John: Your dream began with a situation where you are being offered to take part in something that is familiar to you (it is centered around an old friend). Yet what is offered is immediately compromised by the aspect of it being done to make money, rather than for more altruistic reasons – it’s a learning seminar though, not strictly a business venture, so the worlds of personal development and ego-based concerns are colliding.
You sense right away that this doesn’t sit well with you, but you still have a curiosity. So what has been set up by the imagery is another choice that you are confronted with and, as in the dream described in Inner Decisions, the challenge to you is can you maintain your centeredness in the swirl of trading life, i.e., most of today’s culture?
You have a feeling that you can’t completely go along with it, even though the woman friend is encouraging it, and ultimately the man encourages this type of journey as well.
It shows you having reached within yourself a point of meaningfulness, where you have to look at everything in your life and re-evaluate whether it fits in with the real journey you are on.
You are realizing that from here on, whatever it is that you need to do, must be weighed and your choices and actions need to be based on reasoning that is solid, balanced, and in harmony with who you are (and want to become). Otherwise the actions won’t sit well with you.
In other words, it’s no longer enough to base your decisions on something that sounds good, or looks good (the larger house in the earlier dream), or based on what other people are telling you is a great idea (the trek to the seminar). What you choose to do needs to come from a place within that you hold and recognize as valid and true for how you want to be.
If we take the two dreams together, they both have to do with a type of stepping out into the world. In Inner Decisions it showed you were ready to expand into a larger “house” – to expand your inner life further into your outer life – with the awareness that you need to do it in a way where there’s no going back.
In this dream, it shows that as you expand outside of your “house” into the world, the expansion must be in a way that is empty and free of meaningless gestures, and can allow you to let go even more.
In other words, what the dreams are doing is honing your attention to what it is that makes you tick. It’s an interesting way of slowly backing up into the essence of it all. You don’t drop away from old ways that quickly. You do it when you find that these other options just don’t mean anything for you anymore.
You could have been really charitable about the trek experience and followed expected protocols, but you can feel that to do so comes at a price to your inner self that you can no longer condone.
You’re basically going back and forth with the listening center inside, learning to trust it and really hear it. It’s like you are teeter tottering a bit in terms of being “in” the world, or “of” the world. You are looking for a sense of balance. You can’t have it both ways.
Ultimately you are finding that out through a process of elimination, and a process of moving around and looking at the two sides. As you get closer and closer to the awakening of an essence inside, and the recognition of how real that is, you know you just can’t go back.
However, when you’re in-between, you can glance in both directions and still risk being caught up in the world, as opposed to being firmly planted in your inner self.
So, the question then comes up, “What caused you to suddenly review all of this?” It seems that you’re already compelled and committed to your spiritual journey, but is there another kind of consciousness that needs to come into this in addition to just a flow?
Is there a consciousness that needs to come into it that also needs to rally ‘round and add a focus to how you now see yourself? These are the areas that you are being asked to address, and your decisions will either find you more fully surrendered to your spiritual, inner life, or find you still willing to drift along on the aimless trek that the cultural life thinks is important.
