According to the simplistic Map of the Unworld, the Tunnel defines a route that leads from ordinary waking awareness and ends at the Urumara, then you go through the Urumara into the Unworld. The expanded version is that the Tunnel and the Urumara are multi-dimensional experiences, not mechanistic. You can go through the Tunnel and/or the Urumara many times during one unworlding. Each time you exit the Tunnel to go through the Urumara, or exit the Unworld to go back into the Tunnel through the Urumara, your lucidity goes up or down. The Urumara is the moment of sleep, waking, or becoming more or less lucid, and the Tunnel is the states of mind you transit in order to approach that moment.
Words like 'awake,' 'asleep,' 'mind,' and 'body' are useful but when it comes to teaching yourself how to Go-To-Sleep-Right and how to Wake-Up-Right, these terms gloss over processes that we carry out robotically. To get my own Attention, I tell myself that the body must sleep, but the mind doesn't have to. As a species-wide generic template, the human form will be reinvigorated when we lose our collective addiction to unconsciousness. This template, the Spforildewitt, is altered one person at a time starting with you and me: humans who are interested in becoming tour guides to the Unworld and open to radical new ways of learning and teaching unworlding. I'm not using 'unconsciousness' in the snooty new age sense to indicate 'lack of spirituality,' but in the literal sense to indicate that people waste a lot of energy in the physical and don't have anything left with which to motivate themselves to retain a coherent seed of awareness while transitioning to the Unworld.
They say that in order to learn the most reliable or direct route to unworlding--Going-To-Sleep-Right--much practice is required in the subtle and hard-to-describe art of "keeping the mind awake while the body goes to sleep." While it was probably Oliver Fox who invented the term "mind awake, body asleep," it was popularized as a catchy and clever advertising slogan for the Monroe Institute. And I have no problem with that, but I can't be satisfied with just adopting someone else's advertising slogans, no matter how popular, in the attempt to teach this "art" to non-artists or this "science" to non-scientists or above all else, training myself to do something that I barely have any experience with. I don't want to beat this popular catchphrase to death, but it is semantically incorrect. We don't go in and out of bodies and the body and mind don't exist as entities and they don't go to sleep and wake up. For my purposes, since I regularly meet several distinct and identifiable versions of myself in unworldings and need something theoretical for each of them to do, we have something like seven energy centers which could be characterized as chakras or bodies, and each of these bodies accepts energy from the energy body that is below it in the hierarchy, whatever that body is willing to share. By the time each member of a hierarchically-arranged series of filters takes turns sifting through your energy for the part it wants for itself, nothing is left for the bodies at the top of the hierarchy, the ones that are allowed to live in the Unworld because they know how to wait their turn, and know their way around it.
We need literal terminology that says what is true and needs no further translation once the senses have apprehended the actual words themselves. And the energy centers that comprise the infinite variety of energy configurations we call 'mind' do not in themselves require sleep. Sleep is an aberration enjoyed and definitely needed by the rigid configuration of the Dayly Dreame because holding a strictly physical world together requires so much energy that it makes us deathly tired by the end of the day.
Here's something that occurred to me upon waking from last night's relatively successful dry run at lucidity, another night of "didn't achieve Official Lucidity, but felt like I made progress in finding the way there." Relatively successful because I didn't wake up in the throes of, "When am I gonna get lucid fer chrissake???" which is not a good way to start the day. What occurred to me is that we're looking for an aberration. It's not aberrant that you or I can't seem to easily keep the mind aware as the body goes to sleep. It's not aberrant that some people regularly experience more lucidity than I do, or vice versa. It's aberrant that people in general, in our culture and our time, usually lose consciousness at the same time the body goes to sleep. Because it's unnecessary. It's just a learned habit. I'd have to call it an addiction. And this bad habit is kinda necessary in a way, in order to help maintain rapport with a hard-driven culture based on the pursuit of money due to the fear of death, but I never had much rapport with that culture anyway, so what do I have to lose? I admit openly that I'd like to spend less time in the Dayly Dreame and more time in the Unworld, even if it means that people who have to put up with me think I'm a little weird. Let them think I sleep too much or talk about dreams, of all things, while not giving a fig what my next-door neighbor is up to or what the office gossip is this week.
