‘View’ is a term I’ve learned from the Tibetan Vajrayana lineages of Buddhism. In these traditions, after practices that deconstruct many of the different scaffolds that create our identities (Self, Time, Thought, Emotion, etc.), meditators take up a View, and ‘hold the View.’ That becomes the practice. The idea is not to bring about an experience, but to orient to all and any experience from the View. As we do so more and more, View does bring up experiences that confirm View, and we can relax further and further with a deep and embodied Trust into the View.
The View of Dreaming is not the View of Buddhism, but the practice orientation is similar. In Dreaming, we recognize that 1) Being is Unconditionally Creative, and 2) all that happens in Manifest Reality is an outpouring of this Creative Reality. When we take this View, a few main things happen: 1) We find and surface ‘blocks’ in our body, in our emotions, in our thinking and in our underlying assumptions and orientations to the world where we feel, in one way or another, trapped. This allows us to examine these from a place of freedom, and understanding that whatever they are or were, they have in some way served us. 2) Related to this, it allows us to Align with the Activity of Dreaming, the Whole Creative process that we could never ourselves take credit for. Nevertheless, I can float down a riverbed, or I can try to row my boat off shore. One of these is going to be effective, one is not. When we align with the totality of the Creative Process, we can start to untangle the ‘knots’ in our Dreaming, as well as start to see our Dreaming as being not only inside of us, but the Activity of the entire world that we are, moment to moment. 3) And in the experiences of 1 + 2, that is, of relaxing knots of being, and recognizing the Universal Creativity, we begin to Trust the View that everything is an expression of Creativity, and to relax into it further and further, allowing us a kind of Activity on an order much deeper than simple control. Again, you can’t control the wind, but you can learn how to sail with it. A bit more on experience: Experience doesn’t have the power to take you out of or bring you into View. But neither is View a simple mantra, you just telling yourself that life as it is is Creative. It’s a whole-being orientation. If you’re telling yourself that some shitty experience you’re having is really just the manifestation of Universal Creativity, but on every level of your being you’re trying to get rid of the experience, you’re dreaming about relief and you’re really just biding time — you’re not aware of your Dreaming. In Buddhism, this is called Ignorance: not recognizing that all events are interconnected, and ignorance causes craving, or greed — the attempt to cause some sort of experience to happen, or to become something in the future — and aversion, or hatred — the attempt to not-experience what we’re already experiencing. ‘I don’t like this experience’ is fine — that may be true. But “I don’t want this experience” is self-defeating. You’re already having it! Experiences, however, don’t have the power to take you out of View. You give events and experience that power — it’s not in the thing, or the experience, itself. You can read a bit more about the practice of Dreaming here: What is Dreaming? Or continue in this series on Dreaming with Dreaming is Practical.
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