Who is this “I” you speak of?

It’s not about a progressive disintegration of the brain, but a radical shift in identity.

Spirituality does have a sort of mirror with psychotic disease, funnily enough. Author David Hawkins has this awesome list of relationships between spiritual experiences and psychotic issues.

For example, there’s the spiritual bliss vs. mania.

There’s vegging out in samadhi vs. catatonia.

There’s realizing your true nature as God vs. being delusional and thinking that you’re God.

I forget what book it’s in, but it’s an awesome list.

The concept “Ariel” exists in the mind I have only. I’m can’t even say for sure that you exist, but if I were to pretend you did, I’d say that in your reality, “Ariel” exists in only your mind and no place else.

All fears live in the ego, when the ego is known as pure fear, something happens.The fear begins to fade and the true experiencer begins to awaken, and IT is neither this nor That.

I know , but I seemingly still suffer. namaste.

The ego is not dissolved in the sense that one becomes enlightened. Rather, it’s much easier to leave it behind the same way we leave behind the body like a pair of pants we’re not wearing at the moment.

It is true that during a dream we can experience ego-like qualities such as a sense of identity, fear (nightmares), and desires. These are more like the soul forgetting who it really is in the moment than actually an ego, though we could say the two are very similar anyways.

One could also suggest that dreaming is very much like losing presence while daydreaming. We lose focus of the body and dreams all just our imagination. It’s totally cool if you want to go with this model as well.

I just woke up having set the intention to understand this better and found that in the dream, it was much easier for me to access states of timelessness, the ability to fly weightlessly, death was possible only as a fictitious concept, travel through space can take one from “here” to “there” with every place in between, or it can be instantaneous. Right before I woke up, I was very high above this physical body. There was the fear that I couldn’t come back down to earth without crashing to my death, but that was recognized as a fear. I heard a voice which told me exactly what I needed to know and then I fell right back into this physical body and woke up.

In the dream world it’s much easier to experience higher states of being, but it’s not the ultimate state. Generally the soul, after being used to living with a human body for a while, has trouble fully remembering who it really is. This is similar to ghosts who have trouble leaving the earth plane upon physical death. It’s also related to how we can create any experience after death such as heaven, hell, being united with our relatives, and so on. We’ve forgotten our true identity, but the creative process continues upon “death” which allows us to experience whatever we so desire.

So I’d say that when dreaming, no the ego isn’t dissolved, but it is let go of. Nevertheless, there is a memory effect of who we think we still are, but it’s much easier to be our true Selves in the dream state than in physicality. It’s not the same as enlightenment.

When I dream (not projecting out of the body), I still have some kind of self image.

Dreams are a very interesting subject whatsoever…

Blessings!