A Structural Engineer's Waking Dream: Post #3

 photo courtesy of elementengineer.com

This week we’re following the experiences of a structural engineer-in-training who found himself in the peculiar position of having his work and his specs questioned by a client. This engineer understands the concept of the waking dream. As soon as things started to go awry, he began to pay attention to little clues that were being offered by the environment around him.

Then, he took his understanding to a deeper and more constructive level. What follows is the continuation of his narrative.

A structural engineer takes his experience to a deeper level

Even tuning into the little clues that were being offered by the world around me was reassuring. When you start to see that you are really never alone—that the universe is in constant communication with you—it takes so much stress off of life. Had I not been guided in this way, or rather, had I been unaware of the guidance that was being offered, I would have been a basket case. I don’t handle stress that well, and I tend to get really tense. But these little hints let me know that I should not put too much stock in the encounter with my client and his supposedly knowledgeable friend. It afforded me the opportunity to walk away from the whole experience in my mind. And that took a lot of the strain away.

In addition, I have worked with the dream long enough that I know there is more to it than that. Being able to distance myself, emotionally and in terms of my own investment in the project, was already huge. But there was more. The adage that I learned and, now, live my life by, is “Whatever you perceive, is you.” When you look at life from that perspective, then it adds a whole new dimension to whatever experience you are having. According to that philosophy, everything that I was witnessing and aware of during the encounter with my client and his friend, was actually me. In other words, as I watched my drawings being thoughtlessly and insensitively crossed out and scribbled over, I was looking at myself. The “bad guy”—my client’s supposedly knowledgeable friend—was really a facet of myself. I was the one who was demeaning my own work. I was the one who was not giving credit to myself and, instead, was questioning my results.

By looking at life that way, suddenly, there are no external “bad guys;” it’s just me. And the way to resolve the problem was not to get angry at some lamebrain who was scribbling all over my plans. Instead, what I needed to do was to focus on my own internal conflict. That conflict, whatever it was, was being acted out for me in life. If I wanted to stop the unpleasant encounter, then I needed to resolve the conflict within myself. If I did that, then the world around me would begin to reflect my new sense of peace.

Tomorrow, we’ll ask our engineer what he thinks this internal conflict is.

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