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Dear friends, Some time ago I shared the post below on another thread. I stumbled upon it again recently, and I felt it could potentially help a lot of people. That's why I'm reposting it now with some edits, as well as an "update" at the end of the original post. Here's the original post. ORIGINAL POST I will share in 4 points:1) Intro 2) My experiences with evil spirits 3) My experiences with black magic 4) My proposed explanation integrating viewpoints on evil spirits and black magic (Buddhism, Sufism, Martinus, Hinduism etc)IntroIn my opinion, this is an extremely important topic, that is extremely ignored, belittled and misunderstood by the vast majority of cultivators. Especially those with a western background. Also, even by high level masters who simply don't know about this particular area or haven't trained and studied it.My experiences with evil spiritsI have personally suffered many extreme and terrifying experiences, and no matter where I sought help, I was belittled, ridiculed, ignored or misunderstood.I have seen books flying out of shelves. I have seen bagpacks and other physical items dragged back and forth on the floor. I have experienced "wind" indoors, even though it was a closed off room with no windows. I have seen shadowy/smoke like figures physically moving around, experienced physical touch even though no physical beings are there and much more.When I sought help from a hindu monk, he advised me to start japa of my guru mantra when it happened. I did it... Didn't work.When I sought help from a high level "shamanic" qigong master (you would think spirits would be a walk in the park for a shaman), I was belittled and told "not to pay attention to this illusion I am experiencing". There's nothing illusory about physical objects being thrown around by an unseen force. It's pretty much as concrete as it gets. Almighty God bless him, and bring him to clarity and allow him to actually help people with his powers of qi.When I sought help from another qigong master specialised in healing, he told me to say a prayer and do a mudra. When it didn't work, he explained it away saying that "you're just not powerful enough to do it yet, you need to cultivate more. Be my one-on-one student for 2-3 years, meet me on on a weekly zoom meeting priced at 1.600 dollars for an hour, and then in a couple of years, you will be able to do it".This healing qigong master stated that I have a very loving and very spiritual energy, and that's why troubled spirits get attracted to me. They seek help and healing from me. That's why it worsens when I travel to new places or stay overnight at places that are not my house. The troubled spirits in that place see me and come to get help.I actually believed him, and met him 3 times, wasting thousands of dollars. It didn't work! And on top of that, the clairvoyant things he told me about me and my health were flat out wrong (he said I had weak sexual energy, ejaculated in seconds and drank a lot of alcohol which damaged my liver). I am at a very advanced level of sexual qigong and lovemaking, haven't touched alcohol in more than 10 years and make love for hours daily without ejaculating with very strong erection power.So after 3 meetings, I realized he was simply a semi-psychic (he did say correctly that I had a spine injury, although there were so many other things wrong about his psychic reading), yet pretty good healer (I could feel my back getting better when he gave healings), but most of all he was just thirsty for money. So, of course I stopped seeing him. Dear God, bring him to the straight path, let him let go of his greed for money and selfishness, and instead lead him to the straight path, that he may use his gift of healing for good.I then spoke with a highly clairvoyant sufi master, who did a check on me (for free). He related my entire life story regarding troubles with spirits (without me telling him anything), and he also stated that it's because I have a lot of "light" (noor) inside my soul. This is because of all the prayers and mantras I say each day (since I was a child). He said the spirits are troubled where they are (in "bardo" or "barzakh" as it's called in Islam), and seek my help.He said I should visualise putting up spiritual sign posts around my aura, my house, or anywhere I go that says "I am sorry, I cannot help you. I myself need help, that's why I pray to the light and get that light into me. Please don't come to me, I am in no position to help you, I myself need help, that's why I pray so much. You should yourself pray to the light, then you will get help".I tried it for some time, and it helped in my own house. However, when I went to new places, it didn't work. God bless this man, he is extremely loving, knowledgable and powerfully clairvoyant.When I sought help from another sufi (via the internet), he for free did a "spiritual check" on me. He stated that yes, I have some low level evil spirits around me. He gave me (for free!) a one week program of readings of salawaat (prayers to the prophet), and reciting "bismillahir-rahmanir-rahim" (the bismillah, "in the name of God) many hundreds of times in a day. Then blow on water and drink it.I did it for 7 days, and it worked! It was from his heart and soul he wished to help me. He did it for free.I sent him 100 dollars and said that it worked, and asked if I could keep training with him. I must have paid him only a few hundred dollars, yet I spent 6-9 months corresponding with him via email. He would give me different salawaat, dhikr (name of God), verses of the Qur'an and du'a (prayers). Whenever I did a program (e.g. 7 days, 11 days, 21 days), he would tell me how it went. He would give me feedback on the energy, without me telling him anything. He was very good, he helped me a lot, and he didn't ask much in return. However, after 6-9 months, because he wanted to remain anonymous, I felt that to be a bit weird after so long, so when I had completed a big program, I stopped corresponding with him. We haven't been in contact since.What became my go-to after training with this last sufi guy is 5 verses from the Qur'ran. Ayatul kursi (Verse about the Throne of God), and 4 verses called "the 4 qul". They are the last 4 verses of the Qur'an, and they all start with "qul" which means "say". It's Surah Nas (verse of Man), Surah Ikhlas (verse of Unity), Surah Falaq (verse of the Daybreak / rising sun) and Surah Kafiroon (verse about the Unbelievers).You recite each 11 times (11x ayatul kursi, 11x surah nas, 11x surah ikhlas, 11x surah falaq and 11x surah kafiroon). Then you blow on your right index finger, and visualise your hand coming down from the sky, and drawing a protective circle around the 4 corners of your home, and then finally around yourself, or the room that needs extra protection (e.g. bedroom, prayer room).This has been my go-to for more than 6 years. It has been the only thing that worked for me in this area. If you want to keep your house energy pure, you say 21x ayatul kursi, blow on a glass of water, and sprinkle it around your house. The combination of these two readings saved my life.God bless this man who helped me without demanding anything in return!Unlike these chinese qigong masters, just wanting money and doing nothing to help.Lately when I'm learning Sri Vidya, I feel that some of the mantras and rituals from Sri Vidya will eventually be able to give spiritual protection on an even higher level. There are 2 specific "deities" or energies generated from mantras and rituals for the navel chakra (Durga) and third eye chakra (Varahi) which specifically combat negative spiritual energies, including black magic, evil spirits, the evil eye etc.All of the above are my experiences and solutions for evil spirits so far.My experiences with black magicI have worked for the army in my country. One of my functions was as a translator and interpreter. I have been deployed several times to a UN mission in West Africa.On one of my deployments, there wasn't much work. We only worked from 6 in the morning to 2 o'clock in the afternoon. The rest of the time we we're pretty much on standby.Being stranded in a war zone, there's not much to do. So I spent all my free time reading, studying and practicing (mantras, meditation and qigong).I was in a very good spiritual state at the time due to so much practice, so I was seeing auras and energies most of the time.One time, we were training the local special forces to save hostages. The only building we could use was a big fancy hotel, yet no tourists (because of the war). So to survive, the owner of the hotel rented it out as a brothel.One day, in a break between exercises, I saw one of the prostitutes sitting on the other side of the courtyard (they just sat around and waited for the 3-4 hours that we and the local soldiers used it as a training compound). When she saw me, she started whispering something, and I saw a small cloud of black energy generating in front of her face. Then she did something with her hands, and started blowing towards me. This sent the small black cloud of energy across the courtyard towards me. It just landed in the outskirts of my aura, it didn't go in (thank God!). So nothing happened to me.When I was back in my room later that day, I meditated. Then I understood she was trying to do some black magic on me. Maybe she was trying to seduce or attract me. For a prostitute in a war zone, hooking up with a soldier deployed from Europe could be her ticket out of the warzone to a better life. Luckily, the energy wasn't powerful enough to penetrate my energy field (which was pretty charged at the time due to so much spiritual practice). And as I meditated, the cloud was just destroyed and disappeared from my field.One of the local maids cleaning my place actually put my tooth brush up in her vagina when she was cleaning the bathroom. She thought I didn't know, as I was sitting in the living room. I guess it's a primitive form of African black magic. If you ingest some of the fluids (spit, sweat or sexual fluid) of someone (especially if they say mantras while doing it), you can become more partial to liking that person (becaues you will have some of their energy inside your physical body). I bought a new tooth brush!Another woman working in the restaurant spat in my food and stirred it around to hide it. I ordered a new pasta You need to be very careful in many places of Africa, the Middle East, South America and certain parts of Asia. It's rampant with black magic and desperate people. Luckily they are usually not powerful practitioners, but you can still catch something if you're not protected and observant.My second experience is with my girlfriend. She comes from the Middle East, i.e. the vast majority of her family still lives there. When we got together, it was made public, her ethnicity in our European country as well as her family and relatives in her home country in the Middle East became aware of it. As soon as this happened, she started to fall sick.She would get wrist tendonitis, elbow tendonitis, sore knees, sore lower back, her vision would suddenly drastically reduce, she would get nauseous for no reason, got rashes, stomach ache, started to suddenly lose weight and appetite. For no reason!It just came suddenly out of the blue. She would suffer for some time and recover. Then a new problem came back. This continued for about 6 months. Before we made our relationship public, she wasn't sick even once. After we made it public, she kept continually falling ill again and again.After 6 months of this story of suffering and disease, once when I was meditating, I saw a cloud of red and black energy entering our house. It went to my girlfriend. Then it went into her wrist.That same evening, she started complaining that the wrist tendonitis was coming back.I was very surprised. I was praying and meditating, trying to understand what had happened. A few days later, I got a dream, where I saw planet Earth from above. Then I saw her country in the Middle East (Kurdistan). Then I saw clouds of red and black gathering and forming, and then they travelled to Europe to our country.When I woke up, I understood that God had heard my prayer, and given me this dream to let me know that someone in her home country was