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Posted on March 18, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Cooperation v. Individual Achievement

Not long ago I was writing a report on a 7 year old boy in his attitude toward sport.   After I wrote the report I started thinking that he just might represent the sort of problems that a great many leaders in the world have.    This boy is excellent on the climbing wall in that he can see a goal that he wants to achieve, keep it in his mind for long periods of time, and then work diligently until he accomplishes it.   In every sport that he plays, his work ethic on skill building is second to none.   He spends time outside of structured practices and sessions so that he can improve his performance.

The problem he has is with other people.   Somehow he has learned that his life goal is in being first.   If he is in a race where he doesn’t have a lot of skill as in the pool,  he will just give up after one lap and fake an injury or pretend like he is really tired.    If he is in a running race, he might try to push others away to get an advantage.   In a game if his team goes behind by a couple of goals, he might walk off the field or throw a crying fit at his teammates.   Doesn’t this sound like corporate behavior?    Could it be that we have a culture of men psychologically stuck at age 7?

I think that somehow a great many young men believe that, from a very early age, the goal is to beat others at all costs so that they can be number one.    The very thing that they are naturally gifted in, goal setting and achievement,  is directed at other human beings rather than worthwhile goals.   If we are teaching boys that the goal is be number one at all costs,  we create war-like scenarios that make them into combatants, boy soldiers.  It overrides their natural tendency which is to be cooperative with others, to care for others, and to work harmoniously in groups.

It is the nature of the true self to grow and achieve, to improve each day, which is why goal setting and determination are such important processes.    Being able to set a goal and stay with it is fundamental to human beings.     It is part of the ego, the lower nature, however, when goal setting is turned against others in order to raise oneself up.    We just see example after example in the world of business and government of people whose ambition it is to defeat others.   Defeating another person is not a worthwhile goal which is why campaigning and party-based elections are just so ludicrous.

It is  part of human nature, the true self,  to work cooperatively with others to achieve worthwhile goals.  We have a built-in desire to be with others and achieve together, but young boys seemed to be trained to have their true natures distorted by being taught that defeating others and advancing over them is the goal.   When advancement to a position is the goal,  then young men will seek to prove themselves in ways that are detrimental to others.   They do not care about their relationships only the position they are seeking and who they have to impress.   Young women are not excluded from this phenomenon and when they get into the mode that  a lot of boys are in, they are actually worse,  but normally when girls play sport and something happens to a player from the other team,  most girls instinctively apologize and seek to help the opponent.

To me the war in Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein is a pretty good example of distortion of boys’ natures.   The American government backed by the military was very effective at the goal of defeating the dictatorship who they saw as a threat,  but they were not very good at dealing with the mess after the defeat.  You can see the aftermath of the Iraq played out all over the world at recess time with boys.   The goal is always to defeat others and the aftermath is always a mess with lots of arguments.  Maybe the goal of defeating others is just really so inappropriate that it should be thrown out of our lexicon of possibilities.   The ironic part of the Vietnam War was that communism died on its own.  It didn’t need America to fight against it to try to defeat it.   Parts of Laos are still littered today with unexploded bombs dropped by American B-52s in a war that the American government denied to their own people.  The aftermath of trying to defeat someone is always a mess.

The shift for the 7 year old boy CEOs/world leaders  is to learn how to value other human beings, to see them as precious companions in the journey of life rather than as enemies to defeat.   The goal is not to defeat the Taliban or fundamentalist fanatics.  It would be nice if they didn’t act so badly.    The goal is to promote the equality of men and women and the uplifting of people.

I don’t think the goal is to end competition or to see cooperation as being against a competitive spirit.  Maybe the running community has got it right in terms of competition.    When you enter a race and participate, everyone is rewarded.  You go home with a medal and a t-shirt and you glory in your personal records.    A few people at the top get special awards for their efforts and gifts.    When you start getting a million dollars for showing up at a tournament or race, then you know that the “7 year old boys defeating boys” syndrome is alive and well.

The real key to integrating a competitive spirit of achievement into the world community is the shift toward honoring everyone rather than a few at the top.   Defeating everyone and being at the top has just too much of the front page.    If you watch a 6 year old play, they often do not know what the score is of a game.  They will keep stopping and asking someone if they know the score because to their spirits being involved in the mix of the play is much more thrilling.

But somewhere between 6 and 7 the distortion happens when numbers being fixed in their heads is consolidated as a mental process.   If defeating becomes the goal at this stage,  then the child’s true self is distorted.   The goal of the competitive spirit should be to improve one’s performance, to stay involved in the midst of positive action, and to honor each others efforts.    How do I get better?   How do I stay involved?  How do value and encourage others?

When 7 year old boys begin to see and validate the performances of others, they become so dynamic as to be able to change the world.   When their spirits are distorted by having the goal of defeating others, then they become destructive forces that created huge messes in the world.

Affirmation:  Today I let go of all of my goals of defeating others. 

Transformation questions:  Who am I trying to defeat?  What is my true goal that I am after?

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Posted on February 6, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

The Structure of Audacity

I have wanted to write on this theme for quite some time, but it seems that my dream life had a lot of work to do in learning the virtue of being detached from the things that leaders and others do out of their own self interest.    I would love to live my life free of blaming others,  but I have to admit that some actions leaders do are so horrid and solely for their own ego that it is difficult to practice detachment.   They have a way of drawing you in to their own worst actions.    Every time I thought I was letting things go another action would happen to draw me into their web.    I think that I have let go of a fair amount so now I want to turn my attention to a really great energy, audacity.

Audacity is the virtue of seeing a really compelling positive, worthwhile outcome and going after it without any hesitation whatsoever.    You can be audacious for outcomes that are not very worthwhile, but when this happens it is not a virtue but a characteristic of the ego.   If you practice this latter quality, you end up in increasing fear.  Conquerors fall into this category.  They can boldly attack another land, but sooner or later they themselves start getting taken over and then end up in increasing fear.  In the modern world it is what corporations do.  When you go after something worthwhile like equality or equity,  then the victories you achieve allow for even greater amounts of audacity.

The key ego battle when you are trying to learn how to be bolder is that instead of seeing a positive outcome in your mind,  you see a bunch of negatives often in the form of how other people are acting or expecting you to act.   Last night I dreamt that when I was a running, a few people came along and encouraged me to go even faster so I did.    When I woke up,  I realized that I had to do some work with getting the images of people acting toward me in a negative way out of my head so that I could conform my actions to the dream.    It is the negative images and words and beliefs that hold us back from acting more boldly.

Last year my daughters both made the very bold move of doing homeschooling with their children.   Usually when we are inspired to do the right thing,  we have negative images in our head about who or what is going to give us the most resistance.   If we can just get to the ability of ignoring the resistance,  then we can act positively and achieve great things.    When I was a young man studying at the United States Air Force Academy,  I found that during my third year I had become completely stagnant with my academic work.   I barely made it above academic probation.    While I was traveling in Mexico during my spring break, I was inspired to leave the Air Force Academy.   It was like the clouds parted so that the way was clear, but in my mind were still all of these people who I thought that I had disappointed by deciding to leave.   When I thought of them,  I hesitated.

The spiritual work is to just be able to ignore the disappointed ones or whatever other resistance we might have.   When I could focus on doing something worthwhile for humanity rather than fighting in wars,   my studies improved dramatically.    I wasn’t motivated in the Air Force because I didn’t want to support war.    When I returned to studying in an area where I could be helpful to others,  people started seeing me as gifted, whereas at the Air Force Academy they kept telling me how worthless I was.   It was a matter of motivation.

When you have audacity,  your inspiration and guidance to action come from within with complete disregard for the outside.   You have inner vision and you have an inner voice.    Most often you hear people talking about the vision, but the positive voice you hear in your head to compel you forward is equally important to tune into.    Whenever I have a difficult meeting where there are a lot of people with large egos,  my inner voice is extremely active.    Sometimes it says to be quiet and say nothing and at other times it says to let them have it.   I have absolutely no idea how or why it works,  but every time I listen to it, the long-term effect is positive.

I think that most people want to do some worthwhile things in their lives,  but they end up listening to and seeing what others want for them.   Then they giving into what others want rather than responding to their own vision.   I saw this clearly when I returned to the Air Force Academy the year after I left for my friends’ graduation.    There wasn’t a lot of jubilation and celebration.   There was the realization that they had given into what someone else wanted them to do.   A couple of years earlier I had seen one person so upset after his graduation that he was tossing things all around and crying out loud.   He had given into something he had never wanted and now he was paying the price.

Being audacious does not mean you do not suffer pain.   Being audacious only means that you respond internally rather than externally.    Just because something is the right thing to do and is timely and compelling does not mean you won’t suffer for your actions when you are going for positive ends.     When you stand up for what you believe in and say it,  it sometimes puts you in prison and gets you fired, but mostly it attracts like-minded souls and helps to change people’s lives in positive ways.

The key is ignoring everyone and everything else but the positive end and the inner guidance on how to get there.     Ignoring is not an easy thing because it often means not listening to key figures like your parents or religious leaders or teachers.  At some point everyone is tested.  Everyone!!   God makes you have to ignore someone.   You cannot be pleasing to someone else’s vision of your life and be audacious.    If you are lucky, you have understanding parents.   You seek their opinion because they raised you and deserve your respect, but in the end your life is between you and your Creator.

Most people do the wrong thing.   They give into someone else’s vision and then end up in lives they didn’t choose.   Then they practice false audacity like with having an affair or gambling in business.    This is because most people are fearful of being excluded when they practice audacity.    You can be fearful of being cut out of your family, your peer group, your religious community, your profession,  or even your country.  The audacious practice is to listen inside and respond to the inspiration.

When you wake up in the middle of your life and find that you have lived out of everyone else’s expectations but your own inner drives,  it is not necessarily the time to throw the current outer life away and start over.    If you don’t like your job because it is not fulfilling, but you are supporting your family responsibly, that is a good thing.   Being audacious may be something like creating unity with your colleagues.

When you have a vision, the key to being bold is to ignore the resistance and all the reasons for not doing it.  Then act fully.

 

 

 

 

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Posted on February 1, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

Getting Out of My Sad Stories

Last night I dreamt that I was in the house of a former colleague who had committed suicide a few years ago.    There were a number of people in the living room so I started engaging them in series of sad stories about my life of the bad things that people had done to me hoping that they might be able to do something about them.

As soon as I woke up I was so happy  that today was a holiday in Malaysia, one of the many great ones,  Federal Territory Day, because it has given me time to do some transformation work on this important issue.     The worst part of the dream to me was being in the house of the person who committed suicide because it told me that as long as I was in the pattern of  being stuck in my sad story it was like committing psychological suicide.   Yikes!!!

How do I get to my positive self that relates positively to others, that creates intimacy and is mostly up all the time?    The dream tells me that by dwelling on the negative things that have occurred, hoping that by telling the story to others that something will be done to the perpetrators is  like committing inner suicide.   In the dream itself I was enjoying the audience.  I wanted others to hear my story, but when I thought about whose house (whose self) I was in, I knew I was holding onto a pattern that was going nowhere.   I was stuck in my own never ending story that was only damaging to me.

How do I stay stuck?   If you have ever been to war, suffered abuse, been taken advantage of economically,  or had a life threatening disease,  then you have a good story that qualifies for being in perpetual grief.    It is a why me story.   It is how we become whiners.    The stories are not without their share of pain and hurt.   Mine have to do with being fired three times under unjust circumstances which included a lot of bad treatment leading up to being released.

I now get fearful that when criticism starts coming my way for even the smallest things,   that the end is nigh.   That is when I get into my psychologically suicidal self trying to get a listening ear who might do something to the meanies.    The more I tell the story the worse my mind gets.   What happens is that I keep remembering the injustice, and then it keeps increasing in size.  As it increases so too does the fear.   Then I believe that I have to go against the current folks who have some kind of injustice routine going on.    It is definitely a suicidal pattern.

What is the way out?   One thing that I know from working with a lot of people is that denial or shoving the story completely under the carpet is actually worse that repeating the sad story over and over.    The firings happened.    Bad things occur.   It is not helpful to just try to completely forget about them.   It is when I stay stuck in the sad story hoping that someone else will do something about it, that the really negative things begin to happen.    The work is to let the story go, but not to wipe it away from history by having memory loss.     Letting the story go means that I can remember that what happened to me actually happened.  Holding onto the story perpetually repeating it in hopes that things will change only increases the fear of it happening again.   Where there is a lot of fear, the fear tends to happen.

Injustice is a condition of the world right now.  There are lots of jealous leaders who are threatened by competence.    So it is quite natural that when you do really positive work, that attacks are going to come.    When there is more justice and equality, then less attacks of jealous power seeking will happen.    Now they happen.   It is part of my sad story that I was only ever released from a job when I was getting great results.

Letting the story go is the ability to recognize the loss and the negative but still fully participate in the positive action forward.    We recognize that the disparity between the rich and the poor in even Western countries has grown in the past few decades, but we don’t sit around and just whine about it hoping that Obama will fix it for us or that someone will send the corrupt CEOs to prison.    That is how I commit psychological suicide.    Letting go of the story just means that you recognize the negative and then become a positive player rather than a negative whiner.

Most veterans in war try to bury their memories when they return home, but burying just keeps the conditions for war more present.    When you recognize the negative aspects of war because you have  seen the horrors, then you can become positively involved in those aspects of life that create peace.    Burying the memories takes you out of the positive processes that you could be involved in to have a better world.   On the other hand retelling the sad story with the hope that someone else will do something just makes you more fearful.

The idea is to let go of the story or the bad thing that happen and then stay involved in what will make the general conditions that cause the bad things to improve.  Stay positive and keep participating in the game despite the negative things that happen from time to time.   Hoping for someone else to make the changes pulls you out of the active processes that make change possible.    You shouldn’t hope for a brilliant leader.   We can all become brilliant leaders and take positive action to make the world better.

The purpose of the bad things happening in most cases is so that we can recognize that we all need to stay involved in the larger issues that face the world. We are all players in the earth’s evolution toward a more peaceful and inclusive world culture.  This helps us to let go of our own minor story and regard it more like a scratch rather than an amputation.

When Nelson Mandela was released from prison after 26 years,  he didn’t sit and whine and go for revenge or hope that someone would do something about the injustices.   He just went forward, practiced forgiveness and made positive changes.  When the eldest son of the founder of the Baha’i Faith, Abdu’l Baha, was released from captivity after nearly 40 years,  he immediately set sail on epic voyages to Europe and America that lasted for several years to promote universal peace and the oneness of mankind.

We could all hold onto our story and wallow.  We all have them.  The better option is to get involved in the game.

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Posted on January 8, 2012 by dreamsforpeace

The Lure of Laos

When I was a young man growing up in America, the Mekong River, especially in Vietnam was associated with war and bloodshed.   Here we are at breakfast and at sunset on the Mekong in Luang Prabang, Laos.  It is hard to imagine a more peaceful and tranquil place.  When you look at these scenes, it holds a lot of promise for world peace especially in those areas that are currently in upheaval.   One day soon we will be tourists there snapping beautiful photos

Laos is a relative poor country.  It is landlocked in between Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, and China.   While we were there,  I spent most of my time in nature visiting the rivers and waterfalls by trekking or biking.    Debby was a bit ill so she opted for cooking and weaving when we were in Luang Prabang.

Laos is made up of basically three groups.  The Hmong, Khmu, and the Lao.   The Hmong are also in other countries having migrated from China about 200 years ago.  During the war with America they sided more with Americas so many of them became refugees after the war.   There are actually more Hmong in American now than in SE Asia, nearly 500,000.   The pictures below show the difference in the economics of village life versus the city.  These are Khmu children.  You can see that the attendance is fairly good, but the resources are pretty lacking.   The city picture shows a better state.

Village life is pretty difficult as most are rice farmers.    The women do a lot more work than the men especially when it is not planting season.  Like other places in Asia it just seems like the equality between men and women is one of the really major issues.  The following two pictures show what men do during the day versus women.

Debby took a great course in weaving, where the students went out to pick the materials for the dyes from nature,  then prepared the dye for silk,  and finally did the weaving.   Here are a few pics.

She also took a cooking class.   It began, like most classes in Asia, at the local market to see how to pick fresh food and then proceeded to a lot of cooking.

Most of my time in Luang Prabang was spent in nature including trekking and biking, being on the river and at waterfalls.

When you travel to SE Asia and sign up for adventures like this, you always get really interesting guides who know a great deal about their country.  Because they speak English and have chosen a different kind of life path, they are particular interested in developing themselves.  Here is my guide on my bike trip.  His friends were kidding him all day because he was wearing soccer socks.

Since we had spent so much time in Myanmar exploring temples and Buddhism, we didn’t do so much of it here in Laos.   The majority of Laotians are Buddhism while the Hmong and Khmu practice more native spiritualism.   Because it was also a French colony, there are a fair number of Catholics.    The monks that we saw in the monasteries were pretty young like early to middle teens.   We had seen this in Myanmar, but not to such a wide extent.   Most monks wake up early in morning, chant and prayer, and then go out into the local markets for people to give them food.  They eat their last meal before noon and then will only usually have tea after that.   Their behavior in public is pretty reserved and non-interactive, but the behavior inside the monasteries is often quite active and playful like you would expect from most teens.

We met with some of the members of the Baha’i community on a couple of occasions in Vientiane.   On this occasion we gave a presentation at Tim and Diana Shaffter’s home.   Tim is the director of UNICEF for Laos.  They have lived in Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos and other places and can speak fairly good Lao.

Hunting is a huge problem in the country.  Because of the lack of resources the wildlife are not in abundance.   This is a billboard in Vientiane that we saw that we really liked.

Here is some East meets West food.  Pizza with dried river weed (like dried seaweed) and Laotian sausage.

And this was just a good combo, corn on the cob, spring rolls, papaya salad, and mixed kebab.

