Choose Again

the lucid emissary

If you have ever become lucid in a dream, stop to think, now, about what actually was happening. The dream character—a body of sorts—is suddenly or gradually inhabited by your waking style of awareness (the onset of lucidity).

This waking awareness then exists side by side with the dream character's mind (which is entirely convinced of the reality of the dream and which has no other reference points) within the dream character's so-called body.

It is NOT that the dream character "wakes up" or achieves some kind of new awareness. The dream character does not change in any way. But it is infused or inhabited by your waking state of awareness. There are still two of you there in the dream, so to speak, and when attention becomes lax, the dream character's more limited awareness takes over and you revert from lucidity back to dreaming.

As you then awaken from the nighttime dream, with its varying degrees of lucidity, into this waking dream, you can see through recollection that there was the projected dream body, which had its own very narrow circumscribed consciousness with which you were identified, and the lucid mind, which, through your waking intention and discipline you inserted into that narrow dream-body self, in order to expand the experience of both the waking "you" and the sleeping "you."

Again, the dream self did not awaken. What happened was that a greater awareness, which was always there (since of course dreams take place within your mind) came to the foreground. What ensues is a vivid exploration of the dream environment—an exhilarating experiment in the manipulation of consciousness and an expansion of experience.

All of these selves... the dreaming body-self, the lucid awareness experiencing the dream environment, and the so-called waking self who opens her eyes in bed in the morning... all of these selves are within one mind. Yet none of them are experiencing the whole or native state of that mind because they are all more or less identified with the state of being within a human body.

The you who is identified with the human body cannot awaken and never will awaken. This "you" is a temporary phenomenon. It is only when you begin to see that you have allowed your attention to be trapped by the idea of actually being that body which you inhabit that you begin to sense that there is another "you" and that, in fact, the phenomenon of "you" is not limited in any way. It is multiple and single at the same time. It is completely shared and yet inviolately individual. It is eternal. It expands in ever increasing gestalts of awareness that are existing simultaneously with this very limited experience of the dream of human life.

Looked at in another way, the dream character (you in a non-lucid dream) is completely convinced of the reality of the dream drama. It feels more or less victimized—by the environment, by the other characters in the dream and by the changeable nature of the dream. Even in a so-called happy dream, there is an undertone of fear, because nothing is stable long enough to be relied upon, and there is a sense of being isolated within a body (fictional though it may be).

When lucidity enters the dream, the dream character is suddenly freed from this limited sense of powerless victimhood by the lucid awareness's understanding that none of this is real, and more importantly that its identity is completely independent from the dream body and its environment. So the fearful awareness of the dream character is replaced by the fearless awareness of the lucid emissary.

Within this waking dream we call life, there is also a lucid emissary. That lucid emissary is also you—infinitely more you than the part that has mistakenly identified itself with the body. The part that identifies with the body is called the ego. It truly believes that it is this body, and that it will not survive the dissolution of the body-formation any more than a character in a video game survives the shutting down of the computer. Its consciousness is just like that of the dream figure in a non-lucid dream.

The main characteristic of the lucid emissary is fearless love and indiscriminate, nonjudgmental appreciation, of this, just as it is, right here and right now.

The main characteristic of the dream-figure (human) identity is competitive, discriminating judgment, a refusal to be satisfied with "this" here and now (because it senses its inherent lack of reality and its own temporary nature) and the resulting fear of dissolution, which it interprets as punishment. It actually has no independent self other than these very characteristics, which it maintains through a constant communal stream of non-stop self-referencing mental chatter.

You are not the human. You are the lucid emissary. You are also the mind within which all of this is occurring. When you find your attention trapped by worry, fear and anxiety about tomorrow, or resentment over today, you have forgotten, temporarily, who you are. You've allowed your mind to become distracted by the concept-production mechanism of the human mind. This happens. It's part of the dream-territory. If you are in distress over it, just go silent. Withdraw your attention from it. Shift your attention to that which is not the incessant internal dialogue. Just come back out of thought, out of concept, to this present moment. Relax into the silent, loving lucidity of your eternal identity.

the important thing

It seems to me that on the so-called spiritual path, people get terribly caught up in ideas of better or worse, accomplishment vs. failure. People feel inferior for not having realizations. People feel that others are better than they are, or vice versa.

