Dreams

Blissful is the moment when the last care pirouettes from the conscious, handing the dance to the warm, seemingly empty. Sleep is the technique I’ve mastered. In most cases, I can accomplish this big important nothing on demand. I’m nearly famous for sleeping through loud music, snooze-buttons, fire-engine sirens, and flashing lights. Impressively, when outdoors on the ground, I have slept through hail storms and multiple dogs licking my face. Basically, amidst any situation where I allow myself permission to sleep, there lies a seamless accomplishment. It is no coincidence that life in dream space fascinates me, even beckons me, to discover it’s meaning.

I could not even recall most my dreams when I first joined the Jungian dream group. I buried them away, tucking them deeply into the unknown. One of my main reasons for joining was to learn to weave my dreams from one dimension to the other, and I could not believe the ease of accomplishing this goal. You simply ask. The practice of asking the world for something and getting it so quickly in return is a daunting and exhilarating revelation.

Equally exhilarating are the dreams that I’ve remembered and recorded. I’ve witnessed gigantic moons giving birth and tasted fluffy sweet clouds. I’ve seen flying mice, silvery-beaded fish, and plenty of lions. I’ve curated magnificent gallery openings for horrific art, given my kids the freedom to fly, rejuvenated and rekindled innocent long lost loves. I’ve fallen from tall buildings and died, revived instantly by the person who loved me the most. Let’s just say I’ve escaped from the prairie, the reoccurring dream I’ve had since I was a child. I’ve discovered that by honoring the creative force that is screaming to be heard in this forum, I am creating a new life within myself outside of the unconscious.

It is a theory that we, ourselves, are all of the characters in our dreams. Because we all are mirrors, the people involved are primarily the emotions that they represent to our own lives. With this theory in mind, I am now more intensely troubled by the dreams where I am surrounded by jerks, wondering if I am the jerk or the victim. Either has their burden to bear. More enlightening is the suggestion that we are ever-powerful, capable of living our lives to it’s full potential by recognizing the symbols of awareness that intertwine our every moment. These are available to us when we choose to be present, whether we are sleeping, or not.

What do you really deserve?

I wonder if people ever notice that I literally physically cringe with discomfort and annoyance when I hear the word “deserve”. It boldly towers over every other pet peeve that I hold dear to my heart! Therefore, I have chosen this forum as an opportunity to rant, and here it goes:

The concept of deserving has added more grief and unhappiness than any other concept in the history of the spoken word. When people truly think they deserve, it divides classes, promotes laziness, invokes war, feeds both greed and inequality. The very idea of deserving is based on the assumption that life is fair, that we have an equal start. It is not true, we come from different economic and social backgrounds, even our unique and intricate DNA patterns beg to argue the theory of fairness on any level. The most common usages of “deserve” has absolutely nothing to do with the natural consequences that the world would bestow on us, and I would like to outline some of them now.

"You deserve a raise." It is my opinion that there is a decrease in the value of work ethics because of this theory. When someone snags a large contract, works extra hours, or simply does a kick ass job at work, they feel they automatically deserve to be additionally compensated beyond what their initial contract was with their employer. When a person takes a position, it should automatically be in their mind that they are going to do the best job possible at the price that they agreed on. Because we are told so repeatedly that we deserve more, it actually decreases moral if something beyond wasn’t extended as payment. But, can you even imagine the job interview that these expectations were outlined? “Okay, I am going to come to your organization, do a piss-ass job for the wage you are offering. If I do good, I deserve more.” Unless you are commission only, you would not be hired! We should already have enough personal integrity that demands that when you take a job, you will do your best, and believe that a job well done is a very high reward.

We are now taught at a very early age that benefits that are not related to the actual award are deserved. We give dollars for “A’s” on report cards to small children, rather than teach them to relish pride in that accomplishment alone. Think about this scenario, you have 2 children, one is very smart and one is kind of dumb. The smart kid easily gets great grades, and therefore gets monetary rewards when the grade cards come in. The less intelligent kid works his tail off and gets a “C”, so he is not rewarded. The smart lazy kid learns entitlement, the dumb hardworking kid gets the shaft! Shouldn’t hard work and advancement that naturally comes from doing your best be the lesson?

"You deserve better." This is a phrase that is so commonly used when girlfriends are consoling each other after a relationship goes south. In actuality, when we are saying that, we are robbing them of any control of their own situations. Wouldn’t it much more empowering to say “you want different and it is your conscious choice of what you are going to do with that”? The majority of times when this is said, it is over something so very trivial, such as he didn’t call. So when that is uttered, it is implying that he is a worse human being because he did not do something that she alone assumed would be done. In actuality, he is probably a very decent person if she chose him in the first place. Additionally, why is she different? Doesn’t everyone deserve love

"You deserve a break today." Marketers are in total ecstacy over the ease of convincing people that they deserve every little thing that is available. Once convinced, it just balloons from there. In our society, if one is fortunate enough to afford a well, they automatically come to the conclusion that they deserve water. In contrast, the penal system is overflowing with people who did not get what they deserved in childhood, and consistently deserved less as a consequence for their initial misfortune.

These are only a few examples in which this concept throws me in a tizzy. They may sound trivial, but they’re real and they compound in ways that I cannot even describe in a one-page composition. Call me a Socialist, but I believe that the word “deserve” should be deleted from our language unless it is includes the word “everybody” in front of it.

Brilliant!

This link was written by Albert Einstein in 1949, but is so pertinent to the debates in America today. Perhaps if we could consciously separate ourselves into social vs. solitary beings, the world would be a better place because of our existence, rather than suffer at an exorbitant cost. I think that other cultures have already caught on to this theory, and if we dropped our arrogance for a second and observed, we could learn so much. Just a thought.

Just testing the waters

Don't know why I started this blog. Perhaps it is because I really appreciate the blogs of my friends, and want to return their generosity in sharing their lives with me by doing so in return. Maybe I am just exploding with things to say, and feel this is an appropriate forum for all that. I am a true believer in just putting your thoughts out there for the world to hear, and see what returns to you. I guess we'll see. But, we will see on another day, because I am too freaking exhausted after an action-packed weekend to write anything but the beginning!