Table of Contents
Let’s briefly forget this whole awakening business and focus on something partially related.
You have to dream well. In other words, you should enjoy the life you’re living.
Many people find themselves living nightmares and use that as their fuel for awakening or whatever. And while suffering can be fuel, it’s not the only fuel.
Besides, many of us have the idea that if we wake up from this nightmare, our relative life experience will transmogrify from dumpster to fairytale. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it doesn’t work that way.
You can’t reject your way into a better life.
And if you dislike your life and then somehow manage to wake up, chances are you’ll just destabilize even more. Waking up doesn’t mean the dream goes away—it means the dreamer ceases.
But the first step is usually to face the dream.
Creating Your Drama
Trying to skip over your psychological issues and the life you’re living is called spiritual bypassing.
It’s probably common for people who seek enlightenment to be motivated by the desire to be permanently “above” or “unaffected” by the world. That just leads to more problems.
You should want to be here in this world as yourself.
The irony is that most of our problems stem from us putting ourselves into an erroneous relation with our reality. It’s not our reality that’s the problem; it’s our relationship with it.
When we create a harmonious dream for ourselves, we are in a way better position for the dream to burst.
What I want to convey here is that you are the creator of your relative reality and the problems it compromises. When you realize that, you have taken a huge step.
As long as you point outside yourself as the source of wrongness in your life and demand circumstances to change before you can allow some happiness, you’re doing yourself a tremendous disservice.
Then you’re like a person who hits themselves on the head with a hammer, blames the hammer, and then proceeds to hit themselves with the hammer.
If you for example feel resentful, realize that you are generating those feelings inside you. You keep those feelings alive and then you generate more people and situations to provide you with feeling resentful, thus trapping yourself in a convincing hallucination that resentment comes at you from out there.
Resentment doesn’t exist outside of yourself.
Overlaying a psychological reality over the world and claiming this psychological reality exists outside of us is how we deceive and delude ourselves.
You don’t have to look further than that. Take stock of all the emotional drama in your life—all the stuff that makes your dream a nightmare. Ask yourself if you really have to keep it alive.
Get clear on the fact that no one else is doing emotions or feelings to you; you are doing this to yourself. This means that you can stop doing this to yourself.
Victim Mentality
One of the most important things to get over is victim mentality.
Many people use the emotional suffering they want to release as a justification why they can’t release it. They feel powerless.
You are not powerless. You are not a victim.
You are the operant power. You are so powerful you can make yourself suffer and you can make yourself happy.
Usually, we unknowingly practice certain emotions and thoughts until they become such ingrained habits that we feel like it’s impossible to break them.
You might have had a hard life or horrible things happen to you and that sucks. But you’re not a victim of your emotions and feelings.
Except if you believe it of course. Your wish is your command.
Obviously, there is no need to judge or reprimand yourself. That doesn’t help anyone.
What does help is to crank up your awareness and clearly see what you think and feel on a daily basis. And if you don’t like what you see, ask yourself for how long this has been going on unconsciously.
Has the suffering become a central part of your identity?
The longer it has been going on the more you’ll probably feel helpless to do something about it. Or the harder it will be to drop it.
But not always.
Sometimes just clearly seeing the ridiculousness of it is enough to rid yourself of it in one fell swoop.
Whatever repetitive emotions and thoughts you see that you don’t cherish, ask yourself if there is anyone or anything that forces you to keep it alive.
Spoiler: There is no one and no thing that does that.
From a higher view, there is not even you doing that. But all of that also means, that no one and no thing can keep you from choosing something else.
Your Greatest Superpower
To choose something else, you need to employ your greatest superpower—attention.
The closest we can come to having any form of control is with our attention. In a way, the whole healing and awakening journey comes down to experimenting with attention.
Many people have no idea how powerful attention is.
Our lives are a mental game and the primary tool for that game is attention. Whatever you put your attention on grows.
Reclaiming that tool and using it consciously toward what you want is another huge step. Most people let the world draw their attention outside, hither and fro, up and down the valleys.
A mini-awakening is when you realize you’ve been lazy with your attention.
Another mini-awakening is when you finally decide to turn your attention inside and see what’s going on there instead of trying to fix the world. Putting slippers on to protect your feet is always easier than trying to carpet the whole damn planet.
If you never redirect your attention, your past will be your future.
How can it not?
If you think, feel, and act in the same old way, chances are good that you’ll remain exactly where you are. That’s when people feel stuck.
Sometimes when people are desperate enough, they spontaneously surrender to something other than themselves. A “higher power” intervenes and dramatically rearranges their lives.
But
1. That usually doesn’t happen without any preparation on the part of the person (e.g. reaching the willingness to surrender your life).
And
2. We don’t need to wait for a higher power to initiate some drastic changes.
Happy Dreaming
All this is to say that you can dream well and happy.
You acknowledge everything as it is right now + the fact that no one is doing anything to you. Then you use your attention to choose something else.
And whenever your habitual thinking and emotion get going again, now you’re aware of it. It’s no longer blindsiding you.
Mind you, you’re not fighting anything, you’re just aware of it. That is enough to reduce its grip on you and reclaim some of the energy you’ve been pouring into it.
Soon whatever you have chosen to put your attention on becomes a bigger part of your life and your life becomes beautiful. Suddenly you enjoy the dream and you enjoy paying attention to it as it unfolds as your present experience.
You see cracks opening in your dream space.
And when you least expect it, the eternal sun starts shining through the cracks preparing to bust the dream wide open.
Luka
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My brother this is excellent!
I am curious to know what would you say to those dealing with racism, discrimination, etc!
I totally agree 👍🏾 that this is still has to belong in the category of ‘reactionary and relative (personal/victim mentality) understanding! We also cannot change others!
Still, for those that continuously seem to be victimized in such a way, it seems you’re still saying, ‘notice where your attention or awareness is drawn, to correct the problem or issue! Is that correct?
Thank you, Paul!
Well, obviously someone dealing with racism, discrimination, etc. can extract themselves out of any such situation or take any other action they deem appropriate to feel safer. But as you say, we cannot change others and trying to change others, even if their behavior sucks, can easily backfire.
Yes, that’s correct.