The Secret About Dreaming

In my last newsletter, I shared some of my “Secrets about The Secret.” I am pleased (of course) to hear from so many of you that agreed with my observations. You shared your experiences as friends and therapists listening to people’s self-judgment for failing to manifest the perfect life, and you shared your own frustrations from trying to use the ideas of The Secret and The Law of Attraction to change your circumstances.

Let us not use these criticisms of the latest pop-culture ideas about how to strike it rich (in money, love, and body perfect) to obscure a very important reality: You do manifest the universe you live in through how you dream it. What do I mean, and why is that different than The Secret?

Basic “Dreaming 101:” You do not see “what is out there.” The light you perceive reflects off the objects in the universe, and enters your mind through your eyes and other senses, and creates a little virtual reality in your mind. The image you see is in your mind, not out there in the universe. That is an amazing and indisputable fact: You only see what is in your mind’s virtual reality, not what is out in the world.

In the Toltec tradition, we call this virtual reality in your mind your “Personal Dream.” You are dreaming reality. Your body is an organ of perception—it collects data from the world around you. That information passes through “channels of perception” in your mind, picking up stored information made up of biases, agreements, emotional memories, fears, traumas, desires, belief systems, and all the knowledge stored in your mind.

That stored information distorts the incoming messages carried on the light, and it is the distorted light that creates the virtual reality dream. You look at that dream and think you are seeing “out there.” You are not. You are dreaming. We could call your mind an organ of “deception,” since it creates the distorted dream of a world that has nothing to do with what is really out there.

“The Secret” says that (simply stated) if you can think the right thoughts you will attract to yourself the right things. The Law of Attraction says that like attracts like. Miguel Ruiz, in The Four Agreements,™ tells us: Always Be Impeccable With Your Word. He explains that your Word is every thought, action, spoken word, and your most deeply held beliefs.

In other words, your Word is how you dream. Your dream was programmed into your mind from the very beginnings of your awareness. You were taught what was right and wrong, good and bad, who was Us and who was Them. All that stored information and knowledge, which you continued to add to and refine all of your life, is the dream of the world you live in.

The dream in your mind out-pictures itself into what appears to be Reality. If you dream that money is hard to get, so it shall be. If you dream that love is dangerous, you will attract dangerous love. If you believe you are not worthy of kindness and consideration, you will attract abuse and hurt. If you believe you have a Parking Fairy, you will believe the Fairy finds you parking places. It has nothing to do with the nature of the world or your ability to create it, but you will accumulate evidence for the truth of how you dream by what your dream creates—in the dream! None of it happens out there. Am I making sense?

Yes, it is true that your thoughts create your reality—but only in your mind. That is the only place that the universe you live in exists. Yes, there is a universe there, but you cannot perceive it. You can only dream. Everyone lives in a distinctly different universe.

If you can do your deep inner work, clean out the memories, traumas, old belief systems and agreements, etc, from your channels of perception… if you can clear away the conflicting desires and the resistance in your programming… if you can let go of any attachments to the outcome of your manifesting… then perhaps you can make these laws of The Secret work for you. If you get that clear, you probably won’t care about manifesting riches.

Of course, there is always the issue of the Action < > Reaction nature of the universe to deal with. Everything is in action all the time everywhere, reacting with everything else in the nonexistent universe. Where does your power and influence begin?

We can come back to that part of the conversation next time.

Thanks for reading.

“The Secret About Dreaming”