Archives for February 2018

How to Listen to Your Dreams

In my previous article I shared accounts of several dreams which presented me with information that turned out to be accurate, as well as one dream which was far less accurate, at least in any literal sense.

In today’s post I will provide some ideas for those of you who would like to learn how to listen to your dreams with the intention of receiving spiritual guidance from the wisdom with you. This is not a complicated matter, but it does take a little time to develop the skill of listening to your dreams, so be patient with the process as you implement the ideas that follow…

1 – Know That You Are a Dreamer
Some people will insist that they don’t have dreams, but that is simply because they don’t usually remember any of them. Dreaming is almost as essential to the human experience as sleeping itself, and if you are in the habit of sleeping then you are also in the habit of dreaming. The first step to listening to your dreams is therefore to know that you are a dreamer, whether you tend to remember them or not.

2 – Set an Intention to Remember
Next, you should set yourself an intention to start remembering your dreams. Do this just before you turn the light out every night. If it helps, pause and say to yourself, ‘Tonight I will dream, and I intend to remember my dreams.’ Have a notebook and a pencil on your nightstand so that you can jot down any dream fragments as soon as you wake up. Having that notebook there will reinforce your intention to remember and make it more likely that you do in fact start recalling more of your dreams.

3 – Use Your Dream Notebook
You really should jot down anything that you can remember about your dreams as soon as you wake up, because the more awake you become, the less memory you will usually have of your dreams. You should therefore capture your dream memories as soon as you can. If you awaken at five in the morning with a vivid image in your mind, write it down before going back to sleep, because the chances are that the image will not be as vivid – or even one that you can recall – later on.

4 – Consider the Possibilities
By practicing the three previous steps, you will soon find that you start remembering more and more of your dreams. At this stage, you should start listening to what they have to tell you. There are three main possibilities for any dream recollection, which are as follows:

The dream meaning is literal. In this scenario, the dream content can be taken at face value, so if you dream that you ask for a promotion and you end up getting fired instead, you might do well to heed that warning and leave the promotion request for another time.

The dream meaning is symbolic. In this scenario, the dream situation might simply be trying to tell you something in a symbolic way. For example, the dream of asking for a promotion and getting fired might mean that, deep down, you don’t feel that you are worthy of a promotion, but that you are more deserving of losing your job completely. In that case, you might want to work on becoming a more valuable employee and/or increasing your sense of self-worth.

The dream has no meaning. Some dreams are little more than the result of your brain processing information, and therefore have no deeper meaning that you need to take note of.

5 – Develop Your Dream Intuition
Being able to tell the difference between a dream which should be taken literally, interpreted symbolically or discarded as meaningless is a skill that takes time to learn, and your only guide here is your intuition. Start by considering the dream from both literal and symbolic angles by asking yourself the following questions:

If the dream is literal, what is it saying?

If the dream is symbolic, what is it saying?

By asking these questions, you should soon get an intuitive feeling in favour of one interpretation or the other. If you get no intuitive response whatsoever then it could well be that the dream has no deeper meaning, and you can be happy with that outcome. However, do be prepared for a new perspective on the ‘meaningless’ dream to arise as the day progresses, as the relevance of some dreams only becomes apparent as you continue living your life.

6 – Heed Your Own Symbols
There are many ‘dream symbol dictionaries’ available which purport to provide explanations for what different symbols mean. Whilst such dictionaries can sometimes be useful in suggesting various possible meanings, it is important to understand that the symbols in your dreams were put there by your own subconscious, and so they will be personally relevant to you, and not necessarily to any external dictionary.

That being the case, learn to heed your own dream symbols by asking yourself what you personally associate with them. For example, if you always associate stamp collecting with boredom, and you dream of stamp collecting, you can safely assume that you were dreaming of boredom. On the other hand, if you are excited about stamp collecting, an interpretation of excitement would be more appropriate. Learning to understand and trust the symbolic language of your own subconscious mind will serve you far better than relying on the ‘cookie cutter’ approach offered by external dictionaries.

Receive Spiritual Guidance in Your Sleep

The skill of listening to your dreams is something that takes time to develop, but the good news is that you have the rest of your life to do so. The more you listen to your dreams, the more fruitful the exercise becomes, and before long you will be receiving spiritual guidance in your sleep on a regular basis.

Inner Guidance via Dreams

by Ian Leave a Comment

Dreams have always been important to those on the path of the Seeker, and they can be a very good source of inner guidance for individuals who develop the skills required to remember and pay attention to them. In my next post I will share a few key ideas about how you can do just that, but today I would like to share a few dream events that I have experienced personally.

