1. Opposites live within us all. I have worked with dreams for decades because they are the most profound spiritual guidance we all have access to each night. While I assume that “I have chosen to work with dreams” the opposite may be true. Was I chosen and then lured by my dreams to serve them for a lifetime? In the psyche, all opposites are true. Dreams reveal to us our hidden sides which can often oppose us (Why else would swearing off Haagen-Dazs or smoking make us crave it even more?) but these oppositions are necessary to make us whole. When young you may emphasize achievement, later friendship may rank higher, but both were always part of you.

2. We are all method actors. Every night, every person is a movie star in an inner drama where we appear in one totally convincing role after another. We spend many hours performing in an endless series of gripping dramas each of which we fully accept as reality at the time. When I am dreaming, it seems completely normal that I live in this particular Yurt or Yacht or Castle that the dream has created for me! “Dreams are real while they last,” wrote Havelock Ellis, “Can we say more of life?”

3. Dreams imply that God likes to think in Stories. Every nightly dream is a parable made to order; a lesson just for us. Some mystics believe that we are stories unfolding in the mind of a greater presence. Waking life is as symbolic as are dreams. The eastern concept of maya means that while our consciousness is real, the physical world it inhabits is only a Waking Dream. This world is like a movie set that allows us to physically experience our spiritual lessons (while trying to hold down a day job!). “All the world’s a stage” and so is every dream.

4. Whoever makes us makes our dreams. Dreams wing from afar to nest in our minds, a personal gift from our Source. Each dream activity blazes neurological pathways which affect our future decisions as if the events had actually happened. Although the bear that chased you last night was “only a dream,” your real heart was really pounding all the time! This morning, both brain and body believe you were actually chased by a bear, which can affect your point of view in interesting ways.

5. Dreams flow from the Cosmic “arche-typewriter” as a universal language through which we all commune with our Source. Dreams inform our (earthbound) head what our (heaven-seeking) heart already knows. Dreams email to the village idiot named Ego, whatever the sage voices within us want it to know. Jung’s star pupil Marie-Louise von Franz said our “dreams are nightly letters from God.” Are you reading your mail?

6. Every dream is Universal; Every dream is personal and hints at specific life details. In the psyche, all opposites are true, remember? Dreams are globally personal. And they seem to know their entire future at the moment of their birth. They enrich and speak to anyone who pays attention, and yet every dream includes some meanings that are totally personal to the dreamer. It is because of dreaming that humans are so much wiser asleep than when awake.

7. Our mind’s connection to the higher self is like a two-way radio. We must stop transmitting in order to receive. That’s why dreams mostly appear in the night while our mind is off duty. First the mouth, and then the mind, must stop talking for us to hear the inner wisdom which operates all day long beneath awareness and emerges in dream by night. We mostly obscure the still, small voice by broadcasting our own reality-maintaining, wall to wall, mental chatter. That ego chatter is often called Monkey Mind.

8. Free will includes how we use our attention. The poet Allen Ginsberg, in teaching writing and awareness, always advised: “Notice what you notice.” Meditation and receptivity quiet the mind and allow us to intuit by day the messages that dreams portray dramatically by night. Observers have written that Aldous Huxley, when asked any question at all, would close his eyes, go to a place of deep inner knowing and return, every time, with a gem of insight. Until we master such focus, dreams are the best training ground we have for hearing the continuous wisdom of the guide inside.

You can sign up for the “U of You Notes” newsletter and the free 8 part email class “Discover Your Dreams: A Beginners Guide to Dream Interpretation”. http://www.UniversityofYourself.com/DiscoverYourDreams_a.html

DreamTalk is a low cost dreamwork e-group which Dr Masa, Debbie Hart and Dr Marjorie Miles co-moderate that allows you to submit dreams and to help others understand their dreams. Further info at: http://www.UniversityofYourself.com/DreamTalk.html

Ron Masa, Ph.D. wrote columns on dreams while in private practice for 25 years. Dr Masa has taught classes in dream work, psychic development, Jungian psychotherapy, and I Ching and Dream Work for Naropa University. He and Debbie Hart co-lead the University of Yourself (http://www.UniversityofYourself.com), an online resource for accessing the wisdom within every person.

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Your Spirit is continuously beaming communications to you. As long as your mind is properly receptive to your Spirit, this vital communication is received. But if your mind is busy being distracted by its fascination with the world that serves the ego, or by the fear-based broadcasts of the lower self, the communications are not receivedor the signals are fuzzy at best. Like a radio broadcast that takes place regardless of who is listening, your Spirit is constantly broadcasting to you, but you can only receive that broadcast if your radio is tuned to the right station and you are paying attention.

Of course, in addition to paying attention and being open and receptive to the wellspring of information coming to you through your Spirit, you need to understand Its language and have confidence in it. Because this language is personal between you and your Spirit, you are the only one who can unlock its secrets through attention and experience. It is not something that someone can give you a special decoder for! There are some generalizations I can offer you, though.

The language of your Spirit is only sometimes verbalmost often, it is presented in a non-verbal format. This language of your Spirit, regardless of the form it takes, is what we are accustomed to calling intuition and can usually best be described as a knowing. It may take the form of an urge, an impulse, a feeling, a dream, a vision, a song you can’t get out of your head, a bodily sensation, a voicepretty much the sky’s the limit on your Spirit’s resources for getting through to you.

Your Spirit will often give you information via books, movies, things you find on the Internet, spiritual teachers, and even from the mouths of your husband, your mother, your baby sister, complete strangerspretty much anybodyeven people you don’t like! (Of course, these “mouthpieces for Spirit” often have no clue that’s what they are.) Your Spirit knows you intimately and will use any means necessary to deliver Its messages, and sometimes those means are extremely creativesometimes they have to be!

