Can you feel this?
You gradually become aware of a warmth that is wrapped around you, beginning at your feet. Something has woken you up. Your consciousness becomes aware of your body; you keep your eyes closed and feel around you with your senses. You are insanely comfortable. Your body is completely relaxed and the atmosphere is ideal.
It’s not your bed, you know this immediately.
It’s your best friend’s bed.
You’re here, and his wife is not. She must be sleeping on the couch, maybe. You’re here, and your husband is not. He doesn’t care where you are, much, so long as you’re happy.
That, you are. Oh so deeply and intensely happy. It’s a feeling in your belly that stretches upwards and outwards through your skin.
You have no idea how you got here, and you don’t even care. Nothing matters except how warm and content you are.
Uncurling your body, you reach a foot out behind you and entwine your legs through his legs, sigh out your breath, and relax.
Love floods your body, cocoons you in a pink web of energy from which you never want to emerge.
What is this place that you’ve come to, and why are you here?
How is it that you are sharing this moment?
How did you get here?
What does it mean?
Ah, it doesn’t matter. You just never want it to end.
In the cold light of day, woken up for the second time, and in your own place, you think through the subsequent events: Driving your car out of his loungeroom, past his wife, apologising for having taken up more space in her already complex and busy consciousness, leaving their flat, itself filled with things and people, and heading down the road.
None of them were real.
But the feeling is; that’s something you retain. In your actual awakening, the love you felt while in another state, maybe in another realm, has stayed inside you, radiating out from your heart centre and energizing your body from face to foot.
Interrogating the symbolism of the dream, we can understand that it was about deep positivity, returning to your roots and gaining strength from the earth, gaining rest, and generally taking charge of life.
Many people echo Carl Jung when speaking of the darkness of consciousness. The consciousness isn’t dark. It’s unfamiliar. Sometimes it’s hidden. Sometimes your own stories are buried far away from your conscious mind. And if you’re like most people, the first time you really interact with your own consciousness, you have your eyes closed… and it’s therefore a lot darker.
Emerging from sleep feeling enveloped in a cocoon of love is something that is deeply familiar to me. I’ve experienced it ever since I was child; waking up feeling as though I’ve just been hugged by someone who loves me deeply and unconditionally. Depending on what you read, this feeling in dreams is due to either not getting enough love in daily life, or actually feeling that love in daily life. According to others, it’s because you’re in perfect alignment with your higher self, that perhaps you’re active in another state, that you were in a state of gratitude before you fell asleep, or even that you’re being visited by a spirit. One writer whom I respect defines the state of love as being a state of giving and receiving, and another, a neurosurgeon with an amazing story of his own brain death who defines it as connection with “source” – the basis of everything.
In the past six months I have been committed to a much more regular and focused spiritual practise, the details of which are irrelevant. One aspect of that practise has been deeper meditation, and a more open-hearted view of my own energetic work.
In doing so, I made a commitment not to publish anything publicly about that practise. Which, to be honest, is the most significant reason why my reflective, existential writings here have slowed down.
In exploring the conceptual frameworks, however, the net result is that I’m more regularly experiencing the same things I used to experience as a child – and what I’m going to call Residual Love is one of them.
Whatever the Residual Love idea means to you, to me it is an indication of deep connection with self and consciousness at a greater level. It is a symbol of a higher capability, itself indicative of a complete shift in consciousness.
Imagine a rainbow over a river. To someone who’s never seen a rainbow before, it appears as a band of colours, a shifting and shimmering something that doesn’t really exist; ungraspable and ephemeral. It comes and goes, often surprising and beautiful, but ephemeral. That’s kind of what interacting with consciousness is like for people who don’t go deep very often, or who only access it with the help of drugs. It’s a situation in which the surprising outcomes can be attributed to one-off events.
Once you know how to create the rainbow, however, you can make one whenever you want to see one. In the same way, creating doorways into, and interrogating consciousness becomes a much simpler matter.
Until eventually you get to the point where you are able to use it to your own benefit: For growth, or problem solving, or simply finding joy whenever you want to feel that way.
I don’t even know what my point is with this post, beyond wanting to help you feel a feeling that I have felt – and somehow to forge a pathway into the heart of it. But, what I’d like you to take away from this is that love is something that you are, that your feeling of love, happiness and contentment is not reliant on anything that is outside of you.
It doesn’t mean that you have to find god or religion, or take drugs to get there. You can train yourself to get there, if you’re willing to let go of everything that doesn’t matter, and just exist.
