In a Time of Shock, There's Awe

I've been a long time pondering if there's anything left to say.  One after another collective shock wave hits the news.  Misguided hate filled males opening up with their beloved guns and decimating an innocent group of people; for why?  Leaders inciting that hate so they can get elected and continue their multinational bid for total patriarchal control over everything and everyone, at the expense of the very planet, without which, they too shall die.  The rollercoaster ride of economic survival.  I can go on and on, but for what?

Giving a great deal of attention and energy to the shit that's regularly hitting the collective fan around the world makes me tense and fearful if I don't also take time to give attention to what's happening in my inner dream worlds. Pondering this, I see that, there's the rub.  If I focus on fear and dread, despite that what's actually happening in my personal life now is positive, I not only create a mighty stress in my own physical body, I contribute to the collective stress that surrounds me.  Eckhart Tolle's work is brilliant in making a case to average people for that old meditational chestnut:
BE HERE NOW.

Most of our fear is based on our internal drama and dialogue, despite what's actually happening in our surroundings now.  Fears about what might happen if such and such happens can keep us awake at night time and again.  One remedy I always prescribe is when you wake up at night and know you might have trouble getting back to sleep, treat that time as an opportunity to enter any dream that comes to mind and consider it play time.  I often will play with a particular dream for months because of a character, place or experience I want to develop further in my story telling mind.  It may or may not get you back to sleep, though it often does, and it beats the hell out of worrying thoughts and their consequences.

My dream practice has helped me keep a foot in the temporal earth world and in other dimensions in the eternal worlds of dreaming, which is where the AWE comes in.  Dreaming is organic spirituality; it's our birthright bridge to the eternal without the dusty layers of dogmatic oppression patriarchal religions add to our burden on our journey home.  We each have a reason for being on planet physical earth; we each have something to offer and something to learn.  Mind control religions entrap us in unnecessary suffering and privation. A God/Goddess who has nothing to fear doesn't need anything from us. Divine love isn't based on need.  It is simply What Is.  There is no need to limit or define it; there is every need to experience it.  Dreams are a door to that experience; a direct life line to the Awe in life that keeps us living, hoping and loving.

Throughout life, my dreams have companioned me in a way that has guided, taught and entertained me. I turn to my dreams for answers and for experiences beyond the dull and dreaded in my life.  I'm schooled morally by my dreams way beyond the shalts and shalt nots of Nobodaddy tenets.  I know the unconditional love of the Divine through my dreams; it can take so many forms and act in so many wonderful ways, as some of our ancestors knew.   Locking the Divine in exclusively Male Form is the most damaging psychic wound inflicted on us by patriarchal codes. We project on to the Divine in metaphors and similes; god is like this or goddess is like that.  But, knowing Divine Love in dreams is to know it never keeps just one form; you know you're in the presence of Divine Love by the Awe you feel  Sometimes it takes on surprising forms, but it doesn't have physical form because, ultimately like us, it's not physical.

In a time of so much shock the awe of inner exploration is a salve for the soul.  A dream practice isn't a place to hide from the world, but it can be a spiritual retreat zone.  A resource I can draw on, at times of trouble or trepidation or just for a break and a change of attitude.  It matters whether I choose to live in shock or in awe.  Depending on where you are physically in the world, like in religious totalitarian states like Saudi Arabia, especially if you're a woman, like Loujain al-Hathloul, you may not have an easy choice. Choosing spiritual freedom can be dangerous when patriarchy uses its brutality to enforce their choice on us. But, for those of us who can make that choice relatively easily, once we heal our own psyche from the damage so much brainwashing has done, we can help others to find their own healing and perhaps, together, keep this world going.

Jung's fans know his teachings about our need to heal the individual and the collective psyche; he said the fate of man hangs on a thread, and that thread is the human psyche. What does that mean?  We've got to become conscious of our choices and what fuels them at an unconscious level.  Fear is a primal human emotion that's easy to use for mind games.  Patriarchy loves using fear to control people's behavior and, historically, has done so in fantastic feats of cruelty.

Every time I review the dark periods of our history some of us call the Burning Times, basically where it was legitimate to brutalize and torture women into submission to the patriarchal yoke of servitude, my stomach gives a familiar lurch.  This is all too real.    Ms. Loujain al-Hathloul, held in captivity for a year and a half and counting for her feminist campaign to drive and to change the many other petty restrictions of her basic human freedoms under the patriarchal domination of modern Saudi Arabia. These restrictions, which in such a theocracy is also the rule of law,  are mostly based on religious imperatives. Loujain was recently offered her freedom on the condition that she lie about everything they've done to her; tortures like those of the burning times. She is still in Saudi prison.  When will we free Her? 

