The five colors can blind,
The five tones deafen,
The five tastes cloy,
The race, the hunt, can drive men mad
And their booty leaves them no peace.
Therefore the sensible man
Prefers the inner to the outer eye.
The inner self has no “best” to perform, it simply listens and knows, and goes about its business in a purposeful manner, with no concern for how everything turns out. When you get to purpose in your life, you are in the process of being spiritual, and you cannot measure this with worldly formulas such as “your best” or “the best.”
Suggestions for Releasing the Belief That You Have to Do Your Best
Stop imposing on yourself and your children the belief that you must do your best. Experiment with performing tasks that seem to flow from your inner promptings. But detach yourself from the need to measure to see whether your efforts have been worthwhile.
While meditating, get a picture of yourself being able to do anything. Give yourself permission to be with this image and to forget about the outcome. See how peaceful you feel when you are not being tested, when you are allowed to just be. Give yourself this same permission in all of your daily undertakings.
You will find, ironically, that your performance will improve and that you feel more energized. This is because you are enjoying the moment rather than thinking about how well you’re doing.
Make an effort to compliment others without focusing on the outcome. They will be grateful for your interest and for your not telling them that they always have to do their best.
You will find that there are a few things you want to excel at. In these areas of interest you will be more diligent. But in all other areas of your life, you simply want to do. You don’t have to take the best walk of your life or the best bicycle ride or play the best softball game.
I have run seven marathons and not once did I do my very best. If I had, I would have had faster and faster times. This kind of pressure would have kept me from running at all, since I run to relieve pressure rather than to take more on.
Had I insisted that I had to do my best, I would not be able to say I ran seven marathons. That kind of pressure eliminates so many of life’s pleasures and puts the ego at the controls of daily life.
BELIEF # 10: DREAMS ARE NOT REALITY
Most of us were taught to believe in two separate realities. One is our waking reality, the other is our dream reality.
In this formula, when we are in a dream state, we are in a world that is unreal. We disregard dreams as a mental exercise that happens while we sleep. All of the things that we create during those dreaming hours are considered not real. Waking consciousness is considered reality, and dreaming consciousness is treated as an unreality. I suggest you reconsider this belief.
Imagine that your dreams are simply different aspects of the same reality, and that they contain teachers for you on your sacred path. Begin with understanding that this is primarily a world of energy and only secondarily a world of material objects.
To know your sacred self you need to perceive energy directly. This is what you are capable of doing in your dream state. The entire basis of your perception shifts from concrete objects to energy shapes. When this is part of your reality, your dream state becomes something that you share with other spiritually attuned beings.
Eventually you can be aware that you are dreaming while you are dreaming. This is called lucid dreaming. In lucid dreaming you can control your dreams and be able to dream awake. Through the process of dreaming you perceive other dimensions of reality, which are shut out by your conditioning.
I am not writing about dream interpretation. I am talking about knowing your dream life and being aware of experiencing dimensions of a reality while you are sleeping, which will also become available in your waking moments.
Your dreams are created with the same body and the same brain as is the rest of your perceptual world. It is all yours—you do not leave every night and take on a new brain to experience your nighttime reality.
Everything that you are capable of knowing and being convinced of in your dream has a potential for being experienced at all moments of your daily life. Everything! Yes, this is a radical notion, but it leads you to know the power of your energy body.
You enter your dreaming world with a complete absence of doubt about what you can experience. With that absence of doubt there are absolutely no limits. When you awaken to what you call your waking consciousness, you still have the same body, brain and perceptual equipment, but you introduce doubt.
I believe that your dreams do not reveal things about you but that they are you. They are real and they can become highly effective in helping you to experience your highest spiritual self.
Suggestions for Releasing a Disbelief in Dreams
When you go to sleep, encourage yourself to be aware that you are entering your dream state. Just this awareness is the first step toward higher awareness through dreaming. As you drift off, make a mental note to yourself that you are about to enter the dream state and that you are pleased to be aware of it.
Make an effort, before you drift off, to consciously see elements of your upcoming dream. Tell yourself you will make a note of an object, a room or a specific location while you are in the dream. Experience as much detail as you can concerning the object while dreaming.
If it is a lamp, for instance, bring it closer to you with the power of your mind. Examine the color, shape and intensity of the light.
You want to make direct contact with your energy body, that special body of energy that coexists at all times with your physical body. By examining the content of your dreams you will give yourself access to this higher energy. You will prove to yourself that your mental energy is a phenomenon that you can manipulate with practice and effort. Eventually you will be able to access this energy in all moments of your life.
Your energy body has appearance but no mass. Get familiar with this appearance of your energy and know that it can transport you anywhere in the universe with your command. Sounds strange, but it is within you to make this happen. First in your sleeping dreams and then in your waking dreams.
