DOMESTICATION AND THE DREAM OF THE PLANET
WHAT YOU ARE SEEING AND HEARING RIGHT NOW IS nothing but a
dream. You are dreaming right now in this moment. You are dreaming with the
brain awake.
Dreaming is the main function of the mind, and the mind dreams twenty-four
hours a day. It dreams when the brain is awake, and it also dreams when the
brain is asleep. The difference is that when the brain is awake, there is a
material frame that makes us perceive things in a linear way. When we go to
sleep we do not have the frame, and the dream has the tendency to change
constantly.
Humans are dreaming all the time. Before we were born the humans before
us created a big outside dream that we will call society’s dream or the dream
of the planet. The dream of the planet is the collective dream of billions of
smaller, personal dreams, which together create a dream of a family, a dream
of a community, a dream of a city, a dream of a country, and finally a dream of
the whole humanity. The dream of the planet includes all of society’s rules, its
beliefs, its laws, its religions, its different cultures and ways to be, its
governments, schools, social events, and holidays.
We are born with the capacity to learn how to dream, and the humans who
live before us teach us how to dream the way society dreams. The outside
dream has so many rules that when a new human is born, we hook the child’s
attention and introduce these rules into his or her mind. The outside dream uses
Mom and Dad, the schools, and religion to teach us how to dream.
Attention is the ability we have to discriminate and to focus only on that
which we want to perceive. We can perceive millions of things simultaneously,
but using our attention, we can hold whatever we want to perceive in the
foreground of our mind. The adults around us hooked our attention and put
information into our minds through repetition. That is the way we learned
everything we know.
By using our attention we learned a whole reality, a whole dream. We
learned how to behave in society: what to believe and what not to believe;
what is acceptable and what is not acceptable; what is good and what is bad;
what is beautiful and what is ugly; what is right and what is wrong. It was all
there already — all that knowledge, all those rules and concepts about how to
behave in the world.
When you were in school, you sat in a little chair and put your attention on
what the teacher was teaching you. When you went to church, you put your
attention on what the priest or minister was telling you. It is the same dynamic
with Mom and Dad, brothers and sisters: They were all trying to hook your
attention. We also learn to hook the attention of other humans, and we develop a
need for attention which can become very competitive. Children compete for
the attention of their parents, their teachers, their friends. “Look at me! Look at
what I’m doing! Hey, I’m here.” The need for attention becomes very strong and
continues into adulthood.
The outside dream hooks our attention and teaches us what to believe,
beginning with the language that we speak. Language is the code for
understanding and communication between humans. Every letter, every word in
each language is an agreement. We call this a page in a book; the word page is
an agreement that we understand. Once we understand the code, our attention is
hooked and the energy is transferred from one person to another.
It was not your choice to speak English. You didn’t choose your religion or
your moral values — they were already there before you were born. We never
had the opportunity to choose what to believe or what not to believe. We never
chose even the smallest of these agreements. We didn’t even choose our own
name.
As children, we didn’t have the opportunity to choose our beliefs, but we
agreed with the information that was passed to us from the dream of the planet
via other humans. The only way to store information is by agreement. The
outside dream may hook our attention, but if we don’t agree, we don’t store that
information. As soon as we agree, we believe it, and this is called faith. To
have faith is to believe unconditionally.
That’s how we learn as children. Children believe everything adults say. We
agree with them, and our faith is so strong that the belief system controls our
whole dream of life. We didn’t choose these beliefs, and we may have rebelled
against them, but we were not strong enough to win the rebellion. The result is
surrender to the beliefs with our agreement.
I call this process the domestication of humans. And through this
domestication we learn how to live and how to dream. In human domestication,
the information from the outside dream is conveyed to the inside dream,
creating our whole belief system. First the child is taught the names of things:
Mom, Dad, milk, bottle. Day by day, at home, at school, at church, and from
television, we are told how to live, what kind of behavior is acceptable. The
outside dream teaches us how to be a human. We have a whole concept of what
a “woman” is and what a “man” is. And we also learn to judge: We judge
ourselves, judge other people, judge the neighbors.
