Today we ask you to not get caught up in drama.

You live in a reality that continuously engineers drama.  If there is one thing you can be certain of in your highly uncertain reality, it is this: reality always creates drama.

Why this should be so is not particularly relevant, except to say that drama is an extremely powerful teaching and learning device.  If you want to teach something, it always best to frame it within a story.  Stories are how the mind learns.  The mind continuously creates stories — that is how it makes sense of things.

So stories and dramas are intrinsic to your reality.

But it is possible to experience the drama of reality without getting so caught up in the story that you lose yourself completely.

If you look at the wise men, sages, and mystics in stories, they always stand slightly outside the drama.  They may participate, and play key roles.  They may even die in the course of the drama.  But the wise men and sages always stand slightly outside.  They generally do not experience the same level of terror and trauma that the other characters experience.

It is very possible to adopt this stance within your real-life dramas.  It is possible to stand slightly outside the drama, and not get completely lost within it.

Some of you may have had the experience of a “lucid dream.”  In a lucid dream, you become conscious that you are dreaming.  When this happens, you step outside the drama of the dream.  You are no longer lost within it.  You are awake.  You no longer fear the dream, for you know it to be a dream.  Sometimes there is an exhilarating sense of freedom associated with lucid dreaming.  You are no longer subject to the rules of the dream drama.  You can do anything.

It is possible to experience even waking reality as a kind of lucid dream.  Obviously, there are major differences between waking reality and dream reality.  We do not advise you to jump off a cliff or step in front of a train in waking reality.  The lucid dreamer in dreamland can jump off a cliff or step in front of a train.  The laws of waking reality are different.  

However, waking reality is not as different from dream reality as you may think.

When someone is called “enlightened,” it really means they are experiencing waking reality like a lucid dream.  The drama goes on, but they have stepped outside of it.  They may participate in the life drama, but they do not lose themselves.  Such beings usually are sages who are greatly helpful to their fellow men, just like the sages of fiction.

Waking up in reality begins when you learn that you have free will.  You do not have to react to the drama the way you are programmed to.  What your parents and ancestors have always done, you do not have to do.  What your society and peers say you must do, you do not have to do.  That is how you begin to step outside the drama.

You step outside the drama when the voice in your head shouts at you to REACT! and DO SOMETHING! — and you choose not to.  You are no longer a slave to your impulses and conditioning.

The drama will never stop unfolding.  But it is possible for you to step behind the curtain, and glimpse the truth.  When you learn to question your reactive, impulsive thoughts, you begin to wake up.

And when that happens… life ceases to be oppressive, and traumatic.  It becomes exhilarating.