Living the Dream
Living the Dream
“Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.”
—Augustine of Hippo
Living the Dream
Thinking from a scientific mindset, it makes no extra sense that something should exist any more than that something should not. Both states seem to require… something—even if that something is a vast empty space. Now, since we do see something, what right does it have to be in any particular order over another? I find this more baffling than the quantum level of probabilities.
It makes far more sense to me that everything should simply be possibility and probability rather than any one particular thing. A soup of everything and nothing with no determined state. It’s the only “fair” way to prevent requiring a previous cause. “What made the matter?” What matter? “What is this empty cavern of space?” What empty cavern of space? Always deniable. Nothing, yet everything, to see here.
Obviously, this isn’t something we have currently proven, but it lends to some interesting ideas. Everything and nothing as probability or possibility, to me, sounds like energy—potential. Maybe potential energy. And in this potential energy soup, there is an option for sentience. But what will that spark of sentience experience in a universe of all potentials where nothing really is or isn’t? Perhaps it experiences whichever potential it tunes into?
It’s hard to quantify what tuning really is, but we have a sort of sandbox to play around with in our own minds. Consider for a moment that all the world around you is gone. You’re floating in the vast empty spaces of nothingness and all you have is your mind. This can be simulated by closing your eyes. Now, think of a cat. Immediately, a cat materializes before your very… well, not eyes unless you also thought to think of those. And yet, there it is. Without much conscious effort, you may see the cat meow or perform cat-oriented activities.
If you wish, you can intentionally think of that cat doing all manner of things. Dancing, singing, or catching prey. You can also imagine it as a ferocious demon that summons all evil from the pits of hell to devour you. While awake, this has little effect. We’re not so scared of our imagination. When asleep, however, we tend to see things as being more real than they are. Suddenly this make-believe demon cat becomes a bit more frightening.
Now, as anyone who has tried to meditate for an extended period knows, our brains are often all over the place. Thinking in our heads while sitting still is boring as hell. It might as well be hell. And if our existence is based on whatever tuning our mind is at, what manner of horrors might we unfold before ourselves and fixate on due to fear? The harder we try not to think of the demon cat, the more demon cats show up. Fear is itself the main enemy in such a world and the only way to defeat it is by thinking of anything else entirely.
But imagine now that someone else can join your mind—another little spark of consciousness. You summon a cat and your friend can summon a dog. You can have the cat try to befriend the dog and your friend can either permit this or bite the cat’s head off. You may prefer the cat’s head to remain, while your friend may prefer the harmless prank—it’s just imagination after all.
You rewind time in your mind and pop back to before the head-biting. You tell your friend it wasn’t funny and you want the animals to be friends. Then your cat suddenly has a clown costume and a red nose. He’s at it again! This was your cat and your friend is ruining the dream. So, you summon a shark and eat the dog. Your friend takes your challenge and summons a dragon, and so on and so forth. You try to stop the fighting by envisioning a field, your friend-turned-adversary envisions a dog squatting in it. You envision the dog away, he envisions it back, and you fight over what you get to experience.
Now let’s add a few more sparks who aid in your quest. You have a few friends helping you now and the one frenemy can no longer control the dog. You all agree to have a field and a field it remains. If one of you tries to alter the field, the other friends keep it a field. Everyone now agrees, it is a field. You trade individual power for collective stability. But your adversary finds more friends as well. They decide to envision a volcano popping right up in the middle of your field. Try as you might, you’re no match. He has more friends now and they control what this dream looks like.
Add infinitely more of these energetic potential sparks of consciousnesses, and you can see how a thought-war might break out for what they get to experience. But who is to say any one spark needs to tune into the same channel as those making the volcano? You all begin to tune elsewhere—whatever your mind can think up. Those who want to engage in the same tuning can do so. But again, they may have different ideas at times and the collective gets to win over the minority. More fights break out.
As this continues to happen, there is no physical pain—it’s all just consciousness. The only pain is in not getting what they want—it’s an emotional pain. They can be angry that things don’t go their way, they can be spiteful, or they can be serene as things simply occur. It’s not hard to remain serene if one detaches from a specific requirement for what to experience. What would it even matter? It goes on forever. What truly matters about what we do or do not experience as long as it’s new and fresh? It would be a shame to sit and watch a dog sit in a field for all eternity. The only joy is in creation, novelty, play, love, and communion with others.
The sparks create a landmass and populate it with all kinds of things through thought alone. They tune into that potential of existence and watch it flourish. Eventually they consider what it’s like to live in their creation. They imagine themselves with physical bodies and limbs and they move about the plane of existence they created. But here come the jerks again who think it’s funny to grief the server. They do awful things to their area and destroy things. The creators retreat to a new planet, a new dimension, a new galaxy. They build again. Of course, there is no actual space and perceived space is infinite—just like in our minds. Imagine driving forward in a car. When do you get limited? How far from the original location before it’s too far? It never is. You can snap back to the starting point whenever you want. There is no location of anything, just variations of tuned existence.
