Who is aware? - the question and it's effect

Lucid Adventures
1

Dear Oneironauts,

This morning I went through a series of short to medium lucid dreams, of which I would like to share with you my experience with Stephen Laberge’s suggestion - ask: Who is aware?

(as documented in my journal)

The questions ‘Who is aware?’ comes to mind, and that I wanted to ask it - for it’s effect. Immediately the disintegration of the dream environment starts, the dissolution of shape and color happens spontaneously, and, as many times before, I fall backwards, upside down, into darkness, into a dimensionless black hole, with an intense sensations of precipitating, heading down at increasing speed, into a bottomless, non-spatial abyss, accompanied by extreme waves of anxiety and fear of dying, sudden bouts of a shouting, screaming, an eardrum-bursting loud voice coming from a place nearer than my own ears/head, very unintelligible and threatening, deafening. Simultaneous glimpses or a fore-feeling of sheer timelessness, spacelessness, of the eternal witness. Every now and then I remember to keep asking the question ‘who is aware?’ even during the dramatic, gripping, visceral terror and overwhelming sensory stimuli, and as result intuited this ever-present, silent, non-conceptual, non-attached ‘seeing’ or observing or ‘knowing’ modality of consciousness, i.d. pure awareness. There was no body-image while falling into the paradoxical abyss. Still, sound and feeling came - is this proof of the concept Mind-Space, or awareness as absolute space, where everything appears and fades away, but which itself is neither born, nor will die, has no name, quality or anything ‘objectifyable’? What does this mean for our fundamentel identity (issues)?

Does some of this resemble psychosis, ego death, bardo states, transpersonal realms (as described in psychotherapeutic literature, traditional religious and spiritual scriptures, scientifically documented experimentation with psychedelics/entheogens, shamanistic ritual paradigms)? The vividness and reality of perception and proprioception is so strikingly similar to ‘‘normal’’ waking life that it is fascinating and puzzling to ask: Can the brain just perfectly emulate and create innumerable ‘virtual’/artifical/synthetic/mind-made universes which are structurally often so close to conventional reality that the majority of people will not even recognize the difference, and thus do not become lucid in their ‘illusory’ dreams? And what does this amount to ontologically, neurologically, existentially, phenomologically?

Has anyone experience with the effect of asking the question ‘who is aware?’, while lucid in the dream, or even as a cue to become lucid? And was this in some respect comparable to the ‘falling into darkness’?

I am very curious to hear from you.

Thanks!

Metta,

Mick
17-10-1987

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I’m glad someone else has asked this question in the same manner of thought I find myself in most days and nights.

I have asked myself the nature of reality several times, the nature of life and re-living, being, reincarnation, and many other aspects of this “reality” that we live in and could possibly re-live in, given that we dont truly know the nature of both our origins or what, in truth, “reality” is. I have studied the fabric of dreams, what they are potentially made of, how our mind brings them about, and have come up with this.
Our human “reality” is made up of physical matter represented by the atom: a structure created by something - what they were created by, I have no idea, and I dont know if anyone truly has discovered the origin of the atom, because in all honesty, I could not even begin to comprehend what could’ve made them simply by thinking about it. The “dream” reality is made up of matter represented by our mind, a sort of “veil” representing what we know to be in our “human” reality. But that doesnt mean it is not matter. Matter is anything that can be moved and takes up space. Our dreams our filled with things that can be moved and take up space. This raises the question: if our “human” reality is made of matter, and our dream world mirrors it, is our dream world made of a form of matter?
This is relevant to your question: “who is aware?” in a sense that if both realities are, in a sense, physical, then who is to say that both realities are not, in theory, the same? This could be the reason as to why people have trouble distinguishing between the two, and I will get onto that topic later in this post.
This, however, can be challenged by many, many laws and theories, and is not necessarily true, but to me, reality is only what your senses perceive. Dreaming is what your mind perceives, and can only be brought about by your presence in the “human” reality, and so the “dream” reality is a reality that lies within our “human” reality.

Now, take note of the bold text stated above. Your question: "Can the brain just perfectly emulate and create innumerable ‘virtual’/artifical/synthetic/mind-made universes which are structurally often so close to conventional reality that the majority of people will not even recognize the difference, and thus do not become lucid in their ‘illusory’ dreams? " is actually completely valid. But look at the nature of humans. They go off of what they know. If a man who has worked at a saw mill all his life since he was a little boy suddenly lost his job, and was forced to work as a blacksmith, do you think he would be very successful? This is how I believe humans perceive dreams. Considering the dream world is brought on by the subconscious, the subconscious displays what the person knows. What they have seen, what they have done. This could also be why people who have guilty conscious’s are sometimes haunted in their sleep by what they have done. It could also lead to the origin of nightmares, how a persons mind can stay on a topic that they are unnaturally afraid of, and can incorporate that fear into a dream, because the person knows exactly what their fear is.

Thank you for your questions, I love sharing my philosophy on certain topics, but I find it increasingly hard these days seeing as nobody seems to ask questions about the origins of things anymore :content:

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The brain creates its reality all day long. Sensory input is interpreted and then filtered before it reaches consciousness. But even if it were not filtered, and presented as raw data, it would still be miles away from what reality is like. We only see a very narrow range of light. If we had eyes to see, everything would shine to us. So visually, the world we see, is nothing more than what fits in our ability to perceive light, and even the light that hits our eyes is a reflection of the objects, and the colours are only the colours the objects reject. So we do not recreate the world perfectly, neither while awake, nor while dreaming. We make our own world in both states of consciousness, so no wonder they are often indistinguishable.

This means that, our subjective reality is not physical in the sense we would normally understand the word. It is mental, and so, the waking world and the dream world are, subjectively, made of exactly the same stuff.

What kind of answer do you expect when you ask “who is aware”? Well, it’s obvious. Its me! Who I am is an easy question. The tricky question is “what am I?” It seems that we are ourselves in our dreams, even though we are not physically present in the dream, the dream is present in us, physically. Or so we are taught by science. But we are mentally present whenever we are conscious. It is the one constant. Our personalities may change completely during our lives, but we are still nobody else. Only the same self as always. Our beliefs and ways of thought may change, but are not us. They only define the state of us, but the state of what?

It seems to me then that consciousness is the only thing that is left. So, having stripped away everything else, you are consciousness. Pure consciousness. Having asked the question, if you fall into a state of pure consciousness, empty of everything but consciousness, have you been presented with the answer?

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… … My head hurts! :wink:

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I love this.

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There is no answer to that question because no one can ever be absolutely “aware” of anything except, nothingness.