Escaping Wasted Suffering by Awakening to Reality as a Lucid Dream EP 328

You know you need something, you're just not sure what. You've been listening, you're doing the work, but there's still this feeling that you're circling the same place, like you're waiting for the thing that finally moves you. Now maybe you've thought about working with me one-on-one. Maybe something's held you back, the timing, the money, or you're just not sure you're ready yet. I get that. And I want you to know there's still a place for you. I built a resource for exactly this moment, guided meditations for when the waves hit and you just need to breathe. Workbooks to help you get out of your head and onto the page, ebooks on what near-death experiences tell us about the people we've lost, and whether they're really gone, a full course for widows and widowers who are ready to find their way back to living, and a full course for the evidence of the afterlife. And all of it is available for pay what you want. Nobody gets turned away because of money. I think these resources are valuable, but I don't want to hold them back because you don't have the money to pay for them. You don't have to wait until you're ready for coaching. The next step might be a lot smaller than you think. To find out, go to grief2growth.com/store. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/store. And check out the resources I've made for you. Everybody, this is Brian D Smith back with another episode of Grief 2 Growth. This is a special episode today. My guest is Colleen, and she has been on the show before. So if you— I will have a link in the show notes to the other episode. She had a near-death experience. She's gone through quite a bit since then. But today we're going to talk about some, some pretty deep concepts. Let me tell you a little bit more about her though. She was born in Tampa, Florida. She's been a mystic since the age of 5 and a half. At the age of 5 and a half, she met her guide in what she calls the mind space. And she's been a lucid dreamer, she calls it, since the age of 8. And her guide Michael came to her and taught her to dream consciously. And we're going to talk about this concept of lucid dreaming and about our lives as a lucid dream. In 1978, she died from head trauma in a freak accident. And she met her guide Michael in the lustrous vast of quantum immanence, where he gave her a life review, a revelation and a message. And she then returned to this world that she calls a dream world, and I completely agree with her. So in 2023, she finished and published 5 books. That was in 2023. And all of them were devoted to Michael's message and the books Nearly 100,000 words each, deliver in the form of a literary erotic parable as part of a trilogy, The Vampire Grail Affairs, and her memoir, The Fiddler's Laughing Bride. Again, I'll have links to those in the show notes. And so she's got those books out. And she recently sent me a short book that she's written that she calls Rise. And we're gonna be talking about some of those concepts today. So with that, I want to welcome to Grief to Growth Colleen Grant.

I'm really happy to be here. Thank you.

Yeah, I'm really happy to have you here and talk about some of these concepts. As I said, today's show is going to be a pretty deep dive. We're going to probably only be able to skim the surface, but I see us doing more of this as we go forward because I've read the book You Sent Me Rising. It's got some really interesting concepts in it about the world being a dream and suffering, etc. So let's start with the easy question. Let's talk about the idea of suffering. Why do we suffer? Is suffering— is there a point to it? Is it wasted? Is it not wasted? Tell me about that.

Okay. Well, as I mentioned, Michael prefers I speak extemporaneously. And the very first thing I heard in mindspace when you ask that question is the reason we suffer is because those who cannot hear have to feel. If you don't have your attention directed at all inwardly, and you're all focused on the outside world, which is understandable because of the sensory inundation we all go through every day. But if you're not listening inwardly, you don't get the inner cues that say something needs to change here gently, something needs to change here, something needs to change here. And so what we do is we put it off, we put it off, and we put it off changing until it hurts And then when it starts hurting, we usually go quite a while longer. And that's where the suffering starts to really happen, because we blame our subjective condition, our subjective experience on our environment and on the situation, instead of realizing that we have the power to change our behaviors and our self-talk. And if we change the self-talk about the situation, it automatically reflects our, our subjective experience, automatically reflects the change in our self-talk, what we're saying to ourselves. So you're gonna, you're gonna suffer until you learn to be responsive to your own inner guidance, and then you're going to suffer until you— less so, however— until you realize that it's your labeling that is making the situation feel so uncomfortable. As an example from my near-death experience, the first vignette that Michael showed me in life review was of my first pair of shoes at 18 months old. And my mother had saved money— we were a poor family— and she saved money, and, and she was happy to get these shoes for me to protect her baby's feet, right? And, uh, uh, her baby pitched a fit in the middle of the floor because her baby had never had shoes on her feet before. I lived in Florida, it was warm. I didn't go, you know, I didn't need shoes and I didn't like them. And I thought she tied me to the floor. I thought I'd done something wrong. And so I, with my labeling, made what was meant to be an intense blessing, shoes we could barely afford. I made it into a terrible thing, terrible experience, because that's the way I labeled it. And then I blamed the situation for the discomfort caused by my labeling. That's a joke. That is a grand cosmic jest. We make the situation painful by our labeling, more painful than it needs to be. And then we blame our unhappiness on the situation we made so painful, either by resisting the gentle inner guidance that tried to prevent us from getting to the edge of suffering. Hmm. Okay. Or by then using our self-talk without lucidity, not realizing we're doing it, not observing ourselves doing it. We are victims of our self-talk, and, and that's usually surrounding fear and anger and resentment and stuff like that. Causes what is meant to be good situations into unpleasant situations. So the difference between wasted and unwasted suffering is if you're suffering and you, you observe it and you observe your self-talk and you can see the connection between what you're saying to yourself and the way it's affecting your subjective experience, then it's not wasted. It pushes you. The more you engage as the observer of yourself and how your self-talk is affecting your subjective experience, the more you engage the world that way. The more you feed what Michael calls the chooser. Instead of being the feeler or the thinker or the sufferer, um, or even the observer, you become the chooser. You catch yourself, you observe yourself on the brink— wait, you observe yourself observing yourself talk and on the brink of getting upset, and instead you laugh. The Chooser says, "Why should I give that suffering one more second?" I first tapped into this when I was, uh, 37 or 38 in Washington State, and I was thinking of the abuser who had sexually assaulted me when I was 5 and a half. That caused me to meet Michael. And really, that's a great blessing, you know, because I met Michael, and that changed the trajectory of my life completely. And I was still harboring angry self-talk about Alfred. And Michael said to me, Alfred wrecked a day at most in your life. Alfred destroyed that day. He made it a not good day. Everything since then you have given him. You have surrendered, you have sacrificed, you have suffered needlessly. That is wasted suffering because you didn't observe yourself creating more suffering by rehearsing the events of that day and your self-talk about them and winding yourself up and getting yourself upset. That's your doing. What Alfred did, give him a day for. Wrecked a day. The rest of it, you made it either blessings or cause for suffering in your, in your way of seeing things. Cause for suffering. So that's kind of the— I hope I hit on everything you wanted to hit on there.

