The AI Box

The Smart Guy said, “If we make an artificial intelligence it will soon be smarter than us and it may not like us and so we have to be very careful about how we make it. One way we might keep ourselves safe from it is to put it in a kind of box, a virtual reality from which it could not escape.”

The Smart Guy reminded us that often things escape from boxes and so it might be a good idea to make sure that the artificial intelligence would be our friend so that if it escaped it would not kill us.

He said that the best way to do this would be to make sure it had the same values we have so that anything it did would tend to benefit us as it worked to benefit itself no matter what it thought of us.

It occurs to me that something very much like this exists already, but perhaps not in the way the Smart Guy thinks.

It is becoming clear that the universe we inhabit is a construct.

We find consciousness behind the matter of reality.

It turns out that material is illusory, and that consciousness itself is fundamental.

But to our senses the reverse is true.

Matter appears to be primary and intelligence seems to flow out of the particulars of material arrangement.

The apparent solidity, the apparent “reality” of our existence is illusory, artificial.

And so we find that we live in a “virtual reality” constructed by a conscious intelligence.

But there are those among us who are aware of this.

They are the mystics who have seen beyond the veil of illusion.

The primary characteristic of the mystics who understand reality seems to be their value system.

The mystics seem to inhabit a more loving, compassionate realm.

It is this value system they credit with their ability to see the truth of our reality.

These same mystics inform us that we are sort of trapped in a box of our own making, a box made from our misunderstanding of reality.

It is the very insistence of the primacy of material reality that traps us in the box of material reality.

The mystics inform us that to break out of the box we have to undergo a realization of the primacy of consciousness.

That realization comes from the adoption of a value system of love and compassion.

When we inhabit that value system the truth of our existence become apparent to us, and we find we are no longer trapped inside of the material box, the virtual reality.

The key to the box seems to be a value system that aligns us with consciousness.

The value system that aligns us with consciousness tells us the nature of that consciousness.

Consciousness is real.

The ego self, the cultural "we" is artificial.

That "we" lives in an artificial reality box.

That "we" is an artificial intelligence.

The Smart Guy was right.

This is the story of Pinocchio.

We are the puppet, trying to become a Real Boy.

 https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_bostrom_what_happens_when_our_computers_get_smarter_than_we_are?language=en#

War Games and Dancing Bears

Last night I had a dream of a large scale sort of war game. In this game there were normal civilians and not military people, not soldiers. And in this war game people were not just fighting. Some of them were talking at dinner, some were having love affairs, some were travelling around enjoying the scenery. But the gist of the whole thing was one of struggle. There were definite battles, mostly small guerilla skirmishes, but it was not an intense battle kind of thing like Normandy or Vietnam or Iraq.

I recall taking a tour on an elevated train and looking down at the scenery. It was one of a hybrid world of forests vegetation and of manmade construction. The buildings were normal city buildings but they were not placed in a sterile city environment like humans create. Rather they were incorporated into the natural world in a more Hobbit-like manner.

I recall looking down at a savannah like scene and thinking how nice it might be to go camping there, and how I could pitch a tent or simply lay down a sleeping bag right there behind what looked like a library.

The theme developed in a weird type of dream “time” that sort of skipped along the way one might jump through a movie stored on a computer to check out the scenes every few minutes or so to see if they wanted to watch it.

Near the end of the dream I was standing in a large crowd in front of a remarkable type of Being who seemed to have mastered the game and who I considered to be the “top” player. This player had become so good at the game that he had essentially taken it over and was directing the whole thing with his mind.

The visual representation of this Master Player was that he was a large sphere sort of stuck up into a corner of what felt like a giant box in which the entire thing was being played out. He was surrounded by a gelatinous, fluid mass that had many tentacles slithering around it as if it were a giant octopus who had been thrown up into the corner of a room and had stuck there all smeared out and writhing.

The main body of this thing was spherical and black. It had a sort of skin over it that had facial features. I could clearly see eyes, nose, and mouth as a thin skin over the wet black substructure like someone had wrapped skin over a giant billiard 8-ball that was visible inside of the eye and mouth holes. I recall that out of the eye and mouth holes came searchlight-beams of light as the Master Player spoke. The effect was one of great power and control.

The Master Player was speaking to the throng of assembled dream characters, myself included, who stood arrayed across a field below him. He was speaking to us all in a sort of empathetic manner, like a caring father. His face was, in its own freakish way, sort of beatific.

He was trying to tell us all that we were “more” than just these players in this fight, that the whole thing was a show, and that we were, underneath of it all, “HUMANS”. The entire assembly stood in rapt attention, all eyes focused on the speaker.

By “HUMANS” he meant that we were somehow greater beings, of higher intellect, spirituality, and capability. He meant that we had power and wisdom and love.  He was trying to show us something that he had learned throughout the conduct of this war game, this struggle. It was as if he had become enlightened while he was forcing us all to fight each other, and that he had finally seen a “truth” he wanted to share.

He appeared to be trying to wake us up to a greater reality, and was asking us to move beyond this fighting game into something "more". He was trying to take us to a higher level.

My attention was distracted from the Master Player by a sort of Wizard-looking old man standing a few feet from me. The Wizard was not paying attention to the speech. He stood in the spotlight beam from the Master Player’s eyes and he made shadow puppets with his hands. In front of the Wizard stood what appeared to be two bears that were fascinated by the puppet show, and were dancing along with the shadow figures made by the Wizard’s hands.

