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.