By Ernst Ritzmann
Published June 1997
If you want your dreams to come true, you have to dream them. If you are going to reach your goals, you have to set and plan them. If you want to run around hoping for the very best out of every situation, well for goodness sake, please do. If you want to see the positives in everything, well, that would be a great way to use your mental energy. Finally, if you think that it is a good idea to focus on any shred of evidence of what is hoped for, you are absolutely correct. All of these things are important and powerful tools. Oh, by the way, please do not hope for what you do not want.
You cannot make what you have not imagined. Therefore if you want something, it makes good sense to construct the idea first. Imagination, logic, notes, maps, drawings, dreams and prayer can all be used to clarify the idea and focus energies on it. After defining an idea, you have to recognize and encourage the elements of the idea as they are uncovered by your search for them. Your mind will notice and be attracted to things that can contribute to defining and making your idea a reality. Information regarding your dream can be found through prayer.
Group goals are slightly different. All the dreamers in the group have to hold the group dream in highest priority over any personal dreams that may conflict with the group dream. If an individual’s personal hopes, goals and desires conflict or cannot co-exist with the realization of the group dream that will hinder the group’s work. An example would be an individual who dreams of being monetarily rich and is also a part of a group fighting economic inequality. Sometimes the group can substitute something for the individual dreams that may be abandoned. Often they cannot. Some personal dreams must be abandoned in order to allow the group goal to become reality.
There is still one more element to dreaming dreams into reality. That element is reality itself or, more accurately, an awareness of, respect for, and acceptance of reality as it is at any given moment. You have to know what’s happening. You cannot change what you are not looking at. The more relentless and accurate and current your assessment of reality is, the better are the chances your dreams have of maturing into a solid reality.
With awareness of reality, however, comes painful reaction to it. People are suffering, your work is imperfect in some ways; this is difficult to be aware of without personal suffering. It is especially difficult when you cannot do anything about what you see at this exact point in time. Still to refuse awareness is to limit and even twist your own personal grasp of reality. So suffer through your clear awareness, if you want to be in a position to realize your dreams.
So who wants to suffer? Who wants to be aware of their imperfections and the endless stream of work that they are not quite ready or able to handle? To make matters worse, dreaming and clear awareness seem at odds with each other. It is often an excruciating reaction to reality that led you to dreaming in the first place. So why go back?
There is such a thing as having feelings of any character or strength, clearly registering the reality that generated them, and still getting out of bed in the morning. Look, no depression. Having and being aware of feelings is not the same as getting lost in or being at the mercy of feelings. What is required is an awareness of self and an understanding that you are not your feelings. Your feelings are in fact your tools to help you survive. The following exercise may help you to have awareness of feelings without disruption to your emotional stability.
Imagine you are watching a parade. Your feelings are the parts of the parade. Look at them with interest, study them. The parade goes by and you are still standing there.
Anything good can be accomplished when mental energies are used effectively. Miracles happen all the time, and there are more waiting to happen. As surely as suffering exists, solutions wait in God’s mind for the dreams of the miracle workers.
