Dying to Wake Up

I die daily. -1 Corinthians 15:31

How do you feel about death? Have you ever seen your life flash before your eyes? What do you think happens when we die? I’ve found that the most important meditation I’ve ever learned to become comfortable with is the concept of dwelling on my own death. This is not to be thought of as a morbid concept, though your cultural and religious upraising may scream for it to only be looked at in that light; it is meant to be understood from a higher perspective. When I lay on the grass and envision my body decaying back into the dust from whence it came, I am filled with joy. Recognizing how odd this might sound, I say that one of the happiest thoughts I’ve trained myself to be comfortable with is simply the song of my own death. I feel that this is what Paul was actually implying when he wrote that scripture, that he dies daily in his meditations and prayer to the I Am. Please, spare me your suicide counseling. I am not suicidal, nor do I wish to leave this plane right now for any reason. I have too much work to do here to just leave it all undone. This is simply my own intuition, but,

I feel like we speak of life and death with an odd flavor on our tongues. I'm not talking about death that is brought about by mindless tragedy and violence. I'm talking about how we individually view the overall scheme of our lives, and the death that we assume to be inevitable for ourselves. Based on my own subjective explorations into consciousness, I suspect that when we eventually abandon our flesh-puppets we will wake up from what will feel like a deep, restful night of sleep in a reality too complex to envision properly with the conscious mind. It seems to me that while we are “alive” we are actually sleeping; experiencing a dream, and while we are “dead” we are, relatively speaking anyway, more "awake”. I’ve died countless times in my dreams, and after spending a lot of my life being startled awake from these deaths, I’ve begun to explore the feeling of death more and more each time I die. There is a remarkable liberation I experience that is very difficult to verbalize. In my dreams I’ve died of disease, starvation, murder, and yes even suicide. Of all the dreams I’ve had that have significantly impacted my life outlook, zero of them had anything to do with the Me I identify myself with here in this life. I’ve taken the role of countless other people that aren’t named Seth Mason. I’ve lived and died as those people. Entire lifetimes from birth, childhood, adulthood, and senility, have taken place within my dreaming mind within as little as a half-hour’s nap. The first time this experience happened to me I was convinced for months that I was legitimately insane; finding it rather difficult to separate the feelings and memories of one identity from this current one I’m living, but then I began to explore the concept much further.

I suspect that in a larger holofractographic scheme, my current life that I’m experiencing is little more than another dream; a dream concocted by an aspect of my mind that is more encompassing than the little ol' me that sits in the library typing this. This is a humbling realization for me, because I fancy myself to be pretty good at the art of lucid dreaming. I feel like I know how to build a good, complete dream landscape. I am able to say to myself, most nights anyway, “I want to dream about _____________,” and then experience that dream. But, I realize now that I am only a young apprentice in the art of dreaming existence into form. I realize now that the part of myself that is dreaming this larger, more tangible reality into existence is in fact far superior in skill to any of the dreams I can concoct on my own. I miss the details, I subjectively insert changes to physics to allow for my desire to wield supernatural ability. These things fall short of the glory of what is possible, and the dreaming mind of my higher self is the teacher I look to for instruction and example. You see, the dreams that I construct using my conscious will are simply an offshoot of who I am here in this life to start with. They will always be reductionistic when compared to the reality of my current life that my soul is dreaming. I see my soul as a large branch of a tree, and I am one of the smaller branches that sprouted from it. My consciously concocted dreams are then the even smaller offshoots sprouting from that. The other dreams, the dreams where I cannot attain full lucidity and live out the life of a completely different identity in a completely different time period, I suspect are the dreams where my consciousness itself is retracting back to the source-mind, the main branch of my soul, and entering into the dream of one of those other Me-sized branches for a time. In this sense, those other lives I’m living are dreams being manifested by my soul that are so vast and complex I’m consciously incapable of altering them yet; they are as energetically complex as my own actual life is. While I play around with fashioning twigs, my soul is supporting thick branches.

