It's taken me a bit longer to write this installation than I thought it would. The information has been available for me to write down, but for some reason I haven't had as much motivation to write these last few weeks. I've found that my alone time has turned into an interesting silence, and I just haven't felt much like being bothered to actually create a body for my thoughts to reside in. I have, however, been reaching some vital conclusions about my life and the manner in which I plan to continue my adventures here on Earth. Thus, now it appears is the proper time in which to present this final installation of Anatomy Of A Dream. The content of this article has weighed heavily on my mind these last few weeks, and I very much hope I convey these concepts accurately enough to be of help to others.
Please read Parts One & Two of this series prior to reading this installation for a much more complete scope of this overall topic.
Alchemy? I thought we were talking about dreams. . .?
An astute observation, but Alchemy is in fact the very thing with which you create your dreams! "Alchemy" is derived from the same ancient Egyptian and Greek words that we get our modern-day word "Chemistry" from. As a science, alchemy is much older than chemistry, but this says nothing about it's credibility on a physical level at all. Many esteemed historical scientific figures tried, and failed, to make the teachings of Alchemy produce the effects it was 'supposed' to produce. It is because of this blatant crumbling under the rigors of the scientific method that those scientists were lead to pioneer our modern-day schools of chemistry and medicine; based on repeatable results and accurate observations.
So?
Well, what if I mentioned that the bulk of Alchemy's true information and content has very little to do with actual, solid, physical materials? This changes things quite a bit, because now it becomes essential to reevaluate what exactly all those various terms and jargon used in Alchemy are really saying. For example:
The Philosopher's Stone
A tertiary look into Alchemy will turn up a pretty heavy emphasis on the forging of the "Philosopher's Stone". Alchemy describes this stone as being the result of successfully transforming Lead into Gold; the epitome of the Alchemist's desires. How awesome would that be? To be able to turn a relatively low-value hunk of poison into the most highly-prized of materials? The idea brings $$$ to most people's eyes, and many intelligent people living in the time period following the sacking of Alexandria were quite taken with it. They examined the remaining writings of the Alchemists, who where then disbanded or killed off, and attempted to follow their written instructions. Bear in mind that the term "alchemy" is blanketed across a variety of disciplines throughout history. Many of these were systems of medicine-making that apothecaries in China, India and many of the other contemporary civilizations of the time used for healing the sick. This article is discussing the most commonly thought-of version of Alchemy originating in ancient Egypt. The writings spoke of the Philosopher's Stone made of gold, and how it is possible to forge it from mundane metals and carful procedure. However, nobody was ever able to make it! Try as they might, they simply could not make any sense of what the Alchemists did differently in order to produce this elusive golden stone. The historical feat of successfully transforming "Pb" into "Au" wasn't performed until the science of Nuclear Transmutation became studied in the twentieth century. It's not very economical to transform lead into gold, by the way. The reverse reaction is much much cheaper to do. Figures.
The ancient Alchemists were very wise. They viewed the world through the eyes of men who recognized that the physicality of existence is only a product of the mind. When they spoke of lead, they were often not referring to the element "Pb". Likewise, their references to other metals such as copper, iron, silver, and gold were rarely ever genuinely about the physical substances themselves. Such terms are symbols that represent various aspects of the individual entity. You see, rather than worshiping a deity or otherwise relying upon a separate religious set of beliefs and symbols to express their spirituality, the Alchemist's religion was the very world they lived in. As such, they used common items, substances, metals, plants, and a host of other mundane things to represent and express particular parts of the human Soul. They recognized that their Soul, or Higher Self, resided in a place unconstricted by time and space, and "Alchemy" is the manner in which they chose to conceptualize the "Grand Web" that we have been discussing in parts one and two of this series.
