The are two ways of realizing your dream nature and escaping the tread-mill of humanity. The first way is very rare. It is almost always precipitated by some kind of traumatic event, physical or sometimes drug induced. Most of the time is seems that our ‘subject’ has not had much in the way of ‘spiritual’ studies under their belt. It’s like a personal thermo-nuclear device went off and then one is left alone to clean up the pieces. Sadly, suicide or institutionalization often follows.
The second type of awakening arises in the student who has a general idea of where they are going and has made some efforts as, I am sure, you yourself have. It’s much more gentle and from the dream perspective, safer.
The end points are the same, but the methods are obviously very different. However, for this rant I am going to start my explanation from the point of view of the first method. I feel that working back from the traumatic event/realization will be a novel way to approach the unexplainable. Let’s do a little thought experiment.
You can pick you own trauma as your imaginary starting point. It might be a life threatening drug overdose, an incredible LSD, DMT, a toad or vine experience, perhaps a horrific accident or illness and the subsequent NDE. So, before going any further, pick a juicy one. Of course, you can make it up. You are not going to go through the nasty stuff because we are beginning from the point of you coming out of the experience and returning back to this human dream.
Imagine you have experienced the most blissful state possible. You entered a state of pure velvety blackness and love beyond your imagination. You experienced acceptance like you could never imagine. You realized that you, a person, have absolutely no existence, all is a dream. You get that you have never done anything. You had an experience of not-twoness that was all embracing and loving, you had a deep experience of nothing and everything and, while a little misty because you are just coming around, your ‘soul’ has been tattooed with the wonder of that experience. Next comes the hard part, integration.
After that unimaginable ‘WTF-was-that-experience’, you are expected by society, friends, husband, wife, children and work mates, to merrily pop back into the dream as if nothing had happened. Quite understandably, no one understands you. Your doctor offers you psych meds but you know they are not the answer. You turn to Youtube and find nothing but Pablum being spewed by people who, obviously to you, have no idea of the depth and breadth of your experience. You write copious notes in an effort to recreate, undo, understand… you don’t even know why you write, but it doesn’t help. And that tattoo continues like a splinter in your mind. Stop for a moment and try to imagine the immensity of this challenge.
Out of frustration and at the end of your rope, you decide, rather creatively, to start at the end of your ‘mystical’ experience and walk back in order to make some sense out of it. Perhaps in doing so, you will be able to integrate better into society. And, so begins your journey.
You start by recalling the event as best you can and wonder what you would do if you were that wondrous ‘I AM’ end point. You realize this is going to be a heck of a challenge, but everything else has failed. You know in your heart that it’s all you in Reality, but you put yourself in a ‘what if’ frame of mind by asking yourself, ‘Now, if I were that thingy, what would I do? What would be my next step?’.From the perspective of total nothingness embracing everything, you decide the only thing left to do would to be to play, to set up some kind of a game. How would that look?
From the perspective of your Ultimate Experience, you don’t know that you are everything and nothing. You have nothing to compare yourself to. After all, if you already are everything, all knowing and such other good stuff has no context within which to be held and understood, you have nothing to contrast yourself with. So you wonder, ‘What next? Yup, gotta create a game of some kind. As ‘Everything’, I could use a little entertainment’. Perhaps a game that involved creating some illusion that would let me (as Truth) experience a degree of separation or distinctness. Remember, don’t get too wrapped up in this, it’s just a thought experiment, perhaps.
Giving it a little more thought, something that Truth can’t do, you realize that things spontaneously arise in ‘You’. Using your imagination, you come up with the idea of a spontaneous arising of something called ‘consciousness’. There you go, you have a start. You define it as ‘that which is conscious of something’. Hardly worth of Encyclopedia Britannica (you are getting on in years) but it works for you.
From consciousness you track your game plan along and figure that consciousness must have something to be consciousness of. Without that, it wouldn’t be aware of anything. Hmmm.. aware…. let’s make up something for the next step and call it ‘awareness’. Sounds like a plan.
Next, you wonder where your game should be located. It seems to you that such things as consciousness and awareness would be impossible to contain. You propose that your game locates them both at each and every point in the universe.Oops, you forgot about that ‘universe’ thing. Well, seeing that you are appearing more and more like a raving lunatic, you just imagine a universe… as difficult as it might appear to those ‘normals’ out there, you are coming from a ‘new normal’ and infinite thinking is no problem for the new you. You might even begin to delight at the fun of all this.
