Thread: Astral Projection vs Ego Death

Originally Posted by Omnis Dei

In my experience, "ego death" is one of the most incredible feelings one can experience.

Why?

I'm not being facetious here, Omnis Dei; I am truly curious.

On reading these statements, especially Tranquil Toad's and yours, I'm beginning to wonder if you guys hadn't perhaps fallen into some transcendental state that thoroughly involved Self, but it was so strange and filled with what could only be perceived after the fact as "awareness gone wild" that you attached the best explanation you could to an experience that literally defies definition -- ego death.

I wonder if perhaps you were doing something much greater, but are confined to explanations within reach, and ego death fits the bill nicely. The converse works as well, as I wonder if the pursuit, no matter how philosophically responsible, of "ego death" is really the pursuit of something else altogether.

But wait, there's more:

The flip-side of "Cogito Ergo Sum" is "If I am not thinking, then I am Not." I hope you might consider this, and consider also that something else altogether was going on when you thought your self was gone and only awareness remained (what, BTW, does that even mean? When did awareness become a physical entity rather than the result of sentient observation?) That something might have been incredible, transcendental, and beyond explanation. But "You" were still there to appreciate it. You had to have been, or else you would have had no idea, whatsoever, that anything ever happened. To say otherwise might sound cool, but it defies nature, reason, logic, and the very definition of sentience itself to say that "something wonderful happened to me yesterday, and even though I was not there to witness it I know exactly what happened."

Again, I'm not being facetious here; I am truly interested in why you think it is possible to experience something without your defining self being present, and yet be able to remember the experience as if you, and by extension your ego, witnessed it.

And for what it's worth, my LD focus these days is on just the transcendental "nothingness" experience you guys describe... And I've been (not) there many times. The key here is that I've been there, even if the sensation was incredibly different and decidedly beyond my understanding. I had to be, or else the experience would not be able to survive in my memory for a whole variety of metaphorical and metaphysical reasons that I think Shadowofwind could explain much more clearly than I.

Again, sorry if I'm seeming to be an ass here; I don't mean to be. I just always manage to pause for a long moment when I read terms like "ego death" being tossed around like they should simply make sense when they simply do not, by any measure. Without ego, without identity, there is nothing. Period.

... Keep in mind this is all because you forgot to call me an idiot!

Sageous, this goes back, I think, to what I had said before.

Originally Posted by Alyzarin

It's not that you aren't there to experience it, it's just that your mind has lost the ability to perceive you as an individual. It's still only happening to your mind, you've just lost the part of your conscious programming that allows you to understand individuality.

Part of the concept behind it is that your ego is not your entire perception, it's just a part of it that allows you to comprehend reality. It is still your brain that is going through the experience, but your brain has lost the ability to differentiate yourself as an individual from any other perception. In that sense "you" were there for it, it's just that you aren't perceiving yourself as an entity who is experiencing it, you just are the experience. And it is incredible, transcendental, and beyond explanation. But at least on psychedelics, that's just how things are. The ego death is only one aspect of a psychedelic experience, there are so many other things going on simultaneously that it's impossible to comprehend.

But if your brain has lost the ability to comprehend reality, what exactly is it comprehending? Isn't reality just the word we've chosen to represent, well, everything?

You don't have to answer that.

I'll need to think on this a bit. I know what you're saying, Alyzarin, and trust me, I understand the psychedelic experience, though I honestly discounted it decades ago as philosphically irrelevant, and phenomenologically misleading (this could define my confusion, perhaps). I just have this feeling that you are asking a question here with much more substance to it than, "Are AP's intrinsically the same as ego death?" and I was hoping to coax the conversation in that direction. If I can't come up with words to back my happy suspicion, I'll give up and step away from this thread. Perhaps I shouldn't have chimed in in the first place...

