Dream Wisdom: Tarab Rinpocheâ s astounding insights - A guide to evolving a life of joy and profound body-mind existential horizons

Indo-Tibetan ancient experience covers many levels of awareness that are not generally considered real and relevant in the modern world, where we do not generally refer to levels of consciousness and awareness. We stick to our physical body and the sensory data, which it supplies—data on that which we call reality. This reality is what counts. We have to understand it and we apply our minds to that task, and we mainly rely on conceptual reasoning and science to give us a trustworthy (“objective”) picture. We do not include the greater frame realising the subject–object interrelationships or all the possible levels of consciousness.
It was the custom to identify multi-types and levels of awareness in the ancient Eastern spiritual tradition, where the mind is considered to operate in conceptual ways (conceptual cognition), visual and auditory ways (image-perception), and feeling ways (feeling perception). In the West we are usually not explicit about the different minds even if we recognise the phenomena of thought, images and feelings.
We often deceive ourselves, thinking that the reality we create by means of sense data and our mental elaboration of it equals the reality outside, ‘an objective reality’. In the Ancient Eastern spiritual traditions, the reality we experience is exactly that, our subjective experience, and our picture of a reference world out there. Our experiences are necessarily products of an interaction between ourselves, our senses and what exists ‘out there’.
In these Eastern traditions, transformation systems have been developed that take devoted persons to subtle levels of awareness, meaning a successively greater independence of the physical body and its limitations. On these subtler levels, devotees are empowered with abilities that seem miraculous. The expansion of our consciousness is thus proved to be both possible/real and valuable.
On these higher levels we are bodies with senses, minds and realities that differ from the ones on lower levels. This is the reason why a particular name is given to the body on each level in ancient Indo-Tibetan teachings.
The ancient Eastern view makes us responsible for our reality and our well-being. We have the means to expand our consciousness, to vary our attention, our interpretations and other reactions. We can thus elaborate and refine our experiences to promote appropriate beingness. It is no easy task, however; there is always more to learn and develop. It fosters openness, respect and compassion.