no one can outright deny the correlation between the contents of our waking life and those of our sleeping life.

So the moment we set out to do something about our dreams purposely, we would be seeking to find out two things: firstly, how to increase the likelihood of getting great dreams, by unraveling the connections between the day-life factors and the dreams, and secondly, how to enhance the retention of dreams. Dreams are mostly transient, chimeric creepy-crawlies, but the recall and memory of them upon waking up is even more fugacious, besides being vague and usually scrambled. This is a fundamental problem that needs to be addressed, for what is the point of climbing mountains, jumping off the cliffs and flying around all by ourselves in the boundless blue sky of our dreams if we don't remember much or any of it upon waking up and a while thereafter? Yet I don't think head-shrinkers who should have been terribly troubled by this problem did anything about it at all.

Quaintly enough, psychoanalysts simply confined the role of the conscious mind to one of fumbling recall and note-taking — akin to the general manner of scientists observing Nature while taking care not to interfere with it — in this whole matter of dreams. The possibility of ourselves actively doing something to soup up the engine of our dreams was not simply considered. This is misleading, besides being sickeningly silly. To mention but one approach, both the quality and retention of our dreams can be significantly improved through the means of simple autosuggestion. Relevant subliminal suggestions running through earphones while we are slumbering may also have some considerable impact as would many lucid dreaming techniques and equipment that are gradually becoming more popular. The goal is to somehow juice up our creativity and intelligence when the unconscious mind, which is rather amenable to suggestions and other influences from the conscious mind, gets into the driver seat during sleep. And this would be the most commonsensical thing to do. If the general rationale by which we lead our day-to-day lives is to maximize savory experiences and minimize distasteful ones, the same logic would apply to the world of dreams.

People have been consciously pursuing happiness, and devising all kinds of ways to derive the same, since the advent of civilization about 5000 years ago (prior to it life was presumably more a story of bare survival). One would expect even the ancient people, however dopey they may have been, to be rather interested in seeking ways to transfigure the substance of their dreams. If civilization is all about avoiding helplessness of the jungle and giving purposeful direction to our lives, it is deucedly absurd that even an ordinary person of whatever historic period has not been particularly concerned about the experiences of dreams which he or she invariably underwent for several hours each day of their lives. Instead, they would just take them as a given fact of existence about which not much could be done.

Because everyone of us has a deep inbuilt drive to seek pleasurable, thrilling experiences in some form or other and dreams hold out maximum and seemingly endless potential in this direction, they are not a subject of mere passing intellectual curiosity but of are high pertinence to the quality of our lives. At least, they should be. Because — let me emphasize — it is our common experience that dreams don't come altogether all by themselves, although they may appear to do so; they are susceptible to some degree of subjective control. Yet, down through the history from the Babylonian and biblical times onward, if ever anyone interested themselves in dreams it was, as things go, only in order to take notes and interpret them, as if dream experiences didn’t have any validity in themselves and at the most they could sometimes be used to divine the future or learn about other things through clairvoyant means, by following a code of translation of the supposed dream symbolism.

That's what so many people down through the history have been doing, and even in the 16^th and 17^th centuries in Europe — those gallant times of vigorous intellectual curiosity — there probably were fat dream dictionaries and almanacks available, but nothing much besides. What does a broken tooth mean, what does the appearance of a shrieking black bird mean, what does running naked in the street in a dream mean? — and so on. With the advent of psychoanalysis, Freud and the other shrinks who followed him blew this fad out of all proportions, giving it pseudo-scientific credibility. It was a science in its own way but one which depended on weak hypothesizing and which did not absolutely lead to any technology of taking charge of one’s dreams. Before psychoanalysis, dreams were being used to divine the future, while now they were principally being used to dig into the past, that too in a gruesomely laborious manner — with an intent to ascertain the nature of the influence of our past life on our present self. Nothing beyond that.

Perhaps none of the psychoanalysts even faintly realized what a ridiculous thing they were doing. Let me illustrate the point: every dream is a sequence of events, it has a script and a story-line, however grotesque it may seem to our waking sensibilities. Now, suppose you write a story and take it to an editor, would he read the story and judge its value by its own meaning, impact, and by the creativity glimmering through its content or would he become a Sherlock Holmes and start sleuthing: is this character a representation of someone in your life, did you get this idea from the school-experience you have had twenty years ago, are you vicariously living out the lust you have had for some girl through some other character in the story, and so on? Of what use would such an exercise be? Any sensible person running through your material would try to appreciate your creativity and the promise it holds, would let you understand your shortcomings, and may want to train you so that you can blossom in your artistic talent. The same logic would apply to your dreams: how to tune up your capacity to instantaneously fabricate all these fantastic dream tales, how to get you to enjoy more and more and live and learn from all those dreams that slickly stream across your mind while you are asleep? There is only one interpretation of dreams, and that is that the mind from which they spring up is a source of virtually infinite creativity. When tapped, this mind can transport us to worlds unimagined and to experiences that we couldn't have dreamt of in our wildest dreams, so to speak! Instead of following this premise and working on it, all the barmy psychiatrists writing tomes on 'Interpretation of Dreams' go on endlessly trying to dig your past and whatever possible references to it they can find in your dreams. In fact, Freud and co. were not interested in the study of dreams as such, all they were interested in was to gain some clues from them to treat your insanity; they simply tried to make you into a normal person again, albeit still mediocre and frustrated. Dreams are such a vast and mysterious phenomenon, and all they were being used was for this pallid, paltry purpose.

