There is a problem that some people face. No, I take that back. There is a problem that almost everyone faces. What is that problem? That problem is, we are afraid of following our dreams.

We are afraid that someone will criticize us or judge us. We are afraid that we will fail. We are afraid that the dream may be too big for us. Or that someone else will knock us down before we can achieve them.

We are afraid of our imagination, which constantly shows us what could go wrong. What could fail. What bad things may come to us as a result of following our dreams.

We are afraid of examining our beliefs. The beliefs that tell us that we are small. That we are ignorant. That we are automatically prone to failure. That we do not deserve to achieve our dreams.

We are afraid of tackling the obstacles that are in our way. We are afraid of doing what is hard, but necessary. We are afraid of investing in tomorrow, because of what we may lose today. We are afraid that these obstacles are simply too big for us, and so our dreams are not worth it.

I do not know how many people actually have this problem. But I do know that you should multiply whatever that number is by one hundred. Because for every person who admits to this problem, there are at least one hundred people who are too afraid to even admit that they have this problem.

I am writing this because I am a person who has this problem. I am a person who is afraid to follow my dreams. And I am admitting to it.

I have fooled myself. I have refused to examine the beliefs that hold me back from my dreams. Because I am afraid and because I am conflicted.

I feel conflicted because some beliefs are in conflict with my dream, and so I do not know which to choose. Do I choose my dreams, or do I choose my beliefs?

My Dreams

First, let me outline what my two primary dreams are right now. My first dream is to dedicate my life to exploring human consciousness. So what do I mean by this? What does this entail?

This means that I want to explore what it really means to be human, and to live a human life. I want to explore the source of human consciousness itself. I want to explore what physical life ultimately means, why we are here, and what happens when the physical body dies.

I want to explore Truth. I want to figure out what is true and what is false. I want to understand this world. I want to understand the core of how the physical world operates, and where our place is in it. I want to determine what beliefs correspond with reality, and what beliefs are better to just let go of. I want to understand Truth.

This is my first and primary dream. My second dream is actually derived from the first. My second dream is this: To follow my first dream while maintaining enough income to support myself and my family.

Basically, one of two things have to happen for my second dream to come true. Either I have to earn a decent income from following my first dream, or I have to have enough passive income in order to not think about money at all.

Where I Have Failed

So far I have embraced the passive income stream idea, while completely rejecting the idea of turning my dream into a source of income. This isn’t necessarily a ‘bad’ idea. It’ll work, eventually. The problem is that I still have 8-12 years to go before I can achieve complete financial freedom. And I’m starting to get very impatient.

So why haven’t I considered the former idea? Why haven’t I thought about turning my dream into a source of income? Because of fear, and because of beliefs. For my own sake I will briefly go over the fears and beliefs that stop me from pursuing my dream.

The Fears that Hold Me Back

I am not afraid of failure by itself. In fact, most of the time I embrace it more than I would a success. Why? Because when I fail at something it gives me a chance to learn something new. It gives me a chance to calibrate and improve myself for next time. Failure encourages me to grow.

If I succeed at something it’s no big deal. Yay, I succeeded, now what? I just don’t get a thrill out of success in and of itself. Then again I honestly expect to succeed at just about everything I do. This isn’t because I have some sort of imaginary ‘pride’ issue. This is simply an observation based upon past results. If I succeeded 95% of the time in the past it would be kind of ignorant of me to expect to fail now, wouldn’t it?

But there is still that chance, isn’t there? There is still that 5% chance that I may fail. While my odds may be pretty good, the consequences of failing to start my own business can be pretty high. I know this from first hand experience. On the bright side I’ve learned a lot from previous failures, so my current odds of success have improved tremendously.

But if I do fail in this regard it can have bad effects for my family, especially if I quit my day job in order to pursue my dream. And that is what I am afraid of. I am afraid of the consequences it would have on my family if I ran out of money. No electric. No water. Poor food quality…

If I ran out of money long enough I would even lose my house. That’s what happens if you don’t pay your property taxes for too long. They take your house and sell it in order to pay for the property taxes, even if you technically ‘own’ your house like I do.