Right next to this food fair is the first fast food type place that has been allowed to be in the country, Swenson’s Ice Cream, so of course we had to partake of it.   Letting in the West is a mixed blessing in most countries.    The need for development and people entering the new century is important, but there is a great need for education in basic human values like honesty, trustworthiness, cooperation, equality,  and justice.

It was a great blessing to be in Laos.   It is just one of those places that everyone should visit.   Can’t wait to return.

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Posted on December 22, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

Super Powers in Dreams

I was in a dangerous situation being chased by armed soldiers trying to kill me.   I am running and hiding with a few other people.  In the middle of the dream I find that I can shrink so that I am barely seen and I can also stop bullets without them penetrating my skin.

 

My son-in-law has a workout program in which he uses super heroes and their positive qualities while people are doing the exercises in such a manner as to begin inculcated the qualities of super heroes in their lives.    If you are like Spider Man, for instance, you might be meditating about how to have a stronger grip on things in your life.   The program produces some amazing results.

 

When you have super powers in a dream, you should jump up and down on your bed and yell out really loudly, “YES!!!!!”     The above dream tells me that I can change my size to be almost invisible and I am protected from any type of shooting.    The question is what is the spiritual equivalent in the real world to shrinking and stopping bullets.    And why am I having this dream?

 

Shrinking means changing size so that you are not seen.   If I were a soldier and I could be unseen and stop bullets, I would be pretty invincible.    Being able to shrink in a positive sense means being able to be as nothing.   Most of the way the world is organized right now is about been seen in a very large way.  The goal is to be famous through recognition.  When you go into countries ruled by dictators, the image of the leader is everywhere.   He wants to be seen and honored by the whole population as if he were a god.   Many of us have the same internal desire and believe that our success and happiness is centered on recognition by others.   We want to be gods.   The only lesson from history that we really know for sure is that dictators have a very short life span.  Being god-like in this world is not a long-term proposition.    When we give into recognition seeking, we might as well dig our grave now because it is going to lead to a big fall.   Just ask Napoleon?

 

There is a great advantage in regarding yourself as nothing.   The dream wants me to explore it.   It is a super power.     What does it mean to be as nothing?  Being able to shrink means to me that I am able to shrink my ego, my recognition-seeking, my fears and self-consciousness, so that they don’t get in the way when I am trying to accomplish whatever I am doing.    I have the idea often that in order to accomplish anything I have to either have positive recognition from the top or be recognized by everyone in order to have success.   I have the false belief that I have to be on a famous talk show.    It is just so not true.   What is important is to get as far away from recognition seeking as I can possible get, to shrink from it, and then I can do anything.    Consider the story in the Bible of Peter walking on the water.    Whether you regard it as metaphoric or real is not so important.   The lesson is that Peter could walk on water as long as he was not thinking about what he was actually doing.   As soon as his self (ego) came into it, he couldn’t do it anymore.

 

The other part of the dream is that of stopping bullets.   Bullets are the way that people try to shoot you down largely through harsh words and criticism.    If you cannot deflect the shooting process, everything you do will be shot down.  The problem most of us have with criticism is that we take it in and let it kill us.   When we are shot down, so too go all of our projects.   Being able to deflect bullets means being able to not let harsh words and criticism in.   It is an invaluable super power.

 

You can get good at developing your super powers by doing the following exercises.

 

1.  What are the super powers that you have in your dreams?    (flying, running effortlessly, swimming underwater without scuba gear, walking through walls)

 

 

2.  What are the spiritual equivalents in the real world for the capacities of the super powers?   (e.g. walking through walls is equivalent to having no limitations whatsoever)

 

3.  What are the ego problems that go along with the super powers?  How do they manifest themselves in my life? (e.g. with walking through walls as a super power the ego would be seeing others as limiting you or seeing everything as an obstacle.)

 

4.  Think of yourself with the super powers in the real world.   Repeat several different kinds of images.   Go out and do an activity reminding yourself often that you have the super powers.

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Posted on December 18, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

The Virtue of Obedience: Why and How it Works

I am about 8 years old sitting at my school desk trying to produce something on my paper for the latest writing assignment.   Along comes this helicopter in the sky in the form of a 40 year old teacher who is ready to fire multiple rounds from a mounted machine gun as soon as I make a mistake.   The pressure inside is about being perfect so that the teacher looks good.   It doesn’t feel like it is about me as a writer.   I think about her and begin to tense and sweat.   The pressure mounts.  I am just thinking about her and what she will say and not about the writing.   I make attempts to cover up what I am doing so it won’t be seen and then dread handing it in.

As I grow older the helicopter continues to hover and shoot at will.   Eventually I just want to be rebellious and strike out at the helicopter.    The writing suffers because instead of being obedient to the rules and structure of good writing, I am just thinking about how to shoot the helicopter out of the sky.   I turn to rebelliousness and jungle warfare not unlike the guerrilla tactics  of the Vietnam War.    I am about as far from obeying the rules of good writing or good anything as you can get.  I am obsessed about the rebellion and resist everything.

Taking on the virtue of obedience is a bit like turning your back on your best friend and then walking away from him.    Being a rebel has served me quite well because it has always allowed to be on the edge, experimental, and get to new ideas like developing my own theory for dream work.   When I think of obedience, I think of turning away from being out there with newness.    But being a rebel also has its negative side because I am in a constant state of anger with conservative self-serving leaders.    In my mind being obedient has always been giving into being conservative,  but after so many years of living in bad administration,  the other day I figured that I must have an issue with obedience.

Obedience to the American psyche is like a swear word, certainly not a virtue, and definitely not worth incorporating because it means being blind to what is going on around you and fearful.    Nonetheless, my intuition told me to take the plunge and go for it.  I am only now into obedience for about two full days, but it has already produced some amazing things inside of me.

The first thing that I realized was that when I was resisting leadership (which have been extremely bad)  it put me in the habit of resisting not only the leaders but the work of finishing my own goals and doing all of the small and big things to accomplish what I want.   It was like I could get the new idea and be on the edge, but when it came to having to be obedient to what the new vision wanted me to do,  I lost sight of the vision.   I have a great number of unfinished projects and goals including multiple books to show for it.   Obedience was just not in my being.   The first thing I had to do was to let go of resisting the obedience part and seeing that it was not in conflict with risk taking or being experimental.    To accomplish that I had to be able to give up on trying to resist the rather poor leadership so much, to give them their due, relax, and let go of feeling like they are going to kill everything  I do.

The necessity to give the leadership its due despite its incompetence benefits the goal accomplishment process because it puts obeying what you need to do into a flow or positive and relaxed energy rather than resistance type energy.  This is what happened to me.   Instead of fighting and resisting I just decided to let them have their due and then I could give my own goals their due.    The first result for me was in running.   The day after I started the work I could run easily for an hour despite barely running for a few weeks.   Prior to that every run had become labored because I always felt angry and in an internal fight with the leadership.    I just decided to let go of the fight and go with the flow of obeying what needed to be done to accomplish my goals.

Then, while I was taking a nap today, I dreamt that I hit a kid who wasn’t listening to me.  Then during my teaching in the dream another group took over my facility.    I did a lot of work on this dream and found that there was an unconscious pressure to be perfect with my teaching and no desire on the part of leadership to give the appropriate space to do the work.    It is like the admin wanted results but didn’t want to pay the price to get them.   So as I am going deeper into the dream I realize that the little 7 year old that I hit is the internal state of some of the leaders.   They are like 7 year olds so when  I resist them or go against them in a negative manner, they react really badly.    Besides making the jump to seeing how so many corporate and political and religious leaders are stuck at the 7 year old stage,   I realized that fighting them was definitely not an answer.   I am no match for an angry 7 year old in a 50 year old body.

The key is to let go of the resistance, obey the procedures of the 7 year old in the 50 year old body, and then get into a flow of obeying what needs to be done to accomplish my goals.    This is just so against my American mind.   I want to fight the 7 year olds in all of those corporations and parliaments.   It just doesn’t work.  That is the problem.   The reason it doesn’t work is that a stuck 7 year old cannot handle mixed emotions.   They only see red and then go after people.  They cannot be hurt by criticism and then also listen and be attentive to the needs of others.    If you go after a 7 year old in a 50 year old body, they are going to attack you because they will only feel a lot of anger and nothing else.

When you give the 7 year old in a 50 year old body their due by following their procedures and not striking out at them,  then you get the space to do your own goals.    But you cannot have an attitude about it.   You cannot give them their due grudgingly.     You give them their due so that unity can prevail and then you find that the doors are opening  to get the space that you want for your own goals.

Am I also the 7 year old in the dream?  It is a fair question.    If I were, the virtue would not be obedience, but the ability to be experimental.   7 years old lose their ability to go out on the edge and try new things.  They retreat to conservative politics and conservative religion and then stick to old ways.   They can only really obey someone else’s thoughts.   At 7 children usually retreat into only being able to conform.   Most leaders would benefit a great deal more from being out there on the edge, but the fear of being hurt just becomes too great.

Just beginning the journey to obedience.   The doors are opening.

 

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Posted on November 28, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

A Beer Is Ibuprofen in Liquid Form

For the most part our minds are geared to taking the easy way out of life and in the modern world we seem to have taken the easy way out to an extreme.   The cultural learning is that a physical pleasure gives you a non-material or permanent quality.  Look at this ad.

This ad teaches you the cultural lesson that everyone is supposed to learn and most people do that if you if you drink something that you are going to end up in huge bliss.   Our rational scientific minds are easily overthrown by this ad.  The lesson is that you can get lasting joy in a physical object.  It doesn’t show you that the woman who is going to satisfy your lust is going to wake up one day really pissed at the way you act.   Here is another one.

It would be really nice if this actually worked, that you could drink a beer and then be really happy and joyful.  The purpose of the ad is to get you to believe it.  Most people do because it is unconscious and everywhere.   Spirituality comes in a can.  If we have trouble persevering, being enthusiastic, caring, honest, trusting, or thinking for ourselves, then we can just drink a beer and we will have it.  Getting better is about getting high physically first and then you will have the quality.

The culture teaches us all from a very early age through the quality of envy.   Envy is the ego trait of wanting a spiritual state through using physical means, i.e., taking the easy way out.   When we envy, we obsess on a physical object such as a relationship because we believe that it is going to bring us some measure of happiness.   It is what shopaholics do.   The new “whatever” will give me whatever I really need internally.    Envy is the destroyer of a positive life and the ability to make a better world.     If I want to do something positive, whatever it is, then envy teaches me to take short cuts when I do not have the skills or capacities to do the positive thing.    Whenever I have a really worthy goal such as building a bridge of friendship between two antagonistic groups, then when I run into the least bit of difficulty, the cultural teaches me to go out and drink a beer or two and then go back and do the same thing that didn’t work before.   This is the core of envy.   Instead of doing the tough inner work where you have to face your own fears and demons,  envy teaches us to leave our problems at the bar stool.

If you were a scientist and could really analyze what beer does, it is just so simple.  It gives you a few moments of feeling relaxed.  Then it is over.  You go back to how you were before the beer.  So if you were fearful and angry before the beer, now you are going to be the same afterward.    The promise of envy is that the fear will go away, but it doesn’t.     It just stays.   It is fixed until I actually do the work with the fear.  By having envy and believing in the beer the fear can have a permanent fixed home inside of you without ever having to worry about getting removed.   Envy keeps the fears inside forever.   And what is even greater for our fears is that we have a whole culture aligned in making us feel comfortable that it is ok to have fear and use material means to alleviate the negativity they bring.

I am not so sure that any of us are free of this scourge of modern life.  It used to be that we had qualities like modesty and moderation,  which are designed to keep life real, but the excesses of materialism are so huge inside of us that they are nearly impossible to resist.    You know you are trouble whenever you believe that something new or someone else or something you eat or drink or take in is going to make you happy.

What makes life work are inner qualities.   It is so simple.   What makes life destroyed is envy.   It is the big killer.

Here is what you can do when you are feeling envious, i.e., when you are feeling like you want someone or something to make you feel better about yourself and your life.    Envy starts by seeing a material object that you believe will bring you great joy like a new designer bag or a piece of jewelry.    You focus on your imagination repeatedly until the image is stuck, and you can’t get out of it.  It sustains itself by the believing that it will bring you joy.    Then you go after the material object and it gives you some moments of bliss.  You are really satisfied.  Not long after the temporary joy goes away and then the cycle begins all over again.

The purpose of the envy always always always is to cover up a fear, but it is difficult to go after the fear when you are overcome by desire.  The desire usually wins because it is so packed with the promise of joy.   Now you have a closet full of bags.  When you have this type of envy, which most of us do in the modern world, you can stop it by realizing that when you are overcome by it, it is because you fear that you are not enough inside.    The fear triggers envy because it wants to feel like it is enough so it keeps trying to get more material to fill it.   It is sort of like the way Donald Trump buys buildings and businesses.

The key is to begin to feel enough inside and the way to do feel like you are enough is to fill up yourself with positive memories all the time.   Positive memories shown inside your mind to yourself constantly alleviate the pressure of envy because when you are enough, then you don’t need to constantly buy or get beer to bring us joy or to forget how crappy we feel about ourselves.

Everyone feels better and comes into better balance when they are reminded of their positive attributes and actions.   When you are seen as positive and remember it,  then you don’t have to fill your life with worthless relationships that go nowhere.

Everyday for a week before you go to bed make the habit of writing down 5 positive attributes that you did that day then relive the event consciously in your mind with knowing you are using the positive quality.   So maybe for instance, you showed kindness to a stranger or were courageous in bringing up a difficult subject or finished a job you normally dislike.   Write them down and then relive the quality in your mind.

 

 

 

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Posted on November 20, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

Getting Up from a Fall

About a week ago I was at the UNHCR building in Kuala Lumpur working with a group of English translators from Myanmar on the subject of dreams.  My wife had invited me to the class because she teaches them higher level English a couple of times a week.  As in most of my dream meetings I asked the participants to write down both a positive and negative dream that they have had in the past so that we can look at the metaphors and understand the messages and solutions.

The first dream that appeared was this one.   I was in a building on the 6th floor with my family when the building began to shake.    I fell from the building onto the ground.   Then a large wave came and was knocking me over.   Finally the sun was out, and then a big dark disk started covering it.  The darkness was so intense that it was falling on top of me.  I was running from it and then I woke up.

The theme of falling is a big one in the dream world.    It is one of the most common types of dreams that can be experienced in multiple ways.    This one is particularly instructive to all of us.   The first interesting symbol is being on the 6th floor.   This means that the dreamer has already risen to a certain level in his life.   We can presuppose from this that he has a certain amount of motivation and ability to achieve goals.    But then he feels a shaking and falls to the ground.

Shaking can come in many forms.  It can be a natural disaster, an accident, being fired, or losing a relationship.    For instance, if you are in love with a woman and have put your hopes in a future together, then when she breaks it off, you can be very shaken and take a fall.   The biggest shakes are those that cause some kind of separation.

The key to overcoming shaking is to get right back up again.    When you are shaken and feel separated, for instance, then it feels like a big wave is going to come over you and then the world darkens.    When you are fired or are not accepted or thrown out of your country,  the people who do the best are those that do not stay down and out.

It is  human to feel some grief when bad happens,  but those of us who hang onto it suffer much more than we have to.   A bad government who excludes major parts of its population which we still see happening in the world today cannot withstand the power of people who rise up again and again despite efforts to shake them and keep them down.   What destroys a people is not the bad government, but the holding onto the fall.    Bad governments and organizations always end up falling, but when we fall from a shaking, we can just get right back up again and keep moving forward.

I was very grateful to be able to hear this dream and then study because it taught me the need to just keep getting back up again.

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Posted on November 7, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

Dreams and the Business World

What I am  attempting to do here is to demonstrate  the theory and practice of how a business can achieve a great deal of success by being involved in the practice of analyzing the dreams of its members

To completely understand that the dreams of its members will propel a business forward at accelerated rates requires some understanding of what the dream world is.   The most important key is the belief that dreams do not emanate from the brain of the dreamer, but  rather  they pass through the brain during sleep so that the dreamer gets a perfect understanding of the communication that is needed to  his/her life work.   Dreams come from a world that is transcendent of the human brain, a world beyond the limitations of time and space.   The spiritual force from which they arise only ever has one intention,  positive human growth.

When you read and interpret your dreams, you get hooked into a higher energy that desires your accelerated movement forward,  your greater positive achievement.    The energy that creates the dreams that pass through your mind gives you the information that will help you grow at the very fastest rate in cooperation with every other human being on the planet.   Dreams never send messages that are in conflict with others or try to wipe out others or overtake their territory.    Dreams are the ultimate ecology because they allow you to grow in complete union with others rather than in competing to put down others.   The mess that the world is in is largely due to the belief held by opposing groups that it is us against them.   China, for instance, started making some pretty big strides economically when it decided that the West wasn’t as evil as it made it out to be.   Vietnam has done the same.

The second key to business success is to understand that when you transform yourself as a result of the message of a dream, that it affects everyone around you in a very positive manner.   Take this dream for instance, which I heard from a woman in Singapore.   “I was walking along a path when I came upon this two story house.   I looked up and saw a man with a shotgun trying to shoot me.  I had to run for cover.”

If you were a CEO of a company where this woman worked and you wanted to increase your profits,   you could take this dream and make an absolute fortune.    How would do this?  The metaphor in the dream says that when she is on her life path going for where her life is supposed to take her, she is confronted by men who believe that they are higher than women and then try to put them down by criticizing and making them feel low at every step.     Every single study on productivity, creativity, and achievement says that when people are in an environment where they are belittled, criticized often, and treated as inferiors, their productivity and achievement goes down.   There is no dispute on this data,  but a large percentage of companies still practices what the woman in the dream experiences.  They try to shoot their employees down in order to get them to work harder.

