„There should be somewhere upon earth a place which no nation could claim as its own, where all human beings of goodwill who have a sincere aspiration could live freely as citizens of the world and obey one single authority, that of the supreme truth; a place of peace, concord and harmony where all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his sufferings and miseries, to surmount his weaknesses and ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities; a place where the needs of the spirit and and the concern for progress would take precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions, the search for pleasure and material enjoyment. In this place, children would be able to grow and develop integrally without losing contact with their souls; education would be given not for passing examinations or obtaining certificates and posts but to enrich existing faculties and bring forth new ones. In this place, titles and positions would be replaced by opportunities to serve and organise; the bodily needs of each one would be equally provided for, and intellectual, moral and spiritual superiority would be expressed in the general organisation not by an increase in the pleasures and powers of life but by increased duties and responsibilities. Beauty in all its artistic forms, painting, sculpture, music, literature, would be equally accessible to all; the ability to share in the joy it brings would be limited only by the capacities of each one and not by social or financial position. For in this ideal place money would no longer be the sovereign lord; individual worth would have a far greater importance than that of material wealth and social standing. There, work would not be a way to earn one’s living but a way to express oneself and to develop one’s capacities and possibilities while being of service to the community as a whole, which, for its own part, would provide for each individual’s subsistence and sphere of action. In short, it would be a place where human relationships, which are normally based almost exclusively on competition and strife, would be replaced by relationships of emulation in doing well, of collaboration and real brotherhood.
The earth is certainly not ready to realise such an ideal, for mankind does not yet possess sufficient knowledge to understand and adopt it nor the conscious force that is indispensable in order to execute it; that is why I call it a dream.
And yet this dream is in the course of becoming a reality; that is what we are striving for in Sri Aurobindo’s Ashram, on a very small scale, in proportion to our limited means. The realisation is certainly far from perfect, but it is progressive; little by little we are advancing towards our goal which we hope we may one day be able to present to the world as a practical and effective way to emerge from the present chaos, to be born into a new life that is more harmonious and true.“
This text was written by Mira Alfassa – The Mother in the year 1954. She called it her dream. It was a dream she was working progressively on realising all her life. And it still lives on.
At first this dream seems to be exceptional and unrealisable. Yet it is shared by quite a lot of people. Only they have never formulated it clearly. To them it is just a vague feeling, some kind of yearning never to be expressed because it seems so far beyond the actual range of their lives. But are they right? Do they really know the scope of their possibilities? Do they care?
For the vast majority of people, dreams are events that happen in their brain when they sleep and that have no significance whatever. But there is a great variety of dreams, a vast structure that exceeds the common notion.
The first thing we usually associate with dreams are the dreams we have in the night – the sleep-dreams.
When we sleep it is not our whole being that sleeps. It is only the body and the active mind, the common consciousness, that cease in their activities. But other layers of our being are working on, especially the regions below our waking consciousness. When the regulation of the active mind is absent, the things that have passed by unnoticed or have deliberately been pushed aside can now act on their own without any need of order or coherence. They produce the common, the unconscious dreams, which are void of any deeper meaning, yet can give slight indications about the regions of life that are neglected by us in our waking state.
Then there are those things we haven’t finished during the day, be it by lack of time or by lack of ability. These usually work on during the night and trouble it with unpleasant dreams in the form of repetition of the unresolved questions. And sometimes they also provide hints on lines of overlooked thoughts or even on solutions. These are the subconscient dreams.
All these dreams are only part of the mental or rather sub-mental realm. But there is also the realm of the life-forces, the vital.
When we dream, in a way, we leave our body. And very often we enter the vital plane, the world of the life-impulses, energy and desires. Dreams of struggles, sexual encounters or feeling of power often have their origin in a sojourn in the vital plane, and depending on the quality of our contacts we feel tired or refreshed in the morning.
But of course our nightly dreams generally are composed of all these elements in a varying measure. And apart from the impact on our well-being they are only rarely important.
