From tonight’s hynopompic phase:
While being almost out of the hypnopompic phase, I decided to re-enter to practice WILD.
Instead of entering a LD, the following changes of state became very clear to me, which were as much as exciting to me as having had directly entered a LD:
Being almost totally awake, I started off laying in bed and relaxed physically as completely as possible, releasing subtle tensions.
I gained attentional stability by observing the breath until the quality of attentional coherence became less scattered.Then I switched the object of attention to the space of the mind and observed as passively as possible any imagery that came up before the mental eye.
While noticing that the degree of relaxation and mental spaciousness was directly correlated with the degree of detail of the self-arising imagery to the mental eye, I relaxed mentally further.
Fantastically, it became evident that my sense of identification (to my body and emotions) and the sense of location of my embodiment then loosened up.
At some points I could observe that I was lucid but had no “identification with” and “no sense of” my body laying in bed. My awareness became spacious and unconstrained.
In that moment, it became tangible and clear to me, that I was the “luminous movie screen of awareness” on which (and to which) the self-arising imagery of the liminal state revealed itself.
Shifting back and forth from spaciousness to subtle contractional identification, it became further clear that this is subtle contraction of identity which is happening during the dream … and also during day time.
It dawned on me that we are actually constantly dreaming, i.e. constraining our spacious, luminous consciousness when exposed to imagery.
It was possible to observe this play of contraction and spaciousness shifting back and forth.
From the state of spacious, unconstrained consciousness it becomes clear that identity is something we “contract to” - but is something that can be released. The state of spaciousness is indeed the ground state and it is a tangible experience, not just an intellectual idea.
Steven LaBerges’ “Waking is dreaming with the sense consciousness constrained” suddently made tangible sense.
During the course of today, I try now for fun to practice relaxing into spaciousness while allowing the daytime imagery and sense inputs to appear, trying not to contract away from that sense of spaciousness.
The reason I share this, is because I was struggling quite a bit before today, searching for the tangible underlying experience that should be observable also during the daytime. The luminous spaciousness is observable during the daytime and underlies daytime and night time experience.
Having listened to Swami Sarvapriyananda’s talk on the Mandukya Upanishad, I was looking to find the underlying “gold” in the “bracelet”.