John: What is really interesting about your dream yesterday is that a part of you knows that everything that happens to you is an opportunity to sustain and hold onto this “note,” something that you already have inside you.
If we watch ourselves closely we see that we can be in a certain place within ourselves, yet if the phone rings or something new happens, we get an initial rush and lose that state inside. If the person on the phone is not someone we want to talk to, then we get this feeling of dullness and we have lost the note we were holding.
When that happens you are losing the ability to carry the note through into all the things you are doing. That is where you want to be in yourself, not adjusting and accommodating every “difference” you encounter, but radiating the note inside of you into everything you do.
When you can do that, you do not have all these different “breaths,” there is only one breath. There is one breath in your whole lifetime. But when you cannot do that, everything external to you has its effect on you. In the dream you are trying to meet this man, and the other man turns up. But because he is not what you expected, you move away from him to keep searching.
So the man that turns up is read by you as a distraction, but he’s really not – he’s the one you are seeking, but he appears different from what you’ve imagined.
So you’ve cut yourself off from what you were looking for. It happens automatically with the breath – immediately, simultaneously – as soon as something doesn’t “fit” in the way you want it to fit. So instead of holding the note inside, and being of one breath – which is the simple cycle of creation where everything that exists is all part of one thing – you end up fragmented and separated, and tossed around by what you encounter in life.
None of this separation needs to happen. What can appear to be a nightmare situation doesn’t have to be if you recognize it as a dialogue between the outer world and your inner world. You can’t limit the dialogue to what you are expecting, you have to relate to whatever comes your way.
In other words, when you step from an environment that is comfortable, into an environment that is uncomfortable, we usually begin to make accommodations and adjustments. The first adjustment is with the breath. That adjustment is an act of shutting something off, rather than being able to gently recognize that this is a dialogue.
A sudden change in the temperature is saying something to you. A phone call from someone you don’t want to talk to is saying something to you. The appearance of a man you are not expecting is saying something to you. The thing is to hold the inner note – don’t be dislodged by what comes – carry that inner note through, from you, into what you come upon and have to relate to in life.
Very, very interesting. If, in a dream, you see yourself cutting off different avenues that you are heading down, then you are maintaining a separation between the external and the internal. In psychology, that’s called subrogation, i.e., replacing one thing with another (one man for another in your dream).
I used to get furious at myself when I first recognized this and didn’t know how to do anything about it. I would experience some wonderful energetic, but it wouldn’t be sustainable by me because every little thing would disrupt it. I would be swept along by every new situation.
I consider this a kind of blasphemy. If I’m having this wonderful experience, and yet I throw it aside at the first sign of something else, then I’m truly making a mockery out of what is given and awakened inside.
Well, we all go through this. The point is you can still have all the ups and downs of the experiences in life, and still hold that note. We are meant to be fully in life, as it is.