Healing the human psyche is about acknowledging that we know shit about so many things, but most of all about the exact experience of life after life and about the Divine.  That Which Is is vast and contains all us multitudes, so how can it be as simple as one story, one myth?  Why should we fight each other about what It should be when we're all going to experience it for what it is eventually?  Why don't we take the opportunity our dreams offer us to learn more about those ultimate questions for ourselves?

Of course, the most convenient way to control someone is psychically.  Get them to buy into a particular story, especially when they're young, and they'll do what you tell them to do.  As soon as we are born, we're baptized and cathechismed till the cows come home.  I often think when a parent says to me, I'll send them to church, synagogue, mosque whatever now and when he/she becomes an adult, he/she can decide for him/herself.  But it doesn't work that way!  Once our little imaginations are denied freedom and instilled with fear, it's not all that easy to shake.

What we believe to be true is our reality.  Patriarchal dogmas in all big 3 religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as in other male elevating spiritual practices, including Buddhism, have convenient stories about why women are bad and why everyone needs to tow a certain line in order to safely transition to the other side.

They're not even that good, as stories go.  So, I'm to believe that the Divine is so super pissed off at a couple of newly minted Homo sapiens, male and female, for eating an apple, or even for wanting to know Good/Evil so they can choose for themselves?  I'm to believe that the very Life Force, the Light, the overpowering certainty of Love that I've known in dreaming so many times, not only condemned all future generations but blamed the woman, especially?

And the stories go on, all in the service of why no-one, especially women, should question this male structured mental, emotional and social paradigm that is still grinding along, on an inexorable track to planetary destruction.  As I told my dad in a dream once, patriarchy has been one blood bath after another.  But it doesn't have to continue this way.

Dreams are bridges to self-discovery and to social healing; dreams call on each of us to own our spiritual health as well as our mental and physical health.  Dreams call us to lead a life that acknowledges our own responsibility for our own path.  They call on us to live bravely because, in the end, literally in the end, there is nothing to fear.

The myth of original sin is fabricated to prepare the human psyche for other fear based strictures religions love to impose.  Once you fear God and HIS minions, you'll do what they tell you to do, whether it's to your own benefit or the benefit of your beloved ones is irrelevant because your thought allegiance has been won over.

But if you're not afraid of God/the Divine in any way, your life is an adventure in the physical; you live on the continuum of other adventures you've experienced on other planes or in other times. Past lives are frequently remembered in dreams.  You can know some of what you'll experience after death because you've already experienced it through dreaming.  It's the awe of these encounters with the divine that eclipses all fear and all doubt.  There is nothing to fear, but fear itself.

The only thing that makes sense to me these days is for each of us to do whatever we can, say whatever we can, in the most loving way, to take down the wall of fear that's being steadily reconstructed before our eyes, always looking inward for guidance and advice from dreams and holding hands with fellow/sister dreamers with the purpose of healing ourselves and the planet from the wrathful, wrongful paradigms that keep us in this dismal cycle of doom.

There is no original sin, it's the same thing over and over; why?  Because we're adhering to the same paradigms of rigid Father oriented, male dominated insanity that created this problem in the first place.  Come on, just listen to that ignorant congressman King from Iowa wondering if he would be alive but for the wise forbearance for rape and incest in human history; tell me that's not messed up!

That guy thinks he's a good, god-fearing Christian and there's no doubt he serves the patriarchal idol of god he and others constructed so it would be okay to think that super fucked up way. Women don't even figure into the equation. But the Jesus he supposedly follows championed a woman's right to equal treatment and opportunity again and again in the gospels. Jesus was a feminist.

I can live in shock that we've actually elected patriarchal one dimensional puppets like King, (and worse than him, too) or I can live in awe that at least I was born into a time and live in a place where I can challenge patriarchy because of what I know to be true.  Practice love and look to dreams; that's what I know to be true.

Spiritual Empowerment Through Dreaming

“It’s ok not to be ok” popped up in a meme on my FB page.  It made me think of all the times I’ve heard health professionals teach about self-acceptance. Why should I need anyone’s permission to be who I am? To feel OK?   Who set the standards for okayness?

Society? The norms that bring us so much gun violence and so much divisiveness are in painfully obvious need of reinvention.  American citizens are dealing with a hot mess, politically at home, as well as around the world; the hot mess male leaders insist on making perpetually. Boys with very dangerous toys! 

