Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Thu Nov 18, 2021 10:00 pm
Cleric K wrote: ↑Thu Nov 18, 2021 9:38 pm
Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Thu Nov 18, 2021 7:12 pmIn order to synchronize better hyperspace coordinates, can you give some details about the life circumstances through which you reached that state? Waking, walking, sitting, laying down, eyes open, eyes closed, things like that. There are different ways we can enter such states and this will help me address more specifically your case.
No spiritual practice at all (unless playing tennis is such a practice), after playing all day in Vancouver's Stanley Park, it arrived out of the blue, so to speak, while walking, then brought to one's knees, then laying down, at least that's the position I found my body in afterwards, I think eyes open, though not sure how I would know if they were, no sense of how long it lasted, then eventually found my way home, and the world as I had known it was never the same again.
OK, I see. So it wasn't the Burning Racket festival of 1960 after all
The state of awareness devoid of content is an interesting phenomenon of our age. The future man (I sincerely hope it's the
very near-future man) will look upon this stage not too differently from the way we look at the apes staring at the Monolith in the Space Odyssey.
I keep saying in posts around, that there's great difference in the way these altered states are experienced, depending on if they are arrived at in accidental manner or through gradual development. Consider the following passage from Eben Alexander's
Proof of Heaven.
Eben Alexander wrote:Darkness, but a visible darkness—like being submerged in mud yet also being able to see through it. Or maybe dirty Jell-O describes it better. Transparent, but in a bleary, blurry, claustrophobic, suffocating kind of way.
Consciousness, but consciousness without memory or identity—like a dream where you know what’s going on around you, but have no real idea of who, or what, you are. Sound, too: a deep, rhythmic pounding, distant yet strong, so that each pulse of it
goes right through you. Like a heartbeat? Alittle, but darker, more mechanical—like the sound of metal against metal, as if a giant, subterranean blacksmith is pounding an anvil somewhere off in the distance: pounding it so hard that the sound vibrates through the earth, or the mud, or wherever it is that you are.
I didn’t have a body—not one that I was aware of anyway. I was simply . . . there, in this place of pulsing, pounding darkness. At the time, I might have called it “primordial.” But at the time it was going on, I didn’t know this word. In fact, I didn’t know any words at all. The words used here registered much later, when, back in the world, I was writing down my recollections. Language, emotion, logic: these were all gone, as if I had regressed back to some state of being from the very beginnings of life, as far back, perhaps, as the primitive bacteria that, unbeknownst to me, had taken over my brain and shut it down.
EA calls the above the Underworld. I understand that your experience was not exactly of this kind. There was no sticky Jell-O feeling. Only "Darkness, but a visible darkness", what you call irreducible core emtpifullness. When these states are entered in accidental manner, we find ourselves in something inexplicable. Then they can be only reflected upon
after we return to our intellectual state. Like the example I gave previously, then we can cognize these experience only as far as we have the concepts (which act like the eigenvectors in the measurement basis) to relate meaning to the phenomena. In the state in question, when we look back we have the living memory of existing in the emptifullness. And it is not only a memory but we feel that this background emptifullness is present ever since and has always been. It has been there always but previously it has been merged with the background. Now we know that all conscious phenomena are experienced against this background.
The idea of pure awareness, the basic irreducible container of experience, is very popular today. There's a good reason for this - it is palpable for the intellect. Thinking goes as follows: "Just as there are objects floating in the vacuum of space, so it seems logical that all my thoughts, perceptions, etc. float against the background of conscious space. If I'm able to get rid of all that conscious phenomena I'll be left with the pure quantum foam of consciousness, the potential for awareness of all phenomena including the awareness of the potential itself." For anyone who is not completely in the grips of materialism, this line of logic makes perfect sense. It is also the go to conception of modern scientific studies on meditation. The appeal of this understanding is that it seems it doesn't add anything unwarranted. After all we only remove things from consciousness and remain with what is at its base, so we can't go wrong, can we? Compare this with a report that speaks not simply of laminar awareness but of actual worlds, beings and so on. This immediately raises some eyebrows. Then people say "Ookey.. I see where you're going. But these are all conscious phenomena after all. We can only have objective view of them if we understand the
ground level of consciousness against which all this phenomena appears." This once again makes perfect sense. And in certain sense it is healthy that all these phenomena are not too hastily taken as reality. I've often said that visionary experiences always leave us with a bunch of phenomena which are ultimately up to the intellect to interpret. It is only natural that, for example, from a Buddhist mindset all these phenomena are only that - phenomena against the true background of awareness. There's a Buddhist story (probably Eugene can be more precise) where the student runs to his master and shouts "Master, master! I saw Buddha in my meditation". Then the master starts beating the student and says "Why did you break your concentration?" So we see how fundamental this idea of the ground awareness is and how every kind of phenomena is seen only as something bubbling up from it.