cursing her.That started an 8 month period of fighting this magic.First I consulted this qigong healer about it (the psychic one, who told me correctly about my spinal injury, but wrongly about alcohol, sex etc). He to my great surprise said that someone was putting black magic on my girlfriend, and that she should practice his "small universe" meditation to transform the energy.I was surprised he went straight to Black Magic as an explanation, even though I didn't tell him about my dreams and visions. We tried what he suggested, but it didn't work.Then I went to a hindu tantric, who has mastery over spirits, done sadhana (spiritual practice) in graveyards, and done many tamasic tantric rituals to control these spirits (e.g. animal sacrifice, bathing in blood, smearing yourself with your own filth and urine etc). When I spoke with him, he asked me to send a photo of my girlfriend.After 2-3 days, he called me and said that there is black magic on her. We should just worship and pray to God like normal, remain vegetarian, avoid alcohol, and when he visits our country, he will put a kavach (shield/armor) on her. From that day we spoke, everything stopped. So he did something remotely. After a few nights, I had a dream where I saw this swami doing something. A beam of energy went to the Middle East, where I saw someone had buried a charm inscribed with mantras and signs under the plot of one of my girlfriend's family's buildings. The beam from the swami went in and neutralized the black/red energy.I would again highlight that he did all this for free. It seems again that this phenomenon that spirituality costs money and is a business is mostly related to chinese qigong traditions. Sufis and hindus have helped me completely free of charge, just from their heart.It was about 2-3 weeks where it was completely gone, but then it returned.I tried many different sufi methods, prayers, Qur'an, tasbih (prayer beads). It was always the same. It would make it go away, but after a certain period of time, it would return.Later, after I had done a specific reading of a passage from the Qur'an about Moses fighting the black magicians of Farao, the black magic completely stopped. It took me a month, and you have to recite late at night. Then I finally had a dream where I saw this black magician in Kurdistan. Every new moon, or on specific astrological days, he goes to a kind of basement or cellar underground. Here he conducts terrible black magic rituals, involving animals, kidnapped orphans and other terrible things. That's why it's all black and red energy, because it's dirty and bloody what he does. It's someone from my girlfriend's family who's jealous of the part of the family that's gone to Europe.Then I saw him get hit with my one month program of Qur'an, and he lost all of his powers. All the energy drained from him, he became thin, weak and pale.After this it was about 6 months where we were completely free from this black magic. I thanked God and actually thought it was over. I felt kind of bad that it seemed my Moses-reading had damaged him, but I didn't mean to hurt him, I just wanted to protect my beloved girlfriend. It hadn't really hurt him, just taken away the energy he had built up and the evil spirits he was working with.After 6 months, he decided to start to try again, and start from the bottom to build up his energy (he was the most powerful black practitioner I've ever seen). But this time the things he sent were really weak. We just read some Qur'an and du'a, and it stopped.Finally, after starting Sri Vidya one and a half years ago, and we did a 41 day Varahi tarpana. Now we've been clear of black magic for about 1 year. I feel like we have built our spiritual protection so strong now, that we're mostly safe.My proposed explanation integrating viewpoints on evil spirits and black magic (Buddhism, Sufism, Martinus, Hinduism etc)I've highlighted a bunch of my experiences above. Now I'll try to make sense of it and provide an explanation.I'll use an idea of different dimensions of reality to try and explain why people misunderstand each other when it comes to black magic and evil spirits.For simplicity I'll just use the following terms:1) Physical (shared physical world, objective reality, different beings interact with each other in an objectively verifiable sense).2) Energetic (shared energetic world, objective albeit non-detectable reality for untrained people, objectively verifiable by people with their energetic senses open)3) Mind (inner, individual world, unique to you, subjective reality, there's no one else here but you)4) "Astral" (objective and shared reality with different beings interacting with each other through energy and mind)Buddhism:A big problem is that many Buddhists will brush these kinds of things off and say "it's all just mind". Someone even told me "spiritual beings viewed with ignorance, are demons", "spiritual beings viewed with wisdom, are devas". That sounds great philosophically, but it's a completely useless viewpoint when shit gets serious. Books are flying around your room, or your girlfriend is falling sick. It's not something mental, it's concrete and physical. You need to do something.Just like an intruder in your home trying to steal your stuff "it's just mind, it's just illusion". Yes, fine illusion when he slaps you in your face and rapes your family. You need to take practical action and protect yourself and your family.So all this "it's all mind" is great for a meditator going inwards, but it's not useful if you have a concrete, practical problem. Just like feeling hungry "it's just an illusion in your mind", no, you need to eat something.I feel like the misunderstanding is because the buddhist meditator is talking about "mind", whereas the person talking about problems with black magic and evil spirits is talking about the astral, energetic and physical dimensions.It's true that you can meet "darkness" in your own subjective mind, but this is not the same as the objective, shared reality in the astral, energetic and physical dimensions.Some people who are also generally confused and vague in their life experience will not have the ability to discriminate between "mind" (their own fears) and "astral" (a real, verifiable, shared and objective reality). These are the people that buddhists in general target when they say "it's all in your own mind", because they think it's just imagination. For these meditators getting lost in their own subjective minds, it's a great piece of advice. However, for people truly experiencing objective problems in the astral, energetic or physical domains, it's ridiculing, belittling and just not helpful advice.SufismSufism states that there are unseen beings living in an astral, objective dimension. They also differentiate between the subjective mind or ego called "nafs" and the astral world called "malakut" or world of light (angels are called malai'ka, or powerful beings of light).HinduismAlso differentiates between your own subjective mind, and the astral world.MartinusAlso differentiates between inner subjective world (mind, you and your own mind), and inner objective world (spiritual world, your soul and the soul of others).ConclusionI am sure buddhism also discriminates somehow between inner subjective and inner objective world, I just don't know the correct terms. Maybe someone can help me out?The reason that these qigong masters failed to help and just tried to extract money from me, is simply because even though they're master healers, the just haven't trained in and studied the astral world. They know about the physical, energetic and mind, they just don't know about black magic and evil spirits in the astral.The sufis who helped me, they knew about energy and astral, so they could easily see what was happening and what I should do. They had trained in this and understood it.Similarly, the tantric swami had knowledge and power to help us quickly. The black magician was just very powerful, so he could break the spell from the swami and start his black magic again after a couple of weeks by repowering his buried charm through rituals.Mostly when people belittle or ridicule black magic and evil spirits, it's just because they themselves didn't have karma in this area, so they don't know about it. That's why they brush it off as unimportant and not necessary, because it wasn't important to them in their cultivation. However, if you have karma in this area, there's no escaping it. You need to read, study and understand about it, then you need to train in it (mantra, meditation, ritual etc). Then you will master it and be able to go beyond it and continue your cultivation undisturbed.All traditions have sections of their teachings dealing with this, it's just not all masters who've studied this section of their tradition. Because they didn't need it, they state that no one else needs it (wrong assumption and bias to think everyone is like you and need the same as you did. Wrong. We're all different and unique, we need different things).God bless you all! UPDATE SINCE THE ABOVE ORIGINAL POST On top of our spiritual cultivation, we've employed some very basic truths in our everyday lives, which is usually taught at the basic level in most traditional spiritual teachings, albeit largely ignored or misunderstood by western people (myself included, that's why I'm emphasising it now): 1) "Conceal your blessings" (this is as to not invoke a feeling of lack in others, which could trigger jealousy, envy, evil eye or black magic - practically it just means not to talk about your succes in love, money or spiritual journey publicly (e.g. insta & fb) and even to your loved ones, close friends and family members. We just share it with each other, me and my girlfriend, celebrate our sucess and give thanks to Almighty God) 2) "Certainty" (Yaqeen in arabic) consisting of 3 points 1) everything is from God, 2) it's for my highest good, 3) it has a message for me, about something I need to change. For me the message was simply to accept that "evil" is indeed a part of God's creation, and evil spirits and black magic is real. I always shunned it off and looked down upon it as mere superstition. Nope, it's real! So take it seriously and take mindful precautions, it's simply a test from God. Don't lose your certainty, your faith, have full trust in God and do your daily spiritual work 3) The best spirituality you will find is free or very low cost - all the people and healers I splurged money on failed to deliver and actually help us. The people who had true love, compassion and heart were the most powerful, they helped us completely for free or at very low cost. All these commercial gurus are simply fitna, illusion, they're a Golden Calf or temptation from the straight path. Truth is hiding in plain sight, simple, yet most profoundly powerful. Be a good human being, trust God, have heart and mercy for your fellow human beings and the animals, and you'll be showered with a tsunami of power and protection directly from the Lord Most High. 4) The importance of "local" spirits - each place you go to have a Kshetra Palaka (Local Protector) or TuDi (Earth King/God) who are the Spirit Kings of that place. Further, there are also local spirits living in that location. If you do cultivation there without permission/friendship with the local Spirit King, you can start to get into spiritual trouble. This is a big part of traditional Hindu sadhana as well as Daoist cultivation. After each hindu ritual you give Bali Dhana (spirit charity offering) to the local spirits and the Kshetra Palaka, or in the case of Daoist magic or cultivation you say the An Tu Di Shen Zhou (Pacify Earth Spirit Mantra). It's even one of the Daoist Ba Da Zhou (8 Great Mantras) to be said daily. So be aware if you travel to new locations - make sure to include the local Kshetra Palaka or TuDi to be in harmony with the spirits of that place. 5) The importance of spiritual lineage (sampradaya). When you're part of a true, authentic spiritual lineage, you will also have much more spiritual protection and power. If you call upon your guru or master with the appropriate mantra and mudra, it's the combined energy of thousands and thousands of years of people doing spiritual practice coming to help you spiritually. A complete game changer!

