It’s said that we live our lives “here” in the waking state and then fall “unconscious” for seven or eight hours each night.

Except, not quite.

I would argue for another mind-expanding view… I would say that you never truly are asleep.

You are only ever in your “mind”. And the mind streams different states of consciousness, be that “waking”, “psychedelic”, “hypnagogic”, “delirium”, or, yes, “dreaming”. All states of consciousness are equally authored by the same “mind”. The same writer is behind all masks…

Mind-body problem and oneness

In a nutshell, the mind-body problem boils down to the philosophical “hard problem of consciousness”. How do seemingly lifeless inanimate material objects connect to (some say, [falsely] give rise to) mental phenomena? Is the “universe” made up of two substances, mental and material?

In my view, this misses the point. The truth is, all any of us have ever “seen” or “experienced” is mental. The objects that we “see”, scents that we “smell”, sounds that we “hear”, flavors that we “taste”, sensations that we “feel”, thoughts that we “think”, are all products of mental representation.

No mind, no perception.

It’s not like these perceptions would be floating meaninglessly without a Perceiver…

The world that is “out there” is a projection of your mental representation of it. This includes your body, which is an avatar streamed into the mind.

Subscribe now

Don’t believe me?

Consider the fact that the world revealed by the scientific method demonstrates that we live in a hallucination (a mental model of the world). Even though we perceive solid dense objects, such objects are, actually, overwhelmingly (99%+) of space.

“I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact, the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.”

~ Werner Heisenberg, Nobel-prize winner, one of the main pioneers of quantum mechanics (As translated in Natural Law and the Structure of Matter. Rebel Press, 1981.

All of this is to say that we are all interconnected, all is one: which I explain in detail why here.

Astral projection and “out-of-body experiences”

If mind and matter are two aspects unified in one Reality—that is, if “outer” and “inner” are interconnected—where do we “go” when we dream? And, in “out-of-body” experiences, are we actually leaving our bodies?

Monism (a proposed “answer” to the mind-body problem, where “all is one”), provides a simple solution to this issue. Since our bodies exist inside our mind, when you have a so-called “out-of-body” experience, you are not so much leaving your body as you are simulating an experience without the avatar.

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

~ Max Planck, Nobel-prize winner, originator of quantum theory (Quoted in J.W.N. Sullivan. Observer. January 25, 1931, pg. 17.)

To be clear, this is not to say that there isn’t a truly material object whence the mind came, but ultimately, the idea of a secondary world existing outside mental phenomena, or alongside it, is truly superfluous—no one has ever known such a world, and it isn’t needed to explain the world as we find it.

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down because of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.

~ Erwin Schrodinger, Nobel-prize winner, famous for developing fundamental results in quantum theory (Mind and Matter. Cambridge: Univ. Pr., 1959.)

Since you are part of Reality and are not separate from it, that means Reality is alive. The universe literally is conscious, because you are!

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

~ Albert Einstein, Nobel-prize winner, does he need any introduction? (The New Quotable Einstein. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.)

Alien abduction experiences

This provides interesting fodder to the idea behind alien abduction experiences. While UFO and abduction phenomena is far beyond the scope of this article (and we’ll explore it more later), it is interesting to bring up the topic briefly in light of its overlap with astral projection and dreams.

Frequently, prior to the alien abduction event, experiencers report that their bodies are frozen and that they experience a beam of light. I find that this shares tremendous overlap with reports of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) and sleep paralysis, where the “body” shuts down in preparation for the visionary episode and an ineffable light is perceived through a seemingly otherworldly means.

To be clear, I’m not saying that such phenomena are fake; but, rather, precisely the opposite: they are “real” “other worlds” of the mind. And they provide us windows into a broader reality.

Since everything is already in the mind anyway, alien abduction experiences and UFO encounters represent a mind-expanding odyssey into the depths of what we can experience. It provides us a journey into invisible landscapes of the mind, where the “ineffable” can be experienced.

More broadly, visionary experiences may be the early breathings of us waking up to Ultimate Reality, the dream in which we live.

Becoming “awake” while you dream

This brings us to the phenomenon of lucid dreams, where one becomes aware that they are dreaming while they are dreaming. What are we to make of this?