The motives behind my question are maybe not as philosophical as you think. I would define them more as animalistic. I have an escapist side to me that feels the need to experience my consciousness as far away from its ordinary state as possible. As I've said in this thread before, the reality behind ego death doesn't concern me, I care only about how it feels. It's hard to describe the way I feel about it.... This is probably going to sound more psychotic than I'd like, but think of it like this. I feel like there's... a force. I guess you could look at it as the subconscious mind. It drives my personality (conscious mind) and I feel a strong link to it, almost like I'm consciously experiencing my subconscious. But not exactly, obviously, more like... in a detached way. And my conscious mind feels like it's something of a barrier that's just meant to block me from my subconscious, my true self. And the closer I get to that point of total loss of identity, the closer I get to removing that detachment and experiencing my subconscious without feeling blocked off from it like I normally do. When I hear people talk about how they had negative trips because their hallucinations were randomly violent or bizarre, or they got shown things they didn't want to see, I just don't understand that at all. When I trip, it's not even that it feels that I experience what I want to, it's like I experience what I already knew I was going to, because the trip lets my subconscious take control of my conscious reality and I always have that feeling of being directly in control (even if in a dissociated way) of my subconscious anyway, so the trip unfolds exactly to meet my desires, even in a state of ego loss. Does that... make sense?

Sageous,

Might you be pushing binary logic a little bit further than it goes, and word definitions a little bit stronger than what they're adequate for? As I understand Alyzarin, by 'ego death' he doesn't mean that the ego is in every sense utterly extinguished, though that was also the assumption I had initially made based on the words 'ego death', due to my previous misfortune of having read Adi Da's biography.

Being selectively blocked in that manner seems entirely plausible to me. As an analogous kind of thing, I had a strongly lucid dream once where I was aware of individual identity, but my memory only went back about a half hour. Usually when I dream I have access to a lot of information about waking life, as well as a vast amount of memories from previous dreams. In this dream, my reality, as far as memory goes, was entirely contained within the dream. Of course, had my being truly been wholly contained within the dream, then I would have had a hard time even thinking about the experience while it was happening, because I would not have possessed that degree of cognitive development. But the important detail in the dream is that I lacked awareness of anything beyond it. Which reiterates my point that what we consciously experience does not wholly define what we truly are. So that, for example, a person can experience an absence of awareness of personal identity, but that does not mean that they do not in any sense have personal identity. As I understand him, Alyzarin is not making a claim either way, he's just relating the experience in which he had no awareness of identity.

Off hand, I can't recall having had an experience where I was unaware of having identity. However, my sense of identity does shift all over the place, for instance I can shift it somewhat to my 'muse', and from there it can shift in the first person to other people and events. This is an aspect of how my 'muse' shares information. I don't think this shifting of identity is 'false', I think its natural to be able to move it around like that, and that in a sense I am someone other than my usual self when I have those experiences. (I see I'm repeating myself here, I'm never sure how much to do that.) I also think that, despite having some apparent ease with this, my awareness of identity is muted compared to many other people's. I think that if I was more aware of self, this would help with the waves of sludge problem we discussed earlier, and would make me less confused about what is and is not 'mine' when dreaming. I think I've been improving in this regard. I think that awareness of self was suppressed as a part of how I suppressed other difficult emotional issues. Or another way of saying that, is it was damaged through some kind of misuse of the capabilities of self, and possibly by my environment. I think that temporarily having almost no sense of self is probably well within range of the services my 'muse' could provide, if I needed that as a learning experience. Likewise for other people.

