Right Angles to Reality

Moulding the Wax

"The mind of man is not passive wax upon which experience writes its whimsical will. It is an active organ which moulds and coordinates sensations into ideas, an organ which transforms the chaotic multiplicity of experience into the ordered unity of thought."

     - Will Durant, "The Story of Philosophy".

 

This post is dedicated to defining a set of guidelines to highlight the perils of taking on beliefs about oneself and world at large by examinations into the mind by the kind of waking lucid dreaming I've written about up to this point. I offer these in the hopes of making known the proclivity of people to attribute some greater authority to the meaning of perceived visions and their interactions. In doing so, they fall victim to a kind of cognitive blind spot where somehow because the workings of your imagination are experienced to come "from the outside" - greater credence is lent to their meaning which impacts upon the observer's notions of trying to obtain empirical evidence.

I don't write these discourses lightly. I have suffered from these pursuits greatly and have obtained this knowledge very much the hard way. Learn from me in this regard and don't make the same mistakes.

Seeing is Not Believing

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends"

    ― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream 

Contrary to experiences derived from factors relating to the senses perceiving the "material world", in this realm of dreams it is wise to preserve an adherence to the maxim: "Seeing is not believing". The prospect of taking on a weaker notion that you will "Believe it when you see it." exposes you to treating the visual illustrations of an effervescent subconscious mind as the possibility of providing weight to deeply held theories about what is true about the world. 

 

This kind of evidence gathering occurs independently of some consciously experienced mulling on the matter and can be very subtle process eventually leading to some "ah-ha!" moment where we ponder our experiences and consider that we have built some tapestry of sufficient evidence to support the theory. I could go out on a limb and make the claim that it could be one possibility why so many people do not clearly remember the events occurring in their dreams. 

 

We know not to place the musings of dreams as providing us some privileged insight into our hard-earned interpretation of our day-to-day experiences. Dreaming while awake is still dreaming. The same rules apply. In the waking state of lucid dreaming - beliefs, thoughts and imagination are the elements composing what comes to hand. Belief takes on a kind of structural aspect that the other aspects expand upon.

A Hall of Mirrors

“I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir,' said Alice, 'Because I'm not myself you see.”

     ― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass.

In this communion of mind with a fully waking conscious observer with its subconscious imaginings you are looking deeply into yourself. This is a kind of prophantasia that draws to the fore of your visual perception the raw products of the mechanisms underlying every subtle rumination you have about everything that you understand and can conceive of. This is a very important contemplation here to take on board. I urge anyone exploring this "gift" to consider this. The snake is eating its own tail. Your cognition becomes a feedback effect. You peer into a gateway you create into yourself, about yourself creating. It is an infinity mirror that, with continued investigation, continually transcends it's seeming veracity and clarity far beyond it's initial more innocuous capabilities.

Expecting the Unexpected

"All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities."

    ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas.

If you expect the unexpected - expect the unexpected to occur. Regarding this state of dreaming I attempt to segregate the two prospects of observing and investigation and examine some of the active characteristics. When looking into your dreams in the manner thus described so far - they manifest as if they were a window. This naive interpretation can tend to do away with the observer's notion that they themselves are the ones generating what is seen. It is critical to retain as an axiom that the observer and what is being observed are fundamentally linked in this fashion. 

 

When you dream your attention is turned to observing and pondering various aspects of that dream. The major driving force in determining what is relevant for striking your attention to details appearing afresh as they evolve organically does not actually, for the most part, come from conscious deliberation on the matter. Rather, it is something that is primarily driven by your subconscious mind. The mind has many autonomous devices that do the bulk of the work of collating the incredible amount of information of your perceptions into a various portfolios which are presented to your conscious reflexes as potentially relevant to be investigated. Some of these things will be more appropriate or urgent than others. 

 

Thus, the narrative of what you experience is a story being told by two authors. The conscious, discursive elements of your mind arrange the progression of topics but the subconscious imagination writes each chapter. To that end it serves to mention that the narrative of what you perceive may change accordingly if there is enough competition from the identified elements comprising these lower-lying portfolios to warrant a re-interpretation of what you recognise. This effect is best illustrated by the well known Figure-ground reversal illusion in which the evidence stands precariously in either direction. Is it a vase, or are there two faces? The points made earlier can be expanded in this regard by considering how this image would then look to someone who hadn't experienced seeing vases before. In the abstract, the warning here is not to lose your grounding in reality by becoming transfixed with a revelation that a vase-reality exists where one does not. 

