You are a dream. You are a dream of eternal consciousness in the waking state. You are a dream of varied and infinite realities in the sleeping state. You are the dream of death in the deep sleep state, and you are awake in the superconscious state. Dreaming is reality.
All of life is a dream. There are no unimportant dreams. Dreaming is the borderline between life and death. It is the most sophisticated of all spiritual arts. Dreaming is existence. This world, this Earth, the people upon it, the ages that have past, the stars, the moon, the experiences that each one of us has, our loves, friendships, hopes, dreams, ambitions, frustrations, from the moment of our birth to the moment of our death, that which we call the experience—our experience in this world is but a dream or a succession of dreams.
Normally when we use the word dream, we think of something that’s insubstantial. Dreaming is something that happens at night. It’s the dark side of the moon. When we dream we have experiences that don’t seem to relate to the world we’re in. Sometimes we may dream of a person or a friend, we may find ourselves in unusual circumstances or usual circumstances. Sometimes it would appear that the subconscious mind brings us a message in our dreams, tells us something about ourselves or others or the nature of reality.
Most people tend to forget their dreams. You might remember a dream that was very frightening or very beautiful, perhaps a very zany dream where you went through many different experiences, which were very disconnected. Some dreams bring us into the waking consciousness. The final dream that we have at night, before we wake up, is the easiest to remember.
Sometimes in a dream we will be ourselves. The person you are now will have a dream odyssey, an adventure. You won’t be aware that you’re dreaming. During the dream, you’ll feel that you are wide awake, that you are having a solid experience. And if you’re Susan, Susan will be in the dream as the central character or as an observing character.
Sometimes we will dream another self. In the dream, we will be another person. We’ll have another identity, another name, another set of ideas, different conditioning. Sometimes we won’t be present in the dream at all. It’s as if we’re watching a movie and the only presence, or consciousness, is that of the observer, the witness. We’re watching the dream move back and forth, the characters, the players speaking, talking, acting.
Dreams bring us our fantasies. Things that could never happen in this world that we might want to happen, happen in our dreams. The person we loved who went with someone else can come to us in a dream and be ours for a time. Our worst nightmares, of course, come true in dreaming. All the things we fear can come to us and terrify us.
Most people don’t regard their dreams very deeply. Dreaming seems to be an offbeat experience in our human cycle of existence. We don’t question the fact that we have to sleep or that we have to breathe, that we have life. We don’t question the fact that we need to dream. Science tells us that it’s healthy to dream. If we deprive a person of dreams, if we keep waking them up every time they start to dream and then let them fall back asleep, if a person doesn’t dream enough, they begin to exhibit abnormal behavior when they are awake. It seems that dreaming is a very healthy experience. It purges us. It allows us to process, or cycle through, many different emotions and experiences, radical feelings and tendencies, which would perhaps enter into the world of the waking experience otherwise, and which might not be socially acceptable. In dreaming, we can do what we want to. We can break all the rules and not hurt anyone, including ourselves, and then we can enter into the rational orthodox world after awakening.
There are other levels of dreaming, and that’s what I would like to chat with you about for a little while, if we can dream along together. There is of course, the yoga of dreaming, in which we become aware that dreaming is not ephemeral. When we dream at night, what is actually happening is our subtle physical body, our astral body, another body of ours, is traveling. It’s traveling into different worlds, different dimensions that our physical body can’t see or perceive or enter into. And at night we travel to these worlds. There are countless astral worlds and we have experiences there. Some of the worlds are lower worlds, hell worlds, worlds that are infested with demons and horrible forms. And in these worlds, we see our worst fears. They do exist. Other worlds are heavenly worlds, beautiful worlds, worlds of color and light.
When we enter into these worlds in dreaming, we rarely remember them afterwards. We can remember the horrible worlds because we can relate to them. If we see a horrible creature or being or an unkind person, if someone’s chasing us, those things can happen in this world it seems. But for most people, which is indicative of the spectrum of consciousness that most people experience, it’s very hard to retain the higher astral dreams. When you move into a world of pure light, of ecstasy, various shades of spiritual coloration—since most people experience so little of that in this world, what we would call the world of the waking—there’s no point of relation. When you wake up, you lose it because there’s nothing to join it to in this world, whereas in this world there’s hate and fear and violence and aggression. These are the dominant themes of the world of men and women. The perception of beauty is extant, but not as developed, so it’s easier for us to retain the lower dreams.
