| Monday, November 28, 2011 |  |
| Jumps |
 We're likely to get to the future we desire, not through methodical and linear progress, but through discontinuous quantum jumps.
The idea that life progresses linearly, logically, and fluidly, is an illusion. Just like how you make a motion picture out of a sequence of still pictures. We imagine the stuff in-between, thinking that we're seeing fluid, continuous motion. Our brains hold on tight to the concept of linear experience, which unfortunately means that they are easily fooled by constructed sequences. Discontinuous change isn't random and unknowable. Change in jumps and shifts doesn't mean that intelligence and knowledge and preparedness are all out the window. It just means you need to do better than linear projections. What happens tomorrow isn't just a little more of what happened today. Things actually change. To keep up and maybe stay ahead of the game, we might need some different senses, a different type of logic, some different institutions. You might need to be able to perceive patterns, to sense the energetic or meta version of what is going on, directly, not just as a constructed mental picture. You'll get much further if you can feel things that want to happen, before they happen, even though they currently are nowhere to be seen. You might need fractal, multi-dimensional logic, that includes the movement of the whole, at multiple levels. You might want to see logic as the unfolding of the universe and its laws, rather than as a separated mental activity. Expect phase changes. Disruptive change might not be linear, but it doesn't have to be a huge surprise either. We might need educational institutions that help us flourish as the unique and creative individuals that we are, rather than shape us mentally and emotionally into clones. We might need economic institutions that value what enhances life, all of life, not what perpetuates and secures the status quo for a few of us. We might need governments that flow with the energy of the people, rather than try to rule us and render us harmless and immobile. You can start at anytime by not expecting only what you already had, but by staying present, paying attention, noticing the unique opportunities that are here right now, and acting on them. If the bus you want to be on comes by, get on it. Don't wait. If there's no bus, make one. The current scenery isn't going to last, so there's no reason to bet everything on that it will. [ Dreams | 2011-11-28 22:15 | 5 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Friday, October 16, 2009 | |
| Magic reality |
 It has happened many times in my life. Something impossible or at least very improbably happened. Something too coincidental and convenient to quite be a coincidence. You know, the world changes, you step off into a different dimension than where you were traveling, and suddenly the previous reality seems but a vague memory, like the dream you were having and then you wake up. If you don't somehow write it down or tell somebody about it, it evaporates very quickly.
You could say it is something neurological and psychological, and you're welcome to believe that. It doesn't really matter, as it happens on multiple levels. I've certainly noticed it as a coach or therapist as well. When the client really changes, it is something instantaneous. Suddenly their old self doesn't seem familiar to them any longer and a new way of being feels like the path of least resistance. Of course I know that I took them through certain steps, and it also works better if they have a reasonable and logical explanation for why things now are different. Doesn't matter if the explanation matches what "really happened". It would be a pity to believe that the world is only material, consistent and boring, and the only thing that gets results is hard work and stringent logic. And that any experience of magic, miracles, synchronicity, or anything else improbable is just errant neurons that we use to fool ourselves into thinking that life is meaningful. Whereas the opposite is a lot more fun, more empowering, and quite possibly more real, dependable and tangible. What we think we know about the world is spinning in circles in our heads. But sometimes the real thing breaks through. It is most likely and lucid at times where our mental models clearly don't match what is going on any longer. So, note to self: Pay attention to the moments of magic, where life shines through, despite the odds. Endeavor to steer by those signs of life, rather than by the obsessive need to be consistent with yesterday. [ Dreams | 2009-10-16 03:06 | 11 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Monday, August 20, 2007 | |
| Luxury subs |
