As described in Part I, the unfolding that began in John with the seemingly simple awareness that there is an unseen hand at play in our lives and in the universe, deepens into a path of connection to the overallness of life. From a single dream process, the vastness of the mystery can emerge.
John: Until we allow in ourselves conscious awareness, we are still thinking that our individuality is what needs to be accentuated in all we do. We still have no idea that there is this other will involved. When we allow this presence to cause in us the belief that there is something more to life than our desires and prerogatives, that is when we come to the end of our unconscious, individuality phase (ego). That is when we acknowledge the existence of a higher power embedded in our nature, like an echo, as if to admit “okay, god exists.”
That’s about as far as you can get at this point, but it begins the journey towards god (or spirit, or universal force, as one may prefer); the focus on our individuality was a journey away from god. While journeying towards god, we take on a more responsible awareness of our suffering (as part of the loneliness and longing reflected on previously). Before then, while glorifying our individuality, we might suppress the unseen influence and thereby think we had the ability to manage the stimuli to suit our personal predilections. So you are suffering, but you don’t yet know to what degree. That’s kind of what it’s like. You don’t even acknowledge that there is something being said in the dream images in terms of the suffering.
As soon as we are more sincere and willing to accept the will of the creator, the influence of the higher self causes us to relate differently to the subtle inner presence behind the external scene, within a dream and within our daily lives. We are now feeling the heart’s reactions more directly as we recognize the sorting out taking place. This is the phase where an alignment is occurring. It’s during this phase that we think the light inside us is our own light. It is during this phase that we become aware of our fragility. We see what dulls the light within. We see that personal attachments to the material world diffuse the light. We come to see that the use of this light is for others (service), not ourselves. We recognize that the more impersonal we can be in our actions, the more access we have to the light.
