1 Comment

Posted on January 5, 2013 by dreamsforpeace

Day 5: Dealing with the Ego

“Let them at all times concern themselves with doing a kindly thing for one of their fellows, offering to someone love, consideration, thoughtful help. Let them see no one as their enemy, or as wishing them ill, but think of all humankind as their friends; regarding the alien as an intimate, the stranger as a companion, staying free of prejudice, drawing no lines.”   Abdu’l Baha

Whenever you go about doing any transformation, it is important to realize that human beings have two natures, one that is highly positive and beneficial to others, the true self, and one that is limited and animal-like in nature, the ego.   The dynamic of transformation recognizes that the ego is ever present, self-centered, negative and trying to make its way to controlling the life of the individual.     When you choose a new virtue or process to strengthen your life,   it is usually because you are having problems with the ego.   The virtue is the solution to the ego.

If you think of the ego as a positive force rather than a negative one even though it feels negative,  you can regard it as the communication you need to motivate you to wake up and transform.   Whenever you have uncontrollable fear, envy, greed, lust, depression, guilt, or shame that generate negative patterns of repeating behavior, then you know you have an ego that needs to be worked with.   No one on the planet is free from ego and everyone has work to do each day with it.  In a lot of ways the ability to overcome ego conditions of protection is what defines us as human beings.   When we are able to deal with our egos successfully, we rise above the animal state and can achieve remarkable things that are beneficial in nature.

The important thing in doing transformation work and identifying an ego condition is to not get stuck in it.   If you are wanting to become more inclusive, for example,  you may have an ego state in you that is fearful of being abandoned which causes you to stay away from people.   Transformation is the process of actualizing more of the higher state such as being more inclusive, and finding a way to let go of the lower state.

The simplest way to deal with the ego is to recognize it, set it aside, and then do the opposite which is the new virtue.   The more intensive the ego state,  the more difficult it will be to set it aside.

In today’s exercise you recognize the ego state that is most related to the energy you want to develop.    For instance,  maybe you feel sad often which causes you to sit and do nothing when you want to get out and go for it. 

So one thing you can do is draw a picture of what the ego is like,  It may be an angry  lion or a dark cloud or a raging fire or a big mess.     Then on another paper draw the opposite such as a sunny day, a warm candle, an orderly area.    Look at the two pictures together and then just set the ego one aside so you don’t see it anymore.   Repeat it two or three times.  

It doesn’t matter if the ego doesn’t completely go away.  What matters is that you begin to feel more of what your virtue is like inside.   When you come to a full understanding of the ego and have a more accurate description of the process, then the ego will set itself aside.

Note:  Put the exercise aside if you gets too negative for you and then seek some outside help to work with the issue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2 Comments

Posted on January 4, 2013 by dreamsforpeace

Day 4: Listening to the Spirit Within

“So far as ye are able, ignite a candle of love in every meeting, and with tenderness rejoice and cheer ye every heart.”    Abdu’l Baha

One of the first keys to any transformation experience is the ability to have a positive experience and then remember it.    Because of the way the world is often organized, many of us live our lives according to the dictates of someone else, usually  a leader.   This leads to an inability to remember our own positive experiences.    We might pray for change,  meditate to try to quiet our minds, but then not stick around for what the spirit might tell us.   This is partly due to the belief in many of us that the space around us does not belong to us.   It belongs to the leader or the government or our parents or whoever is above us.

What is helpful is to believe that the space around you belongs to you and you can share it with others.   You cannot transform yourself by believing that the space belongs to someone else, because then you always have to ask for permission from someone else to change and to act.   Transformation is the space that everyone has been given by God.   The earth belongs to you and everyone else at the same time.  There is no ownership when it comes to transformation.

When you are feeling uncomfortable in a space, you can simply say that this space belongs to me.  This space is mine.   Then it is yours.  It helps you take control of your own transformation process.

Today’s exercise is to remember positive experiences where you felt really great.   First remember a single experience that was amazing.   Go inside and hear, see, taste, touch, and feel the experience.  Then ask yourself to name one of the virtues you demonstrated like awe or joy.  Then repeat the exercise 9 times with 9 virtues.

For instance, today I went for a run in the Botanical Gardens in Singapore.   I was so carried away with awe and wonder that it just sent my mind into all kinds of positive thoughts and possibilities.

 

 

 

Leave a Comment

Posted on January 3, 2013 by dreamsforpeace

Day 3: Connecting to Positive Energy

“And be ye not like those who forget God, and whom He hath therefore caused to forget their own selves.”  Baha’u’llah

For most people in the Western world and other places God is an angry man in the sky shooting out lightning bolts when people do bad things.   I am really not sure how God ended up in the sky, but when you are doing inner work, it is better that you relate to the divine as an inner being rather than an outer one.     It is not that God is in the sky or inside of you, but these are constructs for helping us to understand divine forces.   Remembering God when He is on the inside can mean remembering the positive forces that move inside of you which we often call virtues.   When you have patience and acknowledge it, then it is acknowledging and remembering God.   When you don’t acknowledge and honor it, then the divine leaves you and you forget who you are.   That is when the negative happens.

Because criticism and negative is so epidemic and often seen as being a virtue, most people have a difficult time relating to positive aspects in themselves and others.   Being positive is oftentimes equated with being soft especially if God is an angry man in the sky.     The purpose of today’s activity is to begin to relate to positive energy in others and then eventually to yourself.

Make a list of 9 people who are important to you and then write down a very positive aspect about them such as gentleness, accepting,  organized,  courageous, wise, etc..

With each person go inside and feel what it is like to have their energy as if you were inside their bodies looking out at the world.   

If you can,  write, call, or say in person to all those people the positive energy you see because what you are seeing is the divine force within them.   It is nice if they know you see it, because it creates a bond.

 

3 Comments

Posted on January 1, 2013 by dreamsforpeace

Day 2: How the Virtue Will Change Your Entire Life

O SON OF BEING! With the hands of power I made thee and with the fingers of strength I created thee; and within thee have I placed the essence of My light. Be thou content with it and seek naught else, for My work is perfect and My command is binding. Question it not, nor have a doubt thereof.      Baha’u’llah

The advantage of choosing a process or virtue for your focus of change this year is that virtues and processes are automatically generalized to all parts of your life, not just the one that may be giving you the most problem.   When you learn how to have endurance, for instance, you can stay positive for long periods of time with any project.  However,  it is my experience that the mind often needs some help in the process of generalization.

The activity today is to make a list of the various parts of your life and then describe how the virtue will assist you in each one.  Of course the more you understand what the energy of the virtue is the easier this will be.   The divine world is their to assist you so it is very helpful to have a daily prayer asking for assistance in learning about and applying the energy to your life.   God does not just handover to anyone a particular energy.    You can’t go to your place of worship and expect that you will suddenly become a new person.

We have been given a free will and an ability to make efforts.  These are gifts that are aspects of every human being.   God expects us to use them because that is our nobility, but the divine world is also there to support and guide us along the way if we reach out to it.   The communication from the spiritual dimension never stops flowing.    For instance,  something like world peace is not going to be delivered on a silver platter one day to us.  We have to learn our way to it.   A lot of people make the argument that God let such terrible tragedies happen in the 20th Century,  but He has always done His part which is guidance and support.   The problem for us is that we often don’t listen to the guidance.   We do not have world peace right now because we don’t follow the guidance.   Ask for help, listen for it, and then make lots of efforts and your world will change.

Get out some paper or use your computer and make the list.

Happy changing today.

 

 

 

6 Comments

Posted on January 1, 2013 by dreamsforpeace

Day 1: Choosing the Focus of Change

 Let each morn be better than its eve and each morrow richer than its yesterday.  Baha’u’llah

Most people, when setting goals for change have the idea that is widely spread throughout the world, that if you want to accomplish something that you need to have a specific target so that you will see it all the time in your mind’s eye, and then you will know when you have accomplished it.    While this approach to goal setting is valuable when doing material goals, it is detrimental to an inner transformation process.   Material goals are connected to the earth so their value is finite in nature.  When they are over, they are over.    Once you have the million dollars or have lost the 20 pounds, the goal is finished.

Inner goals are achieved in a different way because the purpose of inner change is to  unleash a process inside of you that you are going to keep forever.    When you go after inner transformation,  you pick a target that is general, usually something like a virtue.   (courage, love, enthusiasm, honesty, joyfulness, patience).   These are qualities that everyone has inside of them in potentiality.   If you want to see a virtues list, go to http://www.virtuesproject.com/virtueslist.html.    By keeping a goal general like a virtue,  you recognize that you are not in control of how you are going to get to the process.   In the inner world, you realize that there is a spiritual dimension, a higher power,  God,  that guides the learning.     When you get too specific in the initial stages, you cut out the guidance that comes from the inner world.

The way to choose an inner goal is to first go inside and ask yourself a superlative question that is usually a little negative in nature.

What is the biggest mess in my life?

What is the worst thing I am facing?

What is the biggest challenge for me right now?

It is always good to write the answer.  The biggest mess is my relationship with my children, with my boss, with my spouse.   The worst thing I am facing is bankruptcy.

When you set an inner goal,  its purpose is to solve the superlative questions.   Do you need peacefulness, patience, assertiveness, enthusiasm,  determination, hope,  calmness, love, empathy,  tact, generosity, gentleness,  joy,  courage?   Whatever you need, is a solution.

Pick a virtue or process for yourself right now after having done the superlative questions.

Besides having an exclusive focus on material goals, by far the thing that always stops the actualization of virtues is the lack of daily work.   Most people, whether they set material or spiritual goals,  tend to set the goal and then  stop.   So after you have set the focus, the next step is to commit yourself to a daily process of change which is the purpose of this program.   Inner goal work is successful to the degree that you work on it everyday.

On the first day of the program you can use the name of the virtue every time you run into obstacles.    Here is an example.  The other day I was taking a tennis lesson. The instructor was teaching me a new way to hit a forehand, but when I tried it I kept hitting the ball into the net or hitting it too long.   I realized that I had been dealing with some rejection issues so I just picked acceptance as the virtue I needed.   When I repeated the word acceptance,  every ball went over the net into the court just how I wanted it.  It was pretty incredible.

You don’t have to do anything else on the first day other than pick a virtue and then start naming it when you get to obstacles.   Today is a good day to do it.

Note:  If you have been in abusive situations in the past and have not gotten good help for working through the issues,  doing this work may start to call some of that energy up.  If you feel yourself going into a panic or an out of control fear,  that would be natural for you.  You can do this program as long as your negative emotions don’t run away with you.  If they do, it just means you need to go to for some help.   There are lots of competent people in the world to assist.

Please feel free to post comments.  They are helpful to others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

5 Comments

Posted on December 24, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Falling in Love with Death Dream

I had a dream I fell in love with the grim reaper (death). I was not scared of him and never felt threatened by his presence but we fell in love with each other!

This maybe one of the most extraordinary dreams I have ever read.   You might have a tendency to think that it is a bit morbid to have a dream like this.  After all, falling in love with death!!  Sounds like Meet Joe Black, the film in which a young woman falls in love with Death, played as Brad Pitt.   I guess if you are a woman and death is Brad Pitt, maybe death is someone you would really want to love.

My method of dream work relies heavily on the emotional content of the dreamer  during the dream.   Specifically if you are feeling really positive in a dream like this dreamer is,  it means that death is a good thing.  If you were in love with death, but you were, at the same time, full of negative feelings like fear, it would mean quite something else.   So for the dreamer, death is like Brad Pitt.

The question that arises when death is a positive object rather than a fearful thing has to do with what the advantage of being in love with death is.    For sure it is not about running down to the gun shop and committing suicide.   Suicide is about negative depressive feelings.   Loving death is a positive experience.

If you have read my postings about certain types of dreams in the past, you will know that I am for having a lot of self-discipline about not going for a literal interpretation of dreams.   It is sort of the like the hype around the Mayans saying that 2012 is the end of the world and then everyone expecting the world to end on December 21st.  Here we are.  It is already the 24th.    I am sure that the literal interpretation sold better, but the metaphoric interpretation of the world ending is just so much more exquisite.

The Republican Party in the United States experienced a kind of death in the last elections because their candidate didn’t win.  The difference between the Party and this dreamer is the notion of love.   Falling in love with death is a good thing if you know how to work with the metaphor, but if you read the Revelation of St. John in the Bible and think some scary sea monsters are going to appear in the world,  you are just so in the wrong dimension.    It is much more meaningful and helpful to work in the non-literal world of metaphor which dreams and prophecies are for the most part.

So what is so great about death as a metaphor?    To understand this it is  useful to realize that we have two selves, an ego, that is selfish and materially oriented, and a true self, that is full of positive potentialities that are beneficial for others.    When you are in love with death, you are in love with dying to your ego.

Baha’u’llah in His book, The Four Valleys,  describes it like this.

The story is told of a mystic knower, who went on a journey with a learned grammarian as his companion. They came to the shore of the Sea of Grandeur. The knower straightway flung himself into the waves, but the grammarian stood lost in his reasonings, which were as words that are written on water. The knower called out to him, “Why dost thou not follow?” The grammarian answered, “O Brother, I dare not advance. I must needs go back again.” Then the knower cried, “Forget what thou didst read in the books of Síbávayh and Qawlavayh, of Ibn-i-Hajíb and Ibn-i-Málik, and cross the water.”

The death of self is needed here, not rhetoric:
Be nothing, then, and walk upon the waves.

