I haven’t heard it back but it sure felt like the best. Great questions, great conversation. Great host. Check out Bernardo Kastrup’s website and start following his show. I think he’s got a good thing going here. http://www.inceptiondialogues.com/
(For an .m4a version, click HERE and “save link as.” Check out the Inception Dialogues website for iTunes feed and further info.)
Or, for those of you who want the bullet points, here is a ten minute “digest” version….
That’s right, I’ll be live with Bill & Nancy Birnes Saturday at 6pm here: http://www.futuretheater.com/
Just last night a little lightbulb went off in my head pertaining to the high strangeness associated with “alien abductions” that I think is a tangible clue neurologists might be able to work with. We’ll explore that and much more. Be sure to tune in!
Quick post because I’ve been away with a bad back. Last week, I had a dream. Just a normal dream until I “woke up” into it and it became lucid. When that happened, everything became “more real than real,” as Ritzmann would say. Colors became brighter; objects better-defined. Waking up into the dream was like putting on 3-D glasses.
The downside was, as with all my lucid dreams, once the dream characters found out I was awake they became evil. I woke up as if to avoid an oncoming nightmare.
Anyone ever had that happen? You wake up into the dream and the scenery stays the same but becomes infinitely more vivid?
This morning I found myself trapped in the loop of dreams where I “wake up” into another dream, think I’m awake, but then something happens and I realize I’m still dreaming.
It began with a nightmare. Nothing scary happened in the nightmare except that I realized something was completely off and when that happened I heard the whirring sound in my left ear that is typical when I’m having a nightmare. I felt fear well up in my stomach and my skin go alert. I was awake enough to witness the physical process of a nightmare as it was happening. I took inventory of my senses and sensations as they arose. Then I thought I had thoroughly woken up, gone to work, and told my friend Rosie about all this–but something in the workplace setting was completely wrong and I knew I was still dreaming.
This waking up into another dream, realizing I was dreaming, and waking up again, cycled over and over until I wound up semi-awake having remote viewing type visions (short clips of random things that feel more real than dreams) for what felt like 1-5 second durations.
At some point I was, in real life, lying on my stomach catering to my right side watching these things and wondering what they were. Who were these people in these visions? Were they real or imagined?
I reflected on the initial nightmare that set this off. In it, my mother babbled an incoherent sentence to me. I thought that if everything in a dream represents some aspect of you, then the babbling didn’t fit. In fact these fleeting images didn’t fit. What was I telling myself? Nothing! It doesn’t make sense unless it’s not my unconscious communicating with me. I wondered if these images of people were a manifestation of one intelligence–much like I wonder about alleged alien phenomena, although I didn’t hearken back to that lying in bed. What I actually thought was, ‘Is the Prince of Darkness in my dreams?’
And a voice answered. She was an elderly woman who was also me. I mean, the answer was clearly me talking to myself doing an impression of an old lady. Anthony Perkins, much?
She/I responded, “Why? Do you want the Prince of Darkness to enter your dreams?”
No! That’s a dumb question–of course not!
And as I was lying there having this conversation with Old Lady Me, I was touching this fabric hanging over my bed with my right hand. I was rubbing it between thumb and index. It was coarse maybe like a scarf material. Laying there, eyes still closed, semi-awake, I realized I don’t have anything hanging over my bed. This is impossible, yet here I am feeling this thing with my own hand!
I dropped my arm to my side. My hand plopped comfortably to the mattress. And then I realized that that never happened, for my real right hand was tucked under my chin and my fingers were going numb.
Wow! What the hell just happened there?
I opened my eyes and switched positions. Nothing in the room. Just me trying to get comfortable. And then… back into the cave of dreams reflecting more wake-up attempts until I finally pried myself out of bed at around 9:30am.
Now, here I am writing this before going off to work to tell Rosie all about it. At least I think that’s what’s happening.
Letters… we get letters….
I received an email from a reader who asks a series of great questions pertaining t my last blog post, How & Why Truth-Seekers Lie To Themselves. I asked if I could respond publicly, keeping him anonymous, and mercifully he said yes. So, I’ll break it down and answer as I go. The initial two are questions I’ve gotten before from others so I know there are many of you wondering the same things.
Hi Jeremy. I just read your most recent post on JayVay… the one concerning seekers lying to themselves. I thought it was interesting, though, reading the conclusion makes me wonder why you wrote it in the first place? Isn’t the post itself a reaction to something… a remanent of truth…
If you’re in a deep sleep and the house is on fire, you need to wake up. The person next to you can shake you and yell “Wake up!” but it’s you who must do the waking.