But we do not only dream when we sleep. In the waking state also we have a lot of dreams. And we are usually only marginally aware of these dreams, as they do not have these visual side effects known from the night. These dreams are daydreams.
When the conscious mind relaxes from a task or an effort, it resorts into a daydream, and in this way into the more conscious regions of the mental plane. In this realm we can shape events gone by, expected or desired, along the favourable lines of our imagination. In this way, without immediate necessity of results we can review our mistakes or do some training for coming occasions or think about the course an action should take.
While the dreams of the night help us to come to terms with the past, the daydreams affect the present and the near future.
Together they belong to our ordinary life, to our survival outfit. They are functions of our body, life and mind to help us to maintain the general health of our being and to cope with the uncertainties of life.
The next kind of dreams provide a certain push for the conduct of our life. They are the common lifedreams.
While growing up one is confronted with all kinds of family and relationship constellations as well as with environment units and impressions. Out of these conditions, due to personal constitution, inner development and character the elements are assembled that reflect our present possibilities and the vastness of the vision of our future life. The result is our lifedream. Many people feel themselves small, insignificant and handicapped. And so they opt for a modest life. Others lack original imagination and they run after a life that isn’t really distinguished from the lives of their neighbours. Or they are a wee bit unsatisfied and want to rise socially one or two steps above the place their parents occupy. So the most widespread lifedreams go like this: Find some friends that like and support you; buy some status symbols like a car or an expensive outfit; find a decent job; find the great love or at least a partner; build a house; raise one or two children, if any; spoil the grandchildren; enjoy a well-off and healthy retirement with frequent voyages; tend a garden; die. That’s the general image of happiness.
Yet even by those who accomplish all these dreams in the course of the years, now and then a certain uneasiness is felt. There is the feeling that something has gone wrong. When one tries to put a finger upon the source of the uneasiness it is usually the wrong partner, the wrong job or midlife-crisis. So one sets out with a certain elan to change the presumed constituents of the unease and one likes to imagine, that now everything is right. But yet, if one finds a moment of clarity and sincerity one becomes painfully aware that all these changes, though sometimes necessary, do not touch upon the real thing.
By careful observation and a sincere looking within one might find out, that one’s precious lifedream is a simple adaptation to the demands of the environment on the basis of the prefabricated lifedream of the society one has grown up in. By adapting to these demands one has renounced one’s own true individuality.
If you look back into your childhood you might become aware of the emotions you then had when you thought about your future. They might not necessarily have been accompanied by concrete goals, but most certainly they were dominated by the sense that there is a concrete mission to be fulfilled, the impression of a unique individuality and a certain sensation of power or maybe even omnipotence, but in any way of inner greatness, uniqueness and nobility.
But in the course of becoming a reasonable human being, a respectable member of society and in order to please parents and friends little by little every spark of the truth of our being has been put down with increasing ease. Instead of nurturing the flame it was reduced and hidden, instead of working out the finer details a dumb and foreign influence was allowed to shape a reasonable lifedream, something that was within easy reach.
Of course one cannot say that all these lesser lifedreams are vain. Lifedreams in a way reflect the personality of a man. If a person has a strong individuality his lifedream also tends to be of a more individual nature than the dreams of a man who is lost and carried away into the flood of unconsciousness.
But more individuality does not account for more truth. Just as the lesser lifedreams reflect the outer layers of personality there are also layers that are nearer to the core of things and therefore produce dreams that try to express this higher truth.
So far we have regarded dreams as some kind of passive things that happen to us without any activity from our side. And superficially this is certainly right. Dreams come when we let go of some active faculty and control. In sleep, when we let go of our active consciousness all sorts of nightdreams emerge. During the day, when we recline from some work, daydreams come. And when our efforts in earning a life come to a rest and we step back from our narrow activities the lifedreams surface. So we only perceive dreams to have a passive character because their origin lies not in usually operating faculties, that is our waking and working consciousness, but in those layers of our being that are situated beyond the surface consciousness. But because we are not aware of these layers doesn’t mean that they do not work. Dreams are not only one way for those parts of our being to say: „I’m here!“, but also to present us some results of their working.