When you dive into something new or begin a new journey or are setting out boldly for a new project,  you always first need a death.   The most common death needed, as Baha’u’llah describes here, is the death of listening to the people who have come before whose voices are very convincing about why you shouldn’t do something.    Tradition has a big voice and knows how to use it to create fear about doing something new that is untried.
When you are in love with death,  you just love not listening to all the reasons why you can’t do something.  You dive in and cross the waters.     When you listen to your forefathers telling you how wrong it is to do something, then what happens is that you experience a long, slow painful literal death because all of the things that you could have done,  you don’t do.   You end up living life the way everyone else lives it and the way it has been lived for centuries.
So being in love with death is making a break from the past.   The grim reaper brings death to all of the worn out ideas and habits that no longer serve the present and future.   It is not complete death to the past.  A positive past gives you your earth like qualities such as fortitude, determination, and reliability.    In the modern world we often throw these qualities out believing that technology or material things are going to make us better.  Then we forget to have things like perseverance and endurance.
But for this dreamer, she needs to be in love with death, which mean some kind of severing of ties from the past.   There is always an element of conservation of the past and one of letting go of it.   Conservation keeps the valuable things, whereas giving death to the past allows for the new growth to appear.   We are always evolving and changing because it is our nature to do so.   You cannot change without a healthy love relationship with metaphoric dying.
In the movie, Meet Joe Black,  the girl falls in love with death which allows her to sever herself from her old life and old relationships, and then find the relationship and life that she really wants.   It is an extraordinary metaphor.
So as we are coming to the end of the calendar year this dream will help us with our New Year’s resolutions.   When we are visualizing the new us with less pounds or more strength, there are certain things that we will need to die to and love doing it.

 

6 Comments

Posted on November 30, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Gifts that Come Naturally v. Gifts that Require Great Efforts

In my other job besides doing dream work I work in the area of physical education with young children between the ages of 5-7.    The other day I was reminded of the principle in the title after meeting with the parents of one of my six year olds.   The student received great evaluations in all areas except for mine where in comparison to others his age, he is developmentally behind.    The parents were well aware of his situation because they have a two year old who in many ways is more advanced in terms of coordination and motor ability.     The child is very bright and will sit down with the father watching The Discovery Channel and then having long conversations about science-related things.

When the child comes to me for class, I see him as needing a lot of work to develop the physical education skills, but in most of the rest of the curriculum teachers see him as gifted.    This is sometimes the case with physical education, but usually it is the opposite where we have very gifted athletes who are not so gifted academically.

The meeting with the parents reminded me that the child was very gifted naturally in the area of science, but in order to develop competence in the area of physical education, it was going to take massive efforts.    So then it dawned on me that, in my view, it was perfect for that child.    He has a natural gift for science, but he also has a responsibility to develop his body.    The former he breezes through with little effort and gains all kinds of key insights,  but up until this point the latter has suffered to the point where he gives up so easily on himself with physical activities.   I told the parents that it was great for him that he had to make so much effort to make physical progress because that is where he was going to learn how to solve the very most difficult problems that require effort.    Up until this time everyone had given recognition to his gifts in science, but had given up on his physical abilities.

Something magical happened between the time that I met with the parents and the next class which was today.   When he came to class, he made a massive effort and started accomplishing things that I didn’t believe he could hitherto ever accomplish.  It was pretty spectacular.

If you had read the book, The Element, by Ken Robinson,  you know that his focus is on recognizing the gifts that come naturally to a person, but are often missed in school.   This is because schools are not oriented toward looking for gifts and developing them.   They are looking to develop abilities to serve the current machine.   If a person has a natural gift such as someone like the great tennis player, Roger Federer,  basically the work of developing their ability is to put them in the right environments with the right teachers, and then they flourish.  This is what is usually missing in our culture because we are fearful of our children living a life of poverty outside of the current economic culture.

The less explored territory is how to take an area that is extremely weak in comparison to the rest of yourself or others and develop it until it becomes a gift.   The traditional approach is to look at someone’s weakness and then try to develop those areas by a lot of extra work.   For instance, if a child is great tennis player, but a poor math student, then the thinking is to give the child a lot more math.    The reason it doesn’t work very well is that the being of a person puts up a great deal of resistance when the natural gifts are not first recognized and nurtured.   So the first step in the development of the above scenario is to provide the environments were the tennis can grow.   When that is secure, then the being relaxes and becomes open for the secondary so-called weaknesses to become strengths.    Both practices seem to need to go on simultaneously.

If I am in doubt about myself,  then I usually rely on my dream life to tell me where the priority is, but generally speaking if you have developed in the area where you have a great deal of natural skill,  then at some point the weaker areas will want their turn.    This is where the really difficult transformations take place and where most of us do our hiding from ourselves.    This is where we get lazy and give up on ourselves and tell ourselves that we cannot change.

Before anyone starts the secondary work,  you really have to do the initial work which is to go against the culture and forefathers to develop your primary gifts which always have a rebellious element to them because they are intrinsic designed to change your family and culture.   The primary gifts, the ones natural to you,  transform the world.  If you actualize them, people’s lives around you change for the better.   The secondary work gives you a belief in yourself that absolutely anything is possible because you change the most stubborn part or weakest one.

To do the secondary work,  you first need to ask yourself where you are most likely to give up on yourself or in your life.    Where do you feel the least amount of hope for change?    Once you have discovered the answer to those questions, then you need to have a strong belief that you can transform the weakness into a gift.

Then you can do the transformation work daily until that weakness becomes a strength.   You know you have done the complete work when your identity changes.  So for instance, if people used to call you shy, now they would name you as outgoing or courageous.   If you used to call yourself sloppy and disorganized, now you would name yourself organized.    These gifts take a lot of work because there are usually a great many negative emotions wrapped around them that need to be dealt with, but when this work is done you get an even a great satisfaction than developing your natural gifts and then anything becomes possible.

Leave a Comment

Posted on November 25, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Dealing With Abandonment: It’s All About the Memory

Likewise is it written, “And be ye not like those who forget God, and whom He hath therefore caused to forget their own selves. These are the wicked doers.”  Baha’u’llah The Four Valleys

One of the ways I have learned to look at the above quote is to substitute the qualities of God for the word God.   When you do that it means that when you forget the qualities of God within you such as love, compassion, honesty, joyfulness, courage, or determination,  then you are forgetting who you are.  You become ego and then the cause of negative action.    It stands that the corollary is also true.   When you remember your positive qualities, you remember who you are and then you can do positive in the world.

It is difficult to imagine being able to do positive action in service to the world unless and until our positive memories of our gifts are cemented in our minds.   When we access our positive memories until they become strong and fortified,  then we are propelled into the present tense with a lot of positive energy.   But getting there isn’t always so easily.

One of the ways that we lose our memory of our gifts is by feeling abandoned.   For me abandonment is like being in a dark pit with no support, no encouraging voices, just the alone feeling.  I am sure that others have other images like being stranded or marooned.    I have a hard time not going for the blame frame when I get to the feelings of abandonment.   I can pick out any number of targets, but one thing is for sure.   Blaming keeps me in the hole.   It may feel good for a couple of minutes so I usually partake, but long term it doesn’t work.

The surprising thing that gets me out of the hole is to start making a list and then picturing what my positive gifts are.    God has placed an abundance of gifts in each of us, and it is when we access are memories of them that we started feeling encouraged and then acting with them.

Abandonment can have another darker side than just blaming.   It can start in blaming,  hold the negative memory of how you were abandoned, and then act in gradually increasing harmful ways that are both self-centered and destructive.   It seems like the worse the abandonment is within someone, the darker their actions become.

The key to getting out of abandonment is to first recognize that you are feeling it.   Then you can it describe usually metaphorically.    This does not help the feelings go away at all, but at least it gives you a starting point for taking responsibility for the issue.    The best way to describe abandonment is to think about it as a state of not having access to the memories of your gifts.     When you can access your gifts in memory, then you don’t feel alone anymore.   It is that simple or that complicated.

So the simplicity is to find pictures in your memory of your gifts.  It is as if you are walking into the positive past and picking out all the positive feelings that you want to feel.   Then when you have the memories inside of yourself,  you can walk back into the present and do some incredible things that are beneficial in nature.

The difficult step is to let go of the dark pit or stranded island feeling of being alone and abandoned because it is easy to get attached to someone else getting you out of your pit as if someone else should do it because after all they left you alone.   However, expecting someone else to rescue your abandonment just doesn’t work.   So it is best to give it up and start taking the walk in the positive past.    The dark pit is a mental state, not an actual one.

You cannot have been abandoned by someone unless they are already abandoned themselves.   This is why it is so not good to take things personally.  Easier said than done I suppose.   So let’s get out of our pits and start remembering our gifts.

1 Comment

Posted on November 3, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Envy: The Killer Emotion

It is much easier to admit to an emotion like anxiety or fear or guilt than it is to admit to envy.   Envy is the emotion of desire and lust.   The reason that it is such a killer emotion is that it turns the heart from goals that are lofty and noble to ones that are in the dust.   Envy is not jealousy although the two are often used interchangeable.  Envy is the desire for something that you don’t have which you somehow believe will make life easier or more pleasurable, whereas jealousy is the protection of something that you have that is under threat of being taken.    When you are jealous as in a relationship it means that you are already in a relationship, things are not going as you would like them to, you feel under threat by another person or outside force, and then you do a lot of coping behavior to try to get the relationship on safe ground.

Most people envy an easier life because the life they are currently living is full of stress or pain.   Envy is about escaping the stress and pain by seeking an easier life.  The problem with envy is that it destroys the aspirations you have for a higher calling or a higher goal.   It can really easily just take over and become the master of your house, the master of your self.

When you have desire that is out of control toward lustful goals,  your mind imagines a future state where there is very little stress and a lot of the easy pleasure-filled life.   Then you just keep thinking those thoughts because the thought by itself has a certain amount of release to it from the stress.   When you start acting on it, then the envy takes over.   It causes you to forget higher aspirations which is why you can see that so many leaders start with some good ideals, but when they taste the power and benefits of it,  the ideals are soon forgotten.

Remembering your ideals and pursuing them without being so stressed or tensed is the key.   It is the stress that turns people from ideals to lust.    When you wake up in the morning and the dream you have of something lofty like serving your community is full of tension,  then there is a tendency to fantasize a state of pleasure and joy to just take away the tension.

Since we all live in cultures that are overrun with envy and encourage us in the direction of lust,   it is no surprise to me that whenever I have dream meetings, the most common question people have is that of why they can’t remember their dreams.    When you are having difficulties remember your night time dreams, you probably are also having difficulties remembering the dreams you once  had that were high and lofty.   Your ego has taken over and succumbed to the modern world.     Admitting to envy isn’t so easy because lust carries a lot of religious judgment with it.     When you are not remembering the dreams you had at night, you can ask yourself the questions about envy.   What am I  envying?  What dreams have I given up on?

Power maybe the worst of the things to envy because once people get it they are usually corrupted as the saying goes.   Power has an addictive element to it.   When a leader is stressed, for instance, because of a difficult person in the organization,  using power allows the leader to get rid of the stress by eliminating the person.    The leader imagines a positive state without the person, then eliminates the person, and then feels a great deal of pleasurable relief when the troublesome person is gone.

When you don’t have a lot of power to eliminate others, you are really at an advantage because instead of being able to eliminate people with power, you have to do deal with the stress.   However, most people are not very good at that either.  For instance, if your relationship with your wife is becoming stressful, many men just begin to envy pleasure outside of the marriage and choose an affair over dealing with the stress.

Why does the stress come in?   The main reason for stress, in my opinion, is that the culture of the modern world makes things much more important than they were ever meant to be.   We could get to a life that is much more joyful,  by being lighter and more playful in our everyday interactions and work.

The meaning of envy is this.  When you have a lot of it, you are not pursuing what you really want to pursue.  You are stuck in someone else’s ego goals pushing yourself to get somewhere, but only ending up in a lot of stress hoping for a different life, but not finding one.   Now is the time to start playing more so that you can get to the life of nobler dreams.

 

1 Comment

Posted on October 26, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Using the Virtue of Playfulness to Be of Service

One of the great bounties of my life for which I am eternally grateful is having grown up in a family whose father taught physical education along with my next door neighbor’s father along with other relatives.    We learned how to play.  It comes so natural to me that I can’t imagine how people could not have it.    This past week was a  week long break from school for me so my wife, who teaches English twice a week to translators who work for the UN High Commission on Refugees and who are mostly from Myanmar, asked me if I wouldn’t do some training for one of her students who has a school for about 40 children.

With Ha Bu and the 40 children of the Dai School giving instruction on a tag game

You never know quite to expect when you do this type of service.   Really the only thing I knew ahead of time was that I would have a lot of kids and a big field that just happened to be across the street from the school which is located upstairs in a shop lot in Kuala Lumpur.    The first game we played was a tag game like foxes and chickens.

I tried to introduce snake tag where the children have to make a long snake and then tag other, but it really didn’t work.   For one thing I was speaking in English and they didn’t understand it.   The translation didn’t quite click for them.    When you have the virtue of playfulness,  you allow a lot of flexibility and adaptability in because in this type of group things never really work out how you expect them.    The great thing about tag games is that everyone does a lot of running.  They really help  fitness.

Next I just gave each pair of students a tennis ball to play catch with.  They would take a step back each time they were successful.   Then we played dodge ball.    In all of my experience I think that this maybe dodge ball is the best loved game in the world for children and adults alike.   We played it in a circle.

