December 26, 2025
A couple of months ago, I was in Portugal leading a public retreat. When it concluded, I stayed on for two additional weeks to be on retreat by myself. My intention during that time was very simple and very exact. I wanted to live as much as possible in the ‘mind-awake, body-asleep' state, where awareness remains lucid while the body settles into a sleep-like condition. I wanted to rest and live in that threshold consciousness, the hypnagogic field where perception loosens and deeper layers of awareness begin to speak.
Because I was alone, I did not have to do very much. There were long stretches of unstructured time, and that freedom allowed me to linger in this ‘half here, half elsewhere' state. In that condition, boundaries soften and everything begins to bleed together. Experiences arise without effort, not through willful imagining, but simply as presences that appear when attention is no longer confined to its usual frame.
I tasted that same quality again recently in meditation. I was sitting with my eyes closed, not trying to visualize anything, simply resting in awareness. At one point, I saw an eye, and then a face, although only half of it was visible. The eye opened and looked directly at me. It felt unmistakably real. Then it slowly closed and disappeared. My response was calm curiosity rather than surprise. It did not feel like something I had created. It felt like a being, as though someone noticed that I was available for a few minutes and stopped by.
During my time in Portugal, many such experiences unfolded. I often felt spoken to by divine or nonhuman intelligences. The natural world also seemed to offer energy and knowledge. Some of what was communicated was intelligible, some not. Much of it did not arrive as clear messages at all, but as a steady, ongoing exchange, a permeable flow of energy between myself and something larger. Spirit moving into me, and me moving back into it.
What stayed with me most was not any single dramatic event, but a sustained sense of being permeable to divinity. In that state, I began to notice something subtle and revealing about memory and identity.
Dreams and mystical experiences are difficult to remember not simply because they fade, but because the part of us that remembers ordinary life is not the part of us that is having these experiences. During such moments, our attention shifts into another aspect of our being, the soul self, which exists in a spiritual dimension of consciousness. The experiences occur there, through that mode of awareness.
In Portugal, I spent long stretches inhabiting the soul self, with its own memory and mode of perception. While I was there, everything that had previously happened to my soul in that realm was fully present and immediately coherent. Nothing needed to be recalled. It was simply known.
When I returned to ordinary waking consciousness, I could bring some of those memories back with me, but they faded quickly. Yet each time I reentered that deeper state, everything was still there, intact and waiting. It felt like moving back and forth between parallel selves, each complete in its own domain of awareness.
In my everyday waking life, I inhabit one timeline, with its familiar memories and reference points. In the other state, I inhabit a different one, equally real and equally whole. Moving between them feels like shifting selves, not merely shifting states. I can distinctly feel that these are two different modes of selfhood.
The transition itself is remarkably precise. It feels exactly like falling asleep while remaining awake. Yoga Nidra has finally given me language for this experience. My body relaxes so deeply that sleep overtakes it, even when I am sitting upright, yet awareness remains present. There is usually a phase that is dreamy and unstable, where images flicker and dissolve. If I allow that phase to pass without interference, something else happens.
On the other side of that letting go, there is another awakening. It is not the same person who wakes up there. I am awake in my ordinary life, then I pass through a dreamlike dissolution, and then there is a second awakening beyond it. That awareness feels different. It has a different texture, a different center of gravity.
During my time in Portugal, I was able to move back and forth freely between these two modes of being. I would return to ordinary consciousness to cook a meal or drive to the store, and then, as soon as I was free, I would slip back again. Eventually I seemed to be able to hover in that state even while performing simple activities. I kept wondering how much of my life I could live in that state.
The way I experience it is like tuning between frequencies. My ordinary waking body feels like a lower frequency, though it is still fully awake and functional. Then there is a descent into sleepiness. On the other side of that a second wakefulness appears. That mode of being feels higher in frequency. Everything is brighter. Light is more luminous. Colors are more vivid. The world feels more alive, more responsive. Things begin to speak, not necessarily in words, but in intuitions that do not normally reach me.
Mystical vision, as I am coming to understand it, is not an escape from the world. It is an invitation to inhabit the many dimensions of myself with trust, stability, and increasing intimacy in the experience of living.
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