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found dream article
Nancy and Dave. Thank you both for your posts, kind words, ideas and suggestions. I looked through my files at great length the other day and did find a photo-copy of the article I wrote on dreams for the Macrobiotic (magazine) before I lent it to a friend who did not return it. It is rather long to copy over and I have hardly any extra time running my new company so I can only quote a few sentences at this time. Maybe at a later date I will revise the article and submit it to Cybermacro's article section.
I'm sure a lot more information has been discovered since this article was written (Oct 1977). This part has something to do with "alignment" during the sleep state:
"In the state of sleep/rest we are unoccupied with aoutward and material objects, therefore, the whole organism is relatively free from stress whih allows organic functioning to operate fluidly -- overcoming blockages or barriers caused by the conscious awake brain. While asleep our physical senses operate only slightly. The eyes are perhaps the only sense organs which are totally inoperative; the rest work with subliminal awareness. At this time (while aslee) man is at his most helpless state and quite vulerable to both physical and psycological attack.
To compensate for physical impairment the intuitive functioning of the autonomic nervous system works at a much greater degree. Our receptivity to invisible energy patterns becomes fully in tune. We unconsiously release ourselves from bodily identification , and as Yogananda (Indian guru who wrote Autobiography of a Yogi) says 'and of merging the life force with healing currents in the main brain region and in the six sub-dynamos of our spinal center and recharged by the cosmic energy that sustains all life.' "
Dave wrote:
> My main point of interest is to have spiritual dreams while living the macrobiotic lifestyle which I believe in for enviromental, life simplification, ethical, spiritual, philosophic and health reasons and more. I have often wondered why Ohsawa, who I admire tremendously, often said that a healthy person would not dream. So in my mind, I have tried to differentiate between what I call spiritual dreaming and what occurs when one is living and eating on the yin and yang extremes. <
I don't know what "spiritual dreaming" means. The term SPIRITUAl is quite ambiguous and open to a variety of interpretation which may include anything from empathy with living things, increase awarness, a theological vision, sublime feelings, etc., From a macrobiotic and Taois viewpoint, however we can associate spirituality with invisible forces which are opposed to material, physical fores, both of which are one -- no division. Like night and day, life and death, sleep and awake, yin and yang, etc. So you need to give us YOUR definition of spiritual dreaming so we can understand better what you mean. From the same article on dreaming (above) I quote the following which may be relative to your question:
"Dr. Leonid Vasiliev, a leading Soviet psychologist and parapsychologist states at 'dreams contain only what we have experienced consciously or unconsciously. They are nothing more than a reprocessing by a partially awake brain of erratically tangled fragments and traces of some past experience of what, at one time or another, ahd seen, heard, thought or read.' (I also subitted that some dreams are experiences passed down from ancestors like DNA.) Aristotle declares all visions of sleep are produced by the senses and the imagination."
I did read the Briscoe link that you posted in the Spirituality Forum here and found it somewhat helpful for me to understand a little more about God. I think it is good that Briscoe thinks its a good idea to have different interpretaions of God, but disagree (and find it a demeaning) that people who believe in God have more fulfilling lives than non-believers. This is an absurd assumption and one that is overly ethno-centric. There are billions of people who live on this planet, including all infants (and animals, plants, etc) that do not believe in God(s) that lives that are full and happy as believers. This God equation, in my opinion, has nothing to do with macrobiotics. It is a separate issue altogether. Macrobiotics embraces all people from all walks of life, with or without religion. No one is greater or lesser because of his/her belief or non-belief in a deity. Many of our current world problems are due to cetain religious beliefs and a take on God that wishes destruction to all that do not follow that path. Sounds like the Crusades revisited!
As an American Briscoe has this right and freedom to express his thoughts but as a macrobiotic he must understand that if he says belivers in God(s) have better lives than non-belivers, then he does much to diminish the all-embracing vision of macrobiotics and shows that he is a dualist at heart. So thank you Dave for pointing this fact out to us. You were correcct to place your post in the Spiritual forum.
I hope this helps.
In peace, Roy
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