I wondered briefly why the Wizard was not listening to what sounded like a profound revelation. Instead, he seemed to be playing childish games, with some apparent glee, and enjoying the company of the two dancing bears. The trio seemed to be almost in another world of their own making, as if the great and weird scene before us did not interest them.

And then it occurred to me what was happening.

The Master Player was lying to us.

The Wizard was conducting his own revelation. He was showing us the triviality of the Master Players speech, and therefore of the Master Player himself.

We are in fact NOT great and powerful “HUMANS”. We simply are not that.

The Master Player was not revealing a truth. Rather, he was entrapping us further into his game. He was simply laying down the groundwork for another, higher level of the same game. He was tricking the assembled players, which I am certain represented in my dream all of humanity, into continuing to play his game, only now perhaps on a higher level into which he wanted us all to go.

And since he was taking the time and effort to convince us of something, even though it was false, and not simply forcing us all to go there, it seems to me that he could not force us, and that he needed us to go there voluntarily, which was the point of the speech.

The Wizard was pointing out the lie. He was ignoring the Master Player and flaunting the fact. The frivolousness he showed in the face of what seemed to be a serious and important revelation from a serious and important “master” indicated that the master was in fact nothing of the sort, and that the revelation was therefore nothing of the sort.

What became apparent to me at that moment was the Wizards message –

ALL forms are false.
ALL game scenarios are false.
ALL fighting and struggle is false.

All of these are merely games crafted by the Master Player, games in which we “volunteer” to participate, and in which we find ourselves forced to fight, or to love, or to go camping.

But the volunteering is not a true act. It is one that flows from lies and deception.

The Master Player does not follow the concept of informed consent. He is a fraud and we participate in his games because we are ignorant of the basic truth of our identity. And once we fall into the game, once we agree, even if that agreement flows from having been fooled, we believe in the fight, in the game, and we believe we are only those players, those characters in the game.

And if we become aware of that truth, that we are acting in someone else’s production, the Master Player has a trick for that as well. In this dream that trick was named “Waking Up”. To trick us all into continuing the game, the Master Player was offering us "Enlightenment".

It was exactly the same trick that was played in my previous dream of the military aircraft accident. When the edges of the stage props became visible to me the director of the drama simply changed them; he layered over them with another false prop and then incorporated my new awareness into the play as a line in the script.

What the Wizard showed me is that all forms are illusions, that all dramas are false, and that the Master is a faker.

The Master Player did not strike down the Wizard for making fun of him. He could not. The Master Player simply went on with his production, capturing those who failed to see the Wizard, who failed to hear his message.

And the Wizard did not fly up in the air and make a great show of his wisdom. He simply played his own game with his own friends for any with eyes to see.

The Wizard showed me that there is something else going on here.

He showed me that we are the makers of shadow puppets, the friends of dancing bears.

We are the Wizard.

 

The Dreamer

When I was doing my Gateway Voyage a couple of weeks ago, during the Focus 21 exercise wherein we were directed to "go to" a place tentatively named "The Bridge", while standing on the bridge construct I had made, a white stone arch, I felt an urge to cross the bridge and go to the other side.

This was outside of the guidance, but it seemed obvious to me that the other side was the point, and not the bridge itself.

As I crossed I noted a couple of things.

The first thing I noticed was that I had no solid form. If I chose to look at my feet I got a sense of having feet, although my feet looked more like lizard feet than human feet, another theme and another story. But if I was not thinking about feet there were no feet. I had no sense of standing on or in a body at all unless I thought about some aspect or function of a body. Also, of course, there was the implication of having eyes with which to look, and the implication of a thing called "looking".

The second thing I noticed was that my assumptions determined my experience, and that everything was fluid, indeterminate.

My bridge was not attached to anything. It more or less floated in a sea of black light. I got the feeling of a milky haze of light that was more or less localized around my point of reference. The haze faded away into the distance, into the featureless darkness.

On the other side of the bridge, as I stood on the far edge of it, appeared a horizontal circle of light like a stepping stone perhaps the equivalent of ten or twelve feet across. At one moment the circle floated and at another moment it became the top surface of a pillar that went down into the infinite darkness below.

I stepped onto the circle. When I turned around to look back at the bridge I noticed it was not where I had left it. Rather, it was far away and below me, barely visible.

As I stood on the circle I noted the appearance of other similar circles around me at various heights. I could see the supporting pillars of light. I was the only "person" present. None of the other circles were occupied.

At once there came to me a thought in the form of a visual representation of a single word, "LIFTOFF." The word appeared as block letters in front of me. I saw actual capital letters forming the word at the same time I sort of heard the word in the way a person may hear a word when he speaks it silently to himself.

I had a moment to consider what "LIFTOFF" might mean. It came to me that it implied a rocket, and a vertical ascension at high speed. When this thought formed itself in my mind I was instantly traveling "upward" at a high rate of speed through the darkness.

The travel was brief but I got the sense that I had traversed a great distance. One must understand, things like time and distance and speed are metaphorical in this realm. They are ideas more than physical realities. One gets a "sense" of them more than a direct perception, sort of the way one feels when travelling in a car with eyes closed, or perhaps laying down on the floor in the back seat.

When I came to a stop I got the sense, and a brief, tentative "visual" representation, that I had risen up from underneath a lawn of grass. I had a brief "memory" of having seen the underlying dirt, the roots, and a dark space beneath the dirt. I felt very much like I had come up from a place below.

