Self-Realization
Through Dreams
You
must build your "mansion in the skies"
yourself. You can commence consciously building it here in the body to
greater advantage than to commence after you lose your body. That you
must build it yourself is the law of nature. It is not because any
individuality, however wise and powerful in any of the advanced stages
of existence, says you must. All of these, up to order of mind beyond
our power to comprehend, have been and are now the builders of their
temples (themselves).
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What
most they want of us is to build in like manner our own and with some
blissful results. Because such building is simply the building of our
own individual happiness into grander, broader, and ever-broadening
proportions. |
Your
first error on passing from the body in the state known as sleep lies
in thinking that you are moving about your physical body. You must
educate yourself out of this mistake. You must fix it in your mind
before going to sleep that if you wake up in what you call a dream you
are not then using your physical body. You will fix in your mind
before going to sleep, so far as you can, your conception of yourself
as a spirit - or, rather, as the unseen organization which during the
day uses your body.
The
last thought before going to sleep is the one most likely to remain
with you on leaving the body. If persisted in, you will find it
mingling itself with what you call your dreams. That is, it will be
the first clew towards the recognition of your real self when you are
away from your body.
Keep
this fact then, this recognition of yourself as spirit, in your mind,
and it will be a great help to your unseen friends in the other life
to get near you and waken you to the knowledge of your real
self.
The
wiser and more powerful order of spirits, who may be able to give you
much of their thought in the daytime, or while you are using the body,
may not be able to give you so much of it during your escape from the
body, owing to the condition above spoken of. Instead, therefore, of
going into a higher region of thought at night, you descend, through
blindness and mere force of habit, into a lower one.
You
may be, while using the body, educated up to and enter into their
higher realm of thought by day. Yet at night, being so educated in
part in the school of physical sense, you cannot carry that education
with you. You walk with the spiritual eye and ear, thinking these the
physical eye and ear. All this results in a confusion which no
language can fully express, because no similar condition in this life
can be clearly realized or illustrated.
You
want to give your powerful unseen friends a clew by which, on passing
from the body, they can come nearer to you and help you to wake up,
find your real self, and go where you belong. the thought of yourself
as a spirit, as a being distinct and apart from your body, will serve
as this clew.
A
thought is as real a thing as a telegraph-wire. it will be the
telegraph-wire 'twixt you and them, because they will not stay
permanently with you in your groupings on the cruder stratum of life.
They could if they wished; but they want to draw you up to their
abodes, - their country, their realm, - where all is more beautiful
and fairy-like than ever pen or picture realized here; where, in part,
at least, you may now belong.
To
bring back of this the remembrance to the daytime while your spirit
uses the body, would be to bring the celestial life to earth. It would
be a temptation in the right direction to leave off the coarser
pleasures for the sake of realizing and living in the higher. |
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As
persistently you fix on going to sleep this idea in your mind, that
you are no longer using the body's senses, you will after a time, in
what you have called the dream, find yourself recalling this fact. You
will find yourself saying, "This is as real as my body or day
life. I am only in a different state of existence."
Your
present life of the spirit, away from the body at night, is very often
one that exhausts more than it refreshes. Unconsciously you may drift
toward persons and scenes repulsive to you. You are carried to them by
lower currents of thought. You drift into these tides as an ignorant
child wades into the streams, and is carried beyond its depth and off
its foothold by an outer and stronger current; knowing nothing of the
fact that thought does move in currents, and that the lower one of
inferior or evil thought is most powerful near Earth, - nothing of
your powers and senses as a spirit, you are as helpless as a baby
nightly on passing from your body.
Could
you get a start in the right direction toward the upper and superior
regions of though, - could you ascend through the current of dark and
crude thought, which everywhere surrounds you, - you would find
yourself in a land of beauty, sunshine, and flowers; of grand scenery
and fairy landscape. You would associate there with people you most
wish to see, and to whom you in spirit belong to.
You
would repose in a luxurious languor, yet still be able to note scenes
of indescribably charm by the eye. You would be conscious of life, and
still be at rest. You would drink in life with every breath. You would
return with this life to your body in the morning. Your night of bliss
would be both as a rest in thought and a healthy stimulation to your
life and body.
Your
spiritual senses would open in this elevated thought-atmosphere. You
would be freed from what is now a nightly slavery. Your connection
with the higher regions of thought would become permanent, and you
could attain the power of returning to them at any time to
refresh yourself when overcome by cruder thoughts.
Where You
Travel When You Sleep 
