Yoma – Control – I will start with that. In our western society we are drop fed the idea that we must be in control of our life and destiny.
But what actually are you in control of? The most important parts of your existence are out of your control, your heartbeat, your digestion and the millions of balancing forces taking place in your body are not yours to control. And yet they are the very things keeping you alive!
If the self-regulatory processes of your being ceased their action you would be dead in a very short time. Even a brisk walk causes such enormous changes in the body it would kill you without the action of self-regulation. The production of lactic acid, unchecked, would destroy the system. Also the drop in blood sugar, unless balanced by the release of glucose from the storage in tissues and liver, would result in collapse.
The level after level of safety factors built into our system is nothing short of incredible. For adequate functioning our blood pressure needs to be at about 110 to 120 (i.e. it displaces 110 millimetres of mercury). It can drop to 70-80 before a critical situation arises in which tissue may die because blood is not reaching it. If we lose a lot of blood, even as much as 30 or 40 percent, the self-regulatory process maintains adequate blood pressure by constricting the blood vessels. This action is controlled by a part of the brain. If that brain area is injured or destroyed, other centres take control. If they are eliminated, ganglia in the sympathetic nervous system direct the action. If they too are eliminated the walls of the arteries and veins themselves regulate their own activity.
The very first step on our journey is framed in these questions: Do I as a personality and conscious being, arise out of my own self and will, or has something I know little of caused me to exist? Do I acknowledge frequently my dependence upon that something, called Life? If not, am I impractical not to open my will, heart, passions and mind, my whole being, to that influence without which I would not exist?
So being in control can mean you are often fighting yourself; but of course we remain dual beings, so need some control, but can you control your emotions, your sexual impulses, your eating, or lack of it?. See
https://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/ and
https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/integration-meeting-oneself/#Ox In the past it was called God, but the ridiculous image of god portrayed is way off of what was its original definition – the huge father in the sky, portrayed over and over in paintings. Yet the Hebrew religion from what the Christian views grew, pointed out that the original cause was unknowable for it was everything, and making it a male figure makes it a ‘Thing’. Everything cannot be symbolised easily, and things are only parts of everything.
I am saying the next thing just in case it is important to you. Smoking releases the waking lucid dreaming process. Which is wonderful if you know how to use ‘being the image or thing’. Otherwise the real dangers are that unconscious content, which in ordinary dreaming breaks through a threshold in a regulated way, emerges with less regulation, and without the safety factor of calling it a dream. Fears, paranoid feelings, past traumas, depressing feelings can emerge into the consciousness of an individual who has no skill in handling such forces. See
https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/integration-meeting-oneself/#Shaman Tony