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                 The point is that waking consciousness is not something which is intrinsically different from dreaming, but rather something which evolved and developed out of it; which became more focused and intense and uptight as it evolved.  Waking is merely a way of imposing a semblance of order and control (mind – things making some kind of sense instead of being wholly ineffable) on at least a portion of the dream.  However this is a falsehood:  NOTHING makes any sense – EVERYTHING is ineffable.  In other words, waking consciousness – and the society which supports it – is a complete and total fabrication. 

                  Waking mind is like the insouciance of a drunkard staggering across a battlefield where bullets whiz by all around him but who is somehow protected from it all by his blissful indifference.  That is waking mind.  It is so totally a fiction (the sense that we are separated from everything around us) that it can only be maintained by the constant validation of other people (our sense of being part of society).   Only by all of us reassuring one another that we are separated individuals – by constantly picking at and annoying each other, just as we constantly pick at and annoy ourselves to stay awake – can we jointly uphold the fragile structure of waking consciousness.  Our society assures its continuance by setting its individual members upon each other like ravenous dogs.

When society dissolves because of e.g. war or disaster, everything becomes like a dream, since it’s out of control.  Waking makes for more control than dreaming, but with a concomitant loss of awareness and joy.  Over the next century, as the environment and civilization deteriorate, society will collapse and everything will spin out of control.  That is to say, waking consciousness will dissolve back into the dream from which it emerged at the time of the invention of agriculture.  The human race isn’t going to be able to muddle through this one, as it has always done.  Nor will there be any miraculous salvation:  no one is going to be raptured up into the clouds to sit next to Jesus; and December 22, 2012 isn’t going to be any improvement on December 20th.  And certainly the corporations, governments, and materialistic scientists who got us into this mess aren’t going to get us out of it.  Each individual human being will then be at a crossroads:  either lighten up and enter into lucid dreaming as your everyday mode of awareness; or enter into a nightmare. 

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                     Although waking consciousness originated together with multicellular life on earth, the invention of agriculture was its apotheosis as far as the human species is concerned.  As compared with hunting, the invention of agriculture brought order, regularity, sleep 8 hours at night and work 16 hours during the day.  Humankind had outgrown dream consciousness; it had found dream consciousness – the consciousness of infants and animals – too unstable, too ephemeral, and therefore too limiting for its free expression.  Therefore humans literally constructed, piece by piece, thought form by thought form, over the surface of dream consciousness, the floating edifice of waking mind.  Humankind began to think and reason.           

                     Separation of quotidian life into 16 hours of wakefulness and 8 hours of dreaming – forcing our bodies to stay awake for such a long stretch of time – is a stern discipline, a way of clenching up, which helps block the intrusion of dream material (magical events) into wakefulness.  Ancient humans mixed the two together in their awareness – waking life was as ineffable as dreaming, and everything was a source of wonder and mystery.   Native cultures, such as the Mayan people of Guatemala, maintain much of this thought form structure to this day.  We North American-European-Asian moderns have learned to tone down our sensory impressions, to separate ourselves from our environment by taking everything around us for granted, by not paying attention to anything except our own incessant mental chatter.  This makes our lives utterly boring and meaningless, but nonetheless provides us with our ability to focus our attention, to be methodical, concentrated and deliberate.  Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were unable to focus that much attention.  They had no need to. 

                Along with heightened focus comes a decreased sense of connectedness; a greater sense of separatedness.  And along with the heightened separatedness necessary to focus attention in the waking world comes a heightened sense of isolation and anguish.  In other words, suffering is an intrinsic component of waking consciousness.  Without suffering, the constant self-pinching, we could not stay awake. 

When we are awake we say “I am suffering!”  That “I” is made out suffering (self-pity in the parlance of shamanism).  To gainsay Descartes, “I suffer, therefore I am.”  Just as the waking “I” and the “suffering” arise together, so too do they dissolve together.   If “I” ever stop suffering, the disconnected “I” dissolves too.  The main cause of our self-hatred, the chief reason we are all so neurotic and out of kilter with our world, is simply because we’ve been awake too long.