Then we introduced some group juggling and finally did some running races.

Kids are great wherever you go, but really you have to be able to act with playfulness which is the virtue they seem to have in abundance to relate to them.    I am looking for the next time we go when we will introduce yoga and other things to do in a smaller space indoors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 Comment

Posted on October 23, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Crashing Dreams: How to Slow Down, Stop, or Reverse Time

I just had a dream last night that I was driving really fast down a dirt road and I couldn’t slow down so I crashed into a truck and the truck fell over into the ditch with a small stream. I felt really guilty.  When I found a place to pull over and came back to see if everyone was ok.  I was riding a bicycle.  Then it became night time and I drove to an area of a city with lots of people and restaurants. I parked and went out and was hanging out with an old friend and her newborn. Then I went to try to find my car but couldn’t find it. I was wandering around a dark parking lot with lots of levels and started to get really scared because I could hear a group of guys notice me and then start to come after me.
To understand how to read this dream and others like it, it is vital that you understand the difference of how time works between the physical or material world and non-material or spiritual world.    In the physical dimension we basically have a clock that keeps on ticking one moment after another.    When you are a materialist or practice materialism, which most of us do to one extent or another,  then you are a captive to clock time.  You live and die according to the speed of time.    In a place like the U.S. or most so-called developed places people rush around all day to do as many things as they can before the clock says that the day is over.     When you go too fast along your path, then you crash like the dreamer did.    Crashing is caused by driving too fast in the material world.

The metaphor in this dream says that dream was driving fast along and then crashed into a truck. The truck then fell into a stream.   After that the dreamer felt guilty.   So speeding around as fast as you can after material pursuits causes not only you to crash but also affects others around often even in a bigger way than you.     The guilt in this case is appropriate because the guilt wakes you up to notice what the speed did to your life.   The solution to this part of the dream and to the next is to move out of the world of the clock and into the world of spiritual time.

What is spiritual time?  Spiritual time is the place you go where time slows down, stops, or reverses.    So when the dreamer feels guilty appropriately, the vehicle changed to a bicycle rather than a car.   Time took its first step into the spiritual dimension because on a bicycle you go slower than a car.    This does not mean that cars or bad or negative symbols.  It just means that if you want to get to where your true self wants to go in life,  the first thing you need to do is slow down your rushing because you cannot  get into a positive space by speeding up time.  

The next part of the dream is at night.   The dreamer parks, goes to a restaurant with a friend and newborn, and then ends being chased when trying to find the car.     The reason that the dreamer is chased in the end is that the moment that the goal is to find the car is the moment that the speeding after time begins again.

This is life in the material world.   You rush all day to get a lot of things done mostly for someone else to get some kind of material advantage,  then at the end of  the day when night falls you have a few moments of relaxation only to be chased again by the clock the next day.    It is frightening as the dreamer admits.    If alcohol were a big part of your life, then most people rush endlessly all day and then drink so that all of the tension from rushing around can be released.   But most people do not understand that it is possible to slow down, stop, or reverse time.

The first and most important lesson about stopping time is the belief that the material world is not the priority world.   The material world supports the work of the spiritual dimension, but not the other way around.   Most people have this idea about prayer, for instance, that money is the answer to their prayers, because once they get it, then they can relax and be joyful.    But it doesn’t work because they just rush around and then crash trying to get to the money.    If you rush for material goals, then sooner or later you are going to crash and affect the lives of those around you.

So really the goal of life is more about how to slow down, stop, or reverse time so that your life and the lives of others are greatly enriched and strengthened.  If you stop to think about the ways of the modern world,  most people slow down time only after they are done working for material ends.

I especially want to know how to reverse time so that I am always feeling like I am at the beginning of my energy rather than at the end of my rope.    Beneath every moment of rushing things is a pursuit for something temporary in nature, a material object.  Temporary refers to time.  It means that the pursued object will soon be gone,  but somehow we are lured into an attraction for the fading.

To reverse or stop time the lure has to be spiritual.   Creativity is a good example because when you are in the creative space, time seems to be non-existent.  You can go on endlessly without tiring.   When the goal is winning at all costs or being on top or the wealthiest, the clock is already ticking not only on trying to get to the top, but also the fall.

The first thing to do to reverse time is check out your true motives.  If winning at all costs, advancement to a position, or accumulation of huge amounts of riches is the goal,  then it means your life will always be temporal against a clock.   When you replace advancement, for instance, with doing an amazing job to be of service to others,  then it often seems like the clock doesn’t exist.    Changing motives for doing things is an important first step.

The second step is find the right energy or virtue to place right in the middle of any activity.   Virtues change time.   For instance, if you are a father,  you have a responsibility to provide for your family and to be a good parent.   When you understand the internal structure of how responsibility works, put it into work and home, then time stops and you have time for everything.    One of the key things about responsibility is the ability to have your feet placed solidly on the ground rather than having your head in the clouds.   Responsibility has a reality check.    When putting your feet on the ground metaphorically becomes a very positive experience,  then time stops or even reverses.

Bad motives always throw the virtues out so everyone always has to check their intentions.   They lead to crashes and falls.   The vast majority of people in the world could probably start with the virtue of perseverance.   This is the energy that allows you stay with a project to its end always feeling as if the current moment is just the beginning.  It is like having continuous positive energy all time so that you can reach a goal that is worthwhile.  Having perseverance allows you to always be fresh.  It truly reverses time.

In sum,  when you rush and/or crash, it means that you are too much in the material experience and not enough into your true self’s energy.    To stop time you can check your motives and then find the specific energy that makes your life work now.  Most people need perseverance.

1 Comment

Posted on October 13, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

The Allergic Mind: Overreacting to Negatives

We all know what happens to people who are allergic to bee stings.   Their body overreacts to the sting causing the person to go into a type of shock that can shut down breathing.   It can be pretty frightening.   When you are not allergic,  a simple wasp sting is more like an annoyance that after a few minutes is no longer felt.

Just as with bee or wasp stings your mind can go into an overreaction.    The other day I realized that this was happening to me.   I became annoyed at someone for basically not having trust in what my group was doing and then in my mind I overreacted to the annoyance.  Instead of calming down, breathing and just seeing it as a weakness in the other so that I could let it go,  I blew it up in my mind and then my whole body got very weak.

When I sat down to think about what my life was really calling for at the moment, I realized that I was having a great deal of difficulty being enthusiastic about doing positive things in the said environment.    When I was supposed to be enthused and going for things, I was irritated and blew things up in my mind way out of proportion until I became really weak and unable to do much.

Upon waking up this morning, I realized that the key was to easily let go of the irritating behavior just like I am able to with a wasp sting and then to really blow up small things in my memory that are positive until they fill my mind leaving no space for the negative.   Enthusiasm is about blowing up the positives so that the seem exaggerated.    If I can do the opposite which is to blow up little irritating things until I am so weak I can hardly do anything,  then by blowing up the positive memories in my mind then I should be able to get much stronger and do much more.

I went out for my Saturday morning run with these thoughts.   At first I had blown up negative thoughts and then I would run for awhile before stopping and walking.    As I kept letting go of the negative irritating thoughts by being calm, then I started replacing them with positive memories and blowing them up.   You can guess the result.   Instead of doing the 9 k that I had planned to run,  I did about 14 k with each kilometer getting a little stronger and faster.   By the end I was running with a great deal of speed and strength.

I am thinking that you can tell you are having an allergic reaction in your mind when you get irritated with someone for something relatively small and then build it up in your mind to be huge.    To get out of the allergy we first can let go of the irritation and then really exaggerate the smallest positive memories in ourselves until they seem huge.

What are you mentally allergic to?

What is the positive memory you would most like to blow up?

 

Leave a Comment

Posted on September 22, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Anxiety: It Is All an Illusion

Being worried is a very curious emotion.   It doesn’t make very much sense and it is very non-productive.   The other day, after I had been feel anxious at my work,  I began wondering why it suddenly appeared.   I am not normally a very anxious person,  but somehow thoughts started to get into my head which would not leave.

What I realized, after some reflection, is that anxiety is like a disease.   If you are in an environment where there is a great deal of negative thinking and action,  and you are vulnerable to negative thoughts and energy of others,  you pick up the anxiety as if were a cold or the flu.   What seems to happen is that when the dominant people (usually leaders) are negative,  then they send out a vibration that is felt by everyone.    When your mind is not extremely strong,  you pick up the vibration and then start making thoughts that are worrisome.    The thoughts usually do not have any basis whatsoever in fact, and the only thing they do is lead to is a kind of frozen state where you are unable to act.   The same can be true in an environment that is neutral, i.e., not very positive.     Your mind can just be free floating in worry.

For instance, you may be worried about what someone thinks about you because if they think badly of you,  your mind believes you will be excluded.    The worrisome thoughts are illusions.  You have no way of knowing if they are valid or not, but the result is that you cannot go forward with positive motion toward productive outcomes.    Your mind is like a helicopter hovering in the same place endlessly constantly repeating the same negative illusory thoughts never going anywhere.

Jesus has an interesting quote in the Bible.  He says, “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

In other ways,  we need to find a way to let go of worrisome thoughts and just focus on the problems and difficulties that are in front of us now.  You have to love the quote that tomorrow will worry about itself.    What He seems to be recommending for us to do is to get out of the negative illusions that we have about the future (tomorrow) and all of the bad things that might happen and deal with what is on our plate right now.

The important lessons for me about anxiety are that it is an illusion and that the overall culture of the environment is negative.    To get out of anxiety we first need is to let go of the illusion that is running the brain.   “I am not good looking enough to be liked.”  “I am not smart enough or competent enough to be hired.”     “The world is going to end next month.”
“My boss hates me.”   None of these thoughts have solutions.  The more we try to solve them the more anxiety we accrue.   The best thing is to let go of them.

The second step is to believe that you can do something positive right now that will produce a positive result.  Maybe it is just washing the dishes or taking out the garbage.    The size of the productivity doesn’t matter.   It is getting out of the negative future and into the present in a positive manner.

The second belief that changes anxiety is to be confirmed in the idea that every positive action has an effect on everything else around you.   The more we act in a positive manner, the more the negative anxiety producing environment changes into a confidence building one.

The difference between anxiety and fear is that fear is based upon a memory whereas anxiety is based upon an illusion and is picked up in a negative environment.

Leave a Comment

Posted on September 16, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

If You Want to Develop Something New, You Have to Let Go of Something Old

The old skin has to be shed for the new one to come.  Joseph Campbell

Last night we had a gathering in our place which we have each month to explore various topics.   We always have a dinner because the Baha’i Writings state that the spiritual and material worlds should be like a mirror to each other, a feast for the body and a feast for the spirit.   The topic was about letting go of the old patterns so that the new ones could come in.

It never makes very much sense to discard something old if it is still serving as a way of coping or maintaining the present unless you have something better to replace it with.   Most of us know the kind of energy we need.   When we are presented with a list of spiritual attributes such as honesty, courage, patience, love, or peacefulness, our spirits do the choosing for us because it knows what we need.    When you have a list like in the Virtues Project, then you can just choose the new energy that will really make your life work well. Then you can begin thinking about all of the ways you will be better off for it.

But it is not just so simple to begin thinking about a new process and suddenly have it appear.  You have to give up an old pattern, let it go.    Human beings have two  natures in that we have a material side which is our heritage from animals, and then we also have a spiritual nature where all of our positive qualities lie.    Whenever you contemplate a new virtue and take steps to release it within you,  the material side of you acts as a resistance letting you know that you have some work to do.  It is attached to maintaining itself with its coping ways.

So for instance,  we had an example in the meeting where someone chose the quality of balance and was also thinking of moderation.  Balance is the quality that keeps you going in a steady forward motion without burning out.    The problem that the participant had was that of having a huge vision to achieve in a very short amount of time.  It caused a great deal of always looking around for more time and then eventually just burning out.   The attachment of the ego was to the vision.  The vision was too grand for such a limited amount of time.   When you let go of the ego in a case like this, you let go of the attachment to achieving so much in short period of time.  Instead you try to reach an equilibrium that allows you very steady growth on a daily basis over a long period of time.  (I think this is why the economy is such a mess usually.  You have people trying to do too much too fast.)

Another person had the virtue of flexibility in mind in order to begin a new NGO in a different country,  but the ego kept getting in the way by determining what the vision was for the people in the project and then staying rigid with the expectations that they would accept whatever she had in mind for them.   When you loosen the ego’s attachment, you begin to realize that flexibility allows the other participants more choice in their own vision.   It requires giving up believing that you know best.

Another person with an ego attachment dealt with developing the quality of peacefulness.   Peacefulness is the virtue that allows you to remain calm inside while other negative things that are stormy are going on around you.   What was keeping the peacefulness from being unleashed inside was a mind that loves to whir that is coupled with anxiety.   And these two were sustained by the attachment of having things go exactly the way the mind had envisioned it.

One of the great teachings learned from the meeting was that we discovered when a vision is incorrect.  It is incorrect when you keep ending up in a bunch of negative patterns while  trying to achieve the vision.    In the case of peacefulness the goal is to be calm inside and that is all.   When you are peaceful, the outer storm has time to wear itself out, then the positive vision appears.