See if you can make yourself go from one dream back to another, and then return to the same dream. As you drift off, first become aware of your upcoming dreaming state; then, while in the dream, become aware that you are dreaming, and shift to another dream. After years of experience I have been able to do this only on an occasional basis. But give it a try. It will give you practice for the ultimate key to higher awareness: cultivating the witness. (This is discussed in detail in chapter 5.)
Make an attempt to observe yourself dreaming. Carlos Castaneda calls this the third gate of dreaming. In The Art of Dreaming, he writes, “The third gate of dreaming is reached when you find yourself in a dream, staring at someone else who is asleep. And that someone else turns out to be you.”
This is a state of heightened awareness wherein your physical self is being witnessed by your energy self, and you are conscious of it taking place. You are conscious of simultaneously dreaming and watching yourself dream.
This is a shift—from what you’ve been told about dreaming, into a new world, a world that allows you to become a sleeping dreamer and a waking dreamer and to begin to punctuate your waking life with the magic of dreaming consciousness.
Become aware of your dreams and see if you can shift to lucid dreaming each night. When you awaken in the middle of the night, note the content and objects of your dreams, and then reenter them while staying conscious of your dream state.
It is in this realm of dreaming and waking consciousness that you are going to get to know the existence of the highest energy in the universe.
This concludes my list of ten of the most erroneous beliefs you have been taught. Shedding the past is simply a matter of changing your mind without any accompanying anger or guilt about what you were taught to believe. All that you were exp
osed to was in divine order. All of the exams that life has presented to you were a part of the curriculum you signed up for when you elected to travel from no-where to now-here.
Be thankful for it all, and be thankful that you are ready to transcend those beliefs. This book is in your hands with the same divine providence that guides your sacred guest. And keep in mind that any beliefs that you hold on to that no longer serve you are impertinent intruders into your life. Let them go.
Now is the time to begin recognizing the four keys to higher awareness. They are the subject of the next four chapters.
PART II
THE FOUR KEYS TO HIGHER AWARENESS
4
BANISH THE DOUBT
Our doubts are our traitors.
—SHAKESPEARE
I rid myself of my doubts by remembering that there is a valid reason for everything that happens.
In the first part of this book I described the ideas and opinions you’ve been exposed to that have probably influenced your life. Many of those ideas, given to you by others, may now be your daily reality, defining for you what is possible and impossible in your life.
I’ve encouraged you to abandon many of those beliefs and make a new agreement with reality that is based instead on what you know is your truth. Once you know your personal truth, your reality will be free of doubt.
You might not think that doubt could have much of an effect on your life. But part of the damage that it creates is that it is so thoroughly etched on to your belief system that it becomes impossible to think any other way. Doubting our potential achievements, we proclaim with certainty just what is and what is not possible. But when doubt is banished, we come to a knowing that leads to creative and inspired solutions far beyond what we believed was possible.
With the attitude of doubt you are unable to successfully tread the path of your sacred quest and realize your sacred self. Be steadfast in recognizing this obstacle to higher awareness. You will need to deliberately and actively work at banishing doubt from your inner world. When it is removed from your thoughts it will disappear from your outer world, and you will find yourself on a most satisfying inner and outer journey.
Andrew Cohen, in his blissfully simple book Enlightenment Is a Secret: Teachings of Liberation, explains one way to get rid of doubt:
Q: I’m not clear on how to get rid of doubt.
A: By throwing it out. If you saw your child playing in the kitchen, noticed she had found a bottle of rat poison and could see she was about to drink it, what would you do?
Q: I would slap it out of her hand.
A: Yes. Because you know how dangerous it is. When you know how dangerous doubt is, you will do the same thing. An ignorant person doesn’t realize how dangerous doubt is, so they allow themselves to indulge in doubt and by doing so they destroy the possibility of truly waking up in this birth.
As you begin banishing doubt from your life with this first key to higher awareness, recall this dialogue and how simple it is.
The presence of doubt can prevent you from awakening. Seven simple words describe why that is true: As you think, so shall you be. We do become what we think about all day long. Don’t allow your thoughts and actions to be dictated by doubt.
Permitting doubt is the same as having a traitor at the helm of your life. Doubt is a traitor because it uses limitations and shortcomings to influence the course of your life. To travel the path of the sacred quest, guided by your higher self, means you must banish doubt.
Can you imagine your reality if you were brought up in an environment free of doubt? How would your life be different if you had never heard, “It can’t be done,” “That’s not possible,” “Accept your limitations”? What if you had been encouraged to exercise the energy of your mind? You might have used that energy to explore your power to influence other beings, things, the weather, your creativity.
