The worst feature of the supposedly existing OBE community is the steady hammering of repetitive questions ricocheting in all directions from out of the dank mouth of the Great Cavern of Ignorance which this community of intelligent and well-educated oddballs represents. And I don't mind telling you that whoever said there's no such thing as a stupid question was either joking or else he was drunk or he was being paid to say it. Maybe someone published a best-seller by that title or something. It certainly is a popular thing to say:  "There are no stupid questions."

Not that I mind. People's perpetually ridiculous assumptions give me an excuse to keep shooting off my mouth answering the same wrong questions over and over... at great length, because wrong-headed questions don't lend themselves to simple answers. Naturally, the ignorance which I so enjoy endeavoring to entertain doesn't stem from the questioners being ignorant people as such, it's just that inexperienced unworlders don't know what to ask because their naturally-occurring sets of questions will be framed by the experiences that they do have: reading books and watching videos, most of which either use outdated terminology fraught with bogus assumptions or else try to redevelop new terminology, which they can't do right because they are not me. So all their questions about unworlding will be framed as if the Unworld were an offshoot of the "real world" where these books and videos are made, and therein lies the impossibility of answering a wrong question right, without going back to the beginning each time.

As a framework for most of the wrong questions, there's always the Supreme Wrong Question about what is subjective vs. objective reality. Everyone fell into this shallow sinkhole of quicksand, from Gurdjieff to Kepple, and Monroe was no exception. Monroe even made an institution of delineating the real Unworld from the imagined Unworld, inspiring Kepple and everyone else who wanted to be the next Monroe to try and make a better institution of it... and so it goes.

Ever heard of "hot ice"?

That's like "objective reality".

Reality is defined as what a subjective observer tends to not consider impossible due to his own subjective influences. There's no objectivity involved. There is no real reality. We should abandon the terms 'objective' and 'subjective' completely, especially after Kepple muddied the water by trying to revert to their original meanings, leaving everybody behind in the dust since we already have meanings for those words so most people won't know what he was talking about anyway. So instead of those two terms--Can of Worms A  and Can of Worms B --let's define definitions in terms of what definitions define: identity. Identity and Mind and Body and World and duality and specific dichotomies such as subjective/objective, dark/light, good/bad, right/wrong are just 2ness. Preceding 2ness on the reality hierarchy is a waveless, featureless, infinitude of nothingness, and the moment this nothingness becomes aware of itself, 2ness it is. The first few minutes of existence would make us change our minds about the whole experiment, but there is no obvious way back or out of the mess so we sleep a lot or we die, in our first weeks of life, whichever seems more natural. Nurturing parents and good luck convince most of us to stay, especially in these sterile-but-stupid times when good luck in getting their children to survive is so common for people who can afford modern medicine, whether they plan on raising robots and idiots or not.

The drive to escape solid existence is getting more popular these days. When I was a boy, people had crew cuts and jobs and went to church and stuff. Nowadays it's becoming obvious that most of the jobs are pointless and absurd, the churches are dead from the heart up, and the same crew cut might be worn by a billionaire or a junky drooling in the gutter. Long hair and beard meant Peace, brother!  when I was 13; now it might still mean that, but it could mean just about anything else too. The frameworks shoring up the Collective Average are imploding under their own weight and the most advanced nations where oodles of money have filtered down to the populace in the form of oodles of debt, with desperation hidden under impressive but flimsy layers of consumerism, these modern places poisoned by prosperity are the ones which are in the greatest danger of rotting down to nothing at the end of a hookah hose. Most of my pot-head friends from the 1970s and 1980s died young due to the fact that smoking marijuana made them stupid and some of them even memorialized their own stupidity by killing themselves. Some are still hanging on to the small end of a liquor bottle, which proves that intelligence and life do not depend on having a functioning mind.

But that drive to escape solid existence is quite popular these days. Many online forums exist where the same question may be asked in its infinite varieties such as: "Did I really leave my body last night or did I just dream that I left my body?"

OK... So... Let's. Go. Back. To. The. Beginning.