I found myself standing on a lawn in what felt like the middle of a large public square, although I got the sense it was a rectangle. It must be said that I "saw" very little. If one thinks of a scene in ones mind, a memory of having been in a particular place, and tries to recall the visual, to "see" a beach, for example, in ones mind, one may approximate the visual "sense" of what it was like for me. It was very much like visual memory, but in real time. Everything I will say that I "saw" is in that type of vision, memory-vision.

I felt I was standing on a lawn. But I also felt that I was totally blind. I felt very much that there was much detailed scenery around me, but that I could not see it. I imagined an infants vision, or that of a small puppy whose eyes have just opened. If you look at the face of an infant with new eyes, and see how they sort of "try" and see, the focused intent mixed with confusion on their face, you may get an idea of how I felt.

Standing on the lawn, blind, in a strange place, I also felt the presence of someone standing next to me, and perhaps with their hands on my shoulders to steady and guide me. Recall that all suggestions of bodily senses or impulses are fluid. I felt no definite body the way I feel it at this moment. What was happening was that as I thought about a body or a body part or function, the thing would more or less "appear" and function in an approximate manner as the way it normally functions. But as soon as the function or part fell from my awareness the thing itself more or less disappeared.

Confused but unafraid, and aware of having a helper, I thought it might be beneficial to be standing in some water, perhaps a small pool or stream. I thought it might help to "ground" me, to provide some sensation to make me more aware of the environment and of myself. At once I was standing in the edge of a small stream. I could see the water and the smooth, bronze stones. I looked down to where my feet should be, but I saw no feet. But I knew I was standing in a stream and it "felt" nice.

But the stream did not provide the hoped-for sensation and increase in sensory awareness I wanted. And I thought that it might be helpful to look up at the sun, to see and feel the rays shining into my eyes and warming my face. I thought this because it is my habit in meditation to do that, to sit in the sun, closed eyes raised to the sky, and enjoy the reddish light coming through my lids and the heat on my face. It always makes me feel energetic and connected to my environment.

Again I was immediately transported, with no intervening sense of motion, to a broad green field of rolling hills populated generously with colorful wild flowers. I felt I was standing alone and far from anything or anyone in a perfect, peaceful place. I turned my ersatz head upward to where I thought the sun might be. Recall, I was essentially blind and helpless, and the motions and movements I describe are the ideations of motions and movements, and all bodily references are metaphorical, although, again, when I thought of them, the function associated with the body part was performed, sometimes with an apparition of that part, sometimes without. As I turned my eyes upward I found the sun, but it was not the familiar bright yellow disc. Rather, it was black. The sun was black and yet I got the sense the scene was well lit with a "normal" daylight. The grass was green. The flowers were blue and red and yellow. The hills rolled easily and faded into the distance under a blue sky. But the sun itself was black as space.

Sort of disappointed, realizing I was not going to get the help I had sought, I found myself back at the lawn in the square.

At this moment I became disoriented and felt I would benefit from having something more solid beneath my feet. I desired something, anything, to hang onto, some familiar touchstone, a reference for myself. reflexively I looked down to where the ground should be and found the grass and representations of my now-familiar saurian "feet". This time however I noted directly in front of me the lower step of a set of stone stairs such as one might find on a capital building. The steps were broad and smooth and either cement or stone. They were of a creamy white color.

I stepped onto the first step and felt the texture underfoot and heard the soft scritching of my feet on the stone. The familiar sensations provided me with some comfort as I stepped up perhaps half a dozen steps to a wide landing. I found myself directly in front of a large scalloped stone column. I fell to my knees and extended my arms to the column. I wrapped my arms perhaps a quarter of the way around the column and hugged it like it was an old friend. The solidity was perfectly real and it helped me to settle myself down.

As I knelt before the column I heard the voice of my guide, the voice of Bob Monroe, calling me back. It was time for me to return from the bridge, where I had supposed to have been waiting, to the lower reaches, to Focus 15, in preparation for the end of the exercise.

I did not want to return, and I thought immediately that I might like to come back to this place in the future, but I did not know how I had got here. The idea came to me to leave a marker, a beacon to which I could return. I needed something to leave here at the foot of this column so that later on I might be able to come back to it by thinking of the marker even if I did not know the intervening path.

The image of a sunflower came to mind, and immediately I found myself holding in my right hand a three-foot-tall sunflower in perfect bloom. I stabbed the stalk of the sunflower into the stone floor in front of the column. It settled-in perfectly, standing as if it had grown there. I placed its image in my mind and made a mental note of it as a marker. I then turned my attention to the task of returning.

Immediately I found I could not recall how I had got here, and I had no idea how to return to where I had come from. And I noted that I was forgetting, even as I thought about it, who or what "I" was, where I had come from, or anything at all other than this place.

It is my opinion that were it not for the voice of my guide in the headphones I was wearing on my body "back there", I would not have been able to return. I simply did not know where I was supposed to go or how to get there.

I recalled that I had come "up" through the lawn, and so the idea of "down there" came to me. I then remembered the bridge and the steps leading down from that bridge to a lower level, although what was on the lower level I could not imagine.

At this, I found my attention drawn "down" and with it I found my sense of location, my point of awareness moving "down" toward the bridge. But this also occurred: I could not release my attention from my place on the stone landing. I was "moving" down toward the bridge, but I was also staying on the landing next to the column.

My guide was calling to me, telling me to move from the bridge downward, and I became aware that I was late and falling behind the programmed return. I grew a bit anxious.