It's wrong to assume that the mind and the body must go to sleep at the same time. We do this--or assume we do--because our 2-3-4 Mind is rigid in its ways, in its supposed needs and expectations, and it all revolves around the assumption that the Dayly Dreame is the be-all and end-all of the universe.
Any but a superficial inspection of the unworlding literature will convince even some of the more mechanically-minded that getting unworlded regularly is not a mechanical activity. Mindset over method, blah, blah, blah, yes it's true. So let's take a step backward, retaining our wondrous mindset if possible, to take another look at something mechanical. That thing that was once-and-forever misdubbed "mind awake, body asleep."
The accuracy in my assertion that the mind doesn't ever literally go to sleep boils down to Synfonemia, which explains that there's no such thing as 'the' mind. Mind is not a thing but a state, and the adjustments that comprise the various states of mind are numerous if not infinite. Synfonemia, the harmonics of awareness, is the unifying principle of philosophy, metaphysics, religion, and science. The first few harmonics, the ones I presume to be aware of, are just the start. I've barely had time to consider what might be the 7th harmonic of the 7th harmonic, for example, except to know that 49ness would be a tiny sound with an effect on the whole orchestra that would be undetectable but real. Synfonemia could lead to a more widely-held belief system some day, whether I stick around to get any credit for that or not. I could stop here to explain how I am the center of my universe, but suffice it to say that you are also the center of your universe, and the worlds of many intersect at the most solid places because 3ness or solidity is dimensionality itself.
The Seven overtones of awareness, or the Seven, are individually adjustable as to how much of your limited energy each one of them gets to monopolize. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th harmonics of awareness try to monopolize it all while we're awake, and then in order to endure the act of going to sleep--which the 2-3-4 mistakes for its impending doom--as a body it chucks it all to the wind in a mad dash for the cover of deep unconsciousness. After that, it's completely willy-nilly as to how much of that forsaken energy the 2-3-4 will try to reclaim once the act of going to sleep is complete. The result is, by default, not a lot of lucidity as far as the 2-3-4 is concerned. Since lucidity is a way of measuring relative awareness as a quantity, with the 2-3-4 drooling in the gutter of the Unworld unaware of its own name, the tendency is to forgo much lucidity and somehow make it through the night. The Uppers can experience using the 2-3-4's ignored energy but the 2-3-4 won't remember much of it when it wakes up in the Dayly Dreame and it will seem irrelevant since the 2-3-4 either stays uninvolved, freaks out, or goes off on an irrelevant tangent.
Since transits of the Tunnel and the Urumara are multi-dimensional and not mechanistic, there's no law against being awake or asleep, dreaming or not dreaming, in the Tunnel itself. The degree of lucidity varies from zero lucidity, with no experience to remember, to thought dreams in the Tunnel with no visual component, to incredible experiences of amazing lucidity after several consecutive trips through a variety of representations of the Tunnel and the Urumara.
Mentally "going to sleep"--which is what happens when the 2-3-4 Mind/Body/World releases the Attention--can happen in any part of the Tunnel, or not at all. This moment is not intrinsically linked to the moment when the body goes to sleep, which takes place when the 5+ senses are available to the Uppers instead of to the physical body, and in particular when the semi-autonomous processes such as breathing and swallowing become fully autonomous.
Here's an example of a Tunnel experience upgrading past the Urumara: I'm driving an unseen car--the Dream Usher--to deliver a desirable woman, who is really my 6ness dream body Cwahacoy, to a certain forest retreat, but this is unseen, it's just a vivid Tunnel dream, a thought experience. Our plan is to merge by finding a suitable trysting spot in the forest. When we approach the Urumara, I get a static vision of the situation and park the car. I see a fence between the road--which is the Tunnel--and the forest, which is the Nowhere. The fence is the Urumara and the sign on it that warns people to stay out is the Dream Usher. Doing her job of gaining my interest, Cwahacoy precedes me through the Urumara, which I have no memory of doing consciously. On the other side of the lucidity-upgrade which I call the Urumara--the scary fence--the dream becomes spectacularly visual, vivid, colorful and meaningful.