As this whole game is being set up in order to entertain the Mystery, Void, Truth, or whatever (you have yet to settle on a moniker) it requires a player or players. You decide that your game has to be big, infinite in fact, because Nothing is capable of entertaining a lot of entertainment. Looking around, you notice that there already seems to be a rather large number of players already on one field. They call themselves ‘humans’. Why not use them? Perhaps they are an artifact from some previous game. ‘Quite convenient’ you think. For present purposes, you limit the playing field to the thing called earth. Also, conveniently available.
At this point your game is almost ready for roll-out, but every game has to have rules. You decide on the following:
1.) The goal of the game is to escape the game.
2.) The boundaries of the game are limitless.
3.) The players can only make any rules they like as long as they further entrap them in the game.A game wouldn’t be a game without referees. Their task is to:
1.) Make sure players don’t escape the game.
2.) Reinforce the player’s illusory reality, i.e., that the game has boundaries
3.) Maintain and uphold the ‘self-policing rules’ created by the players.You decide to label the referees ‘Agents’ and individually name them as government, education, laws, etc. Collectively, they are called Agents of Maya, after a dog a friend once had.
Things are going quite swimmingly for you as you consider the advertising revenues you will be generating. Forget football, hockey and baseball. You are going to capture massive audiences and make bank, oh yeh, big time! You come up with a project management plan to enroll and collect funds, ostensibly for distribution to the poor, yeh sure, but that is also part of the game. You call that particular Agent ‘The Church’. It ends up becoming a very big source of ‘policing’.
The players of your game appear to be very competent at creating limiting rules. They create things they call ‘beliefs’, such as reincarnation, karma, heaven and hell, miracles, saints and sinners, politics, Gods, etc., and, while only beliefs, they are all too real for the players. They are taken as real because the players have been effectively shielded from their origin, their True Nature, and the referee is very good at making sure game rules are followed to the letter.
Rolling out the game is as simple and spontaneous as your original experience of Trauma Triggered Wholeness. But you miss something important… very, very important. You forget you created the game. Call it old age, perhaps getting a little dotty, maybe the trauma, but darn it, you forgot that it’s your game. Now you find yourself right smack in the middle of it. You shoehorned you way back into society and your job as an insurance adjuster and now are pretending the whole thing never happened.
Eighteen dull months pass and something a little exciting happens. You step into the path of a police car racing to a gathering of players who are delighting in rioting, a natural outgrowth of your game rules and currently in vogue. You were on your cell-phone and if it wasn’t for a kid playing on the other side of the road shouting at you to ‘Watch out!’ you would be back in the situation you were seeking to return to. Your heart began beating fast and your past experience of Wonder (the moniker you finally settled on) flashed brilliantly upon you. It was there and gone in an instant, but it was enough to awaken that splinter in your brain and give you a massive headache.
At the end of that day’s work, and more than a few Advils, you decide that the way out of ‘your’ game, which due to todays close call you are now very aware of, would be to reverse engineer it. Starting from the present moment, you set out to journey back to Wonder.
It’s a pleasantly quiet evening, nothing going on, as usual. You sit down and start asking questions of yourself. Your game has left a trail and you pick up the scent. It always comes back to ‘you’, back to a ‘me’ who appears to be playing. You focus as hard as you can on ‘me’ and then ‘I’. Nothing happens.Every night, with the family all in bed, you come back to that ‘I’ thought. It evolves, but only a little, into the sense that ‘I am’, the sense that ‘I exist’. Questioning further and using your, ahem… piercing logic, you conclude that something has to be telling you that you exist, otherwise you wouldn’t know. As you move your hand over the arm of your chair you realize that it must be the fact that you can sense things. That’s it! Your five senses tell you that you are, that I exist! Brilliant, you think.
Another couple of weeks pass and your headaches are reduced commensurate with your Advil supply. You find yourself wondering how you know that you have sensing capabilities. They are marvelous and mysterious. In order to sense them, you arrive at the conclusion that ‘you’ must be sensing and you find yourself back at the beginning, that sense of ‘I existing’. Your determination suffers a little, but not enough to stop the journey.