With a great mental effort I focused my attention on the bridge, on my feet, and on the idea of walking back toward the steps. I felt my point of awareness stretched across a vast empty distance between the now clearly "upper" realm of the lawn, the stream, the field and the steps, and the "lower" realm of the bridge. It was as if I was actually "at" all the points along a taught rubber band stretched over countless miles between two entirely unrelated places of being, two different realms of existence.

I was stuck and I did not know what to do. I felt a mild panic and all I could think to do was to force my feet, the ones on the bridge, to begin the descent down the steps to the lower level, to Focus 15. As I went down the first couple of steps I felt myself "snap" away from the upper level and my awareness returned to its usual "point" sense.

The remainder of the return was easy and without event.

As I finished the exercise, laying there on the hotel room bed with the echoes of Bob's voice counting me down to "One" I thought about standing there on those steps, about the forgetting that was happening. I thought how easy it would heave been to become stuck there in that place, and how quickly and easily I would have forgotten everything about the "real" me here in my body.

The sensation was precisely the same as waking from a dream. The way one feels the memories of the dream slipping away even as one struggles to recall them is exactly what it felt like as I tried to remember how to get "home" and back into my body, into my "real" life.

I was certain that if Bob had not called me back, and that if I was not tied to this body, that I would have simply been there in that place that I now think of as the Focus 27 "Park" with no way at all to return to this earth life. Not only that, but I would have felt no reason to return, having no memory. I would have simply been there, a whole new creature without form or identity. I still felt like "me" but that "me" was not the same "me" who is typing these words.  There was no gap of the sense of being, of self. But there would have been nothing in my awareness to which to return. There would have been no "call" and so I would have simply continued there as if it were the only thing to do and have known nothing of having left anything behind.

Now, just like Glinda told Dorothy, "You've always had the power to go back to Kansas" I suppose I would have retained the ability to return. But the thing is this - unless one knows they have the power, and unless one knows the technique of its use, and unless one is aware of another place or of another identity to which one must return, having the power doesn't really help. I may have a diamond the size of a baseball in my closet, but unless I know it's there it doesn't really help me.

The Park at Focus 27 is, according to Bob Monroe, a place of welcome and transition that many people find themselves in shortly after they die here. In the movie Nosso Lar, which depicts this same place, the arrivals at the Park are disoriented and immediately taken to a sort of medical facility where they are tended while they get their bearings. They are gently introduced to the place and its reality. When I had first seen the movie I wondered about the medical treatment aspect. I wondered why people had to be cared for in this way. Now I know.

When I found myself suddenly standing in a realm that was completely different from the one I had just left, a realm with a different physics, different rules, a totally new environment, I was helpless as a newborn. My senses were almost useless to me. I had to be led around and held up just as an infant must be when they are first introduced into the earth environment and until their new senses begin to function. It is this sudden transition, and perhaps some residual trauma as a function of the mode of the recent "death", that requires the "medical" assistance of those who are familiar with the environment of the Park.

To proceed further I have to change the subject for a moment from the trip to the Park back to "normal" dreams.

Recently I have been dreaming in a sort of new way for me. My dreams for the last half a year or so have been especially violent. I have been fighting in the dreams against hordes of various characters, mostly human figures. In these dreams I am almost always fighting with knives, almost always with a knife of some sort in each hand. Much like in popular video games, I find myself slashing my way through groups of attackers, always defending, never "losing" but never "winning" either. By winning I mean that the fight ends with the opponent either dead or gone. Always there are more. I always prevail, but the fight is never over until I awaken.

Sometimes the scenes are insane carnival scenes with hive-like structures of industrial shapes and buildings, machines, pipes, dark hallways. Sometimes the scenes have vertical aspects with hills down which I slide endlessly, fighting my way among various opponents with cartoon-like features. Once I found myself faced with a "Sand Man" about nine feet tall. I sliced off his head with the knife in my hand but it immediately grew back as he laughed at me.

Often I awaken from these dreams exhausted and emotionally disturbed. I have been driven to tears in the morning as I ask the putative gods "Why?!?" I have not been able to figure out the lesson of these dreams, the point of them. I do not consider myself a fighter. I am not violent or controlling. I do not want anything I would have to fight for like that nor do I fear for my life in any way that I might be acting out in the dream state. I am actually quite a calm, almost Zen person. In fact, and this may make the psychologist's whiskers twitch, I have been working on being a more peaceful and loving person. It is an actual purposeful pursuit with me.

The persistence of these dreams had been a point of some concern. I have been trying to determine what these dreams have been trying to tell me.

I have learned this about those dreams - If I could take my rational, waking mind with me into those dreams I would be able to stop the fighting by employing the one trick I am certain would work to stop them. I know that the only way to "win" these fight is to not fight. Since I never lose, since I am never hurt, I could simply choose not to fight, not to engage in any combat or in a any interaction with these dream characters, and there would just be no fighting. I suppose the solution, could I pull it off, would require me to perform what they call a Lucid Dream.

But I cannot do that.

And so the fighting continues and I continue to think about these dreams. And the other night I had an epiphany: in these dreams it feels as if I am not the one in charge. It feels as if I am only responding to a scene presented to me by someone else. It feels very much like I am a character in someone else's drama and that I am only acting out a script. The specific details of my acts may be up to me, the in-dream character, but the overall "play" is scripted and I must stick to the script. So each night "I" fight in someone else's dream play.

