Heightned Awareness
I’ve just started to enter what I believe to be heightned awareness. For me it’s blocks of time where everything seems clear and all the pieces fit. It’s so exilerating during these times, my whole body feels charged with energy and all I can keep thinking is Wow! I want to feel this way all the time 🙂 My problem is I become obsessed with these states after they pass. Lets talk about your experiences in heightned awareness, I would love to see where this new state of mind is going. Please be detailed.
D5 Creation
Sounds familiar. I feel like I’ve been through similar experiences.
For me it was a sudden shift one day into intense clarity, or at least “intense” from the viewpoint of my life up to that point. And then fear started creeping in. Fear of fear, fear of slipping back into normal awareness. And slip I did. But then moments of clarity would come round again, and again and again.
In fact this kind of reminds me of the story of the human mold that is in “The Fire From Within”. It only reminds me of it because it seems to be similar feelings.
Don Juan told Carlos that when seers first see the human mold (as well as mystics who chance upon it at times), they often believe that they are seeing god. Carlos described how he was in absolute awe the first time he witnessed the human mold. But as don Juan had him see it many times over, it was still beautiful, but lost it’s awesomeness, and in time he was able to witness it without indulging.
That feeling reminds me of reaching moments of clarity, heightened awareness, moments of high energy, and such. At first many of us get so caught up in the intensity of it that we indulge in feelings of awe until we drain ourselves back to normal awareness.
But as we keep returning to it, it becomes nothing, or it becomes more our constant state of being. And so as we breathe, as we open our eyes, so we are wide awake and aware, and it’s like the morning and the night. It’s nothing and yet it’s astonishing at once.
What you both describe I sometimes feel but mainly my first enemy comes to reclaim me & melancholy descends. I feel this forum is a great help as I am inspired by other peoples victories. I know that if I keep being impeccable I will win in the end. We all will.
I remember when I went for an extended meditation retreat (well before my CC days) and I started experiencing different sorts of consciousness shifts — the first 2 or 3 days it was an “undesirable” shift into sleepiness and sleep — later it was a shift into what I now think I know as the 2nd attention (or a quasi-second-attention because what do I really know?).
At any rate, it’s the SHIFT of consciousness that was (and is) so STARTLING that it calls attention to itself thus derailing the actual new state. At that retreat I found I had to go through that shift a BUNCH of times before I could face it with sobriety. (And, true to tell, the supposed undesirable shifts into sleepiness actually counted as EXPERIENCE with shifts and helped inure me too, in the end.)
Sobriety through the change in consciousness is de rigueur.
I can’t help but say that that statement sounds a little funny.
Firstly, “in the end” will be at any given moment. The end may come before I finish typing this sentence. I think it’s incredibly meaningful to take this as deeply to heart as possible.
And of course the other part, is that when we think of acting in terms of winning, we are obviously acting with expectations… a sure killer.
Acting for the hell of it, with no expectations because we know without a doubt that we will die at any moment, reduces everything we do to meaningless folly.
I take your point. My command of language in conveying my feelings needs a warrior’s touch as well as the rest of my life. Winning suggests that I am investing in an outcome. At this moment in time though it does matter to me that I don’t fall back into old behaviour patterns. Perhaps I should examine why this is so. I was going to write about why I feel it is important to keep on the path, but halfway through writing I realised it does not matter & that it should not become an obsession. Your comment has made me think. Thanks.
heightened awareness is the door for the second attention
and, I reiterate, it requires tremendous sobriety to navigate through that door …
One thing I remember Carlos mentioning about heightened awareness in one of his books is how difficult it is to remember what happened during the times of heightened awareness. A lot of his memories were forgotten until he managed to have them resurface to the normal attention through his impeccability.
I bet it’s possible that some of us have operated in heightened awareness much more often than we’re aware of.
That also reminds me of the strange way that memory flashes occur in normal life. Remembering a dream that occurred years ago out of the blue, or a long distant memory, seems like perhaps our assemblage point makes a miniscule shift to a location where that memory occurred.
I think the difficulty everyone has even remembering dreams is a case in point. Dreams and that displacement of the assemblage point — takes fortitude, impeccability, sobriety to accomplish recall. Oh, yeah, and fluidity.
Recently I spent an absolutely fitful night dreaming, hours on end. I would wake up and go back to sleep and start up again almost exactly where I left off. I was exhausted in the morning. And it was all about nothing much: some stuff going on a some hotel, people coming and going all over the place, the usual melee.
Later in the morning, though, I remembered that in the middle of all that someone was talking to me about traversing into the unknown. That occurred in some sort of special attention! I wish I could REMEMBER more of the details of it.
It’s in there nonetheless. “A warrior knows that he is waiting and what he is waiting for …”
yeah, i am familiar with similar re-occuring memories that pop up. sometimes, it’s from the waking life, sometimes it’s from a dream. sometimes, i have memories of a dream with someone who was in the dream with me and I’m just about to talk to them about it not initially realizing that it happened only in a dream before i stop myself and realize that it was a dream memory.
yeah ensonar, i think i agree with your explanation of the miniscule shift in the assemblage point…i do remember don juan saying that and emotions are where memories are stored. it’s like there are many analogies in life that repeat themselves…maybe for us to learn lessons that we habitually don’t; maybe to get a more precise and deeper understanding of our follies.
yeah joyseph, i wouldnt be surprised at all if that hotel dream you mentioned was a “real” dream. i remember don juan mentioning that it’s possible that there are multiple entities watching us in our dreams; sometimes they can appear as a friend so they can interact w/ you, sometimes, they choose to remain un-noticed just so they can observe you. i personally think we’re probably being observed all the time; even in our waking life.
joyseph, it’s like someone was trying to give you a ‘push’ in the direction of development when they mentioned traversing into the unknown while the dream was on-going at that time.
wouldn’t it be great if science could get precise enough to actually detect or measure the assemblage point somehow…i think the assemblage point is on the spiritual level though and not the physical; it wouldn’t be science then since science deals with physical matter by definition. we’d have to work backwards from gaining spiritual sight to be able to “see” and then create equipment to consistently measure what some can “see”
hmm, i wonder what we would name this new “spiritual” science?
(sorry for the ADD-like tanget guys.)
Salutations and greetings,
It seems to me that there are an infinite amount of positions of heightned awareness. Some of these states are useless, or at least useless from the standpoint of what I understand our quest to be. Sometimes it’s even reckless to put ourselves in such states during certain times. But for me states of heightned awareness convince my body that what I am doing if REAL! Acting without believing is definetely a not-doing, but in this case I think I’ll pass.