As a BK and doing all the mediations that were prescribed I always had a kaleidoscope of experiences, all of which were very profound, ‘real’, and for me definable and consistent. For most people doing any guided meditation which involves visualization will produce abstractly real experiences. From NLP I learned not everyone thinks like this though. Some people don’t think visually, some think more auditory, or sensory based, so this would explain why experiences vary. When I was a BK I just thought the people who didn’t have experiences like me were losers, but now I know better.
I am definitely not a fan of Eckhart Tolle, partly because of his style of writing (it’s very authoritarian) and maybe because he maybe right and I am just
. Anyways his book, The Power of Now, was something I read a few months before I left the BKs; it was part of some homework. It talks about a state of being of just being and not thinking, something I have later found also describe by Buddhists and Gnostics. I had my doubts about this stage of consciousness but perhaps it has more to it then I have previously given it credit for.
I am currently listening to an audio program, Taming Your Gremlin by Richard David Carson. Richard D. also talks about this stage of consciousness as being our true self and the core and truth of who we are. He speaks about it and describes it from a perspective and style I can relate to and like, humble, humorous, very smart and from his experience as being a psychotherapist and a consultant to human service professionals. He also talks about how everyone’s got a gremlin. I think this gremlin could be the negative subconscious program that we all have acquired through life. It could be the Body Consciousness Raja Yoga is really talking about.
After we learn to ride a bike or drive a car, our brains store this complex information into a sorta program, as I see it, and then we can just get onto a bike or in a car and the program for driving just gets turned on and we can concentrate on other things, like what radio station to listen to or what the kids are doing in the back of the car, etc. I believe we also have this kind of autopilot program with our concept of life. This is our gremlin that we have to over come it in order to be 'enlightened'.
This is perhaps the preverbal Body Consciousness. It determines at any given time where our spotlight of awareness is focused on, whether it be in our projections of the future, memories of the past, fantasies, our minds filtered perspective of the situation we are currently in, etc. Learning to harness our essential consciousness and then making conscious choices about where to focus our awareness could be our key to ‘enlightenment’. I still don’t think always being in the present moment is right, but I am the first to admit I have been wrong before.
I haven’t previously considered your idea of BB’s concept of the essential state of consciousness influencing his perspective or vision of the Golden Age ex-l, but it makes a lot of sense. This could be what his subconscious intelligence picked up and then translated it to him in his ‘visions’.
From what we know he and others took all of his visions literally. In my experience of analyzing dreams and ‘visions’ the information is almost never literal; it is always symbolic, archetypical and can have multiple meanings.
ex-l, could you point us in the direction of the article or post which says that the DJ EEG was false. I gota see that.