Many teachers just emphasize "mind", or consciousness, as here: You are not your body, but you are the consciousness in the body, because of which you have the awareness of “I am”. It is without words, just pure beingness. Meditation means you have to hold consciousness by itself. The consciousness should give attention to itself. (Gaitonde, Mohan [2017]. Self – Love: The Original Dream [Shri Nisargadatta Maharaj’s Direct Pointers to Reality]) Let the mind be present without an abode. (from the Diamond Sutra, translation by Venerable Master Hsing Yun from “The Rabbit’s Horn: A Commentary on the Platform Sutra”, p 60) You are right, self-surrender plays a vital role, as here where Gautama described the induction of the initial concentration: … the (noble) disciple, making self-surrender the object of (their) thought, lays hold of concentration, lays hold of one-pointedness. (The disciple), aloof from sensuality, aloof from evil conditions, enters on the first trance, which is accompanied by thought initial and sustained, which is born of solitude, easeful and zestful, and abides therein. (SN 48.10, tr. PTS vol V p 174; parentheticals paraphrase original; “initial” for “directed”, as at SN 36.11, tr. PTS vol IV p 146) To "hold consciousness by itself", as Nisargadatta prescribed, is to lay hold of "one-pointedness". To stay connected, Gautama advised the extension of the feelings of zest and ease of the first concentration: … (a person) steeps, drenches, fills, and suffuses this body with zest and ease, born of solitude, so that there is not one particle of the body that is not pervaded by this lone-born zest and ease. (AN 5.28, tr. Pali Text Society vol. III pp 18-19) I'm writing about that now: Words like “steeps” and “drenches” convey that the weight of the body accompanies the feelings of zest and ease. The weight of the body sensed at a particular point in the body can shift the body’s center of gravity, and a shift in the body’s center of gravity can result in what Moshe Feldenkrais termed “reflex movement”. Feldenkrais described how “reflex movement” can be engaged in standing up from a chair: …When the center of gravity has really moved forward over the feet a reflex movement will originate in the old nervous system and straighten the legs; this automatic movement will not be felt as an effort at all. (“Awareness Through Movement”, Moshe Feldenkrais, p 78) “Drenching” the body “so that there is not one particle of the body that is not pervaded” with zest and ease allows the weight of the body and “one-pointedness” to effect “reflex movement” in the activity of inhalation and exhalation. In falling asleep, the mind can sometimes react to hypnagogic sleep paralysis with an attempt to reassert control over the muscles of the body, causing a “hypnic jerk”. The extension of a weighted zest and ease can pre-empt the tendency to reassert voluntary control in the induction of concentration, and make possible a conscious experience of “reflex movement” in inhalation and exhalation. Gautama said that he always returned to one-pointedness after he lectured, that he constantly abided in "that first characteristic of concentration". Speaking of staying connected to presence!

