It is a great gift, to see. The glimpse into my native past, whether allegory or true, whether a construct of my mind or a connection to the collective unconscious, opened a door to another world, an alternate reality. How many other secrets or fantasies lie fallow in the hidden recesses of my unconscious? That there are surely more is buoyed by the myriad of dreamscapes that I experience each night, without fail. There are faint “memories” of coming to earth before birth, recurrent dreams of another family on a golden world illuminated by a feeble sun, and visions of darkened forests and deep lakes lit by the light of two moons. All these images suggest that there is more to investigate, whether fact or fantasy. In this life I now feel like a cosmic explorer – not searching the universe for riches or fame, but for experience, for truth.
But what is “truth” anyway? Truth, in this regard, is a conundrum. Either it’s a mutually shared conceptual and empirical understanding, which we call “knowledge”, or it’s a consensual hallucination – and what’s the difference if we are in a closed system? If we all believe in something, doesn’t that make it true? Once we believed the sun circled the earth and, indeed, common sense suggests the same. Yet, it’s the earth that circles the sun. So, truth lies only within the perspective of the observer. Thus, maybe our perspective on human and individual existence is far too limited and, if so, then all truth is merely relative. As we discussed in Chapter 2 all is subject to creation by the thinking mind in any case.
Buddha said not to believe in anything you cannot experience. So it appears that one must experience in order to gain the right perspective, known as the right view of his eightfold path. Yet, when I experience thoughts, perceptions, and feelings they are nothing more than activities of my mind. They play out like a film projected onto a screen, but only the screen remains unchanged, while the thoughts, perceptions, and experiences are transient. What is this screen? Non-dualists would call it consciousness or awareness itself – that which allows us to experience. The psychedelic or shamanic medicines allow us to more directly experience this pure, naked awareness rent from the obsessive activities of the mind. This has been called recognizing the god within and, thus, these medicines have been termed entheogens. In order to know the truth we must experience, even if the truth is relative to the observer that experiences. It’s the crack that lets the light in, as Leonard Cohen wrote. Psychedelics make the crack, our experience – our perception, a bit larger and without the filters of the thinking mind.
All this has caused me to wonder whether my supposed autonomous life (and the world I inhabit) isn’t just a dream of a far greater consciousness or, perhaps, a simulation of an artificial one? Am I but a little dream body – a contraction into form or avatar of this higher consciousness – that experiences life as a waking dream? And just as we awaken from our dreams at night and find out they were only simulations of the mind, can we awaken from our waking dream and find out who we are? Does it then finally dawn on us that we are God dreaming us up?