Also, many people don’t climb into the higher astral regions that frequently because they’re bound by their desires and tendencies. As you are in the waking world, so you are in the dreaming world. If you’re still attracted to the material worlds exclusively, if you’re bound by fears and personality structures, then in dreaming you’ll also be drawn to those worlds. Your hidden desires will manifest.
Dreaming is like going to Disneyland. This is why I like Disneyland. Disneyland is conscious dreaming. Walt Disney was quite a dreamer, and he created a world, as a matter of fact he even calls it the Magic Kingdom, where you can go to the Haunted House, Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, different dreams, and you can go and sit on the rides and have experiences. Well, this is what we do when we dream at night. We visit different lands and different realms.
In the yoga of dreaming, in which there are two primary stages, we begin by learning how to dream. At night, when we go to sleep, we meditate first and we plan to wake up in the dream, to become conscious during a dream that we’re dreaming. You’ll be asleep and you’ll be engaged in a dream, perhaps you’ll be walking through Times Square in New York City or visiting a friend’s house. And of course you’re unaware that you’re dreaming. Then suddenly, you say, “Wait a minute! This is a dream! I’m dreaming. I know my body is lying asleep somewhere and this is a dream. And as a dreamer, I can now change realities at will. Now that I’ve brought my attention into this dream and I’m no longer locked into the movie where all I’m aware of is what’s on the screen, I can actually realize I’m sitting here watching it. I can change movies.”
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It’s like being in one of the Cineplex theaters where they have eight different movie screens, eight different little theaters, and you can get up and leave the theater and walk into another theater. And then another and another. You can choose what you want to dream. That is to say, you can travel and have conscious experiences in the dream state. You can go and visit a higher being in another world, see your friends, visit those who have left this world. You can dream your way to wherever you’d like to go or be.
You can dream yourself to a physical location. For example, let’s say you’re sleeping, and something’s going on 100 miles away. Well, you can actually go there in your dream body, see what’s physically taking place at that time, then come back, wake up and remember, know what was occurring 100 miles away during those hours of your sleep. Experiments have been conducted at several universities where people have demonstrated this ability, which is of course old hat to Tibetan dreamers. People have been able to report conversations exactly that were occurring at great distances, which they could not have possibly witnessed without going there in their body of dreaming.
In the first step of dreaming, we set up dreaming. Oh, there are dream exercises that you can practice to help. Before you go to bed, you should sit up and meditate on something that you’re going to do in dreaming. Meditate for a while and have a nice meditation, and perhaps at the end of meditation, and perhaps for a few minutes at the beginning, you’ll think of a place that you’d like to go in dreaming, where you’ll become conscious. A power place perhaps, where you’ve been, and you’ll go there in dreaming and become conscious that you’re dreaming. You might go and meet someone in dreaming and you’ll think to yourself, “Well, I’m going to go see so and so in dreaming and wake up in my dreaming when I meet them.” And if you hold the image of the person in your mind, particularly if you focus on your third eye, the agni chakra, between the eyebrows and a little bit above, during your meditation, it will be relatively easy for you, with practice, to accomplish this. Now, there may be many, many months and every night you’ll be practicing dream yoga and you won’t get there. But if you don’t give up, eventually you will.
That’s the first state of dream yoga, and that’s to become conscious in the dream world. Then the next step is, of course, to see that the waking world is the dream. Once we’re in the dream world and we wake up there, then we see that this other world, this waking world, is just another dream and that there’s no essential difference between the two. When you’re asleep at night and you’re in a dream, it’s perfectly real. It is reality. Oh, later when we awaken and the dream fades, we say, “Well, gosh, it was only a dream.” But in the dream world, when you wake up, if you recall the waking world, which has now faded, you’ll realize that the waking world is only a dream. Eventually you’ll see that there is no difference between the dreaming world and the waking world. Both are dreams. All are dreams.