So dreams are a gate into the unknown world within us. And this world is very large. We have already seen – in many of the nightdreams – the effects of the levels of being below our active consciousness. And the daydreams and the common lifedreams reflect our everyday consciousness.
But the dream-gate releases still another type of dreams: the higher lifedreams. Those are the proper, the real lifedreams, of which the common lifedreams are but a distortion. Higher lifedreams deal with the possibilities which are inherent in our inner nature, that are formed by the faculties of love, understanding, the will for progress, for activity and for creativity. These are the forces that move our being, and these are the essences our lifedreams express. The relationships of these faculties and their intensity determine the nature or character of a lifedream, which is truly individual for everybody. As the constituents of a lifedream are less fixed and materially concrete than those of the common variety, their expression is more fluent and not so rigid in nature, and its fulfilment can usually be sought nearly everywhere. The higher lifedreams cannot be easily expressed in clear and final terms in the way that common lifedreams are formulated, but they are rather a constant and living looking out for new possibilities to express the inner being, to learn something, to widen the inner horizon, to work something out, to have new experiences, to get a new view, in short to grow in consciousness constantly.
And in always being attentive, in always trying to look deeper into our lifedream and to express it more perfectly we start to become our real selves. And in trying to find out our lifedreams we are indeed progressing towards the finding of our soul.
The soul is our inner truth, that is always trying to make itself heard. It is behind everything and is, though delicately, very persistantly trying to make a difference in everything. It can be expressed easily in the higher lifedreams, but also finds means of expression in the nightdreams.
Looking within, as we do in our lifedreams, opens us to the knowledge of ourselves. This knowledge is indispensable to become free.
Freedom means not to be in a prison of any kind. Not to be brainwashed by industrial, religious, spiritual, political, social, moral or any other advertising but to know one’s inner truth means freedom. Out of true freedom peace arises. So in order for peace to grow freedom must grow and spread. To live one’s lifedream is infectious and in order to propagate peace it is best to live one’s lifedream.
Lifedreams are the present summit of our ascent in dreams. But they are also the entrance into an expanding universe of consciousness, in which still higher dreams may evolve.
But all these dreams do not form the summit of the dream-total. They rather form the outer border of the personal dreams and at the same time the point of transition into a vaster order of dreams.
But before we proceed let us have a look from another angle into the nature of dreams. There is this wellknown phenomenon that if someone makes a discovery or an invention people of different regions of the earth at about the same time have similar intuitions, without being connected in any way to each other. The usual explanation is that at this certain stage of development this special discovery was bound to happen. But there is another explanation, which was discovered by men like Rupert Sheldrake through observation, experiments and deduction. He found that once something is learned and understood by several people it becomes increasingly easier for others to learn and understand that same thing. Everything one learns is a contribution to a common body of knowledge and experience that can be tapped by anybody who has a sufficient attraction to the subject, He called this body Morphogenetic Fields. These fields add substance to the findings of C. G. Jung, a psychologer who spoke of a collective subconscious. This can be visualised by a submarine landscape with peaks that rise above sealevel and constitute the individual personality.
Earlier still Sri Aurobindo and Mira Alfassa have discovered or unearthed and formulated in modern terms old yogic findings. They speak in this context of formations.