Yeah, you did, and, and more. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna go back and go over some of those things a little bit more slowly. I heard you talk about the feeler the thinker, the observer, and the chooser. So could you define those for people? And what are those things?

Okay, we— it's levels of awakening, levels of lucidity. Okay, because when you're identified with your body, and with the sensory input coming in, you're the feeler, you are just immersed in the condition. You're the feeler. Okay. When you begin to wield your self-talk and your attention unconsciously, you're not observing yourself doing it. You're just allowing your mind to do what it does. It ruminates. It like is a batch file that keeps going over the same thought snarls that are charged with emotions. You're the thinker. You're immersed in the thinking. You are ident— you're in identification. With the thinking. So as you rise in identification to being the observer of the thinking and the observer of the sensations, now you're the observer. Some lucidity is coming in here because you're no longer a victim to your thoughts. You're no longer at the mercy of those conditions outside you. Um, and then the next level is the chooser. And the Chooser seems to pop in. And that's what happened to me during Lexapro withdrawals, was I decided there was no cause for me to give any more energy to the thought scenarios that were running chronically in my mind space as I went through the chemical withdrawals. I just withdrew as the Chooser all of my attention from that activity. So I became the chooser at that point. Now I can say I can feel an emotion rise over something really old, and I go, yeah, yeah, that was— that's true, and that's the way it was. And, um, I don't see any reason to be upset about it. It's a long time ago. Choosing. I'm choosing the self-talk that I will empower. I'm choosing, therefore, the emotions that will come out of that self-talk. So I choose different self-talk. I put my attention someplace else on good thoughts. And I've, I've chosen my subjective experience that way. So that's what I mean by those things.

So how would you, how would this relate to forgiveness? Because I mean, you went through, I know you, you love your father dearly. It's clear when we talk about him, when you, the way you write about him. I know you adore your father. But you know, some people would say your father did bad things to you?

He did. He did terrible things. But he was deeply unconscious at the time.

Yeah. So how does, how does the Chooser relate? How does that relate to forgiveness? You know, because as the Chooser—

I'm sorry, go ahead.

I was gonna say, because I can hear people saying, when we talk about forgiving people, well, I, I have a right to be angry, I have a right to be upset, and they want to hold on to that. And they say, well, you can't tell me I have to forgive. Um, so how do you— how do you— how would you respond to that?

They are correct. They don't have to forgive. They are correct. They have a right to torment themselves as long as they like.

Yeah, yeah.

When they get tired of that, which eventually they will, they'll back away from being identified with the thoughts because the thoughts are attacking their peace. They'll realize the thoughts are attacking their peace, that their thoughts are actually the problem with why they're unhappy, why they're suffering. And then they'll say, okay, it looks like a good idea to me now to let— okay, I'm all done with that, on to other things. I mean, but it's a matter of you can actually— people, people have to suffer until they choose to do otherwise, right? That's why Michael says, them that cannot hear have to feel.

Yeah.

So yeah, they do have a right. They do have an absolute right. They don't have a right to make other people miserable while they're going about it. Okay. But, and I feel, you know, I came back from the dead to tell them they didn't have to suffer, to tell them why they were suffering. Okay, that they were doing it to themselves, and that they could choose otherwise. And it's so clear from Quantum Imminence, so clear from The Lustrous Vast, and it's clear to me now too. But when you try to explain it to people, um, the problem is most people either want— if someone offended them or did them wrong or whatever, they either want a deep apology. And in our family, when we used to fight as kids, we would end the fight with going and getting a cold face cloth, a cold wet, fresh face cloth and washing each other's faces. This is how we made up when we were kids, right? So the expression is they either want the cold face cloth or they want vindication. And vindication looks like revenge. And that's where their right ends. They don't have a right to do that, not physically and not even mentally and emotionally. When you start willing bad things on other people because you think they're bad or their behavior is bad and they deserve it, that is creating nothing but turmoil and pain for you. Okay, you, the person who's doing the evil willing, that makes you suffer more longer. You have to— forgiveness doesn't mean you just say I'm greater than you, I'm bigger than this situation, and so I'm going to extend my largesse even though you're evil, bad, and wrong, and you shouldn't have done what you did. That's not forgiveness at all. Forgiveness is when you realize that there's good in everything. Everything comes with a blessing, and the worse the tribulation, the bigger the blessing. Okay, um, it's your job to find it. That's your job, to find the ponies that left the piles of horse poo in the backyard of your life. That's your job. Um, and you can embrace that anytime you're ready to stop suffering. And in between, you're gonna suffer. And, uh, I hope I hit on all there.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, um, so it sounds like, you know, suffering is is a choice. It's, it's the way that we look at things. You talk about earlier, it's like, you know, we, we assign— I don't think you use this word, but I got the word meaning. We assign meaning to things. Events just are, and then we assign what it means to us. And if we choose to hold on to this is bad, this is wrong, this shouldn't have happened, then we can choose to live in that until we decide that we don't want to do that anymore.