Since lucid dreams hinge on “insight” (the ability to be informed about one’s cognitive state) and we are always in our own minds, we can take this “insight” and apply it to the waking state of consciousness…

Which is what we get when we experience derealization, the feeling that the so-called “external” waking world is “just a dream”.

Ever felt like you were living in a video game or a movie? This is derealization.

In actuality, I believe this is not far from the truth. From my own belief, Reality is “alive” through us, and we are like portals into the great galactic universal Mind. We are of one global Self experiencing creation—creating creation—through many “points of experiences”. Each “point of experience” experiences themselves as an individual, but, in actuality, they are like God’s own eyes out in the world. And not just “eyes”, but “nose”, “ears”, “skin”, “tongue”, and other perceptual mechanisms humans don’t know about.

Becoming “awake” to the dream - an infinite, eternal life

Are you able to “wake” then to the fact that all of existence is of the same substance? That the same mind that occasions the experience of the “waking world” is the same mind that occasions the experience of the “dreaming world”?

For God is the true author of all experience.

In this sense, the distinctions between “dream” and “wakefulness”, “delusion” and “reality”, “me” and “you”, “author” and “reader”, “outer” and “inner” begin to break down and merge into a unified whole.

Sweet dreams!

Somehow, it evoked a feeling like we’re in a great mystery and our minds can show us worlds that defy descriptions, something I’ve explained earlier as “the ineffable”.

I was just in shock with how my mind could transport me to such a dimension that felt so eerily outside of this world—it felt, in short, like I glimpsed past the curtain of what we know as our existence here in this reality we find ourselves in.

I had just had to get back there. That forest.

Whatever it meant, I had to get back.

Thus began the active research into lucid dreaming, and how I could control my dreams to transport me to other worlds…

How to achieve lucid dreams easily

For those new to it, lucid dreams are dreams where you become aware that you are dreaming. It is, by nature, quite a surreal experience.

Imagine yourself flying in space and then you “wake up” within the dream to recognize that you are in a hallucinated world of your mind (more about that later…) and that you are actually lying down in bed in your room. You’re aware that you are resting, but at the same time, you are experiencing your life in another world of your mind!

Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to achieve lucid dreams if the interest is there. In other words, I can promise you that you will become very good at achieving lucid dreams if you are constantly thinking about the topic. The reason being is that the more you are interested in the topic, the more you are likely to think about it when you are sleeping and become aware that you’re dreaming, naturally.

So, that brings me to my rule #1 for achieving lucid dreams.

#1.) Be Interested in Achieving Lucid Dreams and Practice for the Long-Term — If your mind is actively thinking about lucid dreams, you will also begin to think about lucid dreams while you’re… well… dreaming.

Interest alone may not be your sure ticket to success in lucid dreaming on day #1; however, over time, in the long-run, having done lucid dreaming now for two decades with an average of ~4 lucid dreams a week, I can say it will ensure it almost necessarily in due time.

Moreover interest needs to be coupled with effort. Without effort, you can often wind up in a state that I call a “pseudo-lucid dream”, were you pronounce that you’re dreaming, but you still lack the insight to recognize that you are, in fact, dreaming. Pronouncing “I’m dreaming” in words is a lot different than actually believing it, let alone appreciating it.

So, how do you gain the insight?

#2) Do a Reality Check — One great reality check that I do to ensure that I am dreaming is look at my hand, palm in front of me, close my eyes and then reopen them. Count how many fingers are there. If you have more than five, you’re probably dreaming!

Another good idea is to close and reopen your eyes to text that is in front of you. If the text starts changing, again, you’re probably dreaming.

Clocks as well are notorious for changing their digits in weird ways—another sure sign that you’re dreaming.

Once you gain the insight that you are dreaming, take time to actually appreciate that the world that you see in front of you is a theater of your imagination, that it is produced entirely by your mind (again, more on that later…)

Open a door and see what your mind creates behind the door. Note that it was all produced by your mind! Marvel at the intricate details and how it feels so real. Smell it, feel it, take it all in—this is a world of your imagination.

And from there, you can begin your lucid dream travels…

#3) “Wake Back to Bed” Method — This is the third and final key secret to achieving lucid dreams easily. This popular method of achieving lucid dreams, when coupled with the two tips above, is almost guaranteed to cause you to have a lucid dream within the first few days of practicing.