Basically what happens is that our twoness, threeness, and fourness, not to mention the Uppers, are engaged, channeling energy, each at varying, individually adjusted, metered rates of energy usage. Passing received energy in a series, like a bucket brigade, with each dream body keeping as much energy as it wants and passing on what it's willing to share. The Dayly Dreame consists of the 2-3-4 Body/Mind/World keeping most of this energy for itself because it takes a ridiculous of amount of energy to keep the solid world solid. Until ye olde 2-3-4 comes within sight of the Urumara, the moment of sleep, and suddenly remembers: this is where I turn my senses off, all the way off!
As mechanistic as the Tunnel map sounds, the Urumara is no more mechanistic than, for example, the Nowhere which stands between every state and every other state and leads literally anywhere from anywhere else. Is there a comprehendable way to describe an infinitely talented portal to anywhere? Metaphysics and pseudo-science are the common peoples' response when science has taken the childish stance that physical proof is the only evidence of non-physical existence, therefore the non-physical doesn't exist because it can't be proven. The Urumara is as multi-dimensional as it needs to be, to accomodate seven infinitely adjustable, freely merging and unmerging dream bodies. The multi-dimensionality of the Urumara and the Tunnel, is not something to be explained but something to be experienced and felt. This is where a detailed dream journal comes in, because there's a point at which the conscious mind will stall in its attempt to make a machine of everything, recalling memories that can't easily be described.
Many of my multidimensional Tunnel & Urumara dreams comprise winding through labyrinthine buildings full of rooms leading one to another with no corridor, just leading from room to room to room. Or I'm outside, going from house to house with no street or pathway, just clusters of doors with some structure defining houses or apartments. You have to keep going through door after door. Each door is the Urumara. The lucidity increases or decreases through each door. Each door is a separate challenge. The final challenge, such as a high wall that has to be climbed, is not always surmounted. For example, I might have to pull my own weight up to look over the wall several times. I might end up going back and fiddling around on the near side of the wall.
The 2-3-4 is emotionally dependent on its belief that life on earth is more real than the other kinds of experience. Could there possibly be anything scary about breaking out of that mold? There must be, because the 2-3-4 is certain that beyond that reflexive panic point lies its own death. The mind and body fall asleep at the same time because the mind is afraid that the body will die without the mind controlling it.
Part of the Collective Average, also know as the Official Earthville Belief System, is that death is permanent, or relatively permanent as thought by the true believers in reincarnation. When in fact death takes place once per Moment and there ain't a damn thing we can do about it. The whole universe self-destructs and re-forms from its own ashes once per Moment and the old one never existed and never did, while the new one is already being replaced by another one and who even believes that the future actually exists, except as a bunch of mostly as-of-yet unimagined notions that will mostly never come true no matter how hard we try to imagine them.
I had a great dream about the Urumara last night. I was facing a door with a curtain flapping in it, blown by the breeze. Or you might say snapping in a stiff wind. Outside was nothing but clouds. I was heading for the door and almost about to wander through it when the sounds I was hearing and the sights I was seeing suddenly added up to the thought that I was about to deboard an airplane without a parachute. I spun on my heels, sheepishly saying to an unseen "pilot"--the Dream Usher again--that I "should have brought my glasses" since I'd almost gone out that open door without thinking about it.
This was a fairly typical Urumara dream, all conceivably within the Tunnel since I rationalized a reason to chicken out and not go through the Urumara into the Nowhere. I was asleep, but barely, and I woke up immediately upon making my remark to the pilot. I had wandered too close to the Unworld and almost fell in. I'd been hearing the energy sensations of the Urumara including the loud buzz which I rationalized to be an airplane engine, the wind, etc. Instead of going into the Nowhere I turned around with my tail between my legs and went into the Nowhere anyway. Lotta good that did, huh? The other Nowhere is usually mistaken for "I'm lying in bed with my eyes shut and I already moved my leg so now I can't get unworlded, shucks, too bad, oh well," from which we proceed to reformulate the usual version of the 2-3-4 Mind/Body/World: safe and sound, and boring, and scary, and dangerously infested with solid, physical repercussions for our many mistakes. I wonder why we can't get unworlded. It's because we are addicted to safety, whether real or illusional, here behind locked doors in the Earthville Mental Institution. We choose to remain on this side of that door, locked up.
