Body Dreams

As a person you are a tiny spark of consciousness, a little bit of self awareness riding an incredibly ancient animal you call your body. Remember that your body has formed from cells and genetic information that has gradually developed over millions of years. It holds that information in it unconsciously.

Our most obvious fact is that we have a body relating to the physical world. Our body’s most immediate needs are air, water and food. This links us with the biological processes of our planet. And this biological aspect of us is quite wonderful. To state it briefly, over millions of years simple life forms emerged. These gradually developed into more complex forms, and these learned to work together in groups, and then as multicellular organisms, with different cells doing different jobs. In your body today you still carry these tiny life forms, trillions of them that we call our cells.

These cells are not in any way independent of the environment as a whole. And by environment is meant the whole biosphere and ecosystem of Earth. And remember that the earth only exists because of the universe.

The air water and food that flow through what we call our body are vital for its survival. They provide a perpetual link with the chemicals, bacteria, enzymes, animal and plant substances of which our body is composed. If we do not include those factors in our view of who we are and how we exist, we have an unrealistic concept of who and what we are.

But beneath that level of our being is another strata, the atomic and subatomic processes. And yes – that is who you are too. If those processes and facts of nature did not exist, neither would you.

If you are unclear about this take time to recognise that as a personality you are almost totally unaware of what is taking place in your body right now. You are not aware as personal experience of the huge history of evolutionary changes your being has gone through in order to become you. You perhaps have little conscious insight into the massive background of social, religious and family influences that go together to enable you to function as an individual and a social entity. Your self consciousness may not include awareness of how your present personality was shaped out of those influences. Maybe you do not know what the major life lessons are that confront you, or what your innate genius and passions are. See Dimensions of Human Experience

In general you are barely awake to who you are! But that is not unusual, most of us are in the same boat. Only here and there does an individual wake up with such wide awareness and shine with light, love and creativity.

If you can accept that you are barely aware of your body and all you carry within you, that is still only part of it. You also exist in the midst of an incredible universe, a universe that we know most intimately in the processes of nature in and on our planet Earth. And how much of the interrelationship that you have with this planet and the universe are you aware of?

I am not asking you about philosophical speculations or beautiful poetry of idealism. I am asking about your day to day relationship with all that is around you and of which you are an integral part. See Opening to Life; Opening Yourself

Is This Relevant to You?

If you think this is not a relevant question – not relevant that is to your daily life as a mother, worker, lover, student, business person – then stop for a moment and realise that without the universe you do not exist. You have no existence outside of it. You only exist as a totally embedded part of it. If you have no awareness of a life giving and sustaining relationship with it, aren’t you missing something?

Perhaps you are also missing an awareness of the intricate web of language, ideas, perceptions and drives that have meshed into what you are as a person. In some ways this is like owning a wonderful car or computer, and not knowing how it functions or how to use it well.

So, for the sake of what I want to present in this feature, let us say that your personality, your little bit of self awareness is something like a little person living in a small room with five sensory outlets to look at surroundings and at yourself. The room is at the top of a massive tree with its roots in the earth and leaves taking in energy from the sun and air. But from the room your sensory outlets are so limited in what they can show you, that you cannot really see anything but a distorted picture of your surroundings and the situation in which you exist.

Apart from gross sensory awareness – and remember that your senses only show you cut down versions of what they interact with. The eyes only ‘see’ a small part of the light spectrum; the ears a small part of the sound octaves; and you cannot look into the depths of your body or mind, as a microscope might; nor can you gain a broad view of the galaxies and what they hold – you do not know what is going on around you or within you.

You are a Genius

However, there is a big BUT here. It is that you do have a function or a sensory input that infinitely extends what your senses tell you. This function can peer deeply into the minute processes of your body, its systems, organs, cells, and subatomic activities; it can overview vast amounts of information to gather a personal understanding of the situation you exist in and what you are capable of in it; it can help you define what is your best and most satisfying direction.

This is not a fantasy or a great hype. Research has now demonstrated that we are all genius’s, but few of us know how to access it. We are still shut up in our small room at the top of the tree, missing the wonderful vision of sky and massive ancient trunks with its connection with the earth and heavens. Ian Peacock in a BBC program on genius, interviewed researchers who could open this genius to almost any one by repressing certain waking brain functions. Professor Alan Schneider of the university of Sydney developed an electro magnetic ‘hat’ that inhibits the left, rational brain, and unlocks the creative genius of the right brain lobe. He says this allows the person to see the world as it really is. Usually we have all manner of filters and blocks in the way, and fit ready made images and concepts to what we see.

However, although Alan Schneider’s cap would be wonderful to try, we don’t need it. We have just such an action of inhibiting our rational mind already built in. It is called dreaming.

In sleeping and dreaming our awareness, usually locked in the small room of rational thought, pre-programmed thinking, cultural taboos and all the other filters and blind spots we live within, manages to slip out of that confinement into vaster possibilities.

Imagine the you that lives up there in the small room at the top of your tree (head) managing to slip out of its skin so to speak and without a fixed form know the trunk of the tree, explore its roots as they emerge from deep in the earth, see into its connections with the heavens.

But hold on a moment. Did you ever learn to swim? I mean did you ever learn when you were beyond babyhood? As a newborn baby you can swim instinctively, even underwater. But once you have learned to start living in that small room with it severely limiting views of the world, you begin to believe that is who you are – a rather limited and short sighted being with the frailty of a physical body that might DIE. So going into the water was entering a new environment, a new experience.

Your naked spark of awareness entering this vaster dimension of consciousness we call dreaming also has fears and false ideas that have arisen from living in the small room. Only slowly can this tiny part of you that you call self come to recognise and feel at ease with the vaster territory of itself that is the body, the subatomic realm, and the universe. So at first you only dream about ways to deal with the fears, pains and influences that have locked you in the small room.

When you move beyond that the possibilities are endless. One of them is to see into the processes of your body to help it heal problems or to recognise the beginning of illness so it can be dealt with earlier.

To gain understanding of what stops us, as the dweller in the small room from more frequently moving into the wider awareness of self, see the description of people entering their usually unconscious self.