To keep it simple, this is the method: when you wake up from a dream, stay up for a little bit… say, 15 minutes or so… and actively tell yourself “I am going to lucid dream, I am going to lucid dream”.

Since your mind was previously in a dream state, likely REM (rapid eye movement), once you fall asleep, your mind will take you right back to the dream state—allowing you to more easily take the conscious thoughts that you had prior to falling asleep into the threshold state of dreaming itself. If lucid dreaming is what’s on your mind, it should not be surprising that you will soon enter a dream where you’re thinking about lucid dreaming, putting you in a good position to do a reality check and then become “awake within the dream”.

Is it that simple?

Yes. While folks may love to make things complicated, these rules are surprisingly straightforward and rewarding to follow.

If you have the drive / interest level (step #1), basic skillset of reality checking (step #2), and are actively putting yourself in a position to consciously enter the dream state (step #3), you will be in a great position to achieving a lucid dream.

Why lucid dreams can help with spirituality and “waking up” more broadly

While I was able to achieve lucid dreams easily in no time through the key three steps, it took me many years later to appreciate the real fruits of dreamwork.

In particular, I came to learn how lucid dreams can be tremendously helpful to furthering one’s spirituality and “waking up” more broadly. Dreams are so much more powerful than just flying around in space or having wild dream sex, as appealing as they may be to first-time lucid dreamers.

In dreams, particularly lucid dreams, one learns that they are always in the theater of their mind. Our mind is the one thing we can’t remove from our life, it is the very experience of the world. It’s not like you can stage a walkout from your consciousness… it’s always there, and it’s your life.

So, when you dream, while it may feel as though you are just now entering a reality of your mind, the truth is that you are only ever in your mind.

The world you see in front of you is a projection of your mind. After all, if there was no perceiving mind there, the perception would not just be floating by meaninglessly without a perceiver. Perceiver and perception are ultimately one, coming together as a joint package, hence the oneness and interconnectedness of our Reality, a concept I get into in my book here, Why does Reality Exist?

In a certain sense then, you are never really asleep; you’re always just in different states of consciousness, be that the “waking state of consciousness”, “dreaming state of consciousness”, “lucid dreaming state of consciousness”, “psychedelic state of consciousness”, etc.

We are our minds.

Will you open your mind and “wake up” to glimpse the wonders of your imagination?

The wonders of actually being alive right here, right now, reading this line before you?

Or will you stay asleep to the dream?

Wow, you exist! Reality is alive, because you are.

When we look outside of that on which we depend, we ignore our unity; looking outward, we see many faces; look inward and all is one head. If a man could but be turned about, he would see at once God and himself and the All.

~ Plotinus, The Enneads

To see that we are all interconnected, consider the Big Bang.

A common misunderstanding of the Big Bang is that it happened “out there” in space. But that begs the question, where did space come from? And if the Big Bang is understood to be the point at which our universe originated, that’s no good—where did the space come from?

Big Bang as Expansion of Spacetime Itself

No worries though, properly understood, the Big Bang was the very expansion of spacetime itself. In other words, there is no “out there” to Reality; there is no boundary to Reality; all expanded from “one point”, loosely defined. Since there is no external scale relative to our Reality to determine an objective temporal or spatial scale, all is relative within Reality.

Put more simply, there is no fundamentally objective “left” or “right”, or even “before” or “after”. There is only simply a “left” to this object, which can be "a “right” to that object. Or, in a temporal sense, “before” and “after” can be experienced in different ways, perhaps explaining why NDErs (Near-Death Experiencers) frequently experience all of “life as a panorama,” with the past, present, and future experienced almost like a field. Or, as Einstein, put it, “time is relative”.

Consider the below report of a NDE experience:

My entire existence… seemed to be placed in front of me in a… panoramic, three-dimensional flashback… I cannot say how long this life review [lasted];… it may have been long…, yet concurrently it seemed just a fraction of a second, as I observed everything at once.

Van Lommel, P. Eindeloos bewustzijn; een wetenschappelijke visie op de BijnaDood Ervaring [Endless consciousness]. Kampen, The Netherlands: Ten Have, 2007.

In non-ordinary states of consciousness, we often become more aware of the surrealist nature of space & time—they appear almost as conceptualizations of the mind rather than anything fundamentally solid. Like the NDEr, we experience our connection to the world in a way that feels like “all is one” or “all is interconnected”.

