Dec '00 / Jan 2001
A
Gift Given, A Gift Received: Water
to Iraq
By Edilith Eckart
Election Analysis Progressive
Directions?
By Bill Thomson
Modernizing Our Electoral Rules
&
Practices
By Rob Richie
Democracy 101
By Blair Bobier
Clean Money: Campaign Finance
Reform
By John Moyers
Book Review: The Cultural Creatives
Paul H. Ray & Sherry Ruth
Anderson Reviewed by
Peter Montague
Remembrance: Robert Theobald
By Bob Stilger
Transforming Our Dreaming
By José Stevens
Democracy and the Airwaves
By Suzi Aufderheide
StarLink: More Bad News for Biotech
by Ronnie Cummins
The US Is Warned "Wake Up
To Global Warming Threat"
By Environmental News Service
U.S. Position Threatens to
Derail Climate Change Negotiations
By Cat Lazaroff
Martin Luther King, Jr: Global and
Social Shaman
By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.
Sexual Union, Inside and Out
By Peter Moore
A Pagan Speak to Jesus
By John Darling
Cosmic Calendar
By Salina Rain
Transforming
Our Dreaming
By José Stevens
Attachment to personal history is the most restricting obstacle that confronts
us as we aim to become free as human beings. Interestingly, mostly older souls
are the only ones actually interested in personal freedom and even then there
is resistance to letting their histories go. Personal history, which consists
of every memory that we each have gained thus far in life, conscious and not
conscious, is the memory of people, events, places, and experiences recorded
through our five senses, whether positive or negative in our evaluation of
them. These memories chained together form one's story, identity, and personal
dream that entwines constantly with the mass dream that humanity is collectively
dreaming. It is possible to erase the load of emotion that this history carries,
to render it neutral, thereby erasing it.
The Collective Dream
The collective dream, called the physical plane or material universe, is being
dreamed by the Tao, as are our local personal dreams. The Tao is not however
attached to these dreams. You could say that the Tao gave birth to the dreamers
and then began watching what they would dream. The most sophisticated dreamers
are sentient beings like human beings who are capable of dreaming up incredible
things. Unfortunately, because of a combination of their amnesia, creativity,
free will, and ego orientation, these dreams sometimes turn into nightmares.
Then the Tao itself endures a bit of a nightmare because it is witnessing
all the dreams of all its dreamers all the time.
In the act of creation, the Tao lovingly decided on a non-interference policy.
That is, it created the dreamers and agreed it would abide by whatever dreams
they created, knowing of course that in the end all dreamers would wake up
and recognize the basic foundation of love in the universe. Many people curse
the Tao for this, believing that it was cruel of the Tao to create this policy,
just another bad idea. But the Tao could not have done it any other way without
restricting free will. If we lacked this freedom to create any kind of dream
we thought of, we would complain that the game was fixed and would try to
rebel. Nothing less than total freedom to dream and discover is the loving
way of the Tao.
When sentient beings gather together in great numbers their collective dreams
become very strong. For a long time on the planet the dreams were about survival,
and then came a long period where the dreams focused on order, laws, control,
and collective living. Then came grand dreams of ambition, power and material
gain. These three levels of dreaming, corresponding with the first three soul
ages, include basic amnesia or unconsciousness. These dreams harbor the beliefs
that everyone is totally separate, in competition, and that the creative force
of the universe either does not exist or exists as some kind of angry punitive
external force. Today these powerful, centuries-old dreams are all entwined
and carry great momentum for humankind, inclusive of older souls struggling
to wake up from the drug-like stupor of this mass dream.
The collective
dream has developed a kind of personal ego, an identity of its own based on
what it has become, a long story. This planetary collective dream has become
a great power and gobbles up everything in its path. It feeds on the personal
dreams of all the people on the planet. What it considers the best food of
all is drama, especially drama that is intensely emotion-filled, particularly
trauma with lots of anger, fear, jealously, envy, and violence. Not only does
the collective dream feast on these things: it requires them to maintain its
remembered identity. So the collective dream keeps trying to incite more incidents
of trauma so it can have more food, just like a raging forest fire that hungrily
demands more trees for fuel. The dream then reinforces itself every second
with more of the same.
Most people's personal dreams are sucked into this vortex and without realizing
it are contributors to a vast nightmare lifetime after lifetime. Sometimes
they dream pleasant things like loving relationships and satisfying work and
creating great beauty but these things are not as enticing to the historical
collective dream as are the more intense traumas. Sooner or later, each person
tends to be driven into the great karmic dream to contribute to it, be enslaved
to it, and be victimized by it. Human beings have become like sheep or cows
filing into the slaughterhouse of the dream. The results are not pretty.
It is important to realize that this grand collective karmic dream is not
evil, just unpleasant. Being a dream, it has no substance, just momentum.
To experience the truth of this, try to prove that you or anything existed
one second ago. There is no evidence to that effect. The only thing you can
actually prove is that you are aware in this instant. Everything else is just
a memory. All fossils and memorabilia exist only now, even though they appear
to relate to a past story. So the dream is not real but appears to be real;
has no historical substance but only pretends to have solidity. Its power
comes from the momentum it has been given and the fuel it is now receiving
in this instant by all the dreamers who think they have no option other than
to have this ongoing, nightmarish dream.
Dreaming the New Dream
A new dream is possible but requires enough dreamers to wake up from their
collective nightmare and choose to transform the dream. A few very old souls,
transcendental souls, and the occasional infinite souls have managed to wake
up from the collective dream and to some extent they managed to wake others
up enough to sway the dream a little. Jesus, the Buddha, and Krishna were
examples of such wakers, yet even they could not change the fundamentally
painful direction of the dream the planet was dreaming. They each realized
that it would not be possible to change the entire dream until there were
enough mature human beings on the planet willing to wake up enough to change
it. They had to settle for presenting the option of an alternative and giving
pointers about how to wake up.
Mostly these teachers have not been heeded because few human beings were mature
enough to know what they were talking about. A few took these guides' lead
and used their help to wake up from their own personal contribution to the
nightmare at large. Most, however, simply incorporated what the teachers said
into the ongoing dream without waking up at all-similar to the way a person
might incorporate the sound of a
passing siren into their dream.
Now, for the first time, the possibility of humankind waking up from the mass
dream exists on a collective level. The possibility exists of establishing
a new dream, a dream that allows the dreamers to wake up within their dream
just as on occasion you discover you are dreaming and begin to take conscious
control of your dream. To wake up from this hypnotic dream is an act of great
courage and discipline and not only is it possible, it must be done in order
to create a new dream that serves essence and spirit rather than a set of
painful dragons.
The local collective dream is made up of many different aspects that together
feed it and lead to its unique character. One major aspect of the dream is
the fact that the Earth is a warrior planet, run and dominated by warrior
mentality. Although the population is divided up among seven different types*,
and warriors make up only twenty five percent of the population, they are
the ones who determine the overall game plan for the most part. Why? Because
here on earth the dominant life form is simian, an aggressive mammal with
opposable thumbs perfectly suited for the warrior approach.
Warriors are producers, doers, and action-oriented people that are happiest
when there is a physical project to be carried out in an organized fashion.
With powerful independently mobile simian bodies to work with, warriors are
able to organize, direct, and produce an almost infinite variety of things
out of the resources of the planet. Thus the dominant societies of the world
have come to value production, organization, and development as their chief
accomplishments. One could say then that warrior dreams have had an easy time
being realized because the environment has been so conducive to manifesting
them.
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