Of course there are certain virtues that when they want to come out have a great deal of memories of trauma connected to them from past experience.    For instance, most children are supposed to develop curiosity and playfulness, but when you are from a alcoholic family where there was instability,  you may have been thrown around the house or beaten severely.  Coping is about being hyper vigilant and hiding out.   So when you recognize that you need more playfulness,  your attachment may be to protecting yourself against negative behavior.   It is not easy to let go of the attachment even though that is what is needed because the memory structure of being thrown around is so strong.     Sometimes the mind is just completely irrational because you can be in an extremely safe environment, but be unable to be playful because the attachment to protection is just too strong.    Trying to be playful when the protection is still there is like trying to run a marathon carrying a 50 kilos of weights on your feet.    As long as you have the protection you are going nowhere, but when your mind is convinced that you are safe, then you can be extremely playful.

Most people need help when overcoming traumatic protective memories so if you are attracted to a virtue and want more of it, but are getting nowhere,  your mind is probably got some elaborate scheme to say no.   Getting to yes is the goal.   Don’t go to a personal trainer right away when you have gain 30 kilos of protection.   Deal with the protection first and then hire as many personal trainers as you would like.

1 Comment

Posted on September 9, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Dreams and Exoricism

Last week someone sent me a dream about exorcising some demonic things from inside of them.   When I work with dreams,  I use two qualities from within myself to help me in the process.  One is the quality of self-discipline and the other is playfulness.    Self-discipline forces me to treat things in a metaphoric manner rather than slipping into literally thinking.  As soon as you go to literal thinking when your work with yourself on any issue,  then you quickly give the responsibility of your life to someone else to solve.  It doesn’t allow you to go deeply into yourself to find amazing answers to your life’s riddles.    Playfulness is the quality that allows you have focus on what you are working with a great deal of lightness.    Playfulness actually allows you to stay focused for much longer periods of time than when you do the opposite which is to take things too seriously.    When life is too serious or you feel you have to be serious all the time, it means someone else is in charge of your life, not you.

Exorcism as a metaphoric process is very interesting.   The idea is that when you were not aware of it, some evil presence into your being and took over it.   Until you get the evil, demonic thing out of your body,  your life will continue on its current path of out of control destruction.    The premise of exorcism is that once you get the satanic thing out of your body, then you can get back onto a normal path of growth and behavior.    In the dream I received the person went to someone who laid his hands on the dreamer, and then lots of gross things started coming out.

The problem with exorcism is that it does not deal with the root cause of how the negative feelings and behaviors ever were allowed to get into the dreamer in the first place.   There is no doubt that people’s lives can get out of control with negative emotions such as anxiety, fear, or jealousy.   It can feel like a demonic presence has taken over one’s life that needs to be pulled out.    The problem for the dreamer is the problem that the vast majority of human beings have.   That is that someone else is controlling what she believes about herself.    She is fed a steady diet of put downs and criticisms until she feels so bad about herself that it is like she is full of demons.    This no doubt happened to the dreamer from her culture, probably her family, and no doubt her schooling.

The dreamer was not taught about her true reality.   In the Baha’i teachings human beings are regarded as amine rich in gems of inestimable value.   In the Old Testament of the Bible it is taught that people are created in the image of God, which among other things means that they have unlimited positive virtues waiting to be brought out.     Most people do not get this kind of upbringing because they are besieged by people telling them all of the negative and “sinful” things about themselves.   The negative approach to being brought up in life makes people susceptible to other people outside of themselves controlling everything about them.

So the chances are that if you feel like you need to have demons exorcised from you,  you are probably in the same boat as most of humanity, which is that you are raised in culture and family that does not honor the many gifts that are inside of you ready to be brought out.   It is more productive to think of yourself as a miner going after the gems inside of you, than as an evil person.

My experience has been that the negative emotions and so-called character traits that become negative patterns like violence or theft, for instance, are better dealt with in the context of being a person who is inherently created in the image of God.    When we forget this important aspect,  then the “evil”  becomes like a permanent thing that can only be changed by exorcism.   When a negative emotion takes control over you life like fear or jealousy,   then it so covers up the positive and controls your mind so much, that you are no longer capable (if you ever were) of seeing the positive and beautiful aspects about yourself.

The proper equilibrium state for a human being is to basically see and feel the positive states within them because, after all, that is how we are created.   In the process of finding new gems or new capacities, the negative states will appear.   They act as communicators to show you where the current weakness is, but they are not inherently evil or demonic.   They are only temporary states that leave when the new virtue is in place.   For example being lazy is a negative state that can go on for a lifetime, but the moment you have the virtue of being industrious, it leaves.    You don’t need an exorcist to transform your negative states.   You just need to find out what positive aspect is that is trying to come out.   As you work on that aspect each day, then you are gradually able to attend to it more fully.  Eventually it is so attended to inwardly in your memory that it becomes a part of your identity.   People say things like you are so industrious.

The so-called demon of laziness leaves, not because someone has laid his hands on you, but because you are no longer attending to its call.  When you are in the initial throws of a lot of anxiety or fear related to the negative state,  it really pays to get some help from someone you trust who has a lot of experience to move you through to the new virtue because the patterns can be complex and entrenched.

The really difficult ego-states in the world that are completely out of control are within people who have gained some sort of power over others, use it for their own gain, and then call what they are doing virtuous which is copied by others.  They become deluded with power and then have no idea that what they are doing is absurd or that they need to transform themselves.   They are usually ruled by fear, but will not admit to it or work on it.    It is best to remain detached from them.

The key thing to think about if you have a dream about exorcism is that you have an unbelievable treasure chest full of virtues waiting to come out.

1 Comment

Posted on September 1, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

The Critical and Encouraging Voices in Your Head

It would be so great if the voices in our head were encouraging ones like a crowd in a stadium cheering for you or a friend reminding you of all of your positive virtues.    The reality for almost everyone, however, is that that critical voices in our heads are the dominant ones.   They can be monster-like, brutish, and really hard.

I think that most of the critical voices start in kindergarten or soon thereafter.   Children are not criticized severely when they are young, but when they get to school, parents look around, believe that they are in contest to see who is going to make it to the top,  then they start finding everything that is wrong with their children.      Children are largely raised by people who have their own critical voices in their head so the parents just see the negative and try to correct it.

The critical voice thrives on making comparisons and is only ever very briefly satisfied with a very high mark, but even as a ribbon is placed on their child’s chest, the critical voice is already thinking of what is wrong and what to do next.   The voice lives out of the fear of reaching adulthood in poverty and being discarded.     As a result of this most people fail at the one area of life that they care about the most, their intimate relationships.   This is because schools and businesses do not grade or hire on the basis of competent relationships, even though it is fundamental for success.    They look at who has the highest scores.    The problem is that no one is measuring people in relational ability.    At best you get a mark for not saying anything controversial,  staying in your seat, and doing what your told.

Being competent in human relationships means among other things that you have two fundamental processes,  finding and acknowledging the positive in others and being a good listener in a non-judgmental way.     When you are trying to get a child to advance in the way most people do it, they are making critical judgments constantly about what is lacking and are only ever focused on the negative.    This produces people who either believe that they are always lacking and worthless or people who try to advance by finding the faults in others.    No one likes the process, but most people seem to have no other choice than to find fault.

There is not a single bit of evidence in the educational research to suggest that finding fault boosts achievement.  What seems to make a difference for achievement is in how much time people stay fully engaged in an activity and then receiving feedback that is useful for improvement.   When you hear words of encouragement that tell you what you are doing correctly and name your positive aspects,  you feel like staying engaged and doing more.   When you tell yourself in your head that you are doing well, you will stay in whatever you are doing longer.   Then you need some instructional feedback for how to get even better.   When people hear critical comments of how lousy they are doing, most tend to tense up and get more tentative.   They lose their confidence to get in the middle of the action.   They stay outside of the action.

The myth that most people grow up with is that finding fault and saying it is what makes people improve.   As they become youth and adults the voice that was their parent’s becomes an internal one.    They now engage in a lot of self criticism.   When we have self criticism,  we become disengaged from the very processes that will help us improve.  This is because we are constantly comparing ourselves to others, coming up short, so we gradually quit.

When you have encouraging voices in your head,  you hear how well you performed and then it makes you want to get out there, do more, and listen to instruction.    Criticism tends to take away our “guts”, our intestinal fortitude.      Over time the beer belly grows.   It shows us that we have lost our fortitude to stay in the midst and give it our all.    You don’t need others to criticize you because you do it to yourself.

So a big change process for most people is the move from a very critical voice in their heads to a voice that helps them become engaged fully in life.    The first step is the awareness of what the negative voice sounds like in your head because for most people it is entirely unconscious.    When you start hearing it, what you will recognize is that the critical voice is your ego-in-disguise and it is trying to take over your life by keeping your true self out of the picture.   It is crafty and mean and is excellent and dominating you and it  keeps you out.    It doesn’t want to give up its position even to the destruction of your whole life.

The second step is to hold the critical voice to the side for awhile and be aware of what your encouraging or true voice sounds like.   It is only interested in seeing things in a positive light so it will have a positive ring to it.  Listen to it.   You will notice that when you hear it you feel like doing more positive activities.   It is miraculous.

The third step is make a list of activities that you want to do more often and better and then experiment with both voices to see which one you are more motivated by.

The fourth step is to let go of critical voice being the dominant one by turning off its volume.  At the same time turn on the volume of the positive one and become more aware of it all the time.
This will dramatically improve your fortitude.   The only problem in doing this procedure is that in the midst of changing the voices from one voice to another, you might run into the fear of poverty or something like it.    If you do not address that fear, the ego voice will remain in tact because it feeds on the idea that criticism is the way to overcome the bottom state.

 

1 Comment

Posted on August 19, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

The Two Memories in You

The other day I was watching a program on quantum physics which said that electrons could be in two places at the same time.   When we think of the world according to Newton,  this is impossible, but in quantum thinking,  they seem to be in many places at once.    This seems to fit with the idea I have about memory.    At anyone time, you have both a positive memory that is connected to the true self and you have a negative memory that is connected to your ego, functioning simultaneously.

When your true self wants to develop a new part of itself, like having a new virtue such as more friendliness or more creativity or discipline,  then the first memory that comes up is a negative one.   It is as if your being wants  to show you the negative so that you can learn from it, become detached from it, and then unleash a new energy.    In the meantime there is a tendency to forget the positive memories and hence feel weak and inept.      All development goes from one strength to another.   When you attain a certain level in a virtue like courage,  then you have it and it goes into the positive memory storage for permanent access.    When there is enough courage for your current life situation,  then your being will desire another virtue that is more important for the current circumstances.     So your life goes from one strength to another.

However, on the way from one strength to another, you run into negative emotions and obstacles and tests that are designed to develop the new energy.    To be successful with the new energy you cannot only use your old successful patterns.  You need new energy, and that is why you get tested.   This forces the memory to attend to the negative energy in you so that you will turn it into a positive.     A lot of people cannot stand the stress of the test because of the negative memories that it stimulates negative feelings, so instead of staying in the process,   they do a lot of coping behaviors.    One of the coping mechanisms is to blame others for the lack of development which is the most common pattern.   Another is to limit the identity by saying, for instance, that you are not a patient person.   This is a way of trying to get off the hook for developing patience.    “I am not an adventurous person.”    This statement allows you to not have to develop the adventurous aspect of yourself, and then allows you to go into the cocoon of your past self.

What works really well for me is to set aside a certain period everyday where I work on my new abilities.   In the meantime I hold the memories of what I am already doing well such as how I work with other people to facilitate their change process,  keep doing the things that work well, and then anticipate and work vigorously to understand and apply the new energy coming in.

In dream life, when you are first developing a new energy, you have a lot of dreams about other people who have that quality, but you may not be in the dream because you don’t have any identity with the virtue yet.   As you work and work, then you start appearing in the dream maybe along with others.   Eventually you have the virtue.

One of the other things that seems to happen with memory is that in the midst of a really difficult test especially where there is abuse and injustice toward you,  there is a tendency to forget your positive qualities altogether which puts you into a depressed and coping state.   Most people need outside help to get through injustices so that they can recover the positive memories while they are working through to developing the new ones.    The positive memories keep you functional and productive in your waking life, but when the injustice memories take over, you stay fixated in them and can’t access the positive ones.

When you have outside help,  it keeps you in your productive state, but then also allows you learn new energy in the injustice without becoming a dysfunctional mess.   So the idea is to always maintain a high degree of positive memory in your waking life so that you can be of service to your family and community, but then also keep working on developing new abilities in your meditative/reflective life.    You cannot escape growth because it is the nature of human beings to keep growing spiritually forever.   You cannot say that I cannot change because life will force you to attend to the change.    What you can do is to attend to the wonderful person you already are that has a lot of good qualities, use the qualities to help others, and then work like crazy to develop new parts of yourself.

Anticipate change.   Look forward to the new energy coming up.   Work for it.

Get help if you have suffered abuse.

Leave a Comment

Posted on August 10, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Getting Out of Your Own Story

Last week I was watching the Olympic Games judo competition.  A young American named Kayla Harrison had just won her first gold medal.  What was so interesting was that Kayla had a history of being sexually abused by her former coach who is now in prison.

The impressive things about Kayla was that while she had been victimized as a young athlete, she didn’t stay in her sad story.  She escaped.  In an interview she said that people could look at her and do the same because she was no longer a captive to her story.  So I asked myself what stories am I still a captive in?   What has happened to me where I felt there was some kind of wrong doing, and then how can I escape  them?    The best stories are the ones about the escapees, not the sad ones,    Kayla’s is a great story because she is no longer in it.