More times than not what we do is incorporate the shaking and the yelling into the dream so we can remain asleep, but every now and then the sleeper feels it and hears it for what it is and emerges from the depths of themselves on high alert. Of course they needed to know they were asleep in the first place before they could wake up, right?
I have to shake and yell–get your attention–because the house is on fire and I need us both to live, but that’s all I can do. You have to have the clarity of mind to see it in the dream for what it is, not sleep through it. I can’t teach you that and I can’t assume that responsibility for you, it’s on you, the dreamer, to see the fact and in so seeing spontaneously wake up. There is no choice, no interval of time, when you actually see the fact: House. Fire. Shit, I’m up!
But waking up ends you, the dreamer. It kills the dreamer, so you generally struggle to remain asleep. You will even go so far as to incorporate the stimuli into the dream, if what you’re dreaming is a hero’s journey where you’re seeking to wake up.
Oddly enough it can be said that waking kills you so that you may live.
If nothing needs to happen why do you continue [to] write?
One answer is that I write it because that’s who I am. What else can I express? Another related answer is that I write because “nothing” is not as passive as it sounds. These may not satisfy but the problem with saying more than that is it immediately devolves into a dissertation or a lesson plan when really, any more words on the matter need to come from you after the fact of waking as they do for me after the fact. Universal means just that and so, when the personal you vanishes, the impersonal (or universal) assumes its natural expression through the body as you. The word “impersonal” sounds cold, which is unfortunate, because it actually contains the personal. You resurrect, so to speak, as You Version 2.0. 2.0 has all the same insights I’m sharing as a natural expression of self and so there’s nothing to learn here.
If that’s confusing, the basic thing I’m saying poorly is that all of this “knowledge” I may appear to have doesn’t come from teachings of any kind. It is inherent knowledge of universal truths that flow naturally and spontaneously within. Where do you think the alleged spiritual masters got all their neat ideas from? They arose from within and so I challenge the notion that they should be taught. Nothing should be taught. All of this should be pointed out so that clarity becomes YOU.
Why, then, you may wonder, if the impersonal contains the personal can’t this energy that is more alive than the dream–more YOU than you–just dissolve you in the first place? I mean, why do you exist at all if you’re a barrier to Truth?
Elementary, my dear Watson! It’s because this “Truth” we’re talking about contains all things. One of those things is ignorance. But you don’t have to be the one living in ignorance. Humanity doesn’t have to be the one living in ignorance. We can wake from it and have it “live on” in imagination and remembrance only and that would be just fine. THAT is the only free will choice in existence.
Does it exacerbate the fearful/paranoid side of seeking by telling the seeker they’re doing it all wrong?
If anyone reading this has a reaction, that’s certainly going to be one of them. Now what do you do with that repulsion? Do you examine why you’re fearful or paranoid? Why these words turn you off or scare you or make you angry?
When I first read Jiddu Krishnamurti I was angered yet something intrigued me. My thinking wasn’t wired to really hear him–he sounded judgmental and kinda crazy. I struggled to read his dialogues because so many intelligent, wise, and aware people cited him that I knew I had to be missing something. Somewhere along the way I found that my anger stemmed from the fact that here’s this guy saying things antithetical to everything I felt I knew and yet at the same time I could not argue his points. They made more sense than anything I had.
He made more sense than me and he was the one speaking the antithesis of me.
There’s no crueler slap in the face than the day you wake up as an adult and realize you don’t know shit and are a dysfunction. You don’t understand a damned thing about the very existence you’re living. You’re a backwards reflection of Truth trying to drag it into the mirror.
So, yeah. I understand that reaction well. Now if these words stick with you and make you feel something, what do you do with that feeling? They’re invading your dream. Do you ponder why you’re feeling anything in the first place? Do you let them eat at you in an unhealthy way? Do you ignore them and move on to the next coherent babble? This is the moment of truth, as it were–what you do with how you feel determines what happens next.
Also, I’m unclear what your full position on ‘seeking’ is. I left with the notion that it’s not warm and fuzzy. If that’s so, how do you feel about curiosity and wonder? Those feel like beautiful qualities (seen at full force in kids) and seem to promote seeking. What’s the difference for you if any?
Those are beautiful qualities. Life is Mystery but this one’s been solved, we just keep living like it hasn’t. We’re stuck on stupid as Dr. Phil might say. (You’re welcome.)
