This question came up in one of our weekly Zoom discussions about Peter Brown's work:
"You say that everything that appears is 'made of' the same consciousness. But in my experience, the waking state and the dreaming state seem to be quite different experiences in consciousness. And then there is the so-called unconscious. How can you say that these states are all the same?"
The waking state and the dreaming state do indeed seem quite different in our experience. The waking state usually seems to be solid, real, and constant whereas a dream often feels insubstantial, illusory, and fleeting.
But when we look closely, the waking state is actually quite strange. The solidity and constancy we assume it has turns out to be a complete fallacy.
For instance, the "stability" of the room I'm sitting in morphs completely, experientially speaking, when I move my head or shift in my seat. And exactly what I'm experiencing right now has never been experienced before and will never be experienced again. Every apparent "thing" in my experience is in constant flux, and each moment is gone as soon as it appears, leaving little to no trace of what it seemed to be.
With only a little bit of acute observation of our direct experience, we can discover that the waking state only seems solid and constant. It's actually a dynamic flow of experiential qualities that's quite similar to the transient, illusory nature of a dream.
And dreams themselves aren't always as we superficially imagine them to be, either. They seem transient and illusory from the perspective of the waking state, but unless you've gone lucid in the dream, the dream seems completely real while you're dreaming. The monster that's chasing you, the street you're walking down, the anxiety about being late...it all feels solid and convincing from within the perspective of the dream. It's only from the perspective of the waking state that we remember dreams as being more illusory and illogical.
And what if we try to look at the waking state from within a dream? At best, it might seem fuzzy and incoherent. Or, more likely, it has completely disappeared. How solid and constant does the waking state seem then?
Despite ample experiential evidence that neither the waking nor the dreaming state are as we usually assume them to be, we gloss over this insight with conditioned interpretive overlays. But waking and dreaming are simply two modes, two perspectives, of the one Reality, and the differences we perceive between them are not fundamental but interpretive. They’re perspective-dependent. By Its very nature, Reality is continually "slip sliding" in and out of different modes and perspectives. Each mode has its own specific flavors and qualities that seem convincing from within that perspective.
In Peter's words, "The intelligence has an amazing facility for erecting seemingly seamless virtual scenarios that appear self-verifying within their context."
In other words, Reality is the ultimate virtual reality machine. Once it "goes into" a certain perspective, everything within that perspective seems true and convincing.
But parsing experience into any 'states' at all is completely arbitrary. Where does one end and another begin? What about liminal, in-between states? A state of being in a drunken stupor? The state of being sick? The state of not yet having had your morning coffee? Or that of having had way too much coffee? Even the much-discussed 'enlightened' versus 'unenlightened' states so popular in spiritual circles?
We could slice experience into infinite 'states,' each feeling quite different. But those differences are a matter of perspective and interpretation, not fundamental essence. Any divisions in experience are arbitrary and exist only in imagination and not in the actuality of experience itself.
So what remains constant through all of this experiential "strangeness"?
The Presence of Experience Itself.
Notice how It never wavers. It is One Singular Event, continually showing up as infinitely different flavors and textures, in infinitely different dimensions, with infinitely different degrees of apparent detail and cohesion. That is what Reality does. It's its nature to do so.
Imagination then groups this infinity of experiential qualities into oversimplified categories: a table, a pen, a body, the waking state, the dreaming state. But these categories are simply interpretive overlays.
So yes, the waking and dream states do have very different characteristics, but they are not fundamentally separate from The One Event. They are the same Radiant Presence appearing as different modes of Itself.
I periodically lead (or co-lead with my friend John Astin) weekly Zoom discussions exploring Peter Brown's teachings on the Yoga of Radiant Presence. These sessions focus on directly investigating the nature of experience and consciousness through practical inquiry and shared exploration. Whether you're new to this kind of exploration or have been engaged with it for years, you're welcome to join us. Feel free to message me if you're interested.
We could “slice experience into infinite ‘states’” …🤯
As far as events go, as Dena says, there's only ONE of them!