Why would that be of value? To use the first analogy that comes to mind....Suppose that given a type of question you know how to find an answer, but that you have no direct method going the other way. If I say "what is 2+4", you can answer "6", but if I say "the answer is 6, what was the question?", you can't tell me. If I say "the answer is 46, what is the question", you can tell me if you know what I'm alluding to. There are many answers that have definite questions, but for which there is no easy path back to that question. In math terms, the mapping is 1-to-1 but its not invertible. As I have suggested elsewhere, spiritual development seems to me to be this kind of problem. To quote an AC/DC song, "who made you? ain't nobody told you". (I did that just to gratuitously throw two jarringly different references together.) So if it were a math problem, how would we proceed? We need derivatives to point in the right direction, in other words, we need to know which way is "up". How do we get derivatives? There are two ways. One way is to have a model for how you get from the question to the answer that has slope information built into it. (In other words, analytic derivatives.) The problem with that is if your model is wrong, the direction it points you will be wrong. And another problem is that not all models are differentiable everywhere. The other alternative is finite difference derivatives. The way that works, is you perturb your model, and see how the result is different from before you perturbed it. You divide the difference by the size of the perturbation, and that's your arrow that points towards the answer. Although people don't explain it in these terms, this is a primary way that people learn about things. Not sure if LSD helps with spiritual growth? Do a lot of it. If its not a good idea, and if the experiment itself doesn't cause you to misinterpret or misplace the results, then you can do something else in your next life. Or somebody else can do something else in their current life having learned from your example. This is part of the reason we're 'lost' to start with though: a lot of our thought experiments do impair our ability to evaluate the results. Religious dogmatism would be the most obvious example of this, where the misinterpretation of the fruits of the dogma is built into the dogma itself. (In other words the model's derivatives are wrong.)

Anyway, if you're searching for awareness of identity, and you have an experience where you're temporarily almost totally unaware of individual identity, that points you in the right direction on several questions at once. By contrast with that experience, you become more aware of individual identity. And you become more aware of universal or at least more general identity. And you become aware of any number of other things which your comparatively strong sense of personal identity had been eclipsing.

A limitation of this kind of thinking is that in any given context it only gives you a certain type of information, and you may be starved for information at another level. To illustrate what I mean: a couple of weeks ago I had a dream about a particular Mandelbrot fractal structure juxtaposed on a moon, as a metaphor for love. It was a nice image, but the emotional background was cold and distant. Since I'm throwing rock lyrics around today, and someone has a Hendrix quote in their sig, "My heart is warm with feeling, but my mind is cold and reeling. Is this love or confusion?" A simple experience of love or gratitude might have been more useful than the fractal metaphor. And that was actually the main point of the metaphor.

I hope the long winded math analogy wasn't too boring. Although its all kind of obvious, for me thinking about it more clearly or in a new context helps lay the ground for a new experience.

In the closest thing I've had to a classic, jnana yoga 'enlightenment' experience, which is the same in some ways as 'ego death', the central message that I wanted to remember from it was "don't decide anything". What that means, as I interpreted it later, is don't harden experience into judgment where the experience should be left more free or open. I don't think the far extreme of not thinking concisely is a good idea either. But as I have suggested before, I try not to draw stronger conclusions than the evidence merits. That balance of critical thinking and openness is where pretty much all of my new experiences and insights have come from. From the 'enlightenment' experience (I wouldn't call it that), I also gained awareness of myself as feeling and desire, and how those are bound up in thought. But the point about temperance in judgment seemed more important, because it seemed to be key to how that awareness was gained or lost to start with.

^^ I'm a girl, by the way.

My sense of self is also a bit shattered from what I believe is the result of emotional suppression, but maybe it's just how I am. I've always, at least for as long as I can remember, perceived myself as two separate people, with one being completely stable and the other being completely malleable. In that sense the latter allows me to "shift" selves as well. But in the most basic sense, my two selves would match to what I was describing before as feeling that I actively experience both my subconscious and conscious mind, respectively. Where I hear people discussing the conscious mind like it's who they are and describing ego death experiences as a loss of control, at my core I feel the exact opposite. My subconscious mind is who I am and my conscious mind is a separate identity created to suppress my control of my reality, and ego death is regaining that control. However, regardless of the situation, I feel my conscious mind identity is still a legitimate identity that did not choose to be created for this reason and so is not to blame, it's just the way the mind works. However, it still creates the distinction between my two minds for me and in my view of reality they are very separate people. I usually like to stick to my metaphor about being a zero and an infinity. My subconscious mind feels like it has an infinite amount of energy but is being kept back from it, and my conscious mind feels like it has a zero amount of energy but is being forced to exist. There are several, several different aspects of my life I could go into that resolve around this metaphor, but I'll stick to the ego death discussion for now. The ego death eliminates my conscious mind, and allows my subconscious mind to perceive itself as everything. It completely solves the problems that both my minds have. It's the most freeing state of existence imaginable for me.