Seeking answers applies to most everything in life. It’s what we do. It’s how our brains are programmed, really. Seek, seek, seek. Answer, answer, answer. Another riddle… another riddle… on and on. It’s no wonder at all why we assume we can seek and find an answer to the ultimate but the ultimate is not within time. It transcends and includes time. So in this special case, rest, rest, rest; be, be, be.
I think it in my personal experience, it’s been the joy and delight of discovery (seeking?) that has loosened my grip on ‘self’… for what it’s worth.
Who is “you” that has a grip on “self”? Did you loosen or divide?
Discovery is a joy and it does lighten. The veil thins, insights occur, the veil strengthens. Those insights add on to who you are. You are stronger by the end of it, actually.
Seekers are easy to talk to but hard to reach. Obviously, you need to want to have the discussion in the first place to entertain the message. Paradoxically, the message is, “Stop seeking, stop wanting, stop doing and be.” That’s a different quality of not seeking than the person who doesn’t care about this enough to quest for Truth in the first place.
We desire wholeness. If you remain unconscious of that, then this goes right over your head. You funnel that desire into other things–sex, entertainment, power issues. You hunger. You feed. If you’re rich you end up telling everyone how wealth doesn’t fill the hole, doesn’t make you whole, and if you’re poor you say, “Yeah, right. You can afford to say that, you’re rich!”
We desire wholeness. If you are conscious of it, you quest for it–you seek it. This is a natural reaction. But you don’t find it anywhere. Your discoveries and insights along the way make you feel as if you’re getting closer, though. They do have very real and beneficial (sometimes tangible) effects. You can become a stronger, wiser person within the dream. You can learn to be a lucid dreamer, if you will. But do not confuse waking within the dream by increments to waking totally out of it. I think that is the crux of most of the confusion with this topic. What I’m telling you is not meant to negate all of the stuff we’ve learned over centuries of contemplation, meditation, and so forth. I’m pointing to something that transcends and includes all of it but looks suspiciously like it and so looks suspiciously like something you should be able to seek with the same tools.
***
Wanting to learn is necessary until you hit the edge of the cliff. There is a little sign tacked to a tree that reads: “Wanting to learn brought you this far. It can bring you even farther. All you have to do is jump.”
If you succumb to the temptation you realize the cliff was really the edge of another rabbit hole. But if you sit and ponder why all the cliffs turn into rabbit holes and what you need to do differently to break the pattern, there’s really only one thing you’ll find you haven’t done: nothing.
Thanks for inspiring this dialogue, anonymous writer!
Snorkeling. Me. Yesterday. Out in the depths beyond the tourists and the reef holding them and the fish in. I saw a moray eel, finally. I’d been wanting to see one for a few weeks after I heard some people talking about spotting one. I saw a couple of types of fish I hadn’t before out there in the blue floating in schools above scattered monolithic boulders. You’d swear there was a city out there swallowed by Pele and time.
But I also saw the usual scenery and heard the usual, too. Part of what I normally hear alone in the water is voices. Human voices. Scattered bits of conversation. Edgar Mitchell talks about this type of thing in the deep of space so perhaps it’s related to sensory deprivation or an inner journey that spills out when the outer one is a blank canvass. Or perhaps I am hearing conversations of tourists rippling through tide and reef. I don’t know but I’m satisfied with a mundane answer and suspect that there is one. What I find curious, however, is that I emailed free dive instructor Ted Roe that evening to ask him his thoughts and the next morning I had the most baffling audio hallucination I’ve ever heard of sans ‘shrooms!
It’s about 5:00AM. Yes, followers of this blog, that pattern continues. I didn’t check the time but my favorite two roosters were working together to alert the ‘hood about the rising sun. Shout the new position or all is lost!
I made the error of leaving my window open. Naturally Big Red and Sir Cockington took that as their cue to Rrr-r-rrr-r-rrrrrrr! directly into my ear. Picture two of the Three Tenors belting a high A-flat in your face at five in the morning and you get what’s going on here: torture. Torture enough to create that perfect chemical stew of dream brain, DMT, and probably the energy that moves me around, within being awake.
