Thursday, November 29, 2012

is it this easy?

It seemed to happen suddenly--changes in the habits of humanity, the kind of mass transformation that cannot be legislated or enforced.  Enough were dreaming of taking the next fork in the road map of reality that it seamlessly shifted into being.  No longer were we occupying street corners and anonymous parks, but our own lives.  The election was forgotten, as was the super bowl, facebook, shopping, and other distracting numbing agents.  Erroneously or gratuitously, 2012 had been noted and predicted as the end, a legend which scared those who had forgotten the observed pattern of the world:  a beginning following every end.  Increasing numbers were excited about the hole in the veil of reality, peeking through and stepping into a way of life that we thought made more sense.

Our dreams unfolded a path of awareness.  We were shaken free of the worldview in which we had been raised, the water we swam through in our daily lives.  We welcomed our perceptions as original, and did not meet each stimuli with a pre-programmed reaction, such as “good” or “bad”.  We began to notice and feel the biological life around us, and felt ourselves drawn into it, melding with it.  We noticed how sun feels on our faces, and also the glow of our screens.  We felt taken into conversations with our friends.  We laughed, a lot.  We began to create, to caress ourselves--our mindbodies--welcoming them to life.  We enjoyed anew what we had forgotten could ever exist.

We sort of remembered a time already traveled, when people adamantly rebelled against the powers of violence in an effort to free themselves.  We felt the chains of subjugation which could not be allied with our concepts of freedom, feelings innate in the mere substance of being human.  (Anytime, especially in a democracy, a government violently erases an attempt to change it--especially an open effort to disperse power--we know it’s gotten out of hand.  If we as citizens allow our government to maim or suppress on our behalf, we  are also suppressing and maiming a basic essence of a concept we value in the word civilized.)

We realized waving a flag and voting for the lesser of evils was a pointless exercise when compared with the mass torture and death of biological life on this planet (the unfortunate result of our indulgent consumption and our government‘s effort to consolidate control of power and wealth.)  We realized our science was as much a religion as any other crackpot worldview.  The notion of progress as something to hold in esteem was laughable, if the mess we had yet to clean up didn’t sober us out of our head-shaking embarrassment.  In short, we grew up.  We took responsibility in ourselves, and also felt giddy with the freedom that action brings.  No more nanny state—welfare or socialism (the way most poor people survive in the moneyed world); instead we felt care and community.  We forgot about ipods, and remembered what it felt to lie under warm sun in a grassy field in the spring.

***
There’s a lot said about dreamers in our society.  The movie “Waking Life” studies that subject in a variety of ways and attempts to knock you off your rocker.  John Lennon also said some words.  Freud attempted to explain every dream, daydream or nightdream, as sexual repression.  (No doubt, a lot of people were and are repressed, including, I imagine, Freud.)   Lucid dreaming is a studied art, an ability to explore the dream world as a conscious spirit, unbounded by “known” physical restraints--gravity being a popular one, and my personal favorite (since I am afraid of heights), breathing underwater.

The dreamworld can appear to us as a parallel world, one in which we find ourselves without limits or boundaries more often than in waking life.  It can also act as a guide, both in providing symbols for us to interpret (the interpretation being the key component in that it provides us an opportunity to make connections in a personal meaningful sense), and offering us an example of what it means to disregard the “known” physical restraints of our waking world.

Our waking world is a description we’ve been raised with since birth.  We enter this world as beings without discrimination, though our knowledge is stored in our bodies; our civilized society calls this knowledge our instincts.  Moment after moment, we are brought further into the waking world, constructed as reality by those who are enacting dreams of the current inertia.  Our reality tunnels give meaning to the events that happen and the symbols that pervade our consciousness.  These arbitrary meanings (one example, marijuana is “bad” in Christianity while another drug, alcohol, is a sacrament) reinforce the narrowness of our reality tunnels.  Anything that happens outside of our reality tunnels is not perceived as happening, is “bad”, or is explained away.

And yet, a whole world may exist outside our realm of explanation.  If we never look for it, we may never find it.  And perhaps we don’t even need to look for it.  Perhaps if we open ourselves up to the possibility that it already exists, we will notice it as soon as we open our eyes.  A time of upheaval can be viewed with fear, because our steady recognizable easily predictable lives are shaken.  But it can also be viewed with hope and gladness, because this world is in need of real change; our collective rut is not only stale and decaying, but also taking down most of the biological life on our planet as we chant the mantra “faster!  more!!”

Yes, let’s count our blessings for our full bellies and warm hands and feet (at least those of us lucky enough to experience this reality), and all the other good things we have.  And let’s allow ourselves the chance to see and feel what makes absolutely no sense.  Let’s be open to our perceptions without judgment,and be honest with ourselves in all aspects of our lives.  Why should we make ourselves do anything we hate for any reason?  Why can’t we make decisions, keeping in mind the awareness of the wake we leave behind?  We can think about what we really want to happen in our daily lives and in our greater world, and allow ourselves the power to be fully human and responsible for ourselves, enjoying the freedom this fulfillment brings.

We may find ourselves luminous beings, connected again with the light of the universe.  We may find ourselves enacting lives worth the effort of living.  We may find that this has seamlessly become our reality, because we have made it so, dreaming it into existence.

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