Spirituality Guide

Yet another possibility is they have an opposition, a team of enlightened or en-knowledged beings who have been opposing their control since it started - a battle for Man across time, hidden in the lost annals of our race as (perhaps) the Seven Rishi, or the Seven Lords of Light fought against the powers of Darkness, handicapped by their desire to allow us to develop our path to Light by choice.

But there is another thought… If our reality truly depends on what we perceive, then maybe they need us to be despondent, to see the negative of life, to lose hope and foresee only an ever deepening loss of freedom and advance, where our world is so circumscribed we can hope only to be good servants of the poor overlords trying their best to keep us all alive. Then, they get the world they want, possibly forever.

And if 2012 is really a crux, truly a time of growing energy as we pass from Kali Yuga into a more enlightened Age, maybe if they can make us hopeless, the energy will not be used to bring a new age of enlightenment but instead to confirm into the darkness, our lives, our hopes and our futures and leave them as absolute rulers of an endarkened people, with the Darkness being powered by the very Light that was meant to bring us out of the mire.

This possibility is rather nasty to think upon – we should all make a determined effort to find ways to be positive in our lives, to see good things, to find hope for ourselves and others, if for no other reason than to ensure this doesn’t come to pass. Just the possibility of this being in our future should be a goad sufficient for us to stop playing the doom and gloom game and to work at bringing a little glow of positive feeling into our lives

And we will be surprised at how such a glow can infect those around us.

Be a little bud-light in your own life.

So if we are spotlighting our way through life, focusing on only the smallest but most immediate part of the flood of perceptions available to us, do we simply discard the rest? Does only what comes through the spotlight get through to be recorded and associated into our sensorium and experience?

Personally I think, and there is quite an amount of evidence that agrees, that everything is recorded. The floodlight senses are working all the time, placing us in our world, filtering the mundane from the focus, filing away extra information as local colour, as extra layers of sense that get attached to the events on which we focus.

I think that is what at least some of our dreaming is about. The Conscious mind runs through the input it has received and the extras, the large part of our world that got missed out of the immediate conscious awareness, gets runs as well. In this way I think the input from the external world gets associated and stored, altering either grandly or minorly, the shape of us, the terrain of Mind in which we live.

But I don’t think this is all the dreaming we do. For a start it is well known that in normal circumstances, we have two REM (Rapid Eye Movement) periods of sleep – this is when research tells us we a re dreaming most actively. It seems a little strange for us to have two such periods – surely the processing of the day could be done in one?

Then there’re the other types of dreams, the ones where problems get solved, or where we learn things, or even the Lucid Dreams where we are aware we are dreaming.

Hands up all those who have had a lucid dream? Keep your hand up if you’ve managed to make use of it? When you became aware that you were dreaming, did you try to do things? Go places? Find God?

It seems to me a Lucid Dream is an opportunity to try almost anything you can think of.

During our normal waking times, we miss a lot of what is going on around us. It’s estimated that, if you were to take a picture the size of your computer screen, then what we consciously perceive of our experiences would be about the size of one pixel on that screen. That’s smaller than the dot at the end of this sentence.

It may seem strange to think of it that way, but our bodies record many things of which we have no awareness. Just sitting in your room, reading this screen, there are sounds, smells and sights from your peripheral vision of which you have no ongoing awareness. If you focus you might become aware of them but as soon as you focus on the screen again, they’re gone, lost in the background glow of incoming perceptions.

I spoke some time back on here about Spotlight and Floodlight awareness, how we are taught from birth to be firmly in the spotlight world of focus on the passing moments. Floodlight awareness is like when you go for a drive with friends – conversation flows back and forth, and it is an enjoyable trip. Usually you don’t stop and think at the end of the trip how much you recall of the actual travel and driving, but when you do you will be surprised at how little there is to remember.

Your ‘spotlight’ mind has been involved in the conversation, and the job of driving was handed over, without notice, to your ‘floodlight’ awareness. We pay for the immediacy and clarity of a Spotlight’ life with a loss (mostly) of the full scope of the world we live in.

I’d be interested to know how many readers here have had the experience of getting to the end of a trip and realizing most of it had passed without conscious notice being paid to it?

Dreams are ephemeral things, phantasms of the night, sometimes sensual, sometimes violent, mostly disturbing and almost always strange. In them we sometimes see ourselves, often see things we do not wish to see and on occasion see familiar things in very weird ways.

There are careers, books, and websites devoted to dreams, to trying to figure out what they might mean or to interpreting the symbolism in them or even to just why we have them. Dreams seem to be necessary – they’re perhaps the major reason why we sleep and if someone is deprived of sleep for an extended period, their functioning becomes, to say the least, erratic.

In dreams our bodies seem disconnected mostly. The link between brain and body seems to be blocked, so that even though the same brain areas that, during waking times, will cause us to run, move and react may be firing, the body doesn’t normally move.

On occasion the severed link seems to get overwhelmed and the body moves – often this brings us out of the dream into wakefulness. Sometimes even stranger events occur as we rise and begin to do apparently normal activities even though our minds aren’t aware of them – sleep walking is poorly understood and while some experience it consistently throughout their lives, others might only go through it once or for a brief time.

I wonder how many of you have had strange experiences with dreams? Are there any readers who have had dreams come true, or who have gained new knowledge or understanding because of a dream?