In the Shamanic cultures that recognized the reality of the second life, the flesh and blood guide would serve as an interpreter of this seemingly strange experience. They would even use it to diagnose mental and physical health issues, but they didn’t make that split conceptually. And they didn’t consider the events of the second life (what we call dreaming, even daydreaming) as any less causative than real life events.

In the second life traditions, the dream and fantasy events would not have such a subtle impact. The Shaman, as psycho-pomp for both the living and the dead, would describe courses of action or creative work to create harmony between the two lives for their people.

Even names were taken from the second life. The Shaman would make note of their dreams when they were aware that one of the people were with child, or enter trance in the early stage of the labour, because to their view this new soul already had a name. They had a responsibility to this new one to acknowledge their second self, which to their view was actually their first self.

The purpose of a vision quest was not necessarily to induce weakness or mental aberration of any sort. What they understood was what we even now understand. The events of your day cross over into your inner second life, and they believed the world was only seen clearly in the dream state, for lack of a better word.

Are both selves evolving in tandem or is the subconscious one perhaps more of the blueprint the other evolves toward? The latter is true. As what they call the subconscious self is present psychically well before the rational mind is.

Rational. To ration or control. Even human visual attention comes to be rational. You take only small samples of the stimulus of whatever you are “seeing”, then you interpret a narrow sample set. Your brain uses a mental shorthand to tell you what you are seeing. It doesn’t even translate all of the sensory input. This is why you don’t recall all the details of something you saw even five minutes ago. But the second life we all have is not subject to this constructed interpretation. It doesn’t have the habit of thinking up a view on things. This is why when you sleep or day dream the imagery often seems strange though recognizable. We just dismiss these weird spontaneous images as impossible.

Is this why we can direct it? Give ourselves subconscious directions? And is why we can be disturbed by it. We recognize a genuine thread of our being in the spontaneous fantasy, even though we swear we would never do that.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~