Trying to read a mind by making symbolic interpretation of dreams is not much unlike trying to read a person's character, his past and likely future, through his star signs. The whole concept of astrology is a fantastically weird approach to things though we tend to take it for granted normally, owing to over-familiarity. Here are planets and stars moving in the sky, millions and trillions of kilometers away from us — an infinitely vast, wonderful and luminous universe closing in on us from all directions; but we are interested in it only to know when we would get the next raise in pay, what kind of spouse we may find, how many children we would have and such mundane things. The simple, suppurating fact is that for thousands of years, in all the ancient or pre-scientific cultures, people were studying the heavens not to investigate and find out what was up there, but only to unriddle what possible influences the movements of planets and stars could have on our totally mundane, festering lives — mostly at personal or occasionally even at collective levels. The very notion that the astronomical position of some celestial bodies could permanently imprint our particular moment of birth with a certain character and thereby influence our personal behavior and fortunes is bizarre beyond comprehension. But even more bizarre is the fact that these priests and pundits of ancient cultures — be it in Babylonia, Egypt, China or India or the Americas — who were all exceedingly obsessed with the auspiciousness of dates and such astrological concerns, didn't know the first thing about the sky, which is the fact that the earth was not at the center of it, and were in the least curious to understand the nature and reality of the heavenly realms they were gazing at. (Interestingly, India had no sense of history or chronological time but was still meticulously finicky with the auspiciousness of dates and times). These learned, much-honored, and supposedly all-knowing fruitcakes of the ancient world were most probably under the impression that the sky was a solid crystalline dome above us studded with these starry orbs, all located at the most a few tens of kilometers away.

Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists are the modern-day priesthood, they are supposed to know everything about mind and perhaps even the soul, and they indeed seem to do their job effectively in bringing solace to people and palliating their worries and anxieties. They are supposed to be most deft at their job, but their job is mostly a daft affair. These people don't know the first thing about you and your mind, which is the tremendous fact that you are not your mind! But still they go on analyzing it ad nauseam and getting paid heftily in the process. Your mind, however, doesn't need any intricate mind-bogglingly time-gobbling analysis sprawling years and years, but only stimulus and impetus for growth. That these psychiatrists usually deal with sick and insane people is a different thing, but if you are even in a reasonable possession of your mental faculties, you have an enormous and perhaps endless scope for growth: your dreams can provide you the inspiration! Instead, as it is, our dreams only wind up giving us so much perspiration, while their sudorific and soporific analysis by the mind-numbing mind doctors doesn't seem to help much either. To study the stars or dreams in terms of our personal, petty, and pedestrian lives is such a doltish endeavor. The outer and inner spaces are dimensions infinitely greater than our surface lives. Beneath us lies the fathomless ocean of the mind, and above us lies the firmament of infinite worlds and possibilities. There is no need to reduce either to the level of our puny selves, instead we must seek to reach out to these realms of beatitude and infinitude that encompass our flimsy, mortal existence.

Else, we are condemned to get stuck in the morass, as so many fleas and flies in a heap of cow-dung, cozily ensconced in it, deriving sustenance from it. This is how all the superabundant gober around us is produced: through a stupendous lack of commonsensical logic and imagination, people moving through lives half-asleep, thinking through dreamy, hazy minds, largely oblivious to the vastness that underpins and oversees our existence.

