Excellence Reporter: Robert, what is the meaning of life?

Robert Moss: For me, the meaning of life is forever under construction. The building materials are stories. No one else can do the construction work for us. We are required to find our own essential stories, and become authors of meaning for our own lives.

Each of us is living a story. If we don’t know that, we may be living the wrong story, a small and confining story wound around us by other people’s beliefs and expectations.

Our first and best teachers, in our lives and in the evolution of our kind, instruct and inspire by telling stories. Story is our shortest route to the meaning of things, and our easiest way to remember and carry the meaning we discover. A good story lives inside and outside time and gives us keys to a world of truth beyond the world of fact.

When we reach, consciously, for a bigger life story, we put ourselves in touch with tremendous sources of healing, creativity, and courage. The right story can help to heal our bodies. The latest research in biochemistry and neuro-immunology confirms what shamans have known for millennia: the body believes in images, and does not seem to distinguish between a physical act and an imagined event. Give the body a story it can believe in, and the body will respond accordingly.

When we are seized by a bigger story and are burning to tell it and to live it, we are driven to create, and make creative life choices. If you know your life Work, then it is no longer work; every day is a play day.

Knowing the bigger story gives us courage. If you know you are living a deeper drama, it becomes easier to cope with the ups and downs of everyday existence.

I am a teller and maker of stories and it is my pleasure to help others remember their bigger and braver stories – and live those stories, and tell them so well that they want to take root in the world.

How do we find the bigger story in our lives? The answer is easier than we might think. The First Peoples of my native Australia say that the big stories are hunting the right people to tell them. All we need do is put ourselves in places where we can be found. That means listening to our dreams and allowing at least a little unstructured, unscheduled time in a day to pay attention to the many voices in which the world is speaking to us.  These are things that I teach all over the world.

I call my approach Active Dreaming. It is about far more than analyzing dreams.

First, Active Dreaming is a way of talking and walking our dreams, of bringing energy and guidance from the dreamworld into everyday life. We learn how to create a safe space where we can share dreams of the night and dreams of life with others, receive helpful feedback, and encourage each other to move towards creative and healing action. We discover that each of us can play guide for others, and that by sharing in the right way we claim our voice, grow our power as storytellers and communicators, build stronger friendships and lay foundations for a new kind of community. Above all, we learn to take action to embody the energy and guidance of our dreams in everyday life.

Second, Active Dreaming is a method of shamanic lucid dreaming. It starts with simple everyday practice and extends to profound group experiences of time travel, soul recovery and the exploration of multidimensional reality. It is founded on the understanding that we don’t need to go to sleep in order to dream. The easiest way to become a conscious or lucid dreamer is to start out lucid and stay that way.

Third, Active Dreaming is a way of conscious living. This requires us to claim the power of naming and define our life project. It invites us to discover and follow the natural path of our energies. It calls us to remember and tell and live our bigger story in such a way that it can be heard and received by others. It is about navigating by synchronicity and receiving the chance events and symbolic pop-ups on our daily roads as clues to a deeper order. It is about grasping that the energy we carry and the attitudes we choose have magnetic effect on the world around us, drawing or repelling encounters and circumstances.

Active Dreaming is a way of being fully of this world while maintaining constant contact with another world, the world-behind-the-world, where the deeper meaning of our lives is to be found. It is a way of remembering and embodying what the soul knows about essential things: who we are, where we come from, and what our sacred purpose is in this life and beyond this life.

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~Robert Moss is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of modern dreamwork and shamanism. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences in childhood. He leads  seminars all over the world,  from the Carpathian Mountains to southern Brazil, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a best-selling novelist, poet, journalist and independent scholar. His many books on dreaming, shamanism and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreaming the Soul Back Home, and The Boy Who Died and Came Back. His latest book is Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbol and Synchronicity in Everyday Life.. He also leads popular online courses in Active Dreaming for The Shift Network.
www.MossDreams.com

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