Daydreaming Your Way to Wellness.
Abraham Hicks’ Law of Attraction has a lot in common with Carl Jung’s Active Imagination, a process of self discovery.
Daydreaming is a way to know yourself and receive information from the subconscious, the higher self, and maybe even ‘Other.’ Being in a particular mode of daydreaming, where you’re aware that you are daydreaming but you’re not actively scripting is the place where you get the messages. The message is in the movie, the unscripted dream. Hicks would say, just be there, observe, don’t do anything, especially don’t analyze the dream while inside the dream! Just be!
That’s exactly what Carl Jung says about Active Imagination.
The Red Book is a collection of Jung’s experiences while being in the Active Imagination, the day dream. Philemon is his spirit guide, who he saw and interacted with as he would a real person. Philemon was as real as anyone. It wasn’t like Philemon was a one time character. He was a recurring character who was more solid with each interaction.
One could argue that’s just the subconscious and archetypes. Fair enough, Carl argued for that, being the leading psychiatrist exploring the unconscious mind. Very few since him have openly explored the unconscious more than Jung because most people today are too adverse to strange stuff. You explore the unconscious, you get strange stuff!
And so, it doesn’t matter to me if you explain the Law of Attraction, or the Secret, as vectors of subconscious brain activity or metaphysics. The fact it works in and of itself is sufficient.
Whether you consider the unconscious mind or not, or meditation as a tool for accessing it or not, it’s accessing you all the time.
If during the course of your day, you don’t recognize that you are daydreaming, then you are in a daydream. If you’re thinking about the future, or the past, you’re daydreaming. It’s okay to daydream, but since something you already do, why not learn to do it better?
The nature of self.
The nature of self is not in a vacuum. If you take the typical model of consciousness, most experts agree the best analogy is that it looks like an iceberg. The exposed part of the iceberg is the daily conscious mind. The bigger part of the iceberg which lies underwater is the subconscious.
Most experts stop there, but the ocean and the atmosphere also affect the iceberg! The air and sun sculpt landscapes, and if changes too much, the weight changes, and the iceberg rolls to a new configuration, better and faster than a die in Magic 8 ball. Yeah, exactly, what new words were exposed?
The ocean currents are the invisible psychic hands of society pushing and pulling. Always there, inescapable. Even in isolation, you are being directed. Sometimes it is you self-directing. Mostly, you think you are directing even when you are clearly not.
This is us.
Most thoughts are not yours.
There is a difference between thinking a thought and receiving a thought. Most people are taught if you have a thought you thought it. You’re responsible for that! People who believe this are at risk of being exploited. If you have a good thought, and you identify it as originating from you, you will think highly of yourself and people will ask of you and you will say yes, because that’s what good people do. If it’s a bad thought, you will think poorly of yourself, and you will do things that mirror that, or in trying to overcompensate by doing more good than bad, which means people will gravitate towards that, and will use you.
They don’t know this about you, but you will ask, do I have ‘use me’ written on my forehead?!
Yes, yes you do. In invisible ink only the subconscious mind can see.
You have thoughts and beliefs about you. Conscious ones and unconscious ones. Reasonable ones and unreasonable ones. These thoughts radiate into the collective unconscious, the ocean, the air, to heights of the moon and sun and stars- we are one. We bend social reality in the same way planets bend space time. All of us attract people all the time. All of us are in orbits and constellations of people. We rise and fall together. We orbit each other in eccentric circles. We are not just dead bodies in space; we also have an electromagnetic field. Some people who are
attracted to us come at us faster than just gravity. Some people get repelled, just like the wrong ends of the magnet pushing away.
You have a brain. You are not your brain. The brain, simply, is the organ that helps you navigate the physical and social worlds. Your brain is a computer doing math. Sometimes the physical and social worlds are aligned. The math is simple. Sometimes the physical and social are out of alignment, which means now you’re doing algebra. Your brain never stops doing math. It is even doing math when your body is sleeping. You are not your body.
Add a third world, like spirituality, now you’re doing calculus.
You have thoughts. You are not your thoughts. We tend to identify with our thoughts. One reason for that is our thoughts are barometers for how we are doing in life. It tells us the real weather, the social weather, and the spiritual weather. Another reason we identify with our thoughts is we were told all our lives this is you, and it is why so many people seem to have a vested interest in regulating your words and thoughts. If you identify with their thoughts and their words, you can be manipulated.
Our words are not us. They’re just thoughts. Some originate from us. Most were given to us by others, and they remain in the form of positive and negative tapes of things we won’t let go of.
Some of the thoughts that we think originated with us were either composites of multiple thoughts, and or the brain taking short cuts. Sometimes people give us algebra, like ‘if then statements,’ and if you don’t have the ability to be quiet and hear the ‘then’ part, you might have an emotional reaction to the ‘if’ part, and blow up before you need to.
It’s okay to blow up, if in doing so you allow that to be evidence you have just discovered an unconscious belief about you or the world.