When experiences like the one we're discussing are approached through our own fully conscious activity we're in very different position. Then every step towards these states results from inner transformation, even if very small at a time.
Now this may cause indignation in many but almost all such states that are characterized with phenomena-less condition, are in fact very closely related to the physical body. This fact can only be approached gradually. This is very obvious in EA's report for those who know what to look for. In fact, he himself is very near this understanding when he supposes that the pounding sounds that fill the underworld may have something to do with a heartbeat. This state can be approached in meditation in somewhat the following way. We all have a sense for our inner bodily spatiality. For example, when we move our attention (not visual but inner) between our toe, our hand, our heart and so on, we clearly feel how we're tracing lines in space. We have a sense for this bodily space much like we have a sense of sound or color. We should completely disregard our conceptual understanding of outer physical space in which we picture our body to be placed. We focus entirely on the completely phenomenological sense of bodily space. We can then focus our attention from head to toe even without knowing anything about Euclidean geometry. These are degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity (movement of focused attention is a form of spiritual activity). Now after we trace this inner space in various directions we begin to get a sense for its volume. Then instead of focusing on points in this volume we begin to focus on its entirety. If we do that with sufficient concentration, without being disturbed by any other thoughts, perceptions, feelings, memories, we should get a pleasant buzzing feeling in our whole bodily volume. When this is continued even further, the concrete form of this buzzing volume (which is in the shape of the body) begins to become more and more fuzzy. Ultimately, we can reach a state where this bodily awareness becomes boundless emptifullness. There are no thoughts, colors, sounds, it is like we are the boundless space itself. It's not that we are at some point and we're looking at that space but awareness itself is spread everywhere. In our normal state if we feel tingling sensation in our toe we're aware of it. If that sensation is in our index finger we are aware too. If that tingling sensation now fills the boundless space in all directions it is as if we're at every point this sensation is present. We feel as spread out awareness. Now we use here 'tingling' and 'buzzing' only as placeholders, something that we can refer to. We need this because in ordinary life we don't pay attention to the sense of inner bodily spatiality. We experience it only in conjunction with sensations like touch, warmth, tingling, pain and so on. The spatial sense gives the intuition of where in bodily space these sensations are. It is quite impossible without training, to be conscious of the pure spatial sense without the support of other sensations. That's why we use things like 'tingling' and 'buzzing' as carriers for the spatial sense. So we should imagine that when we approach this state in meditation the tingling is not the most important part. It fades away and we're left with boundless sense of space, as if our awareness is everywhere at the same time. This no longer feels as "I'm here and I feel the space around me". Instead this space is the shape of our awareness, if I can express it thus. Or if I may put it otherwise, our awareness has transformed into something akin to a sense of touch. We know how if we're blindfolded we can build spatial intuition about an object by touching it. Now take this spatial intuition and spread it in all directions. Now we're not touching anything external but we're touching the shape of space. We've become pure awareness of boundless space. Here space need not be at all related to our familiar conception of outer space. It is the inner boundlessness that can be later conceptualized as below-above, left-right, front-back.
When we attain to these states in the gradual and fully conscious way described, we're fully aware of what is going on. On the other hand if we are thrust into such a condition in accidental manner, we find ourselves in an inexplicable situation because the gap is too wide between what we know from our ordinary life and the state we're now in.
When this state is attained in Buddhist meditation, for example, it can be experienced as the grounds of being. And there is something true about this. From this state we can indeed observe how phenomena rises against this boundless awareness. But there's something that the Buddhist avoids in this state because of the whole soul mood of his inquiry. He seeks the fully objective truth and thus any conscious activity must be pointed in one direction only - to quiet itself, such that the boundless state can be beheld without any perturbations. The vision of Buddha that the student saw is considered such a perturbation.