When she is uplifted and encouraged in herself and by her supervisors,  she will be much more productive.    And if the business were to take the lesson of uplifting others and use it as a principle of management with everyone in the organization, the production would skyrocket.    Furthermore, if the company would see that everyone is equal and deserves equity, then the profits would not only be increased, but would be shared more equitably.     When there is more equity, then you get a stronger middle class which puts resources and new ideas into the hands of a great many more people.

It doesn’t matter who has the dream in the organization for the dream’s message to affect everyone because in the dream world everyone is equal.    A CEO and cleaning staff are regarded as the same in the worlds of the spirit.   The cleaning staff is just as likely to get a dream that will dramatically affect success as a company executive, probably even more likely.    The wildly held belief about dreams is that they arise from the mind of the dreamer which would suggest that you should only ever listen to the dreams of the most competent and intelligent people, but when you believe that the dreams come from a higher source, it allows you to practice humility and openness, which are great keys to success.

Communism was an ideology that promoted equity whereas capitalism is one that encourages initiative, but when you have equity without initiative or initiative without equity then you get a big mess like the one we are in.    The dream world is capable of solving the mess so that you don’t have people with all of the resources creating laws that favor themselves.   For instance,  what is the difference between paying $100/night or $2000/night in a hotel..   You get a little more space, maybe a little more attention,  and the quality of the furnishing are a little better.    The difference is not that great for the fact that you are basically going to go to sleep and take a shower.

For the most part we have created a business model that places one person in charge who is responsible to the constituent share holders to produce a profit.   Because most  of the responsibility is on one person’s shoulders, it is believed that they should be able to make a 1000 times or more salary benefits than the lowest paid employees.    They are regarded as the highest and best, whereas everyone else is lower and less worthy.    This also gives them the right to criticize and practice methodologies that are completely contrary to the science of management.      I am 100% percent certain that were the organization to analyze and implement the understandings from their dreams that it would clearly indicate that the model should be completely changed.  Furthermore, the new ones would be so much sounder and ensure long-term growth.

The purpose of the dream world is to largely eliminate fear in the world.   The systems we have created in the world are largely based on fear.    One of the common dreams that people have is that they return to a former school where they are going to be given an examination all over again.   No matter what they do, they keep getting the dream.   The dream indicates that the results on their examination were not good enough.   So they have to keep going back to redo the examination.     If you have a system like most places in the world that only allows a very small percentage in at the top,   then most of the people are going to have this fear of not being able to make the grade.   And the ones at the top are always going to be having the pressure to keep achieving.   They will repeatedly dream about falling.     When there is so much inequity and lack of opportunity in a system, then it is built on fear.      In the 1960s in the state of California in the United States anyone could get a higher education for almost free.    Now the amount of debt a person pays to get an education that has no guarantees of anything afterwards is astronomical.    In 1975 I paid $200  for tuition fees for one semester.  The same university now charges nearly $8000.      This is a 4000% increase in 30+ years.    In that same time period housing has gone up only 200%.

Why is there such a gap?    The disparity is fueled by the fear of not making it to the top and the top fearing of falling from its precipice.   We know this because in the same time period the disparity between those who are the top and those who are at the bottom has grown so much.    Consider this. The average major league baseball player’s salary has increased by 6600% since 1975, while the average teacher salary has increased by about 66%.    In 1975 the average baseball player’s salary was only $15,000 higher than the average teacher in one of the higher paid states.   Now it is $2.5 million more.  In England there is a soccer player who makes about $10 million a year who refused to play in a game when called on as a substitute.

Who pays a salary like that for someone who doesn’t even want to play?    Our fears pay it.   We are fearful that our team is not going to make it to the top, not going to be the best so we pay outlandish sums for what we think are the best players.     It is pretty absurd.  What if we just didn’t care about being on top?

If we paid attention to our dreams and what they were leading us to, then our businesses and economic lives would thrive.    If you are interested in this idea,  get a group of colleagues together,  have them send me their dreams, and I will show what business solutions the company needs to take.   The only necessary commitment a company would need is that of implementing the solutions.

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Posted on October 23, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

A Day in the Life of Myanmar (formerly known as Burma)

In my on-going education about the world I am learning a valuable lesson, a repeated one, this time in the land we call Myanmar.    When we read about a country from the outside in our daily journals,  we hear about the bad actions of governments, then mistakenly generalize those actions to everyone in the country and believe that it is a dangerous place.   We never felt in danger in Myanmar.  It is a special place

During our time in Bagan, which is an area that has 1000s of ancient temples built from about 1100-1300 AD,  we were anxious to get on top of one of the temples to see a more panoramic vision of the area.    We saw this group of university students studying architecture in Yangon, who, as part of there studies visit Bagan to measure and draw old temples so that the archeological museum in the country  has a record of them in case they are destroyed in a natural disaster or some other way.    I asked them if I could climb up with them where they were doing the work which they readily agreed to.   They were all very anxious to speak to us with what English they had and were extremely friendly, warm, and fun.

Myanmar is actually the country I had in my mind when we first were thinking about moving to SE Asia several years ago, because Buddhism is everywhere.   The type of Buddhism practiced in Myanmar places Buddha at the top in the way one worships followed by a number of spiritual energies called “nats”, which are equivalent to what Christians would call angels.  To me it is very similar to the Catholic Church.   The essence of the teachings are to develop a good character, to perform good deeds, to practice detachment and to meditate and pray.    The people seem to be permeated with a great deal of peacefulness, kindness, and sweetness.     When Debby and I were going to dinner one night at our hotel, one of the workers there said he would like to fix up the room, which at first we thought was somewhat unnecessary, but when we came back this is what he had done.   The bed was lined with a pattern of flowers.    I don’t think we have ever experienced sweetness expressed in that way.  It was quite magical.

Bagan has so many ancient temples that we even had one to ourselves in our hotel where we could go to meditate and pray.   It was explained to us that the way the Buddha is sitting with his hand and fingers touching the ground is a symbol to be grounded by not harming anyone or anything.

In our first day in Myanmar we are driving to a village on the Delta called Daidanaw.  In 2008 during the cyclone most of the village was destroyed.    Nearly all of the homes were flattened.   Today as we are entering it,  everything is rebuilt.    It is as testimony to resilience and the people’s strong character.      Daidanaw is affectionately known by Baha’is as Abdul Baha’s village.   In the late 19th century when the Baha’i Faith had only been practiced in a few countries a Persian by the name of Syed Mustapha Roumie traveled to Myanmar to teach others about Baha’u’llah.    This whole village along with a few surrounding areas became Baha’is.     Debby and I are there to speak to the Baha’i community.   They are so warm and friendly and welcoming and have heard that we do work with the virtues and that I can speak about dreams.    The nice thing for me about doing the dream work is that after having given so many presentations in various countries in the world,  it is easy enough to just get up and speak.   Debby and I first talk around the theme of developing good characters by developing virtues, and then one of the community members asked if I will talk about dreams.    I am shy to do it beforehand because I am not sure how people will react to the topic.   Since they have asked me,  I start the session.    Among other things the dreams they share are about not being fearful of things from outside of themselves,  that there is support from within.

Later when I speak about dreams in Yangon at the Baha’i Centre the themes are about going way beyond what you believe you can do,   having hopefulness and optimism about the future,  developing understanding and compassion,   and finding support from inside.    Several people in both places come up to me after the meeting to talk about dreams that they were reluctant to share in the group.    One is mother of a physically handicapped boy, who in her dream, she saw walking and running freely.  I explain to her that his spirit is very much in tact and whole, and then we talk for awhile on what to do educationally for him.

and in Yangon.

Women in Myanmar and some men wear a type of cream on their faces that comes from a tree back that protects from aging and also seems to be a sunblock.   It seems to be unique to this country.   Most of the women wear long skirts and so do about half the men. The nuns have pink robes while the monks are dark red.   They come to the market every morning where vendors make donations of food to them.    Some people in the market are just characters.

There are so many temples in Myanmar that at times you want to say “enough”, but in Yangon there is a very special one called,  Shwedagon Paya, that is very big and almost like its own village.  Here are some shots of it.

Much of what we learned about Buddhism in Bagan we learned from this man who was our guide.  He had the interesting practice of coming to the airport with the taxi drivers and then riding with the tourists back to their hotels explaining a few things and then offering his services.

And here are some other random shots.

The GQ Monk

Puppetters at dinner show in Bagan.

Ringing the Bell in the pagoda
Old and New
Eating at local restaurant with new friends
One of the Baha'is working at her fathers art stall
BBQ toast for breakfast
Riding to the temples in a horse cart
Woman working in laquerware business
Woman selling birds to release as a way of releasing your problems or people in prison

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Posted on September 19, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

Tsunamis, Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Other Natural Disaster Dreams

When I was in Canada this summer,  my oldest daughter encouraged me a great deal to start writing another book on dreams which was much more about how to do the dream work that I do.   I have to admit that I felt like I knew everything there was to learn about the dream world.   I thought that I was the all-knowing god-like person of the dream interpretation world.    I stopped reading other people’s books a long time ago because I just felt like they had nothing new for me.

Of all of the things I have learned about dream interpretation in the past 20 years the thing that I know is the very spiritual state to be in is that of taking the place of God.    Practically every king and ruler, every CEO, and every head of household in the world make this mistake.    The starting point of all spiritual growth which is the cornerstone of every religion and positive movements is humility.   Humility allows us to free ourselves from having to take the responsibility of the world on our shoulders, to let God do His work so we can be free to do ours.    I have seen the consequences of what happens when people try to play God.   They all end up in misery.    The best position to be in is the lowest one because that is where the greatest learning is.

So when I started in on the new writing project,  I quickly came to this big stumbling block in my writing which has led to almost a month of no words being put on the page.   I really felt like the words would just flow right off my pen, but instead they stopped.    It always seems to begin the same way for me.   I just feel like I am sooooooo smart and then I end up in soooo much trouble emotionally.      The big issue of my life is that I always seem to run into leaders who are trying to play God.  I get angry and into a big fight with them.    They always win.

Recently I felt like this issue was coming on again because my supervisor at my work was not listening to me.   Then my body began to swell after workouts.    And then the clarity in my thinking would just go.    The swelling was a big key for me.   I asked myself why my body was swelling so much.  It became clear to me that I was trying to be God, the all-knowing,  that I lacked a lot of humility, and that my body was swelling to show me that my ego was swollen way out there.    It was as if I believed that I knew all there is to learn about dream work, and now it is my job to give my knowledge over to others.

What helped me a great deal in this process was a new theoretic position I started taking when I was doing the writing, which is that in a dream every symbol can be either positive or negative.     I had used this before with animals such as in snake dreams, but I had never full experienced it in other dreams.    When I received a dream about an earthquake and then a tsunami,  the experience I had when I tried to get over to the positive side of a tsunami or earthquake was blank and constricted in my head.   What is positive about a big shake up or a big crushing?

It began when a woman sent me an earthquake dream and then told me that she wanted to leave her husband.    I am thinking to myself,  how is an earthquake positive?   Then she had this experience.   She told her husband that she wanted to leave him and take their child away.   This was because he just came home every night, sat in front of his computer, and zoned out on marijuana.   When she told her husband that she was leaving, it created an earthquake of positive proportions in the family.   He stopped smoking pot every evening and then start going to counseling so that he could stay in the marriage.   She realized that she needed an earthquake in her own relationship with the spiritual world and began praying more each day.    Now she and her husband on a very different path together.     The shake up of the earthquake worked.

Someone else sent me another dream about floods and a tsunami.    In this dream the dreamer went to the high ground while a tsunami was coming in.   She was also protected by going on a higher road during flooding.    This dream tells us that the true protection for bad things happening at the hands of others around us is to get to our higher selves.   As long as we are on the high ground of our lives, in our spiritual selves rather than fighting with the egos of others who are jealous with power, we are protected.    A tsunami or a flood is needed when there is a lot of jealousy connected with power.   It is extremely positive to be crushed when you are jealous and even more positive when you crush your own jealousy with a big tsunami.

So that is what I am going to do today.  I am going to find where my jealousy lies and then crush with a big tsunami so I can get rid of my swelling spiritually and physically.

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Posted on September 13, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

Getting Out of A Nightmare

In the summer of 1972, a young American named Frank Shorter won the gold medal for his performance in the Olympic Marathon in the city of Munich.     I had just started being a runner that year.    I am not quite sure why I started, but I do remember watching Frank Shorter run and then wanting to copy him.   Whenever I emulated his style, I felt better and could last longer.     In the summer of 1971 I had left the US Air Force Academy after three years of struggle with a system that was so not me.     In a way running represented the exact opposite of the Academy.    At the Academy my life was about following someone else’s life plan for me,  following and endless set of what often seemed like very unnecessary rules, and having discipline forced down your throat.   With running I was able to set my own course,  use my own inner discipline,  and feel free in the open air.

This morning I opened up the Runner’s World site on my web browser to find a 14 page article on Frank Shorter about his abusive childhood.   http://www.runnersworld.com/article/0,7120,s6-239-567–14056-0,00.html

In this article he talks about his abusive childhood with beatings that were quite horrendous given by a father who was very well respected and honored in his community.   What is clear from reading the article is that somehow Frank got out of the nightmare of his abusive childhood in no small measure because of his running.  So the question that I asked myself this morning as I was reading the article was can running actually heal?  Can it bring you out of a nightmare?

I am not sure that every runner can heal themselves,  but I do think that the way Frank Shorter learned to run, which was passed down to me,  has a healing aspect to it that came through his true self, his true spirit.    When you watch Frank run, it has a special quality to it.   It is particularly gentle on the earth, a quality of humility to it.  It doesn’t surprise me at all because when you are treated so harshly by a cruel father you need to find a way to be gentle with yourself.   Running with a soft touch repetitively has a healing effect because it allows for gentleness to replace the harsh treatment.    The remedy for harsh treatment is gentleness.

When I was living at the Air Force Academy,  we were treated harshly.   When I left and took up running like Frank,  I learned how to be more gentle with myself.   After I read the article this morning,  a remembered a very strange thing about Frank Shorter which I don’t find coincidental.    I actually remember that at times when I had very difficult administrators which led to me being fired from my job,  I always had a hard time remembering Frank’s name.    I would actually spend an hour or so trying to figure it out.   This was before Google.

Now it is so clear that remembering Frank Shorter means remembering to be gentle on myself, to get out on the road for long periods, to be free.    Both times that I have been fired I have trained for marathons the year after the firings and both times I found myself balling my eyes out uncontrollably when I went across the finish line.

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Posted on August 28, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

You Are the Images in Your Dreams

You Are the Images in Your Dreams

You are the witch and the monster.     This may be a hard pill to swallow if you are used to doing what we all love to do, which is to blame everyone else for our problems.    How could that thief or killer be me in the dream?    How could my boss who fired me be me in the dream?   You are the hurricane and you are the tsunami.   Furthermore, you are Snow White and you are the Evil Queen.    You are Red Riding Hood, and you are the Grandmother, and you are the Big Bad Wolf.    The Big Bad Wolf is you.    Get used to the idea that you are Mr. Big Bad. The poisonous snake in your dream is the poisonous snake in you. It is killing your life and it is killing you.

Blaming is a huge epidemic and probably the main reason why the science of psychology is so slow in comparison to other sciences.    Blaming puts the burden of responsibility for change on the Soviet Union.    It takes our attention away from the inner work and then asks that our mothers and fathers change so that we can feel good about ourselves.    Here is the bad news.   The Soviet Union changed, but we didn’t.   If you honestly believe that sending your perpetrator to jail is going to improve your life, you are in for a lot more pain.    Imagining that you are Snow White who is a victim of jealousy and deception leaves you vulnerable for a hoard of other evil queens.   Getting out of blame and into taking responsibility is a huge step.   Most of the world practices blame as a way of life and a way to advance.    It is how you get elected president in most countries.   If you are elected president by pointing out the faults of everyone around, then what are you going to do when you get into office?   Exactly.  You will do nothing but pointing fingers at other people, blaming them for all of the problems and then going to war with them.  This is because you haven’t accepted who you are, The Big Bad Wolf.

Consider the following dream.

I was trying to help a girl escape from a government-controlled zombie so I kicked him in the balls so we could run away. I kicked so hard that I actually kicked in real life and it woke me up. I was so surprised.

 There are three figures in the dream.   There is the dreamer, the girl she is trying to help escape, and the zombie.    It is such an elegant process to think of yourself as all three.

First I would like to share a little aside about waking up in a dream.    Several years ago I noticed that a lot of times when people would tell me their dreams they would end up the expression, and then I woke up.    I became very interested as to why so many people have this experience, so then I asked myself if “waking up” was a metaphor just like everything else in a dream.    I wondered if waking up from the dream was when they woke up in their lives because negative experience is often the thing that causes us to change our patterns.   When I started using it with the dream work, it was very helpful to me and to them because I could identify the exact time when they got a wake-up call in their lives.     So you could say that the wake-up call for this dreamer is when she kicked the zombie in the balls.

Above all else I use the quality of curiosity when I deal with the dreaming and transformation processes.   Curiosity is the quality of being able to wonder.   The lead-in is being able to say,  “I wonder what that means.”    In the dreamer’s process I ask myself how kicking the zombie in the balls was a wake up call to her.   She felt surprised which seems to be a very positive feeling in the dream.   The dream says that she woke up in her life when she realized that she could kick a government-controlled zombie in the balls and get away.    This has to be a very empowering feeling.  The dream wants her to remember that the way you get away from a government-controlled zombie is by kicking them in the balls metaphorically speaking.  She also says that she kicked so hard that she kicked in real life meaning she kicked while she was in bed.   This further reinforces the idea that what she was doing in the dream is what she did in real life.  It was so strong that it woke her up with surprise.   She must have thought that was very capable to getting rid of zombies.

Despite the fact that the dream work will take her to realizing that she has an aspect of herself that is zombie-like, there is a very helpful stage ahead of it, which is to find out when she has run into government-controlled zombies in the past, kicked them in the balls, and helped herself and maybe others to escape.   It is ok to jump right ahead to taking responsibility for being a government-controlled zombie inwardly.  Some people can do it, but most of us need to identify the zombies outside of ourselves first.