I recall a smattering of nifty visuals flittering through my mind’s eye as I struggled to remain asleep. Patterns and things. At one fleeting point seeing through the eyes of another man seated somewhere outdoors. All of this is old hat by now. What was new to me was the sequence of audio hallucinations. They started with an amazing song. The song built itself out of nothing. It sounded like a typical New Age instrumental piece made from a synthesizer and Peter Gabriel leftovers. Naturally, I was staring at a cosmos behind my eyes as this song came. As it got going more and more elements added themselves. In the end, there was a rock guitar lead whaling over it and a male reggae vocalist. This song went on for a while. I should have written the lyrics down but they are lost to me now.
As this is playing I’m lucid enough to pay attention to my physicality. My head feels like it’s swelling with energy and I wonder if this is what it means to have the energy center at the top of your head opened and linked to universal consciousness. Are ya turning on a radio?
I decide to risk breaking the spell by opening my eyes. Now here’s where the holy crap moment comes in…. I open them both a hair and the song shuts off. I close them and it fades back in. I open my right eye and the guitar solo shuts off. Shut my right eye, guitar solo fades back in. Open my left eye, everything but the guitar solo shuts off. Close my left eye, the song fades back in.
Anyone ever heard of this?! What would be the scientific answer to this? What would be the crown chakra answer? What about the shamanic answer? Anyone got an answer or is it just one of those mysteries that lets us know we have not a clue what we are and what this body so many spiritual seekers condemn is capable of?
Shortly thereafter, the song fades out and another builds itself. Then another. Then another. In fact one of them features Sheryl Crow singing. I wish I’d written those lyrics to see if they exist… yet.
I didn’t try the eye trick on any of the other songs but I did notice that the skin on the back of my scalp felt like it was pulling in tight and releasing with each new song introduced.
I also didn’t jump up and write down any lyrics because I wanted to see what this was leading to. As usual, it lead nowhere. It was its own thing I guess and so there is no moral to the story and no ending wrapped in a bow.
Perfect for a blog post.
06/30/12
I just want to sleep. I have to be up in a few hours for work. But no, I had a dream with a lesson and the compulsion to write it out.
Write it out now or all is lost!
What would I risk losing by typing later? The elegance of a concept from the flavor of a dream freshly experienced. This morning’s dream dealt with the fear of “alien” contact during an “abduction” — a subject I’ve shared insights about before both from me and seemingly from elsewhere. Well, this one came from a dream, so presumably it’s from me, but where it’s from doesn’t matter so much. The truth of it does and in one sense it’s nothing new. But in another, it’s very new. It’s a refinement. It’s like I keep getting hit over the head with this “Here’s what fear is about” lesson until I can find just the right words to explain it in totality. Let’s hope I get it right this time.
My firsthand insight into the terror of abduction came during an experience in late October 2001. Upon reflection, I realized that there was a huge discrepancy between the actions of these beings standing in my bedroom urging me to come with them and my reaction to them. They were friendly enough. In fact, I’ve said they have a childlike naivety about them and what that really means is they are empty of the psychological/emotional baggage that turns humans into walking, talking landfills. They smile and I react as though I’m being traumatized by a psychotic.
There is a problem in this relationship and it’s me. Perhaps this is what happens when a fucked up person is gazed at and beckoned by the complete: you realize all at once in that moment what you are because the sane and decent personal image you’ve constructed to not have to acknowledge how fucked up you are to yourself and to force others to believe is the real you is ripped from your face. You are then confronted with a simple truth: the being staring back at you is complete in a way that is both what you yearn for and are repulsed by.
Wholeness is the case of you and so it beckons every moment of the day. Every moment of the day you block out the urge to be authentic, because the inauthentic mask that you claim to be doesn’t appreciate being ripped off. It turns this urge into a yearning for wholeness on its own terms. It wants to proclaim itself whole, not get torn to shreds to reveal the whole, hence the repulsion of a real face staring you in the face. And smiling. And furthermore, that real face, while metaphorically more real than your metaphoric face, is quite probably not literally as real as your own literal face.
This gets convoluted, this simple hello.
The next big reveal in the “Why the scared face?” lesson book came during a hallucinatory dream thing at Jeff’s house that involved, I dunno, chakra activation (I assume?), some words, and visuals. The gist of it was that there has to be fear when another universe touches us because that fear galvanizes our senses and puts us sharply in the moment. This is the state of mind where contact is made.
Presumably, then, if you come from the heart, not the mask, and/or live in the moment, fear is neither a dilemma nor a tool of contact.
These are pretty good insights… into us! Jeff Ritzmann’s age-old discovery about the alien rears its head: you learn volumes about you and nothing about it. But that chocolate is to my peanut butter because my age-old revelation is that we cannot ask what the other is until we know what we are. The mask wants what it wants on its terms, yetthe answer from anyone who knows better is, tough shit.