Now, there’s something that lies beyond the threshold of a dream. Beyond the threshold of a dream is waking, eternal waking, which is the superconscious. The superconscious awareness is beyond dreaming and sleeping, in deep sleep, beyond what we would call normal waking. It’s a state of eternal, timeless consciousness, in which there’s no sense of form or self as we’ve grown to know it. And with no self, there are no dreams. Perfect peace, perfect light, the awareness of your own immortality, beyond discussion. All dreams come forth from the superconscious and all dreams return to the superconscious. The art of dreaming is a pathway to enlightenment, one of the many. Dream yoga.
There are other ways to look at dreaming. We view and see life through levels of attention. By that I mean that as you’re listening to my voice right now, you are having a series of perceptions. These perceptions are conditioned by your sense of selfhood. The way you regard yourself, the way you see the world and life, is something that you have constructed. Just as in a dream, we will have a completely defined reality—we go to Disneyland and we’re going to go on the Pirates of the Caribbean cruise, and we’ll ride the little boat and there’ll be pirates all around us, doing the things that pirates do. We’ll enter into a complete world for a while, with its own conditions, its own laws, its own gravitation. Each dream is a world in itself. The state of awareness that you are in is a dream. Now, when you’re in the dream, you don’t necessarily see that. It’s only on stepping outside of the dream that we become aware that we were in a dream. When you’re in something, you don’t have proper perspective, is what I’m suggesting. Or we could say that you do have proper perspective, but it’s only the perspective of the dream.
The art of the perceiver, of the dreamer, is to see and understand that all of the ways of seeing life that we have, within any given lifetime, are dreams, and to be able to step outside of our dreams and see them as dreams, which is of course another dream. This world is made up not of people, places, things and conditions, but of different dreams. It’s a dreaming vortex. When you were a child, you saw the world in a certain way. You no longer see the world as you did when you were four. You may forget what it was like to be four. How you viewed life: your emotions, your feelings, the sense of taste, touch, smell, sound. But the world you’re in now, the glasses you look through, are very different. When you were a child you were in the dream of childhood. Then you were in the dream of adolescence. Now you’re perhaps in the dream of being an adult. Then there’s the dream of old age. There are dreams within dreams. There’s the dream of romance, there’s the dream of marriage, there’s the dream of the family, there’s the dream of success and of failure, the dream of war and peace, the dream of art, accomplishment.
What I’m suggesting is that life is like a giant computer, I suppose. The computer is nothing without the software. The computer is just a big piece of metal, tubes, transistors, chips, diodes, and it sits there and it doesn’t do much. What gives the computer life is the software, the programs that we run on the computer. Now, there is no such thing as a program. A program is a dream. We dream a context in an alphanumeric sense. We create a reality through designing a program. This is why I think computer programming is so fascinating and such a good art for a person who practices meditation, because it’s advanced dreaming. When you write a program, you are practicing dreaming.
We write a program. Oh, perhaps to generate a list, a database, accounting package, a game, whatever it may be. We create a reality. There was nothing. And then we put one point in the center of a blackboard, and then there’s one point. Then we put another point there and we draw a line between the two. Then there’s a third point or a fourth point; we draw lines in different directions. We develop a decimal code. We gradually construct something. There was nothing originally, except our open perception. But then we put the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle together, and a picture forms. And we look at the picture, and if we look at it long enough, we believe that it exists independently of our perception of it, which is not the case at all. It is our perception that gives everything life.
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When you die and your perception of this world ceases to be—which occurs every night when you enter the deep sleep state, where there are no dreams—this world goes away, it doesn’t exist. This world does not have an existence that is independent of your being.
You create the world through dreaming. For example, I can sit in a room, as I am now, open my eyes and see a fireplace, a table, the sun has just set. I see the ocean, plants, a couch. I see these things. That’s a dream, just as if I had fallen asleep and I’m having a dream and I see these objects. Now, I can change levels of attention. I can close my eyes and meditate for a moment and all of this will go away. And I can move through many, many different dreams without changing my physical environment. I can open my eyes and everything will become light. In other words, the couch will not be solid. The plant in front of me will not be solid. I will see the light moving in vortexes and swirls. I’ve moved into a dream in which things are not solid. I’m perceiving reality on another level, where nothing is solid. More of an atomic level, I suppose you might say. I can move into a world where everything talks to me. The flowers can talk to me, the couch, the life force in everything—I’ll sense its meaning. That’s a different dream. I can go beyond all of this. I can move into the superconscious. And suddenly the couch and the room and the ocean and all these things will go away, as if they’ve never been. There’ll be no memory of them. They will all be eternity, without form.
