Dreamed Up Reality by Bernardo Kastrup

Author:Bernardo Kastrup
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-84694-525-0
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Recovering some lucidity, the thought occurred to me that consciousness was surely a non-local phenomenon in both time and space. That is, I had the certainty that consciousness was not limited to the here and now of my physical brain but could, under certain circumstances, gain awareness of places and times beyond, whether real or imaginary – the difference between real and imaginary, once again, appearing nonsensical to me.

I wondered then if I could steer this drift in time and space. Could I bring myself, through intentional visualization, to “remember” my distant past or “return” to places I had not been to in a long time? I formed the intent to return to a particular moment of my childhood. Another self-transformation of the images ensued, as if they were made of a highly malleable and compliant material, and a different point of space-time crystallized before me. I was back at the brackish water lagoon where I used to go fishing when I was a kid. Those were some of my fondest memories; periods of absolute simplicity, peace, contentment, and total communion with nature. I could again hear the delicate sounds of the water ripples splashing against the rocks where I used to set myself up. I could feel the gentle breeze against my face, the sound of the fresh air flowing gently round my earlobes. How peaceful. For all cognitive purposes, I was there again.

I continued this exercise for what felt like a long time, willfully returning to various places, moments, people, and circumstances of my past that were of particular significance to me. Inevitably, eventually the memory of one of the most intense experiences of my life began rising in my awareness: that of falling in love with the person who today is my wife. This time, however, the experience was entirely one of inner feeling, not of physical perception. I was just overtaken by the inner warmth and the sense of wholeness that seem to characterize the act of falling in love with someone. And then the experiment took me to the next level; one that, at that moment, I was not expecting. Somehow, the feeling of falling in love with a particular person keyed my consciousness into what I can only describe as a kind of universal “tone,” or specific vibration. By remembering the feeling of falling in love, I latched onto that apparently external vibration of pure subjective feeling. It then amplified what I was feeling in a kind of sympathetic resonance. My own feelings and this “tone” seemed to be reinforcing one another in a positive feedback loop. Though I do not like to use the word “love,” because it is so overloaded with loose semantics and charged with shallow and cheap sentimentalism, I am unable to find any other suitable word. Indeed, and I blush to say this, I felt as though I was falling in love with the entire universe. There was, of course, nothing sexual about it; just a feeling of profound belonging and integration.

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