Well, a little over an hour ago I had three interconnected dreams, the details with which I will not bore you, except for the third. I’m in a large room, perhaps a gymnasium with a bunch of people. It’s nighttime. It’s a sleepover. The lights are out.
We are a high school choir and in the morning we are to travel somewhere to perform a musical number I helped direct two dreams back. It was really stupid, really shitty and meaningless. I did my best to infuse the act with meaning about saving the planet but I know it sucks because I’m just adding onto someone else’s work, which had some components that could have been deep and powerful but the original director had no vision.
Suddenly, a ringmaster walks in. He is a thin balding middle-aged white man straight out of a Barnum & Bailey poster. Only thing missing is the top hat. I recognize him as an alien and am immediately scared. He walks around the room marking those who will be abducted later with a magic marker. I’m one of them. He leaves and now we wait. Who knows when this abduction will happen?
We all go to sleep and the abduction happens. My eyes are closed. Just like real life. I’m lying on my right side. Just like real life. I feel numerous tiny hands on my back and arms. I feel it in real life, too. I start to scream in my usual stark, raving terror, but even so I’m trying to talk myself out of it because nothing bad has happened. Still, I realize I’m being abducted in the middle of the night and am completely helpless to stop this. No one else is stirring so they’re either being abducted too or are shut off to this. And so the fears mount and the terror wins, when a curious thing happens: I feel one of them who I thought was grabbing my arms place its chest against my back. It’s not grabbing me anymore, it’s hugging me! Trying to, anyway.
I feel this sort of artificial compassion waft through my body with the beating quality of a heart and I get it. I say, “Alright, alright, I’m up already” in the annoyed tone one takes with a screaming alarm clock. They don’t have to “abduct” me. I stand on my own. I’ll go with them because I really do finally understand wholly that they mean me no harm. The hug wasn’t a trick even though it felt like artificial compassion. They really are trying to tell me that it’s okay.
The fear-mongering “abduction researchers” interpret artificial emotion on their part as a manipulation, but my insight here is that this is false. It has to feel artificial because they are not OF here. It’s not that they aren’t FROM here, they are not OF here. They are not made of this substance.
That’s the nuance I feel the compulsion to express. We’re heard it before. We’ve said it before. But we’ve overlooked the multifaceted implications of the fact. This is the refinement of what it means to not be from this universe: They are not of our substance. If they were merely from another planet we would recognize them as hot, cold, doing this, doing that. There wouldn’t be this barrier of artificiality about it even if there was lack of understanding as to motive, where they’re from, and so forth.
They are not of this substance.
The best analogy I can think of as to how drastic a difference this is, is thinking of astronauts in space. Take off that flimsy suit and they are dead. How weird is it that we exist in space–we LIVE in a cold dark void filled with things we can hop to but that transition through space is deadly. We can’t live in the most plentiful aspect of our own physical existence. How mind-boggling is that?
These people are as interconnected with us as we are with the space around earth, while paradoxically being as not-of-this-substance as the space around us is. I mean, that’s it. They’re hugging me in a space suit. More accurately, they’re space hugging me in an earth suit. It’s no wonder we confuse them with actual aliens–but actual aliens’ uncovered hands and bodies would not feel like this. They’d feel… alive.
In the dream when I feel this hug beating through me with the artificial–but still good–feelings, I feel it in real life, too. I open my eyes and half expect them to be in the room but I know they aren’t. Not really. This is a dream, right? I close my eyes and try to stay asleep because I’m really tired but I’ve got the nagging feeling that I have to write this. Now.
“Alright, alright, I’m up already,” I actually say out loud.
I go take a leak then check the time: 6:06 AM. Say, in some alternate universe indicated by a dream I had a few nights ago, wasn’t I supposed to write my last blog post at 5:06 AM? Does that mean anything? Does everything mean something? Eh. Too tired for this. One insight is enough. Well, maybe two….
Last night as I lay me down to sleep, I felt my back throbbing as if (and perhaps actually as) the beating of my heart. It felt pretty good. It was emanating from just below the center of my spine. I thought maybe some chakra energy center was spontaneously activating or leaking or something. I’ve felt this before; it’s of no consequence that I can normally tell, but in this case it links to the hugging incident here many hours later. Between this and the chakra/fear explanation I wrote about in the second insight, do we find a clue?
