Dream Teaching
Student: Can you say something about dreaming, and the dream teaching?
Barbara: Well, dreaming in don Miguel’s estimation, is the highest level of spiritual teaching. The reason he says that, is that it lifts us out of all mythologies and brings to us an awareness of life that goes beyond our little definitions with feelings. It brings us to an experiential place of understanding what it means to perceive through the point of view of life.
The curriculum, if you want to call it that, involves a three day workshop once per month, where information is given, new ideas, stories and mythologies, in order to bring us to that place of truth that can only be experienced. The mythologies can change as the consciousness of the students shifts and changes, until they realize that they need not align themselves with any one mythology. Until they realize that they are the maker of myths.
Not only are there teachings and lectures involved, but also allowing the mind to rest in what we call dreaming posture, which is in a seated position, hands on thighs, feet on the floor, disciplining the body so that it doesn’t distract the mind from flowing freely. The mind can go in any direction. It has never been suggested that there is One Way of dreaming. Only that the outcome, if you want to think that way, is that you see the way the mind works. We see the way it resists, the way it diverts itself, the way it allows itself to surrender, and ultimately permits itself to be informed by something outside of itself, greater than itself. By light.
Student: Stillness. We have sat in chairs in the dreaming posture, we lay down on our backs, hands crossed in front of our chests (the Egyptian position) without moving, to develop will, to develop discipline. What is a healthy type of discipline?
Barbara: The mind, from the point of view of this spiritual teaching, is here to serve the body. Up until now, it has been the big tyrant. The mind is a conglomeration of imaginings. You can’t poke at it, you can’t touch it, you can’t define it. What the brain creates in order to dream life. So, the mind has no business being a boss to this fantastic sensory mechanism, called the body and brain. We are evolving out of that role and learning how to serve the body.
From that point of view, discipline either torments the body, or it gives the body a chance to commune with what created it. That is the difference. We still call it discipline, but one takes us to a place of pleasure, one takes us to a deeper place of pain. I am not recommending the place of pain.
Student: This sounds like it could be a huge amount of work…
Barbara: It’s not a huge amount of work. The work and the struggle is trying so hard, every minute of every day, to be what we are not! In looking at the way our mind works, looking at the old patterns and habits, in looking at our belief system that no longer serves us, we are learning how to be what we are, which has nothing to do with struggle, nothing to do with effort, nothing to do with twisting ourselves and reshaping ourselves into another belief system.
It has to do with letting go of beliefs in order to be authentic. There really is no work or pain involved in it. It takes a shift in attention.
Student: It’s fun!
Barbara: You can make it fun, you can make it hard. It is really your choice, and that has to do with your specific attention, what your early patterns are. If you turn a spiritual teaching into the same obsessive and self-abusive patterns that you weave through all your other pursuits in life, then a spiritual evolution will be painful.
If you modify your old patterns in order to see the fun and the joy in revealing yourself to yourself, even though you are revealing layer and layer and layer of distortions and lies. If you turn it all into a joyous experience, then you begin to understand that life, unequivocally loves itself and you are a reflection of it.