This book, though, is concerned not so much with the business of sleep or dreams as with the business of awakening, of enlightenment — as taught in spiritual traditions, more specifically in Indian spiritual traditions. Indians were the first and the only people, besides perhaps a few other scattered Western philosophers and mystics, to realize — not just speculatively in a philosophical mode but experientially in an existential sense — that this world we see around us doesn't amount to much more than a passing dream. The concept of 'maya' as propounded by ancient Indian seers is a colossal and unparalleled achievement of the human mind. It is a revolution in itself and, in my view, far greater than the Copernican, Darwinian and Freudian revolutions. The concept of maya has staggeringly far-reaching implications, because not only does it say that the world as we know it, and as we see it, is an illusion — but it also implies that the consciousness which is a witness to this mirage-like world is the one eternal, abiding reality as well as the source of all the illusion of the world. The world is given rise to by the cosmic mind, as it were, in the same way as dreams are given rise to by our individual minds when we dream. All the dreams come and go, but the one consciousness underlying them ever remains. This consciousness is us. The key point here is that not only is the consciousness of the individual mind related to the consciousness of the cosmic mind, but since there is only one consciousness which is the one eternal truth, our consciousness itself is the cosmic mind. This is the meaning of that most cardinal assertion of Upanishads, the mystic texts of Vedic times, that this Atman (individual being) is the Brahman (Cosmic Being), there being really no difference between the two. The Upanishads boldly proclaim “Tat Tvam Asi” — "Thou Art That." And that is that, a realization of supreme importance in the history of human mind.

It is said that the Copernican revolution took the Earth away from being the center of the world, the Darwinian revolution took man away from being the focal point of life on earth, and the Freudian revolution finally took man from being the center of his own being. The Upanishads were a revolution too and a fantastic one, though these works actually came into broader daylight only around the turn of the twentieth century and much later owing to the work of preachers and enlightened masters such as Swami Vivekananda and Ramana Maharshi. The Upanishadic revolution puts man back where he belongs: exactly at the center of the universe, of all that exists, existed and will ever exist. This esoteric knowledge equates man with God, both these terms used not in an abstract way but in a very direct and clinker-hard sense. For after all, God is the fundamental ground of being. This is a philosophy that brings meaning, significance, purpose and excitement back into our lives, with a bang!

We must pause and think. Freud died, as one would expect, concluding that 'Life is insufferable’ but the Upanishads assert that our very being itself is of the nature of ecstasy, perennial bliss, satchitananda. The Upanishadic philosophy of Vedanta — centered on concepts such as maya, Brahman, ananda — is a philosophy of unimaginable power and vitality, and should be of paramount relevance to the modern world facing, as it is, dire times of great peril and uncertainty ahead.

While the process of psychoanalysis willy-nilly entrenches you more and more in the limitations of your mind, selfhood and past, through its very modus operandi of compulsively and obsessively dwelling upon the miniscule associated details, the effort of Vedanta is to liberate you, wholly irrespective of your past and such secondary concerns, break away the limitations of your mind and whisk you into the sky of illimitable being. However, just as it happened with the phenomenal discovery of the nature of unconsciousness and its world of dreams, as well as with the monumental charting of the movements of the celestial lights thousands of years ago, the discovery of consciousness and of its dream worlds got bogged down in huge quicksand pits of cow-dung or bullshit.

After a fashion as in Freudian psychoanalysis, in Vedanta too, people refused to attribute value and validity to dreams in their own right. People thought that if the entire world is a dream, then why bother? Instead of energetically treading close upon these fantastic dreams and taking them to ever greater levels, people just lazed and dozed off into eons-long semi-stupor. This is apathy and lethargy of the deadliest kind, and founded on a philosophical basis to boot!

Freud discovered two major impulses in the human psyche. First he discovered eros, comprising the will to life, the will to love, the will to pleasure and such, as being the fundamental drive of the human mind. This is a rather intuitive thing, but years later he proposed a rather counter-intuitive thing, thanatos, or the will to death and destruction (including both violence and self-destruction), as existing in parallel with eros. Now, Vedanta is a lofty philosophy of life-affirmation and life expansion. But sadly very early on in its evolution it got intricately entangled with mighty life-negating tendencies. And the very exposition that is generally considered as the epitome of its expression and the essence of the Upanishads has become its undoing. Enter the Bhagavad Gita.

Krishna’s Bhagavad Gita, the central and most revered text of Hinduism, is a disaster of unthinkable proportions. It is a supremely brazen expression of thanatos, the will to death. To put it candidly, Lord Sri Krishna is very much like a typical psycho of Hollywood movies, in urgent need of some psychoanalysis! To put it even more bluntly, he seems to be sicker in the brain than Adolf Hitler himself. At least when Hitler went on a brutal aggressive rampage during the Second World War, indiscriminately killing people by the millions, he had some mildly valid positive motivations — the vision of a world-dominating German Reich, a new millennium, a new era and so on. He was not in the least contemplating suicide, though he had to resort to it eventually. However, Krishna was a warmonger of a totally different kind. His basic rationale for propagating a totally mindless and doubtlessly suicidal war of an all-out scale was simply that the world is a dream, the soul is imperishable and no one really ever dies! So there is no problem at all, anyone can kill anyone. And might is right. Imagine a Hollywood thriller or a CSI episode where a New Age philosopher-psycho goes on a killing spree executing people while enlightening them, saying "No, you are not dying, my friend, you are just passing from an old dream to a brand new dream, enjoy the refreshing change because everybody needs one! Just consider me your friend and well-wisher. Adios, amigo!"