Or morally?  That which is right?  And who gets to decide that; the boys in black dresses with their ‘oh so special’ inside track to Nobodaddy? Who is your God?  Patriarchy’s bloviating dictators who demand total allegiance on the pain of death and perdition, or Love, the greatest mystery we can know, the champion of our self-acceptance.

I believe, as a spiritual being having a physical experience, each of us has her or his own inside track to morality. Our hearts teach us what is wrong and what is right throughout our lives, and that still inner voice Jesus pointed to, assures us we’re never alone.  The Queen/Kingdom of God is within.

Morality is my social conduct based on my spiritual understanding, which is based on my own experience, not some external law.  My experience has brought me to the conclusion that Love is the Answer (LITA).  Love is a force that very few people have never experienced, but plenty of people deny.  Love is so much more than private ownership of a physical chunk of earth or another person. Love transcends the physical appearances of waking life, whispering in our ears at night.  I AM Here with you; you are SAFE with Me.  Look within.

My spiritual evolution comes from dialogue with my dreams.  Watching my dream life taught me to observe waking life in a similar way. I often experience how the magic of sychronicity and dream correlations meld my waking and dream experiences into a complete sense of Self.  

I have faith in my dreams because they’ve helped me immensely in my waking life, whether by giving me a head’s up that what seemed improbable in a dream is now happening so take charge of the situation, or by consoling my heart when it’s aching, or by making me see the very funny side of life and not take me and other’s pecadillos so seriously.

Because of dreams and dreaming, I have faith that however distressing life gets, collectively and personally, help is always available from the spirit, from those who love me on the other side, from Home.  I have faith that goes from my heart to the Heart Divine.  I’ve found grace, forgiveness and courage so many times in my dreams, and I know it’s a universal reality.  Dreams are our bridge to spirit.  Our breadcrumbs to home. 

If I feel not okay, it’s because I’m suffering from the expectations of me that come from outside myself.  Rules, regulations, codes and enforcers are the hallmark of patriarchies. Our modern psyche is full of dread from too many years of brutal patriarchal rule.  Granted, 6,000 years of warring father religions and rulers is nothing compared to where archeology puts us homo sapiens, 200,000 years of human cultures around the globe.  It's time to admit that patriarchy is bad for the soul, the spirit.  Angry Father Gods have got to go. 

Our earliest archeological records are of the veneration of the Mother Goddess and her Body, the Earth. 

The Venus of Willendorf, circa 29,000 BCE,  is one of the few ancient  Goddess images extant in the modern patriarchal era; goddess worshiping traditions were largely destroyed by centuries of patriarchal religious inquisitions.  Goddess worshiping cultures weren’t necessarily matriarchal, they were, as Riane Eisler brilliantly presents in The Chalice and the Blade, cooperative societies. 

The Goddess spoke to me first in a dream, Howling Mary. Honoring the Feminine Divine doesn’t involve putting our old patriarchal paradigm on a female projection; it means accessing what’s been demeaned.  Chief of all things to access is Love.  Self-love, love of others and love for all things; love as a spiritual practice.    There’s no doctrine for that; it’s a practice, just like dreaming is a practice with guidelines, but no rule book. 

The pay off is spiritual empowerment.  

May all your best dreams come true.  May Love help you find your way.

Inner Resources for Challenging Times

Perhaps some of you, like me, are feeling the intense surrealism of this present time in our country. What just happened?  What is happening?  What will be happening?

What's feeding this bizarre violent nightmare playing out in our country and around the globe? It seems like a world hell bent on Armageddon.  But, it makes sense if you look at the motivating myths and religions of the battling forces.  It's like "battle of the titans"; the war Gods have demands and rules that we mere earthlings must carry out.  If we accept these myths, we are dreaming an apocalyptic consensus reality into existence.  But we don't have to.

When I feel overwhelmed by the oppression of  consensus reality, I often turn inward. I ask myself, from a much larger perspective, what am I supposed to do?  How can I contribute and what can I learn?

I write to share an organic spiritual reality with others that is ridiculously accessible and which can be a balm in these uncertain times when we may well be asking does love trump hate, or hate trump love?  If Love, the universal super glue, matters to you, dive inward.  Pay attention to dreaming. We live in our waking reality, but we also live in the dreaming reality.   If we don't know we're eternal and loved, we can be easily manipulated.

