For many of us, life as we now know it is the dream, a dream in the sense that who we really are is unknown to us and sleeps soundly amidst the noise, hustle and bustle of everyday life, and egocentric conversation. Occasionally, as we dream, our level of consciousness is raised to a level of awareness that reminds us, as we sleep, that we are asleep. That something or someone long forgotten is there beneath the noise, quiet and calm, but ever present and sometimes only aware as through a fog or mist. Occasionally, we sense another self and wish we could know it in a way that we know other things in our typical dream world.
We are often reminded that we are something else, completely different from that which we manifest in the dream. At times, it is as if the part of us that is asleep and the part that is the dream become simultaneously and vaguely aware of the other’s existence, but also know that being in the presence of the other is intolerable. It is a parallel awareness that is often fleeting, but nonetheless powerful and jarring to all of our senses. At these times, we become thoughtful and contemplative and wonder “Who Am I?”, or we may ask other deep questions such as “Where did I come from?” and “Where am I going?” It is almost as if the sudden awareness of that sleeping self is a haunting, a calling out from another part of ourselves that is eerily familiar but distant and unknown as well.
The feeling is not unlike déjà vu. Sometimes we may ask, “What was that?” We may become quiet and subdued and contemplative as we try to put into our own three-dimensional terms what we know, but don’t know! Our contemplation may take us back through our history to recapitulate defining events in our lives that shaped us but drain us of our energy. Some of those past memories may trigger sorrow, joy, sadness, happiness or any number of other emotions or feelings that seem to cause us to retract into another place of meaning, discovery, and knowing that we struggle to understand. “Where did I go?” we may ask as we try to bring forward into present time that seemingly lost soul we thought we knew and actually did know sometime before. Locked inside that knowing, we struggle to identify who it was that was hidden away and forgotten, only to be thought of in these rarest of moments when, for whatever reason, the dreamer tries to awaken from that deep unknowing sleep.
It is as if the dreamer dreams and the dreams themselves live. They do, in fact, seem so real that we are lost to the illusion on display before us and rarely do we ever escape it. Life for most of us is the dream of one who fell asleep long, long ago, perhaps as children. The process of falling asleep begins at birth when everyone in our newly awakened life takes on the responsibility of convincing us that what they see is all that is there. Every institution we are exposed to in life from our birth to our death is the magic dust that keeps us asleep.
What we call ‘reality’ really is the illusion, the dream, the life played out as the dreamer sleeps. The dreamer, aware of the other reality being played out but frozen in the dream, tries to awaken or call out as if to cry, “Stop! That is the dream. True reality can only appear when I awaken. I am the only way to true reality and the answers you seek. Be still and you will find me, for I am always here” the voice of the dreamer whispers. Sometimes we almost awaken and know that we have been dreaming and our hearts fill with a wanderlust and exhilaration as we catch a glimpse of the true reality outside the dream. We struggle inside the dream to awaken fully to this distant knowing, long ago tucked away in the bright lights of the illusion we now experience.
Sadly, for most of us, the dream overwhelms the dreamer because the language of the dreamer cannot be understood in the language of the dream. The dream is action and drama, movement and suspense. The dreamer is still and quiet and falls again and again back into the deep sleep where the dream lies safe and protected from any onslaught of true reality.
It really is like watching a movie. The events are unreal but we attach ourselves to them emotionally as if they were. We let ourselves get drawn into the action as if we were really a part of the fictional events taking place. So lost in the movie do we become that we lose all awareness that we are sitting in a theater watching unreal events as if they were real, believing they are real!
We have coined new terminology that accepts non-reality as good enough to be reality. We call it ‘virtual reality.’ Virtual reality might be thought of as the reality of non-reality, if that could possibly make any sense. Think about non-reality becoming more real. As non-reality becomes more real, reality becomes less real. The less real reality becomes, the more difficult finding and knowing the dreamer becomes. In other words, virtual reality is “the dream becoming the dreamed.” There is no longer a dreamer!
The language already exists that makes the ego lord over all. It is the language that states, “We can feed you non-reality that is so real, you have no need for real reality”. That is the language of ego serving every need of man to the exclusion of an inner knowing of the I am that dreams it all. Wake up, dreamer, and know thyself!
The unconscious life is the life of the dreamer never waking from the dream. It is succumbing to the actual dream – the illusion that plays out as the life we live. Somehow, we must awaken from the sleep that dreams the dream we accept as reality, for everything we see or perceive as the dreamer sleeps is illusion. All of it is illusion if not perceived by the awakened dreamer, the I am, that is one with all things great and small. The dreamer is he, who in those brief moments of insight or awakening, is the non identity we seek that is interconnected to everything in existence. Sometimes our reckoning with this insight is so overwhelming that we lose all sense of our identity and we simply breathe in all of life and our oneness with it. We no longer see it as something that lies before us; rather, we are it and it is us! We are quickened, as it were, and the dreamer outside the dream is aware of nothing but oneness with all that is–the unidentifiable I Am that always is revealed to our knowing! Not our language but our true inner knowing, the knowing that cannot be known at the physical sense level other than a burst of insight and exhilaration we feel all over.