If you had an opportunity to ask an Alchemist the true definition of Alchemy, he would tell you that "Alchemy" is the creation of consciousness where before there was none. The Philosopher's Stone, if likewise defined by an Alchemist, is the symbol of the Ascended Self; nothing at all to do with physical gold. In Alchemy, Lead represents the unawakened spirit. It represents all those who have yet to achieve enlightenment. The Philosopher's Stone, the "Gold-Once-Lead", is the symbol representing the spirit who has awakened to its' true divinity; transforming into an Awakened Avatar. This awakened individual then has the power to "transform lead into gold", which is a well-known attribute and power of the Philosophers Stone. A prime example of a Philosophers Stone would be Jeshua Ben Josef; known to most of the world as Emmanuel, Jesus, and Christ. Jeshua was the epitome of an Ascended Master, and in his presence unenlightened people (lead), were transformed into enlightened people (Gold). To be clear, Jeshua was no Alchemist by claim. Such truths are quite universal, however, and have been arrived at using a variety of verbal terminologies. The more one looks around, the more one begins to see the fundamental truths hidden behind all the various religious jargons out there.
There are those who claim that the Alchemist's use of physical terms as metaphysical symbols was an intentional code to prevent others from abusing their wisdom. There is no way to tell just how intentional the confusion over their art actually was, but regardless it stands as a beautiful example of the Divine's sense of irony. If one approaches Alchemy with the intent to generate physical riches, then he will experience struggle and failure. If one approaches Alchemy with the intent to generate internal, immortal riches, then he will find peace and reward.
What. The Hell. Is an "Avatar".
I'm a video game nerd, and I love Role Playing Games. You know, the kinda games where you play a character and run around an imaginary world completing 'quests', destroying the forces of darkness, stealing stuff from random chests that have been mindlessly scattered around, and other badass stuff of that nature. My favorite RPG is a game called Skyrim, but before you begin you have to create the character that you will use to play the game.
In Skyrim, there is a host of different species and races to choose from, and each one is available as a male or a female. The different races have different physical and intellectual talents, so pure aesthetics cannot be the only motivating factor for selecting to play as any one race. For example, in any RPG that I ever play, my primary means of completing the various quests and challenges is by playing as a sneaky, stealthy assassin-type dude that slits sleeping throats and picks the locks on palace treasuries for loot. Thus, I tend to choose playing as a race of character that is more agile and deft of hand.
Once the game has started in Skyrim, your character is free to go out and do whatever-the-hell you want to make them do. You are granted creative license to accomplish any task in the game in any fashion that you so choose. If you want to have a character capable of throwing fire-balls, shooting lighting, and turning invisible, then you need to guide your character accordingly and complete the challenges in the game that grant your character the ability to do such things. If you want your character to be good at navigating a level undetected, then you have to make your character practice sneaking around. If you want your character to be a tank that dual-weilds gigantic battle axes, then you have to train your little warrior and unlock achievements in strength and endurance.
This character in the game is called an "Avatar". It is a conceptual vehicle that you "drive" around to accomplish tasks in the make-believe world of the video game. While playing the game you are completely lucid to the fact that your in-game character is just an agent of your will. If your character dies, an autosave point reanimates you back to the last saved point. Dying in the game is a frustrating occurrence and all, but obviously isn't dreaded in the manner of actual, physical death by any means (excluding the crazies).
So these ascended masters are just becoming video game characters?
Of course not! The concept of 'becoming an avatar' is a bit confusing to discuss, because, well, we are actually ALL Avatars already in a basic sense. Our bodies and egos represent the physical and spiritual components of our Avatars; the conceptual vehicles (perceived as physical) that we choose to inhabit in order to accomplish the various tasks and quests that our Soul wills to be done.
When Avatars are discussed in ancient texts, it is in reference to a person who has awakened in this solid dream world; the 'video game' world, in which they have placed themselves. Recall that in Part Two it was briefly mentioned that the only difference between this world and any of your "dream worlds" is that this particular dream is being shared and cooperatively dreamt by an extremely large number of other entities; making it much more solid and tangible. Essentially, this dream has many more dreamers, and all those dreamer's combined observations serve to make it much more dense and definite in composition. This fact can not be understated: "Dreams" are no different, no less "real", than this very world you are living in right now. The very term is rather misleading, and as such I have taken great pains to describe this topic without relying too-heavily on the commonly accepted ideas of "dreaming" and "sleeping".
These ascended masters are therefore said to be "Awakened", or "Enlightened", but the root mechanistic explanation for these terms is relatively simple to comprehend: They have become aware of the fact that life is a dream; a hologram, and through realizing that "I'm dreaming. This world is my dream. This world is our dream. Our dreaming minds work together to manifest this co-creationally based dream," on the most primal and fundamental of psychological levels, they attain a state capable of what we normal people call "Miracles".
