I'm still conscious of others. I haven't graduated from the, it's all one, class. :) Honestly, I have to deal in the reality I'm in and for me there's quite a population out there that seems quite real. I can toss around the idea of unity and oneness, but when working with the medicines I hardly ever have time for considering concepts or any activity that isn't related to the moment I'm in. Some things I can do and so I do those, like not getting engaged with the varieties of darkness when I'm on an errand or working. It's all just darkness, kind of like it's all one thing, but mostly it's a matter of staying focused on the task at hand and not taking the time to differentiate one bit from another. If I stop and stare it'll start up the ladder of manifestation, story and noise and all, so I don't do it, but just feel for what it is I'm meant to be about and do that.

Last week I was working and the darkness was so thick I thought it was a problem with my vision until I realized I was in a downpour or a blizzard of driving rain drops of the stuff. When I figured it out I felt for the path I was meant to be on like you would in the dark with your foot and with your hands held out in front of you. As soon as I did that I picked up on something calling of shining or whatever and pulled my virtual collar up and headed into the storm. It took a while to clear up some and I couldn't get through it without getting wet so to speak, but I trusted my family and let it cling to me and taste me. It turns out it was necessary to bring some back after I did what I was sent for and so I was glad I had just let it happen. If I had tried to find a path through it without getting touched I'd have never got anything done. When I had found the place I was called in to find and saw what it was I'd been sent for I whispered a prayer,

Here upon love, here upon forgiveness, here upon healing....

I did some work then and when it began to shift and was in the hands of another I made my way back out. My prayer wasn't what the dictionary means when it tells you what forgiveness is, but what I mean. It's like a thumbprint on a glass. It's not the words themselves that matter, but the energetic signature, the print of the concept if you were to lift it from my heart with something and hold it up. The mandala it would make, which is still just a picture, but a more precise one. It's the intent of the prayer, regardless of the supposed general meaning of the words. It's the feeling of it in my heart made visible somehow, not made to conform to the word, and the word is just a name for the true feeling inside me. That feeling, that faith, is what is getting passed with the words to another. Forgiveness is important to me, in my own sense of what it holds, which is what I pour into it in the long quiet moments of contemplation and care.

Sorry to ramble... Cheers.

heheh... well... actually william james learned or rather should we say relearned everything through his experiments with nitrous oxide...
IMHO... N20 teaches you more about egolessness and nonduality more then damn near anything else... my own experiences i discovered mirrored his own.
yes he went to school... but it was his expereinces with nitrous that fueled his focus.

I think we're embedded in a chain of events and lives that makes our particular moment possible. We don't appear out of thin air and have special and interesting revelations. We arrive in the midst of an ongoing process and it's that process, that life, is important and valid from the point of view of the one living it. Not really knowing how we appear at a particular moment in the big mash-up of the organic circus, it's fair to say we each do the best we can with what's in front of us and what we're able can track down in our immediate environment. Given our environment is the primary stuff of possibility, the grocery store of options, and most peoples is different, I prefer to cheer someone on and encourage them to take heart amidst their circumstances, rooting for them as they go.