COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS
By Nancy Poitou, M.A., ©1998
Published in The Exceptional Human Experience News, Vol.5, No. 2
Upon reading Judith Pillsbury's account of "Dancing With the Numinous," EHE account #27, I noted some similarities to an experience I had in April of 1994. I was preparing to teach the Psycho-Spiritual Aspects of hospice volunteering to incoming volunteers and I was reading Larry Dossey's book Healing Words . I decided one night to visit the highest level of consciousness that night in a dream/astral journey. I told myself as I lay in bed that night that I wanted to experience the non-local superconscious mind.
I had in the past programmed myself to retrieve certain information from "the astral" or visit "the Akashic Records" and had been surprised to find that I could. I had been taught by my teacher Lily Therese to do this during the 2 years I studied with her while I was going through the first two intense years of spiritual emergence. Though this personal programming did not always work, I liked to experiment with using my dream/astral travels to problem solve.
I had in this way mapped out a model of consciousness that I compared with other models of the consciousness, the astral plane and descriptions of the Bardo between lives. I believe we leave our bodies every night and that dreams are symbolic of realms of existence we cannot fully comprehend in waking consciousness, so they are reduced to symbols we can then decipher. The first level of the Astral is technically the astral or sometimes referred to as the etheric level of the Astral. At times Lily and I had met up on the Astral and she would give me words to repeat back to her the next day or she would ask me what we did the night before. It was a thrill and mind blowing experience to know unequivocally that we had met up and communicated. When I would repeat back to her, her exact words, she would squeal and scream, in amazement.
I knew that this enormous experience would reduce to accommodate my waking consciousness. Therefore as I began my descent across thresholds of consciousness, I held on tight to the feeling/knowing of it and began repeating over and over, "It's all this and so much more, it's all this and so much more . . ." and could hear myself repeating that phrase as my consciousness downloaded into my physical container and crossed the last threshold of consciousness. I could still feel it yet knew that it was not the same as being it.
This experience stayed with me for some time as I lay there in bed. For months as I would recall it as a feeling sense, the only visual symbol was this expansive light. I can still access the memory, although I have of course not been fully successful in retaining all of it's expansiveness. I glowed for weeks, it was wonderful and awe inspiring. When I talked about it I would get the feeling all over again.
It is still one of the simplest yet most complex Exceptional Human Experiences I have had. It was so different from our human consciousness, yet I "know" that our individual divine sparks dwells there. It was timeless and spaceless and yet it was also an experience of all time and all space in its true non-linear, non-local allness . It is as though the "I am that I am" is focused into our bodily instruments through which each individual plays it's own unique tune. I have tried to describe this experience yet its elusive noetic numinous quality can only be experienced.
As a personal aside, I truly wish I could give my clients who are searching for some evidence of ourselves as souls and consciousness and contemplating the afterlife such experiences, because then they would "know." Often we are so used to the physical model that we actually block such experiences, or an EE is explained away, minimized or relegated to coincidence and forgotten. The experience I described would hence be explained as "just a dream," albeit an unusual one. At times I have been pleased to say to the open minded client, that was not a hallucination, you are not going mad, your perception is opening up to include the non-physical realm.