Only by forcing ourselves to consciously forgo some key addictions of the 2-3-4 can we ever hope to attain the Magical Mindset and get unworlded all the time. The routines we cling to so fervently are held in place by the past and the future, which don't even exist. The safety we shoot up like heroin addicts doesn't exist. The death we fear doesn't exist. And the life we fear losing--our individuality--doesn't exist either. You aren't real, I'm not real, the separation between us isn't real, and guess what? With all that unreal stuff stripped away, something does still exist. That would be awareness.
Which, by turning off the 2-3-4 in order to "go to sleep" (dissolve the world as we know it), is the very thing we are trying to lose. Of course the loss of the 2-3-4 is the gain of the Remote Mind. The Uppers cavort with the barely conscious vestiges of the 2-3-4 sort of straggling along drunkenly in any part of the Unworld that the Uppers feel like cavorting in. Much of this is unrememberable, indecipherable, and/or unremarkable to a nearly unconscious 2-3-4. We fill our dream journals with what little we can remember in hopes that having more vivid dreams and remembering more details will drive the 2-3-4 into a lucid dream every so often whether he/she actually desires one or not.
Fortunately the Remote Mind barely noticeS the foot-dragging of the 2-3-4 since time isn't really its thing, it isn't in a hurry to force anybody to do anything. So the pushy attitude of the 2-3-4 reading every book on unworlding and watching every YouTube and joining every forum and Facebook group... barely makes a dent in the Remote Mind's fun. Every night at sleeptime, the 2-3-4 has temporarily given up the ghost and unleashed all this pent-up energy for the Uppers to play with, what's so bad about that? The 2-3-4 wants to stagger around like a drunk, who cares? That's one nice thing about the Uppers vs. the 2-3-4; they don't care about control in the same insidious way that the 2-3-4 does. They can laugh at their own source of energy--the 2-3-4--without feeling any spite or malice or superiority. The 2-3-4 is just funny, like a comedian playing a drunk.
When you get serious about limiting your conscious mind's monopoly on your energy with its habitual routine of going unconscious when the Attention stops detecting the body, the Remote Mind is perfectly happy to get on the stick and help you out in any way it can. After all, it's your Remote Mind, no? You--the 2-3-4 in its waking persona--are the source of the Uppers' nightly energetic romp. Nothing wrong with total freedom, should the 2-3-4 actually decide that it wants to get consciously involved, lucidly engaged with the nightly romp. Your future self is more than willing to help you out with that.
Losing track of the body and losing track of the mind have no intrinsic reason to take place at the same time. There's no connection between the two; just the same pitiful excuse: "but I was sleepy..." The reason we fall for this every night is that we don't face it during the day when the conscious mind feels powerful. Daytime practices called Awakenings are one of the Frawmbickly Acts. If done daily, you will quickly accumulate confidence and experience with the borderline of sleep where the Soul Retinue waits for you to show up as often as you care to bother making the trip. Waiting till you're dead tired and sleepy is a bad idea.
As for the Urumara and its multi-dimensional capacity, first of all, if the Urumara were not multidimensional, it would be the first thing ever to not be so, and more to the point, what the heck is the Urumara, anyway?
The Urumara is an action. It's like a verb pretending to be a place. It's the act of leaving the close-in safety of the Tunnel for the unlimited Nowhere, the unknown, where anything can happen. Every time you volitionally or accidentally overcome a bit of resistance and push out from the safety of preconstituted reality, you go through the Urumara. Going through the Urumara couldn't possibly change eternity. But you as an individual are, by definition, not eternity. You are just little ole you, and going through the Urumara consciously will change you.
With the following footnote: in order to get through the Urumara--consciously--you have to change you.
