Reverse-Engineering the Dream of Your Life

On creation, forgetting, and the divine game

“Pillars of Creation,” NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The cosmos dreaming itself into form.

Dear Living Dark reader,

Today I offer the following without commentary beyond this short note. You’re free to take it—or not—as you please. If I suggest that there’s something genuinely worth contemplating in the four quoted passages below, the last of which comes from my own Writing at the Wellspring (headed for publication on December 15, with preorders opening in about three weeks), you can take that under advisement, too. Each passage forms a complete unit of its own, worth reading, savoring, and contemplating. Taken together, they may possess a potency beyond mere contemplation, one that expands to engulf the very contemplator.

Warm regards,

From Alan Watts, “The Nature of Consciousness” (1969 lecture/seminar):

Let’s suppose that you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would—naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams—you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say “Well, that was pretty great! But now let’s have a surprise. Let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don’t know what it’s going to be.” And you would dig that, and come out of that and say “Wow, that was a close shave, wasn’t it?” And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further-out gambles as to what you would dream.

And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today. That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. Of playing that you weren’t God. Because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he’s not. The first thing that he says to himself is, “Man, get lost,” because he gives himself away. The nature of love is self-abandonment; not clinging to oneself. Throwing yourself out, as in, for example, in basketball; you’re always getting rid of the ball. You say to the other fellow, “Have a ball.” See? And that keeps things moving. That’s the nature of life.

So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not “God” in a politically kingly sense, but “God” in the sense of being the Self, the deep-down basic whatever-there-is. And you’re all that, only you’re pretending you’re not. And it’s perfectly okay to pretend you’re not, to be absolutely convinced, because this is the whole notion of drama. . . .

My metaphysics—let me be perfectly frank with you—are that there is the central self, you can call it God, you can call it anything you like, and it’s all of us. It’s playing all the parts of all beings whatsoever everywhere and anywhere. And it’s playing the game of hide-and-seek with itself. It gets lost, it gets involved in the farthest-out adventures, but in the end it always wakes up and comes back to itself. And when you’re ready to wake up, you’re going to wake up. And if you’re not ready, you’re going to stay pretending that you’re just “poor little me.”

From Ken Ferlic, “Ways to Live Life Based on Implications” (that is, the implications of Ferlic’s Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity model/philosophy):

[W]e have to believe or at least open ourselves to the belief that we created everything we see and experience, even the physical world and all its detail, at some level of our being. Start the exercise by assuming that we are a being of infinite consciousness and infinite creative ability. We need to believe that we have created a puzzle for ourselves to prove to our self how creative we really are. Then have a dialogue with ourselves [about] why we created our world and the experiences we have the way we did and not some other way. Let the conversation go wherever it needs to go. In this dialog, remember it is about why and how we created this puzzle to prove to ourselves how powerful a creator we really are. Trust and believe what surfaces. Most are utterly surprised at what we come to understand and we will see what some call magic unfold before us. [Others] simply see synchronicity. We may find that what begins to surface is “too much to be believed.” If this happens, then we will have to decide if we are willing to empty our vessel, to clean ourselves out, and make room for who and what we really are—a being of unlimited creativity simply choosing to have a physical experience within a physical vehicle in the form of our body.

From Ferlic, “Creation Is about Forgetting”:

Creation is “set up” or designed to [cause] us to forget what we set out to do. To create, we must creatively move between holding the intention we wish to manifest and surrendering to the flow of energy created in holding that intention and dealing with what life has to offer in the reality in which we find ourselves. The process is actually simple but we do not see it for what it is because our conscious, subconscious and unconscious intentions usually compete with each other and the mundane [reality] of the world, continually diverting our creative life energy away from what we have chosen to create. All that distraction in turn causes us to forget what we set out to do.

However, if we choose and can hold focus, we can backtrack the creation process and do what is called reverse engineer[ing] of the creation we experience. We simply need to continually pull the string on the question, “Why are we having this experiences as opposed to any other experience?” and see and/or act on what our intuitive guidance provides in response to that question.

From Matt Cardin, Writing at the Wellspring:

Navigating the Dreamscape

This is the ultimate secret of creativity: Your whole life is a story that you are telling. This thing you call “my life” is a dream narrative. You are both its author and its main character. As Nietzsche noted, “We are all greater artists than we realize.” Your challenge and calling, as both a writer and a person, is to wake up and own this.

We humans are inherently creative expressions of the intelligence that gives rise to the entire cosmos. So consciously expressing this creative force in the form of writing, ideas, and projects that flow through you is simply an extension of your own basic essence. Carl Sagan famously asserted that “we are star stuff.” Alan Watts frequently reiterated that the energy that moves the galaxies and causes the trees and grass to grow is what moves you, too. This includes not just our bodies but our minds, our subjective lives. In your very being, you are literally nothing but a creative expression. As the Zen koan says, “Who is the master who makes the grass green?” Answer: You are.

A helpful metaphor: Each new writing project is like a maze that shapes itself as you go. You explore, learning its logic, seeking the exit. Not incidentally (or even coincidentally), this is also how your life works. What you write is a microcosm of your soul. The labyrinth of your self is the labyrinth of your work. In both writing and living, you are simultaneously creating the maze and seeking its exit.

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