Focus & Intent – Jed McKenna
―The vast majority of spiritual seekers are motivated by desire, so the failure of their search is a foregone conclusion, as is amply evidenced by mankind‘s history of near-total inability to find the one thing that can never be lost.
How it is possible that something as simple as seeing what is manages to elude even our most devout seekers and our greatest minds? Because no one really wants what awakening really is. We may express a vague sort of desire to awaken, but we want a very specific kind of awakening: the kind that doesn‘t require us to leave our cosy dreamstate or, better yet, makes it even cosier. We don‘t want to awaken from the dream; we want to dream that we are awake………
Many people hear the ringing alarm in life, the call to awaken, but what we really want, more than sex, power, fame, love, immortality or money, is to hit the snooze button and go back to sleep. When life calls, all we want to do is pull the covers over our head and roll over and, above all, keep our eyes closed.
The last thing anyone really wants, whatever they might say, is to have their slumber disturbed.‖
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My Impression On Above Chapter: „Dreaming Reality‟
In our dreams we are aware of sights, sounds and sensations happening around us. We see dream colours, hear dream music, smell dream fragrances, and taste dream food. We are aware of our bodies; we think and reason; we feel fear, anger and love. We experience other people as individuals separate from us, speaking and interacting with us.
In the dream it all seems very real, and appears to be happening ‗out there‘ in the world around us. But when we awaken we realise that everything in the dream, including our own body, was a creation in the mind. It was all just a dream .
It was just a dream in so far as the image created in the mind was not based on
‗Physical Reality.‘ It was created from memories, hopes, fears, unconscious needs, and other influences.
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The Meaning of Life & Who Is Your Infinite I?
There is no input from the outside physical world or rather very little input; the sound of a banging door may filter through and be integrated into the dream reality in some way, but most of the data is internally generated.
The difference with ‗Waking Consciousness‘ (1) is that the image created in the mind is based primarily on sensory data drawn from our ‗Physical Surroundings.‘ This gives our waking experience a consistency not found in dreams. We don't suddenly find ourselves transported to a completely different location, conversing with someone we've never met before. We don't find ourselves flying magically through the air. We don't find physical reality transforming before our very eyes. When we are awake, the images created in the mind bears a direct relationship to the physical world around us.
Our sleeping dreams are private affairs. Whatever I may be dreaming usually has little similarity to what my partner may be dreaming. They are based on different inputs. Our waking experiences, on the other hand, are based on very similar sets of data. The light reflected from a tree to my eye is the same as that reflected to another person.
The images created in our minds are, as far as we can tell, identical; we are likely to find ourselves agreeing on everything right down to the finest details of the colour and structure of a leaf or thorn. This confirms ‗our assumption‘ that we are experiencing reality as it is, out there, around us.
FOOTNOTES
1.
Wikipedia – Waking Consciousness.
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