Might my conscious awareness of “reality” be an expression of my beliefs? Do you, me, everyone, and everything I perceive exist as imagined dream characters, representational symbols of my beliefs?
From birth, I have developed filters that keep my mind on track with beliefs – safe within my “comfort zones.” Occasionally, life’s experiences challenge that safety and my mind gets to choose. Once I make the choice to live within a comfort zone, the ability to choose fades from my consciousness, the blinders go on and my limited imagination is left to defend a fearful creator – (me). Any wonder Caroline Casey quipped, “Believe nothing, entertain possibilities?”
I question my ability to “believe nothing” as I insist on believing something! Perhaps it is impossible to believe nothing. It may be just as impossible to defend nothing. Beliefs seem fluid, floating in a soup of beliefs at the center of my creativity. A belief is interdependent with all other beliefs. It is this interconnection that gives cohesion to my reality – my story, which I must defend. Perhaps I might express Casey’s quote more accurately as, “Defend beliefs fluidly, entertain possibilities as you do beliefs.”
Regardless, there seems no doubt that my “reality” is not what it appears. What is it, then?
Is My Reality a Dream?
What if everything in my universe is MY consciousness, MY truth, MY dream? Conversely, perhaps I AM everything in my universe. Sometimes unaware I am a collective consciousness expressing itself IN this dream experience as though it were OF this dream experience. Beliefs expressed in metaphoric story form!
What might happen were I to become lucid – aware of dream and dreamer, beliefs and believer? Then belief would simply be an aspect of that condition. “Reality” as I experience it may be the MAP of the belief TERRITORY. Defense gives me a visceral experience – a consequence of belief expression rather than experience of the belief itself – think metaphor rather than literal.
Within the First-Second degree bubble, I doubt any other state of being than my literal experience, the “dream”. The “dreamer” of my reality exists to me as an interesting concept, an entertaining notion. I’m convinced of the literal truth of this material world. I find it difficult to comprehend it as a dream or a metaphoric story.
And yet, from Third Degree Illumination – I question…
- What belief does this reality illustrate?
- How am I defending this belief?
- Why do I defend this belief?
- Who am I, the dreamer of this dream?