When you're sleeping, and you become aware of the fact that you're dreaming, we call this "Lucid Dreaming". When you're awake, and you become aware of the fact that you're dreaming, we call this "Ascension".
Months ago when I initially sat down to write Part One of this series, my original intent was to write a how-to article for developing one's ability to Lucid Dream. However, while writing I was hit with the enormous realization that to approach this topic from such an angle would be a disservice to my audience, because it grossly confuses the reality of it all.
By emphasizing the investigation and research into various methods for Dream Recall, Dream Interpretation, Lucid Dreaming, Astral Projection, or any other forms of Out-Of-Body Experiences, you are effectively strengthening your own mental barriers between your waking and sleeping mind. There is no difference in real-ness between your "dreams" and your everyday life. By attempting to learn about your "dreams", you are actually only solidifying the mental constructs that have lead you into the illusion that your current conscious observations are 'real', and that your "dreaming" observations are 'not-real'.
This notion is false.
A dream is nothing more than a grid-point location that your soul happens to be observing. In any dream that our minds are capable of imaging, we must fashion for ourselves some semblance of an Avatar in which to operate within the dream. One must note that not every dream you enter necessarily requires the use of an Avatar, because such dreams take place in higher realms where individual Avatars have no meaning. As such, these compose the collection of dreams that you can't really remember very well upon awakening; your conscious mind simply cannot process the information from such adventures due to a lack of relatable symbols with which to attach meaning to. The Avatar that we often choose in the various other more familiar "dreams" is much less physically-based than the body you currently inhabit, and they often lack a great deal of the after-market components that your soul has outfitted your current physical body with in order to operate in such a massive cooperative manifestation as this world. In your "dreams", for instance, you carry within your Avatar a much less extreme version of an Ego (the part that defines self from not-self), because there is an infinitely smaller population of other, non-you things within the manifested grid-point location. Conversely, in this current version of Earth, it is quite necessary to incorporate a much stronger version of the Ego in order to maintain the levels of individuality and identity that are so characteristic of this particular plane of existence. This is the only real inconsistency between your "dreams", and your physical life. You could say that in your "dreams", where your entity comprises the bulk of the dream's observations, you are much more capable of miraculous feats than in this cooperative world where your overall will is diluted into a vast ocean of other personalities' observations.
This is why you can fly in your dreams. This is why you can teleport, walk on water, raise the dead, and all sorts of other things in your dreams. It is in these more "private" manifestations of your mind that you are capable of bending the rules however you see fit. Here on Earth, however, those rules are much more static and hard to change because, well, there's usually billions of other people subconsciously working against your efforts to bend them through their beliefs and 'knowledge' that such things are impossible. Your ability to manipulate this world is greatly lessened because you do not control the bulk of the observations that are manifesting it into reality, such as in your dreams (refer to The Scientific Validity of Divinity for a more in-depth look at this concept). Telekinesis, for example, is quite possible here on Earth. However, it is not nearly as effective here as in your dreams because there is such a large volume of people that are currently manifesting a reality where it's not. Whereas in my dreams I can flip cars and spin the moon around with a flick of my hand, here on Earth I am barely capable of making a Psi-Wheel spin while under experimentally-controlled circumstance without tremendous concentration. The concept of "Miracles", taken in this light, is rather arbitrary. The truth of the matter is that "Miracles" are the norm, never the exception, in the universe.
Before you were ever 'loaded' into this video game, your Soul sat down to think about what character, or role, it wanted to play this time around. It had a pretty damn good idea of what lessons it wanted to tackle from the get-go, so it looked at all the available races, chose a gender, chose a sexual orientation, chose a culture, and chose what passions would fuel you from the moment your character entered the game at the moment of conception. I like to think of the time spent in the womb as the "loading screen" of life. To do this, your soul bounced a bunch of ideas around with quite a few other souls. The best way to play any RPG is in a Guild, after all (Nerds: please ignore the fact that Skyrim isn't an online game, and role with the analogy anyway please). These other souls agree to play various roles in your character's life, and you in theirs. Your parents, your siblings, your childhood friends, your enemies, and your lovers, were all in your most innermost of soulular social circles. Your enemies in this life are in fact your soul's most hallowed of friends; it's quite an intimate favor to ask another soul to play the role of an ass-hole to you for the sake of teaching you a new life-lesson or gain a needed experience.