Where or when in my life have a kicked some government-controlled zombies in the balls?

Having already worked with this woman before I know that whenever she didn’t like the way her life or education was going, she metaphorically kicked the system in the balls and got out with the girl which means that she got out with herself who is the girl in the dream.   In a way you can say that she was empowered to see that what she was experiencing in school was being lead by government-controlled zombies.   By kicking them in the metaphoric balls she was able to leave the system and get positive results by doing something else.  If something wasn’t working for her, she just kicked it in the balls, started finding an alternative solution, and then was very successful.     If school was not working for her, she was always able to find an alternative solution.   She saw the government-controlled zombie-like situation for what it was.  As a result she got the education she wanted.

In dreams that are partially negative and partially positive the positive parts are there to teach you that you have positive resources inside of yourself that you can use in new circumstances to overcome the current problem.    In dreams that are entirely negative like in a nightmare the process of development is from the very beginning.    She does not need to learn a new process in this case.  She simply needs to kick her own zombieness in the balls.   The proper term for kicking a zombie in the balls would be the feeling of empowerment to take control over one’s life and then act on what is best for your true self.

Why is she having the dream right now?  

This is a vital question.   It is the one I am usually the most interested in, and the one that demands curiosity at its maximum.   If she can see that she has the inward ability to take control over her life and find alternatives that work, what are the circumstances right now in her life that make the girl under threat again?  If this were my dream, I would want to know what the threat is.   When you have a half and half dream, some negative and some positive, you know that it is ok to do the full responsibility work for the zombie inside.    This is an important distinction.   Totally negative dreams mean that there is an outer threat as well an inner threat, that you have to do a lot of inner work to be able to face the threat that exists in the real world outside of yourself.    Half and half dreams mean that the threat is coming much more from inside of yourself rather than from the outer world.   You are your own worst enemy.    When you do the work on a half and half dream, the positive energy remains fixed permanently in your life becoming unmovable and unforgettable.     When you only do enough transformation to deal with your current situation in the outer world, then the energy may come and go.    When you recognize that you are the zombie and you change it from that standpoint, you will always be able to kick the zombie in the balls.   You will always be able to take control of your life and leave your current circumstances for better alternatives.

How do I do being a government-controlled zombie inside?   A government-controlled zombie always has the same structure so when she solves this riddle for herself, then the whole world is cured of being this way.   This is one of the reasons she has the dream.   If she can escape from being a government-controlled zombie, she can help the whole world.      The way people become zombies is that they unconsciously accept whatever the culture says is the right way to do things and then they just do them.   They don’t question the culture because the culture is always right.    When you are a zombie inside yourself, you are just going along with your current circumstances as if they are right ones even when they are not working.  Most people who are stuck with being zombies believe that they are just not working hard or long enough.    They think that if they work harder, everything will be better, but it just always gets worse over time when you are a zombie.   It really affects relationships.   Zombies try to work harder, but don’t usually work on improving the relationships with others.

What can I do to transition to the positive pattern of “kicking the government-controlled zombie in the balls”?   The most important realization is that there are some current patterns in my life that are just not working.  I can believe that I have the power to change my circumstances.   I start looking for other alternative ways to solve the problems I am having.   I can just act on them.   New solutions are available and I can be open to them and find them.

 Who am I when I can kick the government-controlled zombie in the balls?    I am very empowered and feel control over my own life.   I look for new solutions and alternative ways to do things.   I act decisively on solutions that are better for me.

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Posted on August 17, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

What to Do When You Have a Positive Dream!

When you have a negative dream, you are being presented with an issue that you have to deal with.    It requires a transformation from your current state to a new one through understanding the nature of the issue, how it functions in you, and then finding the positive energy that solves the issue.   Positive dreams do not require a change from a negative to a positive.   They require that you understand the positive patterns presented in the dream and then begin applying them in your life.    The motivation for evolving when you have a positive dream is the force of attraction.   When you have a negative dream, the motivation is about getting out of the negative state such fear or pain, but positive dreams present a vision and ask you to go for it.

Positives dreams are just as metaphoric when they seem like they are not.   Consider the following dream.

I am in a long jump competition.   I run down the runway and when I jump, it seems like I can stay in the air for a very long time, much longer than I would be able to in real life.

This dream is not about long jumping, but if you were a long jumper and applied the message in the dream, then you would be able to leap longer than normal.   The principle of reading a metaphor in a positive dream is the same as reading one in a negative dream.   You need the quality of self-discipline to look for the defining attributes of the metaphor.     The metaphor in this dream is about leaping.   Non-material leaping is like a leap of faith.     The dream is saying that when you take a leap of faith in your life, you are going to go a lot farther than you might have believed.   It is ok for you to leap in your life right now.  So do it.    When you are dealing with the law of attraction, like leaping it always requires an act of faith.

Here is another dream.

I was on a cliff with some friends.  I was just going to teach them how to fly.  I said it’s really easy.  “Just follow me.”   I swooped down and could just easily fly.    Then all of my friends started following me as we flew over a lake.

 This dream is similar to the previous one in that the dreamer just needs to act on faith about the metaphor.   Flying in your life means to feel like you can do things exuberantly, freely, lightly, and joyfully.    The key is to believe that you can live life that way now.   There is no internal resistance such as when you have fear.  You get the dream because it is the process you most need in your life at that moment.    The dream says just act in this manner and it will produce marvelous results.     The difficulty with using the law of attraction in our culture is that we often believe that for learning to be very valuable, you need to go through a lot of difficulties.     Difficulties often give you ample opportunity for learning, but they are not the only way to advance.    Attraction is one of the main ways we grow and develop.

Learning through negative dreams is powerful, but so too is attraction.   Consider the difference between a child learning how to use technology versus a 50 year old.    Children learn how to use the technology through the law of attraction because they have no internal resistance to what they are going for.    They don’t feel fear or anxiety or any kind of stress.    A 50 year old often approaches learning how to do something new like technology as if it were a negative dream.   A person might present themselves with all kinds of resistance because of past issues related to learning such as the fear of failure or fear of not understanding.   The resistance slows them down in relationship to children who are learning rapidly without hesitation.        Sometimes attraction is available to you and sometimes it is not.   Negative dreams tell you that you have to work through the resistance before turning to attraction.  Positive dreams tell you that the way is clear.

Positive Dreams Exist Outside of Time

I always like to think of dreams as existing in another world that is both connected to us and separate from us.   In our existence as physical beings we are captive to clock time, which defines itself by the earth’s rotation and its journey around the sun.   As such we have a beginning, a middle, and an end.  Time proceeds in a linear direction.   It is sequential.    It helps us from going absolutely crazy because of its predictability and steadiness.    It let’s know that the sun is always going to appear in basically the same place everyday at a certain time for instance.   It would be difficult to plant crops if you couldn’t predict some basic things about the sun.   Something like speech and music make sense because of the predictability of time.   If you didn’t have it, you couldn’t have a beat or have a sequence from one tone to the next.

The dream world does not abide by the rules of time because it does not revolve around the sun or another star.   It exists in its own dimension connected to us and not connected to us at the same time.   It appears sequential and non-sequential simultaneously.   It only really makes sense to us when we can begin to play with the dimensions of time and adjust them.   Positive dreams exist completely out of time.   This means that they have their own sphere and can be inserted anywhere in the time and space of your life to do positive things.

Being able to be playful with time in an essential capability if you want to accelerate change in your life.

When I was a young boy growing up in California, we had black and white television, rotary dial phones, and film based cameras.    Now you can carry all three in your pocket and use them simultaneously.   Nicola Tesla first anticipated using solar cells before the turn of the 20th century.    Over 100 years later facing tremendous environment difficulties, we still haven’t utilized the power of the sun very effectively despite knowing how to do it.    There are some things that are readily accepted and others that are not.   What is the difference?  The difference is our relationship to time.

The biggest difficulties we have in being able implement our positive dreams immediately is our attachment to the present tense.   We would like the now to stay as it is because we have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are.   When there is a material advantage to the present tense, then those who have the advantage do a very interesting thing.    They go out into the future, see that the Nicola Tesla’s ideas are still out there ready to be implemented, get filled with fear that they are going to lose their advantage, and then convince people usually with lies and false data that the alternative better future is extremely dangerous in a harmful way.     Those who are stuck in the material world maintaining their advantage over others are forever cemented to the present tense.  It suits them.    They sneak into the future, see the reality of the future, and then tell lies.    This is why the Equal Rights Amendment was never passed in the United States.   Those with the advantage went out into the future, saw that women would have a fairer share of resources, decision-making, and opportunities, and then made up lies and false images to frighten people about the better future.    It worked.  They were good at doing it.

How do you get out of the present tense and get to the implementation of the positive dream?   Many of us have an equally disturbing problem when we are faced with so many people who have unfair advantages.     We sincerely look at the messes that have been created and then design very interesting and useful solutions that work to solve the current mess, only when we go to implement them, the same group that stopped Nicola Tesla is there alive and well to stop us once again.     You cannot discount the effectiveness of those who have the current advantage.   They do not want things to change because they have played the game by a certain set of rules and ended up a winner.   Despite the fact that their rules leave the great majority of humanity in dire poverty and disease, they want to keep the rules.   You have to wonder.  If a person has made billions and billions of dollars using the rules that give them an unfair advantage and then suddenly get generous in their later years, do you think that they will support projects that put people on equal playing field.    I doubt it.    The solution is to change the rules without them knowing it.   This is how you do it.

You sneak into the future and see the way the world is going to be.    Most of us look into future and get frightened because we see the future through the eyes of those stuck in the attachment to their material advantages.   We see the future as frightening.   When you sneak into the future and see it more positive than you could ever imagine, then it starts belonging to you rather those trying to frighten you from it.    In 1983 a number of us moved to reserve in Alberta, Canada to work in a school in a community that had not had a high school graduate in over 12 years, the attendance rate is school was about 50%, with families where every kind of abuse was going on.    We did one thing that really worked.   We kept telling them that their future was extremely bright and that they would have a positive effect on others.    After only a few years we started getting visitors to the school from all over the globe to see what we were doing right.   Attendance went up to 95%, families started going to treatment in large numbers, and education became a positive value, which led to lots of people going off to university.     We were very sneaky.   We went into the future without telling anyone, saw how amazing it was, and then started telling everyone about it.

 

How do you know that the future is amazingly bright?    The future is bright and extremely positive because it doesn’t exist in the material realm.    The material realm in the present tense is where the problems all exist.    You are not ADD, ADHD, manic-depressive, schizophrenic, poor, or in debt in the future unless you maintain the vision of it.  The vision of it is actually a projection of someone else’s fears.   When someone else tries to scare you about your future, it is because they want to maintain their advantage over you.   They are like thieves stealing your future because maintaining an unfair advantage is a form of thievery.       Where the material world does not exist there are only positives.   The future is not a part of the material world.  It is a non-material reality.    A negative vision of the future is a projection of fear.     If you could actually go out and live in the future, which you cannot because of being in a material body, then you would find that all that is there are your positive attributes along with everyone else’s.    Fear is the element that holds us back from seeing a positive future in a magnificent way.   Fear also maintains the present from becoming a better present tense.   The future is always extremely bright.  When you believe this, you can use it to your advantage.

How do you get to the positive future to exist in the present tense?    I cannot emphasize enough the truth that negative futures do not exist.   There is only an inability to see how positive the future really is based upon fear that springs forth from the current present tense.    The future is so positive that there is no one on the planet who will ever be able to fully see or imagine it.  We can only ever see a small glimpse of it.   If we can escape from being so attached to our fears and our material advantage, then the future will grow extremely bright.   For instance, in the future cooperation and friendship and equity are so abundant, that they have the capacity to completely rid the present tense of poverty.   The problem is that our fears and dominance keep us from seeing how incredible the future is.   We simply can’t see it.     In the 1960s in the height of the Cold War very few people dared to imagine that one day the Soviet Union and the U.S. would be cooperating harmoniously on space projects.    Cooperation always existed in the future.  It never went away.   What left was the negative conditions between the two countries that now allows them to cooperate.    Before there was fear which created a false image of the future that was never there.   When the fear dissipated, so too did the false image.    And it could be so much greater!!!

We can see it in the dream work when we reconsider the very positive dream that has already been mentioned.   It is here again to refer to it.

I was on a cliff with some friends.  I was just going to teach them how to fly.  I said it’s really easy.  “Just follow me.”   I swooped down and could just easily fly.    Then all of my friends started following me as we flew over a lake.

When you have a positive dream, it is the energy that best suits you right now in your current present tense.    As was mentioned this includes exuberance, freedom, joyfulness, and lightness.    It is as if the dream has traveled out of the future and into your mind and said, “Wow, look at this picture.  Do you not want this in your life?  Come and put this energy into your present. It will make all the difference in your life.”    Exuberance is available.   That is what the dream is saying.

Most people cannot immediately put a dream like this into practice even when the dream is saying to have faith and just do it.    It is not something to beat our heads on the ground over.   We are fearful and we are attached to keeping our advantage.  It is our condition, but the future is as bright as we are willing to make it and is as available in the present as we are capable of bringing it to us.

The material condition always communicates to us in a form of fear that is exactly the opposite of the positive energy.     If we have hard time being free and exuberant, for instance, it is because we cannot let go of the fear of being put down and humiliated.    And if our friends are incapable of flying exuberantly with us, it is because they have the same exact fear.

The present tense contains the fear.   Children are usually better at bringing positive energy into their lives because they do not have a huge history of fear.   I often hear dreams from young boys being a famous sports star in their dream.   The quality that is calling to them is excellence.   When they know that excellence is calling them and their parents also know it, they can then develop excellence by putting them in the right environments with the right teachers where they learn the quality very quickly.  Once it is learned it can become generalized to every part of their lives in a positive way.

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Posted on June 24, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

The Label is Only Half of the Story

I had a very interesting situation this past year with my grade 2 physical education classes in Kuala Lumpur.   Normally our department follows a rotation system so that each child has a chance to be on the field, a smaller multipurpose room, the climbing wall, the pool, and then gym each semester.    My grade 2 classes had decidedly more boys than girls and a few with the dreaded ADHD label (everyone’s favorite).

Most people look at an ADHD child and are horrified.   Coaches often look at them and say, “at last!” because they finally have someone gifted that sees the entire space and knows how to move in it.    When I got to the multipurpose room with my classes,  I noticed that those classes with the very active students were really hard to control in that environment because it was a small space and required that the students move less.  In the second semester the multipurpose room was scheduled first, but I decided to skip it entirely for this age group and instead do a huge amount of cardio work which especially included running games across a large space.    As the year progressed I just started seeing the students as extremely gifted rather than hyperactive because they were.

In a classroom where you have to sit for a long time hyperactive students just start causing a lot of difficulties because they need more activity that is physical so that they can develop their giftedness.    Regular classrooms do not allow them to develop their talents that show up on the athletic field more than the class.   They are expected to sit and concentrate and be quiet.   When they are allowed to be engaged in more sport, they get excited and look forward to school.

In my previous schools the teachers always used to punish the hyperactive ones by not letting them go out and be really physical as if that would control them.  It usually just makes them worse.    The problem with most of us is that we see the increased activity as a handicap rather than a gift so we try to extinguish it rather than encourage it.   When you add the factor that physical education is not a very validated part of the curriculum,  then the ADHD kids are just a huge problem for everyone.   When they are seen as problems, then they start acting it out by becoming destructive with all of their extra energy.

The key is to see the energy and the abilities as assets rather than liabilities, as spiritual qualities rather than handicaps.   So what can they do that is valuable?    In many cases a high energy child will be able to see everything and everyone with all of their details all at once.   And then they go about interacting with everything and everyone by trying to connect with as much as they can in the environment.    When an active type is encouraged in the right way and trained with the right boundaries,  they become great unifiers because they always interact with everyone.

School is not about seeing wholes and then doing unity building or interacting with others.  It is about sequence and keeping quiet and doing what the teacher wants.   Nothing could be further from what stimulates in a positive way an active child.   They need to connect with everyone often in a very joyous way and in so doing bring everyone together.    In sport like in a soccer match they see the whole pitch, where everyone is,  where the holes are and how to get from one place to another quickly.

The key with any energy that does not fit the cultural norm like being very active is to look for the positive equivalent and then understand that as a parent you have to find the environment that will develop the person’s abilities.   You cannot count on the way that the culture currently does it.   ADHD is there so that the culture will change, not remain stagnant.

In the same way there is a term called the sensitive child who gets overwhelmed easily by a lot of noise and activity.  This child tends to lose who they are when they are in environments where people don’t recognize their needs.    If you think about the sensitive child as a handicap in the same way that you think about an active child as a handicap, then you may not put them in the environments that develop their special abilities.  What they seem to be able to be gifted in is the auditory tonal abilities.  They can hear tones and be uplifted by them.

In our current culture most people have become tone deaf because of the loudness of everything around us and the fact that music is not taught.   The preferred music is loud and repetitive and usually out of tune.   Sensitive people have built in high harmonics.   This allows them to be in harmony with others and themselves.     The current world is like a foreign environment for them because it is just too loud and too out of tune.   Sensitive people can not get in tune with others when it is so noisy around them.   They first need quieting and then they can start to hear and be in tune with others.

So whether you are sensitive or overly active it is the culture that is the handicap and not you because the culture does not provide for the right kinds of environments to develop these abilities.   Furthermore,  it is a huge threat to some of the current practices in the world to have active and sensitive people fully functioning because unity and harmony bring down greed and centralized power.

 

 

 

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Posted on June 11, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

Memory Loss and the Fear of Negative Authority

If history teaches us anything,  it is that over the span of time authoritarian rule is gradually giving way to relationships built on equality.     Equality is as a huge tidal wave that is sweeping over the world.  One by one old regimes are giving way to ones based upon every person having a voice with greater respect for human rights.

