[true]

When I used to think of people, myself included, as being asleep or unconscious, I had seen this model for reality, that it was so difficult to wake up because we were in a dream within a dream within a dream...

I recently verified this from my latest perspective, observing thoughts arising -
When we perceive thoughts arising and falling away, we are pretty close to being 'awake' or seeing actual reality. But when we think about thoughts the dreaming/sleeping begins. While observing thoughts arising, there is nothing to be done about them, they belong to no one, they mean nothing, etc. But as soon as we think about the thoughts arising, we give them some power, some reality in that they are worth acting upon, believing in, doing something about, meaningful to me, because they are 'my' thoughts...

The amazing thing is, it isn't even 'us' who are thinking about the thoughts. Thought is thinking about itself! Thought is self-reflecting in order to create 'reality'. As I've stated elsewhere, there is no 'me', just a bundle of thoughts, collected, given adhesion, gravity, by awareness localizing itself to the body-mind. Just look at the internal dialogue (I intentionally didn't say 'your' internal dialogue). When you try to stop it, it keeps going, in spite of you. It has a mind of its own. It isn't 'you' or 'yours'. Thought is reflecting upon itself to create the universe. It is doing this IN awareness, which IS what we are, and we can make awareness be still and thought will stop self-reflecting and the world will stop. We don't actually make awareness be still - we remember the silence, the stillness that awareness is behind everything.

Anyway, this sheds light on breaking the mirror of self-reflection. The self, which is a collected bundle of thoughts, self-reflects as a collective, just as thoughts self reflect, and this creates the illusion of the 'me' or ego or self-important human form.

So I just thought it was cool, the dream within a dream thing - thoughts arising; thoughts self-reflecting; thoughts thinking in collective bundles giving rise to the idea of self; self interacting and reflecting other selves' thoughts (talking to others, thinking about others, caring what others think of us, etc.; self interacting with its reflection as if it were an actual world 'out there'...

[true]

There are certain things that just have to be seen if you want to escape the closed loop of thinking as you see and seeing as you think.

1. Thought and thinker are one and the same. Don't fool yourself by thinking that you choose or control thought in any way. Anything that you can call "you" is composed of thoughts, internal dialogue, knowledge. You have to see this or you are ignorant and struggling in ignorance. No insult or judgement - just a fact.

2. The thinker and thought create a virtual world that parallels the real world but can never, ever touch it. "You" can only experience your knowledge, which acts as a mediator between yourself and the world; a translator, an organizer, an interpreter. But this is false from the beginning. As stated above, the knower and its knowledge are one, but it creates the false sense of knower as subject and knowledge as object - a false division that must be seen through.
All knowledge is dead; life is alive.

3. There is nothing "you" can do. Anything you attempt, any decision you make, any effort to control, alter or change, will come from this dead knowledge and will miss the mark. Therefore, the closest you can come to doing anything is to completely give up your reliance on knowledge and the mind as knower - in other words, the only thing you can do is do nothing, cause anything that comes to mind will not be it, will still be dead knowledge. You have to see that we are not after knowledge, but we are after life. And in order to live, the knower and thinker must die. Anything you've ever read or been told, no matter how wise and enlightened, will be of no value in an encounter with the actual present - the nagual. There is no way to prepare, there is no instigation of the 'event', it is not an 'experience'. This will make no sense to the mind.