Their insight into the functionings of mind and life shows that there is a world that is filled with thought impulses – the mental plane – in which we constantly bath. Our brain, through attraction admits or rejects these impulses and transforms them into thoughts. And it sends out its own thoughts. So even when one doesn’t speak at all, one is yet at the same time in a constant communion with the rest of mankind. But one does not only emanate impulses and thoughts. Thoughts can also be organised. They can then be sent out in the form of „Entities“ or clusters that have something like a life of their own. These „Entities“ are called formations. The character of these formations can range from cloudy and nebulous to sharp, clear-cut and radiant, from weak to powerful, from small to great. It all depends on the formateur. Somebody with clear imaginations and expectations and the capacity to clearly formulate things, can produce a clear formation, somebody who is powerful can add force to his formation, independent of wether it is whispy or clearly defined. These formations can be sent out and can be enforced by a continued stream of aspiration. Once set loose they go about, trying to produce the desired result. And if they are strong and clear enough, they may even succeed. But the power put into the formation has to be adequate to the desired goal. Great goals require a clear and powerful mind. This is, by the way, the background for some of the advices in the „How to become successful“ books.
Now an interesting thing is that others can contribute to such formations. Fanfiction is a rather obvious example for this. When Marion Zimmer-Bradley, a well-known SF-author, wrote some stories located on a fictional world called Darkover, she at the same time created the Darkover Formation. Soon other authors joined in with stories and the body of the Darkover Formation grew in vastness and definition. Other creations like Star Trek have expanded into other scenes, like Deep Space Nine or Voyager and have thus created a more complex world.
Formations usually are created involuntarily, almost automatically without the will to do so. So if one day someone wishes for a yellow dress, the next day for a red one and then a blue one, one might get each when one is rich (provided of course, that there is enough persistence, clarity and power in the wish), none when one is poor, or maybe a gray one.
Well, wishes are a form of dreams. And in fact most formations are created by dreams and not by a conscious effort.
If now we put all the findings up to now together, we see that dreams have a value and an importance that reaches beyond the individual sphere. The world is the way it is, because we have dreamed her that way. She reflects our dreams and therefore also our consciousness. And so the only way for peace upon earth is not by fighting against war, but by becoming peace. If we fight against war we dream of strife, we create a formation of conflict. But in order to have peace we must dream of it and be ourselves an expression of peace.
And that is one of the explanations for the proverb that says, that if you want to change the world you first have to change yourself.
We have seen now, that formations and dreams have an impact on the world and on life. But this impact reaches far deeper than for instance the question of peace and war. It affects our very perception of life. So far formations seemed some fun to deal with. But that is only the surface. All these formations are rather short lived. But there is much more potential in them than meets the eye.
Let’s take an epidemic. As soon as the knowledge of several cases of influenza spreads and an upcoming epidemic is suggested fear enforces a till now weak formation of illness. And as fear spreads the formation becomes stronger and more and more people fall under its spell and become ill.
Another formation is the already cited dream of a family, a decent suburban villa, a nice car and a peaceful death. That is a tradition. It might of course be a real wish, but most often it is a response to e petrified formation to which generations of people have added. And this kind of formation is called a tradition.
Each time that somebody tells you that this has always been such and such, or that things can only be done in a special way, he might be right. It might be due to a law of nature. But most often it is a petrified formation.
But what about those laws of nature? Every new generation of scientists discovers something that renders such a law of nature obsolete, see e.g. Galileo. The world as we perceive it is full of formations that wait to be discovered. Even death might be a formation, based on the formation of matter. We will see the world as it is only when each formation is uncovered. So – the future is full of promises.
So far we have seen that there is no absolute independence on earth. In a way everything is linked together. And although we are still individuals we cannot really be apart. We constantly interact and counteract. Dreams are produced that lead in every possible direction, ignoring other dreams, uniting with them or contradicting them. The human life on this planet is a reflection of this chaos. This is our present state of affairs, but this state is no irrevocable matter.
As we cannot change the world in order to make us better men we have to begin the other way round.
We have already seen that our dreams lead to formations. And we have also seen that higher dreams often have a kind of nucleus, a tiny soul spark. In dreams we put forth something from our soul. And this soul in its deepest depths is at least in a very intimate relation with every other soul.