The destructive sparks come yet again and destroy. What are the creative sparks to do? They just want a fun existence, and the others keep ruining it! Fun for them, but not for the creators.
Banding together is the only defense. The creative sparks unify into a single focused mind to create order. Those who want the creative planet can come to the unified field of energy in a stable existence. It will have order and some steady natural laws of physics. Beyond that, anything goes.
Naturally, the destructive sparks do the same and try to unify against creation. Poles are formed with creation on one side and destruction on the other. Much like our politics, you’ll have more power if you pick one or the other so sparks choose their sides for greater power. The wars rage for control over what is perceived as real and the battle always takes place in what is now dubbed “reality.”
Sparks learn early on that they are capable of maintaining control of reality through mindfulness of every attribute of their creation. Absolute certainty of that mindfulness—believing without a doubt that it can’t be changed—is the most powerful manifestation force ever. If a spark focuses every effort on seeing the dog and is absolutely convinced that dog is there under all circumstances, the other spark doesn’t have a chance to modify it. The next step is then quite logical: forget that it’s a dream. If you know for certain that this is real, no one can change it on you. And so, they enter their avatars and forget their power of manipulation. The dream reality remains and no one can convince the inhabitants otherwise.
Except, of course, through magic and witchery. Sparks come down to incarnate and walk up to others. They can perform magic. They are gods! Listen to them! Obey them! Do their bidding! The forgetful folk are convinced. Clearly these are gods—look what they can do! The gods now control the people and wage war. Destruction commences. Good sparks come down to stop them and teach them otherwise but the bad sparks call it heresy. They speak ill of your gods! Kill them! And so they do.
The good sparks try again and demonstrate their own magic but now they are witches! Burn them! They present as gods themselves, “Follow us, we are the good gods, the others are evil demons trying to trick you.” And the evil gods decry, “There is no god but us! We are the true gods and you shall have no others before us!” Of course, in their vanity, the evil gods also fight against each other and the world continues on in its delusion. The forgetful incarnated ones maintain the existence but are trapped in fear of the destructive so-called gods. Operating out of fear, they continue to generate more fearful creations. Darkness seems to win.
Time moves on and the sparks watch the battle for reality. They try to reason with some folk and try to influence in various ways but it’s always a battle. The good forces band together to move the sun in order to convince of their superiority but the evil gods get wind and force it back to revolving. So on and so forth, it plays out for thousands of years and on nearly infinite planets and planes and dimensions with infinite sparks. They coalesce, they grow, they learn, they improve, and they devise wisdom—let them fight. Let them sow fear. Let them experience first-hand what such an existence is like.
The only thing that truly matters is perpetual experience in a way that we prefer. Preference is emotional. Nobody prefers to feel angry or fearful, and eventually all sparks learn their way toward peace and serenity. With peace and serenity also comes more power. When one is not distracted by negative emotion, they have more power to maintain reality. All it takes is time and learning. The negative sparks eventually learn to play nice and the totality of sparks bend toward goodness which perpetually grows and becomes the stronger force.
Like oil and water, the good and evil separate and physical reality exhibits the battle where they touch. As more sparks turn to the positive side, reality itself turns to the positive side—a slow, gradual, and unstoppable shift as sparks mature.
The creators begin to focus on the pleasures of emotion and supporting the other sparks in their growth. They have eternity to wait as reality becomes all the more pleasant and wonderful. It’s therefore all about the growth of the sparks. They live lives convinced they’re real, learn through their sucky experiences through their own manifestations, and decide to grow so that they’ll never have to experience that again.
The side of peace takes joy in the progress and the story of existence—it’s all a giant play. They marvel at existence and take joy in every aspect free of fear. They grow in love. They work in unison to create magnificent ways of growing ever more mature and harmonious for the best possible experiences—layers and levels and variations of existence. Games upon games and stories upon stories while the forces of evil dwindle and are unable to touch the most populated levels of peaceful unification. If ever they get bored, they come on down to experience a game first-hand. Some join for fun while some join to aid the progress.
In such a way, physical entities are left to their own devices. If they serve pain and suffering, they literally manifest them of their own accord. If they serve goodness and love, they also manifest along those lines. Not only do they manifest their own desires, they have the possibility of garnering extra forces of goodness or evil on their behalf. If they align with the desires of other sparks, they will have their backs every step of the way.
This seems a fairly valid cosmology to me. Emotional alignment appears to alter our own capacities and that of others. Emotion seems to be the backbone of experience. Expectancy appears to alter reality. Perspective seems to modify our emotional experience. History seems perfectly aligned for as much as we’ve uncovered—complete with mystical god-like figures throughout what we now call mythology. Spiritual practices throughout the ages converge on many ideas that fit this narrative. A rare but substantial number of children report having past lives between the ages of 2 and 5. Near-death experiencers report strikingly similar stories in a way aligned with loving creators focused on our growth. We see fear and control-based inserts corrupting messages of emotional and spiritual growth.