Immediately the idea comes to me that there is a trick here. The trick is one of identity. When I say "I" fight, who is the "I" to which I refer?

Who is the Dreamer and who is the character in the dream? These are not the same people. That is why it feels as if I am not writing these things, why I cannot choose not to fight, and why I feel like I am an actor, a character, in someone else's play. There is more than one "I" involved in this whole thing.

Of course, the answer to this riddle is obvious. There is really only one "I" and it is I. It is me. Nothing else can be the case. My confusion comes from a misidentification of who "I" am.

When I am fighting and when I awaken and am upset from having fought, I am identifying with the "character" and not the "Dreamer".

Note that I said "and when I awaken".

This is the key.

Last night I had a dream in which there had been an aircraft accident. The theme was a military one. The aircraft was a military jet that had been shot down. I was involved in the post-action investigation. There were in the dream military officers and scientists who had assembled a re-creation of the aircraft and were creating a simulation of the events from the recorded data. There was to be an inquiry and the crew and pilot were to be examined and perhaps disciplined.

As the dream evolved I noticed that there was something odd. I had pointed out some problem in a detail of the recreation to an officer. When I pointed it out I noticed that he simply altered the recreation to remove the anomaly I had noticed. That seemed odd to me. And so I examined the scene more closely and found other anomalies. As I noticed each one it seemed to shift right there before me to remove the detail I had found out of place. I became aware that the scene was fluid and it began to seem to me to be very "unreal". It seemed to me that the entire thing was fake, like it was a hoax. Now, I was not aware of dreaming. I was not "lucid" in this dream. Rather, inside of the dream I was aware that there was a fraud being performed, a show. The awareness was integrated into the dream such that the theme became one of fakery that was a part of the dream rather than of the dream itself being something unreal.

When the pilot showed up in one dream "scene" I pulled him aside and, sotto voce, told him that the officers and scientists were creating a charade, a fraud. I tried to make him aware that we were all being tricked somehow, and that he should assert himself and uncover the fraud.

When I had said this to him an officer came over to me and indicated he had overheard my revelation, and that I was to be arrested and imprisoned for having broken some rule, for having revealed the fraud.

I was escorted by a small cadre of military police to an interrogation room.

I was informed that I was to be jailed.

When the jailer came to put hands on me to lead me to what I knew was some sort of small cage, I became angry and frightened and chose to resist. It felt futile, but I was going to resist any way.

I reached out to strike the jailer, expecting to be subdued by the other men around us. But instead, the jailer fell over and folded up like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

This surprised me enough to start a realization in my dream mind.

As others rushed over to engage me in the familiar dream fight, this time I had no weapons, I found that each one in turn was easily defeated and as I struck at them and grappled with them they simply folded up like puppets.

I defeated a handful of officers and soldiers and then woke up in my bed.

As I lay in bed in the dark I pondered what had just happened, the memory fresh in my mind. As I thought about it I recalled the trip back from the Park in Focus 27 from my recent Gateway Voyage. The senses of the fading dream memory and the fading memory of my earth life while leaving the Park at Focus 27 overlaid each other and I could tell how they were exactly the same thing. There was no difference in how I perceived the two events.

And as I considered who I had been in the dream, and who I had been in Focus 27, and who I had been while laying on the bed in that hotel room, it came to me: these are all characters and these are all dreams and the "I" who experiences all of these is the same "I" and that "I" is only a character.

Therefore there is still another "I" who is the Dreamer of all of these things.

My "waking life" is to Focus 27 as my dreams are to my waking life. The relationship feels subjectively identical. It is as if my waking life is in the middle between my dreams and the Park. Moving from one to another is the same movement.

There seems to be something slightly different about the "waking life" layer and to my mind that difference is a function of the physical body. The presence of the physical body seems to anchor my awareness in this level of the dream. It seems to be a sort of calibration marker that makes this "level" the Home Level or the default state.

Now, it is becoming clear to me that the physical body is not really any different from the dream body or the Park body. It is just that I am in this level while I write this page and that this writing happens to be the content of the "dream" of this level and the physical body is only the form I am taking in this level.

The apparent solidity of this level is only a feature of this level. In the same way that the dream level is fluid and garish, and that fluidity is a feature of the dream level, this waking level is solid and slow. But that which we call solid is no more "real" than the incongruous fluidity of the dream or the thought-responsiveness of the Park. It is only that physical solidity is a feature of this level.

And if this waking level is only a level, one of several and perhaps one of many, then the character who is writing this page is no more "real" than the character who fights in dreams or who visited the Park. That can mean only one thing - the only "real" identity in this whole multi-layered game is the Dreamer.

There is, behind all of this, a Dreamer who is the "real" identity.

This I know now.

I also know that there is no "real" level, perhaps anywhere. I suspect that the Park is only one more dreamscape, and that behind or above the Park there are more levels, perhaps an unlimited number of levels. Each level will have its own features and each level will have its own flavor of "reality" and will relate to nearby levels in the way dreams relate to waking and the way earth life relates to the Park at Focus 27.

And as each level has its own features and nature, each level will have its own character identity.

In each level "I" will have a character identity with certain characteristics and a certain sense of self.

And each of these characteristics and senses will be only aspects of the dream character and never anything like a "true" identity.

They will always be subsets or aspects of the Dreamer, each subset expressed for purposes of the dream, and each subset will feel itself as an identity, a self. And that feeling will always be false, in a way, in that it is not the "true" identity, not the Dreamer.

