That Other Place, This Place, and Primordial Stillness

Almost straight way after my initial awakening, I began to see the interconnection of all things. They were elongated moments of cause & effect, beyond that of my immediate, locality, where the boundaries of my current understanding of the physical and mental world blurred to include causality on a wider scale. Buddhism calls this dependant origination, which simply means nothing exists entirely of its own accord. 

This allowed me to see cause & effect from a broader perspective. For example, A table was not simply confined to the word ‘table’ - it had undergone a journey involving many interventions from many sources: water, soil, sun, humans. It became so much more than the word ‘table’. I remember watching the traffic on the road, and intuiting that the cars (and the people driving them) were simply the animated earth driving over itself.

About a year later, these interconnected insights become mediocre; I was bored by them - my passion had faded. They offered no real answer to my identity quandary, which appeared to keep spinning like a vortex. One moment I’m identified, and the next I’m not. And on it went, back and forth like this, for what seemed like an eternity.

After the boredom of these insights settled, a very surprising thing happened on the bus. It marked a new shift into a totally unfamiliar territory that was completely unexpected. I was on the bus going into town. The bus pulled into the bus stop, and everyone began to stand up to prepare themselves for getting off the bus. As I stood up, I looked directly ahead of me, and a man was stood there. All of a sudden, I became the physical manifestation of this man. I could sense very strongly what it was like to ‘be’ him, both somatically and psychologically. I recall saying to myself, “ah fuck - what's going on now!”

I put my head down, and walked off the bus. Now, considering I’m in the town centre, where there are many people, I decided to keep my head down until I could figure out what was going on. It took me a short time to realise needed to be looking at people so that I could navigate the streets.

I lifted my head up, and saw a person smoking a cigarette, and I too was smoking that same cigarette. I thought it was pretty cool that I could smoke a cigarette, and not succumb to the ill effects. 

Sitting down in a café to gather myself, I began to play around with this newfound ability. The thought occurred to me, “what if I catch a person doing some unspeakable act”, that would be both intruiging and unsettleing. I decided to explore the interesting world of inanimate objects. Becoming the foliage was quite fascinating. I also quite enjoyed being a pebble for what seemed like a disproportionate amount of time. I would accidentally find myself falling into an unusual place, like a person's nasal cavity, which was a similar to being the foliage if you consider the nasal hair.

When I became comfortable with this new thing, there were a couple of times when I became a little too egocentric with it. I was wielding a power that no one else had, and I once disclosed certain – private – things about people to them. This clearly left them felling exposed and violated. Suffice to say, they never spoke to me again. I don't blame them - what an unusual thing. Ah, well… I guess you live and learn. 

There are many such events I could write about regarding these very interesting phenomena (clairvoyance, clairaudience, telepathy, recollection of past lives and so on) Perhaps we could refer to it as an extra sensory perception of another mode of reality not directly connected to the physical, sensory world - at least in any logical, spatial or temporal aspect. It’s possible to become aware of whole other realities, speak to other beings, and even obtain new knowledge, as all was the case for me.

This other reality (the extra sensory one) seems to transcend all those imaginary borders we find in the physical world, including time, space and causality, but interestingly finds itself in some kind of acausal unison with the physical world. The threshold between that reality and the physical reality lies inside the mind, and it's the egocentric construct that protects you from that – hidden – reality, which is sometimes called the deep, collective unconscious. It is indeed vast, and full of rich content. Here, I’m not questioning the validity of these being and realities - I couldn’t care in the slightest. This is more about contextualizing in a helpful way an area of awakening that can be extremely difficult to navigate.

For some people, the unconsoius collective content of this inner reality can bleed out into their worldly life, and can take on many forms, including mental illness. Depression, psychosis, schizophrenia are all manifestations emanating directly from this other reality. I remember having a very sinister archetype totally engulf my perception. I had never felt anything so dark and sinister before - such incredible power. On the flip side, I was captured by the most majestic, and heavenly states you could possibly imagine, and many more intersting states in-between.

In any case, I quickly became very bored with the never-ending content of this reality, as I was still stuck in my thoughts, cycling around like an aimless wanderer - to put an end to that was my primary objective. 

If you are on the road to awakening, it might be so that you will encounter this terrain, where you seem to be able to do magical things, and speak to other beings, or intuit whole other worlds, see and hear people that are many miles away, or see another person's thoughts. If that’s you, and you recognise yourself here, control your inflated ego, or else things can take a terrible turn.

So, isn't this a curious thing? What’s going on here? It had taken me some time to give this a language, but quite simply, this is a part of reality that is largely dismissed by the conventional world. That is because most people are materialistically driven. They primarily operate using only the six sense organs, and their sense objects. That is all they know, and that’s completely fine. I like sausages, too.

