It's all a Dream

I love the shamanic path for many reasons, including that it makes me agitated and freaked out. I have a finely tuned woo-woo meter and the shamanic path constantly sets the needle jiggering. I love that.

Today’s needle-jigger comes from the notion promulgated by so many teachers that everything is a dream: that we live in a constant dreamtime, and there is no difference between night dreams, reveries, day dreams and what we call waking. Night dreams are a form of reality where energies are less dense; my waking life is a dream where the energies are hardened into forms. But waking is a dream just the same. Waking is a shared dream. I dream I have a car, and my neighbor also dreams I have a car, and that’s why there is one parked in my dream driveway, right by the dream Azalea that Ralph, my dream neighbor surreptitiously tosses the dream poop squished out of his dream Schnauzer while walking by my dream house.

According to the teachers, when you realize that all is a dream, it empowers you to act by dreaming your own dream, and not being bound by the dreams that others try to perpetrate upon you. The opposite is true also: it is an act of weakness and complacency to claim that we are victimized by outside circumstances or trapped by fate.[1] The dream universe is not just New Age fritter-flutter. Leading edge science is increasingly telling us that reality is more fluid, less “real” and more multi varied than we ever imagined.[2]

So the woo-woo meter jiggle and shakes. Not because this dream idea is crazy, but because it is clearly true and I just do not understand fully how to deal with it and that makes me agitated and freaked out.

Humans are storytelling creatures. We create stories for ourselves and each other all the time. We then begin to live those stories. Some stories become accepted by ever larger groups of people, and those stories become enforced on children and on those who have not yet accepted the stories. This is clear in religion, but every culture is a story, every family, every company. Economics, science, relationship, psychology – each and everything we do is an act of story making, or, in other words, dreaming. Science tells me that the table on which my laptop sits right now is only solid when viewed from one layer of reality – the farther down you go into the atomic structure of everything, the less solid everything becomes. At the atomic level there is as much space between atoms as there is between stars in the galaxy.

ACK! Jiggle-jiggle goes the meter. (As you can see, it’s not really a woo-woo meter, but a “cosmic miasma meter”)[3]

Every human-made story is accompanied by (an often invisible) “therefore, you must live like this…” There is the idea or story of how the universe works and then there is the in imperative to make decisions and act in certain ways in order to live in harmony with that idea. This is true in economics, religion, lifestyle, family – on and on.

The difference between being an explorer of a path and walker of a path comes when you decide to engage in the “therefore live like this…” If you accept the Jesus story, you must live in certain ways to be “Christian.” Otherwise you are merely a student of an idea.

So if I accept the shamanic notion that “all is a dream,” what is the “then live like this…” part? Why do I seem so powerless to change reality if reality is only my dream? Do I have any responsibility to stop other people’s “bad dreams” from being perpetrated on the world?

Comments please.

[1] Jose Stevens, quoted in Sandra Ingerman and Hank Wasserman, Awakening to the Spirit World (Sounds True, 2010) 134
[2] It’s a comedy show, but check out The Steven Colbert’s interview with Brian Green, string theory guru, who suggests that what we call reality may actually be a vast hologram. http://www.colbertnation.com/home/?xrs=sem_b_col_colbert_report
[3] Miasma: noxious exhalations from putrescent organic matter; poisonous effluvia or germs polluting the atmosphere. 2. a dangerous, foreboding, or deathlike feeling hanging in the air – in the case of challenging spiritual ideas, it is the ego that experiences the miasma.

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