Obviously we are nowhere near to where equality desires to go.   But one thing we all know for sure.    Authoritarian rule is dying out at the same time that the tidal wave of equality is growing.    Authoritarian rule is based upon the ability for someone to dominate others so that they can control space and rule over it so that things flow to them in an unequal manner.   The one thing that authoritarian rule does not want is equal access to opportunity or resources or decision making.     I wasn’t raised in a family that had authoritarian rule so learning about it came as a shock to me more than it probably would to others.   My mother and father have always had a relationship based upon equality.    When I moved to Asia and started doing dream meetings in the various countries,  I found that equality in a family between a husband and wife is a rarity.

Since authoritarian rule is about dominance, it requires  power and fear for the maintenance of its position of privilege.      It goes something like this.    The authoritarian ruler is at the top with systems in place to insure the flow of recognition, resources and privileges.    It is as if the authoritarian person believes that they are a god.  This gives them the right to use fear of punishment, particularly exclusion of something to control the dominance.       People under the authoritarian ruler often believe that if they just work a little harder or are a little bit more obedient,   then the authoritarian ruler will look kindly on them, give them recognition and better access to resources.

When you begin to see authoritarian rulers for who they are and take steps toward creating a life that does not meet the approval of the authoritarian ruler,  then you are automatically seen as a rebel who either needs to be put back in line or be ousted.   A really valued person in an authoritarian-ruled place  is a person who works themselves to the bone for the leader’s end.    There is nothing sweeter to an authoritarian leader than a person who works themselves to death.

If you are a workaholic, like being a lawyer in a large firm that requires 80-90 hour work weeks,  then you know that the leadership is authoritarian and out for its own control of resources.    Sooner or later when you are in that situation,  you will start to experience memory loss even when you have an excellent memory.    Here is why.

I first started losing my memory at work in an international boarding school at a time when the leadership in the school changed to being authoritarian.    I had already been working long hours, but the new leadership started accusing our department of not working hard enough.    Having had loyalty as a strong value in my personality I was very slow to recognize what was happening.    Then one day I started forgetting a few people’s names.   It was weird.  It was like the name vanished.    I can almost tell you exactly when it began.   Here is how I see what happened.

My work, as I saw it was to transform young people’s lives so that they could act out of their true selves and live from their inner positive energy.    However,  when the authoritarian elements came into power,  the priority of the school became much more traditional including trying to copy other conservative schools around us.    So my true self wanted to continue the work because that is my passion, but my ego was under threat even though I didn’t see it right away by being so naive.   My ego was fearful of exclusion so it started protecting me by forgetting people’s names.

Now if you are a lawyer or a doctor who works ungodly hours,  then you have already lost a lot of your memory.   My fear, which was already internally recognized,  actually came true.  I was fired.   So in my next job I thought I should be pleasing to the authority, listen to them, and do what they asked.   My memory loss continued only instead of just forgetting the names of students, which continued, I started forgetting to do the things that transform other’s lives.   It wasn’t that I completely gave it up,  but as long as I was fearful of the exclusionary power of authority,  the memory of helping others to change would disappear.    It was like my true self, my passion, would go on leave.  It would disappear and leave me.     I had had a lot of writing projects that I wanted to do, but when I was under threat of exclusion,  I forgot them and had no desire to do them in the same way that most executives and professionals forget their families.   It is like you know that your family is important and that you should want to spend time with them,  but the fear of being excluded is so much more powerful that you just put them out of your mind and ignore them.   You lose your memory of your family.

In most of my dream meetings in Asia  I have found for most people that the authority figure is in the home and is usually the father or the husband.    Almost from the time children begin breathing they start losing their memory of who they truly are because the family is organized around the desires of the god of the home, the man.   Instead of supporting children with their unique gifts and talents,  the pressure on a child is to do as the family commands, to become a workaholic by the age of 5 or 6 and to give up on any of their own dreams.   Children in Asia lose their memories at a very young age.   The only memory they have is what someone else would have them do.

Of course as I stated earlier this is all changing.   Things are become more equal.   Its force is huge, but the old ways are also tenacious.    The other night a woman told me about a dream that recurs for her where she is flying and feeling really positive and then she loses her balance and goes to the ground, starts flying again, loses her balance, and falls to the ground.   This repeats on and on.    This is the struggle.   Her true self wants to fly, to explore new territory, to do new things, to initiate,  but she looks down the ground, feels the pressure of the old ways, and loses her balance and then her memory of who she is.     You know the world is getting stronger or more equal when you hear a dream like that because she keeps flying despite the conditions of the world.  She hasn’t yet lost her memory the way many people have.

Authoritarian rule does not want flyers.  It wants people who will stay grounded from flying by doing all of the things that keep the old older in place.   To be a flyer you have to find a way to hold onto the memory of who you are.     This is the difficult part.   Most people usually give into the pressure and forget themselves.

I used to believe that the answer to dealing with authoritarian leaders was to get into conflict with them.   And then when I got fired,   I went back and forth between fighting and capitulating.    Either way I lost because in the process of fighting or capitulating I lost my memory of what my true self really wanted to do which was to help people change their lives, the thing that I am really good at.    I can tell you that until recently my memory was so bad that after a three week break from my students I forgot about 10% of the student’s names.     A lot of people call this a senior moment,  but I call it fear.  Fear leads to memory loss.   If you do it long enough, the brain just might not have the resiliency to remember well anymore.

So how do you maintain the memory of yourself, your great capacities and gifts, in the face of authoritarian rule.    This is the big question.    Fighting or capitulation  do not work.    The answer is quite simple even though it has taken me about 15 years to discover.  I am stubborn.    The key is that the open door for your true self to be truly functional is the place where the culture gives out the least recognition.   If you are an executive a big oil company making truckloads of money,  then you can ask yourself where am I least likely to get recognized.    It is simple for most professional people.  The open door is always in their families.   They don’t want to go and be with their families because their families are where their true self was excluded.  It has a lot of pain in it.

When I first started really getting some skills in the personal transformation work with others, I was an administrator in a school.   At that point I wanted to be able to have a lot more practice and then really be of service to a lot of young people.  The open door was working in a dormitory with teenage girls.    For the world I was stepping down in my career,  but for my true self it was I was a young child who got a season’s pass to Disneyland.   The struggle, of course, when you make a move like this is with the ego.   The ego craves recognition that comes from an important position and rebels and fights when it doesn’t get it.    To the true self the activity is the joy and it is all that is needed.

So, as it turns out, authoritarian leaders are not that difficult to deal with.   You just go to where the culture is least likely to give you recognition, and that is where the true self will find its playground in complete joy.    The authoritarian ruler does not want to go there because it is where all of their pain is.  They will stay away so it is free for you.

In my most recent history of firings I was moved from an administrative position where I was public all the time organizing a lot of events to teaching physical education with very young children and having an office way off in the corner of the school.    Although I was hurt in the beginning, now I can see that it is the perfect work for me right now.    I can let go of the negative feelings I had for those who moved me because in the end it was really where I needed to go.    But the big work is always recognition-seeking.

What we won’t do for a little attention!    It is the big addiction.  No question.   Who cares about physical education with young children?  Barely anyone except the children and myself.    And a 5 year old’s biggest issue bar none, attention.    “Look at me, I am so funny.”    It is an issue that most people never get over.     It takes me one entire year of working constantly to switch the attention of the 5 year olds from ego getting attention seeking to being attracted to new abilities and going for positive things.     So here it is.  The authoritarian rulers forget who they are at age 5 right at the time they enter school just like most of the rest of us.   I guess I am in the right place.   Working with an authoritarian leader is just like working with a 5 year who has a lot of power.  Yikes!!!   I prefer them when they are 5.

 

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Posted on June 9, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

What To Do When You Cannot Remember Your Dreams

I don’t remember my dreams.   In all of the dream meetings that I have done in the past 15 years this is the statement I hear the most often.   How can I remember my dreams better?   Why don’t I remember my dreams?   I don’t dream.

Here are some things that might help.

1.   Dreams are a form of communication from the realm of the absolute positive potential energy (e.g. the spiritual realm) through the human mind so that you can actualize the most important potentiality in your life right now.    A lot of the science of dreaming comes from the idea that they come from your own mind,  but I have just found that you can make more dramatic changes in your life when you believe that the dreams emanate from a higher source or  a perfect inner source.    Dream content is just too perfect for your life to be from your own feeble brain.     A great many people that I meet don’t want to believe that the Creator has their best interests in mind. They cannot submit to the message in the dream because they have experienced a lot of abuse of power from higher authority in their families, in the secular world, and in their religious leaders.      If you are in this category where you have a basic mistrust of authority,  you can replace your current images of what the divine is, which for most people in the western world is a white man with a beard living in the sky,  to believing that there an extremely beneficent source of absolute positive energy that has your best interest in mind.    When I came to the understanding that the dreams were perfect for that particular moment in time for my life to work,  I just started being able to make changes in my life at a much more accelerated rate.    It helps me to believe that they are not from me but go through me.    What helped my thinking was this.   The Divine has a plan for me which is much better than my own plan for myself.      It is very frightening notion for a lot of people in the West especially Americans because the success of the American nation was built on a basic mistrust of authority despite the fact that the money says,  “In God We Trust.”       You can consider the possibility that if you do not remember your dreams, you have some trust issues.    It is not uncommon.   People tend to stop believing in God when authority figures act in an abusive manner.  They replace their belief in God with relying on material things and being stable financially.     They turn away from everything that is considered a spiritual phenomenon.   Dreams are in that category.

Ironically,  I have had some Christians tell me that studying dreams is a satanic practice despite the fact that one of the greatest heroic figures in the Bible was Joseph, who was a dream interpreter.    Allowing your dreams to be a source of guidance for your life when you cannot remember them usually means that you have mistrust of authority issues.     So the first real key to remembering your dreams is to ask when and how you have been abused by authority figures.    As soon as you are able to answer the question you will run into fear.

2.  Fear of authority cuts off  memory.   In Malaysia there has recently appeared in the newspapers articles about a group of Muslim women who believe that if their husbands are cheating on them by having extramarital affairs, it is the woman’s fault, that they need to do more in the way of being obedient to their husbands and then dress in sexy clothes and do whatever he wants.     As bizarre as this may seem to the majority of people especially in the West it is the various corollaries of this type of thinking that cause us to lose our memories and forget our dreams.       Wherever there is any type of inequality in a relationship then then tendency for the person who feels smaller in the relationship like the employee to the employer,  wife to husband,  child to parent, is to seek the good pleasure of one regarded as higher.    When the higher authority has little regard for the one who feels smaller,  then it creates a fear reaction in them, the fear of displeasing the authority which could lead to some form of abusive action.     This fear causes you to forget your own true self, your own inner plans, and to forget that the one who is really in charge is the Creator.     The fear of displeasing authority causes you to focus on what the authority wants for you rather than what the divine world wants for your true self.    Your focus is taken off of your true path so you have no memory of it and no memory of the communication that is going to get you on the path.

In a lot of the countries in the East the husband is considered to be the god of the house who demands absolute obedience, respect, and is free to do as he pleases.    Almost every Eastern woman has the experience of not being able to choose her own life path because their fathers or husbands have taken over the role of God and have abused authority for their own selfish aims.   They lead a life of forgetfulness because they fear the displeasure of authority and the abuse that the authority dishes out to control others.

So when you have this great fear of displeasing authority figures, you also believe that  there is a possibility of getting their good pleasure if you just are a little more obedient or perfect in your life, if you just conform to their wishes a little more, if you just work harder to make them proud of you.     So whether you are seeking the good pleasure of authority or you have turned away completely from authority in disgust,  the result will be the loss of memory of who you truly are.     It is even worse for the abusive authority themselves because they have absolutely no clue of who they really are.    In many cases it turns your memory away from spiritual communication because spiritual communication like a dream is associated with bad authority.

3. The answer is reflection or meditation.   The biggest fear that abusive authority figures have is when people begin to ask questions.    In my experience in the American military questioning was considered a sin.   Disobeying an order was the same as treason punishable by death.   It is how American soldiers justified killing innocent women and children at My Lai in Vietnam.    As soon as you begin reflection by asking questions,  your memory starts returning.   I am pretty certain that most memory problems in the world have something to do with the fear of authority.    But if, for instance, you were a soldier in the trenches in World War 1 or in the jungles of Vietnam,  every part of you will be about trying to forget rather than having you remember.   The memories just bring up pain so you push the memory of the horrors down and try to forget them.   They don’t leave.

The first reflection question is always what am I feeling right now.   If you have not done a lot of reflecting, the first feeling will always be fear of displeasing authority.       When you know what you are feeling (most people do not know what they are feeling), then it begs the next question.   Why am I feeling this way?   Reflection means being curious, wondering.    Remembering your dreams is equivalent to remembering how you are feeling.    When you can remember your own feelings at any moment and be with them, then you can begin remembering who you are and where you are headed.     When you cannot remember things like a dream, you can begin to ask questions like who does not want me to question them.   It will take you on a wonderful journey of discovery.

 

 

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Posted on May 25, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

Dealing with Criticism from the Inside and Out: Hearing Yourself Say Positive Things About Your Self

Last night I was watching the French Open on TV.  It was an opening round match between the Brit, Andy Murray and a Frenchman, Eric Prodon.    Andy Murray was supposed to win the match very easily, but as he sometimes does,  he has patches of really bad play.   What is very apparent is that he has big moments of out loud self criticism that only seems to make his play worse.   The announcers wanted to call him a head case but were a little too polite.

Since I usually play tennis a couple of time a week,  I was wondering why we get into big self criticism bashing of ourselves and expect that it is going to produce some result.   Well if you are Andy Murray it is pretty easy to find at least one of the sources.    It is difficult to imagine any press in the world more critical than the British press.    I am not quite sure what it is about them,  but they seem to have huge unrealistic expectations of people to perform at the very top level and then trash them into bits when they don’t meet the expectations.     If you are a top level athlete and you are a Brit,  you are going to criticized regularly whenever you don’t win the top prize.  It makes me wonder if the press believe Andy Murray is playing for their sake.  It would appear so.   I am pretty certain that if you receive a lot of tongue lashings on a regular basis where people point out all of your faults,  that sooner or later it is going to go from them doing the criticism to you doing it to yourself on the inside.

A couple of weeks ago I was playing a tennis match against one of my friends when I found myself doing the “Andy Murray”  thing.   I was making a lot of the same mistakes I always make with my backhand even after lessons.   My racquet face opened and then the ball went flying out of the court.    I started berated myself for the mistakes and things only got worse.    Somewhere in the midst of the negative mind barrage I decided to change the strategy.    Instead of berating myself I just starting telling myself that I have a fantastic backhand.     I repeated it over and over.    And then my backhand just got better and better and became almost my best shot.

Today I start playing the same way.  My backhand was terrible for about three games and I found myself into a battle mental game of self-criticism again.   So something inside of me just told me to repeat what I had done the week before.   I did.  It worked.  My tennis partner later told me today how much my backhand had improved.

For years I have been telling people that outer criticism and the self variety do not work.  The research proves that it doesn’t, but we all do it anyway.  We not only do it to ourselves, we also do it to each other.   We must be mules, because we are very stubborn in the face of the obvious evidence.

So I am just wondering why doing the opposite works.   If you hear yourself saying that you can do something amazingly and you have the ability already, you just suddenly start  performing it better.   The key is that your mind hears a positive voice repeatedly inside saying how awesome you are at something.      When you hear the negative critical voice, the mind gets the message that you are a stupid idiot or the worst player ever and then it sends that message to the body and that is how you act.      When you hear that you do something well like hitting a backhand in tennis, your body just starts hitting better.

When I tell myself I am a stupid idiot I tense up and play worse.  When I hear myself saying how great I play,  I relax, feel stronger, and hit better.     It just works.

The other day I was working with a group of grade two students learning how do transition in a swim-run event from doing the swim part to getting out of the pool and putting on their shoes very quickly.    There were close to 80  seven year-olds so you can imagine how that might test a teacher’s nerves to stay positive.    At first I was a bit nervous because I didn’t know how it was going to go,  but then I just decided to be the positive voice inside of their heads.    For about 30 minutes I just yelled out positive encouraging remarks to the students.    The result was that they were enthusiastic, polite, and able to start self-correcting so that they could get faster.

I don’t think that the self-encouraging voice is the appropriate tool when you are learning a brand new skill as in learning how to do a backhand correctly, but it works very well in performing at the highest level with the skills that you already have.    Learning a new skill seems to need a visual approach where you see your self doing the activity.    Most young people can watch someone demonstrating a new skill and then repeat it.   Internally they can see themselves out there doing the skill and then they try it.   Coaching a new skill requires demonstrating it, telling the students when they are performing it correctly, and then helping them to see how to improve.  It is largely visual.

When the skill has been taught and practiced,  the performance of it outside of practice in real games is reinforced by a positive internal and external voice.  It is an auditory experience.     If you are a parent or a spectator and you want your child or your team to perform better,  then this has a lot of implications for your behavior.    You can simply help the team or the child by being a positive voice inside by pointing out how fantastic someone is even when they are not performing up to someone else’s standard.

Like everything else developing this ability takes looking after your own ego’s issues with it.   If you want your child to perform, for instance, so that others will admire them as in, “Look at my son, he goes to Harvard” or “Look at my daughter, she just cut a recording deal”,    then you won’t be able to do this process because your child’s performance is not about them.  It is about you and your own need for recognition.    If you need to please your parents or please your boss to get recognition,  you will always have a lot of anxiety and be self-critical.   You won’t get this.   It works when you have become detached from recognition issues and do things for their own sake rather than for someone else.      People always ask me why I run or I see them running for the sake of losing weight.   When they ask, I think to myself well if you have to ask, you won’t run long term because you haven’t experienced the inner joy and inner satisfaction of doing something well.   If you run to lose weight, you will only run for as long as you get recognition for losing weight.  Then you will quit and start gaining weight again.