But there's something else which the Buddhist misses in this way. (Please note that I'm referring here to Buddhism not to single it out but to use it as a good example where these things are explored in rigorous and disciplined manner) What we'll speak of needs greater concentration if it is to be grasped correctly. When we live in the boundless awareness, this at the same time is an experience of some meaning. Usually we think of meaning only in regards to phenomena that bubble up in awareness - thoughts, perceptions, etc. We experience packets of meaning in connection with them. But even in the phenomena-less state there's meaning. At this point meaning/awareness/knowing coincide into a boundless totality. To be aware of this emptifullness is to
know that it is being experienced. And to
know means that we experience some meaning as pure
intuition. We
know that the emptifull state differs from the one full of phenomena, even though there are no phenomena in the former. So it's clear that our
knowing of the difference between the two states is not dependent on particular phenomena, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to know that empty state has been experienced. This overarching knowing which experiences the meaningful difference between both states is pure Intuition. It doesn't matter what/who is knowing. The important thing is that there's knowing/awareness of be-ing. The other important thing is that there's overarching Intuition which can relate the meaningful experiences of both states. Here 'meaningful' doesn't imply clear-cut intellectual concepts but intuitive experience of a certain state of being. Our intuition continuously grows by encompassing these states in a totality where they fit together harmoniously.
Now imagine that we consider this pure knowing without any phenomena, such as the emptifull state. This is something that many Buddhists will resist but it is possible that we find our activity within this state even though it doesn't lead to any phenomena in the way we're used to think about them. These are very elusive things and require sufficient work on spiritual development to be experienced in their stable reality, but they can be at least approached through images. Imagine that this spread out space of awareness is not that featureless after all. We can use terminology from GR here. We can say that it is indeed curved. Now this is really difficult to imagine, yet we have no choice but try to. This curvature of awareness is not something that we
see as phenomena (although at this point we're doing exactly that, because we're using Imaginative phenomena to approach asymptotically the pure Intuition). It should represent the possibility to experience
nuances of meaning in conscious space which is otherwise experienced to be empty. It should be clear that we need holistic understanding here. This curvature is not something we can point attention to, as we can with color, sound and so on. It is the meaningful shape of empty awareness. If it is curved in waves, this is experienced as one kind of holistic meaning, if it is curves in spirals, we live in other nuance of meaning and so on (obviously here waves and spirals have completely symbolic meaning). The key is to try and imagine that we're not speaking of anything that can be perceived as concrete contents of consciousness. We should consider the state as completely devoid of contents, yet the meaning can
vary even though nothing perceptual changes.
Furthermore, we realize that we're active in that curvature. When we observe our normal thinking we witness thought-perceptions which are conscious phenomena. Yet these thought-perceptions are like the mass-energy in GR which follows geodesics in the curved spacetime. The curvature itself is not something that we see. It's the invisible shape of meaning, of pure Intuition. Obviously, we can approach full consciousness in Intuition only very gradually. First we begin with the exercises in Imagination, which help us to develop higher order knowing of the fact that conscious phenomena doesn't at all bubble up randomly. We begin to sense certain lawfulness - thoughts seem to follow the curvature of invisible meaning. Initially we grasp this meaning very dimly but it becomes apparent that phenomena flow in lawful manner. In Inspirative cognition we loosen our dependence on the phenomena and begin to be conscious within the curvature itself. At this point we enter the spiritual world proper. We no longer need to
indirectly intuit the curvature through Imaginations that capture how phenomena flow. Instead, the curvature is now interference of activity of spiritual beings. We don't perceive them as winged creatures (which is indeed possible in the Imaginative world) but we live in the interference of their thoughts, which constitute the total curvature of meaning. In the world of Intuition we can completely resonate with the perspectives of beings. In Inspiration we live in the reverberations of meaning, in Intuition we can align ourselves with the perspectives from which these waves of meaning are experienced to emanate as from coherent centers.
