Dreams to come true

“Being ready is everything” – so suggests the playwright and poet William Shakespeare, a somewhat mysterious character and a great connoisseur of the human soul.

What is the best way to prepare for the upcoming year?

How do you organize the time to come, without running the risk of ending up in a cage that is too narrow and which does not let in the positive if unexpected surprises, the events that change our life?

In Damanhur, at the origin of any new cycle of process we like to write a Letter of Intent: we take time to listen to ourselves, think back with gratitude on what has just ended, on the gifts we have received in knowledge and experiences. Those gifts are the foundation on which we build that which is to come. It could be that, at times, it is necessary to reclaim that land and clear it of the pain and conflicts experienced, so that it is fertile and ready for the seeds about to be sowed. Accepting, and letting go of the past, is almost a beginning in itself.
Once this preparation is done, we are ready for the most exciting moment: to imagine our future with intensity, tracing its general directions or the dreams to be realized; then going into more and more detail, identifying the individual projects, strategies and timing necessary for their realization. And then down the road, every time in a greater detail, focusing on the bits and pieces, on the apparently insignificant nuances: our thoughts and our emotions, which are the ones that give flavor and color to our days.
The third step is writing down what we have imagined and designed, because dreams must find their place in the real world. “Putting it in black and white” means starting to make our dreams concrete: through the firmness of the ink on paper or the fingers that run over the keyboard. Thus we begin to exercise the practical idealism suggested by the Tarot card “The Star”, which reminds us how the stars in the sky can suggest brilliant paths on earth.

Writing a Letter of Intent is an art, because you need to be really adept in distinguishing the dreaming for dreaming sake, from dreaming that shapes a project which then gets realized. We need to learn to understand what we really want, because sometimes our desires are the result of somebody’s suggestions or may have been induced by a world trends that try to increasingly manipulate us.

How do we know to be on the right path?

Trying, and adjusting the target the following year, based on awareness of what has worked and of what was merely an unrealizable dream, or, perhaps, something that we didn’t really care that much about after all.

Is the writing of the Letter of Intent a guarantee that the projects will be realized?

Absolutely not! But through this tool we are able to give a precise direction to our energy, transforming it into the engine that will lead us towards their realization. The human being has an incredible amount of energy, which is sometimes dispersed in a thousand directions, captured as we face excessive number of stimuli or challenges. The essential quality is to be able to find ourselves at the center of ourselves, where we remain in contact with our true desires, that space from which creative planning is born. It is the moment in which our energy is concentrated in one point before the arrow is launched towards the goal. This way each project is supported by the energy necessary for its realization and the events line up in a synchronic way, to an extent that sometimes leaves us amazed: everything seems to be going the right way!

Why is it important to write the Letter of Intent in this period?

At Damanhur we believe that the days between the old and the new year are special, charged with a particular energy. It is an extraordinary time, which is linked to the great astronomical cycles, a sort of “no-time” that the Egyptians and the Greeks speak of. The Egyptian calendar was made up of twelve months of thirty days each. To make the calendar year coincide with the solar year, it was necessary to add five days, which were called by the Greeks (who had similar issue…) “Epagomenal days”, or “added days”. The mystery tradition has it that the gods were born in this period. An ancient Egyptian myth, in fact, tells that Ra had forbidden that, from the union of Nut (Goddess of the Sky) and Geb (God of the Earth), children were born on any day of the year. The god Thoth, playing with the Moon, has won five extra days, during which Nut, unseen by Ra, gave birth to five deities: Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis and Nephthys.

For this reason, the Epagomenal days represent the best time to start something new: hidden under the invisibility cloak, we can create in freedom. In this ‘time-non-time’, energy becomes more fluid, free from the constraints and any fears that most all of us carry within. This way, when at the end of the no-time period, we return to the rhythm of our usual cycle of time, we will find ourselves renewed and perhaps even positively unrecognizable.