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                     Ancient humans were more magical than we are (not as separated).  They permitted dream material to freely intrude into their awareness, whereas we moderns have mechanisms in place to immediately repress any such incursion into our reality.  When dream stuff intrudes into waking consciousness we get moments of discontinuity.   Any sudden start or shock or fright is a rift in our sense of continuity – or better said, a mad grab for our sense of continuity to mask such a rift.   We have to say that discontinuity is unreal, and that people who experience discontinuity are crazy, or tired and overworked and in need of rest.  We have to get everyone to validate this pretense – to pretend that they’re not experiencing discontinuity, in order for society to exist.  Society and waking consciousness are just two names for the same thing:  in dreams, we are basically alone.  In point of fact we’re just as alone when we’re awake, but we stupidly believe that we are sweating and puffing and bleeding as part of a team.  Thus being awake can be defined as the pretense that we’re not alone (that we are part of a society). 

                       The reason why the dream state is so mutable is that there is little sense of separatedness in it.  It is importance – the sense of urgency, of being driven, of being uptight – which stabilizes attention.  We are able to focus our attention when we are awake because of our interminable, self-referent inner chatter every second we are awake.  Waking consciousness is a clenching up within oneself – a moment-to-moment flinching from death – embodied in a socially-conditioned striving and intranquility within ourselves that keeps us awake.  By contrast, the attention we have in dreams has little importance to it because we don’t think so much; but as a result we can’t control what we will pay attention to (what will happen next) as well in dreaming as we can when we are awake.  What we experience when dreaming is far more immediate, vivid, gripping, and intense than in the ordered waking world.  It all happens so fast that we can’t separate ourselves from it as we can and do in waking life.  We don’t get weekends off and two weeks paid vacation in the world of dreams, and there’s no TV to watch – no way to make it stop happening or pretend it’s not happening.  We must either be on the qui vive every instant; or else stand there in a stupor; but we are inevitably so caught up in the dream, so much a part of it, that although we are experiencing our feelings in symbolic form in dreams, there is little sense of separatedness there.  Mind exists, but it’s not developed.           

              Mind cannot develop until there is a clearly defined sense of separatedness, which gives mind a pause, a moment’s rest or leisure, in which it can reflect on itself.  It’s that moment’s rest or lull which gives birth to a sense of time and linear continuity.   

(continued …)

                     Ancient humans were doing what we would consider dreaming as their everyday state of mind.  There wasn’t as sharp a distinction then between being awake and being asleep.  Then people slept in snatches, as infants do, and they alternated hunting off and on with dozing.  Most of their hunting was done in a state of mind that we would call sleepwalking (a trance state).   They weren’t just wandering around aimlessly looking for game to hunt:  they could sense what was out there and could project their consciousness forward into their prey telepathically and so anticipate the prey’s movements.  We moderns can still do this now and then, as for example when on the prowl for sex, or when we sense a business opportunity, especially when we feel lucky; but our hunter forebears relied on this intuitive faculty to eat every day.   In other words, ancient hunters were more connected to their world, more psychically attuned, than we moderns are.  They were able to pick up information from their environment which eludes us.  But on the other hand ancient humans had less sense of a self at center than we do, just as we moderns have less sense of there being a solid, separated “us” there when we are dreaming compared to when we are awake.  

                    Waking consciousness is something which evolves; which can be seen to evolve even between human generations.  That’s why people “back then” seem so naïve to us – they were dreaming more than we moderns do.  We’re more awake than our forebears.   Consider too how wide-awake First World societies are compared with most Third World societies:  First Worlders living in the Third World tend to find the natives to be “irresponsible” and spaced-out, when in fact all they’re doing is dreaming more in their everyday waking lives than hup-hup First Worlders do.

