when dreams become reality

I’m driving easy in my convertible, tu-tu-ing down a highway, eating pizza and ice cream… there are some friends in the car… an elephant, my eccentric grandmother and a clown in his birthday suit! We’re relaxed and we’re having a great time... lots of humour - feeling the awesome potential of this moment.

Suddenly, something changes - the elephant now wants control of the car! The clown has become my boss, grandmother gets out a gun, and in the next moment - the car is plunging towards a tree! We all scream, trying to hold onto our feelings!
Then I wake up. Lathered with sweat, thank god I realize that the dream, the story, is not real. The emotions are irrelevant and the images are not true. In the dream everything seems real, sure a bit weird, but seemingly sane - of course, until it isn’t.

By being introduced to the Spiritual Principle, ‘Life energy is impersonal’, you are being asked to think differently - your usual human stories may now feel unimportant, even irrelevant. Just like when in our dreams, we think that the content is valid and important, now by changing the weight, by perceiving from a different angle, we can start to see that these stories are fragile, easily broken and often ill-considered.

This is the point of engaging with the Spiritual Principle and of knowing how to practice that.

However, it is difficult to wake a person up from this conditional, physical world. As we deeply invest our emotions into these stories, they then become gravely heavy and important to us; our human senses now tell us that these invested stories are who we are and how life is.

If you study the human world, and how we engage with our minds, you can see that we are very attached to our particular stories, to our certain identities – that these are giving us our sense of who we are. But whether we are conscious of it or not - our identities have been built up. Drawing from stories of gender, family and religion, and from cultural and societal values, ideological portraits are then painted from the perspective or view of your own mind. Everything that we think and action is from our personal, made-up stories. Whether it is beautiful or cruel, you have made it up - your body then actions it and karmic situations happen ever afterward.

And of course, that is fine. These stories are an amazing narrative tool to seemingly plan our lives into a nice, ordered, security. Our very good stories also function to relieve us from any sense of chaos or uncontrolled trauma. It is only when the niceties and the tight order shifts and moves into a chaotic angst, that something changes. Often this is through a surprise, a shock, an accident, a death… your mind then ramps up - the ‘quiet’ elephant in the room starts to get diarrhoea, the birthday clown tries to experiment with your thoughts and a fire breaks out! Oh no, something starts to uncurl! … is that a little bit of fear? Where are my stories now?
We then want to bust out like a looney! To run away from that uncomfortable situation - we now want to change the weight, we want to make up another story. However, hopefully some people will now want to start asking some very fundamental and super questions like, ‘What the hell is going on?’

Usually, it’s at this point that a person might start to consider, ‘What is life actually about?’, and now may want to explore an existential understanding through spiritual practice. In a Hermitage Ashram, one of the first fundamental questions posed to a person is, ‘Who are you?’ This does not mean, ‘What do you do for a living?’ or, ‘Are you the daughter or son of…?’ or, ‘What’s your race… culture? No, nothing like that. It’s an existential question that goads a person into the root source of what you really are - and this questioning is the beginning of a journey, a process, back into your original awareness of Your Real Life.

These stories that you have planted and fostered are now a radical block to feeling your open, wide-eyed sense of the impersonal intelligence that navigates and aligns the world for you. In place of your impersonal intelligence, these constructed identities overwhelmingly become the stories that we tell to ourselves and to each other, and our attachment to our stories becomes the backbone of who we think we are. We then cross over, into other stories, which takes up more space - often suffocating each other to then become a serious, complex and over-stimulating situation. In all of this, we lose our easy breath, which usually feeds the body - giving it the right to feel okay, to be and to know that you are enough.

Now, I want to change the temperature of this writing, to allow for a feeling of fluidity, even a bit of contradiction. Please let me play for a while, I want to use the words, ‘identity’ and ‘story’ – and I want to use them in an intelligent and natural Life understanding, to place them back where I feel that they should be.

Spiritual Practice means an understanding and a feeling of your True Identity. It is possible to participate with people, work, family and in this community with this unified sense of the One True Identity. Yes, of course we can have theatre, costumes, characters, dialogue… to enjoy our diversities. But we must feel in our bones that these will go - because it is naturally lawful, and a life fact.

So, how then to live in this precarious situation?
With the full kaleidoscope of emotions that makes us human?

If you really want to understand Spiritual Practice, if you really want to engage - You must Love Your true identity.

Know, that you will still have need to kick the elephant out of the room, that the clown will still want to fudge you up, if it can, and sometimes… you will want to be consoled by your grandmama.

But, over time you will see that your own instinctive Heart does not need fixing - it was never a story of Problematic repairing.

 Captivate yourself, Your Great Self, where Love is valued.

 Give yourself the right to really See you and Listen to you - this is the only story you need to engage with.

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There is a haunting in this world
the polite spectral of half lived bodies
half shown, half speaking, half conversations
whispered emotions, silent screaming wounds echoing in a nervous system
wanting out, needing security
The moans of wanting more
The damp wet sadness
the dramatic theatre of the living dead

The moon rises
The dead bodies are awake
Yet they sleep and are dreaming.

The world is a room,
with a trap door called Death.
In the room there are millions and millions of species, that are trying to kill each other
The horror for humans, is that it is untainted by personal malice
Oh dear, This is the system? Life does not care?

Life is a Koan
a mind fuck
a trip wire
If you think it is for anything else.
You are insane.
This world
This beautiful fragile, tenderness
the monstrous cruelty

We breathe, eat, eliminate, survive, and we procreate for the genes. Does Life need more?

So here we are.
The mystery
where we can feel indescribable Joy.
be gentle
be kind
You are a paradox
We don’t have to care
We are allowed to be kind.
It is just a story
Temporary entertainments for the will of Life.
Everything goes. 

Arohananda.