But is it?

Why this Implies We Are All Interconnected

Saying that all is relative amounts to an understanding that “all is interconnected," as everything can only be defined with respect to its relationship to other aspects within existence. Therefore, Reality is less like a fixed, definite material object and more like an abstract, mental “thought” or “information”.

Since there is no “out there” to Reality or “before” or “after” it, it is everything and nothing all at once. We are all therefore connected to one another and nature inside the medium together. Definition exists relative to everything else “inside” (since there is no “outside”) and is not absolute to some “objective” scale.

Nothing can be fundamentally separate from the rest, since everything defines its existence relative to other entities within the medium that is Reality.

Reality is ALL THAT.

Reality is like the lived lives and sum of all of us.

You are not separate from Nature, you are part of Nature.

More broadly, you are not separate from Reality, you are part of Reality.

We are all “It”.

“Before” the Big Bang?

It’s not quite that simple though. Since the Big Bang itself originated from physical laws, in what nature of existence did those physical laws reside?

In my belief, this implies that there must be some timeless, locationless realm “beyond” the Big Bang that sourced our world and its origin in the Big Bang. This is what I believe many call “God”, or the “Divine”, or “Ultimate Reality”.

This realm defies our ordinary conceptions of “before”, “after”, “left”, “up”, etc.

We are like temporary interconnected specks from an eternal and infinite sea of existence that is Reality / the universe / everyone / you / me / them / I.

And this is our true Home that originates the world we see “here”.

It is the source that birthed all of our existences outside space & time to be interconnected to everyone of us.

Are we much like a fish in a tank learning how to fly and unable to make sense of the patterns around us?

After all, if there is life more “intelligent” than us “out there,” its way of existence might stretch our conceptions of what it even means to be alive. We understand the world through our five senses, but there are senses, like echolocation, that we have barely a clue about in regard to what it “feels like”. And just like how the blind person’s lack of visual perception isn’t indicative of the lack of the visual sensory experience from the world, so too might we lack the senses to “see” other forms of life.

We experience a world of “knowns”, but there is a world out there far beyond what the eye can see, the ear can hear, and so on.

There exist, in other words, “invisible landscapes” of consciousness. Who knows how many “other worlds”, or “other realities”, there are out there…? And what kind of life exists within them? Maybe it’s disembodied consciousness that exists in ways far crazier than what we can wrap our ordinary minds around?

Perhaps, the life forms that we experience in these “other worlds” are ineffable to us here in this dimension.

Ineffability. —The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical… it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this peculiarity, mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists. One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in love one’s self to understand a lover’s state of mind. Lacking the heart or ear, we cannot interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are even likely to consider him weak-minded or absurd. The mystic finds that most of us accord to his experiences an equally incompetent treatment.

~ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

“I don’t know how to describe it”.

“Somehow I felt like I was outside space & time”.

“I perceived another dimension”.

“Impossible to explain”.

Experiencers of spiritual realities often express their encounters with the ineffable in these ways. If we lack the linguistic capability to describe our experiences in the “other worlds,” the only obvious means we have of understanding it is through what the mystics have been telling us for ages: direct experience.

How can you obtain such direct experience and glimpse “the ineffable”?

Despite the shockingly limited mainstream information that is out there on this kind of stuff, you can not only expand your consciousness to experience the “other worlds”, but you can also do so easily.

There are a variety of methods for inducing non-ordinary states of consciousness that allow one to perceive “new” aspects to one’s world:

• Lucid dreaming (visit dreamviews.com to learn more)

• Drumming

• Astral projection (out-of-body experiences) (visit astralpulse.com to learn more)

• Entheogens / shamanic practices (visit Erowid.com to learn more)

• Chanting

• Strenuous exercise, fasting, etc.

In later posts, I plan on describing how to use each of these methods, but, for now, as you dip your feet into the lake of ecstasy, I leave you with the below video.

The below video analogizes the otherworldly journey into a heightened mystical awareness, where magical life resides in a manner that is far beyond what our minds can ordinarily perceive.

Bear in mind, that this video can never do justice to the actual feeling of being “there”, which again, we lack the vocabulary to describe…

Subscribe now