It’s tough to elaborate completely on this one because it was quite a while ago, and I referenced a lot from ‘Dreams of Light’ to those around me. It helped with my own integration and helped the people around me gain a better understanding of some of the things I had been experiencing.
But before getting to Andrew’s book and how I ultimately ended up here, it is important to start a couple months back. My stable life became unhinged as I was reading ‘A Course in Miracles’ and similar books, like ‘The Power of Now’ etcetera.
While listening to these books everything in waking reality was becoming extremely unreal for me, synchronicities everywhere, profound ones, and on top of that, at the time I was deep diving into my dreams. They were vivid and real. I remember having 4-5 WILDs a night during this time which would feed into the mania that the waking people would see and interact with during the day. This was the beginning of approximately 10 months of intense mania and 3 trips to a psychiatric ward for me. These trips amplified my mania but that is a story unto itself.
Getting back to Andrew’s book, I was skimming through the chapters to find some of the stuff I was sending and found this key section. I remember this being a big deal when I found it because I believe it happen to me. It was like a revelation when I found it. The way Andrew explains this is with finesse too, so when I sent it to my mom and wife they were able to understand it. It was not manic jumbled sentences plastered together.
From ‘Dreams of Light’:
“Most people move through the two preliminary phases of hearing and contemplating before they actually wake up to the experience of emptiness but a rare group can directly experience it before they understand it. Emptiness is the discovery of reality, so on one hand it’s not surprising that some people can glimpse it without preparation. But they often don’t know what to do with it. They have no choice but to download the ineffable experience into the realm of the effable, into their pre-existing conceptual frameworks and worldview. Without proper understanding, problems often begin. If you don’t have a framework to relate to the totally unframed (emptiness), you might come unframed as you try to understand what you’ve experienced. The direct experience of emptiness-to put it more bluntly, the truth of your inherent nonexistence-can be frightening to the fully framed ego. Emptiness is the death, or transcendence, of the ego. Emptiness is egolessness. If you’re not properly prepared, instead of opening your mind the experience of emptiness might blow your mind. This is why many “sudden experiencers” those who aren’t prepared, struggle to retrofit the phase of understanding after they’ve had an experiential glimpse of emptiness. On an absolute or transcendental level, they “got it”; on a relative or conceptual level they don’t get it. Many people are then baffled, wondering, “What the heck was that?” or “How do I relate to that?””
-Andrew Holecek
Getting back to before I found his book, after some of the dust settled and I was out of the hospital for the first time, I began going through similar experiences as Andrew explains in the following section:
“As I grappled with this material I went through a kind of bipolar phase. Part of me was manic. I didn’t understand emptiness, but I couldn’t get enough. I knew there was something deep here, and I had to get it. It was like stepping into a brand-new world. My mania then bottomed out in despondency. I was irritated, defensive, angry. It felt like my conceptual mind was being checkmated. Years later I realized that what I was feeling was like the five stages of grief, as posited by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. My old view of reality, my precious view of things, was dying, and I was spiraling through these stages. Denial: these teachings can’t be true. What’s happening to my world! Anger: the most reconstituting of all emotions. Bargaining: editing the teachings to suit me better. Depression: from the perspective of ego, emptiness the illusory nature of reality is indeed depressing. And finally, acceptance: emptiness really is the nature of things.”
-Andrew Holecek
Flash forward to when I was reading Andrew’s book, finding this was another big deal for me. It helped rationally explain some more of the things I had gone through to my mom and wife. Also, it felt great to know I was not alone in experiencing this type of thing.
Hopefully that covers some of the things, there is so much more I left out because I do not want to attach that many quotes from Andrew’s book. I picked two last examples of the common type of things I would share while reading the book, which aided all of us in our journeys.
From ‘Dreams of Light’:
“Daytime lucidity is discovering that waking experience is also a type of dream, that things are not as solid and real as we think. We’re hacking into what we thought was a fully fully conscious experience, exposing what we thought was real (that we’re really awake, and that the forms we experience in the waking state truly exist) to be an illusion. This insight is what transforms a non-lucid life into a lucid one, a shocking exposé that awaits us in the steamy pages ahead. These domains of consciousness that you’re hacking into are highly classified and secretive because the ego doesn’t want you to know the truth, what’s really going on behind the scenes, or below mere appearance.”
-Andrew Holecek
And
“within the dream, we can confront our belief that the dream is real. We are able to recognize that it is just a dream, that it’s not real and once we discover that the dream is just a dream while dreaming it, then it is possible to wake up.”
-Tsoknyi Rinpoche