Dreams: Another Valid Reality

Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the Darwinian fact’s and yet to interpret them as still showing divine purpose. It used to be a question of purpose against mechanism, of one or the other. It was as if one should say “My shoes are evidently designed to fit my feet, hence it is impossible that they should have been produced by machinery.” We know that they are both: they are made by machinery itself designed to fit the feet with shoes.

Theology need only stretch similarly the design of God. As the aim of a football-team is not merely to get the ball to a certain goal (if that were so, they would simply get up some dark night and place it there), but to get it there by a fixed machinery of conditions: the game’s rules and the opposing players; so the aim of God is not merely, let us say, to make men and to save them, but rather to get this done through the sole agency of nature’s vast machinery. Without nature’s stupendous laws and counterforces, man’s creation and perfection, we might suppose, would be too insipid achievements for God to have designed them.

William James wrote those thoughts in his 1906 essay, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered. The God word, as James points out, has been used to confirm a vast number of facts and truths. As space exploration continues, the reality of this entity or collections of entities continues to expand in our awareness because of its multiplicity. Awareness is the rudimentary force of being that continues to flow in an endless stream of energy. We physically experience that flow in the boundaries of time and space.

Our mental enzymes function in a focused environment, but they also function in other states of consciousness. There are complex grids and connections in which consciousness finds itself, and in those energy streams awareness expands. One of those energy streams is very active in our dreams.

In dreams, we are absorbed by what we call God. We are also encapsulated by our soul in order to sense the distinct aspects of God. But we don’t believe that we can actually experience God in dreams. Our belief system is distorted by doctrines that serve physical time. Our belief system functions on misinformation in order to make sense of our inability to focus on more than one reality at a time.

But in our dreams we are able to move freely through the stream of energy that touches every aspect of us and some of the aspects of the entity we call God. When we begin to treat dreams as a valid reality, some of the mysteries we take on faith will be revealed for what they are. They are just brief stops on the bank of the stream of energy.

The Universal Library Of Knowledge And Wisdom

Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Each revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.

The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, or we shall learn nothing rightly. What befell Hasdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind’s power and depravation as what has befallen us.

Emerson wrote those words in his 1841 essay, History. But those words are more than words. They are perceptions that arise from the world of dreams and innate experiences. Emerson believed that everything physical starts as a thought, and he believed those thoughts are rooted in the universal library of knowledge and wisdom.

Most of us don’t believe we are connected to such a place. We like to believe the hall of wisdom is a separate place that we have to earn to enjoy. But both of those beliefs are shaded by the perceptions of men with hidden agendas. Those agendas also originate in the universal library. The universal library is not a place, and we are never separated from it. This sanctuary of thought is a key part of the energy that exists within us. It is one of the actions of consciousness. Consciousness is not a place or one person. It is a characteristic of energy manifesting as thoughts, life forms and things.

We say this conscious wisdom center is universal and it is, but it is constructed individually. Each form of consciousness uses knowledge and wisdom differently in order to expand in awareness. We use Earth as our individual expansion field, and we assume different roles to increase our awareness of our complete self. The self that never left the library of knowledge and wisdom. So nothing is new in our expansion field. All we experience has been experienced before. The only element that is new is our awareness of knowing what we already know, and the wisdom to accept that knowing.

Dream Perceptions Only Become Real When We Remember Them

It is the growing conscious of a new power in the mind, which enabled it to judge things from a new point of view. Ever since the unfoldment of consciousness we have been led to respond to the inner and outer conditions in a certain conceptual and analytical manner. The discipline of Zen consists in upsetting this artificially constructed framework once and for all and in remodeling it on an entirely new basis. The old framework is called Ignorance and the new one Enlightenment.

D.T. Suzuki wrote those perceptions in his 1927 essay, Satori. The word satori means awakening, and it’s safe to say that human consciousness is awakening to the fact that our physical life is divided into two distinct realities. The first reality is our wakeful reality. We experience our perceptions in that reality, and we create an individual sense of worth because of those perceptions.

Everyone sees and feels their reality differently, but we try to blend our individual realities into one big one, and in the process all hell breaks loose. That hell is a combination of perceptions that conflict with each other. The result is a mass reality filled with the aftershocks of our quest to merge perceptions. Perceptions are the fuel that keep the fire of hell burning in our wakeful world.

The second reality that we live physically is the dream reality. In that reality, we don’t merge individual realities and create the fire of hell in our consciousness. We do the opposite in dreams. We experience what some religions call heaven. We travel through different regions of consciousness and absorb the knowledge that floats through all of them.

In dreams, we prepare our wakeful reality for what can come from our perceptions, but we ignore that preparation most of the time. We live the life of the soul in our dreams and celebrate the union that exists within all consciousness. Perceptions in dreams form a different world, and that world is uniquely individualistic. The dream reality is rooted in our individualism, and our physical reality is rooted in our mass perceptions. And the odd thing is, individual dream perceptions only become real to us when we remember them.