This is coming strictly from reading the title:

Apples vs. Oranges

I don't see the body/brain system as producing consciousness, just producing a certain type. Everything from photon to a galaxy has intrinsic awareness / beingness. The brain filters and projects this into a symbolic format you call the 5 senses - much the same way your computer filters information off the net and projects it into a light display via your monitor. The brain is able to pick up on a variety of levels of consciousness which occur at a certain frequency range. Other life, occurring at higher ranges, is usually imperceptible. We would call such levels spirits or souls.

When consciousness withdraws from the idea of a body, these same frequency ranges would still be experienced but no longer through the filtering system of the brain's 5 sense.

The confusion comes when we take the symbol which the brain constructs out of the interaction with other consciousness as objectively real. The experience of space/time is produced by the body/brain. Its not that you exist in space/time, more that you actually are space/time.


More in reply to Sageous.

First I will prefex by saying that I don't believe to have had an experience of complete ego death, yet I have enough experience to comment on this topic.

This is very difficult to grasp without direct experience. The sensation of you is illusionary. In the last day you have died and been reborn countless times, yet you feel as if you remain. The atoms in your body continually recycle with the atoms of your environment. Your thoughts arise and then subside into nothingness. Where is this core which you claim must remain? You are not a fixed entity which floats through life like a log on a stream - you are a pattern. You are a wave or whirlpool in that stream. A temporary pattern with no center point.

What has endured through all this is awareness. When I say awareness I do not mean any specific sensation or thought, but that which lays behind all experience forming its base. A mirror with no light to reflect cannot be perceived.

There are other "patterns" besides what you have labeled as yourself. Your pattern may subside so others can arise on the blank screen of awareness. I call this ego loosening. The sense of self subsides, as it was just objects, and other sensations not labeled as yourself arise.

There would be a level where awareness has no objects and therefor feeds back in on itself. I imagine this is what we label as ego death. Across this barrier I cannot comment.

Originally Posted by Alyzarin

(long post) Does that... make sense?

I read that and it sounded like a part of myself speaking. I know what you mean.

Gain awaerness of your energy the start focusing attention on each chakra only one at a time, Get to see them like suns or crystal. As you ascend past the 7th chakra, you leave the parts, that cause emotion and thought. Follow with the center of you conciousness as you reach the 8th. Something cool is here. You have become mostly diconected from brain, heart, and earthly want. The state is a very pleasent "Just IS"
Im going to name this "Ego Death Light" with a twist of rainbow.

Alyzarin,

If your motive is to bridge the rift between you and your subconscious, then it appears to me that what you're looking for is a resolution to whatever causes the rift to start with. Otherwise you'll just keep pursuing the egoless experience with stronger and stronger devices, which over time because less and less effective. That's frustrating and unlikely to end well, no?

My awareness is also strongly split - my 'subconscious' exhibits an independent will, and seems to go off to play without my knowledge, mucking with other people's dreams and whatnot. Its like I'm so split that the 'conscious' part of my subconscious part is independently developed. But it also seems that both sides of me are pretty much on the same page about certain things. I respect and value it, and it values me also I think. If your conscious part feels like a prison, might that be a symptom of your manner of struggling to resolve the division? I think I understand that prison feeling, even if I don't experience it in quite the same way you do. Its as if my intellect is an alien computer that's grafted on top of my real mind, and has shoved my real mind into a closet. I used to feel that anyway, as I was first becoming aware of it.