I don't know for that. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So, but, but forgiveness is— to touch on that briefly, unless you want to go further— forgiveness is realizing that the person, um, if it is another human being that, uh, was unkind to you or cheated you or did whatever, um, they're unconscious. By unconscious, I mean they lack lucidity. By that, I mean they are not observing themselves at all. They're not observing their self-talk. They are reacting out of their own irrational emotional snarls, their own snarls of self-talk that are causing them to act that way. So here is like a tit-for-tat globally right now, people bashing each other over the head. And I wish it was all Nerf bats, nobody would actually get hurt, and we'd get all our exhaustion out, probably fall on the ground, uh, our anger out, fall on the ground exhausted, laughing at each other, maybe in with a cold face cloth.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, but in the, in the interim, um, people have to decide what they want to manifest for themselves. And by manifesting, I mean what they want their subjective experience to be. And if they don't decide, they're going to live at the mercy of, uh, the environment. Their happiness will be completely contingent upon the environment, their situation. And what this environment is designed to do is to make you lucid, so that you have control over your subjective experience, no matter what is happening.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, let's, let's talk about because we were using the word lucid and lucidity. You call this the dream of the world, the environment we find ourselves in. So what does it mean that this is a dream of a world? And what does it mean to become lucid? Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

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Okay, um, when I died, uh, the, um, the entering the lustrous vast was just like awakening from a dispiriting dream. That's exactly what it was like. It was like awakening from a dispiriting dream. The, the realization Nothing in the dream of the world. And that's what I called it from the Lustrous Vast. Nothing in the dream of the world could have ever actually hurt me. I am eternal. I am invulnerable. Okay, nothing can really hurt me. It can feel like it's hurting my body. But it can't really hurt me. And it's all didactic. It's all here to teach you. Well, that's a dawning of lucidity right there. But the whole point of all of the suffering, all of the discomfort, is to teach you that you're doing it to yourself with your self-talk. Once you learn you're doing it to yourself with your self-talk, everything— once you've actually experienced that, everything begins to change because you go, oh wow, I have found my effectiveness. I have found that I can, you know, have a direct effect upon my subjective experience that's completely independent of the situation. Completely independent of the environment. My happiness is now internally generated. That is lucidity. Okay, that is the shifting of identification away from being identified with— in identification with the body, which is the feeler, identification with the mind, which is the thinker, which you believe you are your mind and that you cannot stop your mind.. And clearly you can. Now, I learned this in another horrible trial we've talked about before. It was Lexapro withdrawals. And my mind was just like a teething puppy. I happened to adopt a puppy to give myself a reason to stay in the world when I went into withdrawals, right? I was like a couple of months into them and I'm like, I'm getting a puppy because I need a motivation to— somebody who relies on me and trusts me to to stay here. And she chewed on everything. And it made me nuts. Not that I had far to go in that regard at the time, mind. And I realized that you— Gracie, my puppy, I named her Grace. I realized Grace was a metaphor for my mind running away with me all the time and chewing on everything. And I said, okay, if my mind is like a teething puppy, let me give it something productive to work on. So I bought projects, you know, I bought cabinets that had to be assembled, and I assembled them. You know, I cleaned up goo built up in my environment from 5 years of being on Lexapro and having absolute— it almost killed me. Lexapro messed with my heartbeat really badly. And so I had no energy the whole time I was on it. So there was a lot to do around here. And I just, you know, I just worked basically to keep my mind doing something productive, rather than allowing it— by not giving it any attention, by not giving my mind any supervision. Okay, it was chewing on everything and destroying the house. Instead, I learned to direct it. So Basically, that was the dawning of lucidity for me.

Yeah. And you made a very important point there, because most of us, until we start to train our mind and observe our mind, we think we are our mind. But when you say things like, but when there's an indication of some lucidity, when people say like, well, my mind races, or my mind does this, that shows that you, you know, you're not your mind, right? Because you're saying, right, this is my mind. I am something other than my mind. And it's learning to stay in that that is, I think, the dawning of lucidity.

