A Response...
First off, there are no dumb questions, especially when I'm thirsty.
So the linked title actually goes to my post titled "Wingman" for the reason that a comment was left by "pledge" regarding altered states of consciousness. Altered states misconstrues a lot of what mystic practitioners actually do. After all, an altered state is technically a divergence from the waking self, but what does one classify as the wakeful self? The attentive student? The relaxed smoking buddy? The "riding down the elevator while wondering if she caught me staring at her ass" guy? The problem with this question, and it is a fair question, is that all throughout your day you experience altered states regardless of what you classify as a "wakeful state." We have a habit of classifying, and to classify we have to partition experiences. States of consciousness, however, are not partitioned and are instead a spectrum of awareness. This is self-evident if you are mindful of your thoughts throughout just a one-hour period. Between your half-lucid morning confusion and the over-stimulated-list-creating machine when your head hits the pillow at night you continually oscillate between the waves of awareness. Psychologically this can be seen as a sometimes erratic, always mathematic, concordanation of your brain waves from Alpha to Theta, but beyond that, it gives us just a small glimpse of what is possible internally.
This brings up the second portion of your question regarding whether or not our "brains" go somewhere when we sleep. To use a visual, imagine a huge ball of thread. Only this ball doesn't consist of just one thread but thousands of billions of threads knotted up against eachother [for the remainder of this thought experiment, please refrain from associating "threads" with "neurons." It does not apply]. Each thread represents a thought, volition, fear, or simply the connection between a thought and fear or volition. Now experience the weight of this ball of thread. What's it weigh...something like 3.5 lbs? The brain, all 3.5 lbs of it, stays very much content inside the warmth of your own head when you dream. Your mind, during the darkest hours, has the ability to take a few of these threads and play with them. In a knot full of knots, holes, and cul de sacs, your mind has infinite "places" it can go within it's own ball each and every night. In fact, it has so many alternate endings and choose your own adventures that it has no need to go elsewhere. But what I like about this visual image is that there's also the possibility that your mind finds emptiness. A new thought, or thread, could pass right through the entirety of this ball. Why? Because there is no core, no self, no attachment to this new thought...that is, of course, unless you wrap your previous thoughts, volitions, and fears around it and knot it up in the mix. So, to sum up, the "brain" [read: mind] does not go anywhere when you sleep, but it does have the potential to go nowhere if you let it.
So the linked title actually goes to my post titled "Wingman" for the reason that a comment was left by "pledge" regarding altered states of consciousness. Altered states misconstrues a lot of what mystic practitioners actually do. After all, an altered state is technically a divergence from the waking self, but what does one classify as the wakeful self? The attentive student? The relaxed smoking buddy? The "riding down the elevator while wondering if she caught me staring at her ass" guy? The problem with this question, and it is a fair question, is that all throughout your day you experience altered states regardless of what you classify as a "wakeful state." We have a habit of classifying, and to classify we have to partition experiences. States of consciousness, however, are not partitioned and are instead a spectrum of awareness. This is self-evident if you are mindful of your thoughts throughout just a one-hour period. Between your half-lucid morning confusion and the over-stimulated-list-creating machine when your head hits the pillow at night you continually oscillate between the waves of awareness. Psychologically this can be seen as a sometimes erratic, always mathematic, concordanation of your brain waves from Alpha to Theta, but beyond that, it gives us just a small glimpse of what is possible internally.
This brings up the second portion of your question regarding whether or not our "brains" go somewhere when we sleep. To use a visual, imagine a huge ball of thread. Only this ball doesn't consist of just one thread but thousands of billions of threads knotted up against eachother [for the remainder of this thought experiment, please refrain from associating "threads" with "neurons." It does not apply]. Each thread represents a thought, volition, fear, or simply the connection between a thought and fear or volition. Now experience the weight of this ball of thread. What's it weigh...something like 3.5 lbs? The brain, all 3.5 lbs of it, stays very much content inside the warmth of your own head when you dream. Your mind, during the darkest hours, has the ability to take a few of these threads and play with them. In a knot full of knots, holes, and cul de sacs, your mind has infinite "places" it can go within it's own ball each and every night. In fact, it has so many alternate endings and choose your own adventures that it has no need to go elsewhere. But what I like about this visual image is that there's also the possibility that your mind finds emptiness. A new thought, or thread, could pass right through the entirety of this ball. Why? Because there is no core, no self, no attachment to this new thought...that is, of course, unless you wrap your previous thoughts, volitions, and fears around it and knot it up in the mix. So, to sum up, the "brain" [read: mind] does not go anywhere when you sleep, but it does have the potential to go nowhere if you let it.
posted by J.B.P. at 12:32 AM
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