A Dream of Death

For a long time, I thought of dreams as little more than the by-product of my brain processing information that it just happened to have gathered during the day. Like most people, I had my fair share of both good and bad dreams, some vivid and some not so vivid, but nothing that challenged my ideas.

Then one night, in the early nineties, I dreamed that I was standing in front of a grave. I looked at the gravestone, and I noticed that it had my name chiselled into the granite, and that the year of my death was 2000. I don’t recall a month.

When I woke up from that dream, it troubled me, because it had suggested that I would be dead at around the age of 30 (my birthday is in June). The dream haunted me, but I would have to wait several years to find out whether or not there was anything prophetic about it. The fact that I am writing these words in 2018 is a bit of a spoiler, but I’ll return to this dream later.

A Dream of Birth

In 1998, my wife was pregnant with our second child, who was due in May. Two weeks after the estimated date of arrival, we were still waiting, and so my wife went into hospital to prepare for the birth to be induced the following afternoon.

On the night before the induction was due to take place, I dreamed that I was standing in an elevator with a 12 year old boy. I smiled at him and he smiled at me, as you do in an elevator, and then he said: ‘Can I come and live with you?’

‘Of course,’ I replied, apparently not even thinking that his question was at all weird.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked. ‘Because I have a mental disability, and some people don’t like that.’

‘Well some people are dicks,’ I said, because I quite often speak rather bluntly.

The boy smiled at the response. ‘Okay then, I’ll come and live with you,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

‘No problem,’ I smiled, and the dream ended there.

The next day, my wife gave birth to our second child, who just happened to be a boy, and who just happened to have a severe mental disability. My wife was obviously shocked at first, but I honestly wasn’t surprised, and the dream – which I told her about later – gave us a lot of strength as we adjusted to the situation. Our son is now approaching his twentieth birthday, and he’s physically healthy and happy despite the severe challenges that he faces.

Another Dream of Death

The final notable dream that I’d like to share with you took place in the year 2000, which you will recall was the year I’d seen on my grave stone in a previous dream. This time the dream wasn’t about me, but about my father, who lived in another city a couple of hundred miles away. We hadn’t spoken for about eight or nine years due to an ongoing feud between us.

In the dream, my Dad was sick. In fact, he was dying of cancer, and he told me that he didn’t have long left. It was a short, matter-of-fact dream, and I woke from it with a start.

Feeling that this dream was more than ‘just a dream’, I set aside my stubborn attachment to the feud between us and tracked down his phone number. He was very surprised to hear my voice when I called him the very next morning, but he confirmed that he was being treated for lung cancer, which was in its final stages.

My dad refused to let me see him, asking that I remember him how he was before his illness, and although I tried changing his mind about that, I respected his wishes. However, the dream in which he had told me that he was dying did give me the opportunity to repair the rift between us over several extended phone calls before he died a few months later.

And a Sigh of Relief

In 1998, a boy with a mental disability had come to live with us, just as I had dreamed. In May 2000, my father died of cancer, just as I had dreamed. So, what about me? Would my dream about me dying in the year 2000 also come true?

Clearly, it didn’t. But it did make me quite nervous throughout the whole of that year, until I was finally able to breathe a sigh of relieve on New Year’s Eve, and then again on my 31st birthday in 2001.

‘It will happen afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; and your sons and your daughters will prophesy. Your old men will dream dreams. Your young men will see visions.’ – Joel 2:28

My view of dreams today is very different to the view that I had a couple of decades ago. I have learned that sometimes, dreams are far more meaningful than most people would think possible, and that our meaningful dreams can give us guidance, encouragement, or even bring us prophetic glimpses of the future.

I have also learned that dreams are not always meaningful, and that sometimes a dream is just a dream. That being the case, giving every dream a literal interpretation can be a quick way to unnecessary stress and anxiety.

With all of that said, how can the Seeker learn to tell the difference between a regular dream, a symbolic dream and a quite random dream? And how can you deliberately work with your dreams to obtain inner guidance from the divinity within you? Those are the big questions that I will discuss next time, so stay tuned and dream well…

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How to Write Your Own Scriptures

by Ian Leave a Comment

One of the things that makes a Seeker quite different to an Adopter (see What is a Seeker? for my definitions of these terms) is the fact that he doesn’t have spiritual ‘truth’ handed to him on a plate. Whereas most religious traditions have set scriptures which lay down exactly what they believe and why, the Seeker more often draws knowledge, insight and inspiration from many different sources, and that means there is no single collection of writings which reflects his own considered perspective.

