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.

The Ever-Changing Truth Can’t Be Explained

The whole notion of truth, which naturally and without reflexion, we assume to mean the simple duplication by the mind of a ready-made and given reality, proves hard to understand clearly. There is no simple test available for adjudicating offhand between the diverse types of thought that claim to possess it. Common sense, or corpuscular philosophy, ultra-critical science, or energetics, and critical or idealistic philosophy, all seem insufficiently true in some regard and leave some dissatisfaction.

It is evident that the conflict of these widely differing systems obliges us to overhaul the very idea of truth, for at present we have no definite notion of what the word may mean.

William James in his 1907 essay, Pragmatism and Common Sense gives truth a run for its money. Are the truths we learn really true? Or are those facts and fables loaded with the partial convictions, the prompt associations and the past influences of the people that express them? Our beliefs are filled with these altered truths, and they become pliable in our box of beliefs as that box expands to accept other perceptual truths. We don’t usually dissect the truths in our belief box. We massage them with imaginary confirmations and exalt them with vocal acceptance. They are the foundation for our perceptions and the walls of our reality. These truths we call true cause happiness, pain and uncertainty, and the nature of our physical image changes as they change.

We experience truth in dreams, but we don’t acknowledge that truth. We dream in fables and change experiences in order to rearrange truth in our dreams. We are closer to the truth in dreams, yet we move away from it because it seems foreign and uncomfortable. Our wakeful box of beliefs trumps truth in dreams, and we thank God for that ability. But God is the truth in dreams. We try to disconnect from our dreams because the vision and the feel of God is only available in death, and death, according to our box of beliefs, is the end of life.

In some dreams, we try to empty our box of beliefs, but truth helps us keep those fabricated truths. We keep them because we know our box of beliefs can’t be emptied completely, and the ever-changing truth can’t be explained.

Dabbling In The Expected Unexpected

Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportions to their practical force, and do lean and beg day and night continually.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, Self-Reliance tells us that there is no perfect leader. There is no magnificent deed that will solve our self-created misery. Humans are wired to experience their own creations and the creations of others. Many of those creations are self-serving, ambitious attempts to control the practical force that is within us. We lean and beg for relief from men that serve no one except themselves or men that expect their lineage to be honored regardless of the consequences. We worship the isolationists that yearn to separate rather than discern. We kneel down in front of self-righteous lawmakers that speak of God as if that entity needed to express convictions and confirmations. We follow these basket-weaving charlatans away from the truth and find ourselves deeper in the mud of fear.

We do all these things to feel them with our emotions and our soul. We want to stand on the cliff of fear and then ask for a shared parachute that opens in an array of choices. As we float freely through the contemptuous air, we rearrange our mind’s vacillating baggage that we so desperately want to call real. There is no comfort in our beliefs, no vindication in our methods, but we push them into a consolidated box of perceptions. Our illustrious perceptions renovate our life and expand our soul while we continue dabbling in the expected, unexpected.

Free-Floating Desire

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappointments! When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may god fire the heart with his presence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, The Over-soul addresses the mystery of God in a way that most of us can’t accept because we are tied to the beliefs that restrict our awareness. The God we worship is the God of controlling fables and misinformation. In dreams, we sense the actual creative action, but since God is not an object and doesn't just display one form, we don’t know how to process the behavior of this source of all energy. There are multitudinous levels of consciousness that move freely in the value climate of our psychological reality especially in dreams.

In dreams, we move from region to region in a vast oasis of energy. The oasis is filled with diverse as well as esoteric energy. Dreams move us through one oasis after another in the action of our consciousness. As part of that action, we cross the boundaries of limits and push the throttle of our mind to the sub-floor of all existences, and intermingle with the source of our soul. Our soul expands from what we contribute to it in the vastness of the dream reality. That expansion gives the soul a free-floating desire to continue to expand in the presence of all its counterparts of which we are one.

The expansion is the voice of what we could call God expanding along with the soul. There are no physical emotions, influences or associations attached to that expansion. The only ingredient is the influx of energy freshly brewed from our fire of value fulfillment and desire. That fire is the fueled by the presence of being, and the absence of religious rhetoric and traditional brain-washing.

Body Less Journeys

Do we ever understand what we think? We understand only such thinking as is a mere equation and from which nothing comes out but what we have put in. That is the manner of the intellect. But beyond that there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols that are older than historical man; which have been ingrained in him from earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche.

It is possible to live the fullest life only when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them. It is a question neither of belief nor knowledge, but of the agreement of our thinking with the primordial images of the unconscious.

Carl Jung the 20th-century Swiss psychiatrist, and founder of analytical psychology wrote those thoughts in his 1936 book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul. We only understand the data we perceive. Perceptions are rooted in social and religious data, as well as a plethora of other beliefs, but there are other primordial images that exist within the psyche, and we experience some of them in dreams. Those images may not be in harmony with the ego’s perceptions, but they are in harmony with the various realities we experience in dreams.

We don’t understand what we think in dreams. Dreams are a mishmash of thoughts and experiences that don’t seem real, but they are as real as the experiences we have when awake. When we enter dreams, we have a mission, albeit, a hidden mission. Our mission in dreams is to have experiences while the body consciousness is realigning its energy. These body less experiences give us a chance to “feel” what it is like to function without a body.

We take many journeys without our body. We condition the self to use our physical experiences without being physical, and the result of these journeys is nothing short of amazing. Dreams help us enter realities after we leave the body permanently. Without dreams, we would only know what it’s like to be physical. Dreams remind us what it “feels” like to be eternal.