Monday, January 18, 2010

Monday, January 18, 2010

Well, I never finished my last entry—maybe I’ll get back to it one of these days (maybe not).

I’m recovering from food poisoning after eating some bad sushi rolls on Thursday. It’s been interesting. During the nights I’ve been drenched in sweat and full of delirious dreaming, or at least very vivid dreaming now that I’m no longer feverish. In the course of all of this dreaming, all of these little bits of memory from childhood have come up—things I haven’t remembered in forever. There have been all sorts of past life things. There have been insights that have floated up (can’t remember them now, but they feel very close to the surface, so I’m sure I haven’t lost them). And I have received what seems to be guidance about various practical things (like my blogs and the car). My perceptions feel clearer and the world seems fresh and full of possibilities. It almost seems as if this illness went in and cleaned out some cobwebs.
It makes me think about where our consciousness comes from. Some people speculate that we’re not really us, since we’re mostly made up of bacteria and other foreign critters. Rather, we’re the sum total of all the critters comprising us. Maybe my shift in consciousness is not a result of the illness but actually the contribution of the bacteria (or virus) itself. Strange way to think about it, yet it makes sense. Any addition of critters to my bodily ecosystem creates change, so it’s sensible to think the change could filter up to consciousness. In that case, I thank the critters for their contribution.
I might be sensing that one of the insights had to do with paradigm shifting. I just think that in my delirium I was shifting between many different ways of perceiving reality, so the entrenchedness of our current paradigm seems absurd. Why is everyone so attached to this paradigm? We have an infinite number of ways we could express ourselves and human society—why cling so tenaciously to one that’s so dysfunctional and unpleasant?