Apparently there are a bunch us who don’t realize that Glenn Beck is a blood-sucking parasite on the body politic. So those of us who who have watched the Twilight movies and recognize a vampire when we see one need to start sharing our expertise.

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If you follow a news organization on Twitter you know the Beckster told those who have drunk the tea that

Something … beyond man is happening. … America today begins to turn back to God.”

So, we can’t say we weren’t warned, and it’ll be our own damn fault if this thing overtakes us and we’re not ready for it. You know what they say:

First they came for the gay folks who wanted the same rights to get married as I had, but I didn’t speak up because I already had “Married” as my status on Facebook.

Then they came for the Buddhists, because they’re a little squishy on the whole apostolic succession thing, but I didn’t speak up because I quit sitting zazen when the cat peed on my meditation cushion. (Custom-made buckwheat crescent zafu.)

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Then they came for me, but by that time no one was left to speak up for me and tell the God-Squad that the only reason there is a copy of Religulous in my DVD player is that Netflix sent it by mistake and I haven’t returned it yet, which is a real pisser because I’m on the “1-DVD-at-a-time” plan.

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I know that Steve Hawking is trying to be helpful, when he says in his new book that we can explain the creation of the universe without bringing God into it, but I think he protests too much.

(I’ll know more when I actually read the book. I have to wait until it’s on Amazon Used Books, for $0.01, and I only have to pay shipping.)

In any case, I’m not in favor of taking God out of the picture. I think that would make me as much of an arrogant bunghole as GB, and I believe in choosing my battles if I’m feeling the need to be arrogant. I try to only be arrogant about obvious things, like The Office being way better than 30 Rock, even without Steve Carell.

But I do think His handlers need to re-position God, if you’ll take that marketing analogy. Mostly what the major players in Theism, like Christianity and Islam, have come up with is this sort of thing, which I cut and pasted from a (trust me) typical major player’s website:

If you understand that God is your Creator, Sustainer, and Ruler Who requires that you love, worship, and serve Him, you should also understand something very basic about yourself. You are a sinner who fails to fulfill your obligations to God.

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Okay, I’m sorry, but that just blows. You know what we call a being who insists on being “loved, worshipped and obeyed?” The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) calls that “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” You know what we call a self-anointed Supreme Being who tries to vaporize anyone who resists compulsory “loving, worshipping, and obeying?” Idi Amin.

I’m holding out for a Supreme Being who is comfortable with being loved on a voluntary basis, and really flexible on “worship and obey.” I’d even go with what physicist Amit Goswami calls “The Quantum Consciousness” as the Creator and you can call that “God” if you’d like, and I’ll do the same when I’m at your house. Common courtesy.

In fact, I’m thinking the longer we can keep The God Thing as a Riddle wrapped in a Mystery inside an Enigma (Winston Churchill), the more work there’ll be for artists and the less there’ll be for leeching bombasts. And I see that as a good thing.

Steve

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A couple of days ago I switched out the blog header image in favor of something a little “lighter,” pun intended. This had the synchronistic effect of reminding me I need to re-post the link to Tom Robbins’ excellent Harper’s Magazine piece, “In Defiance of Gravity.” (September (more synchronicity) 2004)

Steve

First, there was the music. I had a near-birth experience the first time I stepped off a plane in Honolulu and even four old dudes playing slack-key guitar standards at the The Old Folks’ Home in foggy Western Washington was deja vu all over again, to borrow a phrase. The staff had draped everyone in leis and damned if we weren’t right there on the beach at the Royal Hawaiian.

Still, it wasn’t all leis and pina coladas with real booze. When you’ve just turned 60 and you’re starting to count down the number of years left to fix all the leaks in the family ship while you still have the energy to bail (I mean bail water, not jump ship) it’s disconcerting to be surrounded by all that white hair. The mortality thing is right in your face.

Then I saw the lady in the red dress:

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She was gettin’ her freak on. Sometimes she’d kick one leg up and balance on the other long enough to make your heart miss a couple of beats, but she knew what she was doing. She was also 94 and legally blind.

Watching her and remembering a friend earlier in the week talking about his favorite still-writing-at-80 author gave me a little breather on the mortality thing, a little hope that I could still be kickin’ it at 94, which is three-point-four decades away.

