Hands off the controls!

I had a vivid dream last night—a couple of them, actually, but it’s one in particular that I want to share. I wish I had written it down when I got up to go the bathroom in the middle of the night, but I think I remember the gist of it well enough to convey the point.

In the dream, I was driving in, what I figured out after commencing to drive it, was a specially equipped car. There were no outward indications on the dashboard that it was special in any way, no labels or markings. It looked like a normal car with all the normal controls—steering wheel, brakes, etc. Somehow, I sensed that the car could drive itself and that I was not to touch the steering wheel—BUT, since there were no outward reassurances of this, I had a hard time keeping my hands off the wheel. I was driving on a dirt road with ruts and ditches on either side and it was kind of scary. When I allowed the car to drive itself, it was a smooth ride, and the car navigated itself perfectly and the many ruts were avoided. But for seemingly no reason other than the fact that there were no signs anywhere in the car saying “This car will drive itself. Do not touch the controls,” I freaked out and grabbed the wheel. When I did, it went straight to the ruts and bounced up and down, jarring me severely. When I let go of the wheel, it returned to the smooth, self-guided path. But I just couldn’t seem to trust that it would drive itself even though it was clear that it could. Ultimately, when I couldn’t keep my hands off the wheel, the car ended up stuck in the road-side ditch. That’s all I remember. But I guess that’s enough!

Is that a classic dream, or what?! The funny part is that I totally forgot about it until sometime this afternoon when I was fretting about “what to do next” and trying to figure out how to engineer some opportunities to get the message out. I had to shake my head when I realized what I was doing and what the dream was trying to tell me. What a habit we are in with trying to run our lives! “Engineer some opportunities.” Sounds like old paradigm stuff to me! I had given the “provide opportunities” job over to universal forces, therefore, it is no longer up to me. Yes, I am to follow up on opportunities when presented, but engineering them is not following up! When you give a job to universal forces to do, you need to take your hands off the wheel and just go along for the ride instead of continually grabbing the wheel! It’s just so darn hard for the left brain to trust that sometimes not doing is more effective than doing! Everything we’ve been taught says that we have to “make our own breaks” and basically, that if we want to succeed, we have to be in the driver’s seat. This is a whole new paradigm I’m living now and the old stuff just simply won’t work.

So what’s a person to do while waiting for those opportunities to present themselves? Love. Love. Love. Have a Love affair with Spirit. Do you know that that is truly all we have to do? It is! Remember what the master teacher, Jesus, had to say relative to energy and time management? “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (Matt. 22: 37) If my mind were completely occupied with communing with and loving my Spirit, and following Spirit's guidance in the moment, I would not have room or time to be trying to engineer anything! It’s that pesky ego that has to grab the wheel. It’s the habituated mind that thinks if it’s not cooking up stuff, nothing will happen. It’s a whole new world we’re being asked to create and it won’t happen if we don’t change our minds and our “m.o.”s.

The other dream had to do with Bill Clinton, some other world leaders, a summit meeting in a modest little clapboard house (that somehow I ended up going to), and C.J. from “West Wing.” Crazy stuff. I’ll pass on trying to analyze that one for now!

Oh yeah--after I wrote about Amazon being out of books last night, today they were back to "usually ships within 24 hours," and I can tell by the change in sales rank that they've been selling some today, so they must have gotten in more books already. There's no point in second-guessing, I suppose!