So fascinating, you really made the whole culture and history come alive! It's truly mindboggling how connected (for better or worse) people close to nature are to spirit. But unfortunately they use it both for good and evil. Yes, awesome idea about Kurdistan. In my dream I saw a carved rock-like charm bound with leather skins, both of them inscribed with ancient signs, buried under a plot of land in Kurdistan. This was then re-energized through rituals every now and then. So if we could find it, dig it up, and destroy it, I'm sure it would stop everything for ever. Luckily things have been ok for a long while, but every time one of the family members returns from a trip to Kurdistan, all family members here in Europe start having physical, health, mental or family issues for 1-3 months. So I think when they're down there, it somehow "re-ignites" the fire of hate and jealousy in the hearts of the people living there permanently, prompting them to restart all their black magic against this branch of the family. Luckily we are more aware now and combat it proactively. Just having that awareness that black magic is real, it makes you stop and think every now and then, when everything suddenly goes wrong for no reason out of nowhere. Then you can do something about it, instead of just suffering through it, when it could be stopped/improved by spiritual means.

@Lala Nila Yes, me, my dad and cousins all have it, albeit not as strongly. He had it like clockwork, whenever something was about to go down, very related to the material world and survival, the close ones, the family etc. Whereas for me it's mostly related to spiritual guidance, but I also get dreams of warnings sometimes, or guidance about the people close to me in everyday life (their true character and motives etc). My wife never had dreams her whole life, as soon as we moved in together, she started getting it too. Now it's almost a daily breakfast topic before we hit the day, we talk about our dreams and what they meant. So it's there in my energy field somehow. Now that she started getting dreams it's always about her family and how they're doing. Mine is mostly spiritual guidance as I said, but also what's happening with my family, and sometimes material warnings or guidance. Ofc also the odd psychological dream about my own emotional unconscious every now and then, but usually when I wake it's quite clear what kind of dream it was (psychological or spiritual). Also whenever people cross over, I usually dream of them, see their current state, exchange last words, sometimes help them if they're lost. I cannot always do it in the dream, then I do it in my meditation during the day. I noticed that most non-white people naturally have all these things, a natural connection to spirit, intuition, gut instinct, dreams and the ancestors. Because my one side of the family all have it, whereas the white don't at all. And ofc growing up in majority white society, no one could really mirror these things back to me, as it was just outside their experience, they didn't know, didn't feel, didn't understand. All was mental. Then when I was a teenager I got a lot of friends with immigrant background, serbians, iranians, people from the Middle East, and ALL had it, naturally. Gut instinct, dreams. I also noticed it when I became a SKY master and started giving chakra initiations to people. Non-white people receive the energy much easier and more powerfully, it impacts them very deeply on a soul level much faster. It was the same when I was doing qigong healing as taught by firstly Zhongxian Wu then later Chunyi Lin, this was between 2018-2022. All the non-white people would get visions, dreams, cry, see their deceased grandparents, they would get guidance in the session what had happened and what they needed to change, it was very natural and spontaneous, flowing. I spoke with a sufi master about it, he himself obviously being from the Middle East, and he said he had observed the same. He said it's because each race is designed by God in a particular way, orginally more suitable for physical survival in particular climates, but later now it's related to the types of souls and the "karma" (from eastern perspective) they need to work out. Ofc in sufism they say it's the qadr or qismat, or destiny/fate written for that soul. E.g. people from particular races, cultures and religions are meant to go through different types of karma and soul corrections. Some examples of "nations" and their soul types according to Sufism and Kabbalah (just to give an idea): For instance people born in Iraq are said to be souls with pure hearts, but as they were warriors in past lifetimes, in this life, no matter how innocent and friendly they are, people will attack them, betray them, fool them etc., it's their karma. Whereas people born in Scandinavia or moving to live in Scandinavia are souls which are to learn about mental organisation and structure, but their challenge is that they become "removed" from life itself. Instead of efficiency and excellence, they become robotic and out of touch with life itself, hence the epidemic of mental ilness, unhappy families etc. People born in the Carribean Islands are people who are naturally grounded, relaxed, at ease, in contact with the physical body, enjoy life naturally, but their challenge is that they become overtaken by sexual pleasure and rivalry too much. Like that the "karmic scripts" of different races, cultures and nations are said to be a hint from Almighty God about ourselves and how to best correct our karma.

