PepperFritz
The Cosmic Force
Gimpy: Very sound, balanced advice, in my opinion.
I went through a period when I was a young woman, and very much into the "Seth" material, where I worked very hard on recalling my dreams and studying them for "clues" about my life and "alternate realities". I kept very detailed "dream journals", and increased the number and length of my "lucid" dreams. After a while, though, I found that it took up a great deal of my time, and I began to question how much real benefit there was to it.
Then I came across a Seth statement that completely changed my thinking. (The following is a loose paraphrase on my part, from memory, can't find the book.) He emphasized that everything we SHOULD be attending to (in terms of lessons, growth, etc.) was always directly before us in our everyday waking life, that if we worked at being completely aware and attentive to the mundane details of our moment-to-moment existence, and endeavoured to engage with and not avoid the challenges therein, we could not avoid "progressing" in our spiritual curriculum. He suggested that instead of analyzing our sleeping dreams for "clues", we should view the people, places, and events of our waking life like we would a dream, as both "real" and yet "poetically symbolic" and multi-layered at the same time; a kind of "waking dream".
That hit me like a bolt of lightning. After that I began to pay less attention to my dreams, and more attention to the significances of my everyday life. In the terminology of the Work (which I would not encounter for many years yet), I began to work on being more attentive and "awake" on a moment-to-moment basis in my "real" life, and avoid the "sleep" that can overtake when we become to preoccupied with the minutae of our unconscious mind and various other "phenomena chasing"....
I went through a period when I was a young woman, and very much into the "Seth" material, where I worked very hard on recalling my dreams and studying them for "clues" about my life and "alternate realities". I kept very detailed "dream journals", and increased the number and length of my "lucid" dreams. After a while, though, I found that it took up a great deal of my time, and I began to question how much real benefit there was to it.
Then I came across a Seth statement that completely changed my thinking. (The following is a loose paraphrase on my part, from memory, can't find the book.) He emphasized that everything we SHOULD be attending to (in terms of lessons, growth, etc.) was always directly before us in our everyday waking life, that if we worked at being completely aware and attentive to the mundane details of our moment-to-moment existence, and endeavoured to engage with and not avoid the challenges therein, we could not avoid "progressing" in our spiritual curriculum. He suggested that instead of analyzing our sleeping dreams for "clues", we should view the people, places, and events of our waking life like we would a dream, as both "real" and yet "poetically symbolic" and multi-layered at the same time; a kind of "waking dream".
That hit me like a bolt of lightning. After that I began to pay less attention to my dreams, and more attention to the significances of my everyday life. In the terminology of the Work (which I would not encounter for many years yet), I began to work on being more attentive and "awake" on a moment-to-moment basis in my "real" life, and avoid the "sleep" that can overtake when we become to preoccupied with the minutae of our unconscious mind and various other "phenomena chasing"....