Go Find Me

I had the excellent idea that to grow my dream teaching practice I would start a Go Find Me campaign where I ask all I know to consider me as a wonderful potential speaker at an event, preferably paid, but under some circumstances gratis.  Or, if you have a group of friends, at least six, who want to have a dream party playshop and you live in my driving distance, call me and I'll explain my work and my fee.

I love to teach dream work.  Most people who learn from me seem to love it, too.  So, I could use my friends and students's help in getting out there more.  Thanks so much.

But it's more than what I want to do; it's what I think I'm here to do.  And, I'm not alone.  There are some AMAZING dream teachers out there, on a global scale, like my teacher, Robert Moss, and inspiring teachers on a smaller scale in many communities.  I think there's a very good reason for this; dreaming is a vital skill for achieving spiritual independence. It can help us get the world out of the present human quagmire that's choking all life on this exquisite planet.  How?  By helping us focus on our real spirituality, dreaming is a connection to where we came from and where we're going.

Why do we need this bridge; spiritual independence from what?  From the tyranny of religion, from dogma. No one can tell you that you are a sinner, that Love can be withheld for disobedience.  No one can separate you from the true Spirit Being you are.  How can I know this? Every night I travel in another body, not my physical body, and sometimes, the things I experience as this being blow the doors off my previous waking perceptions and make me feel I am not alone and that I'm truly loved.  Love is a huge, creative, forgiving and humorous presence in my dreams.  It's a resource available to anyone who pays attention to more than waking reality.

Yes, PTSD dreams and severe nightmares need very special attention, but for many people, dreams are an avenue, perhaps a very neglected one, leading to true self awareness and self love.  I'm guessing that's why I volunteered for a tour on the physical plane right now, at this time, in my place, because so much depends on us learning that nothing can conquer Love.  No fear of some spiteful Father can eclipse the natural energy that is our very own nature, a nature we constantly share with the Divine.  It doesn't matter how we speak of Love, what name we call it; it does matter how we Show what what we profess to Know.

The universal need to love and be loved exists because it is our Source; it's who we all are regardless of geographic place or cultural space. We were all born of woman and we will all dissolve with all the sacred elements of this planet at a physical level; we will all die. That's what I call a tour of duty or a lifetime; this lifetime, as opposed to perhaps others, past or parallel or to come.

Here on this plane, at this time we have an opportunity to turn things around, to replace Fear, Anger, Hate and Cynicism with Love.  There are many saying this, like those who practice and teach Mindfulness; Pema Chodron and Eckhart Tolle come to mind, but, gratefully, there are a host of others.  We're experiencing a spiritual revolution.  Is the media reporting it?  Not much, but Oprah does a good job introducing new concepts and many people are finding books or teachers that are challenging the toxic paradigms making us suffer so unnecessarily. The revolution may not be mainstream, but more people now realize that belief creates a psychic paradigm that dictates all we do and say and that is responsible for our joy or sorrow.  When we believe things that oppress, limit and make us submissive, we lose the natural love of life we're born with.  When we're discouraged from loving ourselves by the firm edict that we're born in need of redemption and God's got some conditions we need to meet, if we're going to get any love from Him, we eventually turn on ourselves and believe we are unlovable.  We let charlatans put these ideas in our heads and then we self-police ourselves and create a world in dire need of Love.

Shall I enjoy sex?  Shall I laugh, and sing and cause the rafters to ring?  No, God is constantly asking us to suffer, just like He let his only son do.  Was that His pound of flesh decision, his choice, his fault? No, supposedly, it's ours for being so rotten in the first place.  This kind of catechism breeds self-loathing, a common problem these days, as most will note.  But, what kind of a father could bear to watch his son suffer, especially as some kind of appeasement for a grudge the father himself is holding?  Let it go, it was only an apple.  Good and evil is basically Love or no Love.  We all know that.

Dreaming can help us learn that.  Because my dreams have shown me a landscape for my death transition, as well as allowed me to connect to those I love on the "other" side, I fear death very little.  Through dreaming, I'm already familiar with many things I'll find very helpful to know; most practiced dreamers will concur.  Yes, many of these revelatory dreams are lucid or out of body, but some incredible insights have come to me from my day to day, garden variety dreams.  It's all good.

This is a very important time in history and it's important not to be swayed by dogma and rhetoric, to be our own independent spiritual authorities. Now is the time to place our hands on our hearts and ask to feel Love, to be able to give Love and to receive it.  What we stand for as Americans and as human beings is at stake.  The American dream was always about freedom, escape from tyranny - usually religious tyranny.  Now, maybe for the last century, it's about money.  But since we will all be exiting this planet, a question that we've relegated to the compartment of religion, what happens after this, is really the most important question to answer.  Money is not a necessary commodity once we no longer have a physical body; goddess only knows when it became such a tyranny in the physical.  It wasn't always so.

Once greater number of people connect to their own dreaming resources, religions that manipulate the followers they attract  to exclusivity, to the point of violence, hatred and fear against all others, will no longer be the dangerous monopolies they've become.  It's liberating to know that I have nothing to fear from death, but that I have something to live for on the physical, enough to commit to the here and now and trust the help that I know is available to me spiritually.  The more we Love, the more certain we can be of being reunited with Love.  The more we all Love, the more Real will be the experience of Love on this planet.