The way I try to approach this is to care for the different parts of myself, and to cultivate and become more consciously aware of them. As a man with an abusive childhood, my feeling side was strongly suppressed. I slowly uncovered it over a period of years. About 15 years ago I had something like a birth, as if a huge weight was lifted from me and I could suddenly breathe. The 'I' that was born was feminine, and a part of her is like the clear, still pool that my intuitions come out of. Its also the part of me that communicates, that speaks truly with love. The 'birth' felt really, really good. The first thought I had was "I need to know I'm OK". Its as if my intellect and my experience had been making me feel not good enough for all those years. Not good enough for my dad not to yell at me constantly, not good enough to have friends, people who valued the kinds of things that I cared about or who were comfortable communicating in the manner that I am comfortable with. Since then, I have continued to grow and integrate those different aspects of myself, so there isn't as much gendered polarity as there used to be. My 'feeling' is less feminine, more androgynous, and my 'masculine' side is more sensitive and less pushy. A significant part of me still feels trapped in a male body, but I guess I have to live with that. If we reincarnate, I think we probably cycle through different genders. We're male for a while, then we reach a tipping point where the female part wants to express, and we're female for a while, then eventually we want to be male again. I sort of flipped in my mid 20's. Kind of a problematic destiny in some ways, but it has advantages also.

The 'feeling' part of myself respects reason and power, but wants to be valued and heard also. That speaking as what I am, and being heard by other parts of myself, is mostly a matter of not suppressing myself. But there are also adjustments to be made, so that the non-suppressive dynamic is successful. Using the logic part is important to making that work.

I've been fairly strongly in my 'male' mode while posting here, though I've relaxed it slightly in this message. If I shift to the other part of myself I feel more vulnerable, and I'm even more forthright, which often leads to misunderstanding, particularly in this format where there's no body language. As 'feeling' I speak pretty much directly from what I 'know', without all the qualifications and logical explanations. I also spew metaphors in a way that's incomprehensible to most people - you pretty much have to read my mind to know what I'm talking about. That's the primary reason I don't try to communicate from that standpoint. I sort of step aside from it, and translate for it a little bit. If I listen carefully for a while, I can kind of put myself in a zone where I can partially speak for my muse, as if I'm channeling it or something.

Anyway, this path of self discovery and self respect has worked well for me, so I recommend it to whatever extent you're similar. I still have challenges, for instance I'm working 2000 miles from my wife and kids, and it bothers me that my kids don't have me around except for holidays. But I'm way happier than I used to be. I'm not trapped in limitation and gloom anymore, I feel free and open, with a conscious give and take between the 'personal' and 'hidden' parts of myself.

If there's anything about my internal experience that is of interest to you, you can ask in that direction and my 'muse' will share some of it. This is a completely subconscious thing for me, other than qualifying what is possible by setting my general preferences about such things. But I know from experience with other people that this is quite easy for the 'muse' part, if it seems appropriate, because it has some kind of deep connection with the subconscious aspects of other people. To whatever degree that degree of intimacy seems creepy or inappropriate to my muse or to the other person that sharing won't happen though.

Drug use was not a part of the path for me, but I think I know something about what a lot of those experiences are, because there are other drugs besides drugs, and because I have connected internally with a lot of different kinds of people, and through music. Astral projection, being-conscious(ness)-bliss, all of my bizarre lucid dreams all came out of this opening up of my feeling and being true to more aspects of myself. A huge portion of this experience depended on communication with other people who have had such experiences. They describe to me what they have experienced, and I go there in my mind a little bit, then I experience something of it, at that moment and more extensively afterwards. This is the main reason I signed up at this site, to learn from people like that. At the same time, I'd rather not experience something than reach for it too soon and experience it in a damaging way. I can be patient because I know its still there waiting for the right moment.

Okay, I thought about it, read your subsequent (and most excellent) posts to what I last wrote, and came to the conclusion that it is time for me to bow out of this conversation. I attempted to swim in the wrong pool here, and only managed to ripple the water a bit with my flailing about.