That may sound a bit weird to you. But remember, you are assessing the possible and the impossible with doubts that automatically creep in when anyone suggests something you believe to be outlandish or absurd. If you had been fortunate enough to be raised without doubt you would possess an incredible inner sense of your magnificence.
Never would you utter sentences that reflect doubt, such as: “I’m not talented enough,” “It can’t be done, get real,” and “Don’t you know there are limits to everything?” With doubt-free processes you would have had a handle on your divinity much earlier in your life. You would have known your inner capacity to create the world and tackle social evils and ills with no doubts about your ability to create Utopia.
You would know that mankind is fundamentally good. Human shortcomings would not be blamed on inherent inferiority or the devil. Satisfaction of the ego’s demands would be known as the activity that created those shortcomings.
The sacred self knows no doubt. It has no limits and no boundaries. What would our world be like if we had learned this in childhood? It is time to know that we have a personal responsibility to incorporate the sacred quest in our lives and to introduce our children to this aspect of human life.
I offer my own children opportunities to learn about their inner limitlessness in a variety of ways. For example, I invite them outside with me to make clouds. After dinner, we often take a blanket outside to lie down on, and we engage in what has come to be called cloud making.
The children start by creating an inner picture of a form they want to see in the clouds. Then they concentrate their energy on a particular cloud, attempting to influence it to design their inner picture. The neighborhood has gotten used to hearing my kids shout, “I’m making a house, Daddy. Watch my cloud move. I’m moving it with my mind!”
Many of the children in the neighborhood may be thinking, “Those Dyer kids are crazy, actually believing they can make clouds into designs.” But why shouldn’t children learn that they have the same divine intelligence flowing through them that moves the clouds? If it is in everything, which we know is true, then it is in both my children and the clouds. Why not feel so connected to it that they use it to make their own cloud shapes? Our children have very few doubts, and this inner knowing allows them to create the world that they want for themselves.
You do the very same thing every night when you go to sleep. You enter your dreaming experience with a complete absence of doubt. In fact, you are unable to bring doubt into this nightly divine kingdom. It is as if God has a “No Doubts Allowed” sign at the entrance to your dreams.
In your dream state you are able to do anything that your mind can create. You can fly, visit the past, project into the future, converse with the long departed, see those who have died and know that they are there with you, jump over tall trees, breathe underwater, create dozens of characters and perform an endless list of other activities and scenes. For this one-third of your life when you are asleep, you have no doubt—and hence no limitations.
Then, when you wake up, you instantly introduce your constant companion, doubt, back into your waking consciousness. Awake, you believe that those things are not possible for you in your waking moments. The difference is that in your sleep you know what you can do and you do it; in your waking moments, you believe that you can’t, and you don’t.
Take time to really examine carefully the difference between these two opposing attitudes.
WHAT YOU KNOW—WHAT YOU BELIEVE
If you are able to make a clear distinction between that which you know and that which you believe, you will recognize the crucial role doubt plays in your life. The ultimate goal of putting this into practice is to shift all beliefs into knowings.
Here are the main distinctions between that which you believe to be true and that which you know to be true.
Beliefs are handed to you. Knowings come from within. Your entire inventory of beliefs was handed to you by people who have come into your life for this purpose. In chapter 2 I outlined ten of these most common beliefs and gave suggestions for turning them around. Now I ask you to examine
all of your beliefs. As you do this, think of yourself as a sponge that absorbed the beliefs of others and then called them your own.
Throughout your life you’ve been subjected to thousands of beliefs, ranging from what the moon is made of, to how people should react to each other, to whether sports were of any value, to the edict that poetry is for sissies, to how fast human beings can run, to what your neighbors are really like, to what you are capable of achieving, to the fact that you are just like your father and his father. There is a long list of things that you believe about yourself, the world, God, your potential, the fate of capitalism and so much more. These beliefs, which came to you from outside of yourself, became your very own dance.
Your knowings, however, all came to you as a result of your own experience of having decided to transcend a belief. No one can hand you a knowing. You must have the direct experience of the decision-making function to make it a known.
I could talk to you forever about how to ride a bicycle, or even why it is impossible given the laws of balance and air/speed/wind ratios. You could have a belief about bicycle riding, but you will know that it is possible only when you get on, wobble about a few times and then experience it. Once you have experienced bicycle riding, then no one, ever, can convince you that you should believe that it is impossible.
All of your knowings are like this. They come from the direct experience of your own life, and therefore they exist within you free of doubt.
Beliefs will let you down in a crisis. Knowings never let you down. When you believe in something without knowing it, there is doubt attached to the belief. The doubt resides somewhere deep in the recesses of your mind. Nevertheless, it exists as a thought that you will ultimately call upon when you want to put that belief into practice.
Your Sacred Self Page 8
