A Midwest Journal

What are dreams? How are they different from thoughts?

Levenson covered dreams with a rather Eastern approach, that perhaps our dreams are a different Universe than the one we are in during the waking hours.

I don’t know this to be true or not.

All I know right now is that I’m left thinking when I wake – meaning that I have more releasing to do to achieve that state of a truly calm mind.

My line of reasoning is that a person is trying to achieve a calm mind will should be able to determine between true intuitional inspiration and general, run-of-the-mill thinking.

Thinking will be rather uncontrolled and more than a bit non-sequitur and random. As well, any feeling besides a calm, deep peace with a simple happiness or joy – these would then be non-intuitional, but rather habitual.

(Or the AGFLAP vs. CAP – as Levenson would describe it.)*

So the utter lack of negative feeling, a completely calm knowing should accompany real intuitional inspiration. And would lead to true intuitional living.

I have a few dependable lines of intuition, being that I’ve always been blessed with a very imaginative and creative life. Working in these lines has shown me where the writing or artwork is forced, or requires too much effort – I might as well quit it, or take a break at least.

When I’ve taken up writing, this has opened up an new line – it’s one approach that the simplest line works. Just ask, the next sentence is there – or a phrase that needs to be applied.

One learns not to force or rush it. It’s always there, unless you try to force or rush it.

So that, I suppose, answers the question.

And now, extend that to all living – and your completely calm mind will then finally allow you to answer the question, “What Am I?”

* AGFLAP – CAP is a shorthand emotional scale one comes up through releasing

Apathy
Grief
Fear
Lust
Anger
Pride
——
Courageousness
Acceptance
Peace

The CAP are top-end states which aren’t really emotions at all – these more describe a state of being which becomes more or less persistent as you work at releasing in general.

Of course, I’ve been having quite some fun applying what I laid out at the beginning of this, so I thought to give you an update.

Mostly, just working on stilling the mind has done wonders. But the 1-2 punch of releasing any thought that comes in, followed by asking, “What’s that thought coming from?” took me right back to “What am I?”

And that has produced the best results.

While I can’t say that the mind is completely stilled all the time, I am having wider and wider gaps in time where there are no thoughts and I can just simply enjoy a very peaceful existence, just “Being the Witness” as Levenson covered so often. Because when you still the mind, in my experience, there’s not much choice or reason to do anything else.

It’s just natural.

And so this is what is bringing this concept I had earlier of “Intuitional Living” or “Intuitional Life”. The explanation of this is that you really only live that type of life naturally – but your own thoughts take you out of it and make you effort at any decisions or planning you “have” to make.  These “now we’re supposed to’s” and “musts” and “have to’s” are all really fiction.

They only exist in a very busy mind. Quiet the mind, even a little bit, and their force weakens. Life becomes a calm, peaceful existence. (Or at least more calm and more peaceful.)

The intuitional and inspirational insights which start arriving (no longer relegated to pushing through as thought) are fascinatingly simple and direct. There’s no question about them, no rush. There is a great deal of certainty accompanying them – but no dire urgency for them to happen.

I’m sure that if I were in a very action-oriented situation, I’d have faster and more immediate intuitions about what to do next.

But the flow of life is fascinating, even at this fairly low level. I’m sure that as I get used to it, all of this will seem commonplace after awhile. And there will be another, higher level to attain which seems uniquely interesting at that point.

So, as usual, throw this away and forget I ever said anything down this line. If it’s useful to you, fine. Certainly, your mileage will vary. Definitely.

But I’m certainly having fun with this and thought to let you know.

Of course it was inconvenient. I’d left a pallet of paper-sacked seed out in the bed of the truck, with just a tarp laid over them to keep out the dew.

Here it was, sun wasn’t up. Wind was blowing through my open windows as I struggled to cozey down under my blankets. Weather shift, it came to me. Echoes of weather forecasters telling me a cold front was moving in. Meant rain.

And then I started hearing drops. Big ones. Far apart right now, but that could change at any time. So I threw the covers aside and shrugged on some chilled jeans and slightly warmer socks.

Strugging into a sweatshirt, I paused, I wondered if I should start up the computer to check the online radar. But wisely, I thought better as the drops increased their tempo on our barn roof nearby.

Slapped on a ball-cap and stomped into my gum boots as I went out through the porch into the still-dark morning.

Fumbling for light switches, I got a few on while the rain started an irregular cadence of sorts on that tin roof. The tarp couldn’t have blown far, I reasoned, but the bungey cords hung on the dark wall refused to come loose easily, wanting more daylight to loosen their grip.

