Time and the dreamer

I look at my watch. It is nearly 4:20. I must get on with my lecture. I close my eyes.
    I am standing before to a group of forty or fifty people seated in chairs arranged in a relaxed horseshoe pattern. It is rather irritating that behind the audience is a café area where people are talking quite loudly. At one point, I have to call to the café crowd to keep it down, and they do.
    My subject is time, and the dreamer’s relationship with time. I talk briskly and smoothly about how, especially in dreams, consciousness is forever traveling ahead of the body, returning with reports about conditions on the roads ahead. We can use these travelogues from the future to make better choices at the crossroads that lie before us.
     I next talk about how we also travel into the past. We visit scenes from our earlier lives. We visit other eras across history, sometimes as observers, sometimes entering fully into the mind and experience of other personalities. I talk about how we need to discern carefully whether we are dealing with ancestors, spiritual kin, reincarnational dramas – or counterpart personalities living in other times and other realities.
     To get a handle on all of this, I suggest, we need to rise to the perspective of a self on a higher level, a hub personality or oversoul. From this perspective, we may be able to recognize that a number of personalities – including our present selves – are joined to a central personality, a slightly higher self, as spokes join the hub of a wheel. Looking from this position, from above and beyond linear time, we can see that the dramas of many personalities are playing in the same spacious Now, and turn with each other.
    This is all being received well, but I keep looking at my wristwatch because I am determined to finish in precisely forty minutes, on the hour. I succeed.
    I open my eyes and look at the wristwatch I left on my bedside table. It is precisely 5:00 in the morning. The time I spent giving my lecture, in my dream, exactly coincided with the time that I lay in bed. Contrary to what people may say, dreamers can get things done on time.

Nine keys to living consciously in the multiverse

The only time is Now. All other times - past, present and parallel - can be accessed in this moment of Now, and may be changed for the better.

We dream to wake up. Dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It is about waking up to a deeper order of reality. Dreaming is a discipline; to get really good at it requires practice, practice, practice.

Treasures are waiting for us in the Place Between Sleep and Awake. The easiest way to become a lucid or conscious dreamer is to spend more time in the twilight zone between waking and sleep, or between sleep and waking.  

We live in the Speaking Land, as the First Peoples of my native Australia say. Everything in the world around us is alive and conscious and will speak to us if we are paying attention. Navigating by synchronicity becomes very simple, even irresistible, when we stream into this mode of understanding.

To live well, we must practice death. We bring courage and clarity to life choices when we are aware that death is always with us, and that we should be ready to meet it any day.

We must feed and honor our animal spirits. A working connection with them gives us immense resources for self-healing.

We have a guide for our lives who is no stranger. He is always with us and does not judge us. This is the Self on a higher level. When we rise to the perspective of the Greater Self, we are able to make peace between different personality aspects, including our counterparts in other times and parallel realities.

We are at the center of all times. The dramas of lives being lived in other times and in parallel realities may be intensely relevant to understanding and navigating our current relationships and life issues. We can learn to reach into those other lives to share gifts and lessons. We can dialog with our own older and younger selves within our present lifetimes.

We must entertain the spirits, starting with our very own – the child self, the inner artist, the passionate teen, the animal spirits, the creative daimon.

Adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

photo (c) Robert Moss

Manhattan transfer and used karmas at O'Hare airport

I am changing planes at Chicago's O'Hare airport and stop in at a bar restaurant near my gate for refreshments. A well-dressed older woman comes in and asks for a manhattan. That's a classy bourbon cocktail you don't often hear ordered at 10:00 a.m, except maybe by Don Draper in "Mad Men".
     Before the bartender has mixed the drink, she switches her order and asks for bourbon with ginger ale. I can't resist. I say to this stranger, "You raised the tone of this establishment and then you dropped it down again."
     She laughs, then peers at me and screeches, "We know each other!" I don't recognize her until she introduces herself. She came to some of my workshops twenty years ago. We last saw each other on a group adventure in the high Andes in 1999. How come she's in the bar now? Three of her flights were cancelled, she had to stay overnight at an airport hotel.
    "Do you have a story for me?" I ask.
    "I've been going deeper into Buddhism," she tells me. "I just came from a Buddhist retreat in Wisconsin."
    "Okay. Always good to ground and balance after something like that. Cheers!" We clink glasses. I am an Australian. I'll have a beer anytime I feel like it when traveling, especially when I have been up since 3:00 a.m. But I'll leave the morning manhattan to someone coming off a Buddhist retreat.
    She is earnest about what she has been studying. She wants to know my opinion about karma.
    I tell her I think there are consequences or everything we do, and that it's important to think about how we are collecting karma of every kind in our present lives, as well as carrying karma from other lives. "I like the Buddhist idea that we can be released from all of that in the moment of enlightenment," I say. "Tathagata time!" We toast again.
    More serious now, I reflect on the apparent contradiction between the idea of linear karma and the probability that in  the multidimensional universe everything is going on Now - and on limitless parallel event tracks. Einstein suggested that time and space, as we commonly think about them, are just a human convenience, not a fundamental reality. It may be convenient to step out of them, or across them.
    If I think that the Scottish druid who lived and died 1,500 years ago and the Royal Air Force pilot who was killed in World War II are part of my story, and that I have inherited karma from what they did or did not do, maybe I can reach back to them, launching from the moment of Now. Maybe my thoughts and actions now help or hinder in their own time - which is also now - and may be more helpful as I rise to greater consciousness of how all this works.
    It is possible to operate with these two seemingly contradictory visions of reality: linear karma in Chronos time, and the simultaneity of experience in the multiverse in a spacious Now. It is like the observation in physics that something can be both a particle and a wave, and you will see it one way or the other according to how you observe it.

- from my travel journal for Friday, January 9, 2015.

Nine Keys to Living Consciously in the Multiverse

1. The only time is Now. All other times - past, present and parallel - can be accessed in this moment of Now, and may be changed for the better.

2. We dream to wake up. Dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It is about waking up to a deeper order of reality. Dreaming is a discipline; to get really good at it requires practice, practice, practice.

3. Treasures are waiting for us in the Place Between Sleep and Awake. The easiest way to become a lucid or conscious dreamer is to spend more time in the twilight zone between waking and sleep, or between sleep and waking.  This liminal state is a place of encounter with inner guides and of heightened psychic perception and creative breakthroughs.

4. We live in the Speaking Land, as the First Peoples of my native Australia say. Everything in the world around us is alive and conscious and will speak to us if we are paying attention. Navigating by synchronicity becomes very simple, even irresistible, when we stream into this mode of understanding.

5. To live well, we must practice death. We bring courage and clarity to life choices when we are aware that death is always with us, and that we should be ready to meet it any day.

6. We must feed and honor our animal spirits. A working connection with them gives us immense resources for self-healing.

7. We have a guide for our lives who is no stranger. He is always with us and does not judge us. This is the Self on a higher level. When we rise to the perspective of the Greater Self, we are able to make peace between different personality aspects, including our counterparts in other times and parallel realities.

8. We are at the center of all times. The dramas of lives being lived in other times and in parallel realities may be intensely relevant to understanding and navigating our current relationships and life issues. We can learn to reach into those other lives to share gifts and lessons. We can dialog with our own older and younger selves within our present lifetimes.

9. We must entertain the spirits, starting with our very own – the child self, the inner artist, the passionate teen, the animal spirits, the creative daimon.

Text adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: "World Tree" by Annick Bougerolle

We must live into our own time

Lines written on a napkin in an Irish pub in New York City in 1994:

We must live into our own time.

The memories of the broken cord,
the nest emptied of its young,
the lost love, the knocking at the ribs
at the midnight door, the starling silences
cannot help us here.

Yet their tremulous rising,
dropletted as from the dawn sea,
is almost more than we can bear
and enough to turn houses upside down,
break families and the destiny of a present life.

There is danger in knowing our other selves,

danger in remembering too much, too soon,
of what lay beyond the stiff portal of birth.
Yet life itself in its endless wheelings
through the blur of feathers, through wind and sun
brings us face to face with the Other -
face of desire, face of the heart’s highest longing,
face of red hatred, face of cold fear -
and we are called, backward or forward
(whose time prevails now?)
into another life, and the forking paths of soul.

For commentary, I will simply add these lines from my Dreamer's Book of the Dead, written a decade later: 

During our lives on Earth we can become overwhelmed by memories of another life, perhaps a life involving dramas with previous versions of people we know in our present time - to the point where we can forget to live the life we have been given now. We can also become prisoners of simplistic determinism, telling each other that we and others are fated to live out certain experiences and endure various sufferings because of mistakes we made or obligations that were laid on us in a past life experience. We can only respond to these things well if we rise to the understanding that the moment of power is always now.

photo (c) Robert Moss