Reintegration

My favorite kind of dream is the death rehearsal.

Today my nap was rudely interrupted by astral indigestion and a glorious epiphany that got mostly lost again on the way back to waking consciousness (as is usually the case).

These things are impossibly hard to record, and words are impossibly weak, but I will try to mark it down anyways:

I will say that I was floating somewhere in my bed but under my covers was a sea of stars and moons and planets. In this twinkling, cosmic space scape I began having a conversation with myself, speaker to listener.

But first I must point out that I felt completely weightless and strangely clean, as if I was me in pure form, without all the baggage of my superficial thoughts and identifications. This was confirmed by the speaker (who was me) who began saying something like, "This is the you behind you, the seer, the awareness that is always there while you are alive and that survives death when the ego and body pass away." Simultaneously an image of consciousness flashed in my mind, an analogous display of my awareness as being a stream of flowing blue iridescent water filling and flowing through a particular shape or vessel, that shape being my human form as I knew myself in the world. The speaker says, "That container is your body and the shape that the water takes within it is your ego or your sense of self. Death destroys the body, and therefore the particular shape that consciousness had as it was flowing through it ceases to exist as well... however, the consciousness itself... the actual part of you that is aware and observing, that returns to a larger flow of consciousness and you realize, or remember, that you have always been so much more than that temporary shape. What you thought of as yourself was only a small part of a much larger identity that you had forgotten."

Again, a flash of understanding as I suddenly imagined how the flow of consciousness was funneled or injected into the incredible smallness of the human form. I also understood that it was a willful choice of consciousness to do this, knowing full well that it would forget its own identity and be confused, once isolated from the whole. This was a brave and adventurous endeavor on behalf of consciousness and I felt a reverence for every living thing which in turn, included myself. This was followed by a feeling of legitimate pride, not the ego self-congratulatory type, but a healthy feeling akin to self-worth. I realized that by just existing in the human form, I have been accomplishing a brave and powerful feat. This was true of everyone I knew.

This is what I get for reading all the weird books and spiritual texts that I do. They would obviously inform my dreams at some point. Nonetheless, to experience such things so lucidly, as more than just concepts, well that is something to behold.

Reintegrating with the whole, the reunification of consciousness, if it happens like this, seems to me to be very similar to what Christians view as going to Heaven: ultimate and eternal communion with God, reunion with loved ones, and full understanding of the nature of things.

And if this is true, maybe it can be said that Hell or purgatory at least, is something like that process of watching the you who you thought you were being burned away, which would likely be an excruciating or terrifying experience, especially if one was extremely attached to that particular shape one had assumed throughout their life. (With this in mind, one might view the senility or dementia of old age as being a kind of blessing in disguise, the preparation for such a process, a kind of graceful disengagement from the self.)

The most important part of this dream that I am left with though, is that feeling of demarcation between what you might call my spirit and my soul (to use terms from the Christian cosmology.) If I sit right now and concentrate, I can still feel, if just briefly, that baseline awareness beneath all the outward thoughts and associations that comes with engaging with the world and the human condition. I imagine both life and death would be easier if you could achieve this state of awareness regularly.

“Please Lord give me strength
to be nobody
’cause I am not my thoughts.”

Akron/Family