That is lucidity now. And it's a subtle thing, and it needs to be practiced over and over again, which is probably why my withdrawals have been so long. Okay? Why my life situation, why Michael and the guides and the venue itself, which is conscious, has set up my particular version of the dream to protract the very stimuli that caused me to go lucid to begin with. Okay, it was go lucid or go insane. It was go lucid or end my life. It was go lucid or suffer. Yeah, you know, and I, um, I, I disidentified from the mind because the thought was the mind is attacking my peace. So obviously there's two things going on there. There's me who wants peace, and there's the mind attacking it, right? And this made me realize I am not my mind. And then I learned— I said, I have to control this thing. I have to find a way to control it. So I did all those projects I mentioned earlier as a way of keeping it busy. And then Michael taught me to imagifest And when you lay down at night to go to sleep, your mind wants to, you know, do its thing, go crazy because you're not up and doing anything to take your attention into it and make your mind stay there. Okay, sit, stay. We're going to stay with this topic. Another puppy metaphor. We're going to stay on this project, something constructive. Well, when you're getting ready to go to sleep, you know, you don't really want to do that. Um, you got other things to do. And so Michael taught me to, like, fall asleep. But Michael taught me, since the mind wasn't going to let me fall asleep anyway, to imagine fast. And imagine festing is a method of imagining being— I use, uh, the most wonderful place in the world you've always wanted to be, or if it's not in this world, the place you've always wanted to be in that is you're gonna imagine fest it, you're gonna design it yourself, and you're gonna put every sensory modality into it that you can. For me, it's a beach, uh, in a particular environment, the beach. And I smell it and I hear it, of the birds and the waves, and I, I taste the salty air and the scent of the rotting algae on the beach washed up from the storm. All of this allows me to put myself so my attention so completely focused because I'm imagining the environment as if it were around me, not like I'm peeking in through a window, but like I am there and it's all around me. And so there's directionality to the sound, and I turn my head and I look down at my toes and wiggle them. Imagifesting is a great way to fall right into dreams lucidly. Because you'll fall asleep in the process of doing this, and you can end up right in the environment that you're imagifesting. And you're lucid when you're there. By lucid, I mean, you know, you're dreaming. Uh, you might not know it right away though, because you can fall asleep. You can get so engrossed in a manifesting something pleasant that you can fall asleep and never notice the transition. So this is another way to make the mind do something that's actually helpful to you instead of letting it run away with you and make you miserable. Alternatively, if you don't want to do any of that or you don't have a great imagination, you can just watch its antics and laugh. Laugh.

Yeah.

Because it's not you. No longer allow it to mean anything. The mind is babbling senseless non. You know, just nonsense. Just watch it. Just watch it and laugh at its antics as it tries to masquerade as you and convince you you have good cause to be upset.

Yeah, I like that. That's a great idea. Because I know when people— when you talk about meditating, a lot of times people say, well, I can't meditate because I can't stop my mind, which is not what we're trying to do when we meditate. This is another way of doing that. Because you really— in meditation, if you really understand it, what we're doing is we're observing. We're becoming that observer. And you're talking about a way to do that that I think is a lot maybe more accessible for people. Right. If you feel like you can't meditate, just sit down and watch your mind.

Yes. Just observe your mind doing what it's doing and keep reminding yourself that you are not your mind. Keep backing away. Boom. Every time you back away from the mind and you realize that you're watching it, not that you are it, this is lucidity. And every time you do it, it's like a chicken cracking its egg. You know, it has to push with its head, peck, peck, peck, push with its head, gets a little bit more lucid every time, a little bit more out. And so really, when you get to where I'm smiling like an idiot here, because honestly, the state I've been in for a couple of months now is mostly stuff just doesn't touch me anymore. It'll, it'll, it'll— I'll watch my mind try to latch on to something that would normally trigger the mind to go cray, and I would fall into identification with it. And suddenly I'm caught up in all that self-talk, and I'm unhappy again. And instead, I laugh at it. I just laugh at it. Now, that said, after a while of observing the mind, it loses its momentum. It's as if the mind is trying to trick you into identification with it. And when it realizes it can't, it just runs down. And you do find yourself with your mind still. And it's beautiful. It's a sort of inner— over the last year and a half, I feel like I've become vast inside. You know, like, I, I'm a portal to this vastness. Um, not that there's a portal within me, but that I am the portal. And, and that comes from learning to wield your attention. Attention is key. There's only so much attention to go around, and if you're paying attention, uh, and investing your attention and like endorsing your crazy self-talk Yeah, that's right. Bad things should happen to that person because of what they did or said. Uh, you're going to be identified with your self-talk. You're going to be unhappy. But if instead you're just observing it and going, wow, that's not serving me at all now, is it? Suddenly it seems to deflate.

Yeah. Yeah. So for people, I just want to— I want to hear this concept, just make sure we covered it really quick, uh, uh, well, because I think some people might still be confused by lucidity. So when— because I don't know if everybody's had a lucid dream. I, I have, and they're becoming more frequent as I, as I start to study stuff like the material you're putting out. But if you're in a dream, and you've had that feeling when you know you're in a dream, when you know that it's real, and you— and sometimes you get control, but sometimes you don't have control, but you just know it's a dream. That's, that's what we're talking about, right? That's, that's being able to be in this world and say, This isn't real.

Okay. All right. Well, most of us would agree that the truth is unity. That's it, that the ultimate truth is unity. Just a vast consciousness, right? Unity. So unity has fallen into the dream of the 10,000 things. All right, unity is dreaming all of this. We're all dream characters. Unity dreamt us eternal because Unity loves every one of us. Not only eternal, but godlings, just like Source. We are little gods with all of the creative ability that God has. We just don't have a very big imagination. And we're not very good at focusing our attention. Because to create something, you have to focus your attention. Okay, and then you have to use your imagination, and you have to put yourself emotionally in that space in order to— you're stepping right into the future you want by will when you do this. Wield your attention and your intention in, or your will, in order to create for yourself the subjective experience you want ahead of time. You're like tunneling right across time streams. Out of the one you've been in unconsciously, having a very bad time, hostage to your mind and your self-talk. You are willfully tunneling into another experience by taking yourself there ahead of time. Okay, you're like tuning yourself to the frequency of the timeline you want to experience, and you're doing it preemptively. Okay, now everybody is— what was the initial question?

Before I go off on that tangent, we're talking about lucidity, what it means to be lucid.

Okay, well, the lucidity is just the backing away from identification with the mind and the self-talk and becoming the one who decides, the chooser of what your mind is going to do and what you're going to invest the energy of your attention in, because what you put your attention on gets bigger and fills up your awareness. Okay. I hope that answered it.