@Lala Nila African Voodoo is pretty much just like any shamanistic tradition world wide, it's all the same. It's almost identical to hinduism, qigong and daoism as well. There's life force animating the universe, we should be in harmony with that, and magic is simply working with this life force as well as the ancestors, spirits and Gods. Thanks for sharing about your javanese connection, very interesting! Yes, all the ancestor energy is present in our physical body, and some of them might even be following us and helping us daily or just from time to time. Some stories about my grandfather. He was a typical "caribbean man" in the sense that he had a baby mama everywhere, children in Haiti we didn't know about, in the US with a different woman, 4 kids with 3 different women here in Scandinavia, 2 in Ireland with another women, and God knows how many else spread across the globe. He didn't really know his father, but was close with his mother. However his mother died when he was just 7, so he was sent to live with distant relatives in the US. Since that time his mom would come in his dreams and give him life guidance and messages. As he was a very free spirit who liked to travel here and there, suddenly we wouldn't hear from him for 6 months to a year, but suddenly he would call and warn us of a dream he had. And everytime it came true. E.g. employees stealing money from my dad's business, my dad's relationship breaking (divorce from my mom), my dad's relationship about to break with his new girlfriend, he would call and give the dream warnings about what was about to happen. But my dad is quite the rebel, also because my grandfather wasn't there for him so much when he was younger, so he never listened to the advice. Once my grandfather didn't have money, his mother came in a dream and gave him the numbers to the lottery, and he won using those numbers. Once he used to hang out in a boxing gym when my dad was young and on the national team. They were 3-4 old retired guys, just coming for the hang out daily. My grandfather was one of them. My dad was a fighter. One morning on the bus, my grandfather ran into one of the other old guys. They were chatting just like normal on the bus. However once they reached the gym, the other guy didn't get off. My grandfather thought it was super weird. He told my grandfather to tell the others, that he was doing well but he wasn't coming in, he was going somewhere else. When he arrived and met my dad and the other old guys, he passed the message. The old guys were shocked and got tears in their eyes, because that guy from the bus had died during the night. So it was his soul that came to my grandfather, as my grandfather was the only one who could see and hear him. I could go on and on, there are so many more stories, also my own personal stories of dreams!

I find I often have dreams of myself on parallel timelines. On awakening I look around nearby timelines and put the dream next to them looking for a match. Usually the match is obvious It seems that parallel processing occurs in nature Just as well

I have come to see the psyche not merely as a mind in the psychological sense, but as a layered energetic system populated by subtle forces. At the heart of this view are the subconscious emotional and mental currents, and deeper still, two complementary unconscious currents that I’ve come to think of as the Shiva aspects and the Shakti aspects. The emotional and mental currents we’re all familiar with, but the Shiva and Shakti currents are less obvious, so I will go into some detail about them. They can be recognized through many vivid symbolic pairs: Wildfire / Fireplace The dynamic blaze that consumes and transforms. The hearth that holds the fire safely, giving it purpose and warmth. Fish / Fishbowl The darting, elusive vitality moving through hidden depths. The clear bowl that contains, supports, shapes, and protects its motions. Cat / Dog The graceful, sensitive, easily startled nature that seeks comfort. The loyal guardian that stays close, watching over and calming. Fearful / Protector The trembling instinct that recoils from perceived danger. The steady presence that stands firm, offering safety. These pairs are not idle poetry. They illustrate how the unconscious houses instinctual forces that must evolve together. The Shakti aspect represents a dynamic, vital current — the drive toward life, transformation, emotional vitality, subtle creativity. The Shiva aspect provide containment, the instinctive intelligence that knows how to protect, restrain, channel, and nurture what would otherwise be chaotic. In each pairing: The dynamic life-force is untamed, vital, transformative. The caring containment is protective, shaping, enabling that energy to flourish without harm. They are co-arising: the wild needs the safe space to exist meaningfully; the container finds purpose in cradling the life within. If one seeks only to awaken the dynamic energy (as in a blind kundalini pursuit), without fostering the complementary instinct to contain and guide it, imbalance is inevitable. The system can flare into anxiety, delusion, or emotional overwhelm. This is why so many teachings stress that cultivation is not merely about amplifying energy, but purifying and preparing the mental and emotional channels first, so the deeper forces can safely develop. To purify the emotional and mental currents tangled by personal history, they must be witnessed and brought into greater flow. They are the first terrain of inner work, and through methods such as shadow work, dream exploration, deep feeling and understanding etc, their dysfunctions can be gradually resolved. Only then can the deeper unconscious forces, the Shiva and Shakti layers, find their ground. Importantly, it is the Shiva aspect that must awaken the Shakti aspect, otherwise containment will not occur, and the Shiva aspect in its turn has to first be activated by the flowing current of the emotional and mental currents. Recently, my dreams have begun to show me that when these two deep unconscious instinctual layers find each other and start to mature in their interaction, something new emerges. In symbolic terms, this is represented as a smaller, independent vehicle that will one day travel on its own. This resonates with images from Daoist Neidan (inner alchemy) where an alchemical child is born - an autonomous subtle body that eventually can separate from the main system. This smaller independent vehicle or child is the fruit of a long interplay between mature containment (Shiva) and vitality (Shakti). But the picture does not end here. Overseeing all of this is the witness self, the faculty of clear seeing that stands apart from the energies it observes. This witness is the part that learns to trust that the humble, instinctual containment field is capable of guiding the system more wisely than the anxious grasping of the conscious mind. It slowly informs the conscious mind, which may then serve as the executive agent, ruling not by force but by insight. In the end, I see the conscious mind, gently taught by the witness, becoming the wise steward of the system - allowing these deeper layers to do their work, neither interfering unnecessarily nor abandoning responsibility. Thus the entire architecture of psyche - subconscious, unconscious, witness, and conscious mind - becomes integrated. Each layer performs its unique role, culminating in a new life, an independent vitality born of the interplay between our deepest instinctual forces. A compact visual map (Divine / Mother/ Highest Source) ↓ Witness Self (objective seeing, clear awareness) ↓ Conscious Mind (steward) (makes decisions based on witness insight) ↓ ----------------------------------------------- | | Emotional Stream Mental Stream (Subconscious patterns & biases) ↓ ---------------------------------------------------------------- | | Dynamic Vital Force Containment Field (Shakti aspects) (Shiva aspects) - wildfire, fish, cat, fear - fireplace, fishbowl, dog, protector ↓ Interplay gives rise to: Smaller independent vehicle (new independent ‘entity’ directed by the conscious mind)

Essence is not function. Something can be false (or magical if you prefer) and still function. For example, a dream hammer is useful in a dream, but not useful in the waking state (and vice versa).

