What We Need To Know

We lose Control and our Voluntary Muscles are Paralyzed

During REM sleep while we are dreaming our voluntary muscles are paralyzed – except for our eyes. It is thought this was developed during a period when our forebears were sleeping in trees. Any movement would have made them fall. The eye movements were of course not dangerous.

An important fact about dreaming is that all the signals for movement while we dream are sent by the sleeping brain to the muscles but are blocked by a part of the brain called the pons. Seehttp://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/man-who-didnt-dream/.

But this block can be bypassed by having a passive attitude while awake (SeeKeyboard Condition). This allows for a little recognised phenomenon which, while awake and in a passive state, allows the dream process to break through as spontaneous movement, sound and emotion, exactly as with dreams. In the past, and still in the present, this spontaneous movements and speech are all things that happen when this dream process breaks through into consciousness. Things like Seitai, Chi Gong, Tai Chi, Shaktipat, Pentecostalism, and Reichian therapy, where spontaneous movement is practiced by thousands of people.

But when this spontaneous movement breaks through to consciousness many people are frightened of it and rush to the doctor to sedate it. See http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/sleep-paralysis/ – See alsohttp://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/lifes-little-secrets/

It is vitally important to understand this action – Reaction to the unconscious

In life and sleep we have two powerful actions working in us. The first is our waking experience based on having a body, its limitations, vulnerabilities and a particular gender. Our second is the power that gave us life and continues to express as spontaneous movement in dreams, in our breathing and heartbeat – our life. This I have given the description as the Life Will.

While we sleep our conscious self is largely or totally unconscious, and while we sleep our voluntary muscles are paralysed – therefore another will or motivating force moves our body. So we have a Conscious Will, and what I will call a Life Will. The first one we have experience of as we can move our arm or speak in everyday activities; but the second will takes over when we sleep. See Sleep Paralysis

This Life will can move us to speak, to move our body, and in fact do things that we cannot do with our Conscious Will. As Freud pointed out this inner will has full access to our memories. It can do so many other things that are described else where – See Edgar Cayce and the Cosmic Mind; ESP in Dreams.

For simplicity I have called this experience, of what is actually waking lucid dreaming, ‘LifeStream’. It would take us too far out of looking at dreams to explore it, but it can be studied within these features: LifeStream–People’s Experience of LifeStream– Life’s Little Secrets – Arm Circling Meditation

This Life Will or motivator has been active for millions of years and we see it working all the time in animals. We are partly split in half because we are often opposed to what our Life Will in us wants. So the only way to express what is good for us is in dreams when our conscious will is largely passive or we are restricted by being tied down.

Life Will created your body and pre-existed you as a person you know today. It was working in you prior to your ability to speak or know in the way you do now. But of course it has fantastic wisdom and skills, as can be seen in animals.

But we have to remember that having a personality with self awareness is a very new thing and has only existed for a short time. Before that we were like animals that lived only in the Life Will – what we usually call instincts. So the development of self awareness was an immense step, and left us very vulnerable, and still does. Look around at the number of people who have to take anti depressant, or who have to use alcohol every day, or smoke or take other drugs – all means of facing the difficulty of meeting self awareness.

That is actually the story of the Garden of Eden. At first we were all living in an instinctive Life Will state, having no decisions to face and all directions automatically handled instinctively. But when we left the Garden of Eden by having developed our own will we felt naked and afraid – in the words of Genesis.

So we are in a situation in which we have only a limited awareness instead of the amazing wider world of the unconscious – the Life Will. We are in general very small creatures, and when we begin to meet the enormous world that we left in the Garden, and we meet it with human personality, it often frightens us.

Our Reaction to meeting the Huge that we Are

We feel that it will swallow us and we will die. It is important to say that when we meet the experience of powerlessness through becoming aware of the hugeness of their Life, which they are usually unaware if, it feels like something alien or attacking, it is a shock. When we begin to meet the Hugeness that we are, we often react to it in our dreams or in waking with fear or panic. So we dream of being attacked by aliens or frightening creatures; or being swallowed by a whale or something huge, or even possessed by evil entities. If we realise that they are things we have created through our own fear we will pass on. But otherwise it will continue to haunt us as something that will get you; or you feel uncertain even lost in facing it! But it is only our small self image, our ego that reacts because it feels powerless, even though in reality the Hugeness is part of our totality. It is the enormous potential you have within you, it is Life you are frightened of or have been ignoring.

Example: Relaxation, or any technique which quietens and looses the hold of the conscious mind and will, can be the trigger for such phenomena. And if it occurs to somebody intellectually, emotionally or morally unprepared, it can be a great shock and very frightening. I have seen one woman, in great distress, get up and walk out of a class half way through because, as she put it, “I felt as if I were being swallowed up by something I couldn’t resist. I had to fight my way out of it.” She was practising relaxation and doing it successfully.

When the Conscious Will and the Life Will find unity, ‘This union of the two wills constitutes the spiritual marriage, the accomplishment of which is in the Gospels represented under the parable of the marriage at Cana of Galilee. This divine marriage, or union of the human and Life wills is indissoluble, whence the idea of the indissolubility of human marriage.” Quoted from Clothed With the Sun by Anna Kingsford. We also think of it as Enlightenment. See Enlightenment

The Life Will and the Human Personality

The human personality – the You that you call yourself, with a name, is only a tiny thing. It is moved and tossed around by all manner of drives, ambitions, emotions, fears, temptations, worries, love and desire with its pains and hopes; it is something we take so seriously and get carried away into awful situations; we take many sorts of pain killers to deal with ourselves. Things such as alcohol, coffee, medical drugs and street drugs, and yet we are still prone to break down, as can be seen by the number of people who need antidepressants or are totally lost in themselves. See Programmed

And a lot of the pain and the mental misery is largely because we put s o much trust in what we think and feel. Yet thoughts are simple photocopies of reality and are never the real things. They are just sounds we make into words to help us move around a strange and confusing world. And feelings to are simply a response to what we meet.

We are small because we know nothing about who we are and how we came to be – except of course in the words we have been taught are really the truth. We do not know anything about the mass of things that keep is alive – except what we have read, yet more words. We are largely unconscious of what makes our heart beat, and all the millions of things that life behind our existence does, so we are moved by whatever moves us – whatever that is – childhood fears and social programming, or haunted by the past.

Also most people have lost contact with the animal they are, and so the human person is made even smaller by that loss. Yet we know if we think about without words, that we have evolved through past ages, and in our womb life go through the stages as we develop our reptile brain, our mammal brain and then the human brain – and they are still in us and working. And it is what I have called the Life Will or Life that lies behind it all and needs some acknowledgement.

And behind it all it the Nothing that is Everything. If we can acknowledge that then we may find firm footing.

Also as we begin to meet the Hugeness that we are we often react to it with fear or panic. So we dream or being attacked by aliens or frightening creatures. If we realise that they are things we have created with fear we will pass on. If we refrain from the normal activities and diversions people enter into the conserved energy will flow into and enliven old traumas, and make alive the fears, pains and fantasies those traumas give rise to. So it could lead to neurosis or worse. It could also lead to fantasies of spiritual power or experience. It is, after all, the stuff of life, and is incredibly creative. It brings life to whatever it flows into, whether that is good or what we call evil. So we need to remember and keep in contact with our highest. See Life’s Little Secrets