A spiritual journey can require a lifting of the “veils” to see beyond the illusion of daily reality, into the greater truth that is behind it. Yet that journey requires maintaining a certain groundedness, like a mountaineer scaling great heights requires ropes anchored into the rock to insure some measure of safety. These reflections were begun with the dream Not So Itsy-Bitsy and continued withA Vivid Imagination.
John: It’s very awkward to see what is real through the veil of illusion because we all have an ego and will always carry an ego, even though it is tamed to some degree, as long as we are in a physical body. So that keeps some small aspect in-between, even as one’s sense of otherness develops to a greater and greater degree. And this whole sense of otherness, because it includes everything that can be imagined, needs to be connected to a certain quality of the heart. That heart connection is what keeps the sense of otherness from flying off into wild imagination.
So when one feels a certain pressure, whether in a dream or in life, or that one is trapped, it can set off the active imagination in some fashion, and so one has to be careful how literally one takes things or feels things. If one’s tendency is to be swept up in these feelings it can limit what can be gained naturally through the listening center. In a roundabout way, this is a higher octave of what your dream means to me, in that it draws a focus and attention to it while showing that there is a part of you that hears beyond these kinds of things.
So how does one get beyond these kinds of things? Well, the oddity of being really open in an overallness, the awkwardness of something like that, is that if one stays in just this vast connected state, one tends to hear or become aware of things that are going on that are perhaps not as “reality-based” as usual. So one’s attention needs focus to ground it. In other words, one can’t just float in the otherness, one has to have a groundedness within that which can provide a clarity of direction. If one doesn’t have that rootedness, then the huge expanse can carry one to the beyond of the beyond, which is not a proper opening up process.
I can give you an example of how one can get lost: We have the capacity to connect to something on the other side, and we can see images there. If one gets totally enmeshed in that, one can become a bit dysfunctional in the outer. That is a danger, and a propensity, that one can experience when one starts connecting to something that literally is a movement inside oneself, that sits there in the subtlety of things. It takes a certain audacity, almost a certain wildness, to make the ego sort out from all that the inner and the outer worlds. It is important to have that going on.
It may not look like it is important, because that sense of reality may seem to just get in the way. But if one just went into the expanse without that sense of reality, there’s no way to make heads or tails out of it. Everything can seem to be literally real; that’s where the spiders can be humongous, and every little thing can just spiral into something wilder and wilder, created by the wildest inflections that one has. We all carry these inflections inside us somehow. We could have been subjected to all kinds of strange traumas from which these things have been incubated or bred.
So if you see this kind of thing coming on, what is very interesting is that you don’t actually get rid of it by paying attention to it. You almost make it more real as you focus and pay attention to it (and let an active imagination run in it). It reminds me of a man I knew who could not meditate because as soon as he sat down he would lose his groundedness and would start to astral travel. He expressed this as a serious concern in that he needed to stay rooted because he had the ability to drop human existence away. Without the rootedness he would get all out of sorts. It was the strangest thing I’d heard of, but that was his condition.
So this is a dilemma that occurs when a person gets to a particular point of development. It’s a point where one can actually make a distinction between the density of how something is in the physical realm, and also the attractiveness and the quality of something on the other side. It’s really easy to just let go and go to the other side. A person can get to this point naturally, but many have also done this unnaturally, by going into a hallucinogenic state where they have no rapport with their physical rootedness and get to a point where they can’t sort it out anymore. It is the fifth level of the heart that saves a person from something like that.
We each have our own different way of making this experience of opening up inside what it really is. In the example of your dream, your imagination has made it into this huge spider, and that’s your way of being able to reflect it back to yourself with a degree of safety.