This is a very interesting perspective. I asked ChatGPT to consider what karmic script white Anglo-Americans may be playing out, and it had this to say: 1. Ancestral Memory and Disconnect Many indigenous and non-Western cultures have retained deep links to dreamwork, ancestors, and spirit because survival demanded it. Guidance from visions, intuition, or collective rituals was essential for navigating uncertainty. For white Anglo Americans, especially those shaped by centuries of Enlightenment rationalism, Protestant mental frameworks, and colonial expansion, there was a cultural severing from intuitive and ancestral memory. Dreams and spirit were demoted to “irrational,” while reason, efficiency, and control were elevated. The karmic imprint here is loss of embodied connection, a forgetting of how to listen. 2. Spiritual Purpose of White Anglo Americans From a karmic perspective, souls incarnating in Anglo contexts may have chosen it not to inherit an unbroken lineage of spirit, but rather to learn how to reawaken what was forgotten. Their spiritual challenge is not an automatic connection, but the discipline of rediscovery: To bridge intellect with intuition without dismissing either. To humble the mind and allow heart and body to remember their rightful place. To transform alienation (from land, body, ancestors) into deep reverence for life and the Earth. 3. Karmic Connection In both Kabbalah and Sufi frameworks, karma or qadr manifests as the correction of past imbalances. For white Anglo Americans, some key karmic corrections could be: From domination to stewardship: healing the karmic wound of colonization by becoming protectors of the Earth and allies to indigenous wisdom. From abstraction to embodiment: shifting from living in the head to re-entering the body, land, and senses. From isolation to interbeing: dissolving the illusion of individualism and rediscovering kinship with all peoples, creatures, and worlds. In this way, the absence of strong inherited dream/ancestral capacities may itself be the “teaching field”—a harder soil that requires conscious cultivation, so the lesson is deeply earned. Thus, the Anglo karmic path is not to “become like others,” but to integrate their mental organization and rational clarity with the reawakened ancestral spirit. The synthesis is their dharma. White Anglo Americans, karmically, are here to learn how to remember spirit after forgetting it, to reconnect intuition with intellect, and to transform the legacy of separation into one of integration, stewardship, and humility before the living cosmos. Their lack is their teacher. Their task is not to envy the natural gifts of others, but to midwife a new balance—one where the mind bows to soul, and the heart leads once again.

And thanks for sharing about your dream, very fascinating. Yes, sounds like the sense impressions from your research lodged in your unconscious and replayed during the night as images.

speaking of dreams, I had a very interesting one last night involving an ancient feline type creature. It was wild in temperament, had pointy ears that curved inward and short grey fur. The wild feline freaked my domesticated cats out in the dream. Maybe Bastet related, I was researching some Egyptian rites yesterday.

Yes, 100%. I know for sure the power of my African ancestors. My grandfather (who’s now passed away, God rest his soul) had incredible dream powers naturally, though he never cultivated in any way, shape or form. These have been passed on to my father, me and my cousins too, albeit not as strong. But in all the Hindu and Daoist rituals I’ve done for ancestors, the power in the African side is immense! I get incredible dreams and visions, and it’s always of the African side. They were of course connected to Voodoo, which doesn’t need to be dark, it’s just a connection to ancestors, life force of nature and the universe, as well as spirits ofc. I have so many stories to share about this 😁 Tell me more about your Javanese connection 🙏🏼

Yes, I think ‘Spirit’ can see through both. The mundane or ego mind, as you put it, feels it’s in charge, I think from necessity, since without Shiva present it has no container and so has to run its own defense. Yielding consciously to Shiva can feel like annihilation, because, as you say, the ego-mind doesn’t recognise its proper place as servant and not master. For reasons I don’t fully understand, it seems to me that Shiva is cast out, and when this energy tries to re-enter we resist. I had a dream at twelve of a man sitting in a chair, staring out the window, stroking a cat on his lap. He seemed both frighteningly mad and catatonic. Then I heard the words: “He is me.” That dream pulled the rug from under me, it literally broke my view of myself as a twelve year old girl, but it also set me on the path of learning to understand dreams, because I figured by understanding dreams in general I would be able to understand this dream. Now, forty years later, I believe what I had seen was ‘Shiva’, ‘Shiva-mind’, flagged as me, which I was unable to remotely comprehend then. I’ve come to think we have to walk in Shiva’s shoes eventually. Now my dreams show ‘Shiva’ circling closer: a bull circling the house, a car crashing through the walls, someone breaking in through a window and trying to roll up the blinds. Allowing Shiva to re-enter is unnerving. His energy is powerful and alien, and he is no less frightening now than when I was twelve. But the difference is that today, with more cleared ground and greater understanding, I can at least try to let the process happen, even if it is not easy.

But the reason we know about Shakyamuni's battle with Mara at all though, is because it comes to us by way of the religious teachings of Buddhism. So it is understood in that context. And yes it does have a broader practical application to daily life, even if someone is not a Buddhist, even if they are living an entirely secular life, even if they are not seeking enlightment or practicing dharma. Because every person faces and deals with "what is the right thing to do" in this or that situation which they encounter in their daily life. It is sometimes called conscience. The final sentence (see below in bold) for a secular application could read: Mara is considered the one who distracts people from "doing the right thing." Mara is considered the negative qualities found in human's egos and psyche. " conscience: the inner sense of what is right or wrong in one's conduct or motives, impelling one toward right action. Was Shakyamuni a real physical human being? Yes. Was Mara and the daughters and the army of demons in physical form? No. Did he really see them? Well, physical humans have dreams and daydreams and visions. It is a reality that those occur. But the characters within the vision do not have physical substance. If you had a dream last night then for you it is real that you had a dream. That dream really happened. You know what you saw, including the characters and what they said and did and your interactions with them. The dream or vision is real, yes. Are the characters in the vision or dream physical, no. "[There] is a painted mural in Thailand about Siddhartha's battle with Mara. The story goes that while Siddhartha or Buddha Gautama was meditating trying to reach enlightenment, he was assaulted under the bodhi tree by the demon named Mara, who is often said to be the tempter. Mara used violence, sensory pleasure, and mockery to try to prevent Siddhartha from attaining enlightenment because he was afraid that Siddhartha would. Mara tempted Siddhartha with his daughters but Siddhartha was not moved. So Mara stood up with an army against him and Siddhartha touched the ground and it shook. Mara was defeated by Siddhartha and after the battle, it rained down lotus flowers. In the Buddhist religion, Mara is considered the one who distracts people from practicing Buddhist dharma. Mara is considered the negative qualities found in human's egos and psyche. " from Jess Davis, “Siddhartha's battle with Mara”

I think the self is based on actions we take and our responses to things. I know for myself, I have gone through many choices, often ones contradicting others taken in the past. I am what I choose and do, and though I think I change and move into new attitudes, my dreams tell me differently, for in them, I behave differently than I currently believe, and what greater indicator of who I am than how I behave in a dream?

bingo. yes. i am taking that at face value. hence the universe and everything in it vanishes. just like when a person wakes up from a dream, then the dream is no longer there. it vanishes.