But when you have a positive internal voice about things you already know how to do, you just seem to do them more often and with more joy.     You can stop the habit of self criticism by being aware of it and then just begin saying things like “I am an awesome runner.”    It requires recognizing when and how you are self criticizing and then changing it to a positive voice.

This is a great tool.  I would like to hear from you if you try it and it works for you.

Here is an interesting little exercise.  The next time you are cleaning up a space like the kitchen ask yourself if you are doing it to avoid criticism, get someone else’s recognition, or for the sake of a beautiful and organized environment.     If you do it for either of the first two reasons,  you will be engaging in mental processes that will end up in both self-criticism and criticism of others as well as some sort of paralysis about getting to the work.   If you do it for the sake of beauty,  it is a lot easier to do.   You can say to yourself that you are very good at creating beautiful and organized spaces.

This process is monumental for me.

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Posted on May 21, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

Being Guided: It Isn’t About Psychic Powers.

I am writing this post to explore this topic in my mind for the first time.   If, when reading it, you have additional thoughts, please share them in the comments section.

I don’t give much credence to people who believe they can see into the future and predict it.   I have listened to hundreds of prophetic dreams so it is not like I don’t believe in them.  It was amazing to me, for instance, how many people told me that they had tsunami dreams before the big tsunami in 2004.   This year someone told me that they had tornado dreams right before the big ones hit the South in the U.S..     I just don’t think that a person should go about making a living selling the future  to others.

It is really not that hard to predict someone’s future.    People have issues that are run by their negative emotions based upon what has happened to them in the past.    The reaction to the traumas and negative experiences develop patterns that have fairly predictable outcomes.   The positives are just as predictive as the negative.    If you are filled with anxiety about your future,  it means that you are running a pattern that looks at the future in a negative manner.   I could pretend to be a psychic and tell you that you are not going to increase your income to any degree because your pattern lets me know that you are not going to march into the future with confidence to do what needs to be done.  You will just do what you are comfortable with and that will keep you where you are.   There is nothing psychic about it.   It is straight mathematics.

What I believe is that the future is always a flexible state.    I think that fortune tellers and psychics make their money by having you believe that the future is a sure thing.  And this is because there is hardly anyone in the world that is competent about changing a negative pattern once they are into it.   People tend to keep their old patterns for as long as they live.  So they are predictable.

When you have a negative prediction such as in a dream,  it is there mainly to wake you up and tell you to get out of the pattern you are in.    When you intervene in a pattern even with a prayer or a positive thought, it changes it to a degree which has an effect on the negative future.    A positive dream or a positive prediction is no guarantee either.   It tells you that you have some great energy in you so when you use it in a positive manner, it will have great outcomes in the future, but first you have to do the work to manifest it.

The main problem we seem to have as a world culture, in my opinion, is that people do not believe they can change patterns about themselves that are negative in nature and they do not believe that they can develop new energy in them that they have never had identity with  before.     When we get good at change, the fortune tellers will be out of business.

What do you do with negative guidance?    I had this experience once where a friend was going to meet with a board of people about how to make some positive changes in a business.     The night before the meeting I was concerned about him so I began to meditate about the situation.    In my mind but sort of like a vision off to the side I saw and felt a dark cloud.    I went into the dark cloud to see what it was about it and it told me that the meeting with the board was a trap.     I told him not to go to the meeting because I thought it was a trap.   He said that it didn’t matter because he just wanted to see where it would lead.    The next day he was fired.  The board told him that because he wasn’t happy in the organization that he should leave.

Now it would seem to most people that the guidance I got with the dark cloud and the trap was for the person going to the meeting and not me.   That is what I thought also and why I spoke to him before the meeting.    But really the guidance was for me, not him.   He had already made up his mind on how to go about change in the organization and was taking his chances.    But the guidance for me was that the possibility of organizational change did not lie with that board because they were not really very interested in positive change.    I misinterpreted who the guidance was for so a couple of years later I went to the same board with my concerns.    I had forgotten about the dark cloud because I thought it was for someone else.    Shortly thereafter, I was let go from the organization.

So if you have tsunami dream or a tornado dream,  it might be predicting someone else’s fate, but it is just as much for you as for them.    You have already had  non-material traumatic tornados or tsunamis and now it is time for you to change them into positive forces.    Why else would you get the dream?     The physical world’s disasters are a reminder of our own inner disasters that need to be change.  They are guidance.

A lot of woman come to me about issues with relationships.   They are hoping to get into a relationship that will give them the happy-ever-after feeling and hoping that I will give them a magic bullet to find the right guy.     They are about as misguided as you can get.  Guidance is mostly about knowing that God has your best interests in mind, that you are going to have to do some serious change work if you are going to reach positive and worthwhile ends,  and that happy-ever-after does not exist.     When you ask for inner guidance,   the biggest problem most people have is being attached to the answer they want God to give them.

Guidance is built on the virtue of detachment.   It requires slowing down internally and most of all believing that God knows best.   It is giving your guidance over to a higher mind and then being open to it.   A lot of woman(and men)  make a lot of bad decisions about relationships because they want the happiness they are missing to come from their partner’s efforts to please them.   This is  like a worldwide epidemic that is killing marriages and children.   When someone comes to meet with me complaining about a bad mate,   I can almost guarantee that they are going to keep going back to the person until something hugely dire happens, and then they will just find someone else equally bad.   Sometimes they try to get me to give them permission to stay in the relationship as if I am their guidance.    Internal guidance will always focus on the development of some new virtue to add to your character.     Each virtue will allow a person to be more successful in all of their relationships.

There was a woman who kept begging me to be able to communicate with a man she wanted to have an affair with saying that there was nothing sexual about it.   At the same time she was mistreating her husband making huge numbers of demands that he always acquiesced to.    As long as she was not giving into the affair and staying with her spiritual progress, she was gradually improving.   At some point in her development she stopped listening to her guidance when it required that she begin treating her husband in a more respectful and positive manner.   I have not seen her since.    Had she practiced detachment and kept with the guidance she could have a very successful and long lasting relationship.   When she gives into attachment to the ego’s messages,  she will end up having an affair.

Detachment requires that you do not already have an idea about what the guidance is going to be and be willing to follow it with absolutel faith in the positive outcome when it comes.   There is a story in the Quran about a group of early Christians who were fleeing the persecution of the Roman Empire and were guided to a cave for protection.   They went to sleep and when they awoke it, was some 200 years later.  Everyone had become Christian.  The purpose of this story is to show that there are outcomes awaiting you that your mind could never possibly believe because of your ego’s current state of pain and limitation.   God knows what the positive outcome is going to be so if you trust the guidance and act on it with faith, then the world changes.

The problem is trying to second guess God or pray  for things that are not good for our souls.    ” O God, let this guy be the one for me.”   It is more appropriate to pray for the development of a new quality that allows you be successful in relationships.    You cannot be guided by the inner world of the spirit if you are asking for it to give you a selfish end.  It doesn’t work that way.  Guidance is based upon having a pure heart.   If you want to develop kindness,   you will be guided, but if you want a man to take care of your financial needs, your guidance will be cut off.   God’s voice leaves.

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Posted on May 17, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

Happy Wesak Day: In Honour of the Buddha

Today is Wesak Day in Malaysia.  It is a national holiday that honours the birth, the enlightenment, and achievement of Nirvana by the Buddha.  Although Malaysia is officially a Muslim country, it acknowledges its diversity by having the major religious festivals of its religious minorities celebrated with national holidays.

Buddha's Image at a temple in Siem Reap, Cambodia

The process most associated with Buddhism is enlightenment through detachment.    Much of what we know about meditation has been learned through the practice of Buddhist monks.    It really was not until the later part of the 20th Century that people of the West began to learn more about these processes.    Western material values are based upon how fast something can get done.  If you have to wait for your morning coffee for more than 5 minutes, it is like an eternity to many people.  Life is about rushing.   This is because of the mistaken idea that material comfort is equal to heaven.

The Sign of Life

This symbol is used in many Buddhist temples as the sign of life.  It is not the Nazi swatiska which was actually taken from the East and then turned around and used as a symbol of material power.   This represents the 4 cardinal directions as in the medicine wheel in North American aboriginal culture or as in Christianity, the mind, the spirit, the heart and the strength(body or earth).   Here it is beautifully displayed in a garden representing the many aspects of spirituality that we need to actualize in our life like courage, love, determination, compassion, honesty, and purity.

The feminine representation of spirituality Apsara
Many temples in Angkor in Cambodia have feminine representations of divine power.   In the West we grow up believing that God is a man who lives in the sky with a big white beard,  but the images of spirituality are often feminine in the Buddhists temples.  Apsara is shown with having many different ways her hair is worn.  Since hair is considered empowerment in a metaphoric sense and in dreams, the many ways a woman hair is worn represents all of the many qualities that one can use in the world to do positive things.   That is what it means to me.

Resonating

This  ancient temple had special meditation rooms where when you pound on your heart you can hear it resonate throughout the room.   This shows to what lengths the Buddhists monks went to in order to hear the inner world of one’s heart.

In honour of Buddha and what He accomplished in the world it would be a good day to have some reflection time about how to create a more peaceful world inside of ourselves.

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Posted on May 15, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

Maintaining What is in Your Heart

Last night we had one of our monthly gatherings in our own home.  This one was about how to keep on your own path to accomplish a goal with lots of action.   It was actually the 4th in a series taken from Baha’u’llah’s book,  The Four Valleys.

So to start the meeting we read the quote below and then discussed it.   It is a metaphor that happens to all of us with our own spiritual path and how the Creator reacts to it.

O SON OF DUST! All that is in heaven and earth I have ordained for thee, except the human heart, which I have made the habitation of My beauty and glory; yet thou didst give My home and dwelling to another than Me; and whenever the manifestation of My holiness sought His own abode, a stranger found He there, and, homeless, hastened unto the sanctuary of the Beloved. Notwithstanding I have concealed thy secret and desired not thy shame.

Here is a little of our understanding and then an exercise you can which we all did.     It is important first to take this in a metaphoric way because obviously God is not going to come into your physical heart.   The heart here can mean your love as a spiritual and positive energy.    So when your heart is filled with divine love with its many spiritual distinctions,  then everything you do in the world is positive and for you to do and enjoy.

But we all go through periods or struggles when we allow strangers into  our heart, which are those ego driven desires such as greed, lust, and envy which then make a mess out of the environment and human relationships that create great disparities.   It is worth examining who the stranger is that you let into your heart and what conditions make you more vulnerable.     When the stranger is gone, it makes room for love, which when given out is like a light to the world.

In the old religion preachers used to teach fire and brimstone if we  did not heed God’s messages,  but in this passage it is clear that the consequence of not making room for the spirit is that the spirit goes away.    All we are left with is our greed.   The spirit does not send lightning bolts at us.   Your greediness is its own consequence.     If we want the world to change for the better,  then there is only one choice for all of us and that is to make room in heart for more spiritual energy.       The stranger is not going to go away by one big event brought on by a vengeful Creator.

Our hearts need to be filled with extremely positive energy that replaces the stranger.  It seems to me that the process is an active and daily one.    There are many strangers and they are all trying to make their way in, but there is also positive energy like generosity, truthfulness,  compassion,  joy,  enthusiasm, courage,  reliability, and determination that are waiting to have room inside ourselves.   These are what make the world an amazing place.

So take some paper and drawing utensils and make an image of who the stranger is that comes into your self (your house).    Then also draw the spiritual representation of the energy that your heart wants to make room for.   Ask yourself how you let the stranger in.

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Posted on May 7, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

Satanic Dreams: Allowing the Ego to do its Work

I recently received this really cool dream.   This dream explains a great deal of our everyday problems in life.

“I was in an open area surrounded by tall buildings.    In the dream I kept seeing the devil.   He had two-faces put together in a very wide face.  I wasn’t scared of him.  I just went about my business and would walk right past him.  He was busy torturing other women and wasn’t paying any attention to me.  Finally I was going to go for him and challenge him.  I saw him sitting on the floor beside a woman putting her head in and out of water like he was drowning her.   I was about to go over to him when a young woman begged me not to go over to him.   I took it as a sign and turned on the spot and decided not to go to him.  I knew that I had to leave him alone and then he would leave me alone.”

If you have read anything that I have ever witten about dreams, the most important is this.  SELF-DISCIPLINE.    A dream is primarily metaphoric because life is largely metaphoric.    Don’t be lazy and slip into literal thinking!  Taking a metaphor and interpreting it as literal is the easy way out because it allows you to blame others and stop doing your own therapeutic work.

The dream starts in an open area amongst tall buildings.    This metaphor is the purpose of the dream.   The goal of a dream is always told in the beginning of it.   So the dream wants her to maintain her openness and free spirit even when she is surrounded by the largeness of material pursuits by the rest of the world.   This is a huge challenge for all of us so it is instructive not only for her but the world as a whole.   Materialism surrounds us.

The devil appears to the dreamer as two-faced in the same way that materialism does.   It has a public face, and it also has a private face.    The public face is the promise of happiness, comfort, joy, and satisfaction.   The private one is everything negative that we can imagine.    The devil’s public face (the promise of material pleasure) has a few interesting qualities about it.    First it is a promise of a future, more pleasurable state.  Materialism takes you out of your present misery by having you focus on the pleasures of the material world.  This could be better sex, more money, a new car, a new cell phone, a new video game, or a burger.   He (materialism) is good at taking you out of your misery temporarily with the promise of pleasure brought on by material things.     He is so good at it that most of the world practices it to some extent or another.   You get one or two moments of pleasure and then the other face comes out, the one that tortures you.   If you believe that you have not fallen prey to materialism, you are just in huge denial.   It is why alcohol is marketed so well.

In the first part of the dream the dreamer is free of the materialism because she is in an open space, sees the devil (materialism) and then just goes about her own business.    For instance, she can ignore the devil (materialism) because Satan is an internal, not an external force.  It is part of the invisible negative world meaning it is inside of ourselves.   So when people are being tortured by the devil in the dream, it is self inflicted torture.   They have given into the promise of materialism, temporary physical pleasure, and now they are suffering from it.   They are doing it to themselves.

You can make the devil  into an external force and then blame the government or a bad relationship for all of your problems,  but it is much healthier and life-changing to see the problem as self-inflicted.    Its force is pretty huge especially for women.   Go to any magazine stand anywhere in the world and you will see the torture women put on themselves.    If they look perfect, then they will have a great relationship, attract money, and be happy.    Men believe that if a woman looks like the one on the magazine cover, then they will be happy.

For the most part the dreamer in this dream is free of all of that which is an unusual characteristic for most people in the world.    Then she is compelled to confront the devil over the way a woman is being drowned.   This is where she stops seeing the devil as self inflicting torture and starts blaming external forces. So the question to be asked here is why is drowning different than other forms of torture.    Drowning is the use of water to make a person stop breathing.   In the opening of the dream she is in an open space which means that she has breathing space and can deal with people quite well despite their self-torture.   This shows she is detached from the things people do to themselves in that she does not take them on as hers.    But when she sees drowning she is tempting to go after the devil.    Water is a relational element so drowning is how you stop breathing in a relationship.   Most people believe the devil is the partner (the other person in the relationship) so they heap a lot of blame on their partner for the bad relationship.    Then they leave the relationship and go out and repeat the same mistakes over and over.

As long as you do not believe that you are the devil in your relationships,  you can never grow.   As long as the other person is to blame and not you,  then you end up in the hell of repeating the same misery.   That is a pretty good definition of what hell is like.   Anyway the dreamer is tempted to rescue the drowning,  but then she is begged by the young woman not to do it.    She then turns and leaves him alone assured he will leave her alone.

Why can be she be sure about the devil leaving her alone?   If you define the devil as our attachment to the material world and its promises of pleasure,  then when you are detached from the world,  you  can allow people to be with their own issues (their own satanic forces).    Let the devil do his work and then you can get on with your really great work.    The devil(attachment to our own ego state)  has to be allowed to torture  so that people will wake up and realize that attachment to material objects giving you pleasure is hell on earth.

Why does a young woman come to her as opposed to an old lady?    A young woman represents youthful, enthusiastic, adventurous, and free energy.  If she can be detached from rescuing people’s self torture, then she can awaken all of those qualities in her and be truly free.    The key is not blame others especially men for the troubled relationships that women get into even if they are abusive in nature.   It is so tempting to blame the Taliban, but when you allow a woman in a tribal area to have the issue that her community faces, as opposed to rescuing her from the devil,  then she becomes empowered.

It is, I suppose somewhat ironic, that the richest and most materialistic country in the world is in a war with the Taliban.   Destroying terrorism in the world is a worthy goal.   The injustice and oppression and lack of freedom is unconscionable.  Women’s rights are a good cause to fight for.  Laws should be made and enforced and oppressors put down.    But a woman will never be empowered to have equality until she owns her own self torture, which is her attachment to having a man as a source of material joy.    Freedom is an internal state.    Everyone has their own internal battles which are theirs alone to fight.  The journey is always spiritual to your true self, not material.

The change of leadership in the many countries around the world that we are seeing will surely help a lot of people have a voice.  Dictators really have no place in the world,  and certainly not in relationships.    They continue because we are attached to them giving us material things.

When the dreamer allows herself to be enthusiastic, adventurous and free,  then she can allow others to have their own issues, their own challenges.    By being detached from the devil, she allows the devil to stay present in others lives, and then she can help them be free of him.     If you think of the devil as your own ego,  then you don’t see the devil in the same way as when you see him as an external force that needs to be destroyed.   Your ego tortures you so that you will wake up out of your selfishness and then become strengthened with new qualities that will make you more effective in every way and especially in personal relationships.   By allowing others to have their egos we trust in their ability to change in positive directions even when they live in dire circumstances.

Enjoy your ego.  It is where all of your growth lies.

Try this question.   What is my biggest issue in life?  How does it cause me so much hell?