When you are still trapped in your story,  it means that  you are hanging onto something about it that is negative.  Whatever the story is you can leave the negative emotions behind and jump fully into the story you want to have.   Many of our sad stories are about injustices because for the most part, the world doesn’t operate yet according to the principles of justice.  It still pretty much operates on who is in charge and what their whims are. Just like in Kayla’s case.     I want to be more like her.  I want to have a better happier story to tell.

The main reason we stay stuck in a bad story is that we want others to give us our lives, give us our virtues and capacities.  We think  a lot of  if only thoughts.  If only my boss where more encouraging.  If only my spouse were more loving.  If only the people in this office were friendlier.     We escape the trap by doing our own work and developing our great capacities.    When we are more encouraging, friendly and loving, then great things happen and it becomes a beautiful story.   As soon as we wait for others to change to give us a great story, then the story turns dreadful.

There is a story of a young American who went to Brazil and made a mistake by doing some drug deals.   He was caught and ended up having to spend 4 years in the worst prison there.   When he came to terms with his life, he started creating his own story by learning Portuguese, how to meditate, and how to lead a better life.  When he got out of prison, he fell in love with a Brazilian woman.   Had he not gone to prison he probably would have never learned Portuguese nor learned how to become a decent person.  So he wouldn’t have met his bride.    Now that is a good story.

1 Comment

Posted on July 24, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

In Honour of Will on His Birthday

Will, our fourth grandchild, turns 4 today.   He is the embodiment of joyfulness and play.   I don’t think that 5 minutes go by in any one day where he isn’t laughing or helping someone else to laugh.   He gets so excited when he knows he is going out on an outing that he just breaks out in a song that he makes up on the spot.   When he is alone playing outside, he often sings as well.     It is hard to fill depressed for very long when you are around him.    He was our only grandchild where we were in town (Vancouver) when he was born.   I always have the feeling that I cannot spend enough time around him.    Here are few pics.

 

Leave a Comment

Posted on July 21, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Living a Radical Life: Recovering Creativity by Getting Rid of Mind’s Tendency to Illusion

Bear and Giraffe Dream

I was in my daughter’s house although it didn’t look like the actual house she lives in.   It was much more expansive and elegant.    I found that I seemed to be trying to run away from a bear even though I didn’t actually see the bear.   As I was moving along, I came to a large room that was filled with artists who were painting from live models.   They were not in the least bit affected by the bear as if the bear didn’t really exist.   As I was walking down some stairs a giraffe was also running to get away.    Then I came to the bottom of the stairs and saw a person teaching someone else how to play piano.    Then I woke up.

The house is a symbol of the self.   Since I was in my daughter’s house, you could say I was in my daughter’s self.   That self is the part of her and myself that we share, the part I have passed down to her.    If you take out the bear from the dream, which is the only negative symbol, then it would be so amazing because the main quality would be creativity.

A bear is a symbol of strength.  It can be either negative or positive.   In this case I am fearful of a bear running after me.    Because I can’t see the bear, it is more like an imagination rather than real.    When I am the self of creativity, I seem to be fearful of negative strength or power.    The giraffe is a long-necked character which speaks to sticking my neck out (taking risks) when I am being creative.   When I am in the creative self that requires risk taking, I am fearful of the use of negative power against me.

If I actually saw the bear in the dream, then the fear would be based upon actual experience, but because it is unseen, it is more like an “if-then” scenario.  If I am creative and taking a lot of risks, then the negative power is going to go against me and get me.    The idea of the dream is get me to be more creative which requires taking risks, but my mind is preventing me by creating an illusion of a negative power coming against me.   This is exactly what happens to us when a quality like creativity wants to be strengthened.    There is a dynamic inside of us between our ego, which in this case is our negative imagination, and the positive quality that wants to be actualized.    For me to be more creative I can first realize that the negative bear is just a false thought designed to stir things up in me.  It is the necessary tension I need in my mind to get me to the next stage.

The next stage is to integrate the positive bear-like qualities that I need in me.   A positive symbolic bear is actualized as empowerment, which is the ability to take what you do and put into action.   Empowerment is realized when you first acknowledge the quality, which, in this case, is creativity.   “I am a creative person.”  “I live in the house (the self) of creativity.”  I take risks to create new realities.”    Then you step into the bear’s skin in your mind.    When you step in, you become empowered and the fear vanishes.     Then you can become giraffe-like as well.

Stepping into an Animal’s Skin Activity

1.   Imagine an animal that you would like to be more like.   Identify the quality that most attracts you that the animal has such as playfulness, joy, enthusiasm, love, gentleness, or courage.

2.  In your mind step into the animal’s skin and feel all of the positive feelings of that quality.   Now write what you can do.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Leave a Comment

Posted on July 16, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Why Fathers Abandon Their Posts

For the most part men are still stuck in the Neolithic period acting like Neanderthals.   I am really sorry to say, but it is true.    Men have a code.  Don’t talk about how you are feeling.   Endure all pain without complaint.   Go to war.  

Not everyman carries a machine gun,  but when they leave their homes each day, they put on their military attire and fight battles.    When they come from the war, all they want to do is forget about it.    The last thing they want to do is be with their families and interact with their children.   They certainly don’t want to talk.   Whatever it takes to forget so that they can wake up and do it again the next day is what they do.

When you go to war, the most important coping device you have is forgetting.   By and large after several years on the battlefield most men have lost their dreams.  They have lost themselves.   Then they abandon their children.     You would think that in the modern world with all that we know about development that things would be better, but they seem to just be repeating themselves.    Men keep forgetting who they are and abandoning their families.   It is because they are being loyal to the code.  The code is enduring.

The easiest thing for men to do to resolve the war mentality is to adopt the metaphor of play over war.    The war metaphor starts around age 6 when children start to get compared to one another and then realize that they are in a life and death struggle against others for their material survival.    Girls have the advantage of being able to talk about feelings so the damage to them is ameliorated.   But boys quickly learn that their material survival depends largely on how they stack up against others.   Fighting for an advantage is what they are taught and since they have to shut up about things,  they know no other way.

When men leave the house to play rather than going off to war,  they come back refreshed and excited about being with their families.   They talk more and share more.   Their children feel like they have value.    It is a simple shift.   War is serious business.  Play is light and care-free.   War kills relationships. Play increases and develops friendships.    War is about carving out territory.  Play is about having a good time in your space.

Men have the greater responsibility for the financial well-being of the family, but it doesn’t mean that they have to go war to each day.   They can go to play.   Instead of bring the war home and then trying to forget it, they can bring the play home and remember it.   When you are stuck in the war mentality, even the play like a golf game is life and death.

When you watch children play,  they can enjoy themselves endlessly in the midst of a game, but as soon as the score starts to matter, they start to fight with each other.   Playing does not exclude score-keeping, but it does exclude the score mattering so much.    The other day I was in a store to buy something for my tennis racquet when I ran into a friend who I hadn’t seen for awhile.   Almost the entire time he spent telling me his score card.   He told me how his children were going to  university or getting high marks and something about where his family was going.   I think I was supposed to impressed by the score card, but I knew that the kid going to the university was  majorly into drugs.

One of my favorite stories of a man getting out of the war metaphor was from ecological tour operator in Chapada Diamantina in Brazil.  He had been a lawyer in a big city, probably Sao Paulo.  Then one day he took a trip to the Chapada.   He fell in love with the place because it was a big playground in nature.    He created a great tour into some gorgeous areas and left his life as lawyer behind him.    While we may all not be able to leave our jobs and live in nature, we can change the war to play.

Life is a playground, not a war zone.

Leave a Comment

Posted on July 13, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Choosing the Right Goal: Material or Spiritual

Goal setting is a relatively easily process if you know where you are in your life right now.    Most people are driven by what someone else tells them is important which is material in nature such as more money, better sex, a better body, a better house, a faster car, a more beautiful garden, going to the best university,  or looking like a magazine cover.   The list is endless.

Why are material pursuits like slavery?   Suppose you want a really fast car.   Is the fast car what you really want?  Not really.   What most people want who are into speed is the ability to go all out and then take calculated risks in the process.   They don’t want a fast car.   They want the ability to go all out for something and then have the courage to take the necessary risks.    But if you just spend your time working to get enough money to buy a faster car, then at the end you have become a slave to your work with a few opportunities now and again to go fast on the highway.   You probably end up with speeding fines.   The spiritual goal is the ability to put in an all out effort to pursue something worthwhile and to have the courage to take the appropriate chances like being a good parent.

Likewise, if you want to be a magazine cover,  you have to become a slave to how the world wants to see you and then do everything you can to look that way.    What your true self really wants is for you to have an image of yourself being beneficial to others and then going all out to be that way.

How do you choose?   The way you choose the right the spiritual goal for yourself is to ask yourself what the worst problem is in your life right now.    What is your biggest challenge?   You know what your biggest challenge is because it has  a negative emotion connected to it that you carry around with you all day everyday.    Most people try to solve it materially, not spiritually by having material comfort or pleasure as the end.  When you try to solve things materially, you always end up forgetting who your true self is.

You could be carrying around a lot of anger, jealousy, fear, anxiety, sadness, guilt, envy, hurt, or hatred.    When you don’t recognize your own state of being, then the solution is always material comfort or pleasure and slavery to get there which may mean clawing your way to the top and using a lot of other bad coping mechanisms to get there.

Most people’s issues began in their families of origin by having who they are rejected or abandoned in one form or another.   If you have the fear of not performing well in your work, or being fired, or of losing a relationship such as your spouse, then you are in with most of the world.   The fact that divorce rates are so high and business is so unstable in the world should let you know that the first goal for most people is closeness.

The challenge with spiritual goals is to have the ability to stay with them for a long time.   The reason most people do not stay with a goal like spiritual intimacy is that they have to face rejection and abandonment along the way.     You can do what most people do which is try to be successful and push your way up a ladder so that you can have pleasure in place of intimacy,  but you would probably get just as much pleasure hanging out on the street and finding cheap liquor.   Facing fear is no easy matter.  Most men in the world have a code that does not let them talk about it openly.   They try to stuff the fear down and make sure that they drink enough beer to keep it in check.

The spiritual path is so much more difficult than the material one, but life will always try to bring you back to it to the very end.   It is relentless.

Here are some goals to consider based upon the negative states.

Timidity is based upon the fear of your true self being rejected so the goal is the courage to be who you really are.

Giving up easily on a pursuit is related to abandonment so the goal is staying with a pursuit that is uniquely you.

When your mind spins with anxiety and cannot shut off, you are worried that there are forces out there that you cannot control.   The goal is to have confidence in your abilities and then to use them.

When you envy what someone else has like their house or body, then you do not have a clear vision of a positive self that could do amazing things.

When you are hurt by what someone else did to you such as firing you,  then the goal is get closer to your own heart and then to others.

Jealousy means that you are protecting something like a relationship or a title as if it were a material possession.   The goal with jealousy is the ability to have a close relationship with others.   This is the issue for a huge number of people who try to climb the ladder of success in any pursuit.

Guilt happens when you are trying to live the life someone else has set for you.   The goal is to have a great deal of playfulness about life.   This happens in cultures that are primarily authoritarian in nature.

Hatred happens when you have lost your sweetness for life.  The goal is to find kindness.

Grief happens when you have lost something dear to you.  The goal is enthusiasm for your current pursuits.

Anger when you do not take responsibility for your own self and your own life.  The goal is learning how to be trustworthy and responsible.

The simplest way to pursue a goal such as responsibility to your own life is to wake each morning feel your anger, then realize that can deal with your own life better and that the Creator will guide you through the day if you first ask for His help and then be guided to what shows up.

In the next post I am going to write about people’s issues with their fathers.

 

 

 

4 Comments

Posted on July 4, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Spiritual Goals versus Material Goals: The Difference is in the Specifics

When you go to most self-help or business sections of a bookstore, you will find that when they talk about setting goals and planning for the future that it is important to be specific, measurable, realistic, etc..   because the brain works best when it has clarity about a target and then goes for it.     This approach seems to work best when you have a finite, material goal such as building a home.    When the goal is completed, you have what you have accomplished.  When you get the new home, the goal is over.   It starts to get a bit dicey to do this kind of goal setting when others are competing for the same thing.    For instance, right now in the world you have lots of people visualizing  medals around their necks that they are going to win at the Olympics.   Most of them are going to go away without achieving the goals,  but we will only hear about the ones who actually did win them.   They will reinforce the ideas above which is how they saw the goals being achieved and how they worked to get there.   It leads you to believe that if you do what they did, that you will win a gold medal.     What we aren’t told in the goal setting process is that for everyone who sets a goal of winning the goal medal, there may be 10,000 others who do exactly the same thing, but fail. They go home at least partially disappointed some devastated even though they did what the winners did.

The problem with the way we value things currently in the world culture is that we lavish huge praise on making it to the top such as being first place, and then criticize everyone else who isn’t.    Teams can lose by the smallest of margins, but because they didn’t win the championship, something is terribly wrong with them.    This is because we are busy visualizing with great clarity our team winning and then feeling great about it.  When they don’t live up to our specific vision that makes us feel good, then disappointment and maybe even anger set in.   Then we start criticizing and trying to change the personnel so that the next time we avoid feeling disappointed.