 

This is not an exercise in learning from experience. It is an organic reshuffling and re-observation of your own pre-existing concepts. These are hard-won concepts that you have built from a lifetime of regular interaction with the real world and some new opposing re-interpretation that threatens to bring conflict must be held at arm's length and subject to intense rigor and scrutiny before  any notion of potentially accommodating these into your life should be entertained.

Paths through the Realms

"The Codex uses those who think they own it as slaves, entering their dreams and guiding them on visions of the infinite planes, forcing them to write its pages. This is how the Codex continues to exist and to grow."

    -- A book described in Dungeons & Dragons lore.

Despite the intuitive perception that you are exploring aspects of of the places of your own mind - an important feature of this kind of exploration must be duly noted. The every day conscious mind you associate with yourself is instinctively concerned with navigating the complex web of interactions from day to day in order to facilitate survival, amongst other things. Maslow did a decent job of describing our various priorities in his well-known "Hierarchy of Needs". We carry out our days towards fulfilling our needs in an executive sense where we will consciously direct our attention to the goals and prerequisite sub-goals to accomplish our motivations. 

 

In doing so, we remain relatively unconcerned with the deep machinery of our minds that carries our cognitive processes - while continuously being refined and accepted or rejected - "up the river" from the deepest deltas of our sensory plethora to the the foothills of our ego and ultimately to the purview of what we consider to be ourselves. To borrow a musical metaphor instead - each player in the varied neural orchestra making up our decisions acts independently but is tied to a cohesive theme. The audience (in this case, our external world) attends to the music that results... enjoying it and letting it wash over as-is without the need to focus on any particular individual.

We stand on top of a mountain of our own experiences and the notions resulting. In choosing a course of action, we often consider the shortest paths to obtaining something and potentially little else, if we know we can achieve our goal in the way we desire. It is to be expected that we do this. We have a notion that our energy and time is a finite resource and we should apply it to the prospect of fulfillment in well-measured and expected proportions.

In abandoning other paths our choices and actions represents a kind of linearity in which we navigate our way through life. Distracting things coming from one way or another are discarded and we look for that clear and suitable path towards our worldly goals without requiring any deep and subtle introspection, especially on irrelevant matters. Life goes on and we must get on with it.

Jungian Jungles and Shadow Creatures

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

    ― C.G. Jung

This kind of lazy linearity divides us in such a way that we can quickly justify our actions on a high-order process of thought - but it is not without remainder. To investigate what I mean here I'd like to delve into the appropriate topic of Jungian psychology in which there exists something that is called the "Collective Unconscious". I choose to interpret this point of view of an arm-chair evolutionary psychologist and I extract the theory that there are certain deeper levels of the machinery of our cognition that help to filter and decide and learn about the world independently of our will to do so. 

 

From my perspective it is certainly conceivable that this form of primal intelligence is rooted innately within us in the same way that we inherit from our parents the genes that express other neural designs arising within our brains - such as mechanisms that provide fundamental processing to help us avoid distinguishing shadows on the floor as independent objects and trying to step over them, or other higher level inhibitory frameworks to our behaviors such as not being sexually attracted to family members. Recent studies have been conducted into evidence supporting that even phobias of spiders, for example, may be an inheritable trait.

All of these things operate independently of our conscious mind to color the interpretation of our experiences and influence our activities. I may boldly state that this is to say, there are other forms of intelligence, ranging from simple processes to more much more complex forms that constitute you yourself as a person and indeed, these are the kind of creatures that you stand to encounter when you start to cut away the underbrush and venture into the deepest jungle of your mind. In meeting them in your dreaming - there is a chance that they may be at conflict with you about how you should be carrying out your affairs and when consulted will certainly do as they are supposed to do, which is to represent their alternate perspectives - but now with the fully focused attention of your conscious mind. Whether they do so in a manner that is supposed to carry with it some possibility of a primitive observation to see if you would entertain the possibility of following their directives, to serve as form of feedback-learning, depends on the essential makeup of that aspect of your intelligence by any number of criteria determining its complexity.

In trying to distance myself from trying to present some kind of original research that paints an exotic picture of a fractured mind at odds with itself I will point the reader at the the Jungian literature. The most relevant material discussed previously is highlighted by what Jung calls "The Shadow". I will state that from my own experiences about that the processes I have described - a waking form of lucid dreaming within a prophantasia-constructed "imaginarium" - is a direct path to actively seeking out and triggering "Enantiodromia". I strongly encourage reading up on Jungian psychology as a requirement for anyone attempting to embark into similar states of mind.