There are countless dreams, countless ways to see life. However, for most persons, there are only a few. There’s the dream of infancy, childhood, adolescence, the world of maturity and old age. And the subdivisions are few—desire, frustration, hope, anxiety. It’s as if you’ve got a video player and you only have about 10 or 15 cassettes for your whole life; they last for a certain period of time. And there are little adventures that take place within each one. Meditation is the art of dreaming. Instead of just having those few cassettes, you can have thousands of them, and some of them are much, much more beautiful.
Life is not so simple. In its essence, life is simplicity, but it’s also total complexity. You can have the freedom to change levels of attention, to move into these different dreams at will. Simply because you see life in a certain way doesn’t mean that that’s the way life is, that’s how life is. Another being in another reality who’s not physical doesn’t see the world the way you do at all. Who’s right? Are they or you? Neither. They’re different dreams. Some dreams are more limiting than others. Some dreams are unhappy dreams. Some dreams are happy dreams. Some dreams are neither happy nor unhappy, they just are. The art of dreaming, then, is the art of changing dreams. The advantage that a dreamer has, one who’s mastered the art of dreaming, is that at will they can change dreams. If they find themselves stuck in a certain level of attention, stuck in a certain way of seeing life, at will they can change that. You can change the channel. Everyone else has to just watch the same channel. But you can change the channel. A very advanced dreamer, of course, can not only have access to thousands of different realities but can go beyond all static realities, to infinite consciousness, to the superconscious awareness from which all these things come forth to the source.
There are places in this world where it’s easier to change levels of attention, it’s easier to dream—dreaming in the sense of when you’re awake, in the waking state or in the dreaming state. Places of power. The American Indians used to go to places like this to dream. They were called dream quests. When a young man reached a certain age, or if at any point in life you had to make a decision, you would go to a place of power, a high hilltop, a lonely desert, a place by the ocean. It was usually relatively inaccessible. There were spirits and forces. The magnetic energies and subtle physical energies of the place of power were different. There were beings that existed there, guardians who would help you. You would go to the place of power, perhaps fasting for several days, three or four days first, to cleanse your body and develop your attention, to draw it away from the world, which is synonymous with food. You would focus your attention on eternity. You would go to the dreaming place, and you’d stay there and spend the night there. And at night you would be able to dream different dreams. Someone would come and visit you in your dreams, perhaps an ancestor or a spirit would come and tell you something that you needed to know, where your tribe should travel to, what you should do. You’d be given secret information by other beings; advanced beings in other levels of reality would come to you. The gateway between this world and other worlds would open.
Then there are those whom we call the enlightened, who are always dreaming. They are dream vortexes. They are moveable places of power. When you are with one of them, it’s the same as being in a place of power. You can dream more easily.
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When you go to a place of power, it’s easy to change levels of attention, to change dreams—changing dreams not simply by going there and falling asleep and dreaming of “Darby O’ Gill and the Little People”, but in the sense that while you’re awake, if you sit and meditate there, you’ll find it very easy to change levels of attention. When you change levels of attention during meditation you can change levels of attention permanently.
You see life in a certain way, you’re caught in a web, a maze that you constructed. You’re in a program that you’ve written, and you can’t get out of it. All you can do is experience again and again the same thing, the parameters of your life. But when you meditate, meditation raises us up for a while and we go beyond our world. It’s like taking a vacation. When you take a vacation, it’s easy to change. You leave the frame of reference, your place of conditioning. You go away for a while and it’s easy to start over, to make changes in your life.