 Oh, I'd really like my own luxury submarine. It's my birthday soon. But $78 million is a bit expensive of course. This is the Phoenix 1000.The Phoenix 1000 is a 65-meter (213') personal luxury submarine. The initial design was originally executed for a client and now awaits a buyer. As proposed, the submarine would constitute the single largest private undersea vehicle ever built, and arguably, one of the most significant personal transportation devices of the century.I probably shouldn't even be looking in brochures that say 'perfect comfort', 'unsurpassed' and 'ample' in every paragraph. But a luxury submarine is a nice thing to dream about. [ Dreams | 2007-08-20 21:59 | 6 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Friday, November 19, 2004 | |
| Collective dream diary cartoons |
 At Slow Wave an artist named Jesse Reklaw receives stories of people's dreams, and then he draws cartoons based on them, one every week. They're kind of surreal and interesting. Like dreams are, but somehow it adds another strange dimension to turn them into cartoons.[ Dreams | 2004-11-19 17:50 | 3 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Thursday, September 30, 2004 | |
| Breaking the Veil |
 Paul Hughes talks about the potentials of the dream world:I have come to believe that dreams are actually quite real, more real the so-called “waking life” and that this waking life is simply part of what we must make authentic via this dream world. I can’t speak for others, but I am now quite certain (as certain as I can be about anything) that my dream life is trying desperately to become manifest here in the real world. This might sound too new agey for some people, but it all makes perfect sense to me. When things go right in my life, they have this unmistakable resonance with my dream life – the feelings, sensations, gestalts and so on. In my dream life all the answers are there, the solutions to our problems, to world peace, to sustainable society, to genuine happiness for everyone. It seems so obvious, so simple in my dream life, and yet so complicated here.I feel the same way. The best decisions I've made, the most beneficial and surprising turns of my life have all come out of or been connected with my dreamworld. And there's something there, under the surface, bubbling up where it can, which, however undescribable it is, seems to offer the answers we need to make the world work better for us. I easily forget, and I often don't listen, but my experience does tell me that it usually is more effective to sleep and dream and see what surfaces than it is to think of a solution with mental willpower alone. I don't really understand how it works, but that is probably part of the magic, and part of the problem. That I think I have to understand. We so easily dillude ourselves as to our waking mental faculties. But yet they're so incomplete and faulty, and we don't have all the necessary information, so we're often incapable of making good decisions. And that might be because we try to do it with just the visible 10% of the iceberg. The rest, the more important parts, are under the surface. It seems like the bigger mind we hook into in dream states works on more channels. It has more dimensions, more connections. More degrees of freedom than our more rigid conscious minds that only can juggle a handful of concepts at the same time, and not very well at that. But yet there's quite a veil between the different parts of ourselves. So much that most of us don't really remember what happens in that other section of our lives, and when we do it is just a jumbled mess which fades quickly. Which easily can be dismissed as just misfiring neurons and recooked hallucinations of yesterday. Where really it could be infinitely more. What would happen if the veil lifted significantly more? What if we could be as multi-dimensionally hooked up all the time? What if we accepted the dreamworld more as a legitimate sphere to navigate our lives through? I don't know, but let me sleep on it. [ Dreams | 2004-09-30 23:59 | 7 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Thursday, June 10, 2004 | |
| Dreaming |
 More people seem to be writing about dreams they've had recently. And I've noticed myself that I'm suddenly dreaming a lot again. Every morning when I wake up, I've just been in an intensive dream. If I lie down for a nap, I dream very quickly. The dreamworld is suddenly much closer. And I have signs again of the more lucid kind of dreaming. Like flying dreams. Over the years I've had many dreams where I can fly. And in that kind of dream it always works the same way. Not like superman, but more like my body is really light, and if I kind of jump a certain way, I can then glide along for quite some time, only hitting the ground rarely. And once I get into the hang of it, I can take off a bit further over the ground. Always having to watch out for wires and that kind of thing. It requies quite some concentration and there's a certain aprehension involved in it. It is more like being able to miss the ground by a tricky balancing act than it is any rocket-powered superhero thing. But very cool, nevertheless.
