Your Guru the Dream – Step One
Your dreams can become vortexes of power to transform your life, and to enhance your perceptions. There is no ‘wave a magic wand’ route to this. It will not happen because you read a great book, or look at a good dream dictionary. Those things might help, but the real magic lies in whether you can enter into your dream in the right way. It lies in the difference between being merely curious, and really wanting to know. It matters whether you are a watcher of the sport of life, or a player. A player gets involved, struggles against difficulties, and works toward a goal. Extracting the magic from a dream needs just those qualities. You don’t need to be extraordinary to do that – just an ordinary person with some persistence and courage. If you have that and travel into your dreams, the rewards are like a key opening the door to a magical world.
I am such an ordinary person. I found the key. I opened the door. And I travelled in that magical world! I might be able to help you do the same.
Why would I want to offer you this without asking you for money? After all, it took me years of effort to discover the key, and bloody heartbreak sometimes to enter that magic world.
Well, part of my travels took me under the surface of the world. I went into that strange place of the spirit where all things connect. I saw that my life is interwoven with yours in ways that are beyond understanding. I know that if even one or two of you make that journey and find transformation, my life will be the richer, and the world will have more light and love.
And what’s in it for you?
Apart from dreams being the greatest school, the finest source of education in the process of life, there is the possibility of change. I went on the interior journey because my life wasn’t worth living the way it was. In the world beneath what is normally apparent to us, there are embodiments of your past, of your pains and your wonder. These embodiments confront you, and in meeting them you are transformed. The great myths of the past tell us of these meetings. They describe some of the adventures. But your journey is nevertheless unique. See Super Heroes and Mythical Creatures
First Steps
Before any great undertaking it is wise to prepare yourself. If you were going to climb Everest it would be good to learn how to endure in difficult circumstances, how to meet pain and emergencies. You would need to harden your body and mind, and know how to go without food, or survive with very little. But remember that the training is not the climb! See Intuition – Using It
We do not need those things, but it would be good if you knew how to meditate, how to explore or allow the subtle to be knwn and be aware of the feeling senses within you. It would be of benefit if you knew how to discipline your breath, to relax, to experience a wide range of emotions. If you have already used spiritual exercises, then your psyche, your soul, will be more fluid, more able to respond to the strange energies and upsurges from that huge world that lies just below the surface of your present awareness. If you are afraid of your unconscious and its strange ability to create apparently real worlds around you, then do not take this journey. There are many characters you will have to meet and integrate. There are deeps you will swim in, and childhood terrors you must look in the eye and unmask. If you have not already taken the path of discipline, and undergone the training of will and surrender, perhaps you can learn it on the way. You must decide that. I have nothing to sell. I am not dressing this in fine colours. Nor am I masking the splendour if it.
Being born two months prematurely and born dead – not breathing – the doctor threw my lifeless body aside and told my mother that I would be a weak child and she could have more children. So I lived to meet pain and anxiety. Later events etched it more deeply into my being. Therefore I lived with an almost constant ache inside me. I did not live with the hell that some people have, but it was enough to make me seek a way through. Fortunately I didn’t attempt to drug it away with alcohol, cigarettes or the numerous medical drugs now offered people. They offer no cure at all, only a life that hides ones inner reality. I believed there was a way through and became an almost fanatical practitioner of meditation and yoga. I didn’t find peace from them, but I did develop skills that could be used for the real work. That is what I believe most of such practices are, a preparation for meeting oneself more fully. At the time however, I believed that if I practised hard enough I would find liberation from my miseries. I didn’t, but I had started recording my dreams. Gradually, from my dreams a way toward wholeness was shown me.
The first of such dreams occurred at a time when I was pushing myself hard to practice a difficult hatha yoga routine. I was working full time, and running a business in my spare time. So to manage yoga practice I would rise at 5am. In the dream I was walking across open moorland, followed by a crowd of people. I was their leader, and was supposed to be leading them to ‘Salvation’. The only thing was, I had no idea in which direction salvation lay. We came to a barbed-wire fence and stopped. I was considering the best place to cross, when I noticed a rabbit beyond the fence. My dog was with me, and leapt on the rabbit to kill, but the rabbit fought back and bit his foot. My dog stood back respectfully, as he would if a cat clawed him. I now saw that the rabbit had turned into a huge and beautiful hare, with four pink furry babies. Then the hare spoke to me, saying, ‘Where are you going?’
I told him we were looking for God. He listened, then quietly said, ‘Turn back. Go back to whence you came’. At this I became irritable and said, ‘Who the hell are you to tell us what to do’? I felt this because in waking life I had read so many books with the opinions of so many experts and gurus, all saying something different, and not having found the way themselves. So I felt here was another ‘authority’ telling us what to do.
The hare looked at me gently and suddenly disappeared. Then, in a few moments it reappeared. This impressed me tremendously. I felt it was a sign of complete self-mastery. I knew the hare was the master. He then said again, ‘Go back, and carry on with your everyday life. Do not desperately seek the Kingdom of Heaven. What you seek is within you, it is yourself which cannot be found outside you. Your seeking only hides it. It will emerge as you grow from you life experience, for that is the great teacher.’ We recognised the truth of this and turned and went back to our village, to carry on our usual tasks, knowing that in time, we would find what we sought.
The dream was a turning point for me. It was not so much the content of the dream, though that was impressive. The power arose because in the dream I could feel my desperation to find a way through my misery. I felt the words of the hare penetrate me deeply, because they summed up my condition of desperate seeking, and yet seeking without a real direction. The hare spoke to my condition, and I recognised the truth spoken in a very deep way.
The practices I was using were like a drug, and so were very hard to give up. I had filled them with hope, and so letting go of them was a confrontation with my hopelessness. This was difficult, but it was the most real step toward personal change that I had taken. That dream is still a source of insight for me.
Your First Steps
The first step on this journey is to recognise that there is a source of information within you that knows with acute insight, what your life condition is, and what is the most important and effective thing you can do to move toward healing and wholeness. Even if you cannot accept this fully, you need to accept it as an experimental premise.
The next step is to recognise that dreams can be the means by which this information can be known. Again, perhaps you have to accept that on trust for a while until you discover its truth for yourself.
The third step is to start recording your dreams.
A dream is a mirror revealing your deepest self. Most of us now have experience, directly or through films, of the monitors that sit next to a sick person in a hospital. We know that on the screen of the monitor a visible image can be displayed of the patient’s heartbeat, their blood pressure, even their brain activity. Through ultrasound one can even see the body and movements of a baby within the mother’s womb. Your dreams are like those monitors. In the mirror of your dreams you can witness what is happening in your body, in your mind, and in your most guarded self and intuitions. The hospital monitor may show things happening in your body that you are usually unconscious of. Like the monitor, dreams show things that are deeply unconscious. In this way your dreams take you into the profoundly unknown of your personality and your felt but often unconscious links with the people and world around you. In the mirror of your dreams these things appear as external people and places depicting the subtle and otherwise unknown processes of your body, your mind, and your connection with others. (Quote from Dream Dictionary) |
See Your Guru the Dream – Step Two