Now, the trick is, of course, when you come back, to realize that you haven’t come back. And that the place you’re returning to never existed before. If you take a vacation, go away, make a lot of good resolutions about how you’re going to change your life and then come back home, then you’ll fall back in the same patterns. Your conditioning will pull you back. But when you go away on a vacation, if you realize that when you come back you’re not coming back, but you’re going there for the first time, that the place you came from, where you lived before, no longer exists. It was a state of mind, and when you’ve now stepped out of that state of mind that’s ended, and now you’re going back, not to memories and experiences that you’ve had there before, but you’re going there for the first time, then it’s easy to maintain one’s new dream or one’s new level of attention.
Of course, we try to have nicer dreams and more beautiful and more complete levels of attention as we progress in meditation. Each time you meditate, in each meditation session, what you’re doing is going through the bardo. You’re trying to dissolve your current self and create a new self, a more refined self, a more beautiful self, a new dream.
When you go to a place of power, it’s a dreaming vortex. It’s like a supermarket of dreams. In the cities, in the places, the haunts of human beings, the same dreams are being dreamed by others and you’re influenced by them. Your consciousness is like a blank video screen. There’s nothing on it. Then a show comes on. A cassette is inserted and we see a program. The people around you dream very vivid dreams. Your parents, your teachers, the people who love you, the people who can’t stand you—everyone is dreaming. They’re all watching these programs on video. Now, your little monitor screen picks them up, because everyone is psychic. In other words, if everyone is dreaming the same dream, you’re influenced.
In Nazi Germany, everyone dreamed the dream of the master race, an insane dream. Hitler was the dreamer. But his dream was so strong that it affected others. He touched their weakness, their subconscious desire to be superior and to destroy others in the name of that superiority. He influenced others because he was a very powerful dreamer. He had great power. And the dream spread. Now, as the dream spread through more and more people, more and more people kept dreaming the same dream, the weak were influenced.
You can be programmed by others. This is conditioning. Conditioning isn’t simply that you’re taught a certain language and a set of rules of conduct in a given society. That’s a kind of programming, but that’s a very superficial programming. The real programming of an individual, the real conditioning of an individual, is dreaming. When you are born, you have no dreams. Dreaming comes from the vibratory fields of attention in this world. Everyone who is here is experiencing a dream. If you would imagine that everyone on the street—let’s say you go out onto a busy street, and there are hundreds and hundreds of people walking around to and fro, like Third Avenue in New York at noon. Hundreds of people walking around. But they’re all asleep. If they’re all asleep and they’re walking around in a dream, and you were awake and you saw this, you would see that each one has a different dream. If for a moment you could access their dreams, if you could look inside each one, you’d see that they’re all having these different dreams. And one will look at a restaurant and another will look at the same restaurant, and they’ll see it in very different ways. Their dreams are different. Yet there are certain conventional patterns.
That’s how it really is—everyone is dreaming, they just think they’re awake—to one who is enlightened, who is waking, who is wakefulness. There are certain basic dreams that people have, and you’ve been imprinted. These dreams have been shown in your screen of your consciousness again and again, to the point where you don’t know that they’re dreams. Meditation allows you to change that because the dreams are not particularly nice dreams, they’re not very healthy, that most people dream in this world: greed, suspicion, fear, desire, very limited dreams. Not a good show at all. When you meditate, you rise above that.
The key is stopping all thought. When all thought stops, or even detachment from thought, if you can just detach yourself and pay no attention to thought, which is the dream, then you can change it. Each time you meditate, you modify the dream structure. But then, after meditation, when you go out and see someone, or even if there’s no one physically around, the people in the next house, in the next city, on the other side of the world, all their dreams are so strong, they’re always affecting you. They’re making inroads in your consciousness. As you try and change, it’s hard, because everyone is at a basic level of attention; there are just a few basic dreams, and you’re being influenced by them. You have to be very, very strong, you have to meditate very deeply, and that’s why it’s so important to find other dreamers, other people who meditate, and associate with them because all of you are entering more and more into the dreamtime together, and you’re building up an alternate vortex of energy. If you live in a world of alcoholics, it’s very hard not to drink if everybody drinks. Only the exceptional person can step outside that and say, “Wait a minute. Everybody’s doing it, but that doesn’t make it right. Nazi Germany—everyone’s killing the Jews. But that doesn’t mean it’s right, even though they all say it’s right. I have to go deeper to ascertain what is right, I can’t accept these things.”