Finally, I got some free and in the scant light out of the open barn door, I pulled the tarp back over the pallet of seed bags – which towered over my head and out of reach – then got each corner tied into the pickup bed in some sort or fashion, with the whole thing barely snugged tight just as the wind started whipping down the rain in earnest.

After a quick double-check of the tarp against further wind, I pushed back up to the house, stripped off the wet sweatshirt, then pulled on another dry and warmer one.

Only then did I pour my first cup of hot coffee that morning.

- – - -

And this is intuitional living? Well, yes. I knew without thinking that I better get up right now and get that tarp tied down. Sure, this was from experience of not doing so dozens of times in the past and successfully doing so many times less. I knew all about wind and rain and bags of seed gone to mold after they were wet.

Action, in that early morning darkness, was what was needed.

Surely I could have figured that out earlier – even though I basically saved the day that time (we had another inch of rain before that squall was through, by the end of that morning). Yes, I had listened to an idea to get a tarp over it, but resisted another light idea to secure that tarp so it wouldn’t blow off.

When I did listen, it was intuitional living. When I didn’t listen, it was my own thinking tripping me up.

And so my intuition got me to get out of bed, while my thinking almost fired up the computer to make me too late.

Thinking tops action, it doesn’t speed it or guide it. Thinking just screws things up.

That might be condemnatory, because there are a lot of good uses for thinking. But like a calculator, you turn it off when you are done. You don’t point that calculator or punch its buttons in the general direction of every single thing you are trying to accomplish during the day – do you?

Making a cup of coffee – your mind often winds around to other subjects. Making a cup of coffee is only action, requires little thought. Same for cooking a bowl of oatmeal in the microwave. Turn on the timer and think while you wait. Take it out, stir, cook once more (this keeps it from boiling over and having a mess to clean up, doesn’t it?) More thinking, and then you can eat breakfast – which is almost automatic as well.

But if you think too much during the first cooking, you “forget” that you didn’t cook it all the way – and your bananas and milk now are inseparably mixed with undercooked mush. Yuck.

Thinking just gets in the way.

So the obvious solution is to quiet the mind and get the thinking down to a minimum. Turn it on when you do need it and keep it quiet the rest of the time.

Intuitional Living.

Try it.

Use the Sedona Method to quiet your mind and make living more comfortable and efficient.

Now, right off the bat I have to remind you to not believe anything I say – always, always test everything for yourself.

There is more stuff from Levenson I’ve been working with (although I need to make more time to study him carefully and at length). And a friend pointed this out to me yesterday.

Some background is needed before I get into today’s excitement: Levenson wound up in a very interesting state when he was about 42. While a complete material success, his body was literally dying around him. And Hale Dwoskin talks about this in his intro lectures (free on his site) briefly.

What Lester had to do at that point was to solve this so he could keep on living. And the way he did that brought him in just three months to a form of personal enlightenment so intense that he couldn’t understand it – even as a trained physicist – so he spent several more years studying all the great religions and spiritual philosophies so that he could get his wits around what just happened to him.

And so there is a great deal of Eastern studies (as well as Western) in his references – where you listen to tapes  he recorded directly.

OK, now about this mental fiction we carry around -  well, at least our version of it is fiction.

Lester said that essentially, there is only one Mind and we are all just keeping ourselves separate from it by our individual and collected thoughts.

No, it’s not easy for me to get at this point, either – because it raises a whole lot more questions. But the main point is not to try to figure out how that could be, but just to first test to see if it works as described.

How this lines up is these quantum physicists which we encountered in “The Secret” and “What the (Bleep) do we know?” Fred Alan Wolfe was one (and I really need to look up the other guys) and they mentioned that the next real final frontier to explore is Mind – this is what they found in their studies, that Mind was present in all their experiments and would actually affect the outcome regardless.

And these guys had to also go back to Eastern studies to understand what they had discovered.

So the basic, in American English, is that there is one Mind and we have elected to separate ourselves from it for various reasons. That crazy mind you know isn’t the Mind that is all around us, just your personal little version of it. All those thoughts you have streaming around is what you think are your mind, but actually, they are just a tangled ball of yarn in a whole bag of yarn balls.

The great thing is that any ball of yarn can be unrolled (no matter how badly a playful kitten has snarled it up…)

The best way to do this that I’ve found is the Sedona Method of releasing. This quiets your mind like nothing else.

And allows you to do that “Intuitional Living” I’ve been talking about. Once you get your own individual thinking calmed down, then all manner of solutions start coming to you.

Just the way it works.

(Of course this explains insanity, and provides a method to help those who are “losing it”.)

Let me know what you think on this one. It seems to be a real doosey.