Are You Getting Enlightened Or Losing Your Mind?
A Psychiatrist's Guide for Mastering Paranormal and Spiritual Experience
MIND MAP
BLUEPRINT TO THE BOOK
“Are You Getting Enlightened Or Losing Your Mind?” is one the most complete compendiums of paranormal and spiritual experiences. But it's not an encyclopedic dictionary. I want everyone who's had an unusual paranormal or spiritual experience to be able to find their experience in these pages and know what to call it. There is power and comfort in knowing what to call your experience. After you know what to call it, you'll find techniques and guidelines to help you integrate and work with that experience.
The number of these experiences is vast. I'm comfortable living in the soup of “normal” reality as well as “unseen” mysterious realities. In the early phase of writing this book, I wanted to create a map for you, a map of consciousness. There are not “enlightened” people and “crazy” people. There are only — People! And this map does not make one person better than another or one experience better than another.
We have a “normal state of consciousness” (NSC). From our normal state, we can pop in and out of a variety of experiences: Split Consciousness, Identity Switching, OBE, External Spirit Influence, Mental Illness, Delirium, Narrowed Consciousness, and Mystical States. We can have one of these experiences and then return to “normal.” However, through spiritual practice, deepening spiritual connection, truth, and high-integrity action, our normal state of consciousness rises up the Central Path. When that happens, you have a new “normal.” When your “NSC” has risen all the way up the Central Path, you ARE the white sphere with the golden light at the top of the page. This blueprint is not within the pages of the book. When you walk into a beautiful building, you never see the blueprint, but it's the foundation without which there is no building.
It took six months to work out all the details of this map, this blueprint. You may want to return to it over and over again to help understand your experiences and how they fit into your life. — David Gersten
The 2nd MIND MAP - the FIVE SHEATHS - is on the “About Dr. Gersten” page.