It is indeed difficult to grasp but we must try to realize that what we call 'conscious phenomena' in the way we usually conceive it, is present up to the boundary between Imaginative and Inspirative consciousness. This doesn't mean that in Inspirative cognition everything becomes dark, without any sound or color (conscious phenomena). It is quite the opposite. The world content shines with splendor that can be hardly imagined through sensory means. Yet this world content is not there to inform us about the world. Our living in the curvature of meaning gives us infinitely more comprehensive understanding of what reality is and how it functions. We indeed understand reality only as far as we understand the spiritual intents, the Cosmic Thoughts of beings, that lie behind it. In this sense, the splendor of color and sound is before us as all the potential that when decohered, becomes states of being in Imaginative and further - intellectual-sensory consciousness.
These states of consciousness are not separate floors of existence. They are always present simultaneously. We wouldn't have awareness that we exists if we were not living constantly in Intuition. We wouldn't feel as a being that exists in manifold transformations of meaning if we were not living in Inspiration. We would not find meaning in the world content is we were not living in Imagination. And finally we wouldn't feel ourselves as a thinking "I" that confronts completely independent perceptions, if we were not living in the sensory-intellectual state. For most people today all of these layers of consciousness are conflated on the senses and associated thoughts, feelings and acts. Part of the goal of higher cognition is to delaminate these layers so we can understand the worlds in which we participate through them and how all these worlds flatten in the picture of our Earthly life.
With the above in mind, we should be now in position to understand that it is possible to live in Intuition (emptifull state) even if we're in the context of the physical body. There is indeed something in this state that feels so fundamental, so irreducible that we can't conceive of anything that could go beyond it. And in certain sense this is correct. We always live within the essence of the Absolute. The big challenge is to recognize what the intellect makes out of this Intuition. This is the part with the apes staring at the Monolith. We can either idolize it and turn it into a God with which we abstractly understand that we are one but in whom we expect to fully awaken only after death (the Great pole of the above). We can cover it with intellectual abstractions that try to cognize the Monolith as made of atoms and so on (the Great pole of the below). Or we can understand that we're experiencing so small part of the curvature of the Monolith that it looks completely flat to us and it is through the efforts of our "I"-being that we begin to grow into it. When we don't sense the curvature of the empty state, we get the false impression that as long as we understand our own flat piece of Intuition, we understand the grounds of being everywhere. That is, we imagine that this Intuition is everywhere the same and only the conscious phenomena vary. Such a conception really places the lid on our conscious evolution.
If we don't stop short at the experience of the boundless flatness of the Monolith (as in mystical meditation), through the development of the higher degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity, we begin to grasp the curvature of meaning through the way phenomena flow (Imagination) and then we begin to live in the curvature of meaning itself (Inspiration, Intuition). We can only do this if we seek to experience ourselves as an
active being in these realms. We cannot wait passively to perceive something in the spiritual world (not even in the Imaginative world). This simply translates our habits from the sensory world in the higher realms. Mathematics is actually always a good analogy. We can only experience the intuition of the curvature of mathematical meaning if we are active in mathematical thinking. Of course, in the spiritual world we don't deal with static, timeless mathematical concepts. Instead, everything is spiritual activity of beings, dynamic and ever-evolving interference patterns of meaning. The ideal world is not something that simply impresses into us. Actually, it does but then we behold that as a mystery, as conscious phenomena. When we experience the interference patterns of the spiritual world but we don't have the understanding of what is going on, we call that
perceptions. The perceptions are the negative symbols of missing understanding. Then philosophers begin to ponder about the nature of the world-in-itself behind these perceptions. We can only live in full consciousness in the higher realms if we become active spiritual force which 'touches' in resonance the curvature of meaning of the spiritual world.
So returning to your original question.
Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Thu Nov 18, 2021 7:12 pm
So if in some alternate version on now, there is a 'higher' transcorporeal being experiencing whatever phenomenal content is associated with that, would that same experience absent any phenomenal content be available to such a being? If so, is it not the very same core ipseity in either case?