I’m not afraid of these consequences for myself. I would just adjust to my situation as I always have. Sure it would be unpleasant, but I’ll live through it. And if I don’t live through it, then I’ll finally get a straight answer about what actually happens after physical death.

But what about the consequences for my family? What about them? While I have no fear of doing stupid things for myself, the moment my choices begin to affect the fate of other people I have to factor them into my decision making process. And of course, that changes things quite a bit…On a completely off topic side note, this is probably the same reason that married men tend to live longer. Once you factor the wife and kids into the equation, you tend to think twice before you take the joy ride on the motorcycle.

So to sum things up, my primary fear in this regard is the fear of what may happened if I lose my income. This fear is rooted in the belief that my wife and kids will suffer as a result of this happening. Doing something that potentially results in me losing my income, therefore, is a choice I cannot consciously make because it may cause the suffering of other people. Thus is my fear.

The Beliefs that Hold Me Back

I still seem to have some limiting beliefs about money. I will try to go over these here.

First, I have a tendency to not request money in accordance with the value that I create. This actually goes back to my limiting beliefs about power in general, something which has been a recurring theme during my life. I suppose that I need to recognize that it is okay to request money for the value that I create.

Second, I still have a tendency to see rich people as greedy and ignorant. This is something I need to work on. If I believe that rich people are greedy and ignorant I will probably sabotage my own plans of achieving financial freedom, since I don’t want to become something that I hate. And so it is obvious to me that I need to drop this idea.

Finally, I feel that I may need to downplay the significance of money in general. My intuitive side tells me that the root of my problem is actually that I value money and find it meaningful. Once I drop this value of money my problems about money will go away.

On the one hand, I don’t have any logical reasoning to back this feeling up. Logically, it doesn’t make sense to me why not thinking about money will lead to an abundance of money. Unless you use the argument about the loss of time and energy resulting from thinking about money…But that’s getting a little extreme.

On the other hand though, this goes along with my ultimate goal regarding money. I just want to make it a non-thing. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t really want to care about it. It shouldn’t be something that even requires my attention.

For a long time I’ve believed that by caring about money a lot I will get into a financial situation where I don’t have to care about money anymore. But perhaps the real answer here is that I simply shouldn’t care about money to begin with. Hmmm…I shall ponder this feeling some more later.

Goals to Accomplish My Dreams

In order to hold myself accountable I’m going to openly state my new goals that I am going to implement in order to achieve my dreams.

I aim to accomplish my primary dream by monetizing this site and using it as a source of passive income. In order to do this I will have to market the site, build my traffic, and most importantly I will have to be able to generate a lot of content valuable content that is in line with my mission. In order to do all of these things I will have to change the way I think about this site.

I have a niche market for this site. There aren’t very many Truth seekers in the world. Most humans are actively entertained by their day to day lives and limited belief systems. But I also have an advantage because the people who are interested in this kind of stuff are probably already very conscious individuals, and thus may be loaded with cash already.

Hmmm… Perhaps I would have better luck just getting a highly conscious wealthy individual to sponsor me on my mission of exploring human consciousness. Don’t worry, I’m really cheap.

And You?

There you go. I just spent several hours summarizing five minutes worth of my thoughts. Obviously though if this doesn’t encourage you enough to pursue your own dreams or at least to perform some self-examination then this is just a cheap form of entertainment. And so I have to finish by asking you this very important question.

Are you afraid of following your dreams?

What’s holding you back?

…

Last night I had a pretty lengthy lucid dream. Lately I have been having more and more of these, as I fully make the adjustment from viewing the world from a materialistic point of view to a spiritual point of view. In a way things like this ensure me that I’m on the right track again.

I had a rough day Friday and was physically exhausted when I went to sleep. I woke up at 2:00 AM. I was still physically exhausted, but I couldn’t get back to sleep as my mind seemed to be in hyper active mode.

