The Reversible Dreamcoat
Years ago while backpacking through Denmark as a student, I found a weird little shop. I was a design student at the time, and was in the Danish city of Copenhagen seeking to understand the Danish design aesthetic. I never imagined this little shop might also contain a key personal insight into my own understanding of enlightenment.
The shop was set below the road, and to enter, you dropped down an ornate yet narrow black iron staircase to right below street level. As you descended, the clatter of the busy street faded away and a complete other world appeared.
In one corner, parakeets in an enormous old cage gently chirped. Beautiful wrought iron cabinets with dark blue wavy glass displayed bizarre arrangements of artificial flowers, jewelry, and bohemian clothing. Soft ethereal music was playing from unseen speakers. There were no other customers, it was just me.
At the back of the store was a selection of coats of many different types. One of the coats looked like a simple thigh length autumn coat of the sort that was popular in Europe at that time. As I picked up the coat, I noticed it was unusually light and soft suede leather of a soft brown color, silky and warm to the touch, and very expensive. As I took the coat off the rack, I was awestruck when I suddenly saw the lining. On the fine black silk fabric of the lining was printed an image of an incredible galaxy of stars, like what you see from photos of the Hubble space telescope.
Why would the designer have gone to the effort to find this incredibly beautiful fabric, which was clearly very exclusive and expensive, and then hide it on the inside of the coat? No one could see it there. Possibly the owner of the coat would be the only person that ever knew that they were walking around in a galaxy of stars.
On the outside, everyday reality. Simple, functional, does what it says it does. Form follows function. Very Danish. On the inside, a view into a different universe. Creativity, unlimited-ness, huge spans of space and time. I was sure the designer of this coat was onto something, but at the time I could never determine exactly what. I never forgot that coat.
Years later as I grappled with what I was trying to achieve in my meditation practice, I started to realize that creating an experience of enlightenment was a bit like that coat. The exterior of the coat is our normal physical reality. It’s just there. You can feel it with your physical universe senses of touch, smell, and sight. But the lining of the coat represented something different entirely. Spans of time. Imagination. Vast quantities of empty space. Colors and transparency and energy and light.
What if creating enlightenment was like reversing the coat, and putting it on with the universe printed on the outside? Can we turn reality inside out using meditation, just like a coat can be turned inside out? As I experimented in my meditations hacking together bits and pieces of the dozens of different meditation techniques I had learned over the years, I decided to put these ideas to the test. I started to not only go inwards in my mind using my imagination and non-physical perception skills, but to more actively use those skills to turn reality inside out, concept by concept, idea by idea, sense by sense, body function by body function.
What if all emotions I felt during daily life were something that could be turned inside out to reveal something completely different? What if my perception of the physical world around me during my meditations could be turned inside out in the same way? Would anything happen to me if I did that? What if the sounds of the world around me could be turned inside out? Aren’t sound waves just tiny vibrations picked up by nerve endings deep in the brain? So really my perception of sound is really nothing more than brain activity. If I imagine a sound in my head, is that the same brain activity as hearing the sound with my ears?
Brain surgeons tell us that the brain can’t itself feel, and emotions, even when we think they originate in our body, are actually represented and interpreted in the brain. Could I imagine my own brain activity as it experienced different emotions? Would imagining the brain activity of a particular emotion actually change my experience of that emotion? Isn’t everything we experience both outside and inside ourselves in the end just brain activity? What actually is perception, and what happens in our lives when we have the mental skills to alter our ability to perceive? Is perception really an act of creation, like quantum physics suggests? If so, how can I use that? If we can perceive reality differently, what should we be using those skills to do? If we perceive differently, what changes in our lives, and what stays the same?
As I played with these concepts over and over, I slowly identified which mental patterns and structures within consciousness were the ones I could deliberately manipulate. The weirdest thing was that I’d never read anything quite like in any of the dozens of spiritual techniques I had studied. Do this, and my perception of my body fades away. Do that, and my sense of time changes. Do this, and I feel like the distant train whistle five miles away deep in the night is consuming my entire being. It was like taking drugs without taking drugs.
The Consciousness Muscle
What was the core skill I was developing here? I wasn’t exactly sure. It was meditation, sure, but I was doing things I had not read about in any meditation book I had read. Most mindfulness meditation focused almost entirely on clearing the mind of thought. I was doing the exact opposite. I was selectively intensifying certain thoughts and then morphing them into different definitions of what thought even was, and this required both staggering amounts of mental concentration yet at the same time as simultaneously trying what could be best described as mental sleight of hand. About as easy as talking on your cell phone while driving a race car.
I was trying to trick my brain into understanding reality in a way that I couldn’t find any description of in any spiritual literature anywhere. It was all so confusing that initially I could barely define what to myself what I trying to even achieve. I was an explorer of ideas that I had never read about, never thought about, and never heard discussed with anybody, except my brilliant and ever tolerant wife, who I had met at the most advanced level of The Avatar Course. With a masters in philosophy, she had been trained to make careful and highly accurate verbal distinctions and had a deep knowledge of the role language plays to influence what we perceive and how we articulate knowledge.
Some Buddhist techniques touch on time and space and ‘no-thingness’, but they were vague and frustratingly obscure when it came to actual techniques as to how to systematically create those states during meditation. Mainly Buddhism appeared to focus endlessly on the many nuances around the emotions of suffering and compassion.
My Avatar training helped somewhat, but I was exploring even far beyond the highest level I had been taught after spending thousands of dollars on the Avatar, Master and Wizard level training courses. I had spent thousands of hours in these courses, including going to the two-week Wizard program five times — a total of 10 weeks of 12hr days spent in intensive self-discovery processes, including hundreds of highly emotional deep coaching sessions with others. I had spent multiple weeks during that training drilling with others verbally and emotionally for hours every day through hundreds of topics, and never even touched on these ideas.
Eventually, after nearly two decades of self-experimentation, writing and describing my meditation experiments, a framework of consciousness started to form.
The stories in this medium channel are about those discoveries.
About the Author
Peter J Hill loves to take time to think and feel deeply. Over thirty years, he has studied dozens of meditation, self-development, and spiritual techniques. Guided by neuroscience rather than mysticism, his mission is to teach people to live better lives by using their brains more effectively.
