Portions taken from a personal chat with someone during a somewhat mystical experience that occurred a while back following some shamanic work with power plants. Responses from the other person have been left out to protect personal information and identity. Appropriate notes have been made to clue the reader into the stream of conversation.
amoris313: I feel extremely relaxed and profound. Hard to describe.
amoris313: I was sitting on the couch when suddenly I just felt like closing my eyes and giving in to the relaxed feeling I kept having. And then next thing I knew I was that white radiant ball of light again. Just like last night (only with no plant assistance). I felt an aspect of [my] consciousness talking to me with subtle thoughtforms - explaining practically everything. [It spoke] about mental maps and models and how I had been using my 'system' of magick to attempt to understand the universe, but how I was indirectly trying to force observable phenomenon to manifest in particular ways according to the system, rather than just allowing it to happen and then experience it as it truly IS and then worry about explaining it later. (Which is what I should be doing.)
amoris313: I feel extremely connected
amoris313: more than usual and this time in a very different way
amoris313: not sure how to describe it
amoris313: was amazing - the talking to those aspects of self
amoris313: I could invoke a previous system of thought that I had studied in order to understand or classify this aspect of self if I wanted - I could see it as the higherself, or (using assagioli's model of psyche) as the higher intuitive aspects of awareness that correspond to psychic stuff
amoris313: was like i was understanding ME from the root of my own essence in all aspects of me - instead of being bound up in any one system of magickal thought or practice
amoris313: [I'm] also beginning to understand more in depth the role of various aspects of the psyche and HOW to make more practical use of them. THAT is something that no one ever really tells you in any book.
amoris313: So this is also very practical info, as well as just an expanded awareness and reality check. But it came about through extreme relaxation on all levels, which helped to loosen psychic blocks. (Which is the main problem in most cases.)
amoris313: Thoughts can solidify and create tension and blocks unless recognized, experienced, and relaxed and released. The process of doing so will also cause a permanent shift in awareness and views on the world.
amoris313: Being intellectually aware of something (like reading it from a book and understanding it that way) is nothing compared to 'knowing' and 'feeling' this info - a very different type of understanding that incorporates experience - fully on all levels of consciousness. Right now I'm experiencing the stuff I've been trying to understand intellectually. And in the process, throwing out the intellectual to an extent since it was just solidifying into inflexible presumptions of reality and not actually what the true experience of it is like in actual practice.
amoris313: The map is not the territory
amoris313: or, the experiences begat the map, not vice versa
amoris313: (to quote 2 authors - myself and robert anton wilson)
amoris313: Right now I'm observing the flow of my subconscious and seeing where old feelings/views of life form a person's particular paradigm of reality. [It's] like a visual thing I'm actually seeing superimposed on my body - but I'm disconnected from merely feeling body sensations a bit in order to do it. I feel like a consciousness floating in and around a matrix called 'body. 'Subconscious' is that which flows in and around the lower half of the physical body, and upper conscious stuff is around upper half etc. with the ego/persona being the intermediary between all levels - a point of willed focus. And that is its purpose (the purpose of the ego I mean- to act as intermediary between all levels of consciousness).
At this point in the conversation, the person speaking with me mentioned recent feelings of being emotionally thrown back to certain periods in life and experiencing things from old emotional viewpoints.
amoris313: forwards and backwards to different modes of personal emotional perception from different times in your life?
amoris313: [That sounds] similar to what I felt last night
amoris313: I was somewhat [aware that I was an adult], but couldn't distinguish much - was forced to just experience and perceive as I had [previously in life- only again as an adult].
Note: During the previous night's experience with power plants I had lost the ability to tell where in time I currently was and kept sensing my world from the viewpoint and emotions of my old child-self. I was locked into an old paradigm (or perceptual window) for about an hour.
amoris313: Maybe it has something to do with personal acceptance (In referrence to the recent bouts of remembering one's old self that the two of us were going through over the past few weeks).
amoris313: I mean, we can't forget who/what we were before
amoris313: we have to accept all aspects of ourselves and not judge them as either good or bad
amoris313: part of knowing the self and self-mastery would seem to involve being aware of everything to do with the self including those past feelings
amoris313: [You] can probably incorporate your past positive modes of perception into present reality to make your life better.