Gods have no identity, other than the ones we give them, and neither should we since we, too, are gods. Our identities, which we are so attached to, tie us to the dream and give us place within it, adding to the virtual drama being played out day in and day out.
When Moses was commanded to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, he asked God, “Who should I tell them has sent me?” to which God replied “Tell them I am has sent you.” Who is the “I Am” God was speaking of that would be recognizable to the house of Israel? How do we identify with “I Am” when we are specifically looking for something to identify ourselves with? “I Am” is not an identity but a state of being. It is not a who but a what!
Moses asked for an identity and he received a state of being instead. “I am has sent you.” Gods do not need an identity. Look at the different identities and ways we have tried to describe God through the ages. We say He is all knowing, mysterious, everywhere and nowhere, all powerful, the same yesterday, today and forever, so small He can dwell in your heart and so large He fills the universe, mindful of the least of these, but vengeful and jealous, kind and full of grace, perfect.
All of these descriptive terms are an unidentifiable way of identifying someone or something, and yet God in answering Moses’ inquiry, rather than giving him an identifiable name to use, provided a state of being. In reality, it is useless to try to identify God as anything outside of I Am. Gods simply are and when you strip away the illusion of ego and still the chattering mind, so are we. So, to the unidentified, nothing need be identifiable. It simply is a part of one universal and infinite I am, none greater than or less than. All things sharing a common I am-ness that makes all things, including us, are equal. We are, as is everything, infinite awareness. Simply I am that I am. We are existence!
When we awaken and begin living that reality, the illusion we once lived, the dream recedes into quiet background that only serves to give us a context with those who never reach the same awareness. In other words, we know the reality in which they live, and can access them, live with them in every way, even though we have moved beyond that reality. In this way, we can exist in a reality we know does not exist as anything other than an illusion or the dreams of many dreamers. It is “being in the world but not of it.”
Once we reach this state of being or awareness, things and people as we once knew them no longer need identification. Histories and stories are no longer necessary. Identifiers of any kind are no longer adequate in describing anything nor are they necessary. All the baggage of knowing differences, placements, and time lines are no longer important and are no longer necessary as we perceive that everything in existence is energy radiating in every direction and mingling with our own. Our new perception, or new seeing, takes on beauty that no three- dimensional sensing can comprehend.
Rare is the dreamer who wakes from the dream, and yet it is from the dream we must awaken in order to know the “I Am” within. That is where our true power lies and all the mysteries of heaven and earth come from that place, a place deep within. We are all gods, but for most of us, God sleeps. The noise of ego keeps the divine self at bay and our virtual reasoning convinces us over and over again that the illusion we all live in is the reality. All of our institutions support that and convince us ever more that the dream is anything but a dream.
We are gods and we all somehow know it when we awaken from the dream state most of us dwell in. Recognition of our godlike nature will never happen while we remain trapped in the illusion of our dreamlike state. The projection of life, the illusion we have accepted through years of egocentric conditioning, lacks the ability to comprehend the true power we all possess. We will never know it living the illusion and watching what most of us call ‘life’ play itself out. After all it is only a dream!
How do we know we are in the dream? The dream or illusion is finite. Anything upon which we put finite limits is illusion! That which is finite has a beginning and an ending and carries a finite description as to what it is in three dimensional terms. Ego needs finality-a right or wrong or absolute answers to questions that have no answers when speaking of the infinite. When we look out at anything and see only what we have been conditioned to see we can describe it in very finite terms. In other words “the tree is a tree” or more specifically “the tree is an oak tree.” Illusion comes with description and details-identifiers that make it perceptible in our three dimensional terms and limited to that description.
Life, true life, is infinite. Without beginning or ending. It is so much more vast than any dream. In fact, in three dimensional terms, it is incomprehensible. It can only be comprehended through the eyes of the dreamer who is typically asleep-unconscious to what is really going on around him. The inner self, the dreamer, as it were, has the eyes to see but will rarely see. Most dreamers sleep comfortably, some fitfully, in the noise of illusion and the egoic drama that plays on and on. The non-identity, the I Am, always still, always quiet awaits the dreamer to become again as a child and awaken anew into the fullness of life and the acceptance of all that is! Children know this until we who sleep put them to sleep making them a part of the same dream we dream only now we have added more dreamers to the virtual reality we accept as reality.