There is another way to set goals that has another type of dynamic completely.   It is very effective when the goal is process oriented or spiritual in nature.    For instance,  a great athlete who is at that the top of their game will tell you that they have had to work extremely hard to get to where they are so then we assume that all we have to do is to say the words “work hard” and then just do it.     What is not very well explained or understood is that “working hard” is not a finite end.  It is not a material thing.  It is infinite and non-material.   You will never reach the final end of  “working hard”.   You will only grow in your ability to do it better and better.

If you want to be effective in learning how to do spiritual things, you cannot speak about them as finite entities, but most of us do exactly that.     We tell ourselves or others to be more courageous, more patient, more loving, more generous, or more honest as if saying the words will develop the process.    If you want to become more patient, for instance,  there are an infinite number of things that you need to learn and develop in yourself before you will have it in substantial quantities and then you have only barely begun to scratch the surface of learning about patience.   Process goals are comparable to space travel.    We have sent satellites to various planets, but there are infinite numbers of stars and other systems that we are a long way off of from getting to.

It seems to me that one of the great problems we have is we are stuck in a materialistic view of development.   We are more interested in the size of our bank accounts than in developing our capacities and spending a great deal of time in the learning.    When you set a material goal, you have a thing when you are finished that produces nothing such having more money or a house or a gold medal or a certificate.    When you set a spiritual or process goal such as learning how to be determined, then at the end of working on it you have a process that is going to produce all kinds of wonderful things that will come flowing into you.  For instance, you may have your eye on a specific person that you want to have a long-term relationship with as if that person were a material object like winning a goal medal and you may achieve it,  but when that person doesn’t seem like a gold medal anymore,  you will drop them or they will drop you.    However, when you set the goal to learn how to be more loving and then work on it everyday, learn and develop until you are much more loving, then at the end of the work you will be able to have a great many relationships that are long-lasting and close.

The key difference between a spiritual goal and a material one is that when you are finished with a material goal, it is over, but when you have constantly changed to develop a new capacity or process, then you have something that constantly produces for the rest of your life.   Last year I decided that I needed to get much better at the virtue of detachment.   So basically I put my intention out there of being better at becoming detached particularly from the things that leaders do that I didn’t agree with.   I realized that what I was doing was not helpful and causing me a lot of unhappiness despite feeling as though I was right.    It took a long time nearly an entire year of working on the process daily to make some significant progress,  but now those leaders’ decisions do not bother me so much and I am able to focus and do other things.

Spiritual goals or non-material processes assume that there is a higher power, what most of us call God that is the source of all knowledge.   When you set a process goal such as learning how be more courageous,  what I have found is that you can wake up each morning, ask the divine source for guidance and development in that process,  and then do everything you can throughout that day to get the learning.   Much of the learning will be in the form of dealing with difficult situations, of being tested and tried because that is where the good learning is, but you are also guided to good books and other things that increase your awareness and understanding.    If you can stay in the process for a year, you will have amazing results and then the material things will take care of themselves.

There is a somewhat subtle difference that makes all of the difference.   For instance, if you want more courage, you may be lead to doing something like rock climbing.   If however, you have a kind of bucket list of having to climb a particularly rock face, then when you are finished you are finished.  You may have a big more courage, but not much as when you focus on courage for an entire year.  Because when you focus on it for a year you will have to face all kinds of fears such as the fear of being rejected by your partner.

What is difficult for most people when they do the spiritual goal setting, is that they decide one evening that they need a virtue like enthusiasm,  but the next morning when they have to rush to work or get the children to school, the goal is gone never to return.    If you want to change your character, which most of us believe is impossible, then it is important to give yourself some space and time each day to reflect on the progress and learning and then go out and practice it more each day.    Since spiritual energy or something like a virtue is infinite in nature, there are always new lessons to learn each day.    The divine force will guide you because it knows best.    By staying in the process day after day you gradually change your character because you face your own weaknesses and hardships constantly.    Then one day usually after a year, a new process decides to show up.

Most adults need to have processes that are relational in nature especially how to get closer to others because the world, in its current state, is primarily ruled by material forces that practice distancing yourself from others.   A lot of leaders, for instance, have the notion that they have to remain distant from employees so that they have no problem disciplining or firing them when the bottom line does not appear as it should.    If they were to develop closeness as goal, they begin to discover how much more productive everyone would become and how much better their organization worked, but they would have to stay in their own process everyday for a long time to get to that new ability.

In the next post, I am going to write about how to choose the process you need right now.

2 Comments

Posted on June 10, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Creating an Extremely Bright Future

One of the advantages I have as being a member of the Baha’i Faith is that we have an understanding about the future of mankind being so amazingly positive that it is impossible to get even the slightest glimpse of what it will be like.   To future generations we will be regarded as spiritual barbarians.    It has gotten me to speculate about how to carry that kind of positive thinking into my every moment.

What I have noticed is that when I visualize the future  like for instance the next 30 minutes in a positive way ,  then the next 30 minutes become extraordinarily great.    It just seems so simple.    For the world to become a much better place we are all going to have to make thousands of dynamic transformations.    When my mind sees them, it is as if they go from a distant hope to a very real present.

So who is controlling the future in a negative way?

In most cultures around the world these days there seems to be a certain amount of apocalyptic thinking.   The wielders of negative prophecy throw out the worst image of what is going to happen in the near future like humanity being destroyed in a single event.   It has the effect of making people see the future as negative which then causes a great deal of fear.   As soon as people are fearful then they become controllable.      When you are controllable, you will do what the apocalyptic folks want you to do rather than what is in your heart to do.

Most people grow up in households that use this kind of thinking.   The mothers often see the future as negative so they pound into their children’s minds how negative the future is going to be.    This makes the children fearful which then allows them to be controlled by the parent’s wishes.   It usually ends up being about homework.  If you don’t study everyday and do extra work, then you are going to end up in poverty.     The apocalypse for a child is ending up in poverty so they all give into studying endlessly when maybe they should be outside doing more useful endeavors.

If the goal you have set for your child is to enter Harvard or some other big named university, then you can be sure that you are victim of apocalyptic thinking.   You see the future for your child as extremely negative which causes you to do everything you can to make his/her future safe.   Harvard is like a haven of safety for the child’s future.

To get around this you can just begin thinking about the future as exactly the opposite of the apocalypse which means to see it as bright, not safe.    When my daughter was a student in university, she came upon this period when she got really stuck because it seemed like everything was a dead end that she was studying.    During the conversation I suggested to her that her future career probably didn’t exist in the world yet, meaning that it was new to the world.   She just had to let go and begin thinking about positive options.    The next day she saw a poster about teaching English and studying Spanish at the same time in Mexico.   Then she thought that she could learn Spanish and also study art for a time there.    The world opened up to her and she did it.    I think that it worked because she turned from being protective and negative about the future to being positive.

One of the reasons that control freaks can pedal apocalyptic thinking is that most of us have such a difficult time doing our change work.    Even the self-help gurus try to sell you the goal of having a lot of money and lots of great sex from beautiful people instead of really significant changes because they are trying to be protected from the negative future in their unconscious mind.    Why does someone need to make more money than they can ever possibly use?    It is protection from the deeply held belief about the end of things that somehow gobs and gobs of material things will protect them.       Apocalyptic thinking works.   It controls people.

Controlling things so that a negative future does not happen is what we do as a human race, but what it does is prevent the positive future from being seen and moved to quickly.    The positive future is going to have its way whether we want it or not.    World peace is happening right before our eyes.  International cooperation can even now be clearly seen on the horizon.   There is no holding it back.   When we allow it to be seen, it just happens much faster.

Negative things tend to happen when we do not allow the positive future into our vision.    When we hold onto our protectionism by trying to hold onto the present state of things like who controls the flow of money,  it is because we are fearful of a negative apocalypse.    When we let go of the present that is filled with a negative future,  then we become so much happier and fulfilled.

One thing we know for sure.  The future is much brighter than we think it is.  It will have its way.    When we don’t allow it to have its way by holding onto archaic ideas and practices,  then lots of pain and suffering happen.   This is the real apocalypse, but the positive future has its way all the same.   I don’t think it cares about the pain and suffering if that is what it takes to let go of the negative future.

So  if the positive future is going to have its way,  how do you respond to it?   It is important to realize that the positive future means one that is beneficial to all of mankind and not one filled with selfish interest.    Selfish interest is fear even if it looks like a positive future.    A world where women are dominated by men, for instance, is not a positive future.  It is self interest based upon fear of losing your currently-held unfair advantage.   The first step  to having a positive future is to let go of self interest by recognizing that is fear-based behavior.

The second step is to imagine the brightest future you possibly can and then to ramp it several more notches.    If you are going to have a prophecy about the future, let it be beneficial to others and positive, not negative.     Whenever you feel negative toward what is going to happen in the future, then the key is to understand that you are living in fear.    When you address the fear, what is left over is very bright future which causes a very bright present tense.

Think about the next 30 minutes and how really great it could be.  Now ramp it.  Did you remember about the benefiting of mankind clause?

 

 

 

 

 

1 Comment

Posted on May 19, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

The Keys to Dealing with Fear

The first key to being able to overcome fear is to have a friendly, rather than antagonistic relationship with it.    Fear is a universal negative emotion that we all face.   It comes in a lot of varieties.   We all have fear.  It is part of being human.   I think that perhaps future generations will have less fear than we have now, that motivation to change will be more based upon the attraction principle, but for now fear is an entrenched part of our lives.    When you are friendly with a fear rather than at war with it,  it is because you understand that on the other side of the fear is a great new energy ready to be unleashed in your life that will open new doors and accomplish new possibilities.

Some people mistakenly wear their fears as if they were one of their names.   “Hello my name is Richard Claustrophobic Hastings.”    When you wear a fear like a name, it means that you have taken it on as part of your character, and other people need to adjust to your fear.     When you are friendly with your fears, they become like doors to new positive energy.    When you are claustrophobic, it just means that you have a fear of closed in spaces.   It is inviting you to develop the quality of more openness in your life, of being open to new things and new experiences.    When you say you are claustrophobic rather than being friendly with it, then it is like you give over the responsibility for dealing with your fear to everyone else in the world.

Sometimes I work with young children in teaching them how to do rock climbing.   A few will actually come up to me and say that they can’t climb because they are fearful of heights as if they are to be excused from the activities because of a genetic malfunction.   My job, when I am a teacher of young children, is to get them to friendly with the shaking and trembling because I know that what they really want is to achieve new heights.

When you are friendly with the fear,  it means that you have owned the feeling.  It is yours, not for someone else.   Since the majority of the world is either in denial or war with fear,  it is usually treated very badly.    For instance,  parents who come to climbing and see that their children have a fear often try to talk their children out of their fear or belittle them for having the fear, but it doesn’t work and is not useful.    So the important thing is to develop an environment within yourself of friendship which means that you can look at the fear non-judgmentally, not as a weakness or character flaw, but as a source of growth and development.

Most people in the modern world are fearful of what others think.   They spend endless hours on how things look and their appearance because they are so fearful of being judged and then discarded.     When you are war with this fear, you spend all of your time obsessing about how things look to others.    In essence you give the fear over to the eyes of the judgmental public.    Then they control your life.   When you have a positive relationship with the fear,  you understand that it is moving you to a higher state of being.     It is the ability to look inside of yourself and into the world and find true beauty.       The work inside is to deal with judgment.   When judgment is your friend,  then it will make it easier to find the true beauty.  The difference between being at war with a fear and being friendly with it is in the tension.    When you are at war with something, you are extremely tense as opposed to being very relaxed about it when you are friendly.    Most cultures have it exactly backwards so if you find yourself wanting to fight the fear or being obsessed about getting rid of it,  then you are pretty much like the entire human race.

The second key to dealing with fear is describing what you do as a result of the fear.  Fear is pretty much a stopping energy.  This means that its intention is to get you to stop moving in the direction of the new energy.  For instance, I have had a lot of fear of negative outer authority in my life.    The fear makes me stop doing my innovative change work and dream work by focusing all of my energy on the outer authority and then getting into fights with them.    I get all kinds of tension related illness.     When I develop my inner authority, then I relax and become extremely productive and energetic.      You could be fearful of making mistakes because you are trying to live up to the expectations of someone else.   This makes you stop being able to take risks or try new things.  Instead you focus all of your energy on being perfect and doing what others want you to do.   When you unleash risk taking as a virtue, you get much better results in the long term despite initial mistakes.

The third key to dealing with fear is understanding that most fear is irrational.  It usually takes a singular occurrence of something and then generalizes it and blows it way out of proportion.   This happens as a protective response so that whatever happened won’t happen again.    For instance,  one of the fearful experiences I have had is doing a canopy walk in a jungle where you cross a bridge over the top  level of the trees.   My mind tells me that I definitely going to die.   My wife walks on the same canopy fearlessly.   When this happens,  it lets you know that there is a positive energy on the other side of irrationality waiting for us to embrace, but the fear is saying NO WAY in a huge voice.   My mind sees that I am going to fall, finds all of the ways that I will fall,  and is certain that the canopy bridge will not hold.   When I am in this situation, I have to train my mind to be rational again.   The way I got myself to go down a big water slide one time was to just keep repeating to my mind that no one was dying.   After that it became very enjoyable.     My mind can go irrational around negative authority as well.  I get this irrational notion that what I say to them will actually make a difference, but when I try it, it always fails.   When I bring my mind into a rational state, it realizes that trying to work with an administrator who has a great deal of fear or is overly ambitious is an impossible task.

