Active Dreaming

More great reality sandwich posts

http://www.realitysandwich.com/three_modes_active_dreaming

The initiation may come in the way familiar to true shamans, when a power of the deeper life seizes us and tears us apart and consents, when we are re-membered, to become our life ally. Angels can appear as fierce as tigers, or as tigers. We don't really need to hunt our power; our power is forever hunting us. To awaken to the guide in our lives, the one who does not judge us and is with us always, we don't have to cross the desert and fast on the mountaintop, unless we have forgotten that the soul of the soul is always near, and is lost to us only when we are lost to it.

So what is Active Dreaming? The phrase is a provocation designed to shake us free from the cozy and constricting assumption that dreaming is a passive activity, something that happens when we go to sleep and that may or may not amount to anything more than random chemical washes in the brain or the processing and dumping of "day residue." I am tremendously grateful for the gift of spontaneous sleep dreams, the ones we don't ask for and often don't want. They hold up a magic mirror in which we can see ourselves as we truly are, which can be embarrassing and mobilizing. They goad us to perform course corrections when we have gone badly off track. They serve as a voice of conscience. They preview challenges and opportunities that lie in our future, giving us the chance to make better choices on our life roads. Sleep dreams show us what is going on inside the body, diagnose developing complaints before medical symptoms present themselves, and show us what the body needs in order to stay well. We solve problems in our sleep and can wake with clarity, energy, and direction in a life project that we lacked the night before. And, as the First Peoples of my native Australia teach, our personal dreams may be a passport to the Dreamtime, which is far more than the Dumpster of the personal subconscious; it is the larger reality in which we can meet the ancestors and our authentic spiritual teachers.

Enlightenment is Physical: An Introduction to U. G. Krishnamurti

http://www.realitysandwich.com/introduction_u_g_krishnamurti

The sense of wonder transformed itself into a question: 'How do I know that I am in that state?' The question burned through him like a maddening fury.

On his way back to his chalet, he sat on a little wooden bench under a wild chestnut tree overlooking Saanenland with its seven hills and seven valleys bathed in blue light. The question persisted; the whole of his being was possessed by that single question: 'How do I know?' It was like a question in a whirlpool. He had become the question.

There was silence; it was the mind that was aware of the silence, not simple awareness. When Krishnaji said what is is a comparative state of mind, that hit me hard. That was my state: what is. It was not total silence. And I thought: what have I done? Fourteen years back, in 1953, I had experienced the great silence and I had not moved an inch from there.

The next day he said that in that silence there is energy and my body was vibrating, it was like a whirlpool of energy. And then on the last day he said that in that silence there is action and it seemed he was supplying words to describe my state. But then I thought that if in that state there is action, I wouldn't know it. How do I know then? Is it the mind that is projecting that state?

This kind of questioning went on and on.

If an action has to take place then that silence is action and that action I wouldn't know. So two images were operating at the same time and they were not two different things, they were one and the same, preventing anything from happening. This struck me in a moment and the whole thing stopped all of a sudden. The question disappeared.

RH.