            The point is that there isn’t as hard-and-fast a difference between being awake and dreaming as we are accustomed to believe.   It is exactly that belief (that what we do when we are awake is more important than what we do when we are dreaming) which maintains the rigidity of wakefulness – the persuasiveness of the lie that what is happening to us when we are awake is “real” – that is to say, that there is some separated “us” to which things are happening – rather than that the whole shebang is just our projection.   That “us” is symbolized by the thought forms of a body, and an outside world in which things happen to that body. 

                When we are dreaming, we have a body also, and a world outside of it.  That body and world seem perfectly real while we are dreaming, but when we wake up we realize that it was all just a dream.  The interpretation that we have a physical body when we are awake is also merely a belief, exactly like the interpretation that we have a body while we’re dreaming is merely a belief.    While we are dreaming our dream bodies operate with all five of the usual physical senses.  Therefore, we really don’t have any objective criteria for deciding, at any given moment, whether we are awake or asleep.  In precisely the same fashion, our body when we are awake and the world surrounding it are just a dream.  There is no objective difference whatsoever.  That’s what other people and our society do for us:  assure us that we are indeed awake and that what we are experiencing is “real”.  

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“Someday there will be a great awakening when we know that this is all a great dream.  Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman – how dense!  Confucius and you are both dreaming!  And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too.  Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle.  Yet, after ten thousand generations, a great sage may appear who will know their meaning, and it will still be as though he appeared with astonishing speed.  …

“Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased.  He didn’t know he was Chuang Chou.  Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou.  But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou.” 

                              – Chuang Tzu 

“The self dreams the double. … Once it has learned to dream the double, the self arrives at this weird crossroad and a moment comes when one realizes that it is the double who dreams the self.”

                            –  Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power 

“Indeed, perhaps what is now the REM state was the original form of waking consciousness in early brain evolution, when emotionality was more important than reason in the competition for resources.  This ancient form of waking consciousness may have come to be actively suppressed in order for higher brain evolution to proceed efficiently.  This is essentially a new theory of dreaming.”                         

                                 – Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience. 

                  The basic tenet of magic is, that it’s all just a dream; that waking consciousness is but a more highly evolved and specialized facet of dream consciousness.  Dream consciousness came first evolutionarily, and waking consciousness is an outgrowth of dreaming.   Although we tend to believe that there is a vast difference between being awake and dreaming, the fact is that this is indeed merely a belief – a belief which enables us to focus our attention on waking – to isolate it and solidify it – to the exclusion of dreaming. 

We make a big deal out of the difference between waking and dreaming, but the distinction between the two states isn’t as clear as we usually imagine.  When we run past life regressions; or even just listen to music or dance – any time we are so absorbed in any activity that we lose all sense of self perceiving self and are operating on pure “flow” – we are actually closer to being in a dream state than in a waking state.  The less we are consciously controlling what is happening, but rather just letting it happen by itself, the closer we are to dreaming.  The act of  “going to sleep” is just a thought form we use to convince ourselves that we’re not dreaming half the time anyway.   We use the acts of “going to sleep” and “waking up” to separate out the two modes – to make a distinction where in fact little distinction exists.  It’s like two people who have been living together for years finally getting married – it’s a symbolic thing, there’s not much objective difference between the two states.  It’s as if we made up some sort of distinction like “write with your right hand on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays” and “write with your left hand on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays”.  If we got everyone to do this and make it an automatic habit, then after a few centuries the human race would have invented another distinction in consciousness (indeed, this is in fact what different cultures do).  People would find that life on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays was very different from life on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  But it’s all an artificial distinction. 

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                      Philosophers of language tend to be fond of extolling the glories of human language as our “triumph” over the animal kingdom.   In point of fact, language is but a vestigial  remnant of humans’ primordial telepathic ability, which we moderns have been taught to repress along with our other senses.  However, we modern humans still rely upon our latent telepathic powers when language fails us. 

