A Reader’s Questions on Being Half-Awake

Written on November 19, 2009 by Tom Stine


One of my long time readers sent me some questions about my article To Be Half-Awake (and Half-Asleep). Here are his questions and my answers:

1. You wrote: “It is almost the same experience as awakening from a dream at night. Almost.”

What are the differences you observe?

Good question. Well, the big difference is that when you awaken from a dream at night, the dream world disappears and is replaced by the seemingly real world. As you awaken from the dream state as it is called, as you spiritually awaken, you find that you are still in the dream! But what a dream it is! It is still populated by the same people, the same things going on, but for some reason, it all seems good, even when it isn’t. Very unlike a nighttime dream.

2. Your wrote: “…no tendency to re-enter the dream state of separateness.”

How and why did this One consciousness enter into the dream state in the first place?

For at least 5000 years (our entire written history), mankind has been intrigued by this question. Many have tried to answer it. Gurus for centuries have given answers. And they all contradict each other in some form or fashion. They contradict each other for one simple reason: there is no answer to this question.

Let me be 100% clear: there is no answer to this question. Every answer given, no matter how high and angelic the giver of the answer has been, is in the realm of fantasy. And the reason is simple: the question, being asked from within the world of form, is being asked about something outside the world of form. You can’t know with the mind that which is beyond the mind.

Okay, that said, here’s a couple of things to consider: First, did this One consciousness even enter into the dream state? If the dream state is unreal, and the One is real, then how could something unreal even be created? Good question, huh? No answer to that one, either.

Second, my personal favorite description of the why question is that it is a game. Consciousness having fun. Of course, this description is not the truth, but it is a fun idea. I have a half-written article on the subject that I’ll finish and post some day.

3. I remember Jed McKenna says something like this in his books: I and Universe are the One… I don’t know what will happen in the next moment…

Since he = the One, why doesn’t he know what will happen in the next moment?

Because it’s a fun game to play! The One created a Universe governed by probabilities, ie, quantum mechanics and all that fun stuff. Everything in the Universe has a probability associated with it, every path, every seeming choice, everything. There is even a probability that my body will wink out of existence and appear in China. It’s all probability. So, there is no way to know what will happen next.

Again, none of the above paragraph is the “true” answer, because there is no “true” answer. However, it is what we observe about the world of form.

That said, there is also no need to know. If fear and death are eliminated from one’s psyche, then one doesn’t have a care in the world for the future. The next moment is the next moment. As a matter of fact, there is no next moment, just this moment experiencing change. Since Jed is experiencing this change with no investment in how it all turns out, why care? Why bother to know even if he could? He absolutely doesn’t care at all.

I have to tell you, it is very, very nice when concern for the future starts to drop away. Even though I can still get hooked into future thinking at times, quite often I’m just here, right now, and experiencing no thought for what comes next, no care or concern. And surprisingly, what comes next seems to be pretty nice most of the time.

I hope the above helps. Namaste.

The Andromeda Galaxy - M31, M32, and M110
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Related Posts:

  1. To Be Half-Awake (and Half-Asleep)
  2. The Half-Awake (Half-Asleep) Club
  3. More on Being Half-Awake
  4. The Half-Awake Dilemma
  5. How Do You Know If Someone Is Enlightened?

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Guru Quotes

But beauty, real beauty, ends where intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of a face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.

—Oscar Wilde

Intelligent practice always deals with just one thing: the fear at the base of human existence, the fear that I am not. And of course I am not, but the last thing I want to know is that.

—Charlotte Joko Beck

Q: Since all is pre-ordained, is our self-realization also pre-ordained? Or are we free there at least?

A: Destiny refers only to name and shape. Since you are neither body nor mind, destiny has no control over you. You are completely free. The cup is conditioned by its shape, material, use and so on. But the space within the cup is free. It happens to be in the cup only when viewed in connection with the cup. Otherwise, it is just space. As long as there is a body, you appear to be embodied. Without the body you are not disembodied — you just are.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

So the most important thing to realize is this: Your life has an inner purpose and an outer purpose. Inner purpose concerns Being and is primary. Outer purpose concerns doing and is secondary…. Your inner purpose is to awaken. It is as simple as that. You share that purpose with every other person on the planet – because it is the purpose of humanity. Your inner purpose is an essential part of the purpose of the whole, the universe and its emerging intelligence.

—Eckhart Tolle


Buddhism stands unique in the history of human thought in denying the existence of a Soul, Self or Atman. According to the teachings of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine’, selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities and problems. It is the source of all troubles in the world from personal conflicts to wars between nations. In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world.

—What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula

The disappearance of this fundamental question [How do I know the state of an enlightened one?], on discovering that it had no answer, was a physiological phenomenon, a sudden ‘explosion’ inside, blasting, as it were, every cell, every nerve and every gland in my body. And with that ‘explosion’, the illusion that there is continuity of thought, that there is a center, an ‘I’ linking up the thoughts, was not there anymore.

—U.G. Krishnamurti

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