Law of attraction
In the past I might have led with something like, my family’s religion of origin forbade me to read metaphysical stuff like the Secret. Between you and me, clearly I am still attached to that historical information to the degree I felt it necessary to share. Ha! Yay, we found an unconscious belief, and I am still attending to it. This is how this process works.
It is very clear, from my present perspective, that I was not ready to hear the Secret then. In fairness, someone in my childhood tried to give me something like that. It was a simply rendered graphic book on making friends. It put the responsibility on me. It was right. My moods, my choices, my thoughts about me were influencing my world. If I wasn’t in a group making friends, it was because I was choosing isolation. I believed my thoughts were me. My thoughts were bad. And so, this book at this time increased my feelings of unworthiness because, look I am doing it to myself!
My thoughts originated in a dysfunctional family. This statement is valid, but is also a belief, very much like the first one, that influences my spin. It is true that the many players in my childhood influenced me. I was given a role to play. I accepted the role. Perhaps under duress, but I accepted and played the part. I played it well! When I tried to quit, people would get mad and try to put me back into the role I ‘agreed’ to.
The Secret, or the Law of Attraction, demands we adopt appropriate levels of selfishness. In my family, if I attended to myself, I was called selfish. I was called selfish because other family members wanted me to attend to them. Attending to them was a never ending game of give give give, with so little reward that I was often running on empty. Even after I was spent, I was still expected to get up, go to school, do my chores, and do them. And so, asthma, what a lovely little extra caveat frequently gave me a legitimate out. I could make myself so sick that I would have to go to the hospital.
Sometimes to get out of something, but interestingly, it also frequently interrupted the family dramas playing out. Making my illness a life saving event gave the players something to do other than fight.
Not being allowed to be me is not 100 percent. I did have ‘me’ time. Escapism. I would take a time out and then go back to work- keeping the family peace. Until I didn’t. Quite frankly, when I broke free I did the opposite. I was too much into myself and unreasonably selfish that if people weren’t catering to me, I would say they were selfish.
Hicks says a lot of funny stuff, but I found a pause, LOL moment when it was spoken, ‘isn’t it interesting people ask you not to be selfish in order to support their selfishness?’
From this perspective, it’s funny that I repeated the family history. I became the thing I avowed against simply because I wasn’t paying attention to my thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, much of which were not mine! They were simply the operating programs my family used, which I adopted as my own, called it me, and used them.
Thoughts are programs. If you allow the book Think and Grow Rich as a measure, we’ve known this since the 1930s.
Maybe the truth is we can’t change our thoughts. The choice, the free will of life, is in choosing what you will identify with. We can change what we identify as us. I have a feeling, I am not the feeling. I can tarry with it, just like I can sing the blues when a sad song comes on, or I can change the channel!
I would not be a counselor if I didn’t believe change was possible.
Changing thoughts is as easy as changing the channel.
We are all psychic. We are all mediums. We are all channeling all the time.
Identifying thoughts gives them staying power. You might think ignoring thoughts makes them go away, but that’s just not true. If you have a negative thought, don’t ignore it, don’t ‘cancel’ it, but also don’t identify with it because it’s not yours!
If you find the water heater is leaking, don’t ignore it! Address it. You’re not canceling that out with thoughts, unless you’re at Jesus’ level of manifesting. Once you found it leaking, you’re not likely going to make it go away by pretending you never saw it. This is a lot like not thinking about pink elephants now that you have been given this thought.
I learned the ‘cancel’ technique in the 90s I think. I seriously used that technique, and I can imagine God rolling her eyes, ‘stop canceling out the universe and start coping!’ After all, if these thoughts aren’t mine- they are gifts!
There isn’t a single body builder who earned Olympic gold by not lifting weights.
This is true about thoughts and thinking. If you don’t attend to the thoughts, and the beliefs attached to them, you will identify with things that aren’t you. How do you learn the difference?
The first step is to actively spend time not thinking. Sit down, be quiet, be still, and see what comes. I recommend the puppy dog method of mindfulness for your operating metaphor. Your brain is a puppy. If you never asked it to sit still and be quiet, don’t be surprised if it chases every squirrel. Don’t hit it with a newspaper. Just gently call it back to task.
If you’re sitting still, being quiet… you can bet your ass most squirrels are evidence of thoughts that aren’t yours. These are the invisible, psychic hands of the collective unconscious pushing and pulling you to be in ways you may or may not want to be. If you identify with something you like, go with it! That’s okay.
The more you do this, the more thoughts you will have that you want to go with. The other stuff will fade not because you’re ignoring them, but because you’re simply going with the stuff you attach to.
Balloon! Oh, how pretty. Oh, I am going up. Anvil?! Oh no. I am going down. ‘Ignoring’ the anchor is an active process that guarantees you will go with the anchor because you just tied yourself to it like Spider-man! If you’re attached to both a balloon and the anvil, best case scenario is you get no movement, but most of the time, if you won’t let go of one of them you get torn apart!