And so, if we find someone to love we have a stronger contact of our souls and we start to have a common dream. We dream of being together, founding a family and building a home. Our efforts and our dreams unite. And the soul sparks of our dreams also unite. And out of this a new entity grows. These entities usually are weak, but out of the stronger ones known and unknown dynasties have arisen. In a way families, clans, tribes and dynasties have a soul that is nourished and kept alive by the members of the group.
While the small family-entity is the result of the more private, personal dreams, the dynastic entity shows also elements of the more open-minded life-dreams.
Besides these smaller and larger family nuclei there is of course a vast range of other soul-entities which we are not or only rather dimly aware of. Every community has a kind of soul nourished by its members. If we look at communities like San Francisco, Chicago and Saint Louis we perceive a different and very distinct flair. This flair is of course due to the influence of the climate and the physical surroundings and sponsored by the obvious cultural differences of the constituting populations. But the aspiration of their citizens and their more or less vague feelings of togetherness contribute to the great dream which is their community. Their dreams blend together to give birth to the unique entities of their cities, their souls.
In the same way and contemporarily we also contribute to the souls of regions, countries, peoples, cultures and continents. And in the degree as these communities are perceived as unities the corresponding personalities, the central souls become equally strong and individualised.
But such a soul, once it has taken birth, is not totally dependent on its originating elements. It is a personality in the process of continuous development and formation, just like a new born baby. It develops a character and is, like any man, quickly overshadowed by the conflicting internal influences and tendencies and unconscious wishes. And of course it has its own dreams. So now we have this relationship: There is e.g. the soul of a country which was and is formed by the dreams and aspirations of the people constituting it and which in turn has its more or less clouded dreams and aspirations that have an influence on the people.
Now, we have already seen that there is a difference in the quality of dreams. There are the private dreams centering on the immediate wellbeing which are often nourished from subconscient wells and the formations of the environment.
And there are the more outgoing and ideal lifedreams.
And we have a resonance between the people and the greater entities. This means, that petty, self-centred dreams tend to make the country’s spirit and soul petty and self-centred. And by this resonance people tend to create their own prisons.
And if on the other hand people send forth higher lifedreams and aspire for wider ranges of mind, life and soul they contribute to a kind of elevation of the community spirit and soul. And by virtue of the resonance effect there is an encouragement in the population for looking out towards the vaster realms. An upward and progressive surge is created that could be observed in the years following World War II in the German „Wirtschaftswunder“ or in the rising periods of great cultures. The decline usually comes when all is achieved and nothing seems to be left to aspire for, which means that the dreams of the nations were turned almost exclusively on outer achievements, while disregarding the more important inner development.
So for the best development of a country everyone can use the resonance effect by moving one’s focus from the private dreams to the higher lifedreams and by trying to find out the inner vocation of the country’s soul, because just like there is a unique and ideal place for everybody on this earth, a place only he can fill, the same applies to each culture and nation. And there is no soul of any kind on earth that wants to make war or to dominate others or take advantage of them.
For the individual this endeavour results of course in a growth of consciousness and it facilitates the individual progress and the discovery of one’s own potentials.
In the course of this work we may come across a third kind of dreams. Usually our dreams have a direct relation to ourselves, even the higher lifedreams. When we go beyond them we enter the realm of worlddreams. These are dreams we have for others, though not for special persons (which are dreams that belong to the transition area between higher lifedreams and worlddreams).
Worlddreams are first seen in the formation of nationalistic ideals (which are by the way a rather unfortunate fusion of petty egoistic private dreams with world dreams, related only to one’s own country).
A wellknown worlddream which has emerged from private and lifedreams was the dream of the French Revolution, the dream of Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood. Though it has moved very much it has not really succeeded, for the proper part of the worlddream in this formula has been largely ignored. Freedom is the private dream, Equality the lifedream, Brotherhood the worlddream. By trying to realise Freedom and Equality only a lot of conflict, violence and strife has arisen. But Freedom and Equality are only a result. The question of how this is to be achieved is the real basis of this worlddream and the answer is Brotherhood, which is a major worlddream which is still left to be fulfilled. Brotherhood is one of the bases of Peace and its natural results are Freedom and Equality. Real Freedom and Equality on the mundane stage can only be achieved by means of Brotherhood.