For example:

1)   Mothers know exactly what their babies want; some mothers even let their milk down a few minutes before their babies wake up.

2)   Lovers know the exact instant that the decision is made to go to bed together for the first time.

3)   In foreign countries, we usually know exactly what they’re saying to us, even if we don’t know a word of their language.

4)   We often know when we’re being observed from afar (lift our eyes from reverie to the exact spot from which someone is watching us); this awareness is a remnant from our hunting days.

5)   We often recognize someone we know from way far away, long before we can make out their features, posture, or gait.

6)   And, of course, prophetic dreams, precognition, intuitive hunches – the types of so-called ESP that practically all of us have experienced at one time or another but cannot consciously control, but which our hunter-gatherer forebears relied upon in place of thinking and language.  To them it wasn’t “E”SP – it was a normal part of SP.           

These sorts of telepathic communications are not a matter of body language or subliminal cues (as the rationalists would have it); rather, they are examples of true telepathy, which was a part of humankind’s original equipment.            

The most important concomitant of the invention of agriculture was the invention of the lie.  As long as people could communicate telepathically, lies were not within the realm of possibility, since everyone knew exactly what everyone else was feeling every minute.  Similarly, even we modern humans are not as easily fooled when we’re dreaming as when we’re awake:  in dreams we can sense exactly who or what is evil or to be avoided, in spite of superficial appearances.             

When mindlessness replaced mindfulness, thinking replaced feeling, and the inner dialogue replaced paying attention to the now moment, on a social level verbal communication replaced telepathy.  And the gist of verbal communication is the lie:  all thinking is a lie, in the sense that it is the denial of feeling, of not paying attention to the now moment.  IT’S ALL A LIE.  That’s the gist of waking consciousness.  All rationalism comes down to science; and all science comes down to mathematics; and all mathematics comes down to logic; and all logic comes down to a proposition known as The Law of the Excluded Middle, which states, in effect, that “either a statement is true, or else it is false.”  And that statement is false.  The ability to lie – to ourselves, and other people – is what “elevates” us above the rest of the animal kingdom, and enables us to work hand-in-hand with demons.           

Demon consciousness is far more elaborate, refined, and aesthetic (you might say) than human consciousness.  In fact, demons are as far above humans, consciousness-wise, as humans are above animals; and their opinion of us is about like our opinion of animals.  On the other hand, they are even nastier and more uptight than humans are (further separated from the Spirit).  Actually, they’re pretty slimy and sleazy.  The point is that it’s the demons who taught us how to lie, and the lie is what makes modern society, which is a pack of lies,  possible.  When good faith and mutual respect are gone, contracts and lists of duties and obligations are necessary.             

Humans, guided by their demon mentors, intuitively perceived that a greater degree of mind would result  from a greater sense of separatedness.  And so, over millennia, by painful trial and error, they tried different experiments in separatedness.  Agriculture was the big move, and then it got into greater degrees of division of labor and social complexity.  Humankind went on a rambling, meandering walk for several thousand years.  And it discovered that any separatedness which depends upon denial of true feelings will only lead to self-hatred and self-destruction.           

And now, at this time, humankind has pretty much reached the limits of waking consciousness, having cut itself off from its very roots in dream consciousness.  It will now enter into lucid dreaming.  Dream consciousness is too erratic and mutable; waking consciousness is too ordered and routinized.  Only in lucid dreaming do we have a healthy balance of mind and feeling working together (instead of one dominating the other).  Lucid dreaming is the true union of reason and direct feeling – it is our true estate and destiny. It is the reason why humankind, at the time of the invention of agriculture, explored and refined waking consciousness.  At that time waking consciousness was to humankind what lucid dreaming is to us today:  a new frontier to explore and develop. 