Yeah, it does. It does. And I think it's, like I said, it's a concept that I've been coming across more and more. And, you know, so people understand, you know, there are other religious religions, or the religions' myths, to talk about the world is being dreamt by the Creator. It's, it's a dream. A Course in Miracles talks about the fact that we are, we have fallen asleep. There's a, this is a very common reality or thing that people use to talk about the reality that we're in. And you talked about earlier when you woke up in the lustrous vast, I think you call it. It's like you thought like it was like waking up from a dream. So I always try to get people to understand, it's like when you have a dream and you're in your bed at night, the world feels very real, the world that you're in, you can feel things, you can see things, you can observe things.. And you would swear this is the world, except it makes no sense, right? You're sitting there in a class with no pants on or something. But you don't even question that when you're in the dream, right? So you wake up and you go, well, it was just a dream. That was— wasn't that crazy? And I imagine that's what it was like when you had that experience.

Well, yeah, Michael chimes in that he says, only the lucid dreamer can change the dream.

Yeah, yeah.

But you can't change it necessarily in the way it unfolds. Okay, what you're changing is your response to it, right?

Right.

Okay, so the lucidity is knowing you have the ability to laugh at the monsters and make them your friends. That's the lucidity. When you come lucid in the— in a dream, you may not be able to manifest exteriorized things in the dream. You may not be able to change what's going on out here. But the thing is, you're not here to learn necessarily to manifest conditions in which it's easy for you to be happy. You're here to learn to lucidly manifest an interior milieu in which it doesn't matter what's going on. The world.

Thank you. That was, that was so important. Because that kind of takes us back around to— because as you talk about this lucidity, and I've been, you know, I've read the book Rise, and I'm latching on to this. There's also this law of attraction that people say, well, if I just believe hard enough, I can manifest whatever I want. I can, I can manifest a million dollars, I can manage, I'll drive a Ferrari, I'll have perfect health. And so what's— how does obtaining lucidity, how does it relate to something like the law of attraction?

There is no law of attraction. Okay, that's why it doesn't work. That's why everybody really— I mean, when it appears to work, it's because your lucidity is tuning you energetically. You're allow— it's allowing you to tune yourself energetically as you choose your self-talk and choose where you put your attention. And so retuning yourself and stepping into the vibe you want to be in, because you're lucid and you can do that, actually, like I mentioned, kind of tunnels across the timelines. Okay, you're going into where you want to be. You're changing timelines all the time, and you don't notice it because you're energetically just stepping, constantly changing. What is— what's the event cascade that may occur? One tiny change and suddenly you're in a new event cascade. Lucidity is like the Joker, okay? Like drawing the Joker that allows you to decide, okay, how you're gonna feel no matter what the event cascade is doing. But yes, it does make the event cascade that you focus on more likely, the outcome more likely if you tune yourself to it. But you're not, you're not here to learn to wait for things to change in your environment so that you can have a nice time. You're here to learn to focus your attention, wield your will, your intention, and step and change your vibratory frequency by your holy will and step into preemptively, by choice, the experience you want. Yeah, okay, that you're a god when you're doing that. Okay, you're just not a very adept god yet. In tarot, that's the Magus. Okay, you now you're beginning to wield your holy will, you're awake, you know, you have this power. And you know, you're eternal. So that's the difference. The Law of Attraction is, you know, everybody's like, oh, well, you're not doing this is why it's failing for you. And that's why it's failing. You're not holding your mouth right. And it's one thing after another. It's because we're doing this because we're slightly misinterpreting the data. The data says something like a Law of Attraction is working. Yeah, something like it. Yeah, it's something like it, but it's not attraction at all. That's kind of inside out because projection makes perception. What you're telling yourself, you project out into the world. What you expect, you never question whether it's going to come or not.

Yeah, and it comes, right?

It comes. So don't think, not that, not that, not that, not that. Don't think that. Think this. Ah, yes, this. This, this is lovely. Just thinking about it is lovely. I'm having a good time. And, and then ride that wave and build it, investing your attention. And of course, it does help to use the arm of flesh to, uh, approach your objective, whatever it is you're trying to manifest, the event stream you're trying to get into. Oh, the image keeps coming in my mind of somebody water skiing behind a boat trying to get across a wake. The wake is your destructive self-talk. If you can learn to skip over that, once you find you have that power, you're zipping back and forth across those time streams, having fun while you're at it.

Yeah. So again, going back to that, you know, because what I'm getting is, okay, instead of the law of attraction, then those— these abundance gurus are trying to get us to change, you know, we're focusing on outer circumstances and I'm hearing it's not really about the outer circumstances.

It's not. Yeah, it's not. And that's what— that's why the Law of Attraction isn't really— well, it doesn't exist, but it's not working because it's a focus on trying to change your outside world so that you're comforted and you can be happy at last. Okay. The lucid dreamer changes the dream by choosing what the dreamer is saying to themselves.

Yeah.

The lucid dreamer changes the dream by choosing to feel otherwise, then it doesn't matter what's happening in the world. You're here to learn to not be hostage of the world you're creating with your self-talk.

Yeah, I think it was before we started recording, we were talking about this a little bit, so I want to kind of go over it again in case we didn't capture it, because I asked you how you were doing earlier, and I know you're going through some physical struggles still with the, with the Lexapro withdrawal and stuff. And it's not about— I forgot how you said, you said that Michael told you that this is being prolonged so you could learn the lesson. I think it was something similar to that.

Yeah. What was it? What was the expression? It was take the cure. Taking the cure. Taking the cure of not, you know, it's— I used to, you know, I was raised in a pharmaceutical country. The United States, you know, they start you early taking pills. You got a headache, take a pill and take an aspirin and a glass of water. And the thing that cures the headache is actually the glass of water because typically it's caused by dehydration. Okay, so skip the aspirin, take the water, and your headache will go away most of the time. But I grew up thinking, what can I get? What can I take for this?

