AWARENESSAWARENESS There are several dimensions of awareness. For our purposes, consciousness can be considered the same thing. Dream State When you dream, you are conscious of your dream world, the people, things, and movements of your body within the dream world, all of which were created by your brain. Your sensory perceptions are manufactured by your brain, except sometimes, actual sense perceptions such as sounds or light in the room you are sleeping in will become incorporated into your dream, either literally, or in some abstract way. In dreams, your brain does not know the difference between waking state reality or dream reality, and for the most part, the dream is assumed to be real by your dream awareness while it is happening. For example, during a dream, you would most likely not do anything you wouldn’t do while in the waking state. Sure there are exceptions, but in any given dream, your dream self thinks the dream is real, and your actions can generate undesirable consequences which even your dream self would prefer to avoid.
Waking State This is the “real world” that you wake up to every morning. What makes it “real” is its stability, and apparent permanence. Most things are the same as they were when you went to sleep. Things have an apparent solidity and of course if you play your cards wrong, you could wind up deceased. This waking state, then, is the state that most people assume to be real, and the only state they believe to exist as “real”.
Astral State This is a very rare state that almost everyone has experienced, yet most will not remember. It is not uncommon, that during an REM dream, your dream self suddenly becomes “awakened.” When you wake up inside this dream, your consciousness shifts from your normal dream self, the one that thinks the dream is real, to your actual waking state consciousnes, who knows you are still dreaming! You are fully alert in your waking state, yet you know that you are still dreaming. This is called a lucid dream, and much has been written about them, including techniques for initiating them at will. In a lucid dream, you can either be passive and know you are dreaming, letting the dream unfold as it will, or you can actually control it, which obviously makes for great fun--anything goes! Another dimension of astral awareness occurs during the OBE, or out of body experience. Though some question the validity of the OBE, it is a well documented phenomenon that is different from say, a dream. Some claim the OBE is an offshoot of the lucid dream, and this may well be true, but there are some large differences. For example, most OBE’s are initiated with an almost electric, full-body vibration that ceases once your astral self is seemingly separated from the “actual” body. Your surroundings are very close to what you might see in the waking state, which means you know where your body is physically, as opposed to even a lucid dream. You may or may not be able to fly or move through walls, but the feeling that your consciousness is no longer inside the physical body is striking. When you “awaken” from an OBE to the waking state, eyes open, you remember exactly what happened during the OBE, as though you have just had a waking state experience.
Enlightened State Enlightenment is a state experienced by only a few lucky individuals. It is a joyful state, accompanied by a feeling of oneness with the universe. It is a purely spiritual state that finds automatic joy in the very realization of existence. It is not a form of happiness, but an indescribable knowing of being. It is not an awareness that you exist as a human, but that you (your spiritual being) exist beyond your human-ness, existed before you manifested as human, and will exist after your human is gone. In this awareness, you feel a connection to all there is, even an interminable connection to the God-source. For most people, they will not feel this awareness until just prior to death. For those that do experience this awareness in their lifetimes, it comes in flashes as a result of meditation or inner questioning of the nature of external and personal reality. Eastern mystics claim to exist in a constant state of enlightenment, but as long as anyone is human, it is hard to believe they can do this, as living is a compromise between physical and spiritual being. The more physical you take yourself to be, the more separate you think you are from others, and the more you will dwell in the workaday world of survival. Living purely in the physical breeds a shallow, hand to mouth existence that reacts, mostly in the negative, to external circumstances. You assume yourself to be what happens to you and around you, and if you judge what happens as bad, your experience is bad. Enlightened awareness knows that it is not the content, or what happens to it in life, but is the observer of what happens. By being the observer of what happens, the awareness can be connected to all things, yet the physical entity can remain separate from physical content, and not be negatively affected by “what happens”. The more spiritual you are, the less serious you take the “real world” to be, and the happier you will be, because you know that the universe as described by your senses and limited by the world of language, is not all there is. Where does all this lead? Eventually, you will awaken from this dream of being human to the reality of being. If you can do this while alive in the physical, even if only for a few seconds at a time, you can have all the best of both worlds. How do you do this? By becoming unconditional love. This means you recognize your connection to all things in the universe, that you are separate from no one and no thing. If you hate or kill, you are hating and killing something that is not separate from your true essence. Neither are you separate from the God-source. Allow everything. Allow mentally, the physical shifting of form and energy to take whatever new form it wants. From this physical state of allowing, you can decide to try to change things or not from a place of acceptance instead of resistance. When you begin with acceptance and allowing, your actions tap into the universal intelligence, and are more likely to be successful. Judge nothing. By refusing to judge things that occur in the physical as good or bad, you are denying the possibility of negative emotion being the motivation for your actions. Let the motivation for all your actions be to benefit all things and beings. When your actions are seeded in service to the totality and everything in it, you too benefit as you are part of the totality. As a result, your physical existence, your life, your waking state awareness will experience more happiness, joy, and peace of mind than you ever thought possible.
Intuition This awareness goes beyond that which can be sensed through the five bodily senses. Intuition is knowing something not because you have received some kind of brain signal, but because of your inherent, non-local connection to all things. Non-locality is a proven characteristic of sub-atomic particles which states that particles created from the same source are connected, and instantaneously know what the other is doing without having to receive a signal. According to Big Bang theory, all present matter in our known universe originated in an object called a singularity, smaller than an atom. If this is the case, then all matter in the universe came from the same source, at least indirectly. This might account for intuition, and even Einstein could not explain non-locality, sometimes referred to as quantum entanglement. He called it "spooky action at a distance."
|
