dave_a_mbs
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central california
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Hi Kardec- I tend to agree with you, and I'm not sure how to express what the reality might be either. This question is dear to my heart, and I wrestle with it daily.
Regression and encounters with entities coming foreward in trance to present themselves and talk to living loved ones seem to retain an emotional mode of "thought". It's rather like L Ron Hubbard tried to describe in his book Dianetics, in which he pointed out that on the subcionscious level our thought processes seem to be based on nominal identification and differences (unfortunately, that's is all I got out of his writings, except for some decent sci fi stories).
If I were to ask you to pick up a glass of water and to describe it in absolute terms, you'd have much the same problem. Eventually you'd have to create comparisons that would be close, but inexact. Later, when describing the experience to others you'd still be stuck with the inability to express the precise nature of the experience. In this sense, we deal always with maps, verbal expressions that approximate reality, but never with the actual territory, the experience in itself. In fact, the only way to communicate "water" might be to splash some onto me.
If it might be true that we cannot actually express more than an abstraction of experiences, then it might also be true that we can only recall experiences in the abstract. This has been claimed by semanticists like Whorf and Sapir, whose "semantic network" of definitions seems to be the extent of reality as they conceive it. In that sense, I think of light bending as it passes through a glass, and the wiggles and ripples of the surface, the flow of a clear liquid pouring, and I am still not at the point of the experience.
My personal inclination is to suggest that as we dream, as we go OBE or as we are involved with spirits who act to offer us either guidance or some other experience, or as we experience othr related states we are at the direct point of experience. and that the "spirit mind" or whatever we call it - "subconscious" is an awkward term - operates directly in those terms. Thus we attach to, equate with, and differ from elements of our experiences in a "real" manner, but we are unable to express it. What we CAN express seems limited to secondary abstractions, thoughts about thinking, but never thinking in itself.
Often OBE experts (Carrington, Muldoon and so on) speak of a "spirit embodiment". They locate their awareness inside this embodiment, and they describe what thy do in everyday terms. I resist this description as a probable fabrication, used for the purpose of allowing them to speak and think of their experiences in "everyday terms". Personally, when I have experiences of this kind, I am unable to find any unique personal embodiment. I find the world to be a place of a very different nature than the "everyday world". As an example, to exteriorize into the corner of the room and look down on my entranced body sitting upright brings no sensation of anything of an "everyday" nature except the experience of perception - an abstraction of the experience.
To return to you initial remark, my feeling is that we recall only that which can be held in the "everyday mind", and we miss the greatest part of projective experiences because we don't know how to capture them in thought. It's like remembering how it hurts to be stuck with a pin, or how sugar tastes. On that basis, I'm inclined to look for a mechanism that both agrees with the existence of the everyday world, and yet which involves us in a manner not at all compatible with everyday concepts as we move through our transcendental experiences, so that what we recall can be no more than the shadow image of the true experience.
You live in a land in which the presence of spirits is accepted and in which numerous religions deliberately seek out encounters with them. I wonder if there might be a source of additional experiences there, through which to develop a familiarity that could be somehow operationally rooted and thus expressed in our "everyday" language.
dave
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