What it feels like...

We can still think, even when our selves are not there at all, for what we leave behind in bed drives the waves of thinking on and on. And when we wake in the morning, we dive back down into what has continued to think while lying there in bed. We meet up again with our own thoughts. They did not die away between our going to sleep and waking. We just happened not to be there.

Reading this, I feel enlightened. I feel honored with a deep mystery. It makes me laugh - it makes me say 'ha ha! of course!' It makes me happy. It is true that the kingdom of heaven is inside me; it's right there when I fall asleep every night. They say it's right there even when I'm awake, but in dreaming - which is actually not even on the other side of consciousness, but this side - I can almost say that I experience the kingdom of heaven directly and consciously.

Steiner goes on to say some profound things about the actual sequence of experience that characterizes our falling asleep. He says it can be seen that when we fall asleep, we go through three separate experiences, or three aspects of the whole experience of passing from awake to sleep.

They are:

     a feeling of deep anxiety
     a feeling of the ground falling out from under your feet
     a feeling of total sensory deprivation

This is what it feels like to leave your body.