If Your Road Is "Less Traveled" Maybe You Are Lost
Don Juan to Carlos Castenada in "Journey To Ixtlan"
I first learned about lucid dreaming in the early 1980's. The Carlos Castaneda books included instructions on how to enter the state by forcing your dream self to look at your hands and thus acknowledge that you are both the dreamer and the dreamed - in that instant with your normal awareness. The first time I did it I shook my consciousness so hard I snapped awake immediately, giddy with the strange energy I had just experienced for the first time.
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Castaneda's mentor, Don Juan, warned that the sensation of flying while lucid dreaming was so engrossing that often people never got beyond that phase. In my next successful lucid dream I learned exactly what he meant. I found my hands and immediately my awareness took flight. In the dream I had been riding down a gravel road in the woods. When I went lucid, I flew through the door but I did not soar into the heavens, I skimmed along the ground.
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I could see every rock, as if it were under high magnification. I was moving incredibly fast, but somehow my awareness could linger at each stone. I marveled at their unique qualities, some micro-crystalline quartz that refracted the sunlight into millions of tiny rainbows, others were more volcanic and dotted with tiny pores. Even the grains of sand between the stones showed their original nature with my dream vision, every color and texture you could imagine could be found. I felt as if the message I was receiving in that dream was clear: Watch the road you are on very closely. Most of the beauty in this world is unseen because no one thinks to look for it.
I took that lesson to heart, and I have seen things that others will often refuse to look for. They actually fear seeing it for themselves, easier to dismiss me as crazy and just "fit in." For instance... I learned to watch the sunrise. There really is an energy change at dusk and dawn, it can be measured with the right electromagnetic equipment. In the moments just before the sun breaks the horizon, you can see something pulsate on the horizon line, all along where it is beginning to light up. It is not a cloud, it is not a "thing." It is the energy of the earth and sun, interacting and you can see it IF you stop and look for it. Maybe not the first time, but probably, if you just look. I suspect it would work at dusk except the retina would be sun-blanched at the moment you needed to be dark-adapted.
Go back and look at the photo at the top. That thin band of brighter light along the horizon is where you look. It will pulsate, and I will leave you to discover what else may be discerned.
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When @cabelindsay offered up this weeks prompt for Steemit Vision Quest, I knew I wanted to tell the story of that dream. As I began to compose the tale in my head, another interpretation came to me, just as clearly as the one when I had the dream. It was a message of balance.
Staring with ALL one's attention on the detail of the road directly before us is how one gets off on the wrong road. It is important to remember to look up, check the final destination for the road you are on. It is easy to keep doing the thing we are doing because when we began the journey it seemed to be the right road. As you travel, you may find the road changed and is not really going where you thought it was. You may get so caught up in the beauty of the road you are on that you missed that little "Y" back there and now you are not even on the road you thought you were on. Maybe something in you even saw that turn back there and knew you ought to take it, but the road you are on is just so much easier...
It is OK to change course, indeed it is imperative if you realize the road you are on is not taking you to where you want to be. We often resist change out of fear or laziness, and sometimes simply out of habit. We may be spiritually ready for that next leg of the journey yet so delighted with the road that got us here we forget to step onto that next path. We cling to the familiar, we bask in the glory of past achievements, we enjoy the company of like minds. Yet in the end, YOUR path is made to be traveled by you and only you. If it is "less traveled" than one, you are not where you ought to be!
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We humans try to do what's right,
Yet frequently we're wrong in spite
Of best intent and great expense.
When right too much, we cause offense.
When right and right and right twice more
Are we just fearful to explore?
Entrenched by habit to this route?
Turn left if it's the right way out!
The road, itself, is set in stone
But your feet remain free to roam.
Your highest self will not be found
Following those who circle 'round.
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Thank you @cabelindsay for this most excellent internet meeting of like spirits!
To join in, please see this post:
https://steemit.com/svq/@cabelindsay/steemit-vision-quest-week-9-the-road
Photos, stick-art, poetry, dreams, interpretations, and opinions are all my original work.
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