Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily merrily merrily merrily
Life is but a dream
As you read these words in this very moment, you are in a dream. Within this dream you have dreams at night of course, but what you’re experiencing right now in this moment is itself a dream that you’re having from a higher state of consciousness to which you will return when you die.
When we die, which is to say when this dream ends, it will be a similar feeling to the one we have in this waking life when we wake up from a vivid nighttime dream: “Whoah, that seemed so real!”
Once we know this and internalize it, the goal then becomes to “wake up” within this dream. I think that’s what spiritual enlightenment is: knowing that this life is a dream from a higher state of consciousness, and integrating that higher state into the dream life.
Most people are deeply asleep, just going with the flow of this physical dream realm, believing what they are told, doing what they were always told they should be doing…which is not ideal, to put it mildly.
Imagine a long line of boats chained together being guided down the middle of a stream. It’s still pretty cool, but most of the beauty and adventure is not in the middle of the stream, tethered to all the other boats. It’s along the shoreline, in the little brooks that branch off from the stream into wonderful ponds and all kinds of magical things. And the few others you meet in those places will tend to be more fun and interesting than the people in the middle.
At any point we can remove the chains from our boat and row off to the sides and explore areas that most of the other boats don’t even know exist.
When your boat is still chained to everyone else’s and all you see is the middle of the stream, dying from that state of dream consciousness is like when you wake up and just have a vague sense of what you were dreaming, and then quickly forget all of the details and go on with your day.
I don’t want that of this life. I want to become so awake within this dream that when I die, it’s a seamless transition into my higher state, exactly like when I’m having a lucid dream* while my human body sleeps and I consciously decide to end it and return to my physical body so that I can remember everything I experienced.
*A lucid dream is when you wake up within the dream, realize you’re dreaming, have the same full conscious awareness you have in waking life, but you remain in the dream knowing that your physical body is asleep in bed. It’s an exhilarating, surreal experience to know that your dream environment in all of its detail and glory is being created moment to moment by your consciousness. And it makes it much easier to realize that the same is true of your physical environment, literally.
In this life, I have memories of dreams that are more vivid and detailed than most of my memories of actual physical events I experienced in waking life. Even memories of a few impactful dreams from my early childhood are in higher resolution than most other memories.
Years ago when I first became interested in lucid dreaming, I came to know that this life is a dream of sorts. While this waking physical life seems so real, when you start to have experiences that are more real than this, then you can also know for yourself that this life is a dream.
How do we know if something is real? As far as I can gather, the only way to know if something is real is how real it feels, or how real it seems. Which is highly subjective. Which would mean that reality, which could be described as that which is real, is also highly subjective.
When you go into dreams or out of body experiences where those places, those experiences, are more vibrant, sharper (more in focus), more vivid, and even more emotionally impactful than waking physical life, then you know at the very least that this waking physical life is less “real” than other experiences. Which is not to say less important, just less real. It’s still real, it’s all real, even your dreams. There are just different levels, or different frequencies.
The main point is that there’s not that much at all to be worried about, and we are much, much freer than we might believe. Those boats chained together restricted to the middle of the stream – those are not physical chains. They are mental and spiritual.
After having researched an absolute ton of so-called “near-death experiences” (NDEs)*, and having listened to and read hundreds of such experiences, an almost universal sentiment among these people is that they realized they were worrying too much in their lives. They were taking things too seriously, wishing they hadn’t been so petty about so many things.
*This is a great YouTube channel documenting hundreds of NDEs: The Other Side. I also wrote about a few here many years ago.
Another common thread among these people is that the vast majority of them didn’t want to come back. Where they went when they physically died* was so much more awesome than here that they begged and pleaded not to have to go back, even knowing that they would be leaving behind loved ones. Yet in many cases they were forced to come back because they had unfinished business to attend to. In other cases they were shown what would happen to their loved ones on Earth if they did did not come back, and so they begrudgingly agreed to take one for the team and return to physical life.
