Self-help books are popular; understandably based on the social policies’ celebration self-improvement. I tend to prefer to think about development or growth in terms of cultivation, or maybe even fermentation if you’re down for getting saucy. And this is going to get a bit mystisk for a moment because this cookie is going to dive down the rabbit hole of free-will and choice.
The reason self-help books are referred to is due to the nature of their contents. The schools of thought tend to be based in making rational analytical choices or follow-your heart and make your dreams real choices. The premise of these books is that those methods of being are totally opposite of each other on the spectrum of driving your body through life.
The list of motives keeping bodies in motion, beyond the 460mps/1000mph speed the ground beneath you moves, are vast and quite long. Some are motivated by love, by objects, by mental pursuits. Whatever the thing that drives someone usually doesn’t come into question unless they’re on trial, or applying for a job. The institution/employer always aska for your letter of motivation as if it wasn’t entirely clear there is a transaction of value and labor running the luxuries we have in our lives.
One of the great philosophical tools given to me by Cletus while attending graduate school in Los Angeles was to turn ever “is” statement into an “as” statement. Therein you would find someone’s subjectivity. So when someone says life is weird, or strange, or beautiful, the notion would be that is the way they see the world.
In the Vision-Body theory in Canonical Chinese Medicine, the conception vessel is that which connects the sacral region of the body to the ocular flow. Despite our way of seeing things upside down and having our brain/nervous system circuit that back around to give us a right-side up view, the notion of prophecy in relationship to dream time visions provide clear insight into the motive of a person.
Some people say there is no better way to know what someone is than to sleep with them. That’s not the slippery slope I want to go on here. Some cultures consider saying your dream out loud is back luck. And while I don’t give much weight to notions of karma or superstition, not that they aren’t real, because on a metaphysical level everything has some significance, I would say sharing your dreams with someone is the best way to get to know someone.
The cultural phenomena I have often felt was strange is the caution against that, because of the innate tendency the mind has to be manipulated. It’s pretty much impossible to not digest images, information, motives of what someone else wants you to do. So even if you were raised in a monostatic situation, you would still encounter different beings. It’s a bit of a utopian (nonreal) question, in the context of the idea of free-will. What motivates someone? Because in dream time, whatever you think you are is out-of-office. Pointing towards regular dreaming here, not the lucid, play with the psychosphere stuff, but just your run of the mill, tired, dreamt and happened to remember it stuff.
What organises events that transpire on this earthy plane, are often driven by people’s choices. Individually and collectively, but what is making them do those things? Revenge? Love? Curiosity? Hunger? Those impulses organised in the unregulated self, the one that thinks it’s perfect as is, are the impulses that personally causes me the most distress. The unexamined life, as in one lived by someone who is not addressing what their actions are doing to others, might be a blissfully ignorant life. So strange then culture values happiness so much.
This is not to invite greater value on misery, no, because self-pity might be one of the most selfish acts there is to wallow in. Remorse, when rejected, tends to enable violence, whereas remorse when reflected on tends to produce peace.
Perhaps that is why I found so much reprieve in the Lofoten landscape. I visited there in 2018, by way of body, but I had been there in my dreams as an 8 year old. Not knowing that landscape was even a real place. I stood still upon a rock watching the scenes below flattened by an intensely surreal experience of time stopping. I believed I lived my life following my heart and practicing free-will, withstanding its many breaks from knowing I hurt those I loved following this way.
So when I wonder about dreams and what makes them, while we sleep, in my waking life I do my best to exercise the golden rule: do unto others as I would like to have done. Baked into this is the good dreams, because who really wants to confront a nightmare? While many cultures vilify desire, we have the privilege of living in a time we got to and get to experiment bringing dreams to life. And it would take these kinds of experiences for the wisdom friends, who tend to run 10 - 30 years my senior, generously offered to make sense.
With so many changes and prophecies about the future going on, I wish culture worked a bit healthier and less hatefully. The way elders are discarded and mistreated, the favouring of youthful self-absorption, the attempts to erase “sides” of history instead of embracing the plurality of the reality that created those stories, any of us can go rotten from the ideals of happiness and freedom. Maybe it takes an invisible force to help people return back to their true nature, which is the ability to grow, to be cultivated, fermented. This is how I have been able to reconcile the idea of agency amidst the spooky and weird experiences of something beyond comprehension, happening to run through my dreams. The only choices then are to keep walking toward the dreams and avoid mainstream prophecies which are often much worse than anything that ever comes to pass.
Thanks for reading my dreamtime journal. Even if it is not possible to travel today, I suppose psychic travel is what we do on the internet today.
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