My Craziness!

[Jesse]

I sometimes have the feeling that my own mind is less of a single entity than I imagine,
I feel that there is some part of our minds that are connected, and it's not in some straight-forward sort of way.

I feel that my dreams, and my waking experience, are this sort of veil covering a much larger reality. Where we are much more like a collective being, or, far more connected than we perceive in regular circumstances.

In many ways our identities are simply a set of habitual habits of perceiving, a habitual tendency to view things in some specific way. When these tendencies are disrupted, or willfully changed all sorts of funny things can happen! You can form multiple personalities within your mind-stream, and by this I mean wholly individual sentient beings can co-exist in your mind simultaneously. I have often pondered how this is possible, but it hit me, that a sentient being is just a bunch of empty conditions, once your ego has been fractured to some degree, you can manipulate it at will.

In many ways I have become interested in The deity creation practices, because they remind me of the sort's of things that happen in my mind all the time. My only problem is until recently I had no control over these beings forming in my mind, nor their dissipation. They came and went of their own choosing. I have begun practicing viewing all these phenomena as empty, and it has helped much in removing these beings from my mind, where as before they would feel real/solid.. I can now see them for what they are.. empty appearances.

Just in case anyone is worried about my mental health, I am seeing both a psychiatrist and psychologist and we talk about these issues. (Funny enough, they both seem to think I am remarkably sane considering the things I experience.)

Anywhoo.. I simply would like to work these experiences into my Buddhist practice and thus wanted to explain some of these experiences just in case someone can recommend me some reading material, or even teachers who work with this kind of stuff.

thanks much in advance.