of mountains, pencils, calculators and party games

Let's say you were born a few hundred years ago in a large, fertile valley surrounded by extremely tall mountains that were so difficult to climb and so inhospitable that no one had ever successfully escaped the valley, except by death.

Not in your lifetime, but perhaps in the lifetime of your great grandmother, or just existing in the sagas that were told at night during evening work, were tales of people who had seen the exotic world on the other side of the mountains. No one living had ever been there, or known anyone who had, so really it was just an ongoing story in your collective minds, which were shaped completely by the only things you could say for sure existed: mountains, sky, valley.

This is very much our situation in these bodies, as humans, in this dream of life. And our vocabulary—that which shapes our thoughts—is a function of our situation. We do not have vocabulary for anything else. Everything about our thought processes is limited by the fact of their birth in the dream. Our thought processes only work for the valley. They are a closed system. Our thinking is dream thinking.

Last night I had a dream in which I was trying to tally up an extremely large order I'd received from a good customer. Knowing that she'd gone way overboard in her ordering, I was trying to figure out how much she was paying per piece, thinking that somehow the more she ordered, the less she was paying. We have no volume discounts, so there was no real reason to do this, but in the dream I thought there was.

Because I was not lucid and my thinking was dream-thinking, I was trying to do this by using a dream calculator and by writing things down with a dream pencil on a dream piece of paper. If you are at all aware of the ground rules of human dreams, you'll know that one thing you cannot do in a dream is accurately use a calculator or write anything down, because everything you write down and everything you read on the calculator screen keeps changing. In the human dream-world rules, it states that nothing written in letters or numbers remains the same the second or third time you look at it.

However, because I was not lucid, and because my mind was a function of the dream world, I was unsuccessfully engrossed in this exercise for what seemed like a very long time until finally my attention shifted to something else within the dream. Most important in my failure-to-notice was not the fact that the calculator and pencil did not work. My most important failure of attention was that I had created a problem that did not exist and was attempting to solve it.

This is the nature of the spiritual search. We use the mind we have. The mind we have, by its very nature, creates a problem that does not exist. Then we try to solve it. The tools we have at our disposal are our dream minds. They simply do not work. But the most important thing to realize is not that they do not work, but that the problem is not real.

Yet we keep on trying to figure it all out using the same pencil and the same calculator. The more we employ the technologies of the dream, the further into it we go, until we begin to live lives totally obsessed with the details of the dream, combing through them like rag pickers, trying to find something that sparks a feeling of recognition.

We need to stand up straight and have some self-respect and question the premise of the problem. The ego loves to send us on wild goose chases. The ego is the dream mind. It wants to keep you entangled in problems that don't exist, and keep you turning towards it for solutions until your life is over and you have spent the whole thing within the dream.

And yet, this in itself is also not a problem. The only problem is suffering. When you were a kid and you played pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, you weren't really worried about the fact that you were wearing a blindfold. You knew that eventually the blindfold would be removed, and that the donkey's tail was not a real goal.

Comments

[Simon]

I also remember peaking under the edge of the blindfold, sticking my tail in an uncannily accurate spot, and flatly denying afterwards that I could, in any way, see what I was doing. Is there some way I can do that now?

;)

[Simon]

I also remember peaking under the edge of the blindfold, sticking my tail in an uncannily accurate spot, and flatly denying afterwards that I could, in any way, see what I was doing. Is there some way I can do that now?

;)

[marian]

What a great question. I remember doing that too. All goals are dream goals, is the answer. Or rather, you are the donkey, the tail and the birthday cake. Light a candle and sing yourself a song, love.

[Simon]

Yeah, I don't sing myself enough songs. I bloody well deserve it. (I'll just do it quietly while here at work, and ramp up the volume on the drive home.)

[Aileen]

This is fascinating, Marian. I'm realizing that before we make any progress a huge shift has to occur; from dealing directly with the dream and trying to solve it, to only being concerned with forgiving our reaction to the dream. I'm also seeing that the only problem is suffering. By our suffering alone we engage in the dream and make it real.