Which World Is Real, and How Do You Know You Are Not Making It Up?
The logic mind and the spirit mind cannot be accessed at the same time. It is impossible to be in two places at once, impossible to be in a beta brainwave state and a theta state simultaneously. I cannot think about my taxes and journey at the same moment, and I certainly should not drive my car while journeying. I think of it like an old roaming cell phone with no wifi, where you cannot send a text while you are on a call. You have to switch from one to the other. That is simply how all of our minds work.
An Ancient Argument
Because these two minds never run at the same time, they have been the source of enormous confusion. For centuries, people have argued about which form of perception is the real one and which is the illusion. Spiritualists say the physical world is nothing but a dream, all Maya, all illusion. Materialists say the spiritual world is a fantasy land. Philosophers have made elaborate cases for both sides.
The truth, in my experience, is simpler and more generous than either camp. Both worlds are real. Both aspects of perception are equally real. They are just different aspects of perception. We are looking at the same world in two different ways, with two different parts of the mind, and both are happening at once. A physical reality is unfolding and a spiritual reality is unfolding, together, all the time. We have simply been trained to shut off our perception of the spiritual one, except in sleep, or in the occasional experience we are taught to dismiss as woo-woo.
Why Spirit Perception Gets Dismissed
There is a reason spiritual perception is so often diminished and discarded, and it is worth naming plainly. It is very hard to lie in the spirit world. You tend to see the truth there. That gives a great many people ample motivation to devalue that kind of seeing. But when you live a clean, clear life, when you are honest in your intent and your ethics, there is nothing to hide from, and nothing to fear in that clarity.
You Are Already Perceiving Through Filters
Here is the part that tends to land the hardest. Our inner vision, as perceived by the spirit mind, is no more a creation of imagination than the physical objects we perceive with our senses and file away in the logic mind. Think about it. You are looking at me on a screen, and you are completely certain I am physically real. I am. But look at how many steps sit between us. Even if we were in the same room, light would be reflecting off my body into your eyes, processing through the biology there, traveling down the optic nerve as a signal, and being reconstructed by your brain into an image, which your brain actually has to flip, because we perceive things upside down from the way we think we do.
The same is true of touch, which reaches us as nerve signals interpreted by the brain, and of sound. If I spoke to you for three hours in a high, squeaky voice, your perception of me would change completely, even if my words were identical. That squeak is not my real voice, but it would color everything. So even in ordinary physical reality, we are not perceiving nearly as directly as we imagine. We are interpreting a stream of stimulus through many unconscious filters, and calling the result direct perception.
A Skill We Simply Have Not Practiced
Once you see that, the conclusion follows naturally. What we perceive with the logic mind is no more and no less real than what we perceive with the spirit mind. The only real difference is practice. We have spent a lifetime learning to interpret the data of sight, sound, touch, and smell, until it became fluent. We have been taught to ignore the spirit mind as a source of information. When we learn the skill of perceiving with spirit, developing our language with it, that data becomes just as readable, and in time just as fluent as the physical senses. That is the whole of what we are learning to do.
This matters practically, because sooner or later someone will ask you, how do you know it is real? How do you know you are not making it all up? You do not have to explain or justify your spiritual experience to anyone. It is equally real. You need only own it, know it, and stand in that truth. The people you are meant to be around are the ones who will resonate with you there.
Learning to perceive with the spirit mind, and to trust what you receive, begins with the foundations of journeying in Level 1 - The Fundamentals of Shamanism.