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In general, people do not understand that they are
(literally) living in an egoic illusion of mind.
In the ancient setting, people were involved in the
illusory mind of the dream-state. They were not involved in
anything extraordinary relative to verbal sophistication and
conceptual mind. They lived in a very straightforward
sensory context, from day to day, in the waking
statebut the dream-mind was the form of mind in which
they were principally (or most deeply) involved, and to
which they reached for help, and consolation, and wisdom. If
you examine the most ancient (and, even now, traditional)
literature, you will see that it is the literature of people
who took the dream-mind to be the senior realitythe
reality that (in their understanding) indicated their real,
true, and ultimate destiny. And that dream-mind, or
dream-world, was populated with the
deities, archetypes, symbols, and whole systems
of myth that became the resource of ancient (and, even now,
traditional) religion.
In modern civilization and societies, the mind that
is binding people is the waking-state mindthe complex
perceptual-conceptual thinking and remembering mind that
originates in the waking state. In the modern era, there is,
generally speaking, no longer a great deal of
depth-sensitivity to the dream-state, and little postulating
of a separate metaphysical existence for the
dream-world and the dream-self.
Characteristically, people of the modern (and rather
secularized, or de-sacralized) era presume there is no
reality to other worldsbecause people of
the modern era no longer think of the dream-mind as an
alternative (or metaphysically, separately, and
independently existing) reality.
During their waking hours, people of the modern era
typically presume they are in the only
real worldwhich, to them, means the
physical world. In actuality, however, such
people are merely in the waking-state mindnot in the
Real (or non-mental) world, not in the
world As it Is (Prior to mind), and,
indeed, not in any thing at all that is not
merely the perceptual-conceptual mind itself. Therefore,
being in and of mind-only, they do not recognize
the apparent perceptual-conceptual world As
it Is.
In the modern era, people have a weak dream-mind but
a strong perceptual-conceptual (or waking-state) mind. The
waking-state mind is the illusory mind of the modern human
being. The waking-state mindrather than the
dream-mindis the mind in which the modern human being
is trapped. However, the waking-state mind is, itself, a
kind of dream-mindbecause, like any form of mind, the
waking-state mind is a perceptual-conceptual structure,
patterned by the brain, and experienced entirely
and exclusively within the limits and confines of its own
patterns and states.
Even every moment of perception is memory-only. The
psycho-physical (and point-of-view-bound)
apparatus of perception naturally introduces a time-lapse
(or registering-and-recording interlude), to enable the
brain and nervous system to capture the any
moment of physical (or total psycho-physical)
perception.
Every moment of conceptual activity (or conventional
human knowing) is subordinate to all
memory-based perceptual activitybecause all conceptual
activity is subsequent to inherently late
perceptions, and always only as an exercise of the totally
memory-based brain-body (or generalized psycho-physical)
formulations of pre-recorded experience (or even
imagination and illusion).
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