Children are domesticated the same way that we domesticate a dog, a cat, or
any other animal. In order to teach a dog we punish the dog and we give it
rewards. We train our children whom we love so much the same way that we
train any domesticated animal: with a system of punishment and reward. We are
told, “You’re a good boy,” or “You’re a good girl,” when we do what Mom
and Dad want us to do. When we don’t, we are “a bad girl” or “a bad boy.”
When we went against the rules we were punished; when we went along
with the rules we got a reward. We were punished many times a day, and we
were also rewarded many times a day. Soon we became afraid of being
punished and also afraid of not receiving the reward. The reward is the
attention that we got from our parents or from other people like siblings,
teachers, and friends. We soon develop a need to hook other people’s attention
in order to get the reward.
The reward feels good, and we keep doing what others want us to do in
order to get the reward. With that fear of being punished and that fear of not
getting the reward, we start pretending to be what we are not, just to please
others, just to be good enough for someone else. We try to please Mom and
Dad, we try to please the teachers at school, we try to please the church, and so
we start acting. We pretend to be what we are not because we are afraid of
being rejected. The fear of being rejected becomes the fear of not being good
enough. Eventually we become someone that we are not. We become a copy of
Mamma’s beliefs, Daddy’s beliefs, society’s beliefs, and religion’s beliefs.
All our normal tendencies are lost in the process of domestication. And when
we are old enough for our mind to understand, we learn the word no. The adults
say, “Don’t do this and don’t do that.” We rebel and say, “No!” We rebel
because we are defending our freedom. We want to be ourselves, but we are
very little, and the adults are big and strong. After a certain time we are afraid
because we know that every time we do something wrong we are going to be
punished.
The domestication is so strong that at a certain point in our lives we no
longer need anyone to domesticate us. We don’t need Mom or Dad, the school
or the church to domesticate us. We are so well trained that we are our own
domesticator. We are an autodomesticated animal. We can now domesticate
ourselves according to the same belief system we were given, and using the
same system of punishment and reward. We punish ourselves when we don’t
follow the rules according to our belief system; we reward ourselves when we
are the “good boy” or “good girl.”
The belief system is like a Book of Law that rules our mind. Without
question, whatever is in that Book of Law, is our truth. We base all of our
judgments according to the Book of Law, even if these judgments go against our
own inner nature. Even moral laws like the Ten Commandments are
programmed into our mind in the process of domestication. One by one, all
these agreements go into the Book of Law, and these agreements rule our
dream.
There is something in our minds that judges everybody and everything,
including the weather, the dog, the cat — everything. The inner Judge uses what
is in our Book of Law to judge everything we do and don’t do, everything we
think and don’t think, and everything we feel and don’t feel. Everything lives
under the tyranny of this Judge. Every time we do something that goes against
the Book of Law, the Judge says we are guilty, we need to be punished, we
should be ashamed. This happens many times a day, day after day, for all the
years of our lives.
There is another part of us that receives the judgments, and this part is called
the Victim. The Victim carries the blame, the guilt, and the shame. It is the part
of us that says, “Poor me, I’m not good enough, I’m not intelligent enough, I’m
not attractive enough, I’m not worthy of love, poor me.” The big Judge agrees
and says, “Yes, you are not good enough.” And this is all based on a belief
system that we never chose to believe. These beliefs are so strong, that even
years later when we are exposed to new concepts and try to make our own
decisions, we find that these beliefs still control our lives.
Whatever goes against the Book of Law will make you feel a funny sensation
in your solar plexus, and it’s called fear. Breaking the rules in the Book of Law
opens your emotional wounds, and your reaction is to create emotional poison.
Because everything that is in the Book of Law has to be true, anything that
challenges what you believe is going to make you feel unsafe. Even if the Book
of Law is wrong, it makes you feel safe.
That is why we need a great deal of courage to challenge our own beliefs.
Because even if we know we didn’t choose all these beliefs, it is also true that...
