The realization that there was another present who had more awareness than myself was shocking to say the least.
It made the story of the man dreaming of being a butterfly even more personal for myself. I have always had a fascination with so called dreams. When I was younger I remembered them much more, and can remember some where I would seemingly live a full life yet here only hours would pass. That led me to the conclusion time isn't what we have been taught to view it as.
It raises many questions, such as the realness of what is happening right now in the position considered awake. Some dreams one also feels at that time are real. Perhaps the submersion into the details is so strong it binds us to perception realities that are as much an illusion, or just as real dependent on how one views it as any other dreams we hold.
Reminds me of that crazy song we are taught as children.
Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
Given (in my estimation anyways) the possible ramifications of the so called Mandela effect which I experienced myself many decades in a personal matter well before it became talked of, I have speculated that all possibilities from choice have actually happened and it's possible to jump tracks with another supposed us from one of the other tracks. Given the further experience of precognition I also lean towards the idea everything has already happened and whatever we are travels along the pathways these events took place, our witnessing/experiencing them in some way activating the energy structures of those events.
I meandered quite a lot, my apologies. It's a rare person one can openly discuss such matters with. So many prefer to bind the illusion we have explained most things because of muh science. I believe thats part of why I was drawn years ago as a kid to Jung. I found his hypothesis on a collective conscious to be quite bold, and the fact it didn't allow the group controlled by Sigmund Fraud to discredit and ruin him perhaps even more remarkable. I have my own speculations on the phenomena he believed to be a collective consciousness, but that would be meandering even further.
You may find this old article interesting:
http://www.aakom.com/2014/06/can-you-do-mental-arithmetic-in-your.html
The perceived consciousness levels of dream entities is truly bizarre.
Why do most humans not find this fascinating!?
"It's only a dream!" syndrome is prevalent. Now that's bizarre!
An interesting article, although I still lean towards whatever/whomever was in that dream was independent of myself.
I have a story to share. Years ago I had a wisdom tooth taken out, and a cyst that was behind it as well to have a biopsy done on it. I got infected as the antibiotics didn't work and slipped into being septic. I had taken my then wife to work about 40 minutes away due to a bad snowstorm we were having.
I went home and went to bed, where I alternated between chills and sweats. But during that weird sleep, I had a bizarre dream. In this dream, I had come up with a mathematical formula that solved every problem in the world. It didn't matter what the problem was, it could be solved with this formula. It was one of those long dreams where months or longer went by. I even won the nobel prize because it brought world peace, lol.
So anyway, my alarm goes off and I'm so feverishly out of it that the entire drive through the snow storm I still believed I had figured out this damn math formula. It wasn't until my wife was in the car and I began telling her what I'd done that I made the connection it had happened in a dream. Then I was disappointing because I had written it down on a board several times sharing it in my dream and couldn't remember the slightest bit of what I had written in that dream. Not that I lean towards I came up with any such formula, but after the things Edgar Cayce pulled off from that state to others stories it would have been interesting to at least see if it solved anything.
Damn! The frustration! I've dreamt in both maths and code and geometry. Strangely, the geometry problem was correct - the symbolic solutions... just evaporated upon waking. Like the ashen remains of a BBQ, but can't remember what one ate.
I wonder whether REM actually activates the dream state, rather than the other way round. Our sense of time is largely due to this optical metronome - the microsaccades - which also means that "conscious sleep" appears timeless because that optical timer is switched off. (It isn't the only temporal system.)
Coma patients appear not to exhibit microsaccades, so I wonder if they could be induced whether that would jump-start their "waking up".
I think the first Jung book I read was Alchemical Studies (as was also one of the very few available in full and in paperback at the time) - then read all the psycho-archetypal works, then went back to the start. lol.
What really struck me was the transformative processes, the energetic entities and the creation of a personal mandala of wholeness. That all struck me as far more useful than Freud's fairly superficial analysis - which may be correct for some people, just was a bit useless in my state of mind. I eventually saw rather similar processes in Tibetan Buddhism.
I remain unsure of how much Jung really understood of the Eastern processes, as I recall him being baffled by the concept of emptiness, as he would insist there had to be some atomic consciousness left as the experiencer. What I can say now is that the experience of emptiness can happen without a self during the experience, but that, yes, the moment of recognition would bring consciousness back in, and what is then left is the memory of that pure state. I find that interesting - that the experience does leave a memory trace. ;-) One cannot exist in that state, but the main training is to co-exist in both states.
off at a tangent too!
Well, not so much really, as it also informs the dream state - there is a book on Dream and Sleep Yoga, by one of my teachers, Tenzin Wangyal.
An interesting proposition.
This is a tricky topic, and one where even I'm unsure of how to proceed. I'm not sure if I've experienced it, although it sounds close to something I have experienced that I've seen called getsumei no michi. In my case it is hard to say one was empty because one is still acting (in a heightened efficient way despite being free to do so because one is empty of the normal baggage that is slowing us down). Even trying to describe it here is confusing. It almost seems to me that I haven't experienced it and what I underwent was some heightened awareness that was in perfect connection with the action necessary to take place, where thought on a level one thinks of thought doesn't take place, its faster and purer, and contains some innate knowing that is not limited by doubts that reside in ordinary thought/perception.
Is that the same state as when in danger? the hyper-awareness and speed? Being able to summon that state without it just being a reaction to danger?
You may have gathered, I quite enjoy attempting to articulate transcendence - I dislike so much waffle, as it strikes me as part of the problem of deliberate obfuscation. Not a ref to you, just a note to self of why I bother returning to this topic.
Is way too easy to just say "is beyond language" - find a better language, is my reply! It is beyond subject-object-predicate or possibly a self-referential paradox, eg. "this proposition is untrue."
The "sound of one hand clapping" remains the classic koan, I think because it is one of very few that translate without cultural references. The official response is to ejaculate something random! You are the hand clapping the universe - the clap is the union - there is no hand, nor a universe, just the clap. But the point is not to analyse it - as I just did - but to experience it. Hence need some new koans - Zen masters have, indeed, tried, then fell back on the trad ones as being superior. lol.
Yes, although in my experience it is just more easily accessible in moments of danger. It's the closest I can relate to what you are pointing at. It has been my experience that if one approaches a situation with a certain intent one can also enter that state. An intent that is super focused, which might be why so many believe in the law of attraction to the point they ignore the truth of others ability to have free will and act on the best laid plans fucking them up.
I prefer the
and think it can only be shared through a direct experience in many cases.
I suggested as much to a psychiatrist I spoke with many years ago. The topic was on extra-ordinary event encounters with beings who are more energetic in nature, or at least not detectable to us in our normal sense range. I wish to qualify that last part with one can certainly use their minds eye as well as often feel an electrical surge course through us to detect this many times. I qualify that to also acknowledge there are likely many times there might be no easily detection method, to possibly none.
Anyway, they have it all nice and neatly classified with their science on how its a delusion, even if multiple people all share the same experience. That in itself could be the impetus for a large body of writing and exploration.
One that I suggested to her. I got the topic stopped when I suggested to her that if she was open to the idea, I could take her out at night into nature and prove to her that the experiences are real. She of course refused using her approved classification cult-ure to explain to me on why multiple people can share the same delusional experience.
On that last part, and more off topic. If one concedes that groups can have a shared hallucination/delusion, then what does that suggest for all of these so called normal experiences we are all sharing? lol