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Being conscious during sleep states isn’t anything to get too excited about. Delusions that exist during the day don’t disappear when you shut your eyes. In fact, they often get far worse.

The problem with Wilber was that the poor guy mistook this special condition, this sickness, for enlightenment. Any kind of enlightenment that requires some mystical state is worse than useless. It just reinforces the belief that your “self” has some kind of objective reality. Who’s going to have this exalted state of “heightened consciousness”? Who’s going to float in the formless state of “no up, no down, no over and no there” Wilber claims to have discovered? Who’s going to become enlightened? Why it’s “you” of course!—your self-important self-existent selfish self!

I’LL TELL YOU, THOUGH, when I read this piece I was initially suckered by it. Wilber is a very persuasive writer—hypnotic and positively seductive. When you find yourself getting sucked in by something like that, you’ve got to take a step back, breathe a little, and see what your intuitions tell you. Does reading these things make you notice your own real life here and now? Or does it reinforce a fantasy about going off to exotic places to experience mysterious and wonderful altered states of consciousness—so very much higher than the mundane consciousness you’ve actually got? Does that kind of writing clarify your own inherent perfection or just draw attention the specialness of the author’s insights and experiences?

You’ve been deceiving yourself for millions of years; it’s what your brain evolved to do. But once you catch sight of balance and learn where the center is, you can use your brain differently and always find that center, that balance, and that true reality again in any moment.

Those eleven days of whacked-out über-consciousness must have been quite an adventure for Wilber. And adventures are fun. But after any adventure you’ve always got to come back home, back to the drab, dull, ordinary work-a-day world.

Why is that? This is a very important question: Why is your lame-ass, ordinary work-a-day life the one you keep coming back to? Why is it you always, always, always end up right back here no matter how far out or how high up you get?

The fact is, the universe has chosen you as the vehicle through which to experience the uncanny thrill of cutting up cabbage for dinner, the wonder that is inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, the fabulous spectacle of watching your clothes dry at a coin-op Laundromat™ where the radio is stuck on an EZ-listening station and an old lady keeps staring at you for no discernible reason. The universe has demanded that you be you. Ain’t no avoidin’ it.

What is true during dreamless sleep is true no matter whether you can recall the experience and write about it or not. What is true in a whorehouse in Bangkok is true whether you visit it and take Polaroids or not. What is true for six-legged aliens on the fifth planet circling Epsilon Centauri is true whether you go there and talk to them or not. You may never know the life your toothbrush leads when you’re not around but it’s certainly real.

There’s a personal reason this particular piece of Wilber’s writing had such an effect on me and why I’m spending all this ink writing about it now: It mirrors an experience of my own that was very important in clarifying for me one of the most vital points of Buddhist teaching.

ABOUT A YEAR AFTER my experience by the Sengawa River, I started to have some weird experiences in my sleep, a lot like Wilber’s (though this was years before I read his piece). I wrote down the first one of mine a few hours after it happened:

I woke up this morning around 3 or 4. It was raining hard and the sound must have woken me. There was this strange feeling then, like a gigantic open space. I had the feeling that there was no one at all in the room, just the sound of the rain and some kind of movement. No personality at all. I couldn’t understand the feeling, so I sat up to be sure I was really awake. After a while I went back