I can almost hear you asking this next question: How do you know for sure which messages are from your Spirit and which are from your ego or some other lesser, untrustworthy part of you? And which messages are your Spirit speaking through your mother and which messages are simply from your mother? (And yes, your Spirit trumps even your mother in the message hierarchy!) First and most obviously, when it is a message from your Spirit, it is higher in frequency. For this and many other reasons, you will need to learn how to sense and monitor frequency.

You were sent to Earth with both mental and physical equipment for gauging frequency, for discerning things that are in harmony and aligned with Spirit, and those that are not. Though these tools have been largely decommissioned since you arrived on Earth, it is time to re-commission them in service to your Spirit. To develop the ability to recognize the truth coming to you via your Spirit and differentiate it from the ideas coming from a lesser source, learn to pay close attention to what goes on inside your mind and body in relationship to energy, to frequency.

One of the most important frequency-monitoring skills to develop is the ability to sense when your frequency rises and when it drops. When you are aligned with your Spirit, your frequency is high due to the increase of Life Force/Love alignment provides. Likewise, when you attune to the voice of your Spirit, you will experience a rise in frequency. When you are attuned with something lesser, your frequency will drop. Your Spirit’s messages will always be of a high frequency.

When the idea or message is coming to you through your Spirit, you may feel an excitement, a lightness, an openness, a sense of peace, or perhaps a jolt of energy such as a sensation of heat in your solar plexus or a swelling of Love in your heart. You may have the sense that a puzzle piece has clicked into place. Or you may at first be unaware of feeling anything at all. Mentally, you may even experience some resistance.

So often our logic-loving, “it’s not real unless I can see it and it’s not valid unless it fits in my box” minds will try to prove that ideas from Spirit are threatening or illogical, but with careful observation, you will know when that is going on. It is natural for your ego-self to try and prevent you from taking a path that looks to it to be risky, but when you devote yourself to following your inner guidance, the fire of your Spirit will ultimately raise you up to overcome the fear and propel you forward if it is in alignment with the Creator’s Design for Harmony and Wholeness. Your Spirit is always steering you toward the higher path.

On the other hand, you may find that when the idea or message you are considering is not coming through your Spirit, or if your Spirit is trying to steer you away from something, you feel a drop in your overall energy. Remember that when you are receptive to anything other than your Spirit, there is a drop in frequency as you are out of alignment and Life Force is lessened. You may feel a shutting down, a closing in, an uncomfortable feeling in your solar plexus, a sense that there’s a dark cloud present, perhaps a kind of a sticky “thickness” to the energy or, a special signal that you’ll come to recognize with experience. Or you just may have that nagging feeling that something isn’t right. You may notice that when your thinking is out of harmony with the Whole, your body just feels weaker, less alive. Remember that when you are not aligned with your Spirit, your energythe Life Force moving through youis diminished.

Another clue for discerning if a communication is coming from your Spirit is that your Spirit is all about ease and simplicity. Messages from your Spirit will be simple and elegant as are all things of higher frequency. If what you are getting is heavy, complex, complicated, or convoluted, it is likely that the message is not purely from your Spirit. Most probably, your mind has presented an answer without your Spirit’s guidance, or has added its own, not-necessarily-accurate take on top of your Spirit’s divine guidance. While one of your logical mind’s jobs is to take what your Spirit tells it and convert it into concrete form, it needs to first allow the energy of it to trip the right mental triggers, not just impatiently grab the message and appropriate it to support its own limited ideas. As you grow in your relationship with your Spirit and raise your frequency, this pure translation will be instantaneous. For now, just be aware that your logical mind isn’t always trustworthy the way your Spirit is!

Your Spirit’s voice will never guide you to do harm to anyoneeither in a direct or indirect wayand will always guide you toward greater integrity. Though you may be called upon to speak out or act in ways that challenge the status quo or make the ego-selves of others uncomfortable, your Spirit’s voice will never tell you to do something that will cause damage to anyone. While you’ve probably heard of people who, after committing a heinous act, say that “The voices told me to do it,” or even “God told me to do it,” you can be assured that the voice they were heeding was not their Spirit’s. As I have found, my Spirit’s voice sounding within me sounds just like me talking to myself. If you are hearing a voice or voices that don’t sound like you, you will want to double check that what you are hearing is, indeed, a message from your Spirit.

If, after applying all the foregoing, you are in doubt about the origin of any internal communication, make a firm declaration that you will only heed instructions from your own perfectly-aligned Spirit; declare that you are only willing to respond to energy coming through your Spirit, and that you will ignore anything lesser. Making such a declaration on a regular basis, such as before you ask your Spirit for guidance on any matter, or just as a way to start your day, can expedite your realignment with your Spirit, raise your frequency, and make clear communication easierand keep the serpent’s input out of your conversations!

Keep in mind that, regardless of the details, your primary instruction from your Spirit, no matter the situation, will always be, “Radiate Love.” As the highest frequency energy in our universe, and our assurance of being aligned with harmony, Love truly is the universal solution to all our problems.

Excerpted from Recreating Eden

©2005 Julia Rogers Hamrick

Julia Rogers Hamrick has been a spiritual-growth facilitator for over two decades, and is the author of Recreating Eden: The Exquisitely Simple, Divinely Ordained Plan for Transforming Your Life and Your Planet. Julia writes about and leads seminars on proactive joy, and the relationship between frequency and experience. For more information on Julia and on recreating Eden, visit http://www.recreating-eden.com To read about Julia’s own dance with Spirit, ego, and frequency, read Julia’s blog, accessible from her website.

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