After another week, the concept of awareness pops into your mind. In order for you to be sensing something, there must be ‘awareness’ somewhere in the equation. But you are cautious because you went down a blind alley before. You can’t find awareness in a literal sense, but you’re sure that it does exist.
You twist and turn you mind until you get a sense of ‘awareness’. You carefully eliminate what appears in awareness and focus on awareness itself, pure and simple, but not easy. You end up going to bed with another headache. Perhaps you have a brain tumor and are slowly going insane. You find the thought strangely comforting.
Your dreams that night assist you in the next step. You dream about a giant ladder and how each step is totally dependent upon there being a prior step. Any missing step and it fails to function as a ladder. You wake up very early in the morning wondering how ‘awareness’ came to know that it is.
Work really dragged that day as you were eager to get back to what really mattered most to you. Upon consulting your spasmodic scribblings, you conclude: it all started with ‘I’ and moved on to a sense of ‘I am’. Then the concept of ‘awareness’ arose, almost as a necessity for progress. Now you are at the stage of… what? Remembering the ladder dream, you review the steps and figure out that awareness must have a step above it.
Progress slows up a little as you reflect upon how awareness is aware…. how does it know that it is? Something must inform awareness that is it aware. After all, awareness informed me that I am. A larger concept than awareness was called for, a step higher than awareness. Could that step be ‘consciousness’? There was only one way to find out. You plug it into your mental, and now spiritual, machinations and it fills the bill.
You find yourself with no more headaches and an Indiana Jone’s sense of adventure. A treasure called Wonder is just over the horizon, or is it?
Your intense search has now cost you a year of evenings. Family relations are wearing thin. Despite the fact that the local riot and property damage resulting from frustrated players ignorant of the real rules has been making your job as insurance adjuster more and more important, to you it was becoming less and less important. Something has to give.Another dream come to the rescue. In fact, you seem to be living more and more in your dreams than out of them. In your dream, you are playing poker, a game that you don’t care for. The reason appears clearly to you. It’s because you don’t like rules. You have grown to be quite the rebel. In your dream you begin to bend the rules… some players get angry and accuse you of breaking the rules. They don’t bother you and you calmly reply… ‘I am making up new rules’. The players grumble and the dream game continues until one player freaks, pulls out a gun and shoots you. His last words where clear amid the smoke. He screamed, ‘You broke the first rule’.
Startled awake by the loud bang, which subsequently turned out to be the cat knocking an antique cigarette lighter off the dresser (in all the stress you took up smoking) you found yourself riveted on that last utterance. What was the ‘first rule’? Indeed, you do feel like you have broken a rule, but at this stage in your life you feel quite strongly that rules were made to be broken. Nothing like a rebellious insurance adjustor. Just remember to get him on your side.
What was it about these dreams? It seemed that the further up the ladder you went, the more you had to turn to your dreams for answers. You feel like you have to dream your way out of your human dream.
Then it hit you like a brick. But this time it wasn’t in a dream. It was in a memory from childhood. You were about six years old and subjected to harassment by some weirdo ghost under your bed. He would always reach out and try to grab your feet as you ran and jumped into bed to avoid him.
You clearly remember telling your mother about it, and in a rather un-motherly manner, loving as she was, she brushed you aside with, ‘Oh, you made it all up, all of it’. As a child, the sense of responsibility for it ‘all’ was crushing. As an adult it was the key to ultimate liberation. It reminded you of the game you had created and your ‘first rule’, i.e., The goal of the game is to escape the game.
It took you another month of evening contemplations to realize that saying and doing were very different. You finally ‘got’ that in order to win your own game, you couldn’t take anything with you. Travelling up to Wonder with the slightest attachment would be like trying to get a Swiss Army knife through TSA. It just isn’t going to fly.
You sink back a little in the thought of ‘yes, it can be done, and indeed, I can do it’. You start small by giving up smoking. That proved to be easy enough. Next you….
Wait a minute! This is just a thought experiment. Supposedly ‘your’ thought experiment, with a little hijacking from me. I’m passing the reins to you. Share or not… I wish you the best journey possible from I am to I AM… back to Wonder.
Love ya, Jed.
