States of Expanded Awareness

It’s one thing to intellectually believe that other worlds probably exist “out there, somewhere”. It is quite another matter to find yourself straying into dreamlike worlds while you’re wide awake.

I'd long suspected that there was more to reality than the story that the five senses tell. I intuitively knew, also, that spiritual practice was closely related to heightened perception. But such concepts hardly prepared me for the experience of walking into my living room (completely sober, mind you) and feeling my house plants breathing and "greeting" me in their native way. It didn't prepare me for vivid visions of countries, peoples and historic periods (earthly or no) that I had never witnessed with my waking eyes. Nor for feeling myself an intimate part of the river, or of the trees, or of an ant crawling over the dry ground, to the extent that I could almost see from all these other eyes.

There are certain aspects of my experience that I've been afraid to reveal, and my brushes with altered perceptions are among the last things that I've been holding onto. But I came to realize that the untapped possibilities of consciousness, which are innate in all of us, hold the keys to our survival and evolution on this planet. When you've experienced your kinship with all of life in a visceral way then it becomes very difficult to make choices that hurt the Earth and its creatures - including, of course, your fellow human beings.

Altered states of consciousness are not then symptoms of insanity, as I'd often feared in the past, but are actually one of the roads by which we may travel towards true sanity in this world.

I spent nearly the entire time between September and December of 2010 in a deeply altered (natural) state of awareness. I entered a wonderland that was the fruit of my YES, of my surrender to - and trust in - my inward journey. I was as deeply immersed in my inner work as I'd ever been, spending most of my waking hours in a condition of expanded consciousness so intense that, at times, just leaving the house to perform simple errands could feel overwhelming. I vacillated between bouts of intense fear and waves of exquisite joy and love. I can hardly do justice to the experience with words.

I dreamed of many shifting realities. Here's one example: A friend and I are care-taking some grounds that are, at the same time, a giant computer. When an alarm sounds, we can't figure out the problem, so we tell the computer: "Lead us". In response, a man and woman come out and usher us to a portal. The woman tells me that my body is, in fact, on a plane at the moment. "But we won't be going back to it," she says. I feel the split in my consciousness, my dual awareness of my body on the airplane and my disembodied self in the glimmering field. Then we pass through the portal and it teleports us to a time 5 years before my birth [incidentally, that would be 1967 - the flowering age of the psychedelic revolution in America and England].

And another dream: I'm standing at the shoreline; I think I'm at a gathering of fellow seekers. I look out at Charles' Island (seen from the shore in Milford, CT.), a magical place from my youth. It is pulsing, and constantly shifting shape and size. There are glowing green globes floating amongst the trees. I try to point these out to the other people there, but no one seems to see them.

This is the altered state that I've been referring to. Seeing this magical place - a pristine vision - that no one else around me seems to share in. At times it feels like a psychedelic trip that I'm never going to come down from.

{This is the transcript of a book reading I did the other day. The video rendition can be viewed here: States of Expanded Awareness (Reading)

From The Light that Can't Be Extinguished

Naked in this World

Communing birds
   
          Answering river

                    Pensive turtle

                              Scared human

States of Expanded Awareness (Reading)

Another reading from The Light that Can't Be Extinguished - this one on the topic of (natural) altered states of consciousness.

Trust in Self (Reclaiming Our Birthright)

I spent the earlier part of today writing articles about how we can learn to read our own dreams - and that, (not to deny the value of analysts and the work that they do) we don't necessarily need our dreams to be filtered through someone else's perceptions (and beliefs) in order to hear their messages for ourselves. Of course this brought up a lot for me personally: The memory of what a struggle it was for me to reach that level of trust in Self, how afraid of myself I was, how willing I once had been to hand over the reins and let someone else be the authority over my inner life and what it was expressing...

It's a little frightening, too, to acknowledge that such a notion - Trust in Self - is not commonly accepted in our world. America in particular really believes in experts. Your doctor understands your body better than you do. Your nutritionist knows what you should be eating. Oprah can tell you what you should read this summer. And if you want to know what your dreams - in reality, your own most intimate inner creations - are telling you, then you must see a therapist or analyst.

And then, in breaking with this belief structure, I'm wont to think, "Man, I've already managed to alienate myself from everyone save for the Jungians, and now I'm gonna piss them off too." But so be it - I have to move forward. If no one else is saying what I am in this regard then that's all the more reason for me to say it.

There's a lot of levels and degrees to self-trust. I don't think it's a pursuit that's ever achieved once and for all. It means different things at different times; it's very definition changes along with our perception. But if we really are the creators of our reality then every hardship and form of suffering that we face can be seen as some sort of expression of self-doubt. I don't consider that to be a despondent thought. It's actually pretty liberating. It means it's all in our hands - if we can just believe in the one thing that truly belongs to us, our own selves.