My favorite dream teacher, Robert Moss posted this quote the other day on FB; "Jung once told me that he thought the dream was always going on in the unconscious, but that it usually needs sleep and the complete cessation of outer things for it to register in consciousness at all." - Barbara Hannah, "Encounters with the Soul"  Robert post 12/19/16

There's a great tradition of spiritual literature that balks at the fetters of conventional and religious thinking, including in Jesus' own teaching, "the kingdom of god is within." Jung saw this inner kingdom (queendom) as the unconscious (which he categorized as personal and collective). He came to believe that without a relationship to our inner life, we are doomed to tragedy, personally and collectively.  Paul Levi, a Jungian scholar, writes on his blog:

Jung elucidates, “What future developments are being prepared in the unconscious of modern man…It depends on us whether we help coming events to birth by understanding them, and reinforce their healing effect, or whether we repress them with our prejudices, narrow-mindedness and ignorance, thus turning their effect into its opposite, into poison and destruction.”[xxix] We are potential spiritual midwives, who by ‘understanding’ the psychic nature of ‘future developments,’ ‘reinforce their healing effect’ and birth ‘coming events’ into incarnation through the womb of the psyche. The psyche, which is pregnant with open-ended possibilities, is the very cipher in which the history of humanity is being written. Jung writes, “The world today hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of man."

We need a relationship to our own psyche, our soul, our own spiritual life, just like we need a relationship for our physical love life. Spirituality is the love life of the soul.  We begin, as in any relationship, by paying attention to that connection and how it makes us feel, day by day.

We have inner resources.  When people say to me, (and I wish I had a nickle...) "I don't dream." or "I don't remember my dreams" my first question is always to ask, do you want to?  Do you pay attention?  People mostly smile and shrug their shoulders; many admit that they've never really tried, but would like to. Where to start? I've explained the practicalities of beginning a dream practice on my blog before, so for that advice, I refer you to the previous posts I've linked throughout this sentence.

One thing that blocks our access to inner resources is "lemming social behavior."   For instance, the "media" is something we imbibe in huge quantities on a daily, and for some, an all night basis.  TVs blare in every room across America, especially the "living" room of many, many houses around the country, with a mind-numbing consistency.  Unfortunately, an inner life needs some time of introspection, sleep time to dream, time to meditate, dance or abide in joy.  It's accurate to depict the media as shallow, gutless, full of deliberate and manipulative misinformation, but who is forcing a person to watch it?  Nobody.

Most of us have a choice.  I've heard people say that TV is "entertainment," or" relaxation" or "staying informed."   Add the computer and cell phone, that's a lot of ersatz experience substituted for the living, direct real thing. There are several generations now who've grown up on external, vicarious stimulus far more than on their own creative play and developing imaginations. I call it the "Disneyfication of American Childhood."

Dreaming is our inner reality; waking is our outer reality. Without connection to our own inner life, it's easy to become fearful and susceptible to external controls and idiot influences that cost us not just our money, but our essential life force, our souls. Let me emphasize that by soul, I don't mean some poor spotted white spirit, sin-tinged from the moment of conception. I mean the essential collective energy that is at the core of the Self.  In each incarnation, in each physical personality or ego, we are different, but we have an indestructible core that if we care to nurture, saves us needless grief.  The Soul does not need Saving; the Soul Saves.

We have an invaluable resource we came to the planet possessing; it can't be destroyed like our bodies can, though many willingly shut it down or belittle it. Through conscious dreaming, we become independent, spiritual beings with access to individual spiritual guidance as we tune in.  It's not about the meaning of one dream; it's about creating a dialogue with your inner world.  Over many years, you come to know that the foundation of your own being is unconditional love and endless creative life. You come to know for certain, that you are here for a reason and you are never alone.

May your inner resources grow robust in the coming year and may love energize all you do.

The Dream Connection and the Pope

This may be a bit David and Goliath of me, but I'd like to challenge the need for institu-tionalized religion. I'd like to propose that modern day "religions" do much more harm than good; they divide us from one another and fail to deliver on all the Good they claim for themselves.  I'd like to suggest that we each enter this world connected to our Spiritual Source and will exit this world to reunite with the same Loving Source; even as we reside in the physical body, in a physical world, we are spiritual beings living our unique purpose.  The burgeoning exploration of near death experiences, NDE's, out of body experiences, OBE's, and dreaming in general is opening the gates to direct spiritual experience for everyone, not just the chosen prophets of the status quo.