Experience is what we remember. I remember dreaming something last night, so it really happened. I experienced it, therefore I remember it, that makes it real in my world. Joe Blow and his wife next door are throwing chairs at each other because they both had the 'same' experience and they each remember it differently. Since each is convinced that the other is obviously lying to benefit him or herself or at least to win the argument, they both take the perceptual discrepancy personally and neither one will give in, no one will win, because as usual, people don't know what reality is.

Reality for you is your reality. Reality for me is my reality. To split it up any other way is denial. The entire human race is in denial, and religion and science are partly to blame for having wrested away from us the voices of the gods, which we used to hear in our heads, but naturally this sort of thing stopped when cultures clashed and the voices of the gods no longer made sense due to the fact that you're from Greece and I'm from Turkey and our respective mental voices just don't get along. The march of progress has certainly made mincemeat of what used to keep cultures coherent. The old religions are stagnant and are quietly being replaced by religions such as sciencism, educationism, and capitalism, which are just clever enough to represent themselves as something other than belief systems, but not clever enough to help us meet our needs and solve our problems efficiently. In their quiet wormy way, these new religions can insidiously assume the role of purveyors of reality and no one can complain because no one seems to realize they're just belief systems, just religions which keep us from fearing death long enough to get us to go to work one more day and make some sleazeball rich. We participate in the slavery system because everyone else is doing it.

Experience is what we remember. Unfortunately people think that repetition means reality, so they go out to the Unworld and experience some reality and it feels so real so it becomes a new dogma. Fan clubs spring up around the new beliefs and presto! a new religion is born. Hundreds of years pass and people are memorizing scriptures in lieu of having their own experiences because the experiences of another person--the true mystic who wrote the book that gave birth to the new belief system that morphed into a religion--someone else's exact mystical experiences are not replicable by very many other people.

I'm not saying that we can't get unworlded. I'm saying that your Unworld and mine are different. In fact, my Unworld of today is different from my Unworld of tomorrow. There's no objective reality because the definition of "world" is simply that which does appear to exist vs. that which does not appear to exist. It boils down to appearances, and from transient, temporary appearances, we build semi-permanent belief systems and hundreds of years later we're memorizing scripture and burning heretics at the stake and hoping that the powers-that-be will notice our superior faith in their conscienceless BS.

We humans are beleaguered by this heavy weight called the 2-3-4 Body/Mind/World, or the 2-3-4 for short, although I'm thinking of changing the term to 'BMW' to see if it sells better. A preponderance of 2ness, 3ness, and 4ness in our selection of energy modes with which to express ourselves leads to strong emphasis on individuality, gravity, and time, all of which amounts to the harsh physicality of the worlds we wander around in, lost and relying on foggy memories and consensus to uphold shaky belief systems that we try hard to prove scientifically. Unfortunately, our current belief systems will not survive long enough for science to prove them right or wrong, so science is wasting its time but that's OK, it's a nice hobby for some and even brings home the bacon for many.

Now we get a situation where a competent unworlder is treated as an infallible bearer of the truth because he has coherent experiences in the Unworld. We all try to mimic his experience. Robert Monroe rescues lost souls from the belief system territories where they are found sitting on a cloud strumming a harp or burning in hell, and takes them to his own belief system territory, "Focus 27 and the Reception Center," or even sweeter, "the Park..." which is then adopted as the real  part of the Unworld. We make focus groups on Facebook etc. which assume as a group that soul retrieval and the Reception Center are not just valid experiences--which of courese they are--but also objective experiences of reality, equally true for everybody, and if not, then the one who dares to dispute them is wrong: a heretic.

Now here comes Joe Blow who's addicted to Monroe's teachings but can't seem to get unworlded, so he creates a branch of the Monroe religion based on the Monroe Institute's oddly profitable habit of teaching that these areas of the Unworld can be reached without unworlding. (Pay for the class, no results are guaranteed, pay for the class, no results are guaranteed, pay for the class, pay for the...) With the result that Joe Blow and his followers don't have to learn unworlding at all, and pretty soon we have true believers believing that everything that passes through their imagination is an experience. And it is. And it's real. But reality is subjective. All of it. What you and I experience don't match up except at places where our Moments intersect, and the rest of our supposed consensus about reality is a gloss, a potentially infinite set of blatant assumptions. To the extent that different folks have matching experiences, we might as well trash the notion of individual experience altogether and pull up a cloud, let's strum our harps for eternity and anyone who doesn't mesh with our dogma can just go to hell.