This being the case, it can be a very good idea for the Seeker to write his own scriptures. I mentioned this idea briefly in my post on Scripture Study for Spiritual Seekers, but today I would like to elaborate on it by providing clear instructions for anyone who wishes to take it further.

The word scripture simply means ‘sacred writing’, and all scriptures were once written by men and women who felt that they had discovered something about the spiritual life that was worth remembering and reflecting on from time to time. Writing your own scriptures is therefore no different to what many others have already done before you.

How to Write Your Own Scriptures

The first thing you will need to do is obtain a suitable notebook in which to record your insights. Whilst any notebook could be used, it is suggested that you choose one which is robust enough to serve you well for many years to come, and if its appearance also helps to put you in a more spiritual frame of mind, so much the better. Something like the Sunrise Journal is well worth considering, as it is both animal-friendly and has refillable pages, but if a different journal appeals to you more, you should of course follow your own inclinations.

Next, make sure that you have established the habit of spiritual journaling. This will allow you to note down your personal insights as and when they occur, and to also record extracts from any traditional scriptures that resonate with you as explore your own spiritual path.

The third step is to sit down and review your spiritual journal once every month and to copy whatever writings you view as being timeless over into your scripture book. By timeless, I mean writings that you know – on an intuitive level – are ones which will serve you well in the years to come. The writings that you transfer can include not only your own observations and insights, but also personally relevant extracts that you have noted from traditional scriptures such as the Bible, the Dhammapada and the Bhagavad Gita.

By following this simple three-step approach, you can steadily write your own book of scripture which is as personally relevant to you as any scriptural writings can be. Of course, the value of your scriptures will increase over time, as they expand and your journey progresses, but even a few pages of personally discovered truths can be worth their weight in gold, so start today and perhaps one day in the future your scriptures will also serve to inspire others on the path.

The Joy of Creating

by Ian Leave a Comment

Joy doesn’t seem to be something that is discussed very often these days. We hear plenty about negative states such as stress, anxiety and depression, and we also hear quite a bit about more positive states, such as pleasure and the pursuit of happiness, but joy – both as a word and as a concept – seems to have become fairly unfashionable. This is unfortunate, because the state of joy is quite different to both pleasure and happiness, and it is arguably a lot more desirable.

Pleasure is a momentary and often fleeting emotion based on wholly external factors, such as being able to enjoy a good book in silence, eating a delicious meal or having sex with a partner. Happiness is more often associated with achieving an end goal of some kind, such as successfully beating a performance target at work, or reaching a desired bodyweight target after investing weeks or months of effort at the gym.

There is nothing wrong with either of these states, but they are not usually possible to sustain without interruption. The pleasure of sex begins to dwindle at the point of orgasm, especially for men, and the pleasure of fine dining can soon turn into discomfort when one’s appetite has been sated. Similarly, the state of happiness experienced when one achieves a certain goal can fade rather quickly, making it desirable to set out in the pursuit of another goal so that the ‘buzz’ of happiness can be experienced again.

Joy, in comparison, is something that can be experienced quite consistently over an extended period of time, and is not dependent on external circumstances. It is a state of contentment and satisfaction that is found within the present moment, and can be cultivated by anyone.

There are many ways to cultivate joy in life, but one of the most effective is to develop the habit of finding joy in whatever activity you happen to be doing right now. If you can find joy in activities which will also give you happiness from time to time, then so much the better.

Consider the Seeker who would like to write a novel, for example. Most people would view the actual writing as little more than something that needs to be done before the novel can be published, at which point they assume that they would experience pleasure and happiness. The Seeker, on the other hand, would put publication out of his or her mind for the time being, and focus instead on enjoying the process of putting words on paper. Not only would that here-and-now focus make the writing process one that gives joy in and of itself, but it is also likely to help the Seeker to write a better novel as well.

The same principle can be applied to virtually anything. Seek joy in the process of creating, rather than in what your creation might help you to achieve. For example, instead of viewing your gym visits or exercise sessions as little more than means to an end, you can focus on enjoying each visit or session as its own reward. Rather than working hard just so that you can improve your chances of getting a pay rise or a promotion, you can focus on cultivating joy by performing each task you take on – no matter how simple or complex – to the best of your ability.

