If you’re in the midst of a dream and suddenly recognize it as a dream, a strong urge to wake up can happen- especially when the dream starts feeling more like a nightmare.

Unfortunately, your attempts to awaken can only ever come from a place that still believes the dream is real, otherwise your attempts wouldn’t be needed; you’d simply drop the effort and you’d be awake already.

This life is no different. When you realize that your experience of the world has been created by your assumptions about the way things are, you realize that you’re dreaming.

Our tendency of course, is to try and dream differently, to try and think differently, especially when we realize that we’ve created a dream based on lack and insufficiency.

As it happens though, dreaming differently doesn’t free you from the dream; you’re still subject to a world created by whatever fluctuating emotional state you find yourself in. And even if you attempt to escape from the dream altogether, you’d just be creating another dream to escape into.

The moment you stop trying to wake up, you wake up. But the question is, how often do you stop trying? How often do you wake up? Enlightenment, after all, is a frequency game, not an attainment game. How frequently you’re free is more important than the singular moment you become free. Because freedom isn’t for those who’ve been freed from prison, it’s for those who don’t need to be.

Only when you finally stop trying to escape do you realize that there was never anything needing to be escaped from. Of course, there are situations in life where you’re able to change your circumstances for the better; but changing circumstances doesn’t change YOU- they can only ever change your mind… they can only change the dreamer… for a little while. Pretty soon your mind will start to experience that change as stagnation, incompletion… all over again. The mind after all, is founded upon the necessity to be a work in progress.

You can’t acquire enough, experience enough, or become enough if the very thing that’s looking for fulfilment is dependent upon never finding it. The good news is that you can’t make whole something that was never incomplete. You, were never… incomplete. You were never a work in progress… it only ever seemed that way.

What we’re pointing at here, is surrender to this truth. Because a dream is a sort of ongoing battle with reality- a refusal to be defeated by a supposed constant threat. It’s an attempt to transform reality into something that keeps you safe and gives you what you’ve been told you need to be fulfilled. This is why giving up on safety and fulfillment seems so counterintuitive. But how else can you be free? How can you step back into freedom if you still need protection? How can you finally rest if you’re always an empty cup needing to be filled?

Clearly, we’ve been trained to desire a state of imprisonment. We’ve spent many years investing a lot of energy into breaking free from a prison we’ve never been inside of.

So why does surrender feel so dangerous then? Why does staying asleep and fighting the good fight seem preferable to throwing in the towel and being done with fear? What do we think will happen if we just… stop… for good?

Perhaps it’s that the truth will be revealed. And what is that truth? …That you’re only somebody when you’re dreaming; you’re only somebody when you dream yourself into being… and when that dreaming stops, so do you. Of course, something remains, something brilliant, but it’s not what you think- because ultimate truth is never what you think. What remains is pure conscious intelligence that has no past, no future, no personal story whatsoever that would give it any kind of identity and allow it to separate itself from life again.

We’re afraid of surrender because we’re afraid of permanent, irreversible wholeness.

Irreversible wholeness is the worst thing that could ever happen to you… to a mind that can only exist as a broken part.

The wholeness you think of… is brokenness.

The brokenness you think of… is wholeness.

Stay broken… and eventually… the gig will be up.

Join me this June in New Mexico (Get the newsletter discount – check your inbox for this newsletter and get the subscriber retreat discount. Here’s the retreat information page: https://www.kylehoobin.com/the-high-desert-doorway-new-mexico-retreat/