Dreams Are Letters from the Soul: Discover the Connections between Your Dreams and Your Spiritual Life - Connie Kaplan - Hardcover - 1ST

I hope you will read this book as if it were a series of letters to you from a lover who is on a voyage. Each section in the book describes how our dreams guide us through the different legs of the great spiritual journey of lifethe journey to understanding ourselves and the journey to love. We are all on this voyage, whether we know it or not. It's not an option; it's a deep and undeniable reality. The love letters in this book are designed to help you make this life pilgrimage with more clarity, more understanding, more grace. Those of us who take this spiritual journey seriously devote time and energy to deepen and evolve our knowledge of it. We meditate, we study how the masters and mystics have taken the journey, and we strive to be conscious of our own spiritual unfolding. Others are more casual about this part of life, occasionally attending church or simply following the traditions of our parents' religion. And, unfortunately, large numbers of us have chosen to live in denial of the spiritual element of our lives. Yet it doesn't matter what we think or do. We may have abandoned our spiritual self altogether. Philosophy and religious thought may never have entered our waking consciousness. That doesn't essentially change anything. Our spiritual self doesn't abandon us. We still dream. Sleep still regenerates us, and dreams still guide us unwittingly on our path. These stories are like messagesletters, if you willfrom the level of the soul. Like letters, these dream stories must be opened, read, and understood or else the communication is incomplete and ineffective. What Is the Soul? In order to fully appreciate the dream teachings, it's important for us to work with the same definition of the term soul. I titled this book Dreams Are Letters from THE Soulas opposed to Dreams Are Letters from YOUR Soulfor a very specific reason. My journeys into soul consciousness have taught me something very important: Soul is collective, not personal. When I use the term soul I refer to a vast level of consciousnessone that exists before, beyond, and throughout the separation and isolation that we experience as individuals in human form. Soul is impersonal because it is universal. It is a unifying term, not a separating one. We are not individual souls. We are instead individuations of a collective level of soul consciousness. Picture a meadow on a partly cloudy day. Think of the sun hiding behind a cloud. You can see beams of light shooting out. They look like spotlights, searchlights if you will, radiating from behind the cloud. In your imagination, follow one of those beams and allow it to illuminate a tree some distance from you. In this analogy, the sun is the source of life, or the Creator's light, veiled by the cloud. The cloud veil consists of the thoughts and beliefs (yours and the collective's) that both prevent you from experiencing the Creator directly and protect you from receiving too much cosmic energy too quickly. In a sense, this veil prevents the "spiritual sunburn" that might occur to your nervous system if you are infused with energy for which you are not physically prepared. The tree is you, rooted in the ground of your motherlike Earth, stretching toward the light of your fatherlike sun. The sunbeam is the soul. The soul is the avenue through which the realm of the cosmos (the Creator or God) communicates with the realm of form. It is not a personal sunbeam. It is a transpersonal source of Love. It is the tree's connection to The Source. The sunbeam is the vehicle through which the tree and the sun relate. The level of soul from which our dream letters come is a unified level. When we sleep, we melt into universal consciousness, and the soul imprints messages into our mindKaplan, Connie is the author of 'Dreams Are Letters from the Soul: Discover the Connections between Your Dreams and Your Spiritual Life - Connie Kaplan - Hardcover - 1ST' with ISBN 9780609607916 and ISBN 060960791X.