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14. MIND AND SUPERMIND Having described the "physical" aspects of the Second Body, it would seem most important to examine how the mind apparently operates in reaction to the Second Body experience. Students of the mental sciences may dispute the terminology used herein, since no attempt is made here to review the phenomenon in psychiatric, psychological, or physiological terms. Rather, it is hoped that this section, as well as the previous one, will have common meaning for all sciences and scientific minds, and that it will act as a bridge to further exploration for every intellectual interest. The question posed most often is: How do you know you aren't dreaming, that what you experience is nothing more than a vivid dream or a hallucination of some sort? This does deserve some answer other than the counter-question: How do I know my waking experience is real? As reported elsewhere, I was certain that these experiences were dreams or hallucinations for a long period in the early stages. They were seriously considered as something more only when evidential data began to accumulate. The experiences differ from the typical dream state principally in the following ways:
(1) Continuity of some sort of conscious awareness; (2) Intellectual or emotional (or blends of the two) decisions made during the experiences; (3) Multivalued perception via sensory inputs or their equivalents; (4) Non-recurrence of identical patterns; and (5) Development of events in sequence that seem to indicate a time lapse.
The most certain statement that can be made is that when the condition exists, you are as aware of "not dreaming" as you are when you are awake. The same standards of wakeful-ness can be applied with the same positive result. This is what is so disconcerting in the early experimentation. The duality of existence is completely contradictory to all available scientific