“Miracle of miracles! All people are enlightened, but they don't know about it!"
Buddha
What are altered states of consciousness? What do we mean when we talk about enlightenment? How can altered states of consciousness be used to advance the path to enlightenment? What does a person experience in an altered state of consciousness?
Enlightenment is associated with certain types of knowledge, which is specific to a particular state of consciousness. Complete and perfect enlightenment must include altered states of consciousness.
In Hindu and Buddhist meditation practices, there is the concept of samadhi - a state in which the very idea of one's own individuality disappears, but not consciousness. Samadhi is that state of enlightenment, which is expressed in the calmness of consciousness, the removal of contradictions between the inner and outer worlds.
In Sanskrit, "samadhi" means "one-pointed concentration of consciousness." In the state of samadhi, sensory experience is irrelevant. A person loses touch with the material world, with everything he is used to. There is only one aspiration left - to awakening (nirvana).
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Three steps lead to awakening (nirvana):
The first step is "Samadhi without an image." You need to imagine that your mind is a clear sky. Any clouds - black, gray, gold - are our thoughts that obscure the sky. Clouds appear again and again, but they should be driven away until the sky is clear.
The second stage is “Samadhi without direction”. This state, when you do not want to follow one way or another, there are no more desires. One has to imagine a ball lying on a flat surface, which remains stationary, despite the fact that it is round and can roll.
And the third stage is “Samadhi of emptiness”. It's all the same in this state. There is no evil, no good, no pleasant, no unpleasant, no past, no future. There is no close, no distant. Everything is like one another. And since the differences are erased, then there is no reason to have special feelings for anything.
Ancient Indian philosophers divided states of consciousness into four classes: the waking state of consciousness, sleep without dreams, sleep with dreams, and the "fourth state" called in modern psychology - an altered state of consciousness.
According to ancient Toltec practices, an altered state of consciousness is a dream. The Toltecs kept ancient knowledge about the "primary energy", which "animates and sets in motion everything that exists." The ancient Chinese called it Tao, and the ancient Toltecs called it the Eagle. The warriors of the new Toltec community call this power the nagual.
Toltec "vision" is a state of consciousness in which a person is able to perceive the world in a different, completely new way, in which people are perceived as luminous beings. The practical system of the Toltec teachings is the art of dreaming - an area in which all actions and events occurring outside of ordinary time and ordinary reality fall: altered states of consciousness, dreams and vision. Having mastered the art of dreaming, a person is able to control his usual sleep, transferring it to a controlled state of consciousness.
Lucid dreams are a special altered state of consciousness in which a person is aware that he is dreaming and can, to one degree or another, control its content. The world of our dreams is an objective reality.
Since ancient times, priests, magi, shamans, magicians have been studying the secrets of human consciousness, developing methods that introduce a person into an "altered state of consciousness" - a state of meditative concentration - "Bardo of Meditative Concentration", in which a person went through the cycles of birth, death and subsequent resurrection …
Our consciousness can be divided into two components: first - the "main" consciousness creates a dream, that is, the entire physical world, the second considers itself to be living in this dream. In a dream, we do not suspect that the dream world is generated by our "main" consciousness; it seems to us objective and separate from us. So in life, our "main" consciousness creates the world through regularity. But some events that take place in the incomprehensible, "in reality" are transformed by consciousness into random events of our physical world.
Let's imagine that the world in which each of us lives is a dream of some kind of awareness. If the awareness of whose dream we are is sufficiently prepared for the perception of the Absolute, then we will increasingly be attracted by the random world, not the natural one. Regularities and accidents are generated by our consciousness. Awareness that has reached the required level of perception should wake up by itself, shaking off its own dream-world, which it no longer needs.
So it is with you and me, sleep stops if we realize that this is just a dream, and remember ourselves in another world - in reality. But how to make a dream turn from a simple illusion into a bridge between the real and the imaginary world? The Buddhist doctrine of karma is based on the fact that the realization, having got rid of passions and attachments in one of its own dream-worlds, will be free from them in the next.
There are two levels of awareness: the level of the visible world, in which everything is ordered, and also the unmanifest level of energy. We consider only the visible level to be real. It seems to us that everything is systematized, stable and predictable here. However, at this level, everything is fleeting, temporary and subject to change.
In order to streamline our lives and act more effectively to balance our awareness of the world, each of us should sort out our relationships with people in the present and in the past. It is necessary to train attention, eliminate painful states of consciousness and unhealthy emotions, achieve physical and energetic renewal of the body, open up previously inaccessible forms of perception and develop the ability to stop internal dialogue.
With any change in our perception of the world, our consciousness and, therefore, our knowledge changes. Thanks to this knowledge, the Toltecs learned to “dream” alternative states of reality - to discover alternative paths in the evolution of consciousness.
The Toltecs used four dimensions, and therefore it is impossible to understand them in a frame of reference rigidly limited to three dimensions, they developed the ability to see, manipulated their consciousness and at the same time achieved an altered state of consciousness.
Author: Valentina Zhitanskaya