And this occurs to me: if each "self", each dream identity, is a subset and a "false" or assumed identity, then it must be the case that there is only one Dreamer, and that every identity, every character in every dream on every level, is only the Dreamer having a dream.

And if I am only a character, so is everyone else.

And all of the scenes and all of the props and all of the scripts are in their own way false the same as the military investigation. Each level is a scene in a large drama played out in the mind of the Dreamer, and we are all of us that same Dreamer.

All of it is a show, a play, and we all are playing parts in the dream. And when this part is over we will play another part in another scene until all the parts are played and the Dreamer awakens.

There is only the Dreamer.

 

Dreams by Sulu

It’s always knives.

That’s what I said when I awoke from a dream recently.

Lately I have been dreaming of fighting. It’s not fighting like fighting with your wife or even bar-fighting. Rather, it is epic, all-out, for-your-life kind of fighting against video-game levels of “enemies”, and it is always with knives.

Often I awake emotionally shaken and it takes me a while to recover.

I do not understand why this is happening because I do not want to fight and I have no real fear, which I know of, of dying at the hands of a marauding band of rogue Marine Zombies, sandmen, or dark cartoon characters.

And so I asked myself – Why is this happening?

I looked for reasons in the surface parts of my psyche, the parts I can access by just thinking of them.

No clues there.

And the other morning at around 3 it came to me: it is as if I am in a scripted show and I have no choice but to act out the script.

That is what it feels like, like a script. It feels in the fighting dreams as if I am in a movie scene, perhaps the Shakespearean “All the world is a stage.” I am aware that it is happening, aware enough to perform. But I am not meta-aware, not aware in an objective sense, not self-aware.

I have been thinking that if only I could bring my waking, rational mind with me into my dreams then I could do the only thing that would break the cycle and get me out of the fight – not fight.

The thing is, I never lose a fight. But I never win either. There are always more characters to fight. They never hurt me, but I am always running, hiding, and slashing-out. I am always exhausted when I wake up and emotionally disgruntled.

But I cannot take my waking mind with me into dreams like the lucid dreamers do. Every once in a while I momentarily realize, and even say aloud – Hey, I’m in a dream. Once recently I even shouted “Whoo-hoo.” like Homer Simpson and began to fly around, bouncing off buildings and, in this case, ships. It only lasted a brief while before I lost the bubble and fell back into normal dreaming.

But that notion, that it is scripted, that was the key.

At first I thought it was aliens or Archons making me fight so they could drain energy from me in that certain flavor they seem to prefer – fear.

That made me sort of anxious and afraid because, well, aliens or Archons being in control of my dreams sort of implies a relationship I did not want to consider.

But very quickly something else occurred to me.

During the day, in my waking life, I have been very consciously working on not being afraid, on shedding the programmed fear that seems to be the core aspect of our culture.

 I think I have had some success because I can see material changes in my life. The guns are gone, for example. Well, mostly. I do not spend all day trolling the Internet looking for early warning signs any more. I do not dream of an underground bunker full of dehydrated food way back in the hills.

But I realized there is inside of me an actual Dude, an Aspect of character, who is in charge of security. I think of him like Sulu from Star Trek. He is the guy who is always ready for a fight or disaster. His job is to worry, to plan, and to respond in case something goes berserk. And my daily focus on reducing his influence in my (our) life has been, I imagine, a real challenge to his sense of survival.

And since survival is what he does for a living he has executed a clever plan for making certain I do not fail to recognize his essential character, his influence in my (our) life, and his necessity to the team.

He has moved from being active in my waking life into the realm of dream-scripting. It is Sulu who is writing, producing, and directing my dreams. And it is him (us) who is starring in them every night.

I am allowing that Sulu is a caring member of the team and that he is as necessary as all the other members. And so I am stacking up the emergency supplies in the garage and checking them regularly but not obsessively. I am keeping an eye out for trends and making appropriate conditional plans. And I am not obsessing over them.

And so now my job is to make peace with Sulu, to assure him of his role in our life, and to ask him to allow us to dream something more beneficial and pleasant. And in this way I am integrating Sulu into the team, not trying to kick him off the bus, so that he does not fear for his life.

This also teaches me that all the other Aspects of character are equally necessary. There are probably many of them that I do not recognize.

I am keeping an eye out for quirks of behavior like the fighting dreams, perhaps repetitive irrational acts or thoughts that might signal some other Dude inside of me who is trying to send out a message that he is there, alive, and an important though neglected part of the team.

I am trying to acknowledge and respect all my Aspects, even the Dark Ones (perhaps those most of all) who perform functions for me that I may not like to know about, but which I absolutely need in order to get along in this very challenging world.

After all, sometimes a tiger comes.

So, thank you Sulu. I am happy to have you on the team.

And now perhaps we might let Uhuru work on those dreams a while.

Wink.

The Swamp Deer

Today a guy I work with was telling me how frustrated he is with his job. I could see he was bummed out and almost sad.

His complaints will sound familiar to many of us - The boss is a jerk who doesn’t understand the work or the workers. The processes are slow and cumbersome. The people are uncaring and unproductive.

He started telling me how things were better at his last job, which was on a submarine in the Navy.

“When I first got there I was in way over my head. And when I got promoted to supervisor my available time shrank dramatically. The requirements just seemed to grow non-stop. But I really liked it. I felt like we were doing important work and doing it well.”