The most important thing to understand is that there is nothing wrong with you. Any idea of better-or-worse, any idea of success-or-failure that contains within it even a grain of self-hatred, that contains within it even an iota of the feeling that you are not good enough—is simply incorrect. It's just an incorrect thought-form that you've mistakenly identified with.

Yes, there are understandings to be remembered, but they have nothing to do with your inherent worth. Oneness does not mean loss of the sense of self. It means a remembering that all is given—that you exist and yet you are never separate, never unsupported, never without connection to your source.

No so-called spiritual achievement that does not resonate with this light of warmth and compassion—this absolute sense of love and belonging—is of any true or lasting worth.

This is not a contest or a competition. This is all about remembering love.

back to basics

Most of you probably understand what I mean when I say that you are not your thoughts. You probably have experienced standing back and noticing, becoming cognizant of, the thoughts that are passing like clouds through your mind, and getting a distinct sense that they actually have no more to do with you than the traffic on the street, or the sounds on the radio, or whatever seems to be playing on network television.

Thoughts happen. They range from the sublime to the truly frightening. The entire arena of thought is really very much like the whole internet, or like YouTube. It's largely junk with some interesting observations thrown in. However, every conceivable thought, no matter how lofty, has something in common with every other thought, no matter how base—and that common denominator is the nature of its origin. All thought begins with the delusional yet very real-seeming experience of the separate self. Thought arises simultaneously, is co-emergent with, the experience of separation.

So the very origin of thought is on shaky ground to begin with. It's a lot like thought in a dream. In a dream, thought is arising based on the dream drama, as though the dream drama were actually real. When you awaken from the dream you see that not only wasn't the dream drama real, but any and all thoughts or emotions associated with it were completely meaningless because they were based on the belief that what was not happening in reality, was.

The thought-stream, the internal dialogue, the storyline, is sometimes called the ego, or the mechanism of ego. When listened to as though it were real, it creates a sensation of solidity. It creates a feeling of stable identity that can stand as separate from the identities of other people, objects and occurrences.

All thoughts, when identified with, when given that injection of energy that comes when you hop on and follow along with them, create form on some level. Whatever you include in your attention creates form on some level—so powerful is the force of your attention.

When you watch a little YouTube video, sometimes it amuses you and for the next few minutes the world seems brighter. When you stumble upon one of those "God, I wish I hadn't seen that." type of YouTube experiences, you may find that for the next few minutes your world seems darker.

In exactly the same way as you choose what you expose yourself to on the internet or YouTube, you can choose to be aware of the quality of the thoughts you choose to inject with the powerful creative force of your own identifying attention.

All of this presupposes that you are actually noticing that there is thought, and then there is no-thought, sometimes called "the space between thoughts." To me it feels like space, period, in which all that seems to appear, occurs. A living, cognizant, shimmering silent aliveness, the love and grace of which can inform your choices.

In order to even become aware of this situation, it's necessary to spend some time turning inward and noticing what is happening in your mind. Imagine if you had no idea how to change the channel on a TV, or stop a nasty looping YouTube video, or even turn off a computer or a radio. It's the same thing. It's necessary to use the blessed power of your attention to turn inward and notice the workings of your own mind, on a regular basis. It requires a little bit of effort, similar to the effort required when you learned to brush your teeth every day, or eat right, or get some exercise. Same type of effort.

If you are suffering, and if your world seems dark, you have been (justifiably so, it may seem) identifying with dark, unhappy thoughts and they have attracted more thoughts like them. This has done nothing to harm or change that shimmering essence within you, but your access to it (or its healing access to you) is limited by the fact that your attention is trapped. Learning to shift those atrophied muscles of attention—to understand that you are not a victim of circumstances—can be difficult at first. It's a lot like learning to use a once paralyzed limb, or learning to overcome an addiction.

Eventually you begin to understand that whatever you give your attention to, grows. Your attention is like the sun, rain and nourishment all rolled into one. And as you withdraw your attention from something, it begins to wither. So as you turn your attention away from the thought stream, to the space between thoughts (also called the now, or the present moment, just as it is) your experience of that space grows, and the thought stream in your proximal experience quiets down and becomes less and less obtrusive. These things happen on their own, the way muscle grows when you exercise. It's just the way it is. Nothing about you has changed. You have just freed your attention from its entrapment in thought. It will drift back again and again and again, but each time you notice it, the freeing happens more and more easily until eventually it is automatic.

the freeing of attention vs. the trap of achievement

A few weeks ago it was really windy here and my husband and I went down to the lake to watch the waves. The light was such that the water was a particular malachite green that occurs on Lake Superior, and as the waves broke they were marbled with areas of aeration created by air trapped in the cold—shades of lighter green that appeared and dissolved. My husband called these lighter patches "footprints." Each wave was different in how it broke on the rocks—leaving a unique pattern of footprints and then subsiding into the whole.