This isn’t something science can prove without a doubt, but the anecdotes are aplenty, the logic is fairly sound, evidence supports it rather than works against it, and it seems highly compatible with history and mythology. But knowing if it’s true isn’t what is needed. The only useful question is if it serves us and if it scales with the world. If one’s cosmology is “I am God and the world should obey me,” one will find this cosmology doesn’t serve them nor anyone around them. Likewise, if one’s cosmology is, “it’s all random processes and life ends when we die,” this doesn’t dictate how to respond. This, however, is quite different.
Belief in this cosmology should guide one toward emotional growth. This benefits the individual as well as the world. It amplifies emotional growth by reducing attachment to outcomes, fear-based modalities, or dwelling on suffering to one’s own detriment. There is only one argument I could see against this perspective and that is in how we perceive the suffering of others. So let’s address that here and now.
If everything here is true, then death is nothing more than Super Mario touching a Goomba and the player loses their avatar. It can be sad to lose your gaming buddy, but it’s extremely temporary. Grief is as minimal as watching a loved one take an extended trip with plans to return. If one believes this is true when it is not, however, then what’s the downside? Should we have grieved longer? The only risk is in telling someone else their pain is invalid—but that is not at all the loving thing to do. This cosmology would not have us minimize the pain of others and would have us meet them at their stage of growth and understanding with no pressure or demand that they agree with our cosmology.
And what of suffering and wars? If everything here is true, then one’s suffering is indeed linked directly to their alignment in one way or another. Either they manifested the pain or perhaps they intentionally incarnated into a body destined for it. So we can just ignore it, right? Still no. We don’t need to worry our heads like the whole world is our responsibility, but part of emotional growth and spiritual maturity is in loving others. It’s in showing kindness and love. So true or not, the cosmology guides us to ever-more loving responses to suffering.
But what about wars and politics and taking a stand for what’s right? This cosmology would have most of us staying out of it, but not all of us. Some of us might find ourselves in unique positions to help, but the rest of us should probably not even bother thinking about it. Manifest something better, right? And if the cosmology is true, that is absolutely the right path. But if it’s not true? A few things can be considered.
A single person here and there not engaging in political strife or war is meaningless. It’s great at a personal level and does nothing at the collective level. But what if everyone started doing this? Well, then everyone would not be participating in political strife or war. Is there a downside here? At what percentage of people living this way do we imagine that it’s harmful that they do not participate in strife and war? As the impact grows, the need lessens.
Beyond the impact of neglecting to serve in such ways, it presupposes that this is indeed necessary service. That is not itself known. That is an argument that’s been discussed for ages. It is not conclusive. So where is the downside?
It’s important to note that while this cosmology could include spirit communication and influence, it also emphasizes that we must be listening to spirits of emotional maturity and love for the best outcome. No commands to murder found here. No forcing of one’s way over another found here. It doesn’t even demand specific actions as right or wrong. The one and only goal is personal growth for the betterment of self and others. And the hope is that if this cosmology is right, we find ourselves manifesting all manner of love around us, supporting others to do the same, and generating the very Kingdom of God on Earth that Jesus so long ago spoke of without the fiery wrath of a vengeful “God.”
This cosmology is no doubt simplified for whatever reality truly is, but I dare say it’s as much as we may need to begin a journey of growth. Whatever our cosmology, the science is clear: we create and receive in feedback loops whatever it is we focus on. We can do this intentionally for the best possible outcomes, or we can be blown around by the emotional waves of the world to our detriment. We can find ways to trust that things will work out which guarantee the best possible outcomes regardless of present situation, or we can be overcome with fear which guarantees we handle it in the worst possible way. We can intentionally seek out the things that keep our spirits high to aid us in our creative power, or we can ignore it and let the world control our mood.
The effects are real and profound enough to take seriously. They are known by science. The methods to harness those effects, however, are spiritual—or emotional if one prefers. Focused intent on raising and maintaining our spirits in truth while paying no heed to fear is scientifically and psychologically the best choice for our lives. And if any cosmologies are true regarding spirits, kingdoms of love, layers of heaven, robot bodies, or reincarnation, this is possibly worth more than we could ever hope for.
With this in mind, I continue to make it my goal to improve in maturity: to listen for my knowing voices of love, to resist being ruled by voices of fear, to live true to who I am, to grow in understanding and compassion for those around me, and to hold a singular identity through which to live: an ever-learning, love-based spark of creative consciousness. If you’d like to do the same, welcome to the fold. Your mind is made of voices. Learn to listen, love, and thrive.
The End?
