Inner Michael

Dreaming is a faculty of the imagination. It is also a faculty in service to human health and happiness. It is the way we create our reality and our world. Before something can exist it must be dreamed. When the dream is clear, we can dream the thing into existence. We design a schematic or blueprint in our minds and begin the birthing of the dream in the place called “imagination.”

Sometimes a spontaneous dream informs; sometimes it warns; sometimes it fortells and sometimes it inspires. The dream informs the world and forms the world. We dream the “American dream” as in pop cuture and think it means buying and owning a house and collecting things. We dream that this will make us happy. We dream that more, more, more and better, better, better will make us happy and lead to contentment. It doesn’t. Some people take a lifetime to find that out. Their lives are full of material things but empty of any spiritual treasure.

There is the spiral dream: we dream of happiness, of attainment of going up, up up and of personal and spiritual fulfullment. The other dream is the downward spiral of dark and agony and tragedy. The dark cloud is the reality and follows us and makes more of itself. It is the pregnancy of precipition that determines the outcome of the dream. 

“Precipitation” in this context is similar to the precipitation of rain. The clear sky (the clear slate of life or tabula raza) becomes filled with clouds (ideas, beliefs) and the more focused on the clouds, the more they materialize and the more pregnant they become and the moisture collects and collects and soon it rains. Human consciousness works like weather– if the clouds are of fear, anger and rage or sorrow, they ampify and become storms. It the precipitation is love and gratitude, that is what collects in our atmosphere, and our life rains love instead. We make our own mental weather. Said another way: what we give our energy and focus to becomes our reality. (That is not to discourage feeling and the processing of feeling; that is to caution about dwelling there or getting stuck.)

The dream of the human has a duality. In the natural world there is no duality but there is flow of a natural order– the cycles of birth and rebirth, of decay and renewal, of death and emergence. Circles and cycles. And there is another principle when cooperation with the universal laws is undertaken, There is the spiral of progression and growth. It is a dying of the old, a letting go, and a rising to a new level. Rebirth.

There is a Divine Dream and a Divine Dreamer. All indigenous cultures embrace that belief and most modern ones acknowledge it albeit passively. When the universe follows its natural law the cycles of gestation and destruction follow a spiral path– in service to the advancement or ascension of the species. Ascension is not something we do once. We are constantly ascending. But sometimes we are asleep. We don’t recognize that there is an INTENTION about life. We mistake it or miss it. We sleepwalk through life thinking: “this is it” until we find that no, “this is it!” And with each disappointment we despair because it’s not.

We dream the shadow. We dream the light. We alternate those dreams until we awaken to the understanding that both are parts of the same thing. We express our shadow when we are expressing the opposite of who we really are– in our brilliance. We mistake the brilliance for God. We separate from our own brilliance, call it “God” and make it unatainable. We ignore the Divine Blueprint within and we mistake people as “other than” or separate from us. The separation is part of the dream. The awakening is that we are that and we are all one.

We don’t like shadow because it doesn’t live up to our ideal of ourselves, so we, in our ignorance, try to amputate it or ingnore it or deny it. Instead of allowing it to teach us with its power of feeling, we disengage from the power and deny the shadow by constructing an “I” that is separate from “you” and “us.” Then we structure an ideal “I” from the faculty of judgment. Our ego, in its insecurity, can’t stand the negative label and its associations, so we imagine an ideal self, create it to be real and declare that anything that does not meet this standard is “evil” or “separate from me” or “them.”

We begin to project this undesirable aspect of ourselves by seeing it in others, labeling them and condemning them. If we don’t fit our ego’s ideal, we distract ourselves with business or crazy-making. We whistle past the graveyard: deny, distract, medicate, anesthetize, or amputate. We take pills or drugs; we shop; we overdose on TV or Facebook; we engage in gambling, sex or other addictions, we gossip about others, join the cult of religion or celebrity (they are similar) or we play games– anything to distract and make us forget how inadequate we are (ego’s shadow.)