If the third key, dealing with the irrational mind, is a mild fear,  you can turn the fear around with rational talk, but long standing fears take a certain amount of skill to change.   When you have been seriously violated like sexual abuse, for instance, it instantly creates long standing fears.   What you were supposed to develop at the point of the abuse is stopped until the fear is released and the new energy finds its opening.    If you try to deal with the feelings without the proper skills, what happens is that the fear can just be too overwhelming.    It is best to go after help when dealing with long standing fear so that you can maintain daily functional behavior as the new energy is being developed.   There are a lot of horrific things about the world that create a lot of fear.

If you have questions about a fear or would like to do some work with it,  feel free to contact me @ dreamsforpeace@gmail.com.    We can set up some time on Skype to assist you with bringing out your new energy.   My fees are very reasonable.

44 Comments

Posted on May 5, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Dreams of Being Chased

You can be chased by almost anything in a dream because the dream world is extremely creative in its effort to give you the most perfectly delivered message about the fear you are facing.     The main reason for having a chasing dream is to let you know that the ineffective coping strategy that you are using in dealing with your fear is  running away from it.

The first thing to do when you have awoken from a dream about being chased is to identify the thing you are running from because it gives you the clue about what your fear is.    Since dreams are written in metaphor,   the metaphor will appear in its negative aspect.   A dream symbol can have either a positive or negative value to it.   For instance, water when it is calm and warm on a nice beach is a positive symbol, but water as a tsunami is a negative one.     A lion can be positive courage when it is positive, but it is represents the fear of being attacked viciously when it is negative.     The reason that you can have positive and negative value is because we  all have a dual nature.   A part of us  ego, which acts in selfish and fearful ways, while the other part, our true self, acts from the very best of ourselves like from our generosity, courage, or determination.

You dream a chase dream when you need to get the positive aspect of the negative symbol happening in your life.    For instance,  suppose you are  running away from Godzilla.   Godzilla is a really great symbol because he or she is definitely out to get you in a  huge and powerful manner.      Usually when you have this kind of dream, you wake up immediately.     The reason that you wake up is because the fear wants you to wake up in your life and pay attention.

Godzilla represents a big negative force in your life that has a lot of power usually in a leadership position.   It is hard to imagine a positive aspect of Godzilla because when leaders become like Godzilla, their true selves are completely covered.  You cannot find the positive self in the leader because it is gone.   It might have been there at one time,  but when the dark side has taken over the leader appears in Godzilla form.  This lets you know that the fearful person has no conscience nor morality.   It is quite understandable to run away from a Godzilla figure in your life because they are very destructive.

The goal of the dream is to get you to be a massively positive force to better the world.    You have a lot of choice about assuming the opposite metaphor to Godzilla which is positive because Godzilla has no true self showing.    I would chose something like being a massive flock of small birds.     When you are facing Godzilla, you are terrorized because you are human and usually on the ground running.  You are no match for his power.    This is what happens when you are up against an enormously negative leader with no true self.  You are no match for this type of leader because they don’t mind stomping all over you and destroying you.   Their sense of decency and morality have disappeared.  They are completely ego-based and are good at it.

Companies that have done hostile take-overs are Godzilla-like.   They only ever think of themselves, not the consequences of their actions on the lives of others.  The best thing to do when Godzilla is around to get up in the air and look for lots of positive things to do in another location.    This is not running away, but it is taking a realistic look at the size of the ego, becoming detached from it, and finding a place where that kind of ego is not so present.

If you are being chased by a bear,  then the dream is giving you a clue about the quality you need.   A bear’s negative and positive aspects are the same.   A bear has lots of strength.  Strength is a quality you can use either positively for the benefit of others or negatively to use force or power to get your own ego will done.   When you are being chased by a bear,  the key is always first to wake up in your life.   When you wake up, you say I really need to become a positive bear, a person with a great deal of positive strength.    Strength allows you to do take on difficult obstacles and overcome them in pursuit of a positive goal.

Godzilla shows you that you need to fly away to a new location where positive action is more easily done, but a bear dream is about staying where you are and facing the really difficult obstacles.     It is a very important distinction because the current reality of the modern world is still populated by Godzilla-type people, not by bears.    With leaders who are bears like those who are overbearing,  they give way and can become cooperative partners when you develop your own strength,  but Godzilla-types only step up the attacks when you become stronger.

Running away is a behavior that you use to cope in the immediate present.   How we run away is varied like the use of drugs, alcohol, sex, or entertainment, for instance.    The running can become an addiction unto itself which is something you have to definitely watch out for because if you are addicted to running, you won’t do the work to develop the positive quality the dream is demanding from you.    If you develop the quality, your life goes into a positive equilibrium where action is possible and coping is unnecessary.    Without the quality, you only have coping as an option.  For instance, if you are being chased by a lion, it means that you are afraid of being attacked by someone is aggressive,   but if you develop your own courage, they actually begin to become friends and co-partners.

When you are being chased by an unknown assailant,   then the first thing that should pop into your mind is that the negative thing chasing me is cultural in origin.    Cultural fears are those negative aspects of our psyche that we learn from growing up in a particular culture.    The assailant in the dream is unknown because we learn culture in an unconscious way.    For instance, North Americans would have this type of dream because greed is so seen as a positive quality that they don’t recognize it when they are being attacked by people who are greedy.   The big heroes in North American culture in the past few decades are people who have amassed huge fortunes often at the expense of others.

The way you overcome a cultural dream where you are being assaulted by someone unknown, is to stop, wake up, and ask yourself what is the negative cultural quality that is assaulting me.   When North Americans are at their best, they have a great deal of generosity and community service,  but when the ego takes over, they are filled with greed and theft.

If you are in an emerging culture where there is yet a lot of poverty,  the quality that is most prevalent in a negative way is jealousy.    In those cultures there are a lot of snake dreams.    Snakes that are poisonous represent jealousy, but the positive side of snakes includes such qualities as humility, detachment, and transformation which are key qualities for rapid growth.

 

Summary

1.  Wake up from a chasing dream and identify the negative energy you are running from in your life.   The dream symbol is the clue.

2.  Take steps to develop the new quality and begin implementing it immediately in your life in a positive way.  This will change your habitual pattern from running to going forward in a positive direction.

3.  Avoid people who do not have a conscience.

Leave a Comment

Posted on May 2, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

What is Dream Work?

What is dream work?

Dream work is the process of using your dreams to make the changes in your life that you have always wanted to make, but could never quite figure out how to do it.   It requires believing that dreams are a form of communication delivered to you with perfect messages, that they are coded most often in symbols rather than literal narrative, and are designed for exactly the change you need right now in your life.     When you believe that dreams contain perfect messages for you, that there are no mistakes in them, then you can allow them to guide you to the path that your life is meant to take.

It is nearly impossible to do dream work if you do not have a belief in an all-knowing Creator.    This does not mean atheists cannot do the work.   They can simply believe that there is a force inside of them that is much greater than themselves with perfect positive intentions.

I have no idea exactly where dreams emanate from.   I have read the research and know that when you are dreaming you are in alpha brainwaves.   This means that the brain is definitely involved when you are dreaming, but no one can design their own dream and have it come out exactly as they planned.

Dreams are just too good.    They come from somewhere else besides your consciousness.    Because dreams are benevolent in nature in that they are always trying to lead you to a positive end, even in very dark dreams, I believe that dreams are like a world unto themselves under the control of a great positive force.  They pass through the brain and are completely related to you and your experience, but they are much more out of your control than probably anyone would want to admit.

Discovering that dreams were a perfect message for me, that some other force knew a great deal more about where my life should go than I did was a great shock to me.  It left me feeling quite bewildered.   After all I am an American and naturalized Canadian.   Free will and independence flow through my veins.   Culturally I never wanted anyone else telling me what was best for me especially not a force that I cannot see.

I first started to notice some unsettling things about dreams when I was doing personal change work with a number of clients.    By this time I had already discovered how to decipher the meaning of the symbols and started playing around with solutions as if they were mathematical puzzles. On the day that a person would come I would start getting clues in the dreams about their issues and how they related to me.   Then I would do the dream work on myself before they met with me.   They would start speaking and telling me about their issues and I would be nodding my head because it was as if I had already heard what they were going to say beforehand.     It was a bit spooky for me because culturally I didn’t want someone else telling me what to do. I was, however, so much more prepared after I did the dream work that I continued to let it happen.

The results were just too good when I did dream work to not give up my own minor will to a higher one.  I couldn’t compete.  It was just so much better.   If you are uncomfortable with using the word God or the idea of God in your daily life, which is quite common because of the abuses of religion in the world, you can find another term.   Jung used the idea of collective consciousness, which is very helpful to many people.   Buddhists don’t often use the word God either because the spiritual experience for them is inward.   The important concept in doing dream work is that there is a power much greater than yourself that knows best where your life ought to be headed.     If you are an American like me or have suffered at the hands of oppressive people, giving your will over to a greater one is no easy matter.  This is not giving up the ability to see truth with your own eyes nor have a strong will to accomplish what your inner life wants for you, nor even negates creating your own vision.  Discernment is a highly valued quality that everyone should have.

When you do dream work in the right way, you are going to get extremely powerful messages, and when you actualize the messages into positive processes, your life will change in ways you never imagined possible.   It does, however, require a certain amount of submission and your priorities will most definitely go through a radical shift.

 

What makes dream work different than most change-type programs?

Dream work is based upon the belief that lasting change occurs when you take the variable of free will or choice out of the initial processes.    Free will is given over to the dream dimension to choose your life path.    This is because the dream world is connected to the Creator’s spirit which is much more competent in the choosing process and is a greater guarantee of a positive final outcome.    Here is an example.  Consider the following dream from a woman from Chinese background.

“I was walking along a path and then I came upon a two-story house which I decided to enter, but when I got close to the house a man appeared out of the second story window with a rifle and began shooting at me.   Then I had to run and hide.”

In the dream world a house is a symbol of the self because it is where your being resides. A path is a symbol of your life journey.     In this dream this Chinese woman is on her life journey and decides to enter a self where a man is going to shoot her down.   Being shot down means being put down or belittled.    Notice also in the dream that the man is on the second floor shooting down which signifies that he feels superior to the woman and can say whatever he wants.   The problem she has is in the choice she makes because, like most women in her culture, she believes that she has to enter a self where men are superior to women and have the right to belittle others mainly because they believe that they are superior as if they are the gods of their houses.  A man’s intention is to kill the spirit in the woman so she comes under his control.

She entered the self where she is going to be belittled by men and die spiritually because she felt like she did not have any choice in the matter.   In real life that is the type of marriage she is in mainly because most Chinese women are in that type of relationship where they feel that they have no other choice than to be inferior.  The long term lasting solution to her problems is also housed in the dream just as the problem is.  If she knew how to do her own dream work, then her life would be on a brand new path because the solution is right there.    The dream says that the choice she made in her life has extremely bad consequences, death to her soul.  No doubt she took the choice because she didn’t believe there was another solution.    Without going into a lot of detail the dream is asking her to consider a solution that is 180 degrees opposite to the choice she made when she entered into that relationship.  The dream wants her to consider taking the life path where she regards herself as equal to others.    When she accepts the solution, then she can begin the longer-term inner work that is also an aspect of the dream work.    Her journey will be fraught with fear because that is the emotion she mostly feels right now.  If she continues along the path, her life will transform itself in wondrous ways.

For most people who come from Asian culture it often just seems like there is no solution. The ego then makes the wrong choice because it is incased in fear.  It chooses to live in the house of belittlement where you always see yourself as lower and less capable than others, especially men.   Submission to a higher authority allows you to choose the only viable option, equality, and then beckons you on a great adventure toward that end.

Dream work always allows you to make the right decisions about the final end and then invites you into a process of discovery and change.   Most people make decisions based upon fear because they are not educated in the ways of the spirit, of the true self.

When you look at the above dream, you might ask yourself about the man.   How did he make the decision to be a god of his own house treating others with disdain? What is his fear?   It is quite simple what his fear is, which is the fear of most domineering relationships.  If you have to control someone by putting them down to try to kill their spirit, then you are fearful of being in a positive relationship where there is mutual love and respect. You are fearful of true spiritual intimacy.    Instead of the choice that the Creator would have him make, the man chooses power and the addiction of being a god over intimacy and equality.   His life will forever be full of loneliness by remaining aloof.   His only true choice is intimacy, a path he will not likely choose immediately.

It is fairly easy to argue that most of the problems we are having in the world with the woes of the economy are based on men trying to be like gods rather than seeking what the higher self would have them be, which is to be more intimate and equal with others.   It can also be argued that a great deal of women who enter the work paradigm end up copying the bad models that men set of trying to be god-like.  They are often worse because they are about as far from their true selves as a person could ever get.    The true self is guided by higher forces.  Dreams show it the way.    When we act from our true selves rather than our fears and selfish desires to be god-like, then the world and everything around us gets better.   When you try to be a god, you may end up with a few more toys and land, but you also create a lot of devastation and misery like chopping down all of the forests.

When you do dream work, you first go through the process of finding the various meanings embedded in the metaphors of the dreams.   The second step is to find the solution to the dream if it is negative in nature like the one above.   The solution is a 180-degree shift from the direction the negative emotional states keep you in.    The final step is to make the internal shift from the negative fear-based pattern to the very positive permanent energy.    In dream work you do not do the choosing.  The dream chooses your path and your solution.   This is what makes it the perfect choice for you.

