What do I make of my memories of transcendence?

[DefinitelyNotARobot]

I'm sure some of you can help me with this one.

Imagine you are tripping on mushrooms. You're having a great time and suddenly everything just goes BOOOM! Suddenly your sense of self starts to expand beyond the "boundaries" of your skin. A second ago you were a bag of meat and bones and a couple of thoughts here and there, but suddenly you've turned into the entire room! The human is still there, but the human isn't the protagonist anymore. The human is just kind of sitting there... within you... Just another object in the room like the chair beneath the persons butt. There actually isn't a distinction between the human and the chair. The human and the walls. The sense of self is flowing through everything in the room. You ARE the room and everything within it!

Fast forward a little. Almost two years later to be exact. You are sitting there on a chair and you are trying to get back into this state. You remember exactly how it felt. You remember how it felt when the dam, which we call ego, broke and unleashed the "I" out into the world. No "you". No "they". Just a sense of belonging. Everything belongs to everything. Everything belongs to itself. You remember all of this and you are trying real hard to make your way back into this state. But you can't. "Why won't it work?" You start asking yourself. Then suddenly you get it... Because it's just a damn memory! It isn't real. It's just a thought. An image in your mind. It's not actual one-ness. It's just a thought about an experience of oneness. A fantasy. A fiction.

That's the situation I am in right now. I remember being one with everything. But that's a memory... of a SEPERATE event. It's not now. It's "back then". So what the hell do I do with this memory? Just throw it away? Just act as if I've never experienced oneness before?

The problem is that I am not consciously experiencing oneness right now. I am a guy sitting behind a screen typing some text about some event which supposedly took place in another time. So I can't really make anything of that memory. That memory doesn't represent what I am experiencing right now. But... when do I plan on experiencing this sense of oneness again? In the future? THAT'S JUST MORE IMAGINATION! MORE THOUGHTS! I am here. Right now. I am not yesterday. I am not tomorrow. I am here. HERE. Do I just go: "Well I'll just get enlightened another time in another place.". What other time? What other place? If this "now" truly is eternal, then why am I not enlightened already? Why am I separate? Thinking that there is a future to become enlightened in is just another thought. Thinking that there was a past where I had a glimpse of some mystical experience is just another thought. It's all thoughts. There is no other time. This is the only time to do it. I can just go "well I'll make it there another day" until I die one day. But if the now is eternal, then how can I expect to find something that isn't now? How can something that isn't now happen? It makes sense to the ego, but to doesn't make sense to my intuitive sense of: "Hey it's just a damn fiction. Yesterday is a thought, so is tomorrow, so what am I waiting for? ".

I hope any of this makes sense hahaha. I am just a little confused on how to find something which can't be found outside of the now, when I don't seem to have found it right now...

[Batman]

Having an Enlightenment or Awakening experience is one thing, and transforming the self that you created is another. You are saying: Consciousness is awesome, but what about me?

Well, if you want the embody Consciousness in your self, you will have the change your self. You need to change 'you'. There is no other way. You want more connectedness and less separation? Be more honest and straightforward. Study the self that you created, because it is what causes you to feel separate and identify with specific aspects of experience, while excluding others. You constructed a conceptual and fabricated self in order to persist as some form of experience. By distinguishing a specific form and directing your life force towards maintaining it, the result is separation from other forms. This is fundamentally the illusion of the self-mind, and a few awakenings are usually not enough to break the self that you are being for some time.

You want to attain 'Christ Consciousness' or 'Buddha Consciousness'? That means you need to transform into a self that represents Consciousness (or Truth) as much as possible. This is no easy task, because the mechanisms of self-survival are not designed to reflect the nature of being and existence, they are designed to serve the survival of the organism.

I wish you good luck.

[DefinitelyNotARobot]

@Batman Thanks for your answer. What way of studying yourself would you recommend? Things that come to my mind are: Contemplation, journaling, Self-inquiry, mindfulness meditation, psychedelics I guess. Anything else you'd add to that? 

[Batman]

No, there is really nothing to add. There are many traps in this work, so being honest with your self is key for transforming. I think when it comes to transforming into a different self, Psychedelics and Contemplation are powerful because you can become more conscious of what a self is, what mind is, why are you generating the emotions you generate in certain conditions, what are your core beliefs/assumptions regarding who you are and what reality or life is, etc.

If you had some direct consciousness of who you really are, than this pursuit becomes much more possible and less prone to limiting beliefs. It is very easy to feel trapped and stuck in the present self (of course, this is the self's purpose...). When transforming, inner resistance is to be expected. Moreover, inner resistance and emotional response will signify that you are touching some deep aspect within yourself, that you are not conscious of. The more you become conscious of how and why you created the self that you are Now, the easier it becomes to change it.

Unfortunately for my self, which I mostly adopted from much childhood trauma and fear, this is exceptionally hard. Sometimes it feels that in order to change I must express the hurt and fear the child I was more than 10 years ago. A lot of times I get that Consciousness is 'buried' right behind the fabricated self, and this is why Consciousness work and Transformation are not mutually exclusive, but overlap in some way.

 

[vladorion]

Psychedelics can catapult you there and give you the experience, but you still have to do the manual work of dismantling the ego structure that is the sole reason you're not in that state permanently.

I think the first and most important step in this work is establishing yourself in the present moment. This effectively eliminates the mental ego (The mythical "I" that lives in the head"). And then it's the deepening of your present moment experience and dissolving the deeper layers of the ego. Without this step, spirituality turns into more fantasy.

The fact that you notice that it's just a memory now and not your experience is very good. The mind can create very convincing memories of an experience which some people take to be the real thing. Establishing yourself in the present moment is how you avoid this trap.

[DefinitelyNotARobot]

Thanks for the advice! I've been working on dropping the veil of past/present/future. My ego really doesn't like that. These concepts just seem so essential to my existence as a separate self. Both my memories of the past and my expectations for the future. 

Right now I've decided that I don't want to be a victim anymore. I don't want to be a victim of the past anymore. I don't want to let my perceptions of the past tell me who I'm supposed to be right here right now. I don't want to let my past dictate what the future must hold for me. I want to take ownership of my life. I want the present moment to be a gift of endless possibilities, rather than a limiting curse from the past. I want to write my own story. And NOW is the time!

✌️