You meditate and you find yourself in a world that’s very barbaric. It’s very primitive in its value systems and beliefs. And you say to yourself, “This isn’t right, I can’t accept this.” But you will find that you will be pulled into other people’s dreams. Whenever you have a relationship with someone, they dream you. And unless you’re very, very strong, it’s hard not to be dreamed. Two people fall in love. Well, they each have a dream of each other, they see each other in a certain way. They don’t really see what each other are like at all. They have an image that they hold in their mind. Their mind is a screen and they project this image. And what they will do is, depending upon how powerful they are, they will assert this dream, and the other person will, without realizing it, begin to conform to the dream, depending upon how much personal power the dreamer has.
What I have to offer you as an enlightened being, my suggestion, in other words, is to see dreaming as a way of going beyond dreams. That’s the yoga of dreaming. The old analogy of the Indian story is that we’re going to take this thorn—we have a thorn stuck in our foot and we’ll take another thorn, pry the first thorn out and throw both away. Through dreams you can go beyond dreams. “Through time - time is conquered,” as T.S. Eliot, says. The idea is that we’re going to have subtler and subtler dreams. Each dream will be more expansive, more complete, until finally the dream is so void it’s the dream of eternity, of God realization, of nothingness, of everythingness. It’ll be easier to step out of that dream into the waking state.
We’re in a very deep dream, it’s very thick, we have no idea that we’re dreaming, then we dream subtler and subtler dreams, where more and more awareness comes in each dream. Finally, we reach a dream that’s so subtle that there’s very little difference between that dream and the waking state because it’s the dream of the waking state, and then we move into the waking state, which is the superconscious awareness. That’s the yoga of dreaming.
Also, in dreaming, it’s easy to lose the old self. You’re being chased by someone and that’s yourself—your dream of yourself. Your dreams are chasing you down the street, kind of a nightmarish image of a person running. If you’re a great artist, maybe you could do a picture of it and send it to me. You’re running down the street and all your dreams are chasing you.
How are you going to lose your dreams? Well, the best way to lose your dreams is to hop into another dream. They can’t follow you, or it will take them a while. Then, just as you come out of that dream and your old dreams are about to snag you, move into another dream and then another dream. If you go through enough dreams quickly enough, you’ll lose your old dreams. And you’ll end up in a new dream. Then of course, you’ll have to lose that dream.
This is what I do when I meditate with people, particularly at a place of power, but at our regular meetings too. I bring people through a succession of dreams. They may not be conscious of it, but I have the power to change people’s levels of attention. And I bring them through maybe a thousand levels of attention in an hour. Then they walk out free from their old dreams, not realizing it because now they’re in a new dream, and in the new dream, of course, they’ve adjusted to their current level of reality and they’ve forgotten their old dreams.
I don’t dictate the dream. I’m not programming people into a particular dream. Let us just say that it’s kind of like I’m the Sears Catalog or the Whole Earth Catalog to your self. I just present you with thousands of different dreams, dreams that you might not have seen before. It’s a videocassette catalog. There are thousands of movies that you can rent. You only knew about five; I’m going to show you a thousand. Now you will pick. I’ll teach you how to pick, but I can never pick for you.
As a spiritual teacher, there’s a certain code that I follow, and that is never to influence a human being in any way. The only thing I will do is teach you the art of dreaming, how to stretch your level of attention, make you aware of the thousands of different dreams. But you must make all the choices yourself. I assume no responsibility. The management is not responsible. You pick the dream, you try it out and see what it’s like.
Now, my opposite is a person who’s developed great power, as have I, or you could just say the power came after countless incarnations and meditation. My opposite is a person, like a Hitler, who has the power to change people’s levels of attention. But he’s a Darth Vader, you see. I’m sort of your Obi-Wan type. You know, I’ll teach you about the force—Yoda, the ways of the force—but then you have to do it. Whereas your Darth Vader will program you. Your Hitler will say, “Alright, this is what you will believe.” And their powers are so great, they can enforce that, they can imprint you. Whereas, I do just the opposite, I show you how to erase the tape, then offer you a wide selection of other dreams that you can dream which are nicer dreams, and show you that they’re all really the same. The dream of horror, the dream of beauty, it’s all the same in the sense that they’re all just dreams. Then I will suggest, if you’re really interested in our special catalog, which we keep under the counter, that there’s something else. Of course, in the special catalog there are no dreams listed. It’s an empty catalog. But that’s only for particular customers who have been with us for a long time. We show them that catalog. It’s the dreamless catalog.
