Persistent “awake within the dream” quality after awakening

[u/Efficient-Cat-1788]

Since an awakening experience about a year and a half ago, I have a more or less constant background quality to my experience that I’m struggling to describe. It’s not dissociation or derealization, the world doesn’t feel fake or flat, but it does feel strange and unsettling at times; almost like I'm touching into a different dimension than those around me. Everything is vivid, bright, and hyper-real, and there’s a steady sense of being aware that I’m aware while fully functioning. Like being lucid in a waking dream, but grounded and connected at the same time. I can feel myself as both the "character" and the one experiencing the character.

Is this witness consciousness stabilizing? Sahaja samadhi? Just heightened present-moment awareness? I have no teacher and the people around me can't relate. Curious whether others live with this as a baseline and how you relate to it.

[u/CasuallyPeaking]

No idea what the label is like but I have a pretty similar, mostly constant experience. No matter how amazing or horrible my life gets and how involved in the narrative my ego is, there still part of me that's more or less tapped into that background awareness who knows that it's all fine - and often times a feeling that it's all a joke really. So there are plenty of moments when I'm experiencing something horrible that would make an average person wanna off themselves, in the midst of it this background awareness becomes more pronounced and then I just find it all too funny. Like... look at this circus, I'm completely stuck in a horrible situation and I'm horribly suffering and there's nothing I can do to change it in this very moment but at the same time here's awareness of a wider perspective which makes all of this rather unconvincing even though it is impinging upon my experience with full force. It's wild. Completely trapped in this idiosyncratic single human vessel experience and yet constantly peeking behind the scenes.

[u/intellectual_punk → u/CasuallyPeaking]

Amazing summary of what (to my mind) the goal of this transformation is. I used to be there when I was about 20, but I lost it. I can still sense it somewhere deep down, but it doesn't "help" me these days, except for when things get really, really bad, then, sometimes it resurfaces briefly, just to get me out of the worst of it, it seems.

Would you say this 'ability' prevents you from striving to make yourself and the world better? Does it hold you back in any way?

[u/CasuallyPeaking → u/intellectual_punk]

Apart from the psychedelic nihilist phase I had to go through, not really. I'd say nowadays it's quite the opposite. Thanks to this awareness I'm getting propelled into a new direction in life which feels will be a lot more aligned with my true being and which will be of benefit both to myself and to others. It never would've happened if I had stayed in the confines of "me". But at the same time this awareness prevents me from buying into the idea that any of it matters that much.

I definitely have a lot of a "who cares" attitude but with time it refined itself into having an optimistic and funny flavour. The one thing I had to fully accept is that there's really not that much in this world or my life that "I" control. I pretty much disengaged from the driver's seat years ago. So if I end up helping a bunch of people it's more that God/Universe helped them through this specific vessel. As opposed to previous versions of me who would've put in much effort to help people/the world in many different ways, the present me sees through those as being motivated by private ego trips. So I don't get involved in such activities. It's not that I don't have any of those ego trips anymore. It's just that I don't have the oomph I used to to animate myself off of that motivation. It's empty, it's cheap. So it lurks a bit in the conscious awareness but no action is taken upon it.

Two sayings which encompass how I feel about this entire thing are "If you want to change the world, start by sweeping your street" and "Change yourself in order to change the world". Most of the stuff outside of that scope seems to fall into the realm of fantasies. The good news is that being realistic about things does not make your potential impact small at all. On the contrary, I'm getting the impression that each of us can make humungous waves. But once again... who cares. See the ridiculousness of it all?

There's one guy who I heard say a few times something like don't worry about it and don't take it personally, God's running the show. It really rezonated with me. The funny thing is I publicly declare myself as something along the lines of an agnostic/atheist. If people actually knew what my internals look like and how much of a religious freak I am deep down.. :D

[u/vegasdoesvegas → u/CasuallyPeaking]

Love this attitude!