I managed to get it under control via meditation. As I began drifting off to sleep I decided to try and go lucid, just for the hell of it. And I succeeded this time! My body went to sleep and I transitioned into a nice lucid dream. It’s very rare for me to be able to just transition from the waking state to a lucid dream state. Normally I realize that I’m dreaming in my dream and become lucid from there.

I’ll quickly go over how I experience this process, as it may be slightly different for others. First I lie down on my back and put myself into a meditative state. This basically means that I allow my thoughts to slow down or disappear all together, and I identify myself more with awareness itself instead of the ‘individual me’. In other words, I take the focus off of myself and my thoughts and I put the focus on awareness or “just being”, and nothing else.

After a while the body decides to shut itself down and go to sleep. I can feel when this begins to happen. It’s almost like something in the body hits the sleep trigger, and so the process begins. First I lose my perceptions. I lose vision, hearing, and spatial awareness. Then I lose bodily awareness and everything goes black. Out of the blackness there is a bright light that I always follow. As I get close to the light it turns into a tunnel, which I go through. On the other side of the tunnel you wake up in the dream world. It’s that simple!

Of course, the trick is keeping your mind awake while your body goes to sleep. Normally I am most successful with this when my body is exhausted and my mind is hyper active. The drastic split in energy difference there seems conducive to lucid dreaming. I’m still trying to learn how to do this on a ‘normal’ day.

The Dream

The lucid dream itself was awesome, as usual. It was even longer than most of my lucid dreams. But I do have to work on my dream recall some, as I don’t remember it as vividly as I would like. Here are some of the parts that I remember.

When I came out of the tunnel I woke up in a lucid dream, in my bedroom. I know I was lucid because I didn’t actually come out of my body, or astral project. Dreams have a completely different feel to them than astral projection.

I remember being at a gas station and deciding to fly. I jumped, hovered for a moment, and then drifted upwards. Once I accepted completely that I could fly I took off! Flying around in a lucid dream is truly an amazing experience. You can fly up really high, look down at the city, follow the birds, etc. It seems pretty realistic actually.

I remember flying down beside a river where some people were gathered. I tried to read a newspaper that was lying on a table. I had trouble reading it because every time I focused on a specific line it disappeared! Although I could always see the lines I wasn’t focusing on. The subconscious mind is evil…

I remember walking through walls and changing people into other people. That was pretty cool. Most of the strangers I met I could touch them on the forehead and change them into anyone I wanted them to be. I would touch them and they would shake a lot as they transformed. When I look into their eyes while I do this they would have the matrix code scrolling downwards, which is pretty cool.

This trick didn’t seem to work with everyone. When I tried it on my dream uncle he just looked at me and said, “I don’t think so”. Perhaps it worked better on strangers because I have a stronger mental image of people I know, and thus my subconscious mind plays more of a role in dictating their actions.

I also had sex with a few women in my dream. You generally can’t go ‘all the way’ in a dream because you will find yourself awake. But when I found my beautiful wife in my dream I guess I couldn’t help myself. I quickly found myself awake again, lying next to my beautiful wife, ironically.

Other Random Thoughts

I should probably work on controlling my sexual urges more in my dreams. I have woken up a number of times because I tried to have sex in my lucid dream.

Another thoughts is this. How would I be able to go into a lucid dream in a ‘normal’ state? It’s pretty easy when you’re physical body is exhausted and your mind is being hyper, but on a normal day it is fairly difficult for me to transfer my consciousness from a waking state to a lucid dream state. Perhaps there is some way to do this more effectively. More meditation, perhaps? I don’t know.

Well, time for me to go. If you’re aspiring to have a lucid dream, don’t give up! For most people it actually takes several months or even years of trying. But the first time you go flying in a lucid dream, you’ll realize it was definitely all worth it.

Just don’t get too excited while lucid. You’ll get kicked out of the club.