It’s called cognitive dissonance.
Your direction is based on your ability to think through this math. Don’t ‘keep it simple.’
Seriously, all fragments are attached to bigger algebraic formulas. Our culture is full of them, and they have become fragments because in the process of doing math, we reduce things to variables to have shortcuts. Keep it simple is a variable known as KISS. The full phrase is keep it simple, stupid.
The insidious market plan for the ‘book for dummies’ series is that it works. People think they are dummies, so they buy the book. In buying the book, they acknowledged they are dummies, which likely means most people will not ultimately learn what they need, so that they can keep buying books that reinforce their identity!
Not buying the book eats at you, because now you might want to know if there’s something you don’t know.
The thing is, if you really want to know about a subject, you will buy the book. Buying the book implies that if you don’t don’t know the subject, you’re a dummy, which compels people to buy the book, because they’re going to want to know that they know the bare minimum, which the book will offer. On mastering that book, now you feel smart and can call everyone else dummies.
How so? “I have read this book. Have you?!” Implication: well… you must be…
Books are other people’s thoughts. Are they yours? No. Maybe you thought them, shared them, hated them, admired them- and maybe there are redeemable thoughts. I am not saying never have a thought or don’t cultivate useful thoughts! If you like them, there is an attachment. If you hate them, that is also an attachment, usually stronger than just liking something!
Can you relate to someone else’s thoughts? Sure. But in relating, you have moved closer to discovering an unconscious identity that may or may not be you.
Your brain is doing this math all the time. You can’t hide from it. You can’t ignore it. You can’t cancel it, though I will say canceling is a good start at recognizing things you don’t want to identify with. It can be a tool to pry the lid off the iceberg and peer into the depth of you to find the other stuff weighing you down.
In discovering you, you will rotate this iceberg!
What’s the alternative to canceling? Loving it all. The anvils of life have utility. Every thought, yours or not, has utility if it’s a barometer for the weather. Daydreams are compasses that tell you where you’re going or where you are coming from but they don’t tell you where you are. They don’t tell you who you are.
If you don’t know where you are, more than likely you can’t escape because you will go in circles. Racing thoughts explained! We are so disconnected from nature that we forget the prevailing metaphor for being lost in a forest used to be a real thing that many people
experienced. You think you’re following a trail out, but more often than not, you’re going in circles.
It’s why when you’re lost in the woods you’re encouraged to stay put so rescuers can find you.
Rescuers and people needing to be rescued have been known to chase each other in circles!
The forest is your mind. Recurring thoughts are the trees. Special trees; if you cut them down, they grow back because they have solid roots. Cutting things down usually makes it come back thicker. You can plant seeds and grow new trees. You could build a treehouse. Or, you can adopt a compass and go to a new locale, but if you‘re like most people with allergies, you will move to the southwest, taking the plants you liked with you, which means everyone in southwest now have the same allergies.
Be the dream.
Be still where you are. Be quiet where you are. Observe the thoughts that emerge. Don’t identify with them, just observe. You might become surprised that where you are in physicality comes with its own registered thoughts. Wherever you are, your brain’s thermostat will register that.
You may discover as people come and go, the prevailing thoughts change! Our brain’s thermostat is so sensitive that just adding or subtracting one person results in discernible heat loss and gain.
Be still, be quiet, and when the daydream comes- flow with it, don’t control it, don’t stop it. You might be inclined to stop it because since grade school we have been taught to pay attention, don’t day dream. Learning this daydreaming skill requires you to unlearn what you were taught.
Don’t analyze the dream during the dream. Don’t question it. When the dream is over, or you find yourself too busy in it that you wake yourself up and it goes away, I recommend writing it down before you start analyzing it. The more detail you can put on paper as it actually was before you start adding to it the better.
Eventually, if you learn to go with the dream, you can learn to participate with the experience.
You will ask questions and get answers. If you get something scary and you can stay with it, which is what Jung recommends, you will learn something!
Scary things can’t remain scary. Run from them, they get more scary. Hold your ground, they can’t do anything but change. Often, they resolve into something friendly. That friendly was likely always with you, but you failed to see it because you were taught to hide from yourself, as if you could ever hide yourself from God! You have been so fearful of yourself, you were so busy not being selfish to the degree you were attending to other people and not yourself, that you didn’t notice the real good in you.
The real good in you is not tied to a belief, a word, a phrase, a dogma, or anything substantial that can be pinned down.
I am a counselor. I know change can happen. I have experienced it in myself. I have observed it in others. I know you can become your ideal self because I know the words you use, even the best of them, are not who you are. I know you can change your words as easily as you can change your clothes.
You have to go inside to find you. What better place to discover you, than in a day dream where thoughts are realer than this physical reality we experience for a moment. This nursery rhyme you know embodies that truth, life is but a dream, go with the flow, gently. Down the stream, not up.
Chapter Two
