Printed in the Conscious Creation Journal
August-September 2000, Issue 13
Tracks of Consciousness
by John J. McNally
Almost every day, I get up, go to work, come home, talk with Kristen, read emails and go to sleep. The world advances in a day to day linear fashion, time appears to pass normally, day and night come on schedule and gravity works consistently well. This is the pattern I’ve created as my default reality. In it the world is solid and predictable, it’s the world in which my beliefs are comfortably fixed. During sleep, I explore different places as I dream, experience different realities and/or different lives. In dreams I have a very cohesive dream memory, I can remember previous dreams as easily as my waking memory can recall the earlier days events, yet I don’t have access to this dream memory in my normal waking consciousness.
These two very different foci are what I term “tracks of consciousness” – each track or groove is a non-physical point of focus in which we direct our consciousness. We all do this and I believe we all have a lot more than just the two I mentioned above. For example, when I was in grade school learning exponents, my teacher put a series of numbers on the board and asked which one was not an exponent of 2. Immediately, I blurted out the answer. The teacher was surprised (probably because I wasn’t paying attention half the time) and asked me how I knew. All I could tell him was that it didn’t fit into the track, I couldn’t explain it any better than that.
Another track of consciousness I’ve come to recognize is my fiction writing track. When I enter into this track I become the character that I am writing about, feel his/her feelings, think his/her thoughts etc… The characters come alive in my mind. When I am tired or stressed out, I can’t summon enough energy to get into this mode. As much as I may want to write, if I’m not bringing the character to life, the story just won’t go.
I was raised (as many of us were) to believe that the only REAL track is the physical or default one. This is reality, and everything else, dreams, writing, etc… was a byproduct of the imagination. One was real, the other was not and never the twain shall meet. Unless of course you start playing with ideas of reality creation, suddenly than your imagination starts to have an effect on your default reality.
Is there a magical/creative track? I believe so, although I’m uncertain as to how different it is from the dreaming track. I think that as a reality creator, I’ve been putting my energy into this magical track, overlaying it to a small degree onto the physical one, and watching the results manifest. I specify “to a small degree” because I believe that up until now, with only a handful of exceptions I haven’t really been willing to merge the two.
Even my most successful creations: Meeting Kristen, creating jobs, creating cars, have all been things that fit into the normal framework of default reality. Even more adventurous pursuits, like out of body experiences, and the hypnosis sessions with Kristen, have never actually been physical. They were real for me, but had no physical component, therefore I could have the luxury of running away from all this and holding on to the nice safe comfortable physical REAL world. I believe that truly blending the dreaming and default tracks would lead to unprecedented adventures in consciousness. The best example I can think of for this are the Nagual sorcerers in the Carlos Casteneda books.
Why “tracks?” And what is the point of labeling them at all? I call them tracks because once I enter one of them, it has a linear progression for me. For example in my fiction writing track, my characters will continue to develop from the place where I left off. As for labeling them, it helps me pay attention to where I’m putting my energy. I know better what I’m creating when I am aware of which track I’m on. If I’m focused deeply in the physical track, reality becomes extremely predictable for me. I can look 6 months or more into the future and predict it with accuracy, but ONLY IF I MAINTAIN THAT FOCUS!
For years I relied on this predictive ability, without ever really understanding it. I just knew that at times I could easily see the path of my life for months ahead, but then at other times everything was vague. When I shift my focus out of the default track and more into the creative/magical, the future becomes vague and open; there are more possibilities available to me now. When I put my intent into guiding that future through the magical, the results are extraordinary.
Shortly before meeting Kristen I had spent an afternoon in an altered magical focus, during that time I jumped through two stones I called “the dice of the gods” into a more magical life. Within a few months I was in love with Kristen and quitting my old job in order to travel cross-country and start living more consciously.
The tracks of consciousness do not have to remain distinct and separate, actually, I don’t believe that they are supposed too. The morning I conceived of this idea, I dipped into my writing track, then my creative/magical track and suddenly had the impulse to write this article. It was all I could do to finish shaving before I zipped into the living room to start banging out ideas.
I believe it takes more energy to remain focused in one specific track, than it does to shift back and forth between them. This shifting feels more natural, more fluid, much more childlike in quality. I find my energy levels remain high, even when I’m juggling several projects and working a full schedule. At times when I’ve been mainly focused on the default track, “reality” becomes almost overwhelming. I need more sleep, there’s zero energy for creative projects and I become more susceptible to physical ailments.
I have a theory that one of the main reasons we need so much sleep is because we pour so much energy into staying focused on the default physical track. Imagine how much energy it must take to maintain the illusion of one narrow band of focus, simply because you have habitually identified it as “reality”. Seth and other entities have advised shorter sleep schedules to allow for more fluidity of consciousness. I had very little success with these in the past because I didn’t like dragging myself out of sleep for no real reason. Imagine the latent beliefs I found hiding there!
I’ve been experimenting with tapping into my magical energy as I lay down to go to sleep at night. The first night I did this, I felt myself coming in and out of dreams with a female voice encouraging me and telling me how good I was doing. Despite becoming conscious several times that night, I didn’t feel overtired in the morning. On other nights I’ve woken up before dawn with the memory of several dream experiences in my mind, but I let them slip away after laying down to sleep again. Ah well practice makes perfect. <G>
I’m not sure where these experiments will lead me, but discovering this technique has been a major epiphany for me in understanding the manner in which my own conscious mind operates. I see the merging of tracks as a major freeing of consciousness, really letting me flex my creator’s muscles to see what I might accomplish.
©2000, John J. McNally. Printed in the June-July 2000 Issue of the online Conscious Creation Journal. http://www.consciouscreation.com/ (Feel free to duplicate this column for personal use – please include this copyright notice.)