I guess it was one of those synchronicities that Spouse had earlier put up a Facebook link to a blog post called “Regrets of the Dying.” Reading it after getting back from The Old Folks’ Home was like the cosmos delivering a post-script, in case I hadn’t been paying attention all afternoon. I hope you find these observations from a blog called Inspiration and Chai to be as stirring as I did:

For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.
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When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:
 
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled.
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I wish I didn’t work so hard.

This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.
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I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming.
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I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

… People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It all comes down to love and relationships in the end. This is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships.
 
I wish that I had let myself be happier.

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice.  They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.

When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying.
 
Life is a choice. It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness.

Bronnie Ware in her blog Inspiration and Chai

Like the young folks say, “peace out.”

Steve

But once in awhile there’s a morning when I can see it: How I could just love what is. Just decide to do this, like deciding to get up in time to see the sunrise because I do love that. Practice looking at everything and everyone and having the first response be: I love this. I love that. I love them. I love right now and I will love what’s next and what’s next and what happens after that.

The theory behind this practice is that loving what is reduces resistance. Then life can happen without all that friction and heat, or the pressure that builds and sometimes blows when you just don’t want to do anything, but life keeps moving whether you’re moving with it or not. When you see that happening – life moving without you or in spite of you or against you – you get depressed or angry or needy. You might even take it out on people who seem to be moving on without you when you want them to stay with you and approve your resistance. They’d do that if they really loved you, wouldn’t they?

Love dissipates resistance better than anything, including plans and resolutions and determinations. In fact, it may be the case that plans and resolutions and determinations are just variations on resistance to what is. It’s just a theory.

Speaking of which, whenever I start swinging back in this direction, I think of Tony Parsons, who is the most unflinching “this is all there is” guy I’ve come across.

Steve

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from The Open Secret, the website of Tony Parsons:

This aliveness is nothing being everything. It’s just life happening. It’s not happening to anyone. There’s a whole set of experiences happening here and they’re happening in emptiness … they’re happening in free fall. They’re just what’s happening. All there is is life. All there is is beingness. There isn’t anyone that ever has or does not have it. There’s nobody that has life and somebody else doesn’t have life. There just is life being life.

This message is so simple it totally confounds the mind. This message is too simple. Already your mind’s saying, “Yes, but come on  … what about the levels of enlightenment and what about my emotional blocks, and what about my chakras, they’re not all fully open? What about my stillness – I’m not really still yet, and what about my ego? Somebody told me I still have an ego … it’s a bit reduced but it’s still there.”

But all of that, all of those ideas are adopted lessons about how it should be. The ego is what’s happening. The ego is just being ego. Thinking is just being thinking. There is only being. There is just being. There’s nothing else. There’s nobody that’s running that. There’s no destiny, there’s no God, there’s no plan, there’s no script, there’s nowhere to go because there is only timeless being. Being is totally whole just being.

And it is alive and fleshy and sexy and juicy and immediately this; it’s not some concept about ‘there’s no-one here’. It’s not some concept about ‘there’s nowhere to go’. It is the aliveness that’s in that body right now. There is pure beingness, pure aliveness. That’s it. End of story.

Really it is simply that. So there is no-one, there is no choice. There is no choice at any level. Oneness didn’t choose to become two. There is just oneness. All there is, is oneness being alive with nobody doing it. Is anybody doing breathing? Is anybody doing blood circulation? Is anybody really doing anything? No. There is just apparent doing. Apparent life in freefall.

There is no answer to life because life is its own answer. It’s happening already. It’s this. You never lost it. That’s the amazing thing about liberation. When liberation apparently happens people say, “It’s amazing because the thing I was looking for has never left me. It’s the one thing that never comes and never goes – the one constant that can’t be known or held onto.” And the one constant is being.

Tony Parsons

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There’s a lot of horse pucky being passed off as enlightenment that wouldn’t last five seconds under cross-examination by an empiricist. But I still keep hoping.

I had already watched The Secret three times before it came out on DVD, by streaming it from the website of the production company that made it. I was spellbound. I loved the part where the guy parks his new sports car in the shopping mall parking space that manifests instantly, while exulting to the camera that knowing The Secret has caused checks to appear in his mailbox instead of those cranky notices from bill collectors.

Steve Pavlina, my favorite personal transformation blogger and a dude who has a deep vein of empiricism – he loves “30-Day Trials” – calls New Age horsepoo that won’t pass a 30-Day Sniff Test “info-crack.” Ouch.

