Notes on "Being captured by the mob.".

Here's a response to a dream I found apropos to my dream, particularly when I told this other person my nightmare about being tortured.

POSITIVE-NEGATIVE IN DREAMS - We can turn dream imagery into principles for living. In Greg's dream one can see the one rollerskate as positive or negative. He has a helper to repair his rollerskate and he can move on that, or he can see that as bad and reject it, and then he will have no roller skates to move on.There is a plan to move forward in life. The practical way seems to be to have a goal and a plan. However, to move forward and upward we need to keep creating with the positives so that this energy does indeed move us forward in the real world. Thus, each day create something positive in your life so that it becomes a daily practice. Also, keep changing your attitude that would be negative and defeat you. Live from positives, picking out each day what has the potential and value, then make your choices to move forward. One businessman told me once, "if you are not moving forward, you are moving backwards." -Strephon Strephon Kaplan-WilliamsNetherlands-World - Saturday, August 12, 2006 at 09:38:25 (CEST) Live from positives, picking out each day what has the potential and value, then make your choices to move forward. One businessman told me once, "if you are not moving forward, you are moving backwards." -Strephon Strephon Kaplan-WilliamsNetherlands-World - Saturday, August 12, 2006 at 09:38:25 (CEST)

The statement that stuck me was "Also, keep changing your attitude that would be negative and defeat you". Am I being defeated by my own attitudes? In the dream I'm told that I have to kill this guy, though I resist this in the dream in real life my attitude might be a little to the contrary, Kill, kill, kill. Is this nightmare just my own attitudes being reflected back at me?

In Tibetan Buddhism this could me true. The "Tibetan Book of the Dead" talks about experiences where the deceased, seemingly experiences persons, deities ,objects and demons in the afterlife, but that these experiences are basically the deceases own undying conscious. If decease recognizes this, then he is said to reached enlightenment and moves into the light and delays rebirth. Maybe this is why Buddhist teach cultivation of "Compassion toward all beings"..This is called "Boddhacitta" ..Its a way to keep people out of hell states and into enlightenment a discipline that cultivates compassion for enemies, people that hate you...

Its pretty hard to have compassion toward all, to your enemies, toward people who wantonly malign you and harm you and your loved ones, but maybe its easier to do this when you kind of realize that the person that you hurt in acts of violence, hatred toward others might be your self. Could this dream be suggesting this or am I more a helpless victim? If this is true for the Afterlife it must be true for the dream state as well.

A passage from the Tibetan Book of the Dead says.

"In the second week of the second bardo, the soul meets seven legions of Wrathful Deities: hideous, terrifying demons who advance upon him with flame and sword, drinking blood from human skulls, threatening to wreak unmerciful torture upon him, to maim, disembowel, decapitate and slay him. The natural tendency, of course, is for the soul to attempt to flee from these beings in stark, screaming, blood-curdled terror; but if he does, all is lost. The instructions at this stage of the Bardo are for the soul to have no fear, but rather to recognize that the Wrathful Deities are really the Peaceful Deities in disguise, their dark side manifesting as a result of his own evil karma. The soul is told to calmly face each demon in turn and visualize it as the deity it truly is, or else as his own tutelary deity; if he can do this, he will merge with the being and attain the second degree of Liberation, that lesser aspect of it which is now the best he can hope for here in the second bardo.

Furthermore, he is told to awaken to the fact that all these fearsome creatures are not real, but are merely illusions emanating from his own mind. If he can recognize this, they will vanish and he will be liberated. If he can't, he eventually wanders down to the third bardo.'