Important information about accessing the Audiobook version:
For the MP3 Audiobook version, please download the zip files using this link from a PC or Mac.
To listen to the Audiobook on YouTube, please use these links:
o Part 1
o Part 2
Copyright Mark Manney
All rights reserved. This book and parts thereof may be shared non-commercially. The work has been published by the I Am by Infobeing Foundation. For any questions or requests, write to mark.manney@abscondo.com .
Chapter 1. The Dream of Life
1.1. In your sleeping dreams, your mind has full control over the experience. Here, in this mysterious inner realm, there is no time, there are no unchangeable laws of nature, and no one else has any power to influence what happens.
When you awaken from a dream, you realize that it was all just a dream—that it wasn’t real. You become aware of you, the dreamer, as the being experiencing the dream. This waking to remember your identity is a switch that instantly establishes the unreality of the dream.
The waking dream of life on this planet is a different dream. This complex and sophisticated dream takes place in a realm where many minds connect. Bodies can clash with other bodies and, here, physical matter is subject to the unchangeable laws of nature.
There is an immutable design to this dream of life, and we are all bound to it. There is a truth about how all the pieces work together and, therefore, there is also a correct and optimal way to experience life. The way has been forgotten, but you will remember.
Humans are sick from trying to live the waking dream as though it is a sleeping dream. You may seek peace in isolation from other minds because, just as in sleep, you want full control of the dream.
Dishonesty and avoidance of truth are strategies used to construct a dream of life according to your wishes. But strategies of dishonesty—and other forms of withdrawal and separation—never quite work because no real or lasting peace is found in isolation. In your drive toward personal control through isolation, you feel lonely and cut-off. Lacking energy and inspiration, you ultimately become stressed, fearful, and depressed.
The switch is what happens when you become comfortable looking at truth and accepting honesty everywhere in your life without any fear and without any negative emotional reactions. This requires an awakening.
1.2 . No matter how carefully planned are your attempts to build impenetrable walls to protect your feelings and keep you safe, events continue to occur which oppose your wishes.
When dishonesty and withdrawal fail, and other minds do penetrate the illusion of the dream you have constructed for yourself, you become disturbed and may even respond with attack. You attack to take control over the situation, but it doesn’t quite work. Attack, even in mild forms such as reward and punishment, teaches nothing real—only that violence is legitimate, and only that you would attack.
People are sick because the world teaches a sick thought system. You may have forgotten yourself, your real identity, not as a body and mind but as the force of life, itself. You may have ignored the laws of nature and thought it possible to control reality. In a constant struggle to make real what is not real, and true what is not true, you find only suffering.
Only by looking at the truth and telling the truth, the damage is reversed and the suffering ends.
1.3. While you have believed in a logical thought system that the mind is in control and thoughts are what is real, the result has always been various levels of error and confusion. The unobserved mind isn’t as rational as you may believe. It makes panicked decisions all the time to avoid negative emotions.
Perhaps you would prefer to avoid starting difficult conversations. You may delay looking directly at problems at work or in your finances. You would rather not admit difficult truths in many areas of life. But avoidance only leads to low-level suffering and a constant need for escape. Worse yet, the truth always remains true and eventually emerges. When it does, you ultimately end up with a crisis.
There is a better way—a way to look at all truth and embrace all honesty while remaining calm and in perfect peace. The switch allows you to enjoy the process of rooting out problems. When all your challenges have been addressed, you can fully enjoy the result: a happy life of freedom that rests upon a foundation of truth.
There is a wholly different thought system by which you will experience the optimal way to live this dream of life. If you merely decide for it, then the world’s normal dream of fear, sacrifice and suffering is instantly replaced by a total embrace of truth.
Are you willing to suspend disbelief for a little while? Are you interested in trading everything you do not want for everything you do? If you are skeptical and do not want to change anything about your life, then do not waste your effort here. You can put this book down because the purpose of this book is not your purpose.
1.4. To awaken is not to become a little more peaceful, a bit more loving, slightly less violent, a little less fearful, or to have more faith. A switch can only be either on or off. You are either awake or you continue dreaming. Nothing short of complete honesty and total acceptance will turn the switch. Anything short of this and darkness remains.
You can’t be half-pregnant, you can’t serve two masters, and you certainly cannot apply two opposing thought systems to your life. You must switch from one thought system to the other or you will remain lost in confusion—which always brings tension and fear. This book reveals the thought system of truth. Through your ongoing practice of embracing reality and always telling the truth, you can shine a light that changes lives and ends all your problems.
1.5. You have probably accepted the idea of sacrifice when, by definition, to sacrifice is to give up what you do want for what you do not. Do you still believe that sacrifice is the path toward what you want when, by definition, it is the opposite?
1.6. You have probably been obsessed about love; yet have practiced love as a jealous clinging to one person at the exclusion of all others. You have been taught that love is something you can get—if you find that one right person, use all the right tactics, and if you both just follow the normal rules.
This approach to love always fails for one of two reasons: 1) one of you end up miserable enough to break the rules, or 2) you follow the rules instead and grow old together in resentment. Would you rather remember what love really is and how to experience it always, as your eternal state of being?
1.7. You have probably been fearful at times. This is normal. However, because you think there is anything real to fear, you are not free. Fear can only exist before the switch—while you still believe the dream of life is something that is happening entirely to you.
You may be unaware that you are a dreamer in this dream. Unaware that you are very much responsible for making everything happen that does happen.
Everything happening to you which you do not want is caused by the error of dishonesty. Everything that you do want is caused by telling the truth. Forget this, and ongoing challenges will seem to continue to happen to you only so that you remember.
1.8. What happens when you awaken from a terrible nightmare? Your pulse is racing, and you are filled with fear. As you switch from sleeping to waking, you realize that it was all just a dream. You take a deep breath. Now you find that you are filled with peace and can calmly go back to sleep to find a good dream.
To awaken from the world’s dream of life is like waking from a nightmare. You remember the truth of who you are, you end the fear, and now you can relax because life becomes a happy dream.
There are many portals through which you can switch to the awakened state of consciousness, but there is one foundation upon which all others depend: honesty. The first step toward, and the foundation of your awakening is something you already understand completely: the decision to always welcome the truth and to tell the truth.
Withhold honesty anywhere and the switch cannot occur. Without perfect honesty, awakening is impossible. Without awakening, lasting happiness is impossible.