Row Your Boat: When You Are Clear, The World Is Clear

Row Your Boat:  When you are clear, the world is clear

By Mark G. Lersch

www.marklersch.com

www.corequestpotential.com

smilingdeeply@gmail.com

Modern science seems to be verifying what spiritual experience has revealed throughout the ages:  Our thoughts create our experience of reality.  The world we experience is due to thoughts playing deep within our mind.  So what does that mean on a practical level in our everyday lives? 

Everything consists of the energy of thought, from the person who cut us off in traffic, to our own physical bodies; from the earth orbiting the Sun, to the emotions you feel at this moment.  All is an extension and expression of thought.  Science now tells us that our life is a holographic whole and that every part of reality, a fractal, reflects the whole of reality, much as described in the "Indra's Net" of Buddhism.  Alan Watts described it as: "Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum.” 

Also, it has now been proven that, at the quantum level, it is not possible to observe an experiment without the observer affecting the outcome and that when one quantum particle has interacted with another and they are then separated by thousands of miles, they now know what the other is experiencing!  How is this possible?  

The truth seems to be that life is a sort of dream and we are the dreamer creating all of it, as well as being the experiencer of the dream.  To me this is the real secret behind the "secret" of the law of attraction.  Pretty mind-blowing!  Most of us who have been on the spiritual path have probably at times intuited or sensed that this is somehow true: Life is a dream created by thoughts playing in mind.  To change my life I must change my thoughts. 

Just for fun, ask yourself "what if this is really true" and look around for evidence.  One of my favorite clues is the children’s song, Row Your Boat: “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily life is but a dream.”  Notice it doesn’t say to sit there passively, you have to do your part in rowing.  It tells us to row your boat, not someone else’s and it advises us to do so down the stream, not against the current!  And when we realize life is a dream we can really enjoy the ride.   

Isn't it because we are in a dream that miracles can occur?  Is that why vastly opposite diets can seem to cure the same impossible health problems or why a tiny pill taken once a day can seem to alleviate depression.  Isn't it also why a hunk of metal can carry passengers through the air and why we can speak to someone on the other side of the earth using a tiny device?  Isn't it why there seem to be countless and seemingly contradictory spiritual methods to awaken from the dream into the truth of Love?

In a dream all things are possible.  But if we don't realize we are dreaming then life can become a nightmare that imprisons us.  It is precisely because the dream is so convincing that we attempt to change and fix things by trying to control the holographic projections in the dream (effects) instead of correcting the true problem at the level of thought (cause)?  If you were dreaming and didn't know it, wouldn't you be terrified when your bank account indicated that you have no money?  And, wouldn't you try to do something in the dream to get more?  Wouldn't you panic when a doctor character told you that you were going to die of a disease?  And, wouldn’t you then try to do something in the dream to fix the illness? 

On the other hand, what if you knew life was “but a dream” and you understood how to change the nightmare into a happy dream?  This is what I believe The Course in Miracles (ACIM), Ho'oponnopono, Buddhism, New Thought and countless other signposts in the dream are pointing us to.  I would also propose that this is ultimately what Inner Bonding is leading us to as well.  Try the following experiment and find out for yourself. 

With one minor enhancement Inner Bonding can potentially wake us from the nightmare:  Instead of taking 100% responsibility only for your feelings, what if you took 100% responsibility for your entire reality...as if you were in a dream? 

Imagine the following scenario:

In your dream, it appears that there is not enough money in your bank account to pay your bills.

Step one:  Turn towards and breathe into that experience, feel the feelings and conscious thoughts that are there (don't deny what is happening in your dream, that is called “spiritual bypassing” or the "wrong use of denial" in ACIM). 

Step two:  Open to learning that you are dreaming by taking 100% responsibility for absolutely everything (remember this doesn't mean shaming or blaming yourself). 

Step three:  Dialogue with and embrace with compassion the human dreamer who appears to be suffering. 

Step four:  Open to Spirit and invite Spirit to heal and dissolve whatever unloving/fearful thoughts are causing this fearful dream experience.  We don't even need to know what these thoughts are.  We know that they exist because the dream is reflecting to us that fearful experience.   Then we ask Spirit to correct the causal fearful thoughts because we want to experience the reality of God (peace, joy, abundance, love).  When love meets the fearful thoughts they dissolve and the result is that we feel at peace and loved. 

Step 5: Either the outer dream now shifts making the abundant reality of God evident in our dream (i.e. money seems to appear in our life) or we feel inspired to take some loving action from the experience of abundance as a creative expression of who we really are.  Either way fear is gone.

Step 6: Evaluate over time if the life-dream is becoming happier and more peaceful?  Are you waking up out of the nightmare?

For one day or for one week try this experiment with everything in your life and see what happens.  Try this with every judging thought that arises in your head, try it in traffic, with your spouse, in your work situation, while watching the news and when your kids come home after curfew, and try this when your client seems to be stuck. 

Then let me know what happens.  And if it only makes your nightmare worse, well then abandon it and forget you ever read this article!  I am just a crazy person in your dream, after all.  In the meantime, I will hopefully be taking 100% responsibility for the fact that you showed up in my life, and I will invite Spirit to meet with love the thought that created this shared experience for us both.  And wishing you a wonderful dream-life!

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily….     

Mark is a certified Inner Bonding facilitator and spiritual psychotherapist in private practice in Longmont, Colorado.  He can be reached at 970-670-0557 and via email: smilingdeeply@gmail.com. His website: www.marklersch.com