We should now be equipped to answer this. As said, there's always some essence of what you call core ipseity that will be the same. This is what is at the basis of our ability to say "I". There's continual expansion of overarching meaning that integrates memory and it still feels that it is always the same essential being. We have changed quite a lot since our childhood yet we can still say that we were 'there'. There's some overarching Intuition that grasps our current and past state as meaningfully belonging to a metamorphosis of experience. So yes, in the deepest core it is always the same ipseity in all cases. But where things can become misleading is when we imagine that the partial intuitions that we have along our metamorphic stream give us a
complete picture of that ipseity. Ashvin has recently turned attention to this many times. The real trouble is when we imagine that we're at the upper boundary of the container of awareness and everything from now own is reshuffling of multidimensional conscious phenomena in infinite possible ways (Gödel's candy shop). In this way we feel that we are more or less
complete, it's all a matter of filling the gaps, but it is assumed that the general geometry is already encompassed in awareness. We can only avoid this if we deeply understand that anything we call conscious phenomena which enter and leave the field of awareness without knowing how and why, is the mass-energy symbol for what flows along the curvature of meaning. If we focus on the aperture of entering and leaving of phenomena, and we accept the emptifull state as the ground state from which they bubble up, we're really living only in a small region of Intuition (which appears flat, in the same way the Earth appears flat within a small region). We need a dose of humility here. Our Intuition of being has changed since childhood and will surely change more as time goes by. Most certainly it will change even more when we cross the threshold of death. The episodes of the emptifull states will most certainly be understood in much wider context too. So any attempt to imagine that we have grasped the grounds of existence and it is now all a matter of reshuffling the contents, has a paralyzing effect on our development. We need to get in the habit of continually dying for the old and resurrecting in the new.
We can witness how this kind of attitude has such a paralyzing effect. Adur has posted his essay which has completely essential ideas in it. Yet his idea of the Absolute Nothingness is really the refusal to gain consciousness in the curvature of meaning in the spiritual world. This makes it so that one reaches the threshold of the spiritual world between Imaginative and Inspirative consciousness but since no effort has been given to live without images (that is, in pure meaning) it is only natural that one succumbs into unconsciousness when the images are pulled beneath one's feet. This results in the widespread view of the two-tier system where from the ground level of the void/plenum/nothingness/whatever emerge already shaped units of ego consciousness. If you remember from his essay, from that point onwards it is really only a matter of mutual filtration of the Imaginative world based on the principle of consistency. From this mutual filtration the physical world condenses. There is actually something very essential in this idea but in the way presented is very misleading because it portrays the world entirely as the consensus of human-like ego peers. What is missed in this picture is that the intuition of having personal consciousness is in itself only a particular constellation of higher order meaning. If the absolute nothingness is entered through Inspiration and Intuition it will be found to be a fully conscious world where a whole hierarchy of living idea-beings form the curvature-gradient of meaning which steps down the One Consciousness into the Earthly ego loci. Without this consciousness of the spiritual world we are forced to believe that the ego loci jump out completely differentiated directly from the absolute nothingness.
To the other part of the question - yes, the states without phenomenal content will be even more common for the future self but they will be reciprocally richer in meaning. Much more of the curvature of the spiritual world will be consciously grasped. We are transcorporeal beings even in this moment. The bodily experience is only an aperture through which we experience continuous integration of memory/meaning. If every 'frame' of existence jumps to different bodily experience this would never feel as a stream of metamorphosis. We can only experience time in such a way that there's gradual integration of memory. As far as we experience specific aperture of sensory perceptions, this necessarily means that this metamorphic view has to be gradually integrated. We are not what we identify with from the world content of conscious phenomena but what we experience as Intuition of being at any point. When we understand our metamorphic view only as a vortex of desires and opinions, tightly related to the particular bodily complex and its Earthly destiny, we feel as a personality. When we begin to live in the curvature of higher meaning, where we cognize the threads of karma, the development of nations, evolutionary epochs and so on, the bodily complex is seen as lawful process in this totality. We understand that the movements of the limbs, the pulsing of desires are just as part of the world content as everything else. Yet thanks to our vantage point we can guide these processes according to higher order understanding. The local curvature of meaning, along the geodesics of which our personal opinions, desires and acts flow as conscious phenomena, is not separate from the general curvature of meaning of the spiritual world in which our local aperture is embedded. So the destiny of our aperture is entirely within the curvature of Time, the evolutionary epochs and so on. We gain our individuality not when we draw a chalk circle around certain conscious phenomena and say "mine" but when we resonate more and more with the Cosmic curvature of meaning along which the world content flows. We are an "I" not because we have a piece of private real estate in the world content but only as far as we encompass more and more of the monolithic meaning of the Cosmos.