Peace itself is another worlddream and so is world union.
But by now the dream of world union is still very far away. People do dream for peace, but only on a small scale with predominant regard to their own countries and world region. But to successfully dream of peace one has first to try to create a profound and lasting peace in oneself. That’s a first indispensable step which requires, as every progress does, sincerity.
Of course a first step towards world union has been made: the founding of the United Nations and the subsequent World Trade Organization and the World Health Organization. Economic associations and later the founding of the European Union are further steps.
But there are still many obstacles left. There is no peace in a considerable number of states, and even when there is peace, usually there is still much discord. And how shall the people develop the necessary consciousness to dream of a World Union when their immediate troubles are not solved. This is a world dream, we still have a lot to work on. When then there is finally peace they need some time to stabilize the country and to work out the country’s personality and soul. Only then can they dream of a unified world.
The other problem seems to be alive all-over the world. It is the fear of loosing the achieved individuality. Most people imagine a World Union to result in a homogenous equality of culture. And although e.g. a common world language seems to be advisable, this does not necessarily mean that local languages will inevitably vanish, though in the course of centuries this might be the case. On the contrary, the countries should try – and be encouraged to do so – to uphold their individualities by bringing to flourish their – often multiple – cultures.
Unity and multitude are not things that are incompatible. It is variety that makes live worth living. If everything were the same all-over the world no one would like to travel anymore. But eventually a common global culture will arise also which will be the clay holding together a multitude of cultural expressions.
But for all this to result we first have to dream it and to spread this dream all-over the world. Only then can the World-Soul grow in substance and personality, which is indispensable for the advent of the World Union. And then the world itself will start or intensify a dream that will facilitate the vision and upcoming of a truer and greater humanity, of Future Man.
But all this is only one way to take a look at the dimension of dreams: It’s the view from the outside with the help of the spectacles of the reasoning mind. But we can also take another point of view: It is like looking from inside out, from the origin to its expression.
So far we have had an ascending order of dream levels surrounded and backed by the soul element. The quality of this view is of a phenotypal nature, meaning that we have only classified appearances. But if we now turn this diagram of the levels by 90° to the side we can add depth and a more profound view to this image.
We have already become aware of a psychic element, the soul, which is present in a varying degree in dreams of almost any kind. In the new picture we perceive of the soul as the dominant element and the different dream levels as superficial structures that have a more or less intense contact with the soul but are otherwise blocking the view and direct access to the soul. And we can also see, that the soul is but a direct spark from the divine.
So let us now have a deeper look into this new image.
Our present conception of the world consists of an evolution starting from matter and progressing through life to the mind. And in between there appears now and then this mystic thing named soul, which cannot be proved by biology, chemistry and physics.
Now, if this is your central conception of existence there is nothing more to add. But this applies only to a small number of people. For the majority, however, there is this being, which religions usually call God, with a wide variety of different names, and which is the origin of everything that is. We will name this concept or being here the Divine.
So in order to have a greater view, we can now enlarge our threefold cosmology.
In the beginning there was the Divine which has created out of itself the manifest and unmanifest world. So everything is divine by origin and in nature. Every thing and every being is linked more or less consciously the the Divine. This link is a spark of the Divine, the soul.
The soul contains the divine potential (meaning it contains all that is and all that will be), which led to the emergence of life out of matter and later on to the emergence of mind out of life.
Now the situation is this: We have the Divine and the soul which is the part of us, that is closest to the Divine. As original element it is our central nucleus. Then we have the common manifestation in which the divine presence is more (matter) or a little less (mind) veiled. But even less veiled does only mean nearly no direct contact to the Divine. To get this contact there are usually two ways: One is the further ascent nearer to the Divine, which means to rise further above mind to the next stages, namely the Supermind, and the other way, which is with regard to our topic more important, is the way inside to our soul.