The organic spirituality dreaming offers is like having a spiritual compass through life helping to connect us on a regular basis with inner resources, as it provides us with personalized guides, teachers and angels, messengers of the wisdom beyond embodied reality that delivers us from the trials of waking life, big and small.  We can also gain freedom from judging ourselves by the standards of the physical world only, because we have other experiences to cultivate in other realities that often more than compensate for lack on this plane.  We’ve been brainwashed to believe the physical is the only solid, real reality. Despite a century of exciting developments in the fields of Physics, Consciousness Studies and Dream Studies, a great number of people ignore the dream portals to other worlds that are being offered them on a regular basis.

We've been taught, conventionally, to rely for spiritual nourishment on external reality based religions that give prescribed outlines of dimensions beyond the physical and demand consensus on the grounds of an elite, usually male, group of authorities who alone can decipher what even older all male authorities wrote about the Divine. I'm mostly talking about the big three, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  Perhaps some accept constricting religions as our only spiritual option for lack of alternative. These limiting religions, especially as absorbed through the mind of a child, which is when most of us get brainwashed into them, operate on a deeply suggestive psychic level to imprint on us the dire consequences of disbelieving their dogma.  They utilize a simplistic and dualistic punishment and reward system, commonly known as hell and heaven to instill fear and obedience to their projection of the Divine. Yes, they profess that at the core of their teachings is the ultimate reality of Love, but by their deeds, as Jesus put it, you shall know them.  These patriarchal religions have a track record of deeds that belie their preaching of Love, from present warring zealotry in the Middle East to horrendous historical events like the Roman Catholic Inquisition, when claiming any direct revelation from dreams could get you barbecued.

The myths that these for-profit organizations perpetuate can be truly detrimental to the human spirit, especially if you're a woman.  The myths begin by saying that once we were loved and provided for in a wonderful place, but something happened, so we got kicked out.  Humans DISOBEYED and worse, it was HER fault, the woman’s.  The serpent, EVIL, outsmarted her cute little self and she used her wiles to get the smart one, THE MAN, to do what he otherwise would surely not have done.  The rest, most believe, is HIS-STORY.  SHE must be constricted, especially sexually, so she doesn’t again undo all HIS progress,  SHE, whether in human body or as EARTH can also be abused and used, because SHE is but MAN’S servant.  HE AND GOD are on the same level; they are the PATRIARCHS.  The GODDESS is no longer anywhere to be seen, at least not in the CIVILIZED world; yet, since the beginning of human history, archeologists have discovered, the Divine was worshipped as the GREAT MOTHER.

Surely most people can see that religion, at least as much as money, is the root of our accelerating self-destruction.  The great mystic poet, William Blake described our mental chains, our unexamined, constricting paradigms as "mind forged manacles." These patriarchal myths, with different players, are in dangerous and violent competition for supremacy around the world.  If people adhere to these limiting myths for lack of a real alternative, one that satisfies, informs and inspires beyond that old time religion, then the world is ready for the alternative - individual, direct experience of the divine.

There are many roads to these direct experiences being explored by a growing number of people, all over the world, through the contemporary Consciousness Movement   My portal of choice is dreaming because it's effortless, natural and organic.  It doesn’t require much of me; all I need is to want to dream, want to remember and to pay attention.  Sharing and playing with dreaming in family groups and community groups can nourish our need for human connection and help us build a better future together.  Through individual and group dream explorations, we arrive at our own certainty, we gain our own authority over our spiritual lives.  For me, dreaming provides access to my spiritual home long before I finally go there; death does lose its sting.  It’s taught me that in thought responsive, non-physical worlds of dreaming, it’s all up to me.  I create my inner world with my intention, desire and imagination, yet in these worlds, I meet others who share similar visions and we create together.

Dreaming has also taught me that “as there, so here.”  The mirror lessons from the dreaming that apply to physical reality are the gifts we receive to carry into our waking lives.  If I can create my dream realities, how much of my waking reality can I create?  If I can conquer my fears in the dreamworlds, can I conquer them in waking? 

Rather than disconnecting us from what’s important and turning us into “dreamers” as is sometimes said with disdain, connecting through our dreaming to our eternal, non-physical self and exploring the resources available to us in those dimensions can anchor us in our authentic lives, despite the “peer pressure” of social consensus.  In waking life, connecting through meditation, mindfulness, open-hearted living are ways to keep spiritual portals open; when we sleep, it can be effortless.

