Dream terminology

[CFTraveler]

Liminal:

1 : of or relating to a sensory threshold
2 : barely perceptible
3 : of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition : in-between, transitional

from:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/liminal

[sleeper]

I enjoy often exploring liminal states, they are fun places and are always rewarding. But the only truly liminal thing I've found is my understanding of those states.

[CFTraveler]

Ditto there.

[sleeper]

Not much controversy yet

[CFTraveler]

I know we're so boring.

[sleeper]

This morning, I laid in bed, reflecting on some of my nocturnal experiences. hehe.

In my nightly meditations, i have startling clarity of thought and often have very powerful realizations. I'll think: "I should write this down," but I keep having the realization. As i arise into waking consciousness, I ask: "how could I write this down? it wouldn't make any sense." Once I'm awake, I can remember the experience but I can't understand it completely and it drives me nuts. I know that waking consciousness is different from the other levels of consciousness, but I'm interested in the details.

As I lay there this morning, I silently asked the question, and had a little chat with a voice in my head. Here is the main part:

The problems of the Brain are Threefold:

1. The Mind is the source of all wisdom and knowledge in the universe, so it is trusted.
2. The Brain will betray you the first chance it gets, because of the limited nature of knowledge.
3. The brain tends to interpret thoughtform stuff as abstract, rather than the singularity, which it is.

the third surprised me. I had assumed that thoughforms were abstract, even though my experiences with them were the opposite. The brain is always accused of being overly simple, even though it's always breaking ideas down into smaller pieces. Even our brain parts are compartmentalized, separate from eachother, which sounds pretty abstract to me.

Anyway, I don't know much about this, and I don't usually talk to spirit guides. i don't even know why he used the word "singularity," because it has a bunch of different meanings and I tend to shy away from the new age quantum spiritual ideas. But I intend to explore the liminal states, with these types of questions in mind, and just observe.

[CFTraveler]

Maybe because....everything is one (singularity) and the one is undifferentiated-but as you said, the brain tries to break it down- and the closest it can get to differentiating without differentiating (or rather informing) is to abstract it- and the simplest form is the abstract (or so we think, I could be wrong about this) hence the abstractification (prob. not a real word) of the undifferentiated.
Does this make sense? It does to me in a way.
The one I find the most interesting is #2-

The Brain will betray you the first chance it gets, because of the limited nature of knowledge

I can see how that can be, since to be able to know you have to break down, hence the limited nature of information. And the brain tendency of adding information (matrixing) based on the info it already has.
Interresteeng.

[sleeper]

what you said about abstract things makes perfect sense to me. I'm wondering if that's actually the best way for us to learn, to break everything down into differentiated parts, and experience them individually. If that's true, then it might corroborate some other things i've been considering; namely, that incremental development is the only fair way to develop, from an individual perspective, and it's the only comprehensive way, from a cosmic perspective. So while meditation and divine experiences are no doubt important, mental development (in ever increasing ways) seems to be the critical part for "bridging the gap" between the physical, and the divine.

...

I still haven't learned to trust my guides.

they have told me some mind boggling things.

[Korpo]

I wonder how your brain made the jump from A to Z here, because there seems to be no connection between the message you got and your conclusion.

Meditation is a way to experience the whole directly. Meditation offers the possibility to transcend duality and be what you are contemplating. It therefore is in this regard superior to any analysis as there is no lack of knowledge - being the object, transcending the object is the ultimate "knowledge" of the thing you seek knowledge of.

Abstraction is a problem because it seems to explain things while it does not. Forming a model of something always and inevitably requires dropping information. Abstraction is dropping of information.

Abstraction is the process or result of generalization by reducing the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, typically in order to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose.

(from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction)

A word like "dog" is a massive abstraction from a certain "breed", "breed" from the individual being. All of these represent loss of information in order to still be able to reason about something without being overwhelmed. This kind of sequential analysis and thought can never iterate enough. It has to always drop information and streamline information in order to continue being able to digest, but the thing digested is no longer the real thing. It is instead an abstraction of no substance, building on other abstractions.

The "Mind" as your message calls it here is strictly distinct from the "Brain". That is IMO no accident. As the brain "channels" the mind, distortions by the brain are limiting access to the "Mind". What if this mind is thinking holographically, from a perspective of the whole and thinks happening simultaneously, seamlessly folding into each other and unfolding, with no real separation? There exist clues that this is so. Try to squeeze this "through" a brain that is addicted to linear, single-item thought. The brain needs to break things down into chunks it thinks it understands, but this chunks put together do not form a whole. On the other hand, if you break a hologram into pieces, the pieces still contain the whole. Each individual mind IMO has the potencial to be this part of the whole, to think holographically.

These two kinds of thoughts are at odds to each other, and might be the explanation why "messages", "visions", "channelings" and "dreams" are often so hard to understand - we process one thing at a time and have a hard time even being mindful of the context, get stuck on words, etc. At the same time we are bombarded with a multi-sensory message chockfull of content. I have encountered something like this at least once.

If you think linear thought is the sole answer, if you think you can iterate the infinite - it can't be done. (It is even mathematically impossible if that has any importance to you.) At some point the perspective of duality needs to be dropped or the whole can never be understood. It cannot be approximated. If you lived forever, that approach would take you forever. While incremental development is necessary for a while, ultimately another approach is required. At some point it requires a plunge into the unknown, the "leap of faith", and meditation and moments of grace provide the opportunity to change the whole approach and change the whole thing at the root.

If I listened to every instrument of a performance separately after each other, is it the same as listening to the performance? Is listening to each tone present in a piece of music only once the same as listening to a tune? Is the same tune played in two different locations the same? Are you really the same listener every time you listen to a CD? Everything changes, even if only subtly. Abstraction "dictates" that things are the same that aren't, and while that may be fine for science it is not for personal experience.

I find it amazing that a lot of things if not all in the brain seem to be arranged holographically, but we think linearly. This might be more of a product of our upbringing than the actual potential of the brain.

Oliver

[CFTraveler]

A word like "dog" is a massive abstraction from a certain "breed", "breed" from the individual being. All of these represent loss of information in order to still be able to reason about something without being overwhelmed. This kind of sequential analysis and thought can never iterate enough. It has to always drop information and streamline information in order to continue being able to digest, but the thing digested is no longer the real thing. It is instead an abstraction of no substance, building on other abstractions.

Yet the word 'dog' encompasses more than the word 'poodle', because a poodle is only one kind of dog, while all dogs are 'dogs'. Which is what I was getting at. Abstraction is the brain's (not mind's) way of trying to comprehend the infinite.
I'm still not sure what your objection is to this interpretation.