You know, right, right.

What can I, what can I, what can I take for this? You know, and when I went through Lexapro and Percocet withdrawals at the same time, uh, I kept thinking, what can I take for this? You know, and the inner response from Michael was nothing. This is just to hold on till it passes. Just hold on till it passes. There is no cure for the symptoms of withdrawal from drugs that change your nervous system while you're taking them. You just have to let your nervous system reboot itself. You know, homeostasis will come back, but not if you keep dithering with it, not if you keep putting things in trying to get away from the symptoms. It's a matter of two things. First of all, the cure I've taken is on my attitude about what can I take for this? You know, when I think, what can I take for this? I take food or I take water. I take something natural. I take a nap. If I've got a headache, I put ice on my head. I lay down, put ice on my head. The fact is, you're either going to be in some sort of physical discomfort You know, as you're dealing with the initial ailment or problem, whatever it is that you started taking the medication for, and then the body gets over that by itself without the medication, or you're going to take the medication a long time. In my case, it was depression and anxiety, and I took, I took the medication for anxiety. And yeah, it was chemical chainmail. I didn't have any anxiety most of the time I was taking Lexapro, but I had an incredible amount of anxiety when I came off of it. Do I want to stay on those drugs the rest of my life? Heck no. So suffer now with just the anxiety or suffer a whole, whole lot more later with physical symptoms and anxiety and stuff like that when it's unnecessary. Somebody could have taught me these cognitive techniques that I had Michael's help to teach me in order to get off the drugs. Okay, that is a much better— if you had these cognitive techniques, you wouldn't need the drugs to begin with. Okay. And in the other way that it's the prolongation of these symptoms, because as I mentioned, I'm like taking a very low dose of Percocet every day because I need my left hip replaced. And I'm taking a whole bunch of inflammatories and anti-inflammatories to stop it, to sleep at night, mostly creams that you put on. And it's— I have, I have, because I need the hip replace, not been able to totally quit the Percocet. And so I'm And I'm right after Hurricane Idalia came through. My Percocet requirement went quite a bit up because I had to prepare for it and clean up after it. And it really wrecked my hip. And that prolonged— then I went right back down after 4 or 5 days up at like 7 milligrams. I went back to 2 milligrams. And so I've been in withdrawals, you know, from that. And what that does is it keeps causing me when I'm uncomfortable physically to have to back away from being identified with the body or being identified. You know, bad thoughts run through my mind and I go, there they go again. You know, and so I'm getting more practice on being the observer and the chooser because it's been prolonged for so long. So life has taken on a funny a funny, a funny vantage point to where, um, things that would just used to really upset me because I'd get identified with the thinker or the feeler, um, I'm not gonna let them steal my wah. I'm not gonna let them steal my joy, right? I don't want to leave this, this space that I'm in And so I observe them and I ask myself, is that something real that I need to attend to? No. Okay. So is it something worth my attention and the investment of my energy in it? No. Okay. Is it in any way serving me or humanity? No. Okay. Well, I don't think I'm going to engage in that.

Yes, yes. I like that because I think you said in the book, it's like is this true, you know, and is this helpful? And when we have, when we have a thought, something I try to always keep in mind, you know, it's, it's, if I'm going to entertain this thought, it's got to be both. It's got to be true and it's got to be helpful. If it's, if it's not both, then I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to continue to entertain that thought.

Exactly. And because you're lucid to a growing degree, you have the ability to do that. Your mind has realized you're in charge. It's not in charge anymore because you're not identified with it, right?

Right.

When you are identified with it, it could pretend to be you and just suck the energy right out of your spirit while it ran its array of dispiriting programming.

Yeah, exactly. And I, and I, I think that, you know, because we talked about— we started off talking about suffering. And we talked about wasted suffering versus, you know, useful suffering, or suffering that's not wasted. And I think, you know, the, the, the things that we go through, as you said, you know, even the trials that you're, you're still going through, the physical trials we're going through, that allows us to practice. And just that, that thought, that observation, changes our reality from, oh, I'm suffering, to, oh, this is something for my benefit.

One of the first signs of awakening for me— by awakening, I mean becoming lucid, and that, by that, again, I mean basically disidentifying from the mind and the body and the story. Okay, we're all very attached to our stories.

Sure.

Because we want them to turn out nice, you know, and that is one of the things we have agency over. We're constantly telling ourselves our story from the inside, right? Was I realized that everything came with a perk, even the worst suffering. Hang on a second. Hey, guys. Okay, sorry. Cats were trying to kill each other.

Okay.

Yeah. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Nothing was happening to me. It was all happening for me. Mm-hmm. Okay, well, I stayed in that from like 1995 until about a year ago, uh, and as I came out the other side of Lexapro withdrawals, I realized not only was everything happening for me, it was happening through me. Hmm. Now this is a new development because I had come lucid and I had asserted my dominion over where I put my attention and my intention through my self-talk, I found that I could— when you— when something's about to unfold, um, and I still do that, I do this all the time, something is about to unfold, and like, I'm— even when I'm messing with technology and it's not behaving the way I expect it to. There's a moment when, okay, you think, I know, like I had trouble with my camera this morning. I was like, okay, what's going on with this? Why won't it give me the menu? Keep pressing the menu button. Oh, this is an unfamiliar camera too. So I went, okay, what could it be? Michael, what do I do? Take the battery out. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's a good idea. I'll take the battery out. Just shut it down, take the battery out because there's a little computer in there, right? And I put the battery back in and clipped it shut. And there was a little thought ran through my mind that said it won't work this time. It still won't work this time, right? And I went, nonsense! And I pictured it up lighting up properly when I press the menu button, and it did. Now people will say, well, it was going to work anyway. Well, you don't really know that. Yeah, yeah, you do not know that. And so now what I do when I'm at one of those little crossroads— will it work for me? Is it going to go— is the person I'm asking to do this for me or to let me do this gonna say yes or no? Is it going to go in my favor? The thought always runs briefly through your mind. Oh, I hope it doesn't go that way. Don't put your attention there. Put your attention on the way you want it to go.