In the frilly aftermath of Saint, I mean, Pope Francis’s whirlwind visit to our land, I heard the fluttering comments about his awesome Presence here. I have nothing against him personally; he seems like a truly sincere and nice guy, but as a Pope, he’s doing the RC Church a great service by gaining so much popularity. Talk is cheap and the fact that he rides by papal Fiat is not the point, or perhaps, on a PR level, it is.  The Vatican alone is a vast empire of wealth and power with deep corruption issues; does he really wield any influence there?  Could he be, perhaps quite unwittingly, the misogynist and power hungry RC church’s best media foot forward?  This is the church of the outrageous child sexual abuse scandals that are still current in the courts and the just as outrageous cover-ups by Church authorities.  This is the church that continues, the only one out of just about all others in “Christendom,” to deny women equal access with men to clerical office, and it’s proud of it!  So, how about that papal fiat to reform all this; will he do it?  Can he do it?  I don't know; but the fact that he just canonized J. Serra, despite all the impassioned pleas for him to consider the man's brutal acts towards the indigenous peoples he savagely forced to build his missions is not a good sign. 

Here’s a wonderful article on papa’s visit by Maureen Dowd in the NYTimes; well worth reading!  In it, I learned that a San Francisco priest was just officially forbidden to say mass, for attending a women's conference on ordination.  This outrageous censure of true pastoral outreach happened under Francis's watch, NOW.  What's changed? For those who might think that women's ordination is a marginal issue, here's a view to consider.


Without the Feminine Divine to balance the Male Deity, the psyche of humanity is completely out of balance.  As Carl Jung famously put it, the fate of humanity hangs on a single thread and that thread is the Human Psyche, the soul of humanity, which is dangerously out of balance.  Restoring that inner-world balance of Feminine/Masculine Divine is the only way to restore outer balance; an internal mythic world where God is Male alone means an external world that reflects this.  But, the Feminine Divine is an energy source just as powerful; to deny Her is to bring on our own destruction.

A dream connection is more important than a pope or a religion.  Organized religions need people to close their minds to other possibilities; dreaming perpetually opens new frontiers with first-hand adventures. One time, when my husband and I attended a friend's religious themed Halloween party as Death (me) and the Devil (he), someone in clerical garb asked us about the religious connection of our costumes,   My mate promptly replied, "Without us, you'd be out of business."  It's much easier to move beyond fear in the actual practice of dreaming than it is in the tomes and regulations of sects, cults and religions.  Organized religion feeds on fear of death and projects evil outward. Our own dream encounters over a lifetime with all aspects of Spirit, helps us weave the personal connections with divinity that makes us strong and helps us not to be afraid.

Religions give us a prefab God with lots of restrictions; one of my favorite jokes is that religions are all guilt with different holidays.  Relying on my own innate ability to connect with Spirit gives me the confidence to know that whatever my strengths or frailties, my successes or failures, I'm essentially a spiritual, whole being, experiencing this physical existence willingly for a purpose.  As long as I stay connected to my own experience in waking and dreaming, I'm free of the fears which make me vulnerable to psychic manipulation.

I'll end with one of my favorite quotes from a great dream explorer, Carl G. Jung:

“The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.”

Death, Where Is Thy Sting?

Once I dreamt my exit strategy.  In my dream, I’m told that this dream landscape would make a good place to enter as I’m physically dying. In my dream, there’s a lovely woman, a guide of light assuring my safety.  And the drums are calling me to dance.

Needless to say, this is a dream I value highly; it’s a gift to me because it’s one way I can choose to play out my death experience. My spirit crossing, “shuffling off this mortal coil” can happen like this if I want it to. In this dream, I’m given the map to that country that so intrigues us as humans and I’m given an exit strategy through a dream portal I can re-enter in order to familiarize myself with the plan, the landscape and my options, NOW.  I don’t have to wait, in fact, just like buying the guidebooks to Hawaii before I went there, anticipation and some scouting ahead is part of the fun of the trip. 

Though many people still don’t want to think or talk about death, we on this planet, at this time are starting to evaluate old paradigms and open to new ones in record numbers. We’re blessed with some extraordinary teachers of these paradigm shifts and the books they’ve given us. There is a growing community of people deep in spiritual exploration; perhaps we will dream a new dream for humanity in time to restore this beautiful earth to it’s natural state of living vibrancy.  Perhaps that’s why we’ve chosen to incarnate at this time.

I’m not negating that death, like birth, can be messy and painful.  I wish us all a smooth exit at the right time.  I don’t claim to have conquered every fear of death, but I also came into this life kicking and screaming.  Both ends seem to have some pain factor involved.

In this magic moment in time, a  new spiritual consciousness is emerging, and the extensive dream and spiritual exploration blossoming this past half century are key contributors.  Dreaming practices open avenues of exploration to any human being willing to pay attention to her/his own dreaming. As Robert Moss puts it, “Dreaming is the science of soul for the 21^st century.”