(excerpted from Thought Forms, Copyright © 2000 by Bob Makransky.  All rights reserved) More of Bob Makransky’s articles are posted at:  http://www.dearbrutus.com and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MagicalAlmanac/files 

Subscribe to Bob Makransky’s free monthly ezine at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MagicalAlmanac

            Importance – that is to say, focus:  our ability to focus attention – is the means by which we consolidate death, or grab onto it (though what we believe we’re doing is pushing it away).  Importance is the illusion that we are controlling our death, when actually the reverse is the case.  It’s like hanging on for dear life to a runaway stallion and all the while trying to pretend that everything’s just fine and dandy.  The runaway stallion we cling to is death, and the pretense that we are in any way, shape, or form in charge of the situation is importance.  It’s what keeps us from enjoying the scenery as we gallop along.

            Without our fear of death thought form we would be more aware of our past and probable lives (at least the feeling of them, if not the actual thought forms) as well as of the feelings of other people.  We’d be able to feel them as our own feelings, as infants do.  And thus we’d lose much of our sense of separatedness.  That’s how lunatics and magicians live:  they still have individual lives, things happen to them, but there’s less of a difference between something happening to them or to someone else.  Something which happens to them is no more important than something which happens to someone else.  Their feelings are no more important to them than someone else’s feelings.

            Death is the blank screen upon which all of our lifetimes are painted.  Those lives don’t exist; they’re just momentary plays of light and shadow.  However, to us they seem utterly fascinating and absorbing.  To get to who we really are we would have to pull all of that obsession (energy pinned down by importance) out of all of those lives.  As we do this, we find less and less of what we now consider to be “ourselves”.  We find the barriers which separate us from other people and the world around us becoming less and less distinct.  It becomes harder for us to feel where we end and the next guy begins.

            Death is just a way we keep score, keep count, keep track of things:  it’s how we separate this moment from that one, and this lifetime from that lifetime, and me from you.  Without death the whole thing would just be one big stew.  Death is what props “us” up – if it were not for death we would not have any sense of there being an “us” there at all.   After all, what are “we” anyway?  The sum total of all our experiences (memories) and expectations (desires).  Right?  What else is there?  Nothing, right?

            We, of ourselves, are absolutely nothing.  Zero.  All we are is something that is going to die.  That’s the only reason we have life at all, is to die.  We are something that death conjured up, as an afterthought, to give itself a raison d’etre.  And then, once it created us, we took off like a lumbering Frankenstein monster, and death tagged along to watch what we did.

            All death is doing is watching us.  It doesn’t approve or disapprove of what it sees; it isn’t conscience or shame; it just watches dispassionately.  And what we are is death watching itself.  It has nothing to do with us whatsoever.  We are just a reflection in death’s mirror – a symbol for death.  We have no primary awareness:  just as the moon only reflects light, we only reflect (are a symbol of) death’s awareness of itself.  We only exist as death is watching itself through the metaphor of our lives.

            And that’s why we say that death is mind:  because that sense that we have that we are being watched is our death watching us.  Without our death there watching us, we are nothing – nothing but a little point on a random walk through an infinite jungle in which nothing makes any sense whatsoever – there is no rhyme nor reason to anything (no mind).  Mind (order) can only exist when there is something there watching the path that this random blip on the screen is taking.  And that’s what we call death. 

(adapted from Thought Forms, Copyright © 2000 by Bob Makransky.  All rights reserved).

More of Bob Makransky’s articles are posted at:  www.dearbrutus.com  

Subscribe to Bob Makransky’s free monthly ezine at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MagicalAlmanac

The “you” who is reading this sentence is actually a very different being than the “you” who read the previous sentence, and this is not meant in a trivial sense (that a few cells have split in the interim) – it is meant in the deepest sense possible.  The belief that you are the same person from moment to moment is an illusion, a lie.  To maintain this illusion you must snatch yourself back from death every instant, be on the qui vive every second.  It is precisely this clenching up against death which creates and sustains waking consciousness (gives us the focus and control we lack in dreaming, e.g. the ability to balance a checkbook).  This is why we are so uptight when awake compared to how open and vulnerable we are in dreaming.  To maintain waking consciousness requires incredible fortitude and self-discipline (not to mention completely lying to ourselves every second that we are awake).

