John: I have two very different dreams here that actually deliver the same message.
In the first dream I’m in very hot and sweaty conditions and I’m supposed to hold onto a vibration in a slow, steady, and consistent way. It wasn’t supposed to be this way – at least it’s not what I expected.
I’m convinced that I can sustain this vibration at an even quicker pace. Then it wouldn’t need to be so slow and be in such a hot, awkward environment.
Still, I resist my temptation to go faster, and as it turns out I see that I was better off going at this very slow pace. Eventually, the environment did cool down.
I found something very humble about this approach – a quiet consistency. There was no fanfare, and no frame of reference because this was not something that I would have chosen. My expectations gave me the urge to speed up. If I had done that, I would have missed out on being able to see myself as being steady, slow, and consistent.
That’s the first dream.
In the next dream, I