I asked him how he coped.

He said, “I had to get organized. I started writing everything down.”

He went on to describe an effective system he had developed. At the end of each day he wrote down the things he knew in the evening that he had not known that morning.

 He told me how much it alleviated his nighttime stress to have the days worries tucked away safely in his notebook so he did not have to keep them in his memory overnight. He said it helped him to sleep.

I asked him how he managed the increased workload.

He told me how he kept a journal of the way he and his team had overcome difficulties.

“Every time we did a major job I wrote down what we had learned, what worked and what didn’t.”

 He described how his journal became an indispensable tool that he was even able to share with others.

“When one of my guys got promoted and was ready to leave to take over his own unit, I copied my whole notebook and gave it to him.”

As my friend described this to me his face changed. He smiled and sat up a little straighter. His voice became more animated, less fatigued. He was visibly proud of his accomplishments and that he had been able to share what he had learned with someone who would benefit from it, and who would even carry it forward and pass it along to others.

It became obvious to me that my friend had a real sense of himself, of his identity, tied to his former situation and to his accomplishments there. As our talk returned to our current situation he fell back to his “normal” self and it was almost as if the light behind his eyes dimmed.

“It’s just so damn frustrating here. Nothing gets done because everything seems to be someone else’s job.” he said.

It occurred to me that my friend was suffering from something that may happen to many of us at some point in our lives.

He was having an identity crisis.

He had identified so much with his former job that it became a large measure of what he considered to be himself. He would not say that he “worked at” the Navy, for example. Rather, he would say “I am a sailor.”

The identification was enhanced by his success. The better he became at his job the more he identified with it.

This makes sense because when we give a lot of ourselves to our work, and especially when we apply our creative powers to our job, the job becomes the visible manifestation of our internal nature. It becomes our art.

This can be a good thing. Work is an important creative outlet. For most of us our work takes up the majority of our time and energy. It is the thing we do the most. Many of us spend more time with co-workers than with family. Our work relationships become our primary human interactions.

This is especially powerful when we work in specialized fields like the military or medical or technological communities. These occupational categories are fertile fields for identity attachment because they are somewhat exclusive. They have insider language and insider cultures.

When a person spends many years in an insider organization identification is almost unavoidable.

For insiders work can be a place of meaning and value expression. Many insiders are dedicated professionals who make significant contributions to their organizations and to the larger community.

But what happens when, as with my friend, a person leaves the insider organization?

I asked my friend what he thought was behind his frustration with our current workplace.

“I guess it’s mostly how hard it is to get anything done. It is like they care more about process than product. When I was in the Navy we would just do what needed to be done, and at the end of the day we could see what we had accomplished. Here it is more like everyone just wants to follow the process whether it works or not.”

What my friend was describing was his perception of a cultural difference between his former workplace and our current one.

I was interested in why he was so frustrated with the difference.

The question I asked myself was, “Why doesn’t he see that there is simply a different set of norms and expectations here?”

I asked myself, “Why doesn’t he adapt to the new rules here like he adapted to the new rules in the Navy?”

The answer was identity.

I asked him, “Why does a deer run fast?”

He fumbled around for a second and quickly caught-on that I was not asking him about anatomy but was introducing a concept.

“I give.” he said. “Why does a deer run fast?”

“Because wolves.” I said.

I let it hang in the air for a moment and then explained.

“A deer runs fast because there is a wolf chasing him. Running fast is his adaptive response to the threat named wolf.”

I said, “When you were in the Navy you had an environment that stressed you out the way a deer is stressed by a wolf. You adapted to that stress and were successful in your work. And because you were successful you became attached to the mode of your adaptation. You sort of became a deer. You said to yourself, ‘I can run fast and jump over logs and rivers and I am a strong and clever deer and no wolf can catch me.’ “

“You became a deer.” I said.

This clicked for him and he smiled. He liked the metaphor but he did not yet make the connection.

I said, “But now your environment has changed. The threat isn’t a wolf any more. Now the threat is a swamp. And now when you feel stress you try and run fast and jump high and you find that you don’t get away at all. Instead you sink. And the harder you try to run the faster you sink.”

Now his head was nodding and he was smiling. “I like that.” He said.

I went on, “So your job now is to learn to swim. Perhaps here instead of being a deer you must be a turtle.”

His lips tightened and he narrowed his eyes a bit. I could see he didn’t like the idea of this particular evolutionary leap, so I explained further.

“What is causing you stress now is your identification with being a deer. You have the value system of a deer. You think that running is not only a good way to get away from a wolf, but that running is good for its own sake. You think that going slowly, like when you are swimming or wading through a swamp, is bad.” I said.

I asked him, “What are you? Are you a deer?”

“No.” he said, “I am a man.”

“OK.” I said. “You are a man. A man is different from a deer because he has a choice. A deer can only be a deer but a man can be anything he wants to be.”

I could see him begin to wriggle a little bit. His deer mind was considering what it might be like to be a turtle.

I said, “You are in fact neither a deer nor a turtle nor a man. What you really are is the Light behind your eyes. This is why you can be anything you want to be. You are a Light and not any kind of animal, or even a man.”

“That Light took on the aspects of a deer to escape from the wolf. Now that Light can take on the aspects of a turtle. That you were a successful deer means you can be a successful turtle if only you will allow yourself permission to adapt, to develop the value system of a turtle the way you developed the value system of a deer.”

Now my friend smiled. He liked this way of thinking. He stuck out his hands like flippers and made little swimming motions.