Krishna is not only responsible for wreaking enormous havoc and destruction at a certain point in the ancient, unchronicled history of India, but even if the Mahabharata war didn't really happen, he is responsible for a much more real and greater tragedy: he killed the very impulse to think and question in the Indian mind! Thought was stifled, the spirit stultified. For as soon as anyone dared to really think on his own regarding these spiritual matters, he would have been naturally led to wonder what kind of a maniac this Krishna character is for urging and driving people into a massively futile war when clearly he had the option to avert it, and doing it all under the pretext of a very sublime philosophy that is grossly distorted and used totally out of context. But leave alone sanity, questioning even the full-fledged divinity of Krishna is a taboo in Indian culture, where he is the Christ-equivalent, most beloved among the gods and a direct expression of the Godhead. He is considered so, entirely apart from the Mahabharata and the Gita, mostly because he used to be a very cute and naughty kid, prone to get himself into adventures which usually involved miracles, and who among other things was in the habit of stealing clothes of young girls when they were bathing in the river, again for spiritual and symbolic reasons — darned be symbolism! So, generation after generation, century after century, people went on praising the glories of Lord Krishna, and hundreds of commentaries of the Bhagavad Gita turned up, attempting to fathom the infinite depth of this turbid effluent, thereby piling gober upon gober in the process, and the Indian mind went on putrefying. India became a suicidal, cadaverous slave nation for hundreds of years, and was finally brought a little back into life only thanks to the British rule and the system of education and discipline they imposed on the country. Ironically, the Bhagavad Gita too started enjoying a renewed popularity from about mid-nineteenth century, owing to the breaking forth of the freedom struggle. Thus, just when India was about to jump out of the mire that was created — to a significant extent — by the Bhagavad Gita, it again got stuck into it!

If you place the control of a nuclear weapons system in the hands of chimpanzees, disaster is bound to follow. The original philosophy of Vedanta had the explosive power of a thermonuclear device, and properly used it could have propelled mankind to the stars, but unfortunately it fell mostly into the hands of monkeys and India got badly baked. What was left was mostly ashes and rubble and cakes of cow-dung. Bhagavad-Gita, in an outburst of thanotic self-destructive impulse, single-handedly undermined the whole power and potential of the Vedanta philosophy, that very doctrine it purported to expound. A philosophy of dreams, a philosophy of stars, but what came from it so far is only a humongous dump of humus and dung.

My book, originally published at my blog Gober Gas, has been written in the hope that something positive and useful can be made out of all the gober that is floating around. ‘Fueling your mind through the analytical breakdown of holy cow-dung’, says the tagline of my blog. When cow-dung, or gober, is broken down in a biogas plant, gober gas is produced. Of course you cannot run a rocket through methane gas, but you can at least cook some food which can then give you energy to think and act and aspire. By dissecting the desiccated cow-dung, in the rather laborious psychoanalytic style, bit by bit, piece by piece, my intent is to stir up some fresh and rational thinking among the readers.

Throughout this book we would be using the generic term ‘gober swamijis’, referring to traditional Indian gurus of past and present who claim to be wise and enlightened but often do not have a clue as to what they are talking. All of them invariably are staunch admirers of Krishna and the Bhagavad Gita. They fervently advocate the philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, trying to follow it in some way or other. Most of them are seemingly Vedantins, but unfortunately the general knowledge of many of these swamijis is abysmal, their logic pathetic and their idiocy pathological. In the blog we also look into their general discourses not directly related to the Gita, but in this book we mention them mostly in the context of their notes on the Bhagavad Gita.

One of the swamijis I would be looking into the blog is touted as the most happening guru in the current global spiritual gurudom scenario. I was going through a book of his in which a dunce of a disciple asks the swami "Do dreams [in sleep] come from the soul?" and the swamiji in his divine innocence answers "No, dreams come from the conscious mind." Whether or not they are dreaming with their conscious minds, these swamijis seem to think with their blighted, benighted unconscious minds, the blind leading the blind and all toppling over into a ditch of cow-dung. This same swamiji extols Krishna elsewhere in that book, saying that he is a great, inscrutable mind who goes beyond all logic. Not only Krishna, to me all these Dadaist gober swamijis seem to be inscrutable minds, going beyond logic, straight into the realm of dodoism, or the cuckoo country! My present book, as well as the site it is a part of, is a bemused examination of the discombobulating slapstick comedy of people befooling themselves and fooling others, boldly defying logic and falling headlong into a heap of utter rotten nonsense. My work can be used both for serious-minded enlightenment and light-hearted entertainment.

Swami Gober Gyanesh

July, 2009