June 08, 2014 - Death a Gestalt Shift?

JUNE 08, 2014   SUNDAY MORNING

    Hi, Sweet Pie.  Yes, we were together in the astral during the night.  We are both making good successful efforts in getting fully consciously back together.  Or rather should I say we are succeeding in piecing through the illusion of traditionally forced physical conceptions of reality and making our way into the higher, more subtle dimensions of our eternal togetherness.  

    I think it is expedient to discuss the effects of a Gestalt Shift in regards to our perceptions of the world we exist in.

    I have let the details of last nights dreams slip away from detailed memory but the conviction of our time together remains as a kind of vestigial recognition that our work is still progressing.  Not to worry.  We are still together, forever. We just need to flip our perceptions around from foreground to background of consciousness and back and forth to see where we are after the change in consciousness called death.

    I think I have mentioned before that the reason I believe these so-called dream details so often fail to cross the border from dream state to waking state (that is from the higher dimensions to the lower dimensions of thought and experience) is that it has something to do with the foreground-background shift in consciousness often referred to as a Gestalt Shift.  

    This perceptual shift in consciousness is often exemplified in the late Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin’s figure-ground drawings, of which his famous Figure-Ground Vase is the best example.  If you look at the figure in the center of the drawing, you see a white vase against a dark background.  But if you focus your attention on the background instead of the foreground the vase disappears and now you see only two faces looking at each other in profile.  The vase has completely vanished from your perception, except for the thin edges of each side of the vase which are now serving a different purpose.  They have become the thin lines of the nose, forehead ,and chin of each face looking at each other in profile.

    Flipping focus of your attention back and forth ,from the center of the overall drawing and the background of the drawing, you see the face and vase supplant each other, again and again, in your perception though you never see both the face and the vase in the picture at the same time.  One has to disappear for the other to appear.

    One interesting common denominator that remains regardless of which picture is perceived is the fact of the thin lines marking a border between the faces and the sides of the vase.  This may or may not be an important observation.  But I suspect it is an important.

    A similar shift in consciousness seems to happen during the crossover from dream state to waking state.  A point of demarcation separating the two modes of consciousness (dreaming from waking) may be self-similar to the experience of the lines separating the faces from the edges of the vase.  

    Some of the dream state awareness remains for a very brief while and then completely gets washed away by the dominance of the waking state of awareness.  This occurs after the crossover from sleep to waking state has completed itself.  Some may argue that the wild imagery of dreams makes it through into the waking state.  But in my observations of my own experiences of “waking up from sleep” such wild imagery is really just an after the fact misinterpretation or mutated memorization of the original dream events which elicited no brow raising alarms in logic.  Such alarms always come after the transition from sleep to awake has finished. I think the fantastic stuff occurs shortly after waking as a bad translation of concept languages, if you will, between the realms of consciousness.  Each world has its own “thought vocabulary,” as it were.  In the dream, no such outlandish fantastic images exist though new experiences belonging to the spiritual realms do exist separate from the physical realm, and natural to those subtler climes.

    But both sides of the equation are equally true and valid.  It’s just that the interpretations get fouled up sometimes.

    Our love for each other is vital and alive, Honey Bun.  You and I meet consciously in the astral planes all the time and continue our lives together.  We do many different things together.  Life is multifaceted for you and me just as much, or more, in the higher dimensions than it has been for us in the physical mode of being.

    I love you.