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Posted on April 27, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

How We Are Going to Achieve World Peace

Act in accordance with the counsels of the Lord: that is, rise up in such wise, and with such qualities, as to endow the body of this world with a living soul, and to bring this young child, humanity, to the stage of adulthood. So far as ye are able, ignite a candle of love in every meeting, and with tenderness rejoice and cheer ye every heart. Care for the stranger as for one of your own; show to alien souls the same loving kindness ye bestow upon your faithful friends. Should any come to blows with you, seek to be friends with him; should any stab you to the heart, be ye a healing salve unto his sores; should any taunt and mock at you, meet him with love. Should any heap his blame upon you, praise ye him; should he offer you a deadly poison, give him the choicest honey in exchange; and should he threaten your life, grant him a remedy that will heal him evermore. Should he be pain itself, be ye his medicine; should he be thorns, be ye his roses and sweet herbs. Perchance such ways and words from you will make this darksome world turn bright at last; will make this dusty earth turn heavenly, this devilish prison place become a royal palace of the Lord—so that war and strife will pass and be no more, and love and trust will pitch their tents on the summits of the world. Such is the essence of God’s admonitions; such in sum are the teachings for the Dispensation of Bahá.     Abdu’l Baha

There are a lot of people in the world that believe that world peace will happen instantly, that something big is going to happen, and then suddenly everything will be wonderful.    They are waiting for God’s magic to change the problems we are facing into a kind of heaven on Earth.     It is a little bit like how psychologists and psychiatrists think about certain disorders.   They describe them as being unchangeable, which therefore need some sort of magic pill to help a person return to some kind of bliss.     I believe that God’s magic is in the quotation above.   It is not an entirely new message for mankind,  but it is perhaps the most challenging and why world peace is so elusive for us.

So how do you do it?  … should any stab you to the heart, be ye a healing salve unto his sores:… How do you get anywhere near this state?   Believe me I have very few answers,  but I am bringing it up here so that we can put it on the table and then all become the cause of world peace.

It seems to me that a great many people can do it over a long period of time.  So let’s say, for instance, that you are in a relationship with someone, and then they commit some kind of betrayal.    The first reaction for most of us is hurt.  When you are stabbed you feel hurt.  This is our protective ego working.   It feels the pain and then sets up barriers to the person so that the hurt does not happen again.   If we are aggressive in nature, then we may even strike back which has the effect of either beginning all out war or keeping the person much further back.    It  does not take a huge leap of thinking to see that countries act in the same way to each other.   Coldness and war prevail.     So after a time,  the hurt feeling often subsides, feelings calm, forgiveness sets in, and then union can happen again.

But I think that what Abdu’l Baha is asking for us to do is to recognize the stabbing, but not feel the hurt and pain.   Most of us feel like we have a right to be hurt, that it is correct to be hurt, and that we can act against the other person because they did the hurting.    This is how we all end up stabbing each other.   The key is not to be hurt at all.     Jesus said to shake the dust from off your feet.   We need thick skins.

The reason that we become so easily hurt has a lot to do with trying to get our love from another person and then they really hurt us.  Who hasn’t done it?  Hollywood has made its entire fortune and the idea that someone else is going to take care of you, to be your everything, and bunch of other nonsense.    We still believe it.  That is the sad part.   The worst idea is the one that says you are like a half person until you find your lover and then you become whole.   Barf!!!!!     If we believe that we are only half a person without the other, then of course we are going to get hurt and feel correct in being hurt when the other person in the relationship doesn’t act the way we want them to.     We all have a great deal of unrealistic expectations on others and try to give them the responsibility for our own love.

So there seems to be two keys.  One is to find your own love in the invisible realm, inwardly, in your own heart as it connects with everything positive, and then the other is to be completely detached from the negative things that people do to you.    The first step to finding internal love (divine love) is to admit to the hurt.     When you admit to the hurt, you are truthful about your own weakness, your own ego.   This is what is means to have humility.    If you can’t do the quote,  it is not very helpful to try to force yourself to do it while still holding onto hurt.     The wonderful thing about exploring hurt is that it is the negative emotion that really leads the way to opening brand new doors.      What I do with hurt when I have it is to say to myself that I am about to open something new in my life.   New possibilities, new relationships, and new processes are all going to happen if I stay with the hurt and deal with it in an honest manner.    Running from the hurt and pretending it is not there is very destructive to a lot of relationships.

So you just say I am really hurt,  but only to yourself not to your partner or friends.    When you say it to your partner,  you are trying to put the onus of change on them because you believe they are so rotten.    Even if they are rotten, it doesn’t matter.   Your hurt belongs to you, not them.    Love your hurt and become friendly with it because it is about to open whole new worlds for you.   It is as if God has come down out of the sky, through the clouds, and given you a big gift in the form of a troublesome relationship.     It is your curriculum.  So the best thing you can do is enjoy it.    I am hurt because I have a weakness that needs strengthening.    You are not hurt because someone else is a schmuck.  You are the schmuck.  You are hurt because you are still not strong enough to deal with whatever others do.

When you go to the hurt inside, it will almost always appear as a metaphor, just like as if it were a dream state.   The metaphor can be like being stabbed, being shot down,  being run over,  having a tidal wave hit you,  or being ripped open with glass.    The metaphor is the key to your own healing because it tells you what process is about to open.     Whatever the metaphor is that you are feeling, the opposite in a spiritual direction is calling you.    So if you feel like you are constantly being shot down by someone by the terrible comments that they make to you,  this means that was is opening up to you is how to uplift yourself and others.     The gift is in the hurt because it gives you the direction.   When you read the metaphor, you know where the divine world is leading you.

The hard part is letting go of the hurt.   It is just so tempting to hold onto getting revenge or hoping for the other person to get punished or trying to make the other person change.    Very few of us do not get into this state.   Fewer yet reach detachment.   Letting go seems to be assisted by the realization that whoever is doing the harmful behavior is equally hurt, if not worse than you are.    You can have compassion and detachment by realizing that when you go after someone who has been hurting you,  it just is like going into a hospital and finding the person hurting you there in a cast and then trying to break another leg or arm.    What good does it do?    They are hurt.  You are hurt.  So let’s all hurt some more.

Once you have the metaphor as in being run over,  then you can describe how the metaphor makes you react in behavioral terms.     I am put down, for instance, by the unkind words of others, then I feel really down which makes me run away and hide.   Or it may do the opposite which is to give the put downs right back at the other person.   Both ways are unproductive, but they are also keys because instead of running away and hiding or giving back put downs, the spiritual world wants you to become detached, find your own love and then be out there fully with positive actions and uplifting comments because these are what heal and make peace.

In my own dream life this used to come out as swearing at the perpetrator.  My wife  even have to leave the bedroom.    I wanted vengeance.     But Abdu’l Baha would have me give the person the choicest honey.    What a long journey this is to giving choice honey instead of vengeance!!!  Is it possible?

Let’s review.  First is to admit the hurt and take responsibility for it because it is yours not theirs to solve even when they are unjust.    Second is to find the negative metaphor like the feeling of being stabbed or shunned because it leads you in the direction of your growth which is the opposite positive energy like uplifting others.    Third is to detach yourself completely from the hurt by understanding that they are extremely hurt also probably from a very early age and than hurting back only makes things worse.    This is is important to really believe that hurting back only makes things worse.

When you are detached from the hurting process, then you can begin to feel the positive energy inside of the new process.   What does it feel like to be uplifted, to feel like you can run forever instead of feeling run over?   What does it feel like to feel be able to do really positive things for others?    When these are implanted inside of you, then you can just start acting on them, and then great things will happen?

But again you won’t be able to do them by just forcing yourself to visualize them or saying a mantra about them.    You have to do the dirty work which is to admit to the pain, describe it, work with it, and then transform it.    Admitting to weakness seems to be the hardest.

One of the questions you might ask is about the justice in the whole thing.   If someone does something to you like sexually abuses you,   what are you to do with your vengeful feelings?    Obviously the inappropriate use of force to get one’s way is intolerable so you have to be intelligent enough to take appropriate steps to protect yourself and others.    If justice is not available for sexual crimes, which it is not in most of the world,  then you can find ways to protect yourself from the perpetrators.    Self protection is very desirable under these circumstance.    Justice is so warped in some parts of the world that a young woman who is raped is often seen as the perpetrator and then she gets condemned.   There is no justice in that.

But justice does not give you healing nor does it help you to grow.   Justice allows us to have societies where heinous crimes are not allowed to flourish unchecked, but they do not heal.   The perpetrator can go to prison, get rehabilitated, and then come back in society, but you stay the same for as long as you hold onto the hurt.   What heals is detachment, and then new growth and positive action.     It doesn’t seem to help the perpetrator by being really vengeful.  It only makes them want to be more negative.

Today I will love my hurt.

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Posted on April 18, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

What I Have Learned About Support?

Sometimes I have a really bad attitude.   At the beginning of this school year in August was one of those times.   I just didn’t want to be there.    The school moved me from one position to the other in what I would consider a non-transparent way.   I moved from what was primarily administrative and events management position to full time teaching with 5-7 years in physical education.

I guess you could say that I was looking for support for a very very long time from those above me in the administrative hierarchy.    It never came.  What did come was a lot of criticism and fault finding.    I became resentful and bitter.   I am a taurus, so holding onto negative things for a long time comes quite naturally to me.   When I began the new position,  I just tried to keep my head down, do the work, and then leave at the end of the day.

And then my body began communicating to me in profoundly negative ways.   The metaphoric place of where one gets support in the body is one’s back.   Mine reacted badly to my attitude.   I was looking for support from outside of myself from up above. It never came.  I felt completely unsupported.   And then my back went totally out.   The pain was so bad that on 3 occasions I went to the emergency room at 2:00 am to get a pain killer so I could sleep.    The most I slept at any one time was 1 hour and even then it didn’t feel like sleep.   I was taking as many pain killers as I could, but it was just sheer hell.    You don’t have to  tell me what hell is like.  I know.    Finally, between the work of a good chiropractor and some cortisone,  the pain subsided.

I think I can be pretty objective in saying that the people above me did not act in good faith,  but I know that I have a certain amount of responsibility to bear for it.   I was mostly hurt from them because I was looking for support.  They just didn’t know how to give it.    On top of that I held things strongly against them for not supporting me.  I allowed bitterness in.

For some reason maybe because the culture teaches it,  I have done a lot of support seeking from outside of myself from the leadership above me.    When I have had supportive leaders, I have thrived, but when people were not so encouraging,  I developed really bad attitudes with a lot of bitterness.     I wish that I had been more self-supporting in the past, but I wasn’t.   I suffered for it.   I guess I just had to learn the hard way.    The hard lesson for me is that leaders are just like everyone else only with power and authority.

I think that going for support from outside myself is a little bit like buying a lottery ticket.    You have about a one in a million chance to get it and even then it is only fleeting at best.   The real support is internal.

The habit that I have is based upon the belief that the leaders have the power to change things in an organization or in a country.   It is a huge myth largely perpetuated by themselves so that you will feel like they are so important.   The really humongous fact is that 99% of the time you are alone in your work.   It is you alone with the tasks or with the discussions.    They are not around and have little effect on the outcomes.   The outcomes of my work are always in my hands.  Even if the top leaders were to constantly encourage me and support what I am doing,  I am still the one doing the work.    I organize the experiences for my students and guide their interactions.     But the habit is to believe that the leaders are so important for the accomplishment of my goals.   The big wake up news for me is that they are not.   I am.

So what does my mind do.   First it imagines that they have a lot to do with my success.  It even sees them as big figures  much larger than me and believes that they can do so many positive things for me.    And then they always disappoint because the reality is that I am the big picture in my life.  They are very very tiny and insignificant.

So what does support look like inside then?  Here it is.   Support is seeing yourself as huge in relationship to the task.   You are huge inside and feel capable and confident to get the job done.   Others are non-existent in the image.  It is you as being large and the task small.  That is internal support.    This is what someone does when they are supportive.  They try to make you seem big so that you can do the task.

Here is how Baha’u’llah describes it to us.

Dost thou reckon thyself only a puny form
When within thee the universe is folded?[1]

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Posted on April 14, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

Achieving the Impossible: Create an Encouraging Voice Inside of You

When you were getting rid of the tyrant inside of you based on the exercise in the previous post, you probably noticed how loud and critical the tyrant sounds.   A tyrannical voice is controlled by volume and so is criticism.

What I found after having my Nazi dreams, was that when the tyrant was present, I wasn’t able to hear an encouraging voice inside of myself.  It is a pretty interesting phenomenon because when I can’t hear my own encouraging voice with sufficient volume, it as if the vision I have for achieving things has no engine.   I have read a great deal in many books about the importance of creating a vision.   Most companies and organizations have a vision statement these days,  but very few have the internal engine that runs the vision.    They do not have an encouraging company voice.

Up until recently mine also was very non-existent.  It was as if the tyrant had drowned it out.   Getting it started is no easy matter because for the most part I had sought my encouragement from others, especially tyrants.  Ironic, eh?  Stupid is more like it.    Seeking an encouraging voice from the outside has its own sets of problems the obvious of which is it is dependent upon the good pleasure of others.   They rarely deliver.  If they do, it is short lived.

The best engine to run your vision is your voice of encouragement with a fair amount of volume.   I cannot speak for everyone’s process, but if you are having trouble doing the things that get you to your vision,  the issue with encouragement is most likely that you take criticism too harshly.  The research in this area suggests that 80% of us take criticism badly and another 10% just don’t process it in a worthwhile manner.   That means that about 9 out of 10 people which is just about everyone turn off their vision when they are criticized.    It is not a very promising statistic because we all love to tell each other what we are doing wrong and where to improve.     Constructive criticism by and large is destructive.   It doesn’t work.

This doesn’t mean it couldn’t work.  It just only works for 1 out of 10.    So what should we do when we have vision that turns itself off and is no longer active like the next day after New Years when you give up your resolutions.    How do we find an encouraging voice inside and then achieve what we never thought possible?    Most people grow up in homes and neighborhoods that are more critical than encouraging.   It is rare to find a culture that encourages.  Most are characterized with jealousy that spews criticism and backbiting.

So when I started doing this work on myself,  I found that criticism was like having my guts stomped on and then I lost my goals and quit relationships.   It was really a surprise to me, but a great revelation.    The wonderful thing about it for me was that it is very easy to fix.

I was watching the movie Invictus the other night which portrays how Nelson Mandela uses the Rugby World Cup to unite a nation.    One of the great things he taught was the importance of forgiveness, to let go of the fast and envision a positive future.    He said that it was impossible to get to the future if you are holding onto grudges of what people did to you in the past.  He was in prison unjustly for 27 years.    This was definitely speaking to me directly.  I was so holding onto a lot of things, but watching the movie convinced me that forgiveness is a powerful tool.  My hurts pale when I think of 27 years in a small cell.

Something would happen to me at the hands of others, I would take what they said and did really strongly, and then I would hold it against them.  The result was a lack of relationship with them and a lack of vision for me.   It always makes me forget the vision.  Aargh!!!     Then I just found that what was missing was an encouraging voice inside to go after my own goals because as soon as the voice is in me,  I can let go of the negative feelings toward others, start relating to them again, and really strongly go after goals.    It is pretty remarkable.

This is what it is like inside.  First I would hear criticism or remember what someone did to me. Then  I would interpret it as having my guts ripped out.  (pretty graphic).  This then caused me to drop the vision, hold onto negative feelings toward others and then quit activities.

The solution for me was to see my goals and then have a really big voice of encouragement inside.   As soon as I did this,  I started acting toward my goals and had decent relationships with those who had hurt me.    What changed? It is hard to say.   The words and actions they used were negative for sure,  but now they don’t matter because the encouraging voice is like an engine that keeps me on track moving me forward despite what others do or say.

I am pretty new into the process to say just how beneficial this is going to be.  All I can say right now is that it is a really great feeling and I am looking forward to more to each moment.

This is how I made the change.   I listened to the critical and hurtful voice, then I interpreted as a metaphor for ripping my guts out, and then I stopped relating and doing positive actions toward goals.     With changing it, I relaxed saw the positive vision listened to my own encouraging voice inside, turned up the volume, felt like everyone was with me, and then just starting acting.

If you have done this already or try it and it works for you, I would love to hear from you.

R.

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Posted on April 5, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

Nazi Dreams: Ridding Yourself of Your Inner Tyrant

This is a post that is from my next book about dreams entitled Life is a Beach.

Recurring Childhood Dream (1950s):  I am in my neighborhood on the street where I am living.   In some dreams Germans are coming to take over the neighborhood.  In other dreams it is the Japanese.   In either case I am always looking for a place to run and hide.   I usually try to hide in one our usual places that we used for hide and seek games.   I awake very frightened and feeling like I am going to get caught.

Recent Nazi Dreams:  I am my current age and am in a building that is going to be shelled by German soldiers.  I am looking for a place to hide and then run.   Then I awake frightened.

It is so easy to become completely undisciplined about this sort of dream.   We know that Hitler was a tyrant and wanted domination of the world.    Therefore, it would be natural for me to deal with this dream as if I have to learn how to deal with all of the nazi-like power that exists in the world because we all know that non-merciful dictatorships exist in lots of nations, corporations, organizations, and families.    Let’s face it.  It is easy to blame our problems on bad leaders.   At least it is a pattern I fall into very quickly.   It allows me to take the easy way out in life.   A bad leader means that I have no power.  It means that I can hide away.

The wonderful aspect of this recent dream for me is that it reminded me of an unresolved childhood issue.   Since no one ever talked about dreams in my culture when I was a child other than saying them occasionally, there was no way that I could have ever resolved this as a child.   It stayed with me for a long time, 5 decades.    This is just such an absolutely amazing thing about dreams and your own life patterns.    Hitler is gone in the real world, but he is still so alive and active in my dream mind and in the way I act in the world.

But really this dream has nothing to do with Hitler.  It is about me, and how I act just like Hitler.    This may be a difficult idea to admit to for you, that you have a Nazi inside of you oppressing you, from which you need to run and hide.  I do.   Where is my beach?   Get me out of this dream.