Some of you will notice that I’ve labelled ‘six’ sense organs. Traditional psychology recognises only 5 senses, because they assume they (the observer observing the other senses) occupy the sixth sense, so the brain becomes overlooked. It’s similar to the eye not being able to see itself. Thoughts cannot look at themsleves without adding more thoughts (another observer) and that is because they innocently identify as the continuity of their thought stream.

In any case, this isn't traditional psychology, and the brain is a sensing organ. It works using a similar mechanism to the eye: the eye detects visual forms, but the brain detects thought forms.

So that is the world of the sense organs - eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body (somatic/feeling) and mind. It’s a materialistic, egocentric place where we identify with the thought stream and adopt various worldviews, and try to – haphazardly – cobble together some sort of meaningful experience. 

And yes, it’s important to have some sort of experience, and obviously satisfy the basic needs in the sensory world. This is not about excluding that reality; absolutely not! These worldly relations help protect you from this inner reality, because its content is just too vast, frightening and will shatter your egoistic laws and principles. For most people, it’s safer to remain ignorant to this larger reality.

So, for ease of comprehension, it should be quite obvious that I’ve broken this down into two parts (slightly ironic for a website that points to non-dual principles - and surprising third part is added soon!) it’s as if I’m saying that there is one reality, the physical plane where we do human stuff, and another reality made up of hmm… dare I say, ‘energy’ (there… I said it!)

For me, it begs whether people are really driven by the sensory world, (physicality with its four dimensions, of length, breadth, width and time) or if they are driven by this other reality, the ‘energetic one’ that transcends time, space and causality -- the extra sensory reality that lies just outside conscious awareness, yet seems to have a powerful influence upon humanity.

At this phase, it’s hard for me to see that these two planes of reality both work in unison, at least in any causal sense: one reality has strict physical laws, boundaries and all those things, and the other reality is totally unpredictable and irratic. It’s fair to say, I'm totally perplexed! I cannot reconcile both of these totally paradoxical components.

It’s not that I’m having an internal battle about it; not at all. It’s like when I first discovered peanut butter and jam (Jelly, for the USA residents) in the same butty (sandwich for all those in other areas). Being English, these two did not fit together (and still don’t). It interested me, and I could see how they could sit together on a piece of bread, but when I tasted it, they didn't fit together, just like these two realities don't fit together in any rational way.

Now, what's fascinating is that there is a third component I’m going to throw into the mix here, and interestingly, without this third component, I would not be able to see these two seemingly contradictory realities described above. That third component is a rather anticlimactic ‘nothing’, which is, strangely, as obvious and as louder than all the changing phenomena from the physical reality and that other reality.

We could say this ‘nothing’ is what I am, because it doesn’t change. It’s the integrator or unifier of everything I speak about, so it is fundamental to all physical and formless manifestations. Therefore, it is not exclusive of itself for it is inclusive of all – and the perplexity of this position (it’s not a position, but let's package it that way for ease of comprehension) is confounded by standing consciously at the intersection of both the materialistic, physical reality, and that strange energetic reality. 

It’s a bird's eye view of an inner psychological landscape that transcends basic logic and reasoning. This ‘nothingness’ is really important, because it unifies the tension of that perplexity around these two fundamental realities. It smooths out the paradox such that everything is bound together into one seamless whole.

In the initial phases of awakening, however, this ‘nothing’ gap (sometimes called ‘spaciousness’, although it doesn't refer to space and its 3 dimensions) helps unify the tensions of your immediate life circumstances, your relationships, your worldly dramas, your feelings, and, of course, perhaps the greatest struggle: your families. That’s where, if you do the fetter inquiry, fetter 4 & 5 shows you how to use this remarkable no-thing, and to become aware of this fundamental unifying element. But you won’t get access to it until you have broken through the identity layer.

As you advance in your awakening, this non-dimensional gap opens wider to include more stuff, because, well, when you’ve stopped grumbling about your parents, or the state of the world, or greedy cooperations; when you’ve stopped trying to become a righteous, morally driven individual, then you can start to see other universally-driven principles and perspectives. Your inner eye becomes wider than wide, and wiser than the definition of wise itself. 

When you can hold more of the world's tensions, and I don’t mean in a stressful way; absolutely not! When you can be when all around you in chaos, this is good, because a natural transmission can occur, and if someone is in your presence, they will see you, listen to you, and might even learn from you. But you’ll also encounter people who are affriad of you.

As for the magic stuff - well, tread carefully, and if you notice you're wielding that stuff like a crazed, hubris intoxicated mortal, then get someone to slap you across the face… real hard!