You are a creative being, so it is easiest to find joy in tasks which are in some way creative. Fortunately, almost everything that you do as a human being can be viewed as creative if you choose to do so, and that means you can find joy in every moment. Even the simple act of sitting and taking a coffee break can bring you joy if you focus on sitting and enjoying your coffee to the best of your ability, rather than allowing your mind to drift off into the future, past or to some completely different place.

Instead of fixating on pursuing the happiness that comes from achieving specific outcomes, try focusing on finding joy in the actual process of pursuing those outcomes. Find joy in the cooking of each meal, in the time you spend on the treadmill, in the washing of your car, and so on. By doing this, you will fill your daily life with a rich sense of inner joy, your sense of general wellbeing and contentment will increase, and you will still get to experience any happiness gained through the achievement of your goals as a welcome bonus.

The joy of creating your life from moment to moment is one that can be developed in any and every situation, so start where you are right now. Live today with joy by doing whatever needs to be done for its own sake, and to the best of your ability, and you may well find that this is an enlightened and empowering approach to life that you may also want to adopt in the weeks, months and years to come.

A New Way to Look at Consciousness

by Ian Leave a Comment

The words consciousness and spirit are often interchangeable, especially when we discuss the question of whether or not there is some part of us which will exist after the death of our physical being. Like many other Seekers before me, I have thought long and hard about this particular question, and although I haven’t come up with any hard-and-fast answers (the fact is that we won’t know for sure until we get there), I have come up with a way of viewing my own consciousness or spirit which satisfies both my desire to be rational and my desire to pay attention to my intuition.

Those who view man as a purely physical machine tend to think of consciousness as something that is a by-product of the physical brain. With that model, the death of the physical brain naturally means the end of consciousness, and the oft-reported ‘light show’ of the near-death experience is regarded as little more than the brain being flooded with chemicals to make the dying process less painful or frightening.

Those who view man as a spiritual being tend to think of the consciousness as a continuous stream of awareness which passes from lifetime to lifetime, with perhaps some periods of limbo in between.

My own view is a little different, but I think that it meshes well with both perspectives.

Imagine that you want to build a simple AM transistor radio. To do that, you would need to obtain various electronic components, such as transistors, capacitors, resistors, a battery and the all-important ferrite rod. Lay all of those components down on a table and you would have everything you need for a potential radio, but you wouldn’t hear a thing.

If you were to assemble those components in a certain way then you would have an actual radio which can be switched on and tuned in. The radio would now make a sound because it is capable of receiving radio signals – which are ever-present in the environment – and play the resulting broadcast for all to hear.

Having built a functional radio, you could now disassemble it, either by removing the components one by one, or by smashing it with a hammer. This would change the configuration of the components so that they could no longer operate together as a radio, and your machine would immediately cease to make any sound. The broadcast would fall silent.

Now, where is the broadcast that you listened to earlier? You can’t hear it, but it hasn’t exactly ceased to exist, because it is still being transmitted, all around you. All that has happened is that the machine which you used to receive and play the broadcast is no longer functional.

I think of consciousness as being much the same as the radio broadcast, and of the physical body as being analogous to the radio itself. Consciousness, then, is not something which arises from the physical body, but rather, it is something which is expressed through the physical body.

We tend to think of ourselves as having very different levels of consciousness or spiritual development because we all behave in very different ways, but that could simply be due to the fact that we are all unique physical machines. Listen to a particular radio broadcast on a cheap transistor radio and the quality won’t be anything like as good as it would be on an high-end system. The broadcast itself, however, would be the same.

My notion, then, is that there is just one signal being broadcast throughout the whole universe, meaning that there is just one consciousness. You are that one consciousness, which is currently being animated through your physical being. When your physical body dies, the broadcast being expressed through it will seem – to others – to fall silent, but it will continue forever, and will express itself in many other ways, through many other physical bodies.

To put all of this into a more ‘spiritual’ context, you are not really an individual spirit, but rather, you are an individual expression of the one Spirit, or what many traditions call God or Infinite Intelligence, and so is everyone else.

Look at your neighbours, your spouse, your parents, your children, you co-workers, your pets and any other living being, and you will see yourself – the one Spirit – being expressed in many different ways. This is why so many teachers have said that ‘we are all one’ and that we should love our neighbours as we love ourselves, and be careful to treat others as we would like to be treated.

Every single living thing on the planet is an expression of the one Spirit. Those individual expressions may come and go, but you – the Spirit itself – will continue for eternity.