So as an average human being we are more or less totally ignorant of the Divine, and no religion can mend this. This missing link is the ultimate origin of the chaotic state the world is in. It is only the soul that can give hints on what are the right things to do. And it is constantly at work trying to improve our situation by trying to establish itself as the needed connection.
But the same transform syndrom (If you have a great and lucent idea and trouble with expressing it in words or working it out in matter – that’s the transform syndrom) that has veiled the Divine in the creation also veiles the soul from what we call our consciousness, as long as we have not learned to rend the veil. So only a small fraction of the soul’s impulses comes to the surface. But as we are neither equipped nor properly trained to perceive these impulses they enter unnoticed and have to be transformed, that means translated into a kind of language we are able to understand or at least to perceive. And often theses translations appear to us as dreams, merged and overburdened with a lot of things that have no connection with the original message and distorted to the point of being totally unrecognisable.
To get to know the soul is a usually long process which demands persistance and utmost sincerity. One has to look for the psychic element in all circumstances, trying to become increasingly aware of its hints and impulses and to heed them unconditioned.
A statement of Sri Aurobindo may be helpful in this endeavour:
”It is the soul in us which turns always towards Truth, Good and Beauty, because it is by these things that it itself grows in stature; the rest, their opposites, are a necessary part of experience, but have to be outgrown in the spiritual increase of the being. The fundamental psychic entity in us has the delight of life and all experience as part of the progressive manifestation of the spirit, but the very principle of its delight of life is to gather out of all contacts and happenings their secret divine sense and essence, a divine use and purpose so that by experience our mind and life may grow out of the Inconscience towards a supreme consciousness, out of the divisions of the Ignorance towards an integralising consciousness and knowledge. It is there for that and it pursues from life to life its ever-increasing upward tendency and insistence; the growth of the soul is a growth out of darkness into light, out of falsehood into truth, out of suffering into its own supreme and universal Ananda.“ (The Life Divine, Chap. XIV, p. 610)
And Mira Alfassa – The Mother adds:
”The psychic being always has an influence on the thoughts and actions, but one is rarely conscious of it. To become conscious of the psychic being, one must want to do so, make one’s mind as silent as possible, and enter deep into the heart of one’s being, beyond sensations and thoughts. One must form the habit of silent concentration and descent into the depths of one’s being.
The discovery of the psychic being is a definite and very concrete fact, as all who have had the experience know.“ (Some Answers from The Mother, p. 397)
Now let us turn back to the subject of dreams. As we have already seen, the soul, though heavily veiled, permeates everything. It is a weak influence on our lives, but through omnipresence and persistency its traces can be observed everywhere from those who are able to see.
When we dream, no matter what kind of dream, we loosen our conscious grip on our perception of the world, which is censored by our concept of reality. In dreams we have, some more, some to
a lesser degree, the possibility to look at the world with new eyes, to accept a new reality. And in this there is a double aspect.
The first is that dreams prepare us for new insights and for progress, because progress means to get a wider view and to enlarge, modify or update our conception of reality. Progressing, enlarging one’s horizon means life – immobility, stagnation is death.
The second aspect regards the expression of the soul itself. The soul in it’s nature is absolutely fantastic and exceeds our common everyday existence by lightyears. And in this, in a way, it ressembles the dreams. This similarity makes it easier for the soul to seep through the dense layers of life and mind and find expression as an element or a guiding line of a dream. And in the same way as arts can be an expression for dreams they too can become an istrument to express something of the soul’s essence or message. The greater the psychic element in a dreams, or the more prevalent it is the more important a dream becomes. We should always try to detect this element and to learn from it. In this way we can strengthen the psychic being and help its influence to get more to the front, to become a more direct presence. And it is only the psychic presence that can realise our dreams of love and peace, because love and peace are central attributes of the soul, but not of life and mind, to which these are only theoretical concepts or high ideals.

August 2003