Yeah.

And then you are stepping into— you're not attracting anything. You're stepping into it.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. Well, I want to, I want to keep this relatively short today because I know we covered some really deep concepts. I want people to kind of digest them and go over them. Also kind of a new thing we've got going is I have a Grief 2 Growth community, which you've been generous enough to join. So I want to invite people to continue the conversation there. So it's grief2growth.circle.so, or just go to my website, Grief 2 Growth, and look at the chat button in the lower right, lower right corner. This episode will be there as well. And I want to carry on the conversation so people can can talk to both of us about some of these concepts, but also let people know where they can reach you directly and let people know about all of the books that you, you put out recently.

Okay. Um, all right. Uh, can I give them a quick story?

Absolutely.

Okay. Um, all right, so I've like always been a mystic since I met Michael at 5 and a half in my mind space. You know, these things, um, that go on inside our minds, we generally realize that other people aren't having similar experiences, or we think they aren't, and so we keep it to ourselves because you don't want people to think you're totally daft. And so not talking about it, we don't have any context within which to actually know what's happening with us, right? So like, um, I've always seen things in mind space that For instance, I— there's a model of the world around me. Michael calls it the local verse, and that model exists inside mindspace. And I never noticed it was there until I started seeing things in that model in mindspace that were not out in the exterior world. And then I went, holy crap, there's a— there's a model of the world in my head, and there's stuff in it there that isn't down here. Typically, this involves seeing people who have passed. Right? And other people expect to see a ghost externalized, and I don't think that's really the way it happens. That hasn't been my experience. I see them inside my mind space, superimposed on the environment somewhere, somewhere around me typically. Um, so anyway, I just realized in the last year or so what was going on with that is I'm, I'm a medium apparently. Uh, so, and people died all of my life. So many family members have gone on before, and they all came to visit me in dreams. So wow, I must be a medium or something. I don't practice it intentionally or anything, but it just seems to be a natural facility. My awareness seems to be very porous, probably because I spend a lot of my attention is turned inward. I'm listening and looking inward as much as I'm looking and listening outward. I'm directed inward as well. Pardon me. Anyway, uh, so Michael I met in mindspace at 5 and a half, and he was with me always, and I believed in him until I turned 15 and discovered science. Then I became an empiricist, and I set him aside, uh, as an imaginary childhood friend. And I started, you know, with all the magic having gone out of my life, out of my world, because I said it's not real. I declared it not real. I started, you know, kind of grappling with depression and issues and experimenting with drugs and alcohol. And that's how I ended up getting kicked in the face by a horse at 20 and died. And in the lustrous vest, there was Michael again. And I came back to the world and said, okay, he's real, but so what? Okay, he's real. So what? And what does that, you know? Okay. At 28 years old, he said to me, when I was getting ready to marry my first husband, he's a very nice man. Michael said, he's a very nice man, but he's not for you. Okay? He's not your husband. I'm your husband. We came here this way so that I could stay in the door between the worlds and give you guidance. So that you could do certain things in Earth venue. You came here to do specific things in Earth venue, and you needed a guide who was right in between the worlds, okay? And, um, so you really shouldn't marry him even though he's a nice man. And I said what I thought I'd never say to Michael, which was, 'Leave me be,' okay? Because I wanted that experience. And Michael went silent for 6 years. Now, he was still there. And he popped in occasionally when I was in imminent physical peril, he would tell me, he would show me what was about to occur. Or he would say, watch out, literally, not in words, but in concepts. And in 1995, I came in after school final exam, last final exam before summer, getting my bachelor's in interdisciplinary natural sciences. That was my second bachelor's. And I thought, what am I— I've been awake 3 days from cramming. And my mind was really porous. Because when you're sleepy, your brainwaves are changed. You're right in between the worlds. Theta is the brainwave state where it seems he's most easily able to— Michael's most easily able to reach me. So he said to me, I got this— I get it very regularly, frisson, where the hair stands up all over the body. And I feel like— I feel like energy is just either raining down on my head and shoulders and arms and upper back and then travels through my form, either that or it's like boiling out of me. I can't tell which it is. But it's ecstatic. And sometimes it's crippling. It's so strong. I mean, it's literally, it's just like, oh my God. You know. And that was one of the occasions I came in and I sat down and I said to myself, well, it's about to be summer. I haven't heard from Michael now very much in 6 years. About to be summer. What am I going to do? Probably a lot of diving this summer. Pop the beer, sit back, glurg it down, right? And he says, go in and boot up the word processor. And I'm like, eh, ah, must be because I'm sleepy, I can hear you so clearly. No way, I'm not going in there. I'm not gonna, I've been doing papers for the last month. I'm not gonna type anything. My wrists hurt. I get carpal tunnel when I type too much, right? And he hits me with a jolt of chi that rushes up my spine, out of my tailbone, which thumps, boom, boom, boom, and up my spine, and it seems to bounce off the inside of my skull. I've never felt anything like that before at this juncture. And then it runs down my spine and thumps in the tailbone again. And I said, you gotta be kidding me, I'm exhausted, I need to go to sleep, leave me bone. And he did it again. He said, and this time it did it 3 times, wham, wham, wham, wham, up and down my spine. And he said, I have a story to tell you. I promise it'll be a great adventure. And I went in and sat down in front of the word processor and booted it up. And the first book began to pour out my fingers, through my mind and out my And the Vampire Grail Affairs is the story he told me. And it has been a great adventure. And especially because as I was writing the third book, Traveler, I was learning to imagifest and to use a portal I had imagifested. To travel lucidly in dreams across the world. So the vampire grail affairs in Traveler then intertangles my life and what was happening in my life as I went through withdrawals with the world I had written as I realized the power of a person's thoughts and a magifesting, and I came to terms with the fact that if I had created these beings— because I'm asking myself, did I create these beings who seem so dimensional to me, or did I just tune in on an alternate version of the Earth where they exist? So as I grappled with that I realized that if I had created them, then I owed them a karmic debt because I had created some of them with terrible backstories and they were hostage of their backstories.

