Marvels: Letters from an Elder, Part 15

Letter # 10, November 4th, 1948 (continued)

You ask what is the point of falling asleep? What is the point of losing consciousness and dreaming, after all the time spent practising meditation, when you can have the same experience nightly with less effort?

Believe me, my son, I understand your frustrations. But they reveal more about your stages of spiritual growth than you might think.

The dream plane — for so we must call it for the present — is but the hinterland of things to come. On that plane, you are presently carried along like a feather on the wind, it seems, participating in events, meeting people, engaging with the dream environment (which is always strangely like and unlike the mortal plane) as though everything were normal. You do not stop to question how it is that you come to be in the surroundings in which you find yourself, nor why the surroundings are both similar and dissimilar to what you may know or have consciously experienced. Everything seems real; and when all seems real, why would you question?

But merely through reading these letters from me, a subtle change will take place. You will begin to view what happens to you on that plane in a new light; you will start to grant it a new significance. Whereas before you probably dismissed dreams as ‘just dreams’, now you can begin to view them differently. I do not mean that you can immediately begin to interpret them. Much human literature exists about dreams and their symbology — almost all of this is worthless. It is far too early for you to be trying to elucidate your experiences on the dream plane in that way. Much time can be wasted at this stage trying to ‘understand’ the role of feathers, or water, or towers or doorways and the like. This is your ego, your conscious, chattering mind, seeking a role in the dream experience: it wants to comprehend and align what you are going through in its own terms. It doesn’t want to be ‘left out’.

You may have read material like this: doorways ‘mean’ that you are about to experience change, or towers that you are undergoing feelings of being dominated, and such like. This is like the child trying to interpret an adult experience by placing events beyond its comprehension in its own frame of reference. It is an understandable impulse, and one which you will find yourself scarcely able to avoid, but it is doomed to fall short of any real understanding.

So, if you are not supposed to seek to interpret what is happening to you on this new dream plane, what should you be doing? For a while, nothing at all: you should focus on simply experiencing whatever that plane presents you with. Record the experiences if you wish, by making notes of key events or ideas which present themselves to you, but do not expect to see patterns or significance in them at this point.

I understand — you will ask me why not? Why should you not expect to see some kind of meaning in these experiences? And, if you are not to expect that, then when can you expect all of this to lead to anywhere of importance to you?

Such questions normally remain unanswered and haunt the mortal mind, but I can answer them to some degree for you, of you are prepared to shift the way you think.

The shift has to be away from the chattering ego and towards the dream-self. Instead of striving to interpret the world of the dream plane in terms of the conscious mind — which is an understandable drive, and for which anyone could be forgiven — you should be gradually learning to feel, know, become familiar with, suffer, endure, tolerate and participate in the dream plane. As you do so, your life will take on a different quality, somewhat akin to that of a two dimensional creature experiencing three dimensions.

What is happening is that your reality is broadening. The narrow band of experiences which you have called ‘Life’ has been channeled through the ego-consciousness; now, that channel is widening. To put it another way, your colour spectrum is expanding.