In one dream I threw myself off of a slave ship and drowned in the middle of the ocean. At first I struggled to stay afloat, but I had never even seen a large body of water up until that horrid boat ride and couldn't swim at all. I flailed around, gasping water both in my throat and my esophagus. Then, I quit. I gave up. I sank down and down, holding my breath as my body told me I had to, but quickly I reached the inevitable conclusion: I was going to die. I knew I was going to die before I jumped and just didn’t want to think about it; the alternative of remaining on the ship still seemed worse. Nobody came after me, because they too knew I was going to die. In that moment of panic-stricken struggle to survive, I decided to see what happens if I just stop fighting it. I took the largest inhalation of water I could muster. I let the ocean fill my lungs, and it hurt so very badly. My ears were popping as I sank deeper, my chest was pulsing with a pain all the torture my captors performed on me paled to, and out of nowhere all the pain stopped. There was blackness all around me, and I felt an odd sensation of falling asleep; I was "loosing consciousness" as we ironically like to call it. At this weakened point in my dream I became lucid in my thoughts; I recognized that I was dreaming, and I was ok with it all. I knew in my heart that when this experience fades I will have a choice: I could continue to follow my death deeper and deeper, or I could simply wake up. I decided this time I didn’t want to follow my death as I have so many of my other deaths. I decided this death wasn’t very fun. I woke up, and took my dogs to the park to play in the Sun. When the moment comes for this Me to also die, I expect that a larger portion of my mind will become started into lucidity just as I have experienced countless times in my own dreams. I expect this knowing to calm me in my final moments, for I know the feeling well. In fact, you know the feeling well, too.

Our lives are an endless dance between quadrillions of deaths and births. Right now, there are millions of cells composing your body that are in their death throws. Simultaneously there is (if you’re healthy, anyway) millions of cells dividing and repopulating the body. On average, every seven years of your life it can be said that who you were seven years ago is completely, entirely, and utterly dead in the most physical of terms. After seven years, there is not even one singular cell within you that has not already died. Are you 28? You’ve physically perished four times now. 63? Congratulations, you’ve lived nine physical lives. Sure, the momentum of your consciousness gives the appearance that your life has sustained unchanged throughout this period, but such is only an illusion. You could not be who you are today if you were not composed of a multitude of deaths.

To be awake is to simply occupy a specific space-time grid location for what is perceived to be an extended duration. We call it being awake, but you’re really just looking at this one spot in lieu of others. When you dream, you leave this spot and explore different ones. In a grander sense, what we think of as wakefulness and sleep can be easily overlaid upon the pattern of life and death. Now, one might equate life with wakefulness, and death with sleep, but I argue that it is the opposite. While our soul continues to dream about us, our lives are created and made possible. While our souls are awake, there is no focus on our lives and therefore no perception of them. In the same way I die in my dreams only to awaken here in this broader world, I propose that when I die in this “life” I will wake up to a proportionally broader experience. . . unless I wish to turn over and dive into another dream in order to continue my learning processes, of course.

I feel that this is what the concept of reincarnation is actually implying, because in order to occupy an arena that is in full command of both the space and time that it's dreaming, enter into life anywhere within space and time at will, the source of the consciousness must come from something broader in dimensionality than space and time. Otherwise, you couldn't even perceive the time you're manipulating (kinda like us). If this is the case, using the analogy I invoked earlier, then the "trunk" of the thing supporting the "branch" that is you lays dimensionally beyond space-time. Keeping this in mind, it would follow that each and every "time" that larger portion dreamt, meaning every "incarnation" it creates, is capable of beginning its inception at any given place or time available within the realms of "past" and "future" relative to us right now. Some call them "past lives", but to the higher portion of your self governing its composing cells its all working in unison. 

Eventually, when you have learned the lessons you set out to learn through all of these endless dreams and experiences, you will begin to feel bored and feel motivated to look elsewhere. I think that the miraculous stories of those famous historical men who ascended into "heaven" or "nirvana" or however you like to say it were indeed very special and unique people, because they were on their final dream; the dream where they finally decide to "wake up"; never to physically incarnate here again. 

What matters most, I suppose, is whether you will remember this dream as a good one, or a nightmare.


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