Awareness of the Now

 I remember lying in bed as a kid, looking up at the ceiling, seeing the texture of the ceiling morph and change (akin to a hallucinogenic experience) and thinking nothing of it, that it was supposed to be like that. Every hallucinogenic experience I've had as an adult has been accompanied by a feeling of familiarity. A feeling that this is 'home'. My first memories I can remember are indeed very "trippy" memories, and having now children of my own, I see the look in my 1-year-old's eyes when we go out and look at the snowfall. He makes the same face I'm sure I made when I was having my first psychedelic experience. 

On one occasion during an LSD-trip I experienced what's known as ego-death; I experienced myself being one with the entire universe and knowing everything that there was to be known. During this 2-3 minute (in my perception eternal) moment the only thing I could vocalize to my girlfriend at the time was "remind me of this tomorrow.. remind me of this tomorrow..". Of course when the filter of my "self" descended upon me again I could not remember any specific secrets of the universe, but I do remember that I had that experience. The point I'm making here is that as kids we have a more clear view of this "Eternal Now" and as we grow older we adopt more and more limiting beliefs that tell us what  this moment is and what it isn't, thus "blocking" the view of the true  moment. As kids we don't really believe anything, until our parents start pushing (with best intentions most times I'm sure) their beliefs on us. 

So how do we reverse engineer this process and return to a state from which we can see reality unfiltered again? How do we unlearn years of programming and conditioning? The inherent mystical and magical nature of our reality has been given no significance in the purely material and rational way we are taught to perceive reality as the only correct way. We are convinced that if some mechanical instrument can not measure it, it simply doesn't exist. 

It's interesting how, as I'm watching my kids grow, I'm activating memories from my own childhood as my kids are having similar experiences as to the ones I had as a kid. I seem to be remembering further and further back. Another "cognitive position" I remember that was regularly a big part of my experience, was the knowing that "everything happens because of everything else", the most profound level of causality, the concept that EVERYTHING is connected, from the most "insignificant" little gesture to the biggest moments of our lives. I remember just looking at the comings and goings of the people around me and just knowing that in some way I was also contributing to whatever they were doing. There's this fragment of a thought I remember having as 2 or 3 years old; "Do the grownups know that we are controlling them?". Still quite often I slip into this mode of perceiving - something I correlate to the Tao in Taoism - where every little visual, audible and kinesthetic sensation blends into one observable phenomena, where my awareness kind of just sits as a leaf on the surface of the physical appearance of the river of reality and just floats along, changing shape and form.

For example if I'm in the grocery store, I will just gently let my awareness go to where it wants, maybe I meet the eyes of a customer, who looks in a direction, my eyes follow and end up meeting the eyes of the store clerk on the other side of the shop, I then proceed to think "I wonder if I need to get dog-food" and just as the thought ends my eyes land on a candy-bag with a dog as the character, in that moment a kid runs past me towards his parents who just called him (like a dog), I look up to meet the eyes of the parent and we smile at each other, I look towards the dog-food section to see somebody drop a can of dog-food on the floor, and on and on and on it goes. It's like everything happening in the store is dependent and contingent on my paying attention to it. It's a difficult concept to explain but maybe somebody could tell me if you recognize this phenomena and maybe tell me your experiences with it, if any.