 

Leave a Comment

Posted on April 29, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Sexual Dreams

Sexual dreams are very interesting because when people have them they often wake up with the physical sensations as if they actually had sex.    Probably there is no other category of dreams that require the virtue of self-discipline and mental focus to get through to the message that the dream is actually portraying than sexual dreams.

Sexual feelings tend to be powerful and compelling.  Many people tend to lose their minds and to act irrationally when they are taken over by them.   The metaphor that underlies sexual dreams is intimacy which is  the principle virtue for our age as human beings on the planet.     The goal for humanity is worldwide intimacy or worldwide closeness so that wherever we go in whatever village or city we are in, we see others as if they are members of our family like a brother or asister.    Intimacy in terms of the feelings of love for others is probably the most powerful of all of the positive characteristics of humankind because once you have it, you are willing to do anything for the other person in the relationship including sacrificing your life for them.

When you have a sexual dream, the first thing you should think of is intimacy, but probably not physical intimacy.    Spiritual intimacy should take up most of our time and efforts because once we have unity and love and closeness, the other things like equality and equity follow.    Justice is hard and painful when there is no love and intimacy in the society.

Sex with your Ex:    This type of dream where you are having a sexual encounter with someone whom you have already broken ties with is extremely difficult to process.    Sex with your ex usually means that you are in a very addicted state of neediness for being touched and loved.    The reason that you had problems in the first place with the relationship was neediness and wanting the other person to fulfill your needs, so when you dream about sex with your ex,  you are going back to the place in your ego that is very needy in order for you to deal with it.

This is the biggest mistake that the majority of humankind makes.   We believe that someone else is going to give us the life we want by loving us and acting positively toward us.   The other person usually promises it and then your are eventually really stung in the relationship because there is only ever one person who can give you a positive life, yourself.    The purpose of having sex in this type of dream is to remind you that despite leaving your ex, you are still addicted to having someone else do the same thing.  

Almost every single thing we see in movies and television tells us that as soon as you feel attracted to someone you should go to bed with them.   No one ever tells you that you should take a long time to assess the other person’s character to see if they have the qualities that make a relationship last for a long time.  Furthermore,  we aren’t being told that jumping into bed at the first sign of attraction is more like a drugged state, an addiction, than anything to do with true intimacy.   No one ever jumps into bed right away with another out of altruistic motives.  Jumping into bed quickly in a relationship is selfish because it is using someone else to make you feel good.

Sex with your ex in a dream means that in place of remembering your positive qualities and acting on them in the world, you are hoping to have someone else make your dreams come true.    This is the myth that is killing most of us and holding us back from really creating an amazing world.    So if you have sex with an ex,  realize that you are in big trouble and need a lot of help.

Sex with the Same Sex:   This does not mean you are gay.   It has nothing to do whatsoever with being a homosexual.     What it means is that there is a quality in the other person of the same sex that you want to have so badly that it is like having sexual intimacy with them.   This dream type takes a huge amount of self-discipline to not slip into believing easily that there is something wrong with your orientation or that you should change it.     Most sexual dreams have to do with gaining a quality that the other person has.   If you are married, for instance, but have sex with someone else in your dream life, it does not mean that you should dump your partner for the other or feel guilty for having an attraction to the other.   The dream is sending you a message about being attracted to the other’s quality so that you can develop that quality and use it in your life in a good way.  Anyone who wakes up after many years of marriage and suddenly proclaims that they are gay is really living in lah-lah land.   The important thing to remember about the dream world is that it is only ever really interested in your spiritual life and what qualities you are developing.

The problem that is so difficult to overcome for human beings is the tendency to try to get love from someone else.   Love is an inside out process which means that as you feel positive and loving inside and then express it outwardly,  great things happen including the feeling of closeness with others.     When we expect others to give us  love or complain that they are not showing us love, then we are going to always end up in a state of disappointment.

The self discipline of life is to reach out with your gifts in an effort to be of service to others.   When this is the state we live in,  then positive feelings come back to us in abundance,  but the very moment we start expecting it from others is when we get into the slippery slope of addiction and pain in our egos.     It is one of the great paradoxes of life that you can give out a lot of love and then have it returned, but you cannot expect it to be returned nor given to you.      I am not quite sure why we are wired this way other than the fact that every new undertaking that we initiate is usually met with disdain and rejection.    When you expect or desire to be loved for what you are doing,  you meet with a great deal of disappointed feelings.    When the love is generated from within for a new idea, for instance,  that love and the vision of it actualized in the future is what sustains the efforts in the present tense despite the rejection.   It helps us to remain detached from the reactions of others while maintaining a great deal of action.

Young people’s sexual dreams:  The main issue with most young people in relation to sex and dreams is that the curriculum in schools and relations in families are about as far from being spiritual intimate as one could ever imagine.  I think that whoever invented the current structure of schools had no idea whatsoever in anyway about true intimacy because schools are by and large created to promote distancing rather than closeness.     When the curricula eventually changes, which it will, young people will be so close to each other that they will willing give up their lives to assist anyone in trouble.    The way they are designed now is to stay so distant from each other that you are capable of screwing someone without any feeling and that is the sexual metaphor of our time,  to get pleasure out of screwing someone else.

That last sentence came out somewhat strongly, but it illustrates the current reality of our times.

12 Comments

Posted on April 11, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Running Out of Fuel/Running on Empty Dreams

Why do you run out of gas in a dream?   

Automobiles in our dreams are symbols of getting from one place to another in our lives.   For example, suppose you are the type of person who plans out what you want to accomplish for a day or a week or a month.    You sit down and probably write all of the things you want to do and then slot them into a time frame.    When you get into your car in a dream,  it is the part of you that is trying to implement the plan.    You begin in the present tense, get into your mental car, and try to arrive at the destinations that you have set forth in your plan.

Running out gas is caused when the plan you have made is going after incorrect goals.  Your internal car drains your energy so that you will stop and reconsider what you are doing.      If you stubbornly hold onto the wrong goals,  you will probably constantly start with a lot of enthusiasm, then break down and tire somewhere in the middle.

For instance,  it is logical to think that if you want to see big changes in an organization, that the way to do it is to change the top, but, in most cases the people at the top are thinking that it is everyone else beneath them that needs to change for the organization to be successful.    Instead of ever focusing on themselves or supporting the ideas that others create,  they believe that they are the ones generating the ideas and trying to get others to change to implement them.       Your plan, that ends up draining you, may be to try to get someone else to do something that they are just not interested in.    The draining comes in when your mind holds to the plan believing that if you just say the right things or change your tactics, the others will change.   They don’t.

When you get drained, it means that you are stubbornly holding onto a plan that is not going to work.    You can fill up your tank and have it permanently run, when you remember your successes and then continue down the same path that worked in the past.    At the same time you can just let go of the mistaken goals.

I have a really difficult time letting go of trying to influence people at the top because I believe that my logical thinking is so good that they won’t be able to resist.    THEY RESIST.    When they resist and I hold on, my system drains me.  I run out of gas.    When I remember where I have been successful and then continue down the same road,  my tanks refills itself all the time.

There is a counter-intuitive part to filling up your tank that I recently found out that can be very helpful.    If you run out energy when you are on the right path going for positive goals, then your system is just calling for more endurance that you get from gradually increasing efforts and rest.     In that case you occasionally need rest in order to restore yourself.    If you run out of gas because of going down the wrong path, your spirit and your body stop you, making you feel like nothing is in your tank.

The two states are very different, but in both cases you feel drained.   When you are running on empty because of being stubborn,  you can just let go of the wrong goal and begin acting in another direction that has worked for you before.   As soon as you move forward your tank will begin filling up.   The more you stay in that direction the more energy you will have in your tank.

Here are a couple of ways we tend to get stuck and run out of gas.

1.  We don’t like the way our spouse is acting, so we create a plan to get them to change.

2. We don’t like the way the leaders are running the organization so we try to communicate with them to get some positive changes.  When they are not open, we think up of new way to communicate.  We just keep repeating this pattern.

When we do change work in the wrong direction,  it is as if we are trying to be the one on top, the one in control of the other.    Successful plans always begin by remembering positive strategies that actually work.   They are never about moving vertically in a relationship, a group, or an organization.

Exercise:

1.  Remember a period in your life when you were most successful.   Think about what you did and how you thought that created positive results.  Write it down and repeat it to yourself everyday for a week.

e.g.  When I learned a new language,  I went to classes,  studied a great deal, and took a lot of risks in making mistakes speaking to others.

2.  Let go of everything else.

3.  Find a way to generalize you success into other areas.

2 Comments

Posted on April 4, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Catastrophe/Apocalyptic Dreams

A few nights  ago I was in Singapore doing a dream meeting with about 25 people.  There were quite a few interesting dreams as there always are, but one thing that really caught a great deal of interest for me was that of dreaming about catastrophes.     In the particular dream, the dreamer said that he dreamt that something extremely terrible was going to happen, that he was frozen in his response to it, and that he rarely remembered many dreams.

When you do dream work,  it is always solution oriented.  This is a bit different than when you go to a therapist’s office and get dream analysis based upon the the therapist’s interpretation of the symbols.    The symbolic work is pretty straight forward.  It just requires having a pretty lengthy knowledge of analogies.  The purpose of dream work, while it includes analysis,  does not stop there.   The important thing that people want to know is how to transform the dream into useful energy that they can then do something positive with.

Catastrophes always provoke fear.   The mistake that most people make is that they believe that catastrophes are about the future, that they somehow come out of the future, but really catastrophic thinking is always related to the past, not the future.    When I was living in Minot, North Dakota, our house was situated in the flood plain of the Souris River.    Because of the rains one year and the rate of the melting snow, there was a big threat of a flood.     What I noticed was that all of the people who had lived through the previous flood in the city were terrified,  but those of us who had not experienced the flood didn’t have the same kind of fear.    We were concerned and we could get into the required action, but the people who had been through the previous flood were truly frightened.

Catastrophic dreams happen to people who have lived through something terrible.   The purpose of the catastrophic dreams is to help them remember what happened in the past so that they can apply solutions that will prevent the negative things from happening in the future.     What normally happens after a catastrophe like World War 2 is that the mind tries to shut down the memory so that people can forget the horrors and then get back to some kind of equilibrium.     This is such a universal process that it seems as though everyone uses this pattern.

What is interesting about the dream world is that it never forgets.   The ego mind tries to forget the horrors of the past catastrophes whether it be abuse, excessive criticism,  war,  or natural disasters, but the spirit world remembers and at the propitious time, reminds us of the really bad stuff.    It does not do this out of a sick sense of cruelty, but out of compassion and mercy.    We forget, while the spiritual world remembers.     We forget bad things because it is just too painful to go back to the memories, but they always come back in either the dream world or in real life.    Real life catastrophes repeat themselves only because we do not singularly or collectively learn the solutions to the last catastrophe.

The dreamer gave us the universal pattern of most of humankind.   We live through a disaster, then we fear the next one,  so our minds shut down and start forgetting.   This gives us the feeling of normalcy at least for a little while, but it also keeps us frozen in a changeless world where the conditions that created the first disaster remain ripe for the next one.     As most therapists know, it is tricky work to take a person back into their worst nightmares, their worst fears.    Unless it is going to be replaced by something much better than what currently exists,  the fearful mind will always resist addressing the fear and instead seek to  remain the same.    Even if the threat is recognized, the response will be to fight the negative force again so that things can go back to the status quo.    The work is not about fighting the fearful force.

To get to a transformed state you first have to have another much more powerful positive energy that acts like a lure.     In a catastrophic dream you always have an evil force trying to wipe out what currently exists because this is what happens in a stagnant world.    When people are reluctant to transform by resisting change and trying to remain in their level of comfort and ease,  then the catastrophe happens.     So the fear in the dream is that something bad is going to happen.   The solution to the dream is to be able to create an amazing vision of much better world and then to take steps to make the vision appear in the real world.     The same catastrophe happens only because of forgetfulness.  Forgetfulness is cause by a lack of belief in our dynamically positive powers.

The dreams wants us to believe the opposite, that we have the inherent powers to have a dramatic impact on what happens around us in a positive way.    What happens internally is that as soon as we can begin to let go of the fearful image by replacing it with an extremely positive one, then we get unfrozen, thawed.  Then we start to act on the vision.  As long as the vision is strong and positive our beings will automatically be drawn to it.

The laws of change state that when you act positively it changes the future.  Every time someone does a positive act it affects the future by making it more positive.  When stagnation and non-action exist,  the future gets more terrifying.      It is a very simple formula for getting out of any rut you are in.    Even when the worst conditions exist around you, the moment that you act positively toward a vision like helping your neighbors, the world and the future suddenly appear brighter.

It is only when you are doing nothing toward changing the current reality or trying to maintain the way things are that the current reality gets frightening. When you act positively, you start to remember who you are truly and then that opens up even more positive possibilities.     When we couch in our equilibrium, we forget ourselves and then the bad things happen.

 

Richard Hastings
richard Richard Hastings is an expert in change work and dream work and author of Dreams for Peace. He is a Baha'i and currently lives in Vancouver, BC. Read more...
Exciting New Ebooks Available Now!

19 Day Transformation Program
Start transforming your life now with the: 19 Day Transformation Program

Dream Work
Dreamwork: How to Interpret Your Dreams and Transform Your Life.

Coming Soon: Daily Change

Free Dream Interpretation

Contact Richard by leaving a comment or emailing: dreamsforpeace@gmail.com    Also think about supporting the Community Transformation Foundation.   See the link on the site.

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 490 other subscribers

Categories

Blog at WordPress.com.