Expedition Briefing, Final Warnings

Breaking the Habits

Having a new experience is sometimes easier if we can get away from our habitual experiences. So, when experiencing awareness in a new way, it helps to break up our habitual human perspectives.

Microscopic and telescopic views help restructure our view of "beings."

Kaleidoscopes are good for fracturing our human sense of geometry.

Time-lapse or slow motion imagery is important for overcoming our human interval of awareness. These de- phasing instruments alter our fields of perception.

Looking for the Thread of Awareness in relationships between strange sea creatures in This Magic Sea,   helps avoid some human prejudices.

Avoiding words that are part of your conviction-definitions also helps. You might want to make a list of your convictions and key words that control them.

There are some contentious words we can't avoid. 

In order of importance to experiencing the thread of awareness you'll need to re-examine your understanding of the words - awareness, mind, consciousness. And associated descriptive nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

I'm sure you already have convictions on what these words mean. But, just for a moment, just during this cruise of This Magic Sea, why not go along with the original (ancient) meanings of the words as given in Webster's New World Dictionary.

Let's agree, for example, that Conscious, from the Latin words com meaning "with or together" and scire "to know", will mean knowing together. Just that and nothing more. Give the words their own chance before adding other layers of meaning to them.

I have put together a glossary of terms with definitions. The more complex ones are defined, with examples, in various parts of This Magic Sea, with links to the Log of the Moira.

The Thread of Awareness and Mythology

I have avoided using religious, mystical, occult, or mystical words wherever possible. I could not resist Om Mani Padma Hum, as it is so ancient. Scholars suspect it may be the only surviving phrase of the first language-based hominids. It describes the thread of awareness to perfection. I could not resist yin / yang, either. The understanding is at least 3,000 years old and as helpful today in visualizing polarity as it was when Chinese philosophers based their world view upon it.

We all have a basic set of convictions on what can be called religion or metaphysics. Religion literally means to bind to; to join with (whatever) again. Metaphysics refers to a web of controls or events beyond rational physical laws. Religion, mysticism, the occult (which literally means hidden), and metaphysics all deal with what we can't perceive directly. And the Thread of Awareness is smack in the middle of these invisible domains, tying them all together, making it very difficult to examine without getting snagged on the mental nets of formal mythology.

Other Dimensions and Realms

For the past three thousand years, or more, humans have believed the realm of the unknown is just that, a separate realm. A huge number of scientists believe in other dimensions, especially in a dimension that somehow acts as a mold for events in the physical realm; an ideal set of conditions that manifest the material world in particular ways. People are so tied to their metaphysical and religious belief systems that all incoming information dealing with non-tangible concepts is adjusted to that bias. Any question can be molded to and answered by nearly any self-consistent metaphysical belief system.

Suppose I ask something really simple. Like, who created your hand?

You were there, you know, when it was being produced. In fact, every year, your hand gets all new atoms and even a whole new population of cells and you are there, in the middle of it all, operating the system, every second. Even now.

Do you, when you think about the creation of your hand, have a mental image of your hand developing from a single, spherical, microscopic fertilized egg, dividing into a hundred thousand million little animals crawling here and there to become skin, bone, blood, muscle, tendons, and so on? Marching to ancient memories and present directives of the whole you as you developed within your mother's womb? Can you remember fashioning all those little bones and nerves and blood vessels and skin cells and even the tiny unique whirls of your fingerprints while you bobbed around in that cozy amniotic sac? Breathing water?

Would you, when asked who made your hand, wonder about the mind system that orchestrated and directed that exquisite ballet of hundreds of millions of little animals? Either from the viewpoint of you developing in the womb or you developing over the 3.6 billion years it took to fashion you, your mother, or her womb? Or you maintaining and using your hand right now?

Wisdom is the ability to have more than one working model of reality. This has always been a prime requirement for those who wanted to navigate beyond the horizons of their own perceptions.

I would love to hear from you about your experiences and any questions, comments, or suggestions.

• More about the Thread of Awareness in Chaos

• 20 Facts of Life to keep in mind

• 10 hot tips for experiencing the Thread of Awareness.

• Indoor Experiments you can start with now

• Outdoor Experiments that will get you going