So there you were, crafting your character while sitting on your couch observing the Fifth-Dimensional Grand Web. You chose your likes, and your dislikes. You chose your friends, and they chose you. You chose your dog, and it chose you. Now you are navigating this world through the eyes of this fashioned Avatar of yours, and you are curious about the Anatomy of your Dreams. How does one go about manipulating these dreams, then, if they are in fact nothing different than this whole holographic world you live in?
By beginning to realize that you are already dreaming! All the time! The dream never ceases, you just shift from one location to another! Throughout your day, simply take a few moments to genuinely ask yourself: "Am I dreaming? If I'm dreaming, then I should be able to ________ !"(insert miraculous act here). Then actually, genuinely, attempt to perform the miracle. Will you suddenly be able to heal the sick, or walk on water, or fly? Of course not! But what you are actually accomplishing by 1) Asking if you're dreaming, and 2) Actually trying to perform a miracle, is that you are eroding the strict barriers that you have developed over time between your waking and sleeping mind. Essentially, you are developing the new habit of questioning your reality, and this translates into your subconscious actions very effectively within your dreams; causing the overall frequency of your "Lucid Dreams" to increase as a side-effect. Now, in your "dreams", you will begin to instinctually begin to question "Am I dreaming?", and upon this questioning you will become Lucid within the dream. This is how you develop Dream Manipulation, by beginning to see that all of existence is in fact no more or less real than any one of your dreams.
To better understand the worlds you inhabit and experience in your dreams, it is helpful to elaborate on the primary component of the Avatar a bit more. As stated previously, the Avatar is always composed of some semblance of an Ego, so now it is appropriate to discuss what, exactly, the Ego is.
The Cage
Your "comfort zone" is the volume of the space within the box that you've caged yourself in to form your individuality, and if left unquestioned it serves as an effective prison for your mind. The cage itself is made of your Ego, and the role of your Ego is to stand as the barrier between 'you' and 'not-you'. The Ego is the most vital component of the Avatar you are inhabiting right now, because it is the component with which you manifest duality, and therefore make your physical existence possible. Without the "software" of the ego installed into the body/mind complex, it would be impossible to live three-dimensionally, because physical existence is entirely hinged upon energetic polarity.
Often I'll see a philosophically minded person say something like "release your ego", or somehow otherwise express disdain for it, but one must understand that without the critical job of defining 'self' from 'non-self', there would only be one consciousness; no individuality at all. This complete loss of individuality is rather uncomfortable to consider at first; especially because we are fundamentally wired to desire a physical existence in the first place. Therefore the cage, and subsequently the comfort zone contained within it, should never be thought of as bad, primitive, or otherwise undesired in any way, because it is the very thing that gives this existence any meaning in the first place.
This cage is both plastic, and upgradable in nature. For example, let's say public speaking is something that makes you uncomfortable. If and when you are forced to stand up in front of others (let's say at least 10 people) to deliver some message, you are likely then overcome with fear. In such a moment you have stepped outside your comfort zone; your cage. It feels uncomfortable because a potion of your cage is being stretched; causing stress. If this action is performed enough, however, the cage expands enough to accommodate this new mental 'location'. Eventually you will not feel like you are "stepping outside your comfort zone" one bit. Eventually, if the cage is stretched often enough, it becomes much more flexible. This makes the discomfort of stretching outside the comfort zone much easier to manage. If this state is achieved, the rate at which you can expand your box of joy increases exponentially. You literally can't stop becoming happier! By consistently stretching the cage and challenging yourself to have new experiences, the Ego begins to feel more comfortable with that which is deemed "not-self". This comfort level must be developed in order to allow yourself to begin forging your own Ascension, and realize yourself as the Philosophers Stone that you could be.