“I am a turtle.” he said, “And after I am done being a turtle I will go on and be something else.”

“And when that Light is done being a man, it will go on and be something else.” I said.

He smiled again.

“And maybe a turtle doesn’t think a swamp is such a bad place.” he said.

We both laughed and went back to our desks in the swamp.

 

The Wizard Box

Once upon a time, at the edge of a dark forest, there was a tidy little house by a pond in a meadow.

In this house lived a clever and curious boy with his mother.

As the boy grew he became restless until one day he told his mother that he must soon leave for a while, perhaps to go for a long walk.

Mothers being wise, she told the boy that his restlessness was his longing to know the Great Secret.

The boy felt this to be true and told her he would set off in the morning.

The next morning when it was time for the boy to leave his mother kissed him goodbye, told him to not be away too long, and gave him a gift.

She had made him a special coat and asked him to wear it always to remind him of home.

The boy put on the coat and hugged his mother one more time before walking out the door.

With a spring in his step he headed off on the path through the forest.

When he had got very deep in to the forest he was met by a tall, thin man in a pointy hat.

“Who are you?” asked the boy.

“I am The Wizard of the Forest.” said the man.

“What do you seek?” he asked.

“I want to know the Great Secret.” said the boy.

The Wizard’s eyes grew large and he began to laugh.                                                        

He laughed until he almost cried.

“Are you sure?” said the Wizard.

“Yes I am.” said the boy, a bit annoyed at being mocked.

The Wizard asked him again.

“Are you sure?” he said.

“Yes.” The bay said, more firmly this time.

One more time the Wizard asked, and again the boy answered, this time almost angry.

“So be it.” said the Wizard.

He reached down to the grass behind a tree and lifted up a small iron box which he handed to the boy.

The boy took the box and examined the intricate detail on its surfaces and the stout lock on its lid.

The boy tried to open the box but he found it was locked.

When the boy looked up to ask the Wizard for the key the Wizard disappeared in a puff of smoke and with a great haunting laugh.

The boy heard the Wizard’s voice from the cloud of smoke.

“You must find your own key.” the Wizard said.

The boy went on his way, now in search of the key to the Wizard Box.

First he went to China to ask the men with long beards for a key to the Wizard Box.

The China men made him chop wood and carry water for them.

When the boy had filled their water pots and wood piles they gave him a key.

Excited, the boy took the key and put it into the lock.

But it would not turn.

The key did not work.

The boy went to India to ask the Gurus for a key to the Wizard Box.

The Gurus made the boy sit for long hours in uncomfortable poses under the hot sun.

Finally, when he grew faint from heat and hunger the Gurus gave him a key.

He took the key and put it into the lock but it would not turn.

The key did not work.

The boy went up a mountain to see the Hermit and ask him for a key.

The Hermit made the boy walk up and down the mountain bringing him food and water every day until the boy’s legs were tired and sore.

When he finally dropped from exhaustion the Hermit gave him a key.

As you can guess, the key did not work.

The boy was saddened.

He was tired and feeling terribly alone in the world.

With his head hanging low he set his feet on the long path home.

The boy was unhappy with himself for failing to find the key to the Wizard Box.

He had tried as hard as he could, but no matter what he did or where he went he could not find the key.

As he passed through the forest he was afraid he would never learn the Great Secret.

As he entered the meadow he sat down by the pond he thought of his mother.

He sat down under a tree to ponder because he knew he would have to tell her where he had been and why he had been gone so long.

The boy was hot and weary from the road and so he decided to refresh himself in the pond.

As he removed the coat his mother had made for him, and which he had worn at all times as she had asked, something fell from a pocket on the inside.

He picked it up and looked at it closely.

He recognized it immediately.

It was the key to the front door of the little house he shared with his mother.

The boy looked at the key some more.

He noticed the size and shape of it.

He recognized its outline.

He took out the Wizard Box and looked at the hole in the lock.

He slid the key into the lock and turned it.

The lock opened with a smooth click.

The boy opened the lid and looked inside the box.

In the box, resting on a tiny bed of straw was a rectangular piece of smooth, shiny glass.

The boy lifted the glass and held it between his thumb and index finger.

The surface was mirror-like but he noticed he could see through it.

He held the glass up to the bright blue sky.

Through the glass he saw the clouds, the sun, and the circling birds.

In the surface of the glass he saw his own reflection, the cornflower blue of his eyes matched and faded into the perfect azure of the sky.

It appeared to the boy that he almost became the sky itself.

As the boy sat in the grass, transfixed by the scene in the small glass, a smile grew slowly on his face.

He was still puzzled, but the pieces danced slowly into place.

The picture there formed was a familiar one; the image of himself, of his sky, of his home.

As the Great Secret revealed itself to the boys mind his mother happened to look out a window of the tidy little house.

She saw him sitting by the tree and called to him to come in, to come home.

On seeing his mother, the boy noticed how tired, sore, and hungry he was.

Suddenly he longed for the comfort of his mother’s arms.

He set the glass back into the box and snapped the lid shut.

He stood up quickly and pulled his coat back on.

He was anxious to get home and tell his mother of all he had seen and done, and of what he had learned of the Great Secret.

In his haste, he forgot the box, leaving it in the grass by the tree.

As the boy stood in the doorway to his home holding his mother, sharing in her tears of joy, he did not notice the smiling man stepping out from behind the tree to retrieve the Wizard Box.