We are all made of light – not the spiritual hippy dippy, can’t we all just get along kind of light – but true particles of light. We are also stars. Whether or not you believe in a God, science has proven that the elements that create stars are the same as the elements that create our planet, as well as elements that exist within each of us. A good amount of our DNA is similar to many other living creatures on our planet and about 99% of our DNA is exactly the same in each human being. From a scientific perspective, we are all the same, and we are physically connected to all of creation.
Beyond the physical world, what we can perceive with our senses, is the psychological world. Our brains are capable of taking information in and then processing that information based on a pre-set context of parameters that we develop when we are very young. As a child, when you pointed to a piece of fruit, you would not know it was an apple until your mother or father told you the word to associate with the visual information you had gathered. Those parameters help us to more clearly define things, people, places, etc. that we encounter along our life’s journey.
What stood out for me in Part 1 is the concept Ruiz writes about “that we dream when we are awake and we dream when we are asleep.” When we are awake, these dreams have a linear format and when you are asleep the framework subsides – dreams often change. How many times have been driving or walking somewhere only to realize a few moments/minutes/etc. later that you either don’t remember where you going, or that you don’t remember the details of the trip? How many times have you driven by a street corner only to notice one day there is a huge office building where an empty lot once stood and you say to yourself or someone near you, “when did they build that?!”
This is what it means to dream while we are awake….to have a lack of awareness for the present moment and all moments that came before it. He goes onto to explain about “society’s dream” to further the point as to how much of our reality is a dream….all of the distractions that we preoccupy ourselves with – work, school, TV, radio, clothes, money, Facebook (oh the irony), books, Internet, our own egos….the list goes on and on…..these are our attachments and our aversions that keep us from knowing, trusting, and loving our true Selves….these are the things that catch our attention (our awareness). In Part 2, Ruiz discusses the implications (or karma) whether or not we choose to allow them to keep our attention, or if we will choose to allow our attention to shift to something else.
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