If these beings are not of this substance and let’s say Jeff is right that they cobble together bodies from elements here… might their essence remain wherever they are from? Might the body be physical and here for as long as the interaction takes, but the soul remains behind the veil of differing substances? Might the emotional contact only be available through these nebulous energy centers we call chakras? I experience them; science cannot detect them. They are said to have physical correlates with organs in the body but not be physical in nature. Could they be the emotional centers between worlds and so to express emotion that we can feel is to play us like a musical instrument?
Oh, you want that chord? Chakras 7, 4, and 3. That chord? Compassion? C5 and C1.
If these people whip up a recipe for bodies on earth while remaining where they are and connect to us through chakras, that explains a lot, actually. It explains why interaction with them take on an eerie quality that we interpret as robotic or demonic or like the dead. There are several disconnects going on at once beneath the surface of this organism smiling and trying to take us somewhere. That’s assuming they are physically trying to take us somewhere, which is a terrible assumption to make.
To make matters worse, they could be not of this substance and still be a version of robot. Or the dead. But demon? No, I’m ruling that one out. If demons exist something tells me they wouldn’t bother with this learning curve thing. If nothing else, we can rule that out. So, in that last paragraph where I wrote “that explains a lot, actually”? Yeah, maybe I jumped the gun a bit. Baby steps.
I’ll see you back here at fear insight #4.
Hey, Gang:
I’ve started blogging Paratopia-specific stuff at www.paratopia.org. I’m reproducing my first post here along with some follow-up insights I wrote in the posts’ thread on our forum: http://www.the-bunker.net/paratopia. You have to join to partake but man alive is it worth it.
We had the richest forum on the planet until the big move. That’s when a bunch of folks migrated to the Paratopia Facebook page until we constructed a new forum. Now it’s all crickets because people have found a happy home on Facebook. As nice as the Facebook group is for somethings you can’t have as deep a back-and-forth as you can a message board. Plus, posts just keep scrolling down into an abyss, never to be read again.
This, then, is my bid to get you back to the message board. If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. But it would be nice not to have one series of conversations in a vacuum while the more popular venue ultimately is a vacuum by design.
Dream Within Dream about Worlds Within Worlds
Aloha, Paratopia. How apropos that my first blog post since the island blew up is a dream involving Tyler Kokjohn and The Jeff. Not just any old dream, though. One in which we learn something. Maybe. That is, if it accurately reflects reality in some way we have yet to prove. Of course if we can’t prove it we can’t know if it reflects reality. And here we are, together again, exploring Mystery….
Early this morning I’m having a dream the content of which I’ve forgotten. But I don’t think it was related to what came next, which I do remember quite well. A straightforward, matter-of-fact male voice brought the dream to a halt when he injected himself into my mind scape telling me that reality is comprised of worlds within worlds. I see a visual of a bubble or perhaps a particle and we zoom out from that into Earth. Zoom out from Earth into another Earth, the former becoming a particle. On and on.
The man tells me that these worlds are linked by universal constants, some of which are equations (and I take him to mean equations in physics) that do not have a solution. In other words there are some equations we have not figured out but there are others that will not have a solution anywhere. This is the mathematical equivalent of Mystery and it’s what keeps us going. We think these are throwaway erroneous formulas but if we could distinguish between error and Mystery we’d actually have a better handle on the architecture of reality.
Finally, he asks me if I know the Golden Rule. I say I remember the name but not really. I figured we were still on math and he was asking about the Golden Ratio. I Google Search “Golden Rule” and the “Do unto others….” biblical quote pops up. Now I feel stupid, because I did know that. In fact, now I’ve got the Pearl Jam song Not For You playing in the background of my mind: “Can’t escape from the Golden Rule/If you hate something don’t you do it to/This is not for you.”
He says that is an example of universal Truth. These truths aren’t just true on this earth now, they are true everywhere through all time. Universal truths are just as important to defining the architecture of reality as universally unsolvable mathematical riddles.
And with that bit of knowledge imparted, the dream ends and I wake up into another dream where I’ve leapt out of bed to blog this on JayVay.com. I start off with the time: 5:06 AM and take it from there, but I get too bogged down in the details and struggle to remember what was said. The details are of something that wasn’t in the original dream. They are of a large sketch pad. On one side is written what the man said. On the other is a pencil sketch of a bald young adult who looks like Charlie Brown by way of Ken Wilber. I understand that Tyler Kokjohn drew this as a self-portrait. It looks nothing like him. He left out the details because either he doesn’t know who he is or he has low self-esteem and doesn’t want to know–I can’t tell which. I think, ‘Oh, that’s sad,’ and begin penciling in thicker definition to the eyes. It looks like he started to do that then stopped. I hoped it wouldn’t look like eyeliner. I stopped touching up the piece because I thought that if any of you reading right now saw it you’d say I was remaking his self-portrait into my image and I didn’t even want the hassle of trying to explain it.
