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Dream Confined
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 Without inner freedom there is no possibility and promise and consequently no dream. The dream is ever present.
Yet living the dream means to set the dream free from it's prison of static, pollution and shackles.
Here are seven chains – unconscious and often self-created – confining our dreams:
1. The Frailty
2. The Distractions
3. The Mark
4. The Merry Go Round
5. The Ambivalence
6. The Manipulation
7. The Big Misunderstanding
The Frailty
When we're uncomfortable with questions or can't bear to look into the mirror, we miss out on self-knowledge. Without self-knowledge we cannot generate change. What is not acknowledged, questioned or looked at, still persists. The result is repetition of same old. Same old, same old, becomes a chain tying us down in - what else - same old same old. Same old same old becomes a treadmill and at once our dream confined.
It does not have to be this way. We don't need to atrophy by being disconnected from our history or our inner power. Educating ourselves about the themes of our personal history and learning the valuable lessons brings a wealth of riches. As we tolerate and accept frailty, we discover bravery and happiness. In the midst of discomfort we find our strength and ourselves. We turn baggage, scars and calluses into the most fertile growth. What we face and own liberates and can be dissolved to make room for whatever new we want .
The Distractions
It is compelling and oh so human to dull disappointment and dissatisfaction with distractions and quick fixes. Whatever the intoxication or idolatry might be, it's ultimately harmful. The frenzy of the compulsion destroys empowering and defeats the natural inner force pushing us forward to our best living.
Without exception distractions and quick fixes are an opportunity to look away from solutions. Think of the heroes in Hemingway's books or certain world leaders. They try to escape mediocricy by choice of high excitement like "big game hunting and bullfighting and wars". All snares and illusions of cause, stirring yes, but never generating change or bringing joy and peace. All same old, same old comfort-zone and inevitably detrimental or deadly. And all at once our dream confined.
Relax. You don't need distractions from the outside. Relax. You can wake up in the knowledge that your high and highest aliveness is already there, right there, inside of you.
We'll break the spell, focus and shift to vision. We'll restore balance, so that you can live the high.
The Mark
We are born open, curious and in a perfectly natural state of unity with all being. Yet as we grow up we slowly come to look at ourselves as others say we are. Pretty much everything imposed on us from the other and the outside is a mark. We learn to speak what is spoken in the family and in the land. What is passed down is mimicked and internalized, often without realizing it and by osmosis. What comes from outside becomes part of us and then consistent with us. Our true and wise being is pushed back into oblivion.
Covered with layers of "foreign and false" our unique voice goes faint, until barely perceptible. We have gotten mixed up in the projection, inclination or purpose imposed on us by someone else. We confuse image - what other sees - with essence - who we really are.
We become conflicted in our identity, divided against our selves.
"Being oneself becomes being-other-than-self." Now we have lost our natural state of being.
The mark has become an imprint, a permanent nature and a fate, preventing us from seeing and thinking for ourselves. Now we are living the expected, instead of our essential being. Spirit, essence, the natural and wise vitality pushing us forward to what we are capable of and need to become, is at once distrusted and obstructed. It does not have to be this way.
Whatever we learned, we can un-learn and re-learn. Whatever we internalized we can cast out in the same vein. We'll go on a quest, we'll separate inner truth from outer fiction and pollution. Then we recover and re-new just the same.
The Merry Go
Round
Our brain stem, the part of the brain that insures survival, is like an enormous computer.
Every single one of our experiences is burned and stored in the files of the computer as a picture. You can replay the emotions attached to these pictures at all times. Even though we might have forgotten about the experience, we react from that deep reservoir of our past just the same. We carry the colors of the familiar family courtyard experiences within us and see the world through its glasses.
Musician Eric Clapton, in sobriety, after years of abusing drugs and alcohol, a break up of a marriage, and relations with unavailable women, asked himself: "Were these the conditions that had governed my feelings about my mother and was I still unconsciously trying to replicate that relationship? I think so."
Naturally, Mr. Clapton is right. The theme of his relations became rejection.
"I became surly and withdrawn, rejecting everyone's affection, as I felt I had been rejected," he says of the 9-year-old Eric, who only knew how to survive by doing what had been done to him.
Yet the survival tactic, as brilliant as it might be in childhood, without fail becomes a prison in adult life.
Shares Mr. Clapton:
"I found a pattern in my behavior that had been repeating itself for years, decades even,
I could only choose partners who would ultimately abandon me, as I was convinced my mother had done, all those years ago. I was living it all out again in the present. It seemed like I would never be able to break the mold".
It's like that for all of us. We become puppets on the strings of past lacerations and karmic compulsions.
We keep resurrecting the same old fate.
This merry go round presents us with a double whammy of smoke and mirrors:
• We can't see it, because we're in it and on it and it is in us.
• Clinging to the habitual and familiar, we only do more of the same old, same old.
We don't wish to do so. We actually have a deep longing for a different outcome. It's just that we don't know how.
It does not have to be this way.
We can opt for the work of "uncovering and recovery" and break fate, chain and mold. Then we abandon the merry go round instead of ourselves and walk beyond the family's courtyard. Ultimately we turn the corner and meet the dream. That is, if we're willing to lay it on the line, like Mr. Clapton, who insists: "I had to break the chain and give him (his now diseased son Connor) what I had never really had …"
Mr. Clapton has become a genius two times over - playing one dream and completing another - going beyond fate, healing his children and the world, by breaking the chain for himself.
The Ambivalence
Setting the dream free not only requires freedom. Crystal clear intent is also part of the design.
If we're drifting and sending mixed messages we will inevitably miss out on manifestation.
There's no fooling the law of attraction and high invocation. Without clarity the dream will stay confined.
False perceptions of self or strong family and cultural taboos are lurking underneath the ambivalence.
To be ambivalent, or to want one's cake and eat it too, is to be human.
Yet it does not have to be this way.
We don't need the delays, or lost days. We'll find the model, so that you know that what you want is possible. We'll finish up old until you get the new picture and are free to set the power of self fulfilling prophecy in motion.
Time and time again I witness how people cling to the same old and familiar, no matter what it costs them. Time and time again I witness how hard it is for people to believe dream is their right.
Relax and remember: what you have created you can re-create. Relax and remember: the dream is not only right there, but rightfully yours for the taking.
The Manipulation and the Big Misunderstanding will be addressed in a future writing.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, 1952
Eric Clapton, Clapton, The Autobiography, 2007
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