When I first began to trust in and follow my own natural rhythms, the sensation of all that (previously pent up) energy flowing free was so unfamiliar and startling that I felt at times like I was tripping. It was beautiful. It was decades of my natural birthright suddenly returning to me.

The other evening I found myself slipping into that state again, feeling all of my surroundings as somehow an organic extension of myself. From that expansive state I kept looking at normally mundane things as if from the perspective of animal consciousness. I came home and scribbled down a child-like poem:

Lamp post beside an old oak that 

grazes a barn's pitched roof 

The squirrel's perch 

ladder and 

stairs

I was the squirrel in that moment. And I was also just myself...thankfully, for the moment, my natural self without apologies.

Trusting the Unseen Source

Dream: The media are trying to trace where a particularly valuable delivery originated from, and some newscasters have descended upon a small logging town that strongly reminds me of what I've read about Aberdeen, Washington, where Kurt Cobain grew up. They're interviewing a tall, bald and husky trucker.

He insists that it couldn't have come out of his town, as they "don't have anything, really." He goes on to list a lot of basic goods and services that his little community lacks, in order to prove his point.

This dream carries a message that I have sorely needed of late, a reminder that good fortune, fortuitous breakthroughs and other miracles don't really come from the world. They are manifested through the same unseen creative thrust that formed the physical world in the first place - and that continues to renew it in every moment.

That media crew will never be able to trace the origins of the precious delivery because it sprang from the unseen source. At this point in the dream I got to thinking about Kurt Cobain, who emerged from "nowhere" - a small and socially/economically isolated town where he had little support and often slept under bridges or in friend's garages - to be catapulted into the public consciousness as a member of one of the most successful and influential bands in music history. The same magical principle applies.

This dream urges me to remember the underlying creative framework of existence and the many miracles that it holds as probabilities that are  just waiting to be catalyzed into realities through desire, belief and intent. This includes events that seem impossible from the perspective of the reasoning mind.

It speaks to the way in which I began to lose myself recently. I was grasping in the world for the realization of my dreams - particularly after my recent book became a reality, and I was convinced that I somehow had to find its readership through an effort of will. I'm reminded that I can't "know" the inner mechanisms through which any dream of mine manifests, any more than the reporters can know from whence the ship came in. I have to remember - and trust in - the unseen source, and realize that my own part of the bargain lies in what I seed there through my own thoughts, feelings and beliefs.


The Light that Can't Be Extinguished

Her Touch Melts the Frozen Places

Dream: I attend a dance, at a place that I have been frequenting for the last few weeks. There's a crowd of people gathered, and they've left the middle circle of the dance floor clear. A woman is making the rounds, and there is the expectation in the air that she will choose a dance partner.

She stops in front of me and asks me to dance. We move into the circle. She's very sensual; blatant, at times, letting her hand graze across my groin.



Wishes are an integral part of our nature, and it works to our detriment when they're dismissed. I still sometimes view my sexual and romantic wishes with suspicion. This woman is trying to bring me more deeply into my body; she coaxes me, encourages me to trust its natural rhythms...to drop down into those sensual feelings and accept them, take ownership of them more fully.

Living with desire was always a tumultuous road for me, and I can see now how this was obviously due to the harmful beliefs that I picked up, somewhere along the line, regarding sensuality itself. I could blame my religious upbringing, or certain confusing and distressing experiences of puberty, but what would be the point of any of that? What's pertinent is that I still carry that resistance even now to some extent, and it limits my world. Here this woman is challenging those beliefs - now, in the present. She's not agonizing over their roots and origins, nor suggesting that I do so.

When working with this dream, I could describe the sensations that arise with words like melting, thawing, dissolving. I can feel the energetic dams loosening up, warm psychic circulation moving into constricted places. The hard layers of defense can flake off like molted scales once I'm no longer convinced that they're necessary.

Her touch melts the frozen places. I become like an unmanned canoe, cast adrift on the current. Identity dissolves - at least, that part of my identity that was built up upon shame and the lies that feed it. The aspect of it that set up artificial divisions, walls against the free-flow of my nature - of which desire is a crucial part.

The First Creatures

Wild lines, proudly crooked

Venturing into lawless creations

Faring out to sea in a
moment before the days and
the nights

Half-clad apparitions
Free to form their own
categories of thought and
madness

Limited only by their want of limits

Underworld delvers and
sky swimmers

Begin with the punch-line and
then work backwards to
the joke

This is how Creation is a process of
playing dumb
A Divine Charade

But not without meaning

oh no