I woke up again into my old apartment with my mom and sister. I’m excited about this communication. This dude was obviously reflecting the same concepts Jeff’s shrouded man showed him. I joked that maybe since Jeff is ignoring him he’s decided to attach himself to me. Ah, sloppy seconds. However, this voice was different than he who said in a dream “I can be strength” over and over that time I stayed at Jeff’s house. This guy sounded clean cut and young, not gravely-voiced and world weary, so I don’t think it’s the shrouded man.
My sister is trying on a new dress and can’t be bothered with the dream, so I tell my mom. Sister comes out of my bedroom, which she’s using as a changing room, into the living room and asks me to help her with the zipper at her neck. I’m talking to my mom and zipping her up. Her neck hurts so I rub it but I’m causing her worse pain because I can’t tell the story and massage her neck at the same time.
That dream ends and I wake up for real. Just for shits and giggles I check the time. It is 4:59 AM. It’s not too much of a leap to think that if I decided to boot up the computer and log onto JayVay to write this out, it would be 5:06 AM like in the dream. Maybe in some other world I do that. In this one I go back to sleep and write it for Paratopia.
Make of it what you will.
Further Musings From The Message Board
POST #1
There’s something that rings true about the physics of reality being comprised of unsolvable equations. My vision of this is that the physics we can 
solve is what comes to define this world and so on for other realities–but the glue holding them all together isn’t solvable. Presumably to do that would be to create another world, another “box” so to speak.
Localized physics have full formulas… nonlocal do not?
I wonder if dreams are where we experience the nonlocal formulas in action. Looking back when you wake up, everything is vague and unreal or hyperreal depending on the dream. And yet no matter what the dream is there are times when it seems as if other beings communicate, right? Dreams that are more than “just dreams.”
So, is this the meeting ground of all minds from all realities? Is this what unsolvable physics looks like from the inside?
Could this be the answer to the need for an “altered state of mind” during high strangeness encounters? It’s not actually the mind’s state that’s altered but the perception of physics that are shifted. The person is shifted into a “state” where localized this-universe physics do not apply, or perhaps only apply to the physical body. But the nonlocal mind–that aspect of us not chained to the local laws of physics–is taken to the meeting ground transcendent and inclusive of all worlds.
We meet on the bridge, so to speak. In dreams, 9 times out of 10 who we meet is ourselves in fluid landscapes concocted by our mind. But every now and then someone else or Earth herself pops in to communicate something extraordinary. And every now and then some intelligence brings some of us there during a wake-state experience.
Jeff has wondered on the program who or what is roaming around the outskirts of the fractal. Maybe the answer is, everyone from everywhere when we need to meet.
POST #2
Joe Gooch just corrected me privately that the Pearl Jam lyric is “common rule” not “Golden Rule.” What played in my head during the dream was “Golden Rule.” I always thought the lyric was Golden Rule and so my brain delivered.
I wonder now if he didn’t just stumble upon something significant. On the one hand you could argue that this is evidence the whole thing is a dream. My problem with that is the voice felt foreign to me. It felt like dream intrusion, if you pardon the negative connotation. And what he said was certainly not something that felt like it came from my imagination, but who knows?
Still, I think a more interesting answer, and perhaps more honest, is that what Joe just figured out is how un-mystical entering a dream needs to be. I mean you think it’s got to entail quite a bit of work to somehow create a landscape in the mind put me there, talk to me, make it all work for me, the receiver. What technology–what magic–is capable of that?
What if you don’t need to do anything other than speak or show an image or two? What if it’s the internal version of the alarm clock going off or the rooster crowing or the person shaking you, telling you to wake up? At first you often incorporate the stimulus into the dream, then you wake up. What if an intelligence injects itself into the dream and then your mind wraps itself around it, trying to make it make sense by farting out applicable sounds and images from your personal data base of thoughts and experiences?
You aid and abet the “intruder” in your dream as a means to blend this stand-out communication back into the tapestry of the dreaming mind. This actually makes sense because as I said, we do it all the time with external stimuli.