We (we in usual terms) are the wave. A seemingly separate, frothy expression of the big "is-ness." This expression that we are is not something degraded or inferior. The wave is not something that does not exist. But it is something that, like all appearances, is temporary and does not in itself have the ability to create and sustain an identity.

Thought is a product of our experience as wave (body). All of our concepts and perceptions are the interpreting of experience from the point of view of wave. There is nothing wrong with this, but it leads to the experience of suffering when we mistakenly believe that it is somehow the body that is generating our sense of identity.

Thought belongs to the body dream—the dreaming of wave. Thoughts are a product of our attention being trapped momentarily by the wave. Believing and experiencing itself to be separate creates the sense of two-ness from which thought as an effect emerges, the way mist sprays from a breaking wave. It's a shattering and fragmenting—a spray of droplets, each a pattern in itself. Without this sense of two-ness, thought, as we experience it, does not exist.

If you believe yourself to be wave, and believe that your identity is being generated by the body, then the droplet sprays of your thoughts are tinged with the color of fear. If you understand yourself to be the lake or the ocean from which the wave emerges, your thought-spray is more an experience of temporary exultation. If you understand yourself to be the whole of being from which all ideas of ocean and wave emerge—commentary ceases.

Each day, minute to minute, we are wave, droplet, ocean, universe, nothing. Identity appears in infinite ways, always the same but always different. There is no need to try to limit the sense of "me" to one or another state. No need to try to be always one way as opposed to another way. The whole ball of wax is fine. If you find yourself suffering and wish to change that, do some inner housekeeping and look at how you are attaching to thought, and from which state of being that thought is emerging. When the dishes are dirty, we wash them. If your thoughts are giving you problems, look at them.

The looking itself is freeing. That's the miracle of attention. This is about intention, yes, the way lifting your hand to your mouth to drink some water is intention. It's about imagination the way imagining that the sensation of thirst can be quenched is about imagination.

What it is not about is any kind of permanent achievement. The idea of achievement is purely a wave-thought. You can identify wave thoughts by the fact that they have opposites. Achievement is about the wave (1.) desiring to be loved by the ocean because it has forgotten that it is the ocean, and (2.) struggling to make itself permanent (and therefore safe) as a wave (a permanent wave!), which is our sad little human adventure.

self-respect

When you bring your attention fully into the present moment, your present environment, motley though it may be with all its seeming chaos and smells and uncertainty, the crumbs in your keyboard and fact that you need a haircut, the kids and all their problems and the whole money thing... when you bring yourself fully here and just allow the litany of thought to quiet down, slow way down... it becomes possible to see that what you have been chasing, be it awakening or enlightenment or wealth or love, is illusory, and that the chase itself is not only the suffering you have been experiencing, but the very thing that has been keeping these qualities from your life.

Stopping—turning one's mental back on the chase, the seeking, the hoping for something other than this—requires a certain kind of self-respect. We are mortally afraid to say "this is good enough, this is it" because we fear that by saying so, by resting right here and appreciating this, we will cut off our chances of ever getting anything else—and ultimately, at our core, of ever being reunited with what Is, with God, with Truth, or however you wish to put it.

The secret is that the entire problem lies in our resistance to this "is." We want some other "is." Truth is never found anywhere other than right here and right now. And it is this we refuse to accept. Yet without this fundamental acceptance, this fundamental relinquishing of judgment—right now, and only right now—there is no hope of noticing that wherever you put your foot is sacred ground.

It is the resistance that blocks the awareness. Yet even saying that, it seems like I'm talking about something special that you need to do, in order to get something special that is other than this, right here and right now. That's an unavoidable consequence of language.

The chase, the resistance, the argument, the judgment, the concept, the idea—it's all occurring at one level—all occurring in thought. It's all thought. There is no solution at the level of thought.

When you face this conundrum, you notice that all seeking is a function of the thought-self, and its continual, unreliable, self-contradictory concepts. That's where the self-respect comes it. That's when your grasping hands begin to open and their emptiness is felt to be the essential gift that it is.