To solve this dream I first have to think about how tyrants act.    How did Hitler act?   What makes most tyrants very successful is the ability to describe an enemy in such a way as to make them very evil.   By repeating the speech over and over a belief begins to happen in the minds of the people that the tyrant is correct.   Then he can do whatever he wants and achieve the goal of domination.   So if Hitler did it this way, could it be that I am a tyrant to myself in the same way that he is to himself.  Yes!   It is.  I do.

How do I do it?   I have a part that just finds lots of things wrong with me, a negatively self-critical part.   Then I repeat the criticism over and over.  Whatever I do wrong, I self criticize inside.    Then I believe that my true self is bad.     This is because the emanations from my true self are not always in line with everything else in the culture around me.    My true self does not go along with certain parts of the way the culture is.   It is different than the way the culture is.   Hitler found the Jews.   I find my own true self and torment it.     It gets me off the beach fast.  I run and hide.

The reason that Hitler was able to get into power was because people listened to him.   The more he spoke.  The more they listened.   When he had enough people who believed him, he could just do whatever he wanted.    So the key to overcoming my inner tyrant is listening.   I am listening to the tyrant trying to find its way to the top in the way society so it can have domination.    As a child I didn’t have any power over my ego.  It was just too strong as a tyrant.    The dreams were trying to awaken my true self, but the tyrant just wanted it place in the culture as it is.     For a long time I was good at it.   I was good at listening the tyrant and doing what the culture said I should do so I could advance.

I wish that I could say that I have finished with the tyrant, but this dream tells me otherwise.   I am not on the beach.  I am running and hiding from my own Hitler.   Getting to the beach which is the fullest expression of my true self in the outer world means that I turn off the tyrannical voice trying to dominate me.     It is just so strong and persistent.  It is just like Hitler, but if the dominating voice is no longer in my head, then what happens is that it all of the positive memories about my true self are freed up and ready to act in the world.

The tyranny goes away as soon as you just stop listening to it.    The true self is connected to the Highest Source.    When it is remembered and let out, it is always guided to the perfect path, the beach in your life.     Turning off the volume switch on the inner tyrant is no easy matter.   The belief is just so strong.  It makes you want to run and hide from it in order to conform to its power.

Just turn it off.  Remember the true self and all of its abilities.

The Inner Tyrant Exercise

Who is the outer tyrant in your life?   __________________________________________________

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How does the outer tyrant act toward you?  __________________________________________

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Identify a metaphor for who the inner tyrant is inside of you?  (mine is Hitler)

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How does the inner tyrant speak to you?   What does the tyrant make you do?

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How do you give into a false life with the presence of the Inner Tyrant?   How do you run and hide?

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What would begin to happen to your life in a positive manner if you remembered your positive virtues and started using them in the world?

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What are some of the new abilities you would develop if you stopped listening to the tyrant?

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To allow the inner tyrant to go away first listen to how it sounds on the inside.  Notice how loud it is.   Then listen to a really encouraging voice that is also inside your mind.  Turn its volume up to see what it is like.

Once you do this you will have two voices, a negative tyrant trying to protect you from danger and an encouraging voice trying to get you to your goals.     To get the tyrant to stop start in your head with the tyrant and then turn the volume down.  As you are doing it, turn the volume up with the encouraging voice.

Repeat this several times until the encouraging voice is the one that is in your head.

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Posted on March 31, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

Being an Individual and Being a Group at the Same Time

Early this week Debby and I spent 3 days among the aboriginal people of Malaysia, the Orang Asli.   In Malay the word orang means people and asli which original.      An orangutan literally translated means a person of the forest.     Many of the Orang Asli live in an area known as the Cameron Highlands which is actually a bit cooler than KL and a large percentage of them are members of the Baha’i Community.    Most of my days are spent playing with young children in p.e. classes so not too long after we arrived at one of the villages we were playing soccer (futsal) on a very small pitch.    What was so impressive about the children was that no one ever argued or fought or said unkind words.   They just played extremely hard with impressive skill.

Later on that evening or the next evening I gave a banana to one of the small boys.  He was very excited about it,  but it seemed like his first concern was for every other child in the village.  So he went around to all of them and brought them over to me to get a banana.    It was very impressive because I cannot ever remember being around very many children who thought about others before themselves nor begged for more.

When we arrived at the village,  there were a couple of the Indian Malaysian Baha’is traveling with us who had already lived in that area on periods of service so immediately the people started talking with each other about where we would stay and where we would eat.    The children and others frequently change which place they are sleeping in from one night to the next because it is as if everyone is a relative and everyone’s house belongs to everyone.   This is where we stayed on the second night.   It is a bamboo house with some tree logs for support and an aluminum roof.   It took the owner one month to build it.   It is very comfortable on the inside, quite warm, and had no mosquitoes or insects.  It was extremely clean.    The only discomfort for Debby and me was that they only sleep on mats, no mattresses so we were a bit sore after two nights.   They, of course, are perfectly comfortable.

In the evenings we sang along a lot, chanted prayers, and ate with the young people.

So far the Asli culture has not been devastated by alcohol or drugs so in many ways they are very strong spiritually.    It would be hard to find a group of people who live more harmoniously as a group.   The social virtues are ever apparent. This is a group of young woman playing a game together something like kick the can.

The problem for the Aslis happens  not because of the social virtues.  For me they are bright shining examples of cooperative living.  They are generous, sharing, and kind to each other.  The children are loved and elders respected.    What is difficult is when they want to respond to their own individual uniqueness because in our world there is no place you can go where people live in harmony with each other and encourage the development of one’s unique gifts.

Most of the world has been overtaken by greed, jealousy and constant comparing of status and wealth.   This leaves most of us in a state of lonely isolation from each other.   The Aslis have tried to go onto higher education in the cities, but the existence is just so full of emptiness and isolation that they cannot take it.   They return home and live in the place where there is always an abundance of love and friendship.

This is the big unresolved question for the world.  How do we develop environments where people can develop both their social and individual aspects?    Does even one university in the world look at a person’s test scores on their ability to place the needs of others over themselves?    Wouldn’t it be interesting if you couldn’t get into university if you showed signs of being greedy?   What if you had to be competent at giving away what you have to others in the community and on how well you were able to make friends and keep them.

I think that  science students who have a driving ambition to achieve a great deal in making discoveries  probably first should spend a year among the Aslis so that deep with their souls they use whatever they develop for the benefit of mankind and not for their own selfish desires.    We have seen what the world has created by rewarding socially incompetent human beings with large sums of money.    They create a socially incompetent world that believes that technology and science are going to save it.   Let’s get over the idea that people who have amassed huge sums of money by acting in their self interest have any business whatsoever trying to better mankind until they have spent a year with the Aslis.

When you have a chance, spend a night in this village. You might just learn how to look out for each other mo

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Posted on March 25, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

Why We Hate Children

Ok, I admit it.  I am trying to be provocative.  But it is really true.

We despise children because we despise ourselves.   It is pretty simple.     We don’t want them in our lives because we don’t want ourselves in our lives.     Here is what happens.  Children are full of dreams and aspirations and energy.    When we(cultural we) look at children,  we resent the fact that they are so full of optimism because we have long turned our backs on dreaming.    We have given into someone’s material quest.   We are surviving.   We hate children because they have a process that we have lost.  Dreaming.  So we try to keep children excluded from society.  They are more like nuisance than a joy.

I would say most people spend most of their days waiting for the time when they don’t have to work anymore because their work is someone else’s dream and not their own.   They certainly don’t look forward to going home to their children because then it is a double-in-your-face-I’m-not-living-my-dream existence.

If you still have dreams, you automatically love children.  However,  if the dreams are ambitious ones about moving up the ladder or keeping up with the neighbors, then you hate children because advancement up a ladder is not a dream.  It is the pressure you feel from what someone else told you your dream should be.     It is hard to not go for advancement because that is the message all around us in every type of media.   But it is not dreaming.   You know you are not dreaming real dreams when you hate children, when children are a pain rather than a joy,  and when you would rather be at work than with your own children.

When you are dreaming your true dreams,  it is because you are responding to your own positive energy from deep within you.  You also automatically recognize the positive energy in children even from a very young age so you long to be around it.

You could be reading this and thinking ok I am a sell-out.  I will quit what I am doing and find my real passion and do it.   That would be extremely wrong.    Maybe you are a doctor who always wanted to be an architect or a car mechanic.   Maybe you are building houses when you would rather be  a concert pianist.   Don’t quit.  Please don’t quit.   The problem is not what we are currently doing.  It never is.

The problem is the lack of dreaming.   Dreaming is the ability to entertain a possibility that comes from an inward source, not an outward one.    Most of society is based upon responding to outward stimulus, rather than inward ones.   If you have ignored being a pianist,  you don’t have to throw away the job that supports your family.  You simply have to start playing the piano.    When you find the love in the piano playing, it will automatically generalize in a positive way to every part of your life.     You will start loving children because you are dreaming.

You don’t have to dream big to have it have a positive impact into every part of your life. You just have to do it.   You can do it by asking yourself what things are attracting you to your life or what is calling to you.    When you respond,  you are dreaming, but don’t quit the things that support your family.      The logic is simple about how this works.   If you are a doctor who starts playing the piano, you are going to start listening to what resonates within your patients.    If you start a program of running, then you will encourage your patients to get well by doing positive things for themselves.     I think it is important to accept the reality that you are where you are by reason of who you are right now.     It is just not wise to throw away responsibility to become someone different overnight.

Just start dreaming and it will be like magic and then things will change as you develop.  You will start loving children.

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Posted on March 20, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

Getting Out the Door By Overcoming Hurt

So, there you are sitting on your couch, the plan you had of becoming fit and doing great things is only a vague distant wish.   You reach for another cookie, a soft drink or beer, and then turn on the TV to watch some meaningless mind-numbing soap opera.

Why can’t you get out the door?   Where did the dream go?   Where is my will-power?

There is always one big emotion that keeps you on the couch of heedlessness,  the emotion of hurt.   Its favorite strategy by far is procrastination.    Whatever you are not getting to in your great plan of life starts with hurt.    Everyone has been hurt because hurt arises from having been abandoned in one form or another.   It is part of the human experience in the age we live.    Perhaps distant future ages will not suffer it as we have, but for now, the unity of the world that we all long for has not yet arrived.

We keep apart and keep away from acting and seeing our dreams by hanging onto hurt.   Maybe you have been fired or ignored in a relationship or severely criticized and put down.    Hurt is the feeling that allows you to close the doors to opportunities and protect yourself in a shell of negative thinking.     When you are hurt, your mind is taken over by obsessive negative thoughts that can last for decades.   It is a living hell.

Most of us hang onto hurt for a long time because we expect someone else to fix it or heal it in someway by acting toward us in a kind and loving way.    We can wait a long time, can’t we?  It maybe the single most difficult act in the human experience to overcome; to let go of expecting someone else to do the right thing and heal our pain, but it is exactly what is needed if we are to get out the door to our dreams.

The difficulty with hurt is the infection it causes in the mind.  It is like it entraps our mind in negative thinking that spins itself over and over.   If your mother abandoned you or your boss treated you unfairly or your friends gossiped about you, then you feel hurt, and your mind believes that they should fix it.   Then your mind starts thinking of all kinds of negative things to do so that they can fix the hurt, but instead of any positive results, you stay in a heap of hurt and negativity, and  no one wants to be around you.  Your dreams go on the procrastination button.

There is only really one way out of hurt as painful as it maybe to admit.    The way out is first to realize that you allowed yourself to be hurt by the abandonment.   Not everyone automatically feels hurt over abandonment so it isn’t a given that you have to feel it.   Someone can do something negatively to me like viciously criticize me,  but I am the one who allows myself to be hurt.   I do something to allow the hurt to function and then close the door.   What you do, in an unconscious manner, is to believe that you need to close the door and protect yourself from the behavior of another.   To get out of the hurt you can believe that protection can be a choice, that you don’t have to feel hurt.   You can actually experience detachment in otherwise hurtful situations,  by believing that there are other options besides protecting yourself.

Usually hurt is experienced as a metaphor by people so when it is dealt with, it is good to describe it as a metaphor.   It may feel like being stabbed in the heart or stabbed in the back, or that your guts are being ripped out, or that you have been trampled over.    These are a few of the metaphors.   So ask yourself  what the hurt feels like inside.  What is the metaphoric experience?

When you are detached from the metaphor,  it no longer affects you.   I have heard people say that their whole family turned on them as if they were surrounded by a gang that beat them up.    When you are detached,  you can see that it is the other person and not yourself who is hurt before you became hurt.   This changes everything.  Believe me it does.  Try it.   Instead of feeling like you were stabbed in the back, step out of your body and see the stabbing and the person doing the stabbing and you will notice that they are hurt from a former stabbing.    They only ever repeat what was done to them.

Now ask yourself as you are being stabbed, but watching it from a distance how that person is ever going to heal your hurt.   They are NOT going to do it.   So get over that idea.  They are in too much pain themselves.    They actually need your healing, but not the other way around.

As soon as you get to detachment over hurt by seeing that the person doing the hurt is actually full of hurt,  then youcan  drop the bag of Oreos and head out the door with your own plans.   When you are detached, your mind will automatically become much more positive and optimistic, but first you have to get to a state of zero expectations from the other person.   Don’t succumb to it.  It is deadly and is like being caught in a whirlpool, like being on a permanent spin cycle inside your washing machine.    Drop the oreos and get out the door.

Review of the steps with hurt.

1.  Remember the dreams that you are currently procrastinating.  Write them down.

2. Describe the hurt in metaphoric terms.

3.  Detach yourself from the hurt by seeing the person doing the hurt as the one who is really hurt.   Accept the fact that they are not going to heal your hurt.   Then just let go of all of the pain.

4.  Take the first steps out the door to your dreams and then allow yourself to be guided.

I wouldn’t mind hearing your metaphors on the hurt issue and what your experience is after detachment.   They may help others with their own hurt.

I think I will go take a run.

 

6 Comments

Posted on March 10, 2011 by dreamsforpeace

Abandonment Part 2: How to Get to Your Very Best

My Short History of Abandonment

Up and until 1997 I never had an employer who deliberately abandoned me.  Mind you I have had a lot of moments of  incompetence as probably most people do,  but no one ever asked me to leave my job.   Then, when I felt I was getting really great results in that my students were  changing their lives,  our whole department was given our walking papers.  It was a bit ironic to  experience abandonment because our department promoted concepts of bonding as if  we were family.   The decision was made to change from a family bonding orientation to a more detached regimen.    So while I lost my job, the school also lost students after the firings.   It hung on for 10 years, but never regained the numbers.

My next experience with abandonment happened in a very similar manner.   When our data was showing very positive growth rates with students and the unity of the staff was on the rise, the ownership of my school decided to end my relationship with it.    After that time the school lost about one-third of its population.

My recent experience happened after I had had a whole series of really positive evaluations and remarkable results despite the size of the school in comparison to others.    My supervisor made up a bogus assessment of me and then used to say I was incompetent.   The data showed very different results.  And now just about 8 months after the abandonment, the participation levels by students in the programs I managed are falling.

The reason that I am writing this is because justice is just not all that apparent in the world.   We have a large number of leaders who seem to be so threatened by positive results, so overcome with jealousy, that they won’t even take a detached look at the data.   Instead of being fair, they feel that people who are competent in their work are going to take away some of their recognition.    The more competence that is shown, the more the jealousy takes over.    There is not a causal relationship between who advances and how competent they are.

The playing field in the world is marked largely by injustice.     Let’s face it.  If you grow up in Libya,  the freedom to pursue your desired vocation is just not the same as other places.     There are a lot of books about finding your passion, etc., and going for it,  but injustice is a big factor in shutting a lot of doors.  It is undeniable.    I am just thinking about what poets went through in the Cultural Revolution in China or any person from the city in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.    When injustice is the ruler,   the most competent folks are seen as the biggest threats.

This post is not a rant.   It is about abandonment.  What do you do when the rug is pulled out from under you when you are at your best?     When you get abandoned, how do you transform it to thriving?

The first and most important thing to recognize, which is by no means easy to see, is that they are abandoning you, you are not abandoning them.    When I feel abandonment,  I suffer.    When I see it as them abandoning me, they suffer.   It is simple. eh?     Not so easy I am afraid!    The problem emotion is hurt.

If someone abandons you, and then you can see it as their issue, not yours, then it means that some brand new big doors are going to open for you.   This is a fact.   This is not new agey stuff.    Hurt is the emotion that signals new openings.   All you have to do is get over the hurt.

So step one is to see that they abandoned you, not the other way around.  Step two is the realization that because of the abandonment new doors are going to open for you.

Step three is the BIG ONE.   Step three is remembering everything positive about your life and everything positive that has happened in your life.  When you invoke positive memories on a grand scale, it releases huge amounts of positive energy in you.   The only problem is that if you are stuck in hurt, you cannot get to positive memory.   Hurt keeps you stuck in negative memories and freezes the present tense.  Letting go of hurt and seeing them as abandoning you, opens up all of your positive past memories.   This gives you huge energy.     I can honestly look on my firings as them losing me and what I had to offer.   It was their loss, not mine.   At the moment of the firing I didn’t see it that way.   I suffered a loss of energy because I was stuck in hurt and then I lost my memories.

When you remember something in a positive way,  then it feels your body with positive feelings.   Those feelings then drive you to doing lots of great things.   Then the doors open.   What happens to the people doing the abandoning and the reason they suffer is that instead of taking the opportunity to get closer to people,  they distance themselves from others.   The further they are from others, the more they suffer.

But there is a dynamic which I am not too sure about yet,  that as long as I am hurt, they don’t have to feel the suffering of their abandonment.   As soon as I am detached from the hurt, then they feel it.    Strange!  Care to comment?  Feel free.

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...
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