The Yoga of the Mind
The ego is not to be exclusively "released"; it's easy to do such a thing with a little practice (a genuine state of yogic meditation is defined as the state of "no-thought" associated to the dissolution of this "cage" and the revelation of unity). Learning to expand the comfort zone is a much more difficult challenge to most. The point is that one cannot operate in this world while in a complete state of unity; by definition you just can't physically exist without the energetic polarity that is required of physicality and built into this Avatar of yours. This means that to ever occupy this dense 3-D realm, some degree of an ego must be installed in the vehicle of consciousness that is being employed. Essentially, it is impractical to use the concept of "releasing the ego" as a means of fully expanding the Self and experiencing Waking Lucidity, because this actually works to undo everything you're trying to do here in the first place. Meditation is a powerful thing to practice in its' own right for the illumination it brings to your overall understanding of things (such as phenomenon encountered while dreaming), but one cannot function as a contributing member of any society when perpetually lost in such trances.
Personally, I feel the spiritual community generally places far too much emphasis on 'meditation', and not nearly enough on simply going out and making shit happen. I love my morning meditations, I really do. I go out of my way to ensure I have a quite, uninterrupted time most mornings to dive deep into the vast recesses of my mind. But, at some point you have to take what you learn from these things and go put boot-to-ass. If all you want is to meditate yourself into the 12th dimension, sell all your belongings and move to an ashram, or monastery (which is probably still quite a bit outside of your comfort zone, anyway). Otherwise, you need to regularly condition your ego by stretching that comfort zone in your day-to-day operations. Why? Because in order to efficiently learn how to manipulate your dreams, in order to become comfortable with being completely Lucid in your personal manifestations, you must fully realize the truth that there is nothing at all to fear in doing so. This is accomplished by properly conditioning the Ego complex of your current Avatar by stretching the cage of your comfort zone.
We are now approaching the end of this series.
Realize that you are here to experience physical life. Your Soul would not have wasted the effort manifesting your current physical reality if it did not desire to live physically. Don't fight it dude. The longer a cage is left un-stretched, the stiffer and more difficult it becomes to do so. The ego is a vain thing that will seek to increasingly maintain its' sense of safety and security at all costs (it's quite protective of you), and this will work to further solidify the separation between your sleeping and waking thought constructs.
By stretching the cage, you make it confident in its ability to maintain 'self' by releasing the fear of 'not-self'. By also learning to dissolve the ego, you keep it in check by remembering the state of unity from whence you came, and will eventually return in your infinite desire to express yourself and learn new things. Both are necessary components of leading a fulfilling existence on this plane, and both will work together to deliver unto you a lasting sense of powerful, joyful happiness and contentment.
This is the path of Alchemy. This is how you turn "Lead" into "Gold". In Part One we discussed the nature of time and its' direct role at organizing the x/y/z physical grid into specific thought-locations, and how we higher-mammals are capable of observing the web of probable outcomes to a given decision. In Part Two we expanded on this concept by zooming our vantage point 'out' to the frame of our Higher Selves observing the Grand Web, and discussed how our Soul directs and guides us from that overarching view of all that we cannot physically see. Here in Part Three we have elaborated on this 5-D vantage point by describing it through the (spookily accurate) analogy of a Role Playing Game; ending with the ironic realization that to study The Anatomy of a Dream is really nothing more than a fancy roundabout way to study The Anatomy of Life.
This is how you master your dreams. Realize that your entire life is a dream, and that your dreams are just other dreams. Become the Master of your Life, and you will become the Master of your "Dreams" by default.
This is the path of Alchemy. This is how you turn "Lead" into "Gold". In Part One we discussed the nature of time and its' direct role at organizing the x/y/z physical grid into specific thought-locations, and how we higher-mammals are capable of observing the web of probable outcomes to a given decision. In Part Two we expanded on this concept by zooming our vantage point 'out' to the frame of our Higher Selves observing the Grand Web, and discussed how our Soul directs and guides us from that overarching view of all that we cannot physically see. Here in Part Three we have elaborated on this 5-D vantage point by describing it through the (spookily accurate) analogy of a Role Playing Game; ending with the ironic realization that to study The Anatomy of a Dream is really nothing more than a fancy roundabout way to study The Anatomy of Life.
This is how you master your dreams. Realize that your entire life is a dream, and that your dreams are just other dreams. Become the Master of your Life, and you will become the Master of your "Dreams" by default.
live.in.freedom
excellent Seth!
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