*In many cases their bodies were clinically dead. No brain activity whatsoever. Yet they were conscious, and in many cases could recall specific events that occurred around their physically dead bodies. As far as I’m concerned, this proves that consciousness does not arise from the brain. I see the brain as an antenna of sorts that allows our eternal consciousness to tune into the frequency of physical Earth life so we can operate within it. Consciousness is primary.
For those who didn’t come back and did “die” “early”, just know that they chose to move on. Where they are is way, way more awesome than here and they’re having a better time than you can even imagine. You’ll join them there soon enough. Ask a hospice nurse about common threads among the dying, and most if not all will say that many or most patients start talking to deceased loved ones as if they are in the room with them. The spirits/Souls of the deceased are actually there spiritually in that physical location to help the soon-to-be-deceased transition out of this intense dream state and return home.
“But that’s so mean, to leave me here alone, I miss him/her, how could he/she be so callous as to leave me!”
The deceased know the full deal, and we don’t. When someone dies, the veil is lifted. While we dream this dream, the veil is down, and for most of us, it is impenetrable with our human consciousness, as long as we’re operating from within the antenna which is the human brain, which is tuned to physical Earth reality.
Imagine you’re in a lucid dream while your human body sleeps, having a dream experience with a loved one, but only you know that it’s a dream. Your loved one thinks it’s real, that the dream is true reality. You’re bored, or in pain, or have just had enough with the dream experience so you end it, knowing there are infinity future dreams together that are way more awesome than the last. You have eternity together to do whatever you can imagine.
That’s the post-physical-death perspective of our loved ones who left Earth earlier than we thought they should have.
Sometimes this physical life can seem miserable and intolerable. But once we realize that this life is just a dream, then the stakes lower. We no longer fear death, even if we wish to avoid it. We’re less sad when people we love wake up from the dream and leave us here without them. We aren’t so bothered when things don’t go how we want them to.
For me, it was lucid dreaming and astral projection practices that showed me the truth of our situation. You can gain the same knowledge with various psychedelic drugs, or by doing intense breathing exercises, or a variety of other ways.
Nothing is as it seems. When we die, we wake up, and we’re in a much better place than here. We won’t miss this at all, we’ll be happy it’s over, but grateful for having had the experience because through it we learned a lot and greatly expanded our consciousness in the process.
That said, there are those who understand that where we came from is much nicer and easier and more heavenly than physical Earth life, and so they view physical life as an annoyance, or worse, some kind of hellish experience. They view physicality as inferior to the non-physical realms from which we incarnated, and they view the physical body as something to be transcended. I think that’s a mistake. Although this place is dense and there is a lot of ugliness, there is also infinite beauty, love, all things good. It is a realm of duality, and whether or not we believe it, in every moment we have the choice of what to focus on. And what we persistently focus on becomes our reality. Further, we came here to experience physicality, time, and limitation. Why try so hard to transcend it while we’re here? Why not just wait until we leave and then we’re automatically shifted back to our non-physical home which has no limitations and is outside the scope of time?
It’s like learning to play chess at a high level, entering a tournament, and then complaining the whole time about how dumb all the rules are and how bullshit the game is. Dude, you chose to enter, even if you don’t remember it. Play the game. Play it as best as you can and be creative and focused, and enjoy it. You’ll learn a lot.
Not a great example since the rules of chess are clear, but many of the things we think are rules in human life are actually false, limiting beliefs, e.g. “we have to pay income tax”. But the overriding point remains.
I love my life, all the good and the bad. I realize this is a dream, but it’s mostly a pleasant one and I’m learning a lot, just like I’ve learned a lot within my physical human life from my nighttime dreams. I can’t wait to return home and have the veil lifted, but I also want this dream to go on for a long, long time.
At this stage in my development and learning, I believe the ultimate goal of this physical human life here on Earth is to expand our consciousness. To learn, to become larger and more expansive. The good news is that it is impossible not to do that here, so we cannot fail. The bad news is that our Souls might be relishing in their expansion, but the expansion is occurring through trauma and other experiences we humans judge as bad or even horrific.
The whole point of this is to remember to try to be merry as we row our boats gently down the stream. That goes for all of our future boats and streams as well. There will be many.
What do you think?