More on emotion in dreaming and out of body experience

Again, thinking about Lakoff and Johnson's (Metaphors We Live By) contention that consciousness is metaphor based, and metaphors are always grounded in embodied experience--Well, obviously, people who have out of body experiences report emotions, so Lakoff might argue that consciousness is tethered to the body during the OOBE state, and once the body dies, then consciousness must subside, since there is no grounding or emotional anchor for metaphor construction. It could be, however, that whereas all feeling may have to be experienced within a state of division or tension, it doesn’t have to be a division between self and body or self and other. The division can be constructed within the self rather than between the self and the body.  If emotion is based on metaphor, which provides a phenomenal interface constructed in a state of duality, then metaphors could constructed out of a convenient division within the soul/monad itself, not between self and the physical body. The experience that renders the abstract as specific and knowable doesn’t have to be physical as much form-based. Form is the currency of the mind as much as the body: the mind doesn't need the body for that. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that there is no consciousness without division, and that division can be erected by the mind itself. We all know that, don't we?

Emotion in Dreaming

 The question came up in my online dream group concerning emotion from the standpoint of co-creative dream theory. I think of emotion as the degree of dissonance between the dream ego/staus quo, and the emergent dream content that may consist of unresolved past memory, current new issues, or future-oriented aspects of our calling. When the dissonance is resolved, then the dream imagery dissolves into light, and the remaining feeling is ineffable, in that it does not derive from dissonance, but from the experience of union. Lakoff and Anderson make the case that dream metaphors always have an embodied component which grounds the abstract dimension. They also conclude, erronenously I believe, that there can be no consciousness truly beyond a body, since all consciousness is metaphor based, and needs an embodied experience to make it conscious. I believe that the feeling that is left once the dissonance is resolved is the nature of the type of feeling beyond the body, and once experienced, it becomes obvious that the emotion that we experience when embodied, based on dissonance, is fundamentally distinct from the feeling that we have once the dissonance is resolved. One can argue that this feeling is still based on what Wilber refers to as “subtle oneness,” which retains a subtle division between self and wholeness. But I think that anyone who has experienced light and ecstasy can say with conviction that the feeling that coiners with the experience of radiance is not related to any previous embodied experience, and is an elixir that is wholly distinct.