But the brainiacs burning National Science Foundation grant money trying to prove that human consciousness is an epiphenomenon of subatomic particles accidentally bumping into each other are full of shit, too. (Sorry if any of that “shit” got on your lab coat, doc. My postalveolar fricatives start to spray when I get worked up.)

Give me a fucking break. We need to stop worshipping science. Let’s use what the quantum mechanics (the guys in the garage with Schrodinger’s Cat tattooed on their forearms) can do – like using electron tunnelling to build superconducters – but let’s not let the mechanics say shit like “consciousness is an epiphenomenon” without giggling.

I read recently that Hippocrates theory of humoralism dominated medical science until the middle of the 20th century. Get a whiff of this:

Essentially, this theory held that the human body was filled with four basic substances, called four humors, which are in balance when a person is healthy. All diseases and disabilities resulted from an excess or deficit of one of these four humors. These deficits could be caused by vapors that were inhaled or absorbed by the body. The four humors were black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Greeks and Romans, and the later Muslim and Western European medical establishments that adopted and adapted classical medical philosophy, believed that each of these humors would wax and wane in the body, depending on diet and activity. When a patient was suffering from a surplus or imbalance of one fluid, then his or her personality and physical health would be affected. This theory was closely related to the theory of the four elements: earth, fire, water and air; earth predominantly present in the black bile, fire in the yellow bile, water in the phlegm, and all four elements present in the blood.

Wikipedia

Who knows which current empiricist paradigms will be the functional equivalent of humoralism five hundred years from now?

Okay. I’m over it. I get all hyper-vigilant when I want to suggest something a little whimsical and I’m afraid some science asshole is sniggering behind a clipboard.

All of that for this little observation:

Surprising fortuities follow when I engage my imagination in a certain way.

(You want to get the gimlet eye from a test tube suck-up, just say “imagination” like it was something at least as “real” as that gork bubbling in his pyrex.)

I’ve got to quote my main man, Tom Robbins:

If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It’s a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.

To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul.

There is something about thinking of imagination in the same way Tom writes about the soul that will wring a lot of the snake oil out of the word “soul.” You might even try re-reading the quote and substituting “imagination” wherever he writes “soul.” Honestly, I don’t think he’d object.

If you are secretly yearning to expand your connection to the Mystery, run a 30-Day Trial:

Stop denying that every morning you wake up blurry and it feels as if you’re trying to run an auto repair shop with a pair of pliers and a butter knife, only because you inherited it from your father, and you’d lock the front door and drop the key down a storm sewer grate except the customers have already paid and you’ve got their cars parked out back. Then do this:

Lie in bed a few minutes longer and imagine what it would feel like to hang a sign that reads “No more cars” and use the customers’ money to hire a guy with the proper tools and the Ferrari logo tattooed on his bicep to finish up all the cars parked out back.

Then imagine what it would feel like to attend to the yearning, to work diligently on what expands your connection to the Mystery. Do this for 30 days. If you miss a day, you have to start over.

Steve

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For a comic who was recently listed as sixth best standup comic of all time, by the Comedy Channel, I can’t believe I’d never heard of him before a few months ago. Probably the fact that he died in 1994 has something to do with it.

William Melvin “Bill” Hicks (December 16, 1961 – February 26, 1994) was an American stand-up comedian and satirist. His humor challenged mainstream beliefs, aiming to “enlighten people to think for themselves.” Hicks used a ribald approach to express his material, describing himself as “Chomsky with dick jokes.” His jokes included general discussions about society, religion, politics, philosophy and personal issues. Hicks’ material was often deliberately controversial and steeped in dark comedy. In both his stand-up performances and during interviews, he often criticized consumerism, superficiality, mediocrity and banality within the media and popular culture, describing them as oppressive tools of the ruling class, meant to “keep people stupid and apathetic.”

Hicks died of pancreatic cancer in 1994 at the age of 32. In the years after his death, his work and legacy achieved the significant admiration and acclaim of numerous comedians, writers, actors and musicians alike. He was listed as the 19th greatest stand-up comedian of all time by Comedy Central in 2004, the 6th greatest in 2007, and 4th greatest in 2010 by Channel 4.