My world morphs from Moment to Moment and every Moment is the magical Moment of Choice. Due to the belchy, bloated inertia caused by feeding almost all of our available energy to the lower chakras 2ness, 3ness and 4ness, we believe our past really happened a certain exact way, when in fact we select a different past once per Moment and invent diseases like schizophrenia and alzheimers to explain the existence of entities who find reality to work otherwise. I'm not advocating schizophrenia or alzheimers, nor do I advocate the use of psychoactive drugs which break the hold of inertia in the filtering processes which decide what kind of reality we're going to have. My sermon is about not being fooled by your habitual assumptions. Our worlds can intersect only in the Moment, and the rest of the time we're just agreeing about the nature of the illusions we call the past and the future. Some people will argue all night about what's going to happen in the future. Almost the same number of people will argue all day about what happened in the past, and somehow this fact of life never seems to mean anything to us. People don't experience a set, fixed reality. They gloss over the details so they can keep pretending that we all live together in the same reality. We don't. Not even close. Joe Blow passes you on the street and ignores you, maybe doesn't even notice you... you are, in his reality, an automaton at best. I speak literally, not symbolically. You ignore Joe Blow or don't notice him, he's a two-dimensional image in your world, at best.

Most of the time we have this tunnel vision thing going on, looking straight ahead and not seeing what's to the side and obviously not seeing what's behind us. A good part of the time we can get away with being lost in thought and we don't even see what's in front of us. "Thing-blindness" is a common phenomenon in which we're looking for something, and the harder we look, the more we can't find it. According to what's about to happen--someone else will walk right up to it or it will appear where you just looked a dozen times already--it's in plain sight, and you can clearly see every other object in the room. This is a glitch of awareness, a true fact of life. This is just one of those pieces of evidence like deja vu  and Murphy's Law that we discount as mythology while it holds true and holds true and holds true some more. If you focus too hard on something it disappears, in this world and the next; you create a custom blind spot for just that sort of thing. Do you think rich people lie in bed unable to sleep, obsessing about whether there will be a check in the mail tomorrow? You got to be kidding. People whose notions of money are configured in that way don't have a pot to piss in because they're disappearing the thing that they're obsessing over. Ten years from now they might have managed to reconfigure themselves, and then they might experience some prosperity. Said prosperity might even be a direct cause of an earlier obsession having brought it into focus, and then once the configuration was adjusted, it turns out that what had once been focused upon too much is now properly lined up in Intent.

But there is no ten years from now and there is no yesterday. The most obvious fact noticed by more philosophers than any other phenomenon is that nothing really exists outside of the current Moment. From this fact of life we can create libraries full of philosophy, but from a practical standpoint we can also create some of the most effective means of cultivating the ground for getting unworlded. You don't have to pretend  that the past and the future don't exist, but it is highly recommended that you realize  they don't exist because it might help you to not obsess on them, and that will help point you in the direction of the magical mindset Intopia  which is guaranteed to get you unworlded every time.

We don't need to be doing reality checks; we need to be living in the reality check: Life is a dream... Check! The past doesn't exist... Check! There is only one awareness... Check! I am in an extended false awakening... Check! Individuality is an illusion, the ego is a pitiful being shivering in panic at the specter of its own death, our lives are just files that we--a collective we, a single soul, a single awareness--focus in on with individually held tools called the Attention while ignoring the fact that the Moment is infinitely small and infinitely vast at the same time, nothing else exists, it never stops changing, and none of us will live long enough to figure any of this out, much less do anything about it.

Assuming that we die at all. And that's an assumption based on what other people seem to experience. Personally, I can't recall ever dying. But I recall many dreams ending and that's what I expect to happen some day to this Dayly Dreame. As for my individuality, I hope I have enough sense to let go of most of that before I die, because it seems to keep me locked into a very inflexible world that is more rigid and rulish than free. When I die, if I die, I'd prefer to have the freedom to go anywhere I want.

For starters, realize that every dream is lucid and every experience is a dream: dream  and experience  are the same thing. Don't take my word for it. Get out there and prove me wrong. Just don't get yourself killed.