So then, if you attain enlightenment, what that means is that you are dreamless. Or, you can come in and out of dreams if you choose to. But you’ll always remember that they’re dreams. Very often as an enlightened person, if you’re a teacher, you’ll experience the dreams of your students and your friends. They’ll pull you into their dreams and you’ll allow them to do it. They dream you. But you realize the whole time that they’re dreaming you and while you’re appearing in the dream for their benefit, you yourself are not affected by their dream. The smoke comes through the air, it doesn’t affect it. If the smoke comes through the building, it will leave soot on the walls. But for the enlightened person, the smoke will come through the air and the air may appear to be cloudy for a while, but then the smoke will vanish and there’s no trace. The air is clean. Enlightenment is the clear air.
Dreaming is the art of meditation. It’s one of the mystical paths to enlightenment. There are other pathways. Each pathway is a dream. At the end of the pathway, there’s something else. We can’t say what it is, because there are no words.
Try to become more conscious of your dreams. Not so much even the dreams that you have at night, but the dreams that you have during the day. Realize that you are separate from them, that they are videotapes that you’re watching. When you meditate, what you’re doing is popping out the cassette for a while and seeing what it’s like not to be plugged into anything in particular. Then as you meditate, the more deeply you meditate, the longer you can stop your thoughts or detach yourself from them, the larger the range of new dreams you have. The important point in meditating in the advanced states and dreaming is not going up. Going up is easy. But it’s coming back and choosing the right dream. That’s what we call the rebirth process. I did a tape about that, “The Tibetan Rebirth Process.”
That’s the art of dreaming. And of course, the art itself is a dream, which you can step into or out of, as you see fit. God is dreaming all of this. God is the dream of nirvana. Nirvana is the dream of God. Beyond the dream, there’s waking, the dream of waking, and beyond the dream of waking, there’s something that’s even beyond dreams. Our special catalog under the counter. But first you have to become a good customer. After you’ve rented all our best videos—and we’ll be glad to—and you’ve seen them and viewed them and you can do that at will, once you can change all the levels of attention, then we’ll show you our special catalog.
Just one more word about places of power—it’s very important where you live. Because where you live, the energies of this world, make it easier or more difficult to dream. In certain places dreams are very manifest and very strong. You should always pick a place to live that’s good to dream in. One of the best places to dream is by the ocean, because it’s a formless dream. If you have ocean on one side of you, if you live along the beach, it’s very, very good because the vibratory forces of the human beings can only be on either side of you or behind you. But you’ve got ocean out there; it’s easier to dream. The wind comes in. The vibrations move across the ocean. You get more formless. There’s not as much of a locked-in vortex around you.
It’s easier to dream by the ocean or on very high mountains. Very high mountains do the same thing. You’re up above the vibrations. The vibrations don’t tend to go into the upper atmosphere. That’s why flying is so much fun, in a plane, particularly if you’re not in a big commercial plane. Even there it’s good. But if you’re in a big commercial plane, with 300 people on it, each one of those persons is dreaming something and you feel those dreams. You’re in a locked little space with them. But if you’re in a private plane or if you fly yourself and if you’re by yourself in a plane, you put it on autopilot, it’s very, very easy to meditate, to change levels of attention.
The dream vortex has a limited physical radius, just as radio waves do. Radio waves don’t go on forever, they go a certain distance and stop. Dreams, as projected by people, depending upon their personal power, will only carry a certain distance. The vibratory field of the people who live next door to you will project for maybe a hundred yards or two hundred yards. If the person is very, very powerful, if he’s a politician, and he’s dreaming about running for president and if his dream is strong enough, that dream will touch people all over the country.