I used to work much more deliberately on dreaming. I was into astral projection, lucid dreaming, Monroe's out of body experiences, Castaneda, Seth on Personal Reality, and whatever else I could get hold of that helped me dream more consciously or travel more deliberately in alternative realities. And one can quickly take it further if one puts one's mind to it. The most simple thing to start with is to write down one's dreams immediately, so one can get used to remembering them and being conscious of them. One can very well wake up several times every night and do that. Then there are tricks for becoming more lucid. Lucid dreaming is essentially when you wake up inside the dream, being aware that you're dreaming, without leaving the reality you're in, but able to navigate around in it and explore it. One approach is to remind oneself frequently to check whether one is dreaming, even while awake. Then one might also remember to do so while in a dream. And then there are tricks like Castaneda's approach of trying to find one's hands when inside the dream. Which isn't easy. But if you can consciously become aware of your hands, then you can probably go a step further and do something with them. For several years I had a job that allowed me to sit down and meditate for a few minutes every hour. And when I came home from the job I took a nap every day. This allowed me to be much closer to the dreamworld in general. I started frequently dreaming while awake. I'd sit by the computer and the wall to my side would dissolve and turn into a corridor or something, which I could walk down and interesting things would happen. Or I would start dreaming by deliberately visualizing some other place before falling asleep. Frequently it turns into a dream reality, and things would start happening by themselves. And I would thus both fall asleep and wake up dreaming. I would find that in the more lucid types of dreams, there would be certain places I'd frequently come back to. Not always the same place, but I'd often be aware that the place where I was a couple of nights before is "right over there". And the reality was very consistent. There's this place which is quite a bit like the society in the movie Brazil. It is very overcrowded, and there's like wires and cables and pipes everywhere, and shoddy building codes. I had a house and an appartment there. I'd often be driving or walking around looking for a place to sleep, ironically. And even if I found my own house, there would often be somebody else sleeping in my bed already. Very hard to hold on to one's property there. Oh, and the more astral projection types of dreams that I could pretty much step into at will, where there were a number of consistencies too. My favorite approach of getting around was this surfboard, which I could fly on, like the Silver Surfer. Very different flying than the previously mentioned jumping and not hitting the ground type. And there was this blue-skinned Egyptian goddess ladyfriend I had there, whom I'd run into in all sorts of places. Robert Monroe's out-of-body techniques is another approach again. I went through his various hemi-sync tapes, which essentially does some synchronization thing with the brain, to make it easy to let the body fall asleep while one stays awake. That part worked ok, but I didn't have any great success in going interesting places that way. You first have to drag your energy body out of your physical body, which isn't that straightforward. I didn't manage much more than lifting an arm or a leg that way. When I did manage by other means to do out-of-body experiences, I'd tend to be bouncing around and hitting walls in the darkness, finding it very hard to navigate. Anyway, I do happen to believe that the worlds we can visit in dreaming is much more than just some recooked memories from one's day, or some random chemistry in the brain. I've seen too much to believe that kind of stuff. Although, sure, normal unconscious dreams have something to do with that. But the more interesting kinds of dreaming is something quite different. Something real. I usually have found that my waking time is of higher quality when I spend more time dreaming. Solutions tend to appear by themselves, and inspiration is always close. Sometimes the full text of something I need to write appears fully formed. So, I'm trying to form the intention here to dream more consciously again. I think we need to access more dimensions to solve our problems in the world. The reason we get stuck in things is usually that we think too one- or two-dimensionally about it. More fluidity and wholistic awareness is needed. And imagination and the ability to jump between diverse worlds and world views. Live, complex experience. [ Dreams | 2004-06-10 09:01 | 12 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Monday, May 31, 2004 | |
| Transcendental Realms |
 Terence McKenna on levity.org via FutureHi:History is a kind of indicator of the nearby presence of a transcendental object. And as we approach the transcendental object, history will become more and more hallucinatory, more and more dreamlike, more and more surreal--does this sound familiar to you? It's the neighborhood, right? [laughter] That's because we are so close now to this transcendental object, that is the inspiration for religion and vision and revelation, that all you have to do to connect up to it is close your eyes, smoke a bomber, take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness, and the veil will be lifted, and you seen, then, the plan. You see what all these historical vectors have been pointing towards. You see the transcendental object at the end of time--a cross between your own soul and the flying saucer of cheap science fiction. I mean--the city of Revelations, hanging at the end of the Twentieth Century like a beacon. I really think that this is happening, and that what the-- It's as though we are boring through a mountain, towards someone else who is boring through that mountain, and there will be a handshake at a certain point in time. We are moving, literally, into the realm of the imagination. This is where the human future lies. [ Dreams | 2004-05-31 05:46 | 2 comments | PermaLink ] More > |