Wikipedia

Here’s my favorite Bill Hicks story, from further down in that Wikipedia article:

He was raised in the Southern Baptist faith, where he first began performing as a comedian to other children at Sunday School. … Worried about his behavior, his parents took him to a psychoanalyst at age 17 but, according to Hicks, after one session the psychoanalyst informed him that “… it’s them, not you.”

Now that’s a theme for a blog post: It’s them, not you.

I’ll anticipate possible reactions from anybody who knows me by saying, upfront: I’m not who you want to be consulting about social skills. I’m 60 and still befuddled by garden variety gatherings where the order of the day is casual chatter about … whatever. “Whatever” throws me. If the talkers veer from the weather or their kids or the hosts’ kitchen remodel to topics the talkers have actual opinions about, I can roll. If it looks like we’re going to be workshopping the advances in countertop technology for more than five minutes, my head starts to ache near the primary somatosensory cortex, my third “will power” chakra freezes up (the yellow one on those charts), and I feel the need to cool my cortex in a bathroom sink until we can go home.

That said:

If someone is causing you to feel shame about not contributing your fair share to the talk about countertops, @#$% ‘em. It’s them, not you. (On the other hand, if the talkers are okay with you relaxing into a silent reverie about Michel Gondry films, without drawing attention to your silence: bless ‘em.)

Look: This is just a grownup version of that bullshit you ran into your first day in daycare or kindergarten, where the teacher insisted you had to play Duck Duck Goose when you just wanted to be left the @#$% alone so you could finish One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s recess for @#$% sake. But, you had to “join in” or risk a negative entry on your Progress Report. “Stevie has read all the books in the card catalog in the school library, up to “V”, and it’s just the end of the first quarter, but we’re concerned that he doesn’t want to play Dodge Ball or Red Rover.”

Kids in school are mostly powerless. There are consequences for flipping the teacher off and sticking your nose back in your book. The upside is that you can probably keep reading while you’re waiting to chat with the principal. When you’re a grownup, just take your “Unsatisfactory” in Gregariousness like a man and motor on. No drama necessary. It’s them, not you.

On a related matter, I’ve never been able to fathom why certain phrases have such power over us. Like these:

“Grow up.”
“Get a life.”
“I know you like it, but it’s not a ‘real job.’”
“Have you finished your Christmas shopping yet?”
“What will everybody else be wearing?”
(add whatever’s on your list of fear-or-shame-inducing trigger phrases)

I also can’t fathom why I automatically assume that almost everyone else but me is Doing It The Right Way.

Have you been paying attention to what the grownups and the ones who have a life and a real job, wear the right clothes and finish their Christmas shopping early have been up to? A partial list, not including the other continents:

8 years of George W. Bush (Yeah. TWICE we elected a guy we wouldn’t trust to teach junior high.)
“Reality” TV
Fox News
At least ten distinct categories of antidepressants
Wall Street banks
Washington, D.C.
Corporations with constitutional rights, recently including the right to influence elections
Drilling for oil in the ocean
Clear cutting
Strip mining
Baby seal clubbing
The NRA
Bernie Madoff
Glenn Beck
Factory farming
Subsidized tobacco
Subsidized corn for making fast food the money-saving choice
(add whatever’s on your list of complete dumbassery attributable to “grownups”)

With that kind of track record, why do we flinch when some self-appointed spokesperson for The Right Way To Do Things tells us we need to “get a life?”

The people we’re led to believe are Doing It The Right Way have given us no real reason to believe they know shit from shinola. Why do we care what they think about what or who we should be buying, wearing, eating, reading, loving, watching, listening to, helping, (whatever’s on your list)?

If you’ve started to rebel, even just a little:

Maybe you’re becoming a vegan or don’t want to wear animal skin anymore. Maybe you’ve stopped going to church or don’t want to play in the company golf tournament this year. Or go to the office Christmas party. Maybe you don’t feel the need to keep a sharp edge on your lawn or wax your car. Or own a car. Or a lawn.

If you’ve started to go your own way (but only on the weekends, until you get a better handle on going your own way) and you’re starting to get the rolled eyes and the unsolicited advice:

There’s at least a 9-to-1 chance it’s them, not you.

Steve

I believe God made me for a purpose. But, he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.

Eric Liddell, 1924 Olympian

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Maybe it was my wife, Sue, doing the Danskin Triathlon yesterday, as a gift to herself in her 60th year, that made me think of this.

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When we run, we feel His pleasure.

Cheers,

Steve

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1.

