The Reversible Dreamcoat

Years ago while backpacking through Denmark as a student, I found a weird little shop. I was a design student at the time, seeking to understand the Danish design aesthetic. I never imagined this little shop might also contain a key personal insight into my own understanding of enlightenment.

The shop was set below the road, and to enter, you dropped down an ornate yet narrow black iron staircase to right below street level. As you descended, the clatter of the busy street faded away and a complete other world appeared. In one corner, parakeets in an enormous old cage gently chirped. Beautiful wrought iron cabinets with dark blue wavy glass displayed bizarre arrangements of artificial flowers, jewelry, and bohemian clothing.

At the back of the store was a selection of coats. One looked like a simple thigh length autumn coat of the sort that was popular in Europe at that time. As I picked it up, I noticed it was unusually light and soft suede leather, silky and warm to the touch. As I took the coat off the rack, I was awestruck when I suddenly saw the lining. On the fine black silk fabric was printed an image of an incredible galaxy of stars, like what you see from photos of the Hubble space telescope.

Why would the designer have gone to the effort to find this incredibly beautiful fabric, and then hide it on the inside of the coat? No one could see it there. Possibly the owner of the coat would be the only person that ever knew that they were walking around in a galaxy of stars.

On the outside, everyday reality. Simple, functional, does what it says it does. On the inside, a view into a different universe. Creativity, unlimited-ness, huge spans of space and time.

Turning Reality Inside Out

Years later as I grappled with what I was trying to achieve in my meditation practice, I started to realize that creating an experience of enlightenment was a bit like that coat. The exterior of the coat is our normal physical reality. It's just there. You can feel it with your physical universe senses of touch, smell, and sight. But the lining represented something different entirely. Spans of time. Imagination. Vast quantities of empty space. Colors and transparency and energy and light.

What if creating enlightenment was like reversing the coat, and putting it on with the universe printed on the outside? Can we turn reality inside out using meditation, just like a coat can be turned inside out?

As I experimented, I started to not only go inwards in my mind using imagination and non-physical perception skills, but to more actively use those skills to turn reality inside out, concept by concept, idea by idea, sense by sense. What if all emotions I felt during daily life were something that could be turned inside out to reveal something completely different? What if my perception of the physical world could be turned inside out in the same way?

The Consciousness Muscle

What was the core skill I was developing here? I wasn't exactly sure. It wasn't really traditional meditation any longer, as but I was doing things I had not read about in any meditation book. Most mindfulness meditation focused almost entirely on clearing the mind of thought. I was doing the exact opposite — I was selectively intensifying certain thoughts and then morphing them into different definitions of what thought even was.

I was trying to trick my brain into understanding reality in a way that I couldn't find any description of in any spiritual literature anywhere. Eventually, after nearly two further decades of self-experimentation, writing and describing my experiments, a new framework of consciousness started to form.

NeuroYou is the result of those discoveries.