Ah, I disagree with this. Is the physical really not "real"?
in a dream I had right after my second past life regression session, I found myself inbetween lives in a world that was made to ease the transition... I asked someone there who seemed to be in charge... why it was I could still remember "this world" while I was in "the inbetween world" but I could not remember the "in between world" while in "this world"
while most of what he said vanished, everything was crystal clear before and after his explanation [not meant for this world yet], his last words were... P T Barnum... which triggered in my mind "there's a sucker born every minute", to which I replied--- "yes, but this world [the inbetween one] is ALSO a MENTAL creation, right?" He walked over to a window over looking a city I had not know in this world, and tapped on the frame and said: "It's as real as real gets" to which I protested, "but it is still in the mind, right? he did not answer...but another who seemed to be in charge looked at an object in the room and that object of its own accord lept into the air... demonstrating to me that I was correct, mind was the place where this was happening....
A year later, I was in Kansas City on business for three week...without much to do at night, I read a book on out of body experiences and it had a section for experimenting... I tried for two solid weeks without results but then I got this sudden urge to snap my fingers on my right hand....and after doing so I noticed something remarkable... there was my right hand, elevated off the bed in the position just after snapping my finger...there was also my "other" right hand lying on the bed next to me where it had been during the meditation excersize....I felt both at the same time, they both felt like MY right arm and hand, I could not tell which was the "real" one...and then the excitement snapped them back together and I got up... I did not acheive out of body, but I did know with certainty now that those who had were not lying about the experience, because it does seem quite real...but I realized something more important....
I had struggled since my past life regression to try to make sense of something that seems impossible... how could it be that a mind could be seperated from its body? there seemed to many things that made them two sides of the same coin...to lose one seemed to be the end of the other and vice versa...but this experience showed me something that clicked with my prior years dream.... as real as real gets... is not real at all...it just SEEMS real.
the body I know, is not my REAL body, but an image within my mind, it is NOT real and my apparent seperation from my body was no such thing, it was another body IMAGE being formed with the first one...BOTH were still within my mind. when a person acheives full out of body, they are actually acheiving the creation of a new body icon or symbol with a different point of view within their own mind...they are able to see the contents of their mind from the point of view what seems to be someone outside their body.
everything we KNOW is actually activity in a mapping that our mind makes... when we sleep that activation of parts of this very same map compared to no activity areas is perceived as real... when awake the apparent sensory activated portions of the map make the "thought" portions seems unreal BY COMPARISON....but if you meditate or take hallucinagenic drugs, you alter the levels of the map activations and you confuse the thought with the "presumed real" and even may think the thought is the real and the real is the thought.
but in all cases it is just mental images and symbols we KNOW, dreams...none of them ARE real, but may [note carefully] represent reality... but may not.
if all of us...all the minds that exist...all the waves upon the one ocean... are sharing a common STORY, a shared hallucination, there would be no way to tell it from anything we think of as reality...because what is it that we think of as real anyway? the most obvious factors are consistancy, and the ability to share it with others.... but these factors ASSUME that others exist in the first place and that consistancy might not be acheiveable by another means such as simply a constant story being told to us on a sub-conscious level...hypnosis.
I put it to you that the flesh is nothing because the flesh is just mental invention, not reality...spirit, not substance...thought perhaps nothing more...after all who do you KNOW who can go outside his own perceptions, his own mind and see its true source?
the movies like THE MATRIX and THE 13TH FLOOR are based on this notion that reality as we perceive it is not from the "real" world, but another hidden source.... much of religious mysticism is based on the notion that another more real world exists and is hidden from us.