Your dreaming is what you do in life. You dream your career, you dream your wife or your husband or your friends, you dream your death. We set it all up, is what I’m saying. But I’m suggesting that the way you set it up may not be the way you really want it to be. The cassettes you have—you think you have the choice, the ten cassettes; you think that that’s all there is. And I’m suggesting that there are millions of them. It’s an unlimited video rental library. There are many more than you realize. But you’re not aware of the titles. You assume or take for granted, “This is life. Hey, this is what everybody experiences, this is the range of human experience, and I can pick and choose in this. This is the range of existence.” But it’s not.
The dream energies, the fields of attention that influence you much more than you realize, have a limited distance that they travel. In other cycles, there were even fewer. When there were fewer people on the Earth, it was easier. Now that the Earth is getting so crowded—there are three billion people on Earth, there’s three billion different dreams—it’s harder. That’s why it’s good to go sometimes to a place where there aren’t many people. A remote place, physically, it’s easier. But then again you don’t want to be limited to that place. You have to become strong enough so that you can go into downtown Los Angeles, where there are some pretty wild dreams, let me tell you, and not be affected.
Being a recluse is not necessarily desirable. It’s good to take some time to go to a place distant from people. That’s why the ocean is so good. Because if you’re at the ocean, particularly late in the day, let’s say, or in the winter or sometime when it’s not crowded and there are not a million dreams on the beach, the dream of the body consciousness, when it’s kind of lonely—you haven’t gone a thousand miles away to be in a forest, it’s not necessary, because the ocean is in front of you. When you go on top of a mountain, if you go to Mt. Palomar or Mt. Shasta or one of those places, when you get way up high, Colorado—this is why they had the caves up in Tibet, the yogis living in Tibet, because you’re above that level. Now, it’s harder and harder to get away from people. It’s very difficult to just find a place where there’s not an airplane or a person, but it’s not really necessary.
There is something that you can do. And that’s to live in a place of power. There are certain places that are dreaming vortexes. The energies are very strong in a place of power because people meditated there many thousands of years ago and the energy of the land itself — not the physical, but the subtle physical energy that surrounds it on the astral plane — is very open. Dreams come in and out faster there. The southwest United States is a very good place to dream. It’s easier. On the East Coast and the Midwest, the dreams are fewer. There’s less choice. It’s harder to dream there. New dreams. The West is the new open horizon buffeted by the Pacific Ocean, and particularly California, which is on the ocean. If you live in that little coastal strip, it’s very easy to dream there.
People came thousands of years ago here to dream, the Indians, and long before the Indians we know about, a race of very powerful dreamers dreamed here. They meditated here. And their force, their fields of attention are still here. There are subtle beings here that help. Certain places are dream vortexes. The people who live here won’t really notice, who don’t meditate so much. La Jolla, most all of San Diego, certainly, but La Jolla is a dream vortex. Malibu is a dream vortex. These are places where, particularly along the ocean or up in the mountains above it, it’s very, very easy to change dreams. Mt. Palomar and some of the other ranges, the Anza Borrego desert, Joshua Tree, these are places, where, if you live there, it’s very easy to change dreams. You’ll just find you’ll go through changes faster living in a place like this. The energies cycle and recycle constantly. It’s very disconcerting sometimes. In other words, it’s as if you’re in a place where the weather changes constantly. It’s raining, it’s sunny, it’s raining, it’s sunny. In Malibu, La Jolla, places like that along the coast of California, you’ll find that the dreams can change constantly. It’s easier for you to view the different cassettes of existence in these places. It kind of counterbalances the civilization vibration.
Always try to live near water, if you can. Water is like a giant radio telescope. It reflects and mirrors vibratory energies. If you can live near a lake or an ocean, it’s really worthwhile. Try to live by water if you can. Living on a mountain is fine too. Now, not all mountains are dreaming vortexes. Not all places by the ocean are dreaming vortexes. There are specific ones. Each one has a different tonality, a different pattern and a different power. If you’re really interested in dreaming, until you become absolutely adept at it, it’s good to live in such a place or, if you don’t live in one, to go there occasionally on pilgrimage. To go to the places of power and meditate there. And then when you come back, remember you’re not coming back. You never come back — a new self and new world, and there is no back.
Dreaming.
At the end of the dream, there’s wakefulness.