In actual fact, we are nothing more than our death.  Our death is the complete written record of our life.  It is all contained in our death.  Our death can be likened to a microdot which contains our entire life in one little point.  We are like the little point which moves on an Etch-a-Sketch board or computer drawing program, blazing out a path through life (making a squiggle on a previously blank screen) and leaving a trail behind it.  The entirety of our being is like that blank screen, and the squiggly path is this particular lifetime.  It has a beginning and an end, and is delimited.  That delimitation is death.

            In other words, just as our sense of space is our sense of having feelings (familiarity); and our sense of time is our sense of having thoughts (importance – our ability to focus our attention); so too is our death our sense that there is some contained entity which is having those feelings and thoughts.  Death is our sense of containment, of boundedness, of singularity, of discreteness.  It is a species of glue which binds random feelings and thought forms together into an integrated, cohesive whole.

            Death projects a body thought form to symbolize this sense of discreteness, solidity, stability, boundedness – just as we project a body thought form when we are dreaming, to symbolize “us”.    What we consider our unity – our individuality, our continuity, our  “us-ness” – is actually our death.   When we cling to our sanity, our sense of being centered in a stable environment where things are more or less predictable, what we are clinging to is our death.  Wakefulness could not exist without it.

Observe that in reality there is no such distinction as importance – but if we were to say that one is more important than the other, certainly our death is more important than (primary to) our life.  Our life is just a symbolic reflection of our death; it’s not the main issue at all.  To think that our life is more important than our death is not only gross stupidity, but plays right into death’s hands.

            Death is neither malevolent or benevolent – it just is, like the force of gravity.  Gravity can both hurt us and help us, depending upon how we use it (or let ourselves be used by it).  So too with death.  Death actually calls all the shots and we have to dance to its tune, really; but we can do that either elegantly or spasmodically.  Master magicians waltz with their death; caress it fondly; and then seduce it.

(continued …)

When we say that death is watching, what we’re saying is that the act of watching is what we mean by death.  Anything that watches will die.  This is because watching – separatedness – is a lie which eventually must run out.  Separatedness is a lie which all sentient beings tell themselves.  That lie is what embeds them in linear time.    If a vortex in a river were to suddenly start saying to itself something like “I’m a vortex!  I’m a vortex!  I’m a unique, individual, separated vortex!”  then that vortex would be lying to itself – it’s not a unique, individual, separated anything.  But by telling itself that lie, it embeds itself in a linear temporality in which it watches this, and then it watches that, and then it watches the other thing; until the vortex runs out of energy and dissolves back into the river and stops lying to itself about having been separated in the first place – i.e., it dies.  But it was “dead” all along.  Watching = separatedeness = death; they are just different ways of talking about the same phenomenon. 

Our sense of personal continuity in the dream state is not based upon a linear, sequential, unfolding of events, as it is in the waking state, but rather is based upon an awareness of self as experiencer (i.e., one’s death).  That vibrant, alive quality that dreams have is actually awareness of death.  In dreams we are aware of death every second, willy-nilly, because there’s nothing solid in dreams to cling to:  there’s no way of toning down the intensity of what we are experiencing by focusing our attention elsewhere (on our thoughts).  We’re face-to-face with death every second in dreams.  That’s why we feel more alive in dreams than we do in wakefulness – because we are seeing with the eyes of death; we are one with death when we are dreaming, which is why we can’t die in dreams – we’re already dead.  In wakefulness we make a separation between ourselves and our deaths – an absurd pretense, but a useful one for certain purposes (such as being able to focus attention enough to e.g. balance a checkbook) – and that’s why wakefulness is duller, less vivid, less joyous than dreaming. 