When we experience states similar to the Underworld of EA or the emptifullness state, we are still very closely fitted into the inner nature of the physical body. In the expansion of awareness through inner space, we become conscious of something that in scientific terms is known as the etheric (life) body. This is not a conscious phenomenon in the same sense as something that we see in front of us, as we see the physical body with the eyes. We can only perceive it in the proper way by experiencing the curvature of awareness that belongs to it. The difference between living in the dazzling darkness of the physical abyss and beholding the wider environment, stands in something that can be described as loosening of the etheric body from the physical (I have re-posted something on the topic in Eugene's thread). This loosening is experienced from within as if the emptifullness begins to increase in resolution. It becomes richly meaningful. We no longer feel as if we're in indeterminate nowhere that is simply being known, but this increase of resolution begins to add dense meaning. This meaning may be experienced as reflected in images (Imagination) but these are no longer the conscious phenomena that we simply witness coming and going from the field of awareness. It's much rather as if we imagine how a single thought-perception in our mind is reflection of meaning and we then imagine that this thought-image spreads to enormous proportions basically becoming our world. Such is the nature of the true Imaginative world. Everything is as lucid and meaningful as if the world content is the thought-image of the meaning that we think. Of course, we don't think this meaning for ourselves but we move through it, as we seek to resonate with the curvature of meaning of the world. Depending on how advanced we are in Inspiration and Intuition, this state can be experienced as quite chaotic or much more ordered. In all cases, the loosening of the etheric body opens a whole new world for us. Previously we have been as if paralyzed in a small island of flat Intuition spread along the sensation of bodily space. Now we feel as if we have emerged from a cocoon and a whole world reflects thought-like meaning to us.
This transition can be seen clearly in EA's report:
Eben Alexander wrote:Something had appeared in the darkness.
Turning slowly, it radiated fine filaments of white-gold light, and as it did so the darkness around me began to splinter and break apart.
Then I heard a new sound: a living sound, like the richest, most complex, most beautiful piece of music you’ve ever heard. Growing in volume as a pure white light descended, it obliterated the monotonous mechanical pounding that, seemingly for eons, had been my only company up until then.
The light got closer and closer, spinning around and around and generating those filaments of pure white light that I now saw were tinged, here and there, with hints of gold.
Then, at the very center of the light, something else appeared. I focused my awareness, hard, trying to figure out what it was.
An opening. I was no longer looking at the slowly spinning light at all, but through it.
The moment I understood this, I began to move up. Fast. There was a whooshing sound, and in a flash I went through the opening and found myself in a completely new world. The strangest, most beautiful world I’d ever seen.
Brilliant, vibrant, ecstatic, stunning . . . I could heap on one adjective after another to describe what this world looked and felt like, but they’d all fall short. I felt like I was being born. Not reborn, or born again. Just . . . born.
Now this loosening of the etheric body (which is completely severed from the physical at death) is experienced in the most various ways in NDEs. The thought-image that we perceive is heavily shaped by the eigenvectors of what we can cognize. For this reason people at this stage speak of worlds that are like Earth, yet they know that they are not really physical. All of these are indeed panoramic thought-images in the etheric spectrum which are shaped according to whatever we can cognize based on our life experiences so far. The less cognitive element these images have, the more they resemble dream images. This is something that I've pointed attention to many times. When we attain to these states in fully conscious way, we're in position to trace what comes from where. People going through NDEs simply don't have the concepts that we're developing here. Even if something like the GR curvature of meaning is deeply understood in thinking, this in itself will put an eventual accidental loosening of the etheric body into a completely different light. Things will be understood in ways that simply don't register in someone who has understanding only of the sensory spectrum.
So we see that there's a long road in front of humanity. Unfortunately there are many, many ways we can go astray along this road. This shouldn't cause despair. This doesn't mean that it's all a game of chance. We simply need to always seek the
harmony of the facts. So is the case with everything written here. Nothing of this can be taken in isolation and asked "but is this true?" Everyone will need to take these indications and see how they fit or contradict the living experiences in all areas of life.
After I post some of the things that I'm working on (sorry everyone, for taking so long) we'll surely return to these topics, hopefully with the possibility to tackle them from new vantage points.
I had just turned 30, so no, I'm not quite that old. If there were any entheogens involved, they would've had to be endogenous.