Many people, across the globe, are arriving at a new human paradigm that sees each of us responsible for his or her own soul journey through dense matter, through this physical plane.  We are finding that turning inward, experiencing dreaming and the dream worlds have made us our own ultimate authority on the meaning of life and has eased, if not erased. all mortal fears.  

Dreaming isn’t the only science positing a new heaven and a new earth; contemporary theoretical physics also points to  a multiverse hidden within the one we observe as reality.  William Buhlman gives a wonderful and succinct overview of the most revolutionary physicist’s views in, Adventures Beyond the Body and draws exciting parallels to OBE experiences he’s had or researched in his sweeping surveys of OBEs around the world. 

We live as entities of energy in the multiverse.  The best way to see this is true is to pay attention and participate in your dream life equally with your waking life.  This simple avenue of proof is what we’re born with, a gateway home through the multiverse, a place before birth and after death.  A continumm of my existence, not a stagnant malignant restricting place, a place of possibility, free of the density of matter.

In dreaming, we experience, to varying degrees, depending on our own focus, the multiverse of non-physical realities that physics say exist and that dreaming says are the landscapes of our infinite non-physical existence. In these realms, energy generated by intention, thought, emotion, unconscious factors and consensus matters a great deal; it’s important to be clear about what you want and open hearted.  Those energies get you into the best places.

What about Heaven and Hell? Religious paradigms, literally man made, mental constructs, what the famed mystic poet William Blake labeled, “mind-forged manacles.”  Religions demand adherence to non-experientially based belief, often called “faith.”  Has anyone else noticed that religions, especially hard boiled, my way or the highway patriarchal religions in the world today are kind of ruining it for everybody? Having violent, jealous gods is getting old; having women reduced to chattel again is not an option in my hymnal.  Religions are causing a lot of trouble.  I myself am looking forward to being popeless, if just for a few weeks. Authoritarian belief based systems are the dinosaurs that smash spirituality, but we are living in a consensus paradigm that has the potential to become post-religion and truly spiritual. 

Organic spirituality, dreaming, isn’t based on a belief system, it’s based on experience in the dreaming and in the waking.  Each person is his or her own authority.  What I know to be true is what I’ve experienced myself in the dream worlds and in waking life, the physical and the non-physical.  And I’m not alone in this consensus; all over the world, people are waking up to the power of dreaming and the spiritual reality of our planetary existence on earth, the physical realm. 

At this moment on earth, we’re blessed with many wonderful teachers and their written works. It’s a spiritual explorer's dream come true to learn from dreaming pioneers like Robert Moss, William Buhlman, Patricia Garfield, Gayle Delaney – so very many more, as well as  from dreamers on the internet. My primary resource is my own dream experience…when I lay me down to sleep, I open a window and fly through it…I’m free.  Yes, not all dreams are pretty and sometimes they're hard to retrieve, like shadowy ghost images fading as I call them back.  But dreams are the royal road to inner-spaces.  Once you build a relationship with your own dreams, you see the bridge before you, there and back again.

“To be or not to be…”, if that’s the question it helps to know, based on the empirical evidence of my own experiences and those of countless others, that the physical event of death is a transition very much like the physical event of birth, that I’m turning the page, transforming my reality.  Maybe it’s not death where is your sting, because it definitely can hurt, but it appears death’s sting is fleeting compared to the rest of what I’ll experience. Death be kind, give me a good transition, but I don’t fear what Hamlet did “….for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?” Bring those dreams on! I'll have new opportunities; the I that is spirit, energy, consciousness will endure in the most interesting ways, depending on where I am in my quest when I cross.  This holy grail of attaining spiritual awareness, becoming Conscious as Eckhart Tolle puts it,  just might be more important than making it in business.  It doesn't preclude financial success, but if all that survives death is who we are and not what we have, some balance would seem wise in preparation for the inevitable.

Based on his OBE experience and research, William Buhlman asserts unequivocally that we’re eternal spirits having a physical experience, each for individual reasons, determined to enter this physical external plane with something to accomplish.  What he describes resonates with many of my own experiences in dreaming.  This empirical spirituality offers me a great alternative to fear based, reward for towing the line, religions.  Dreaming offers a portal into my authentic being and teaches me what I'm really here on this amazing gorgeous planet to do.  Religions that insist on incinerating everybody on principle should be carefully assessed, as should those that have not protected children nor served LOVE.  I think the big 3 need to stand trial in this modern world. Ancient and indigenous spiritualities honored dreaming as a vehicle between worlds, always; they still have much to teach us.  Father obsessed religions of the last 6 thousand years or so don’t serve us as human beings, nor do they serve the planet and the future of our children.

