Читать книгу Tufti the Priestess. Live Stroll Through a Movie - Вадим Зеланд - Страница 5

Well, my dears, if you have already walked through a waking dream, you should now be clear that the comparison of reality to a motion picture is no simple allegory. You really were there, as a living character, while the other participants continued to move around as if they were sleeping and following some kind of external script.

The comparison may not seem wholly fitting, after all, we all understand that people sleep in bed at night, and during the day operate more or less consciously.

However, you saw for yourself how negligible this proportion of “more or less” is when you noticed your own attention constantly falling into either the internal or the external screen. You undoubtedly saw this and now know how it happens.

From now on, whenever you go for a walk in the dream, you will catch yourself continually falling back into the screen and drifting off to sleep again. Something distracted you, caught your attention, or you started thinking about something and… and that’s it! You cease to exist as an aware human being; you can’t even call your soul your own.

So who owns it? Who are you taking orders from?

You are being directed by an external script, woven into a motion picture, in which you are now one of the characters.

I shall gradually explain what all this means, all in good time. For now, you must be clear about one simple thing. Both in sleeping and in waking, you are in a film being carried along in the flow of the script. You can’t call your soul your own because your attention is not your own.

The moment you wake up and take control of your attention, the script will lose its hold on you. Of course, you have to go to work and attend classes as usual and fulfil your day to day obligations, but not as strictly as when you are directed by the script.

Unlike the other characters around you who are sleeping, you see yourself, you see reality and you can consciously control your will, which you haven’t been doing before now. This is your first step into a new level of self-mastery and mastering of your reality. You have woken up from ordinary sleep many times, but you have not yet tried reaching a higher level, right?

In an ordinary dream, you are helpless, even if you are aware that you are dreaming. You are inside a film and completely gripped by the story because your attention is immersed in the screen. But unlike the other characters, you are capable of dragging your attention up another level, i.e. waking up in the dream and even going two levels higher, and waking up in reality.

The characters in a dream can’t do this. How are they different to waking people? They have no self-awareness; they have no sense of personal identity; they have no personal will; they are not free to act as they see fit; they are subject to the script. They have no soul. They are simply templates – mannequins.

When you learn to wake up in the dream, try the following experiment. Ask a dream mannequin this question: “Who are you?” They will try and avoid the question or will tell you what their role in the script is. But they won’t say, “I am myself”. They don’t have their own ‘Self’.

In the same way, you could ask the mannequin, “Do you know that I am sleeping now and am seeing you in a dream?” This question will throw them, too, because they have never fallen asleep and never woken up. The dream mannequin lives in a film just like a fictional character, once shot on a film roll.

The only difference is that a normal film is shot by normal people, whereas the film rolls of dreams are stored in the Eternity archive. They have always been there and always will be, for as long as this Universe exists.

Living people have a soul, will, and self-perception. They can say, “I am myself”, although that is all they can say about themselves. Living people are aware of themselves, but their self-awareness, as you have seen for yourself, sleeps, and their will is used rarely, when they need to mobilise themselves to take some kind of action.

And what’s more, the will is used only within the context of the current frame, but we’ll talk about this a little later. I have already done you a great honour, spending so much time with you, my little fit-for-nothings. Make the most of this moment, admire me, praise me, flatter me – I am Tufti, your High Priestess!