I’m waiting to make a left hand turn at the crosswalk. Dude walks by with a T-Shirt that says, “Got Jesus?” That is over the line. I park and run to catch up with the guy. I come up behind him and tap him on the shoulder.

“Dude, your Jesus T-shirt was made by Communists.”

Like, I’m way too old (sixty-three) to call another man “dude,” but I’m way too old for this earring, too.

“I’m telling you,” I say, trying to make eye contact. “Communists made your T-shirt. Lemme show you.”

I grab the front of his T-shirt and pull it up out of his ridiculous gym shorts. The Jesus Dude is still speechless, but now his mouth is moving. It probably moves when he reads his T-shirt in the mirror. I show him a tag sewn into a seam. It says “Made In China.”

“Dude, the Chinese are Communists. Okay, maybe they’re Capitalists now. Who can keep up? Point being, you can’t be a Communist or a Capitalist and also a Christian. Why are you supporting Communists and/or Capitalists by buying T-shirts they made? Think about it.”

Obviously he’s thinking about it or his eyes wouldn’t be jerking back and forth like that.

“Also, I think this qualifies as taking the Lord’s name in vain. ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. Exodus 20:7’ I’m trying to help, here. You’re welcome. You may want to turn this T-shirt inside out until you can change. I can’t stress this enough: You’ve got the Lord’s name on a fucking Communist T-shirt. Or Capitalist. Which reminds me: ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God. Matthew 19:24.’ You’re welcome. I hope you didn’t just put this on your credit card hoping Jesus would come before you have to pay the bill and then the rest of us have to bail your ass out or the Antichrist will kill us. Lemme see your receipt.”

“Are you a cop?”

His voice trembles. Well, finally. The Jesus Dude speaks. He could be frightened, he could be pissed. I need to keep my alpha vibe going, like the cops do to stay in control of a situation.

“No. Lucky for you I’m your friend,” I tell him. “Philip McCann. Call me Flipper.” I stick out my hand. He fishes in his pocket and hands me a crumpled receipt. Unbelievable. He actually bought this shirt himself. Recently. I was just fishing for a defuser when I asked for the receipt. (I think I just used variations of “fishing” twice, too close together in the same paragraph. I should have at least arranged them in an acceptably parallel syntax. My bad.)

“See this?” I ask, pointing to the receipt. “There are three sixes in the transaction code. That’s The Mark of the Beast.”

He jerks his T-shirt out of my hand and starts running toward the ticket booth on the ferry dock.

“Asshole!” I yell, “I’ve known Christians, and you’re no Christian!”

This just makes him run faster. I don’t know. Maybe I crossed a line with that “Mark of the Beast” thing. Lesson learned. Sometimes it’s better to let them figure stuff out on their own.

That should give you a taste of what I’m up against. Nobody takes religion seriously around here. Which is why I started my own.

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I have to consider that my food for thought may have been served up by clowns.

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#1: In a recent post I quoted SciFi writer, Ray Bradbury, to wit:

If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don’t love something, then don’t do it.

Pretty straightforward, but I’ve burned hundreds, probably thousands, of billable hours trying to figure out what it is that I love, since I figured out the first day in my lawyer office, thirty-something years ago, that the stress and insecurity and adversarialness in this biz will eat you alive, and I’ve had a hard time finding the love.

I think I do good work: clients refer their friends and family, other lawyers refer clients, I get the occasional compliment, so I must not be a total bozo. But there are days when I want to chop my @#$%ing shingle into kindling and … what? That’s the rub. What?

For one thing, I’m sixty years old. For another (there probably doesn’t need to be another thing, since “sixty years old” may be a discussion ender) it would take graduate degrees to be a therapist or a minister or an English teacher, even if I was sure I wanted to be one of those. (This is just a variation on the “sixty years old” theme.)

I took another look at the Bradbury quote. What if I twisted it a little?

If you love something, you just do it. You practice, practice, practice and then you’re good at it.

This begs a different question: Instead of “What else can I think of that I would love to do?”, how about “What is it I practice, practice, practice now, not only to be good at it, but just to do it?” Even if it seems delusional to imagine it as a livelihood, small keys can open big doors.

