Tuesday, November 22, 2022
4:20 a.m. Let’s see how much I can bring back. Sinking though a web of associations, returning up the same web if something calls me back. Experiencing, truly, but all mental construction, equally truly. And what we are helps determine how we drift and what we associate. “Real life” isn’t actually much different than “mental life.” And how do good and evil enter into pursuing webs of association? All they can do is inhibit exploration, inhibit experience.
Will I be able to expound upon this? How dreaming, remembering, fantasizing, all are sort of the same thing?
It started by my recognizing (what has become clearer and clearer in recent months) that I was spending the nights (and parts of the days, if I was lying down napping or even spacing out), moving in and out of states of more focused and less focused consciousness.
So I was coming “awake” after a prolonged dream-like period, and I was aware of myself becoming more conscious – more concentrated, you might say – even as it happened. And I was aware that waking and sleeping and dreaming are not three separate states, but more like three phases of one state. Sometimes the movement from one phase to another was abrupt and firm, but sometimes it was gentle and approximate, and in no case did it mean only one thing, though it could easily appear to be only one thing.
Gradually I realized that one way to see what happened is to think of myself floating in a sea of logical and other associations, all chained by whatever connectors. (This wasn’t pursued then, but as I write this, I can think of it as one vast data base, with various keys, some mental, some logical, some perhaps physical memories, some emotional connections, some biographical, some fictional, some a little of each, some all sorts of things. The thing about a date base, as opposed to a flat file, is that the data is not linked in one inflexible way, but is all available and all connected according to the keys one constructs – or discovers – to explore it.)
So, as sleep or relaxation releases the controls that a relative concentration imposes on exploration, in our sleep or reverie we may drift along, following chains of association downward deeper into the ocean, one thing leading to another. In sleep this will appear real to us sometimes, and at other times will be obviously constructed even as we follow it. In reverie or I suppose in some drug-assisted journeys, it may appear to be entirely imaginary, regardless of how it is constructed. (Let alone by whom!) In waking pursuit – to the degree that we can allow ourselves to be guided by the logic of the data rather than by the categories our ego-selves impose – it may appear to be genuine discovery, or conscious functioning, or the illustration of usually hidden mental laws and processes.
This is coming out very abstract. Perhaps people will find it dry and obvious. Guys, a little help here?
You’re doing fine; just, as you work, stay in that drifting emotional/mental/imaginal space and let it come through there, you shaping as little as possible, or, let’s say, only as necessary.
I had a real sense of moving up and down the web of relationships of data, a real sense of how it is that we move between waking and sleep and other states of being.
Say more.
It has interested me, how we changes states like that all the time. How, and why. “Why” in two senses of the word: to what purpose, and following what laws. And in recent months – it has been quite a while now, I suppose at least since I wound up in the e.r. on New Year’s Eve 2020 – sleep and waking have interwoven often enough, smoothly enough, that the movement between them has become at least as obvious as the difference in states.
That is, you began looking differently at the most common experience of life, how you experience 3D life as alternation.
Yes, I suppose so.
When you sleep all in one long increment – six or seven or eight hours at a time, followed by the rest of the 24 or 25 hour cycle “awake” – it can easily seem like you are moving between two states that have little in common and are, in fact, as puzzling when considered together as either one is considered in opposition to the other. When your sleep is broken into two or three bits, interrupted by what you think of as sleeplessness, still it seems that the two states alternate, rather than inform each other (let alone participate together). But your experience has dissolved that illusion of separation, and you have seen first-hand how your mind moves to de-center and re-center.
That’s a good way to put it. That is just what I have been experiencing. It is something like daydreaming, too.
Your normal mental processes, observed closely, are not nearly as much you dictating as you riding and steering.
That’s an interesting way to put it! That’s it exactly. When I start to write a sentence, I usually or anyway very frequently have only an imprecise idea where it’s going to wind up. I sometimes can feel myself hovering in indecision as to how to conclude, as for instance in adding that “too” in the previous graf. And of course it is that very habit of steering rather than dictating that made possible this form of conversation with you. It has my conscious input, but it is not limited to, or by, my conscious decision or teleology.
And – as I get up to refill my coffee mug – the light goes on, and I remember that while I was experiencing all this consciously, I realized I was experiencing – that is, consciously experiencing – what our 3D life is. It is a mistake to think of internal and external as separate, not merely because they reflect each other (though that is true as well) but because it is a false distinction to begin with. That data base is everything: experience, fact, thought, emotion, ponderings, desires, etc.
It could be called your unfinished business or it could be called the boundless well of creativity drawn upon by every kind of person there is. There scientists find their facts. So do biographers and historians. So do novelists and psychologists. And artists and artisans, daydreamers and wastrels, “good” and “bad” people of all kinds.
Which is why we probably ought to stop calling it “unfinished business,” in that that sets up expectations of an ultimate empty Inbox.
Any phrasing, any conceptualization, will have problems. That can’t be helped. Even a perfect concept or phrase, if it were possible for there to be one, would be misleading or repugnant to somebody, because of that person’s state of being at the moment. But we’re perfectly happy to use a different phrase, if you care to suggest one.
We’re coming up on an hour. What have I not mentioned that I ought to note before we close?
Not that you failed to mention it, right off, but it bears emphasis that “good and evil” inhibits understanding of the way things really are. We have said this, now, many times, in different contexts.
It is becoming ever more obvious. The first time you hear it, it sounds like “Anything goes, and damn the torpedoes.” And slowly you begin to understand that man who said that when you realize that it is better to be whole than good, you enter into a stricter life, compared to which your previous rectitude was flowery license. That’s a pretty close quotation, though I can’t remember whose words they are.
However, though an important insight, the crippling effects of “good and evil” are not the critical theme here.
No indeed. But I don’t know which is more central, the continuity of our consciousness whether waking or dreaming or in between, or the continuity of experience when seen from an image of ourselves floating along data chains of “real” and “imagined” and – what? Half-real? – input.
Perhaps defer further analysis to another time. What was retained and expressed is worthwhile in itself.
Today’s theme, then? Continuity?
That would do as well as anything.
My thanks in particular, and as usual the thanks of all of us, for your participation in this exploration.
The thanks is fully reciprocated, as you know by now.
Till next time, then.