Taken from “The Mystery Experience” By Tim Freke
We’ve seen that life is like a dream, but who is the dreamer? In this chapter I’m going to explore the perennial spiritual teaching that life is the dream of God and suggest a new way of understanding this ancient idea.
The Hindu philosophers teach that life is the dream of Brahman. Braham is a name for God, so they’re claiming that life is God’s dream. In many mystical traditions we find the same idea. There is a primordial being, which is called brahman or God, Or a host of other names. This supreme being is the primal awareness within which the dream of love is arising. Everything is a thought within one big mind as the Zen masters say.
You and I are experiencing the life dream right now. But this isn’t my dream or your dream, because we are characters in the dream. The life dream is God’s dream. The primal awareness is dreaming itself to be you and me, and experiencing the dream through us. This is why we are both experiencing different perspectives on the same life dream.
There is one awareness imagining itself to be everything and everyone, and missing itself in all its many different disguises. In the words of Joseph Campbell, life is 1 great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream to. What an amazing vision!
The neo platonic philosophers describe God as the mystery of being, which is in the process of becoming all that is. The mystery of being is arising as all individual beings. This profound idea brings us to the greatest teaching found at the heart of the spiritual tradition of the world:
Atman is Brahman
The soul is God
The individual “I” is one with the mystery of being
In my experience this amazing teaching is true. If I look out at the dream of life I appear to be an individual “I”. But if I bring my attention back onto itself, I deep know the deep self as the primal awareness within which everything is arising. On the surface of love are appear to be Tim, but at the depths, I am God.
I am often asked if I believe in God and I reply I don’t believe in anything but God’s. It’s all God. We are all God. There is only God. God is not some distant figure somewhere in the sky. God is my own deepest nature and yours too. We are God playing a game of hide and seek. Pretending to be separate individuals and then awakening to our deeper nature, so that we realise something extraordinary. Essentially there is one of us. How exquisite!
The field of being many people have problems with the word God, so I’d like to develop the ideas we’ve been exploring, using the concept of a field, which is central to physics. Scientists talk about fields such as the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field, which reach throughout the whole of space. I want to use this concept for spiritual rather than scientific purposes to describe the mystery of being as an omnipresent field, because this can help us understand life in a whole new light.
I want to suggest that the mystery of being is a field of unconscious awareness within which life is arising like a dream.
The unconscious field of awareness becomes conscious through the particular form it dreams itself to be.
The body is the means by which a centre of consciousness arises in the field of unconscious awareness.
Consciousness isn’t inside the brain. Rather the brain allows the primal field of awareness to become conscious.
Imagine the brain like a radio receiver. The music that a radio plays isn’t in the radio the radio tunes into an electromagnetic field of radio waves. And then we get to hear the music.
In the same way the brain can be seen as tuning in to the unconscious field of awareness. And that’s when consciousness arises.
When a radio tunes into radio waves it creates a pocket of sound in a particular place within the silent electromagnetic field.
In the same way the brain creates a centre of consciousness that illuminates a bubble of conscious being within the field of unconscious being.
A Love Story
the fundamental motive at the heart of many ancient myths is that the primal oneness of being is manifesting as the multiplicity of life, so that it can come to know itself. As the gnostic sage Simon Magus says in “The Great Announcement”:
There is one power… be getting itself, increasing itself, seeking itself, finding itself. One root of the All.
In my imagination we are sitting together around a fire underneath a starry night sky, so that I can share with you my version of this myth. It’s just a story but it resonates inside me like an ancient memory. It gives the human adventure the grandeur it deserves. And it helps me appreciate love in a deeper way. So come up close and I’ll tell you an astonishing tale.
In the beginning was the word-less.
There was no one to think and nothing to think about.
The primal field of awareness was unconscious, because there were no experiences to be conscious of.
The field of awareness was like the presence of light without anything to illuminate, so paradoxically the light was dark.
It is the nature of awareness to be aware, however, so the primal awareness imagined the dream of life.
The timeless possibility for everything imagined the flow of time through which everything came into being.
The mystery of being manifested its paralogical potentiality and the primal oneness appeared as a multiplicity of life.
The mystery of being manifested as the evolutionary process of becoming.
The field of unconscious awareness dreamt the story of life and progressively became more conscious through the evolving forms it imagined itself to be.
And so it came to be that the primal field of unconscious being arose as many centres of conscious being.
The twist in the tail cell 4 so good. But this brings us to the twist that adds drama to our tail…
the problem arose that the primal awareness identified with each of the separate forms it appeared to be and didn’t recognise its deeper identity as the oneness of being.
And here we are… that’s you and me. Each one of us is the field of awareness believing itself to be just a separate individual.
This is not a satisfactory state of affairs, because when we’re lost in separateness it’s lonely and frightening.
We feel we are constantly missing something and that’s because we are
yet this underlying discontent pushes us to explore the depths of life.
We feel there must be more to life so we start to wonder.
The journey of awakening
This begins our journey of spiritual awakening.
At some point on this journey we become conscious of the deep self and we recognise that our deepest being is the primal mystery of being.
You and I are centres of consciousness arising within the field of awareness and when we realize this, the primal oneness comes to know itself through us.
The unconscious field of awareness is coming to self knowledge, but dreaming itself to be you and me on a journey of awakening.
Unconscious Oneness to Conscious Oneness
So the message of this fantastical story is this.
The primal oneness of unconscious awareness is arising as separate centres of consciousness, because through these centres of consciousness it can come to know that all is One.
Life is a journey from unconscious oneness through conscious separateness to conscious oneness.
The Happy Ending
This brings us to the happy ending.
When we know that we are one with everything and everyone, we find ourselves in love with everything and everyone, because love is how oneness feels.
When we’re conscious of the oneness of being, we fall in love with all beings.
We simply love being.
So our epic fable turns out to be a love story and that’s what makes it worth telling.
Author: Spirit Connection
Spirit Connection is an online platform to facilitate connecting light workers with people seeking their help.