Each of those distractions offers the polarity of shadow and light and require another choice. We can run from self or we can face it and FEEL. We can bear witness or we can engage in busy-ness (business) separate from feeling. We can choose people or corporations, democracy or fascism, integrity or deceit, the natural world or concrete jungles, money or value, nature or nurture. We can disconnect from the world or engage with it in all its infection of human messiness.

We can make wars and indenify with who wins or if we don’t have the stomach for war, we can do that with our favorite football team. It’s the same impulse. We can cooperate or compete but both pastimes involve people, so we have to deal with them. We can make them an “enemy” or “monster” or we can glimpse the boogey man in self and instead of fearing him into amplification, laugh him into oblivion. We can conscript others into our “little wars or big wars” of conflict, bullying, pointing fingers, proclaim others inferior or superisor or play the law enforcement/incarceration/punishment/execution game. We can create killing fields and pretend that we are killing someone other than ourselves.

We can distract ourselves individually or collectively and create a kind of cournterfeit “relief” by finding someone to point to who is so much more shadow than we are! Maybe it’s our grumpy neighbor, our awful teacher, our weird classmate, the cast of a reality show, the celebrities in rag magazines, the inmates at the prison, or some other “bass ass” to wear the costume of shadow for us. Maybe it’s another nation, race, ethnic group, tribe, gender, religion, and we dislike them so much we make war to eliminate them. What we are fighting in these instances is our own beliefs. We are fighting our own shadow.

Or maybe we amuse ourselves by chosing an individual who is “different” and very visible in the world, a famous person– and we heap judgments upon him. We ridicule his voice, his nose, his face, his behavior,  his music, his ideas, his marriage, his children, his choices, his home, his style, his art, his life. And then we could ridicule his admirers.

Maybe we could escalate that practice and humiliate, ridicule, condemn, judge, laugh at, loathe, strip any dignity or humanity from him and make him the world’s poster child for everything wrong with being alive and human. Maybe we could get a little relief by projecting our individual shadow and monumental relief by marginalizing him and making him “the other than…” (likeable, respectable, Ok, or even human) for the whole world. Maybe we could heap the uncomfortable collective shadow on him. We could forget he is human and bully him as long as he lives and we could encourage others to bully him too. We could call him names, look for anything he does that we could call “weird” or “bad.”

If it is convenient and he is an easy target, we never have to look at our own darkness or the darkness of the world. We never have to acknowledge our own shadow. And we never have to admit that is it our shadow that created him with our layers and layers of projections. Surely that is better than taking a good look at our broken selves?

We can sleepwalk until we are no longer asleep. Until we are awake– whenever and however that happens. We can allow a deeply shattering realization to shake us awake. Then we might understand our part in creating the world. We might look at creation, understand there is a plan, appreciate its utter elegance, its stunningly simple fairness and justice, understand that our humanness with humility and see the accompanying emotions in clarity: they are tools to find the divine– in Self. 

We can come to understand that ego, whether in self or others, is an infant. It is a not-fully-developed-or-self-appreciating-part-of-me. (And you.) It wants to exist even though it doesn’t, and insists upon being fed in order to come out of hibernation. It is asleep. No amount of feeding will make it real or wake it up. It has tantrums, makes judgments, condemns, isolates, bastardizes, complains, wants attention (or demands it,) seethes with ‘righteous indignation’ and in its infancy– condemns with words, gossips about, bullies, maims, beheads, boils in oil, kills and makes war upon others of its own kind as it fails to recognize brothers in others.

A shock, trauma, tragedy, despairing circumstance or spiritual emergency can awaken it. And the dreamer can awaken or go back to sleep to await another opportunity to come to an awakening. One can fight with the dream (or fight with the imagination) or one can embrace it as the infant it is and love it into its bright shadow and the alchemy of immortality.

Fight or flight. Engage or run. Explore or deny. Feel or numb. Invite the holy spirit or push it away and make it unreachable. Step into it and be its effect or step outside it an be invincible. Do the dance forever or do it once. No matter. The dance will wait for you. The dance is the way in and the dance is the way out. It’s all dance. It’s all a dance. So dance. Or not. Dance seriously. Or laugh dance. Create the dance or dance the creation. Or dancing the dream, DANCE THE DREAM awake.