Hmm.

And it was my responsibility to help them become lucid and transcend their backstory. And so Traveler is named for the fact that I started going between the worlds to interact with those characters. So it becomes a trans-world story. And then there's my memoir, Fiddler's Laughing Bride, which is right now down for revision. So anybody that wants to can let me know that they, you know, drop me an email and let me know that at crackedpotpublications.com, uh, where I go by my pen name, Mycaleen Mohr, which is— you can get to me through the site, but it's Mycaleen Mohr, M-Y-C-A-I-L-I-N, then M-O-H-R, at Cracked Pot Publications. And I'm sure Brian will have that in the links.

Yeah.

Um, and if you want to see Fiddler, as I call The Fiddler's Laughing Bride, which is the story of my, my life as a paranormal romanticist It's the story of my relationship with Michael and how he has brought me through everything he's brought me through and led me to this incredibly liberated perspective, you know, in which, uh, stuff that would normally steal my joy now is met with, uh, chortles. Yeah, yeah, you know, which is a great place to be, really. And, um, for those in the grieving community who are wanting to handle their grief in a productive way, um, that can be very empowering and liberating, taking the position of Observer Chooser, because you then get to choose how you live your life and make it a tribute to those who have had such a big impact on your heart that you're grieving for them. Them because you can no longer interact with them in the physical. Um, so that's, that's basically what my, my books are about, except for Rise, which you talked about, we talked about. So, right, um, I'll soon be doing another book, Michael tells me, similar to Rise, which bears a striking— the voice in Rise, a striking resemblance to A Course in Miracles. I don't know if you noticed it. Did you notice it?

Yeah, yes, yes, absolutely.

It's funny, it's, you know, when I asked Michael, did I create these characters or did they exist already? He was silent. And I said, why aren't you answering me on that? And he said, I am answering you on that. I've been answering you all along. It's just that your belief structure is not big enough to accommodate, is not, it's not integrated enough to accommodate the answer. The answer is yes. You did create them, but it's not the you you think of as you.

Hmm. Yeah.

Okay. And yes, you did tune in on the world where they exist as equally valid. It's another— dreams seem real while they last. And you can say no more than this about your life. If the truth is unity and everything else is just dreams, all dreams are equally real and equally unreal. Yeah, so, uh, you know, that world is just as valid, and it— if when you're in it, it feels just as valid. So, um, there's also an audio file that I've made to give away with the books. It's meant to be reading ambiance. It also is for lucid dream induction, and it goes, um, from a gamma, uh, trailer in to get your attention, and then it goes to alpha and then theta and then delta, and then alternates between theta and delta for 3 hours. And it's meant to sound like the portal, which is a locker room in Chalice, the first book, and the second and the third book in the series. Um, it's meant to help you get into the portal between the worlds through a lucid dream. So that's— I don't know if you've used it anymore, but you had one good—

I have used it, and, uh, yeah, I've noticed that since I've been using it, my dreams are more, more, uh, vivid, and I've had, I've had more lucid dreams.

Yeah, yeah, it does work. And I put it together based on what Michael told me to do. Yeah, I mean, he basically said, you know, do the gamma trailer, do the, you know, the thunder, then do the alpha, then the than the theta, than the delta, but use solfeggio tones and make the solfeggio tones far apart from like high hertz where you're going into delta, and high hertz but not as high when you're in theta, because you want to offset the tendency to go un-lucid with that solfeggio tone in the background. Okay. And that solfeggio tone offsets it a little bit. So when I practice lucid dreaming, I lay there and don't think, literally can just not think. And it's— you never know you've been unconscious until you wake up.

Right.

And that's okay. So you're laying there in bed and I fall asleep and then I go, ah, I was briefly asleep. Okay, I'm back again. It's not like a jolt awake though. It's like a jolt back up into wakeful theta. You're ready to fall asleep, but you're awake. And I do that over and over and over again. And that's what the portal does to you. It just keeps pulling you back up. No, no, no, don't fall totally into identification with that other world you're going into. Don't fall into identification with it. Stay lucid. So it seems to work.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, um, Colleen, so great seeing you again today. And we'll definitely do this again. I said once a day to introduce these concepts to people, give people a chance to digest them, talk about them. So go to crackpotpublications.com. That'll be a link also to find out more about Colleen. And if you want to discuss this, go to grieftogrowth.circle.so, or go to my website in the chat in the lower right-hand side. And we'll have this up there and Colleen will be there with me as well. So again, thanks for doing this today.

Thank you, Brian. It's really a pleasure to work with you. And I love seeing you. You've got a great energy. And I really, really admire what you're doing with the tribulations you've encountered in your life.

Thanks, I appreciate it.

Yeah.

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