            Here’s the answer to the mystery:  what we consider to be “ourselves” is just a given thought form at a given moment.  Our lifetimes are like a collection of scenes or tableaux strung together by mind into a lattice of threaded beads.  All of the beads (or life events) which directly connect to a given bead are probable realities.  From that bead, mind can take any number of directions to another bead.  The black threads connecting the beads are death – we literally die from moment-to-moment.  We always have to pass through death to move to the next bead (the next scene; the next moment); and if we take a turn which leads to a long run of black thread till the next bead, that’s “real” death and the next bead is birth in another lifetime. 

            Another way of saying this is, we have ourselves separated into a bunch of little pieces, each of which feels isolated and disconnected from (more important than) the rest.  However, within each little piece we have tremendous focus and stick-to-itiveness (“fear of death”) – a willingness to keep up the struggle to stay awake and separated no matter how much of a bummer it is. 

(continued …)

When we listen to sounds, we can distinguish between two phenomena:  “sounds” and “listener listening to sounds”: 

“Sounds” is when we are hearing all sounds indiscriminately, like a tape recorder does; when all sounds are impacting on our awareness with equal vividness. 

“Listener listening to sounds” is when we are focusing on one specific sound, and the other sounds are in the background of our awareness.  That “listener listening to sounds”– that focus, or sense of there being a detached perceiver there who is perceiving – is what magicians call lower self.   At least, that is what dies when the person’s body dies.  When there is no longer a sense of a separated perceiver perceiving, when everything is impacting upon our awareness with equal vividness, what is left is a feeling of oneness, a background of peacefulness, which is what magicians call higher self, or death.  Death is in the background all the time.  Death is the canvas upon which our lives are painted.

            When we feel that we are watching ourselves – that there is some part of us that is watching our every move – that part is our death.  It is constantly looking over our shoulder; it’s the sense we have that something out there is watching us (the Spirit is watching us too, not to mention lots of other beings, both angelic and demonic; but our root self-consciousness, the sense that we feel within ourselves that something is watching us, is our death). 

Observe that this is not the false watcher thought form, which we use to watch ourselves with glory, and exalt in how marvelous we are.  That watcher is a phony copy of the true watcher – death – which is utterly cold and dispassionate.  The false watcher – our self-consciousness, or need to keep referring everything back to ourselves – is a thought form which takes anything that is going on and glamorizes it, and imagines other people applauding us for it.  We learn the false watcher thought form from our society:  the false watcher thought form is in fact society’s way of papering over death.  We do have a true watcher watching us, and that watcher is our death.   The false watcher is society’s way of eradicating death from people’s awareness, to make people act as if they weren’t going to die, to make people forget about death as much as possible.  Only by making people forget about death can they be led into believing that there could be anything more important than the fact that they could die in the next instant.  And part of banishing awareness of death is substituting a glory thought form of watching (“watching oneself in glory; watching oneself with approval / approbation”) for the true watcher thought form, which is death. 

            Another way of saying this is:  the sense we have that we are perceiving; that there is some detached perceiver there perceiving; that there is some “us” there to which things are happening; is our death.  Without that sense of a detached perceiver there, we wouldn’t be able to focus on anything.  Everything that we see, hear, touch, etc. at every moment – not to mention bleed-throughs from other lifetimes and probable realities – would bombard our senses with equal impact.  We would be overwhelmed with information; indeed, we would have no sense that “we” exist at all (just as an infant doesn’t) – we would be pure perception.  This is a common experience when one is tripping on psychedelic drugs; for example, when we take a shower while tripping, we can feel (are aware of) every individual drop of water as it hits our skin as a discrete event.  On the other hand we can’t balance a checkbook while tripping because we can’t focus that much attention – there’s too much going on to be able to focus.  To use mind – to be able to focus on one thing at a time by separating it out from its background – is to create a perceiver which is perceiving; and that’s what we call death. 

(continued …)