I am, he came to me in a dream once. But, being a Gringa I didn't really know how to go forward with the experience, it was an odd time in my life. It happened a few years back, I was doing some darker toned magick at the time, dealing with death and my path. Lot's of liminal places, chthonic entities, etc. This drum vid, struck a deeeeep cord with me. I use a lot of dance in my work, building cones of power, using djembe drum beats and music that resonates on a more 'primal' level. When I was younger, I spontaneously joined a drum circle in the middle of a park in Europe. I sat there stoned outta my face just playing the djembe, I had never played a percussion instrument (expect bass guitar in middle school) prior to that. I tapped into this stream, I don't know where it came from-well, I do, it came from long ago, another life...those guys that I was playing were super impressed and asked me how I knew how to play. When I allowed those vibrations to take over my body, heart and mind, I felt the current open up and became a vessel of sorts. Thank you for sharing that story about Wallenganda with me over the flames of that fire with me (yes, I saw those flames and heard the crackling). it's a lovely story, I've heard parts of it before. Sounds like a shaktipat to me! This is really wonderful and obviously set a tone going forward in your life. I find that sometimes entities from paradigms you're not too familiar with in this life time will appear to you in ways that resonate the deepest in that moment, for whatever reason- be it Undines, Star Lady of the Sea, etc. Agreed, 100%. Again, thank you so much for sharing all the above! beautiful and amazing experiences.

I was always a minor dabbler in occult and mystical things, casually reading and adopting different magical ideas, but then a spirit got ahold of me and I stumbled into serious belief, yet, I did not know what to believe. I started searching and what I found led me to pain and madness. I found myself living out ideas that evolved on their own, and started overlaying my daily waking awareness mixing with dream and fantasy. I would act out in response to the hallucinations. Eventually these fantasies would break, and I'd wind up in a deep depression. This has been going on for 20 plus years, and after this last psychosis, I think I have broken this curse, because all of the ideas and experiences culminated in a total breakdown. Crossing my fingers.

Long ago I had a dream that I was in a prison camp. Someone had broken the rules but I was punished not them. I felt that was most unfair. When I awoke I asked about the dream and was told that when a member of a group breaks a rule, it does not matter which in the group is punished. Thus group karma can result in the innocent bearing the pain.