It doesn’t matter if Golden Rule was the correct lyric. It matters how I sang it all these years and what it meant to me. The dreaming mind takes that from the closet, dusts it off, and makes me wear it to better illuminate what this guy was saying in a way that makes sense to me.
Perhaps this is how a rigid, rational seed is planted in the fertile soil of dreamtime metaphor land. And what grows is my retelling of it. The retelling will be neither incomplete nor complete. It will be a mutation to which you, the reader, will add or subtract in your retelling and on it goes. It’s not “the telephone game,” it’s “fractal knowledge gestation.” The idea gestates in all who read and ponder and contribute to it until it dies or some version holds as common wisdom.
Joe! You’re a genius! (Accidentally.)
1 hour. That’s the countdown to Jeff Ritzmann and I taping our final weekly installment of Paratopia. Of course we’ll carry on as a monthly free show but it won’t be the same. In some ways it may end up better, but man, this was fun. So was the live show. I’ll miss both.
We’re going out with a bang. I have a feeling it will be one of our deepest episodes coated in sweet, sweet comedy. (Because… you know… we’ve got to tie up all those running gag loose ends. Priorities, people, priorities.)
Jeff told me not too long ago that he felt like we were going in different directions in terms of investigating high strangeness. I thought, if that’s true, it would make for a great premise to the 3-hour monthly. Maybe hour one we explore it his way, hour two we explore my way, and hour three we come together to discuss what we’ve found.
Still, I found it hard to believe because… well… I didn’t feel like I had a direction, really. I, like he and like many of you, just had an above-average understanding of where not to look–but that’s not saying much. Most people aren’t looking at all and many of those who are have gotten stuck and built a home in the quicksand. But, since he said it, I was curious where he thought he was going.
I didn’t have to ask about me. Clearly, I’m the oneness spirituality guy, right? So that’s my angle if I’ve got one. But it’s not exactly an angle. It’s a destination I see all authentic roads leading to but that doesn’t tell us anything about the roads or about what authenticity means. And those roads are the ones we travel and that authenticity is the mystery that consumes us. Oneness as a destination is just a word. It is meaningless until you “get” there and the odds of you getting there are, let’s face it, slim at best.
To my mind, we’ve got reality inverted. The thing we most fundamentally are is fictitious to us and the thing we call “illusion” (or fiction) is what we perceive as nonfiction, as reality. All along the way of the story of us, some of us encounter beings that we are told by rationalists, debunkers, humanists, and the like must be fictitious. They’re right a lot of the time and they have explored reality in such a cowardly–yet sensical–way as to only include that which is repeatable in their worldview of what is. The obvious, in other words. It’s an intellectual move but it’s not realistic and we’re paying for it now on many levels.
Since we are living the backwards reflection of the real, I’m not willing to take the illusion’s explanations for these beings no matter how sharply dressed, impeccably thoughtful, or empirically cloaked their presentation. I’ve seen different. If that doesn’t agree with you, tough shit. If tough shit bothers you, might I suggest you’ve boxed yourself in and now have to defend your walls like any common zealot?
See, I’ve got a mindset that is experience, an outlook based on psychological and cultural pressures–but no direction, really, where the allegedly paranormal is concerned. This functioning can be mistaken for a direction if you don’t look for the difference.
Yet Jeff does have a direction? That’s news. So I asked him what it was and he told me and we riffed on it. For hours we riffed because I can get behind where he’s going next. It sounds suspiciously like a perfect storm of Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Jeff, and me–and I think there are elements we can find bleeding over into other areas of study and of life. Or not. Maybe it will fall flat somewhere along the way–but at least it’s testable. Not testable in a repeatability sort of way but testable in a “Could this apply here” sort of way. Like the crossover between ufology, magick, and hallucinogens. Whereas before we were looking for crossover phenomena, now we’ve got a theory that makes sense of what we’ve found.
But then making sense doesn’t equal truth. Lot’s of fiction stories make sense, but you’ve got to share them to find out, right? And even then….
This Friday, on our final weekly episode, we will serve up our latest ponder-food in the hopes that you’re satiated until we start the monthly show. Naturally, what we talk about here will double as the launch pad for the monthly where we will explore it with Tiokasin, with guests, and with listeners.
Speaking of listeners, it’s time to evolve that notion a step further. But we’ll talk about that in 10 minutes and you’ll hear it on Friday.
Crap. Ten minutes. Really?
Gotta go!
