wirenotlantern

I meditated on consciousness for 25 min before bed. I felt it like a multi-planar field of spacetime which stretched and changed based on input. The nature of the field was mostly smooth and ebbing but noises from the outside would causes high-frequency and high-amplitude spikes within it. 

I could feel the field extending in all directions of real space and then more; it reached into formless realms built on thought and memory and it would always return back to my self-area with the gentleness of surface tension holding water together in space.

This cross section of spacetime covered me and my immediate vicinity and was in constant flux, influenced by all things physical and mental. I was a sailor on an ocean of waves, but there was no boat and there was no sailor.

I laid down to assimilate the experience and had the wildest of dreams.

My uncle Ian was there, younger than me and in his blue denim overall. We hugged. He had a head of flowing curly hair and was grinning. Then my dead grandad was there too, young, vibrant, alive. He flashed me a playful and knowing smile, ear to ear, then grabbed me, picking me up and holding the back of my t-shirt and trousers so I was looking at the floor like a kid doing airplane.

He started to run along the dock. He ran and he ran, the ground and tiles flying past my face only inches away, faster and faster. I was exhilarated and excited with the wind rushing over me and he kept speeding up as we flew over grass and neared the edge of the dock and then… he leaped.

We soared through the air, 50 metres or more, and fell and fell and fell toward the estuary where the river meets the sea and into the water we went, and down and down and down into the eternal darkness and then he let me go and I swam toward the surface and he was gone. 

Blip. 

I was back on the land. There was some kind of intermission with people from a past life, me getting lost trying to put things into words, and an endless field of curry rice that my wealthy neighbour was busy trying to eat. In this rice there were… two magic buddha-bubble heads which were alive or something, and we followed them to where a sorceress appeared. She was angry that her magician had been taken away and people had imprisoned her again, and she tasked me with the job of setting her free.

Blip. 

My wife was saying, ‘make sure its a wire and not a lantern’. I said ‘it was slack, flapping in the wind, but now it is taut and I can walk it again’. 

And then I woke up.

This is wild.

I… what is consciousness? I feel like it is a field through space and time which connects us all. It may even be a ‘thing’ on one of those 7 dimensions we cannot perceive, and a part of this thing just happens to be operating within each one of us, all the time.

Memories can interact with it, as can future projections, as can external and internal present reality. It changes its shape and nature based on the stones that hit it, like ripples in a pond. The present-realm sensations like sound hit it and give it large spikes in amplitude which make it move like those bed-of-nails images on 3d spectrograms. When those gross impression are not present, it moves more like a waterballoon which can expand and contract through all of time and space.

There is no controlling entity. This is not something we own. It is not us and it is not not-us; it is conditioned by everything we have ever encountered, everything we are encountering now, and possibly even things we could encounter in the future.

I have to stress that I am not a superstitious person and I have never believed in religion or magick or fantasy. I am pragmatic. This is my direct experience of what consciousness is. I can feel it within me, and I know it extends to without.

My arm hairs are standing on end. There is so much more to this world than we can ever know. Everything feels fated again. I am not driving the ship. What is this? It’s so exciting and liberating and new. I believe in… no… I *know* that there is something… I can’t put words to it. I can feel it in the way my consciousness is extending now, from behind the rear of my skull, like a cushion just waiting for me to settle back in.

Maybe my mum was right and she is the more neurodivergent of the two. I always assumed it was my dad. Maybe it is both. Maybe my dad is traumatised by his incredibly hard early life and that is what made him divergent. But maybe my mum was born that way.

Maybe Ian got somewhere with his meditation when he was younger, in his blue denim dungarees, around the age of 30. And maybe my grandad got even further, with that bike that his colleagues gave him when he retired age 60.

But that bike was a gift, from people who also have consciousness. None of it was our choice. It was all causality.

I feel so awake and alive and this boat is rumbling along and going to be doing so for another 18 hours or so. I am calm but I am invigorated. I feel like I have seen through the next veil, somewhat. I feel like the Buddha had so much more to say than just brain chemistry.

Mind before all, though. You need the right chemistry to open the door. But what if he was right? And what if consciousness really does span all of time and space? How could it not, if it can interact with memories and ideas and starlight from the other side of the galaxy?

Another door is in the process of opening. But don’t worry - I will not follow it like the lantern of the angler fish. This is a wire and it is taut and I can walk it now. I can use it to go and come and find out more about what reality is.

There was no aripirazole involved in any of this.

Maybe that door just needed smashing open, and now it’s left ajar.

Our reality is so much more than we know.

/jb202509290331