Intro by me, Surya (not a part of the substack) So, in the winter months, I had a chat online with this wonderfull fellow, about Jung and myth. He invited me to his substack, where he once in a blue moon shares his writings. I have decided to share this with you for several reasons: - to spread his writings - in the hope it is of interrest to you as well - perhsaps start a discussion here Cheers! Follow Your Bliss: Joseph Campbell’s Path to the Transcendent Liam James Jul 10 READ IN APP For Joseph Campbell, following your own personal myth provides a framework for personal growth and helps us live lives in tune with our nature. You find your myth by following your bliss. Discover Campbell’s teachings on following your bliss to reach the transcendent below, with help from Brazilian football and Oasis. All the Campbell quotes below are taken from Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation. Pledge your support Mythic figures as guides Mythic figures can serve as role models in a given area. Campbell explains: ‘…the gods represent the patron powers that support you in your field of action. And by contemplating the deities, you’re given a kind of steadying force that puts you in the role, as it were, that is represented by that particular deity.’ Myths represent a society’s values and provide directions and frameworks for living well, something Campbell held valuable. ‘I don’t know how it is now, right this minute, when so many new possibilities have opened up for life. But in my experience it has always been the model that gives you the idea of the direction in which to go, and the way in which to handle the problems and opportunities that come up.’ But even then, in the mid-to-late 20th century, he hints at a lack of myths to represent the diversity of human experience. The ‘new possibilities’ Campbell refers to in the last century are dwarfed by contemporary risks and opportunities ushered in by technological advancements and AI, rendering the myths of old even less applicable and new myths harder to imagine. He makes the same point later in the text: ‘Life has changed in form so rapidly that even the forms that were normal to think about in the time of my boyhood are no longer around, and there’s another set, and everything is moving very, very fast. Today we don’t have the stasis that is required for the formation of a mythic tradition.’ So while the myths of old may offer some guidance, we need some new way of relating ourselves to the transcendent through myth. Read the article I wrote on Campbell below to learn more about the transcendent: Becoming Transparent to the Transcendent: Joseph Campbell on Realising Your True Nature Relating yourself to transcendence Campbell distinguishes myth from Eastern traditions as a way of relating yourself to transcendence: ‘Of course, in trying to relate yourself to transcendence, you don’t have to have images. You can go the Zen way and forget the myths altogether. But I’m talking about the mythic way. And what the myth does is to provide a field in which you can locate yourself. That’s the sense of the mandala, the sacred circle, whether you are a Tibetan monk or the patient of a Jungian analyst. The symbols are laid out around the circle, and you are to locate yourself in the center. A labyrinth, of course, is a scrambled mandala, in which you don’t know where you are. That’s the way the world is for people who don’t have a mythology. It’s a labyrinth. They are battling their way through as if no one had ever been there before.’ So myth gives you direction, unscrambling the labyrinth. But if the old models don’t fit, what can we do? Share Bliss as a model for life Campbell suggests following bliss is a reliable model for reaching the transcendent: ‘In this way, your bliss becomes your life. There’s a saying in Sanskrit: the three aspects that point furthest toward the border of the abyss are sat, cit, and ananda: being, consciousness, and bliss. You can call transcendence a hole or the whole, either one, because it is beyond all words. All that we can talk about is what is on this side of transcendence. And the problem is to open the words, to open the images so that they point past themselves. They will tend to shut off the experience through their own opacity. But these three concepts are those that will bring you closest to that void: sat-cit-ananda. Being, consciousness, and bliss.’ He continues: ‘Now, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been thinking a lot about these things. And I don’t know what being is. And I don’t know what consciousness is. But I do know what bliss is: that deep sense of being present, of doing what you absolutely must do to be yourself. If you can hang on to that, you are on the edge of the transcendent already.’ Campbell studied in Germany and Paris, and returned to America just three weeks before the 1929 Wall Street crash. But this apparent disaster proved auspicious, as it allowed him time to pursue his bliss: ‘…I didn’t have a job for five years. And, fortunately for me, there was no welfare. I had nothing to do but sit in Woodstock and read and figure out where my bliss lay. There I was, on the edge of excitement all the time.’ The edge of excitement is a great place to spend your life, and Campbell’s experiences there inform his philosophy for life: ‘So, what I’ve told my students is this: follow your bliss. You’ll have moments when you’ll experience bliss. And when that goes away, what happens to it? Just stay with us, and there’s more security in that than in finding out where the money is going to come from next year’. I recently started rereading Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid, and found this to resonate with the teachings of Campbell and Jung: ‘That tension – between beauty and cynicism, between what Brazilians call futebol d’arte and futebol de resultados – is a constant, perhaps because it is so fundamental, not merely to sport but also to life: to win, or to play the game well? It is hard to think of any significant actions that are not in some way a negotiation between the two extremes of pragmatism and idealism.’ Campbell’s clearly on the ‘play the game well’ side, but his point is that this idealistic philosophy is the most practical too; more ‘secure’, to quote him. The blissful ideal itself becomes the practical guide. Discovering your myth through bliss For Campbell, bliss is a guide that will help you discover your myth: ‘Your bliss can guide you to that transcendent mystery, because bliss is the welling up of the energy of the transcendent wisdom within you. So when the bliss cuts off, you know that you’ve cut off the welling up; try to find it again, and that will be your Hermes guide, the dog that can follow the invisible trail for you. And that’s the way it is. One works out one’s own myth that way.’ The idea that it is one’s own myth is key for Campbell; earlier traditions can give clues, but they are only clues: ‘As many a wise man has said, “You can’t wear another person’s hat.”… You’ve got to find the wisdom, not the clothing of it. Through those trappings, the myths of other cultures, you can come to a wisdom that you’ve then got to translate into your own. The whole problem is to turn these mythologies into your own.’ The Holy Grail Campbell references an Arthurian myth, where the Holy Grail partially reveals itself to the knights assembled in the banquet hall. It doesn’t appear in its full glory, and is covered with a radiant cloth, before it withdraws, leaving the knights in awe. Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, proposes that the knights go in quest of the Grail to behold it unveiled. Below is Campbell’s response: ‘Now we come to the text that interested me. The text reads, “They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the Forest Adventurous at that point which he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no way or path.” You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no way or path. Where there’s a way or path, it is somebody else’s path; each human being is a unique phenomenon. The idea is to find your own pathway to bliss’. Leave a comment What if you don’t know what your bliss is? ‘I don’t know what it is that makes me feel alive I don’t know how to wake the things that sleep inside I only wanna see the light that shines behind your eyes’ Acquiesce – Oasis I’m realising my teenage dream tomorrow and seeing Oasis live – a band that millions of us worldwide love for the way they awaken that very feeling of blissful transcendence and liveliness within us. And while it’s probably optimistic to try and discern too many deep truths about the human condition from Oasis lyrics, particularly those related to the psychological teachings of Campbell and Jung, there is a light-hearted connection to make between the opening lines of Acquiesce and the points I’ve made earlier in this article. The point is, we may not know our bliss – what makes us ‘feel alive’ – but there’s often some hint: some fleeting moments of curiosity or sparks amid the dull listlessness of life that can orient us towards the transcendent. Campbell would advise looking out for these. In Jungian discourse, uncertainty is often just a lack of self-knowledge, and can be approached with inner work that deals with the unconscious Jung would probably go a step further than Campbell and advise using active imagination and dialoguing with both emotional sides – the general feelings of ennui and the transient moments of interest or joy – to explore them more, gain self-knowledge, and expand the personality. Summary For Campbell, bliss – that ‘deep sense of being present, of doing what you absolutely must do to be yourself’ – is a pathway to the transcendent. Following bliss puts you on a mythic path, offering an alternative model to that of Eastern traditions. And if you don’t know your bliss, you can look to Jung’s teachings on working with the unconscious to unlock the energy stored there. Thanks for reading The Creative Awakening Playbook! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Pledge your support The Creative Awakening Playbook is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell The Creative Awakening Playbook that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments. Pledge your support

bold above i agree. 100% Yes. time space and form are illusory mental constructs, and have no more substance than a dream or thought. here it is again. yes, this (below). This is exactly what I have been attempting to convey. These two posts here just say it a lot more succinctly Thank you.

Now you have just returned to your original narrow premise , To go further would be circular . Circular again , I already addressed this . I am not , you must have missed what I said . Its the whole Neuro genetic system with its receptor feedbacks and linked to genetic consciousness and memory and another faculty which is 'non-local' I already laid that all out . If you missed it and think I am claiming its in the brain .... there isn't much point continuing this discussion as it would go around in circles more , So does sleep lead to temporary loss of consciousness , but does sense of self leave ? Ever had dream with 'yourself' in it ?

My pleasure. _/\_ Duality is a persistent illusion. When you wake up, there it is. When you dream, there it is. When seen from enlightened mind... well, you get the idea. There is no "other" place enlightenment takes you... what is seen in this moment is reality. Enlightenment looks like this moment. Anything that you might think of as having its own, intrinsic (basic or unique characteristic of a person or thing) being-ness or separateness from other imagined things is illusory. Nothing exists separately. All things that appear separate of any kind, including places, times or dates, or beings and objects are ultimately not real in THAT way. Not real as a separate thing, moment, place. This is explained in myriad ways - the Cittamatra (Buddhist) school says it is all "mind", other traditions assert the reality of an outside world, etc. etc., but NONE of them are "correct". For deep reading on this topic I would suggest: Put put it succinctly, Shuryu Suzuki said: "Just THIS is it". I like to say: "There is THIS, happening now."

In a way, we are always inside our own minds. I interpret it a bit differently. I guess it depends on how we define real. The experiences in the dark are extraordinarily vivid and compelling - sounds, visions, emotional reactivity, and yet there is nothing there but my own mind. Similar to dreaming. In the dream, there is no question about its reality, unless of course we are lucidly dreaming. For me it is more about the relationship between daily life experience and the mind.

Heard this continuation of Zhuangzi's dream.* ...So then the Japanese patrol captured Zhuangzi and interrogated him. Why are you planting explosives all over our military trains routes and derailing our trains, they asked. And he's, like, I have no idea what you're talking about, I'm a butterfly, I don't interfere in your military affairs. -- And what did the interrogators do? -- What could they do, they put him in front of the firing squad and woke him up. -- And then what happened? -- What could happen? He's flying somewhere out there, visiting this flower, then that flower... *from an accomplished martial artist who thinks he's a taoist -- but far as I can tell, the only taoist thing about him is his zhuangzesque sense of the absurd. Which is good enough for me -- better than what many others who think of themselves as taoists have to show to justify the self-identification.