Now is a very good time to become a dream explorer.  I hope I can help.

What's My Story?

In a recent interview I say that we're in the midst of a spiritual revolution and that dreaming is at the center of it.  One aspect of the Consciousness/Awareness movement that we're experiencing right Now is the individual practice of "Mindfulness." Mindfulness encourages us to be the watcher as well as the do-er; the Self as well as the Ego, Jung might say.  More and more people are learning to "watch yourself."  Dreams are Magic Mirrors that let you see your "little self" your ego, as your Self, your Observer does.   In his latest book, "The Boy Who Died and Came Back," Part IV: At Home in the Multiverse, "The Double on the Balcony," Robert Moss writes some very fun stuff about this topic.

I've written here about one of my all time favorite dream sequences, In the first, I hear a voice that says, "Can the Ego be dissolved?  What is the role of the Observer?"  Dreams are often koans, mental jigsaw puzzles or parables.

Two months after this dream, I got my answer by way of a lucid dream, perhaps an OBE because of the hyperconsciousness of the experience. I was in what Robert Waggoner calls the Clear Light, though I hadn't read his books, yet.  I always chuckle that I had this transcendent experience as an unexpected dream gift. I came awake from the dream saying, "I'll never be able to explain this, not even to myself."  In my dream my sense of "I" was in that Light, as I came to, the sense of Oneness I experienced began to fade, my separateness became stronger.  As my ego took charge of waking life, I could re-enter my dream and feel the sense of awe over and over again.  Today, these many years later, that dream is my portal to the Light; the feeling is still strong.

What I learned from the dreams and where they took me in my studies is that the Ego needs an Observer to keep it in check and to help it really blossom.  In my two previous posts reviewing Robert's new book, I talk about the power of story.

As human beings, maybe even in some animal clans, we love stories.  "Tell me a story"is frequently the request we hear from young children.  I love to hear stories or to read them, but what this dream koan and the many wonderful teachers of Mindfulness, like Eckhart Tolle, have taught me is that my thoughts are frequently telling me stories that aren't really that groovy.  I might quite unconsciously be telling myself the story of a puny checkbook and a robust bill basket while I'm brushing my teeth.  What I've learned to do is say; "Aha, listen to that story!  Where does that get me?  Is this the story I want to entertain.  Duh; no."

By listening to what I'm really telling myself all the time, I can choose the best story for me.  Okay, "all the time" is perhaps not realistic; the drunken monkey, as Buddhists call the ego/mind, is a tricky and slippery little devil.  Luckily, Monkey isn't hard to please once you get to know it through Observation.  Dreams hold up a mirror that helps us see Monkey working.  Dreams knock on our inner doors and ask us to open to our own Wisdom and connect to the Light.

In a recent extended-family drama, the kind of thing that has the phones ringing and different relatives chiming in, I found myself feeling fearful, protective of the Me and Mine.  I asked for a dream of guidance; "What can I do?"  I dreamed that two of my nieces, (one was purely a dream niece), wouldn't allow me to use their make-up; yet, all I needed was a simple eyebrow pencil. I felt they were shallow, heartless and careless of my feelings.  I woke up feeling the sting of rejection.  Reality check: real niece, but not the relative involved and unlikely to deny me an eyebrow pencil, dream niece not someone in waking.  As I lay there feeling the strong emotion this dream evoked and trying to fit it with my question to the dream source, I saw what my dream was saying.  "What can I do?"  I can focus on my heart; I can marshall my kindness, (when I first typed the question, I found I'd written, What kind I do?:-).

As often happens, these nieces were Shadows my Ego was casting with its fearfulness; their behavior mirrored an unconscious story that could dictate my conscious behavior. I relaxed and focused my awareness on my heart chakra and bathed it in emerald green light. I expanded my heart center with every breath.  My dream gave me the perfect answer.  As I wandered through the emotional land mine (I wrote "land mind") of the crisis, I was predisposed to close down in fear.  I focused on my heart and trusted that step by step, in the moment, things would work out.  And they did.  The outcome opened a door that had been shut in anger and created new possibilities for personal growth on everyone's part.

This is one reason I think dreaming is at the forefront of the Spiritual Revolution.  If Self-Awareness, Mindfulness is at the heart of Enlightenment, really of Being, then dreaming is a vital practice.  In dreams we get to talk to and listen to the Observer, who has a much bigger picture to offer than the blinkered Ego.  What's my Story?  I'm writing it as I live it.  I write as consciously as I can and look to my dream stories for the best suggestions, the best plot ideas for my waking ego to use.  I stay connected to my dreams so that my Big Story, the reason I joined this human experience again, will inform all the little stories, the personal dramas that can take too much time and sap too much energy, unnecessarily.

Each of us has a Story.  Together, we  are the Book of Life - All of Nature included.  No one can tell us what our story, what our purpose is, but we can lose the thread and go off narrative if we're not connected to the Watcher, our own Soul Mate in the Multiverse.  Dreams are an organic, innate avenue to Spirit.  All we have to do is pay attention, listen and learn; then we'll each find our own story and how best to live it.

May it Be So!