Dreaming is the royal road to the unconscious and through the gates of death into the new, extended adventures available to each and every one of us.  This knowledge shines a very different light on “old age” death and the after life.  Instead of a decline of all that’s important to me, a loss and a disconnect, I can experience my old age as a new chapter and an opportunity to look ahead and take control of my journey. 

Shakespeare’s brooding prince Hamlet peered into death’s abyss hoping for solace from his earthly woes, but stopped short of doing himself in with his bare bodkin when an existential question occurred to him: “What dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?"  Fearing dreams, he was unprepared for death.  He was also cut off from his spiritual options; it would take several more centuries for the doors of dreaming to open the doors of death again.  But it’s happening.  What dreams may come?  What dreams do you want to realize?

The other day I had one of those conversations, okay, yes with a man, that’s heavily mental; they call it “reason, logic” and back it up with quotes from whatever dead author they believe nailed the truth in some pithy tome.  My sense is that whatever teachers I read and admire are my predilections; I don’t expect anyone to genuflect when I name them. I am not the authority over someone else’s waking dream or night dream.  After letting him spin out for a while, I held his paradigm of a dystopic, depleted future ruled by man’s technology gone awry before him, summarizing it briefly and asked him, is this the future you want to see happen, the one you want to bequeath your sons?  No, it's not.

Though being cynical may make us feel intellectually superior, in the long run, I think it’s dangerous.  There is a great deal of energy in a passionately held thought or belief and this carries energy that manifests into reality. When large numbers of people hold these negative beliefs, well...  We don't have to deny the obvious problems to adopt a passion for solutions instead of resigning ourselves to fear.  If thought is a form of creative energy, what we think matters.  Personally, If I’m conscious that my death will not end anything, that I’ll pick up in some way from where I left off, then I want to make sure that I like where I’m picking up from and where I left off.  That’s something I can do right now, prepare for death by living in the light I want to behold when I die and by dreaming the future I want to see happen, not the one I fear. 

Preparing for death means living a life that flows from waking into dreaming realities in a natural, openhearted and curious way.  Of all the wonderful acquisitions I can manifest on this physical plane, the ones I can take with me are the product of my own searching, my own experiencing in the physical waking world and the non-physical dreaming dimensions. Unlike Hamlet, I choose to stick around not because I fear death, but because I came here for a reason.  I have a job to do, something I signed on to do.  When I’m done, then I’ll cross over; and when I cross over, I’ll continue it on another level.

For me, I’d be happy enough to have helped foment a spiritual jail break, “setting all the captives free” seeing all those paradigm prisons dissolve and humanity turn a new leaf. A dream fueled spirituality will allow more of us to have fun in this dimension, resting in the secure knowledge, born of experience, that we are not alone and that we are each eternal spirits.

 Although religions parrot this, they put all sorts of imperatives and conditions on salvation and usurp individual spiritual authority.  The ancient poet Ecclesiastes wrote, “Naked came I into this world and naked I shall return.” We each come and go, the experience is individual, natural and safe, but we make that crossing on our own. The most universal dream report I hear is about a beloved departed person visiting the loved one in the dreaming and assuring them they’re ok.   Wish fulfillment?…nah-ah. I’ve seen too many eyes sparkle and hearts open telling me about when dad, mom, child, beloved partner or even a cherished pet comes back in the dreaming to give their reassurances or make their requests.  It is organic spirituality’s portal through death, the dreaming, a glimpse of non-physical realities.  

When you know through your own experience, your own dreaming, that death is a door that opens into a non-physical multi-verse, so what you attract to you by your attitude and desires will be your new environment when you walk through that door, it seems to me that you evaluate and adjust your passions and desires in order to attract the environment you want to live in forever.  I guess this is where good guys actually finish first. The Egyptians believed at death each person’s heart is weighed against a feather on golden scales, only a light heart will pass the test of eternity.

In my up-coming dream group, we’ll journey, as I’ve done in groups with Robert Moss, to the realm of Luna, the transition station where souls either incarnate or arrive after incarnation.  I look forward to hearing the stories each dreamer will tell of their adventures.  I look forward to exploring this realm again with a new group of travelers.  

The strongest thing we can do is to dream our best dreams for the highest good of all.  May it be so.