| Home Forums Library Media Gallery Glossary Links |
 |
September 23, 2004
Breaking the Veil
Ever since I was a small child I’ve had the most amazing dream life. Although I’ve also had my share of nightmares and even off periods, most of the time my dreams are always deeply satisfying and beautiful. Like most children I lacked the capacity to clearly distinguish between the dream world and reality. However, if you ask the Aborigini’s, such a distinction is meaningless anyway, with the dreamworld being the more "real" of the two. For me this is a belief I share with them and have carried into adulthood. My dreams have offered so many profound insights, and the lucidity of them has been so intense and real to the depths of my being, that to deny the veracity of these experiences would be to deny my very soul – the deepest meanings that guide my life. And it is here that people start to make value judgments that although the inner life of dreams might be significant, the external world is more important, because without it we die. In the West particularly this emphasis has been valued almost exclusively to the detriment to our inner lives. As Ghandi once said when asked what he thought of Western Civilization, he said, "I think it’s a good idea."
So what am I getting at? Quite simply, I have come to believe that dreams are actually quite real, more real the so-called “waking life” and that this waking life is simply part of what we must make authentic via this dream world. I can’t speak for others, but I am now quite certain (as certain as I can be about anything) that my dream life is trying desperately to become manifest here in the real world. This might sound too new agey for some people, but it all makes perfect sense to me. When things go right in my life, they have this unmistakable resonance with my dream life – the feelings, sensations, gestalts and so on. In my dream life all the answers are there, the solutions to our problems, to world peace, to sustainable society, to genuine happiness for everyone. It seems so obvious, so simple in my dream life, and yet so complicated here. I have speculated often about how I think there are “dark forces” that are conspiring in one way or another, perhaps merely out of greedy and banal self-interest to further their own ends, at the expense of everyone else. So as a result over the centuries we now have this overly complex, rigged system that benefits the rich and powerful at the expense of not only everyone else, but now the planet itself.
Bucky Fuller said way back in 1965 that right now we have the capability to feed, house and clothe everyone on the planet sufficiently that everyone would live like billionaires. So why hasn’t this happened? Because those at the top want remain the exlusive shareholders of such graces. To sacrifice their exclusivity would be to sacrifice power and control. Since fear ultimately rules these people, that fear will keep them stuck in this struggle for power. Unfortunately for them, their days of power and control are coming to an end. Despite the signs all around of us of increasing repression, surveillance and control, there is no way the system can sustain itself much longer. I have written about this lack of sustainability here and here.
I started thinking deeply again about all of this since I came back from Burning Man a few weeks ago. The evidence of a build-up towards some kind of cambrian explosion as Ming points out here is all around us. What amazes me these last few years is how much everything has changed from a 'potential' standpoint in terms of connectivity, collective intelligence, communications, smart mobs, internet, global network point of view, yet how much everything has remained the same.
How much longer can the old hierarchies, this old civilization keep hanging on amidst so much grass-roots intelligence burgeoning all around us? Burning Man is a good example of just how much energy and connectivity is there - so much that it was overwhelming... and until I went I had no idea! I could feel it everywhere, the social networks, the people all talking with each other, most of them all on this high vibratory wavelength. It's not a fluke, and it's not just because of Burning Man. It's already there. I compare it to the functioning of mushrooms, which are merely the sex organs of this vast underground mycellia network. This network grows, and grows, and it then reaches a critical point, where it then flowers. I see the same thing now in what I recently called Counter Culture 2.0. The connections are so thick and complex, that no manner of oppression can wipe it out now, except the end of life itself.
And since each day the technologies of connectivity continue to minuturize and grow smarter each day, there will come a point, soon I think, where this huge breakout will occur.
Those at the top are not stupid, they know this, sense this is coming, which is why I think they are so scared, and the global politic is getting so nasty and repressive, especially here in the states, where this connective freedom is greatest. That is no coincidence.
So rather than some smooth "controlled" evolutionary move upwards, its going to be a sudden out of control breakout. I suppose I was hoping for the former, but I'll settle for the latter over stagnation and death.
I'm more hopeful than ever.
i believe that dreams play a vital and important role in our waking lives, without them we would loose our minds; a dream can give us hope for better times and can help us heal emotional hurts; they can also help us make decisions; albeit bad dreams can cause us temporary anxiety but they have a place in that they have a lesson to teach us; dreams should not be shruged off as "just dreams for get about it" they have a place in our every day lives and they should not be seperate
Posted by: vikkie at September 25, 2004 12:54 AMSome thoughts I had regarding this:
In external life (while we are awake), we collect the pieces of a puzzle. All the external world events and processes which we interact with are there to provide a setting in which we can gather these pieces. As we grow, we will have more and more of them.
In dreamtime, we are working with the pieces we dug up out there. We try out various combinations of them, we try to fit them together. We are looking for THE optimal combination, the one which can hold all the pieces in one unified oneness. We want a wholeness which contains everything, where nothing is left out. That's what our minds are striving for.
Each of these pieces holds a certain sort of power. If we put two pieces against each other, it's possible that their powers will cause them to "attack" each other and thereby make the harmonious unity impossible to achieve. In seriously wrong configurations (or when seriously powerful elements are played with) our whole world (because this is what the puzzle is) may fall apart.
Fortunately, as we increase the number of the pieces, we have more and more possible combinations. Then the pieces may be set against each other in ways which may lead to local conflicts, but still result in a harmony when we consider the whole. (This is the ideal, which we want to achieve.)
Now here is how I think our modern society tried to solve this problem as a collective consciousness: we tried to get rid of the power of the elements, the pieces. If we play only with pieces which don't affect us considerably in emotional/mental ways, then they won't attack each other and we can build something from them. For instance, if we mechanize the whole thing, if we set up rules and force everyone and everything to adhere to them, if we try to weed out all those pieces which are against our pieces, then we may be able to create a oneness (a society) which works. Unity by law. The problem with this approach is that it is severely limited. We don't dare to tread onto unknown territory, because we are afraid that thereby the oneness will be lost, but at the same time we deeply feel that we cannot get to oneness unless we tread onto unknown territory. Oneness without openness is always fake. And at the end of our march towards "perfection" we will realize this. (And this realization can be painful, down to the guts. Unbelievable mental torment.)
What I found is that any kind of the "us" against "them" attitude is a sure mark that we still have not attained the harmony of our picture. There is a paradox involved here. Before we can find the harmony, we have to incorporate the most powerful pieces, the pieces of Darkness and Light into our picture. But if we let these pieces into our picture, then this will most certainly result in an "us" and "them" attitude. The mind at first simply cannot solve the problem of massive energy conflict in any other way. It has to create the two fighting poles, otherwise it would blow up. The trick is to acknowledge this but not cling to it. We have to believe that there is "us" and "them" but at the same time know that it's only this belief that makes these pieces of the puzzle powerful enough so that we can use them in our "cooking" of the Grand Unified Everything. If we wouldn't believe them, then they would lose their power. If we believe them, then they become very dangerous. Dancing on the razor's edge, that's what this is all about.
That's why saying things like "the external reality is only a dream and has no significance" is misleading. If you don't believe in external reality, then your pieces will lose their power and they won't work in the alchemical transmigration process. But if you believe in external reality, then there is a chance that you will try to find your safety in rules and mechanistical systems that you build in that reality, instead of using the reality elements as tools inspiring your awakening. Again, it's a fine line between two polarities.
I think that the awakening comes when we learn to believe A and not-A at the same time, without making A less valid than not-A (or vice-versa).
The world is the most serious thing and a joke at the same time.