The Two Realities, and Why Staying Balanced Between Them Matters
Right now, in your body, reading this, you are in what we call ordinary reality. It is physical flesh reality, the world we move through in normal waking consciousness, and it runs on the laws of Newtonian physics. Drop your keys and they fall. Gravity is always in play. And please, do not test this by trying to fly off a building, your spirit might soar, but your body will not. Ordinary reality has rules, and in the body we are bound by them.
The Dreamtime Has Different Laws
The dreamtime, or spirit reality, sometimes called non-ordinary reality, is the aspect of reality not bound by the constraints of the physical world. There, you can fly. You can breathe underwater. You can ride a dragon if you like. Nothing happens to your physical body, exactly as in a dream. Most of us have had the dream of flying over the land, or being carried on the back of an eagle, and felt that strange grief on waking that we cannot do it here. That world is real. It simply runs on different laws than this one.
We touch these other states of consciousness more often than we admit, in intuitive flashes, in dreams, and at the far end of the spectrum, in hallucination and psychosis. They are all glimpses of perception that is distinctly different from ordinary waking consciousness.
Why Balance Is Everything
This is where an important truth lives. Consider someone who, without the mental health care they need, has drifted into a state where they are speaking to things the rest of us cannot see, unable to manage their day-to-day life. What has happened, in the terms of this work, is that they have gone too far into the dreamtime and cannot come back. They cannot close the door. They have lost the ability to return to ordinary reality and function within it.
That is exactly what we are training against. The goal of shamanic practice is not to escape into spirit reality and stay there. It is to move freely between the two worlds, to remain grounded and rooted in our physical day-to-day life, functioning well, while also staying open to the spiritual awareness available to us. Not shut off from spirit, and not swept away by it. Balanced, with the door opening and closing at our command. That balance is the whole art.
You Have to Enter It to Know It
We can talk about the nature of quantum realities and the spirit world with the logic mind, here in physical reality, and I can do my best to describe it in words. But description is not experience. We can only directly perceive these realities when our brainwaves shift to the frequencies that let us enter the dreamtime. Right now, reading or listening, you are in a logic-mind state. You can grasp all of this intellectually. But grasping it is not the same as being there. The knowing comes when we actually change brainwave states and journey, and then return to share what we found.
Learning to enter the dreamtime and return at will, staying grounded and balanced between both worlds, is the first and most fundamental skill we build in Level 1 - The Fundamentals of Shamanism.