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#2: A couple of recent threads of thought have gotten entangled:

I’m intrigued by the work of Dr. Amit Goswami, a retired University of Oregon professor of theoretical quantum physics, who writes and makes movies (at least one) about what he calls “Quantum Activism“. In essence, he (and a few of his peers) question the prevailing paradigm that consciousness is an “epi-phenomenon” of “objective reality”. They posit the opposite: “objective reality” is a product of consciousness. He insists that adopting this posit-ion can be transformative. He believes that by understanding the influence of the “observer” (that would be you and me), on the “collapse of the probability wave” (the collapse that produces “objective reality”), we could, in fact, consciously “create our own reality”.

At the same time I’m enjoying Dr. Goswami’s dumbed-down-for-civilians website discussion of quantum mechanics, I’m reading my favorite blogger, Steve Pavlina, who is writing about his current “30-Day-Trial” of what he calls “living subjectively”, which includes acting, without question or hesitation, whenever “inspiration” comes to him. He’s talking about the same general idea as Dr. Goswami, when he talks about “living subjectively”: the primacy of consciousness. But he calls consciousness “The Dreamer” and has been walking around imagining that he’s literally “dreaming” his moment-by-moment “reality” into “existence”. This has apparently caused some remarkable effects, which you can read about beginning HERE.

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Comedian Bill Hicks

I’ve been trying to wrap my sixty-year-old-brain around this stuff, in a way that might allow me to put a toe in the water that Steve Pavlina is swimming around in, but I’m having a hard time conceiving a way to “practice”. Then this came to me:

We all have a “focal point” of awareness that most of us place somewhere in our heads, probably behind our eyes. What if I followed Steve Pavlina’s lead and imagined that “focal point” to be The Dreamer? Not just my little “individual focal point”, but a “focal point” of THE Dreamer. THE Dreamer who has “dreamed” my body, your body, everybody’s body, and everything else into “existence”, as part of The Big Dream. What if, from that “focal point”, it is possible for The Dreamer, as “me”, as “you”, to make transformations in “our” experience of The Big Dream, by some further exercise of Imagination?

(This also requires imagining that while we’re all part of The One Dreamer, Time and Space are set up to allow the useful illusion of “separate” selves, perhaps to expand The One Dreamer’s experience of The Big Dream.)

By “some further exercise of Imagination” I mean the idea – an idea Steve Pavlina alludes to – that already familiar dreamwork techniques, including lucid dreaming practices, might be helpful. In a dream, everything is significant and meaningful, if the dreamer learns dream language. Dream therapists and other dreamwork practitioners talk about “incubating dreams”: planting the idea in waking consciousness, before falling asleep at night, that the dreamer would like a particular experience or assistance from a dream. In the case of lucid dreaming, the dreamer “wakes up in the dream”, recognizes that he or she is awake, but continues the dream. Experienced lucid dreamers are able to influence the dream in ways they can’t ordinarily influence “objective reality”.

Steve Pavlina’s theory is that the inability to influence “objective reality”, as if it were a lucid dream, is due to the reasonable belief that there is an impenetrable wall between the dream state and “objective reality”. So, he’s experimenting with the thesis that there is no such wall, that a “lucid dream”, or an “ordinary dream”, are dreams within The Big Dream. (As briefly mentioned, the other part of his experiment is to test a related thesis that it’s possible to receive, and recognize, “messages” from The Dreamer, in the form of “inspiration”. But they must be acted on immediately. If you think about them very long, the door in the wall, through which they came in and through which you can go out, will slam shut.)

Maybe if All This is The Big Dream one should be less intimidated by “objective reality”. Maybe if one walks right past it, one finds an open door.

It occurs to me that clowns think this way. But that’s not so bad. Everybody laughs when clowns try to walk through walls. That’s why they do it.

Steve

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Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life. Harvey MacKay

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I enjoy my work so much that I have to be pulled away from my work into leisure. Ralph Nader

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I feel sorry for the person who can’t get genuinely excited about his work. Not only will he never be satisfied, but he will never achieve anything worthwhile. Walter Chrysler

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Never continue in a job you don’t enjoy. Johnny Carson

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Nobody can be successful unless he loves his work. David Sarnoff

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The biggest mistake people make in life is not trying to make a living at doing what they most enjoy. Malcolm Forbes

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What is it that you like doing? If you don’t like it, get out of it, because you’ll be lousy at it. You don’t have to stay with a job for the rest of your life, because if you don’t like it you’ll never be successful in it. Lee Iacocca

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Gary Vaynerchuk

Steve