I guess it's because I haven't thought about things like this in many, many years, and I've almost forgotten the "feel" for a subject like ego death that you must have in order to speak rationally about it. My work has moved in a polar opposite direction for far too long. Sorry to bother you guys.

No, I'm not. It was fun to read your thoughts, and be reminded of a very exciting emotional/spiritual place I once visited, but left behind, bridges brightly burning. Thank you. I still think you're all on to something that lies far beyond the stuff you describe here, and hope you keep describing. I also hope you don't take it all too seriously, because what you describe is a step in a direction, and not an end in itself (though it sure feels like that).

Now back to my world of binary logic, definite terms, and awareness as tool and not entity....

Sorry it took me a while to get to this response, I have kind of a headache today so I don't feel I'm expressing myself as fluently as I could.

shadowofwind, A lot of what you've said describes me as well, though with a couple things flipped here and there. I have a lot of gender polarity and fluidity too. My subconscious always identifies as female, but contains the masculine side of my personality. My conscious is more androgynous and changes to somewhat reflect whoever I'm communicating with or focusing on but contains the feminine side of my personality regardless of what the gender expression is. When I'm alone I feel like it's reflecting my subconscious and is always female-oriented, so I feel like that's also its "default".

My two sides also agree on one thing but differ on many others. However they're not really against each other in any way... I got over that a couple years ago. Like I said before, it's acknowledged that neither side chose to be in this situation, and though my subconscious feels trapped by my conscious's existence there is no resentment. Seeking ego death is actually a consent between them. But I have learned from experience that, yes, seeking it as an answer is frustrating and doesn't end well. These days I'm more interested in simply using it to explore my mind. I have lately actually been working to resolve the distress that is at the core of my problems and it's been going very well, I'm already a much happier and more at peace person than I was before.

I feel like while growing up both my masculine and feminine sides were repressed. I don't feel like discussing publicly why that was, but you can send me a PM some time if you really want to know. As a result most of what made me who I am, at least in my conscious mind and to other people, revolved around the reflecting of other identities. Generally, unless I'm with my absolute closest of friends, I feel uncomfortable if I don't stay in conscious mode. As you say, it makes me feel extremely vulnerable, though I'm also working on overcoming that. But on this website I've been able to switch back and forth whenever I feel like and be perfectly fine... it's one of the reasons why I love this place so much. Actually, I've been using it somewhat as a means to be okay with communicating to people through my subconscious side, it's really helped me a lot lately.

I'd love to say more but I'm kind of pushing myself as it is, I think I may need to lay down for a bit.... But thanks for the perspective, it's highly appreciated.

And Sageous, it's no bother. I'm glad you enjoyed what we had to say, and thank you for the advice.

I can't speak to Astral Projection, as I have only experienced it maybe once, but I have experienced ego death and various states of void multiple times.
The fist time I experienced ego death was on hallucinogens. I have always been very strongly effected by any hallucinogen, and this time my sense of reality was so obliterated that I when I was under it's influence, I couldn't recall taking a drug or any past experiences. It's actually hard to even describe the experience as I don't remember anything from that night in normal linear time.
I knew that my perception was becoming different but didn't know why. I assumed I was either going insane or dying. The more I thought I about it, the more convinced I became that I was dying, but did not feel frightened, only a sense of peace. I remember lying on the carpet inside thinking this, but also simultaneously being outside in a chair. I accepted my imminent death and felt that I was floating up from my body inside on the carpet and at the same time through a brick wall outside. Suddenly, I felt I could sense the entirety of existence. It was not my ego being stretched to fill the universe (I have experienced this also at other times), but more of the walls surrounding my consciousness being shattered so the cosmic consciousness could now experience what had been a part of it all along. The was no me, or sense of my body or any feeling at all. The experience seemed to be outside of time and space. In way, even calling it an experience or memory seems misleading. It seems something outside of my experience that I can only really recall or revisit in dreams. I do remember the sense of awe and wonder when my ego returned.
Buddhists say that our individual lives are like waves. A ripple or a wave may seem as an individual entity for a moment, creating the illusion that it has a self, but it is gone in the next moment. The true nature of the wave is that is the ocean. I believe ego death is moving beyond the illusionary concept of the individual to realize our true "ocean" nature.

Alyzarin, nice to hear that things are going better for you. I hope you're over your headache.

Although its not always obvious since most people don't talk about it, a fairly high portion of the people I know had abusive childhoods. Not coincidentally, I find some of those same patterns in the interrelationships within myself. For example, I related a story on another thread where it seemed I was attacked by a demon, then I realized that the aggressive fear that was turned on me was my own, as if shown in a mirror. When I wrote of this, I reinterpreted the action of the 'demon', which is related to my subconscious self, as being helpful rather than hateful. However, I think that a more direct way of looking at this, rather than attributing an altruistic motive to the subconscious self, is to just consider the suffering that I project from my heart, and reflect on the lack of love. Can I find it in myself to love? Maybe not all at once, but I think that just becoming more aware of this is probably key, that it answers all these other issues.

Desiring strong psychic experiences from the other side of myself reminds me a little bit of people who stay in abusive romantic relationships because they crave the intimate attention that's connected to the abuse. And from the other side, my subconscious self lacks in love if its willing to cause my 'conscious' self psychic trauma or bad health effects for the sake of the experience.

It also reminds me of a story I read years ago about a man who performed brutal psychological experiments on himself, trying to figure out why he lacked compassion.

Last year I had a dream where I was like an demi-god 5 year old caring for a beloved fish. In transferring it from one environment to another, I perceived that the water I was pouring on it was too hot, so I adjusted the faucet. But I turned the handle the wrong way, and it got hotter. The fish gasped in shock, and I woke up with a start. In this dream, my 'personal' self is the fish, and the one turning the knob is my 'higher' self. The dream is an explanation of why my exotic, paranormal dreams have mostly stopped for the past year. The dreams were sort of necessary to my development, up to the point where we could see their distorting effect, the inept and self-destructive nature of self-love that they involved. Seeking to know or understand myself in that way was in a way analogous to seeking love in an inappropriate sexual relationship. I was 'learning' things, with the dream experiences giving a taste of what I seek, but in a distorting way that had I persisted in would have taken me further and further from what I truly sought. As I suggested earlier, this is my opinion also of meditation aimed at being-conscious(ness)-bliss or similar mystic states. The experience is wonderfully pleasant and teaches a person of our deep unity, but where it doesn't come naturally on its own, it is also alienating and paralyzing. Other human activities become pale in comparison, becoming seemingly vain and unimportant. And yet, if we do not work at the mundane things, the only way to get what we need is by parasitically manipulating other people, which is the kind of behavior that blindness and suffering comes from to start with. Similarly, experience of the seemingly transcendent love can distort our capacity to love in the more immediate, sincere and compassionate way that we need more. It is said that the sage treats people like straw dogs, as if this is a good thing. But I think what we really need is to learn to stop treating ourselves like straw dogs, belittling and dismissing ourselves as unreal or unimportant in the face of the eternal. Experience of the divine should make us treasure the immediate details of our lives more, but that perspective eludes us in our current undeveloped state. What we need more than knowledge of higher or alternative states is to take care of ourselves - eating healthy, getting enough sleep, exercising, working hard, in moderation, treating other people right, and standing up for ourselves. Knowledge of higher things will come too, as we think about ourselves and our experiences. But that process enriches us in a sustainable way, not breaking down other parts of our being as had happened when we sought in a way incompatible with the love we desired.

Not that I'm perfectly good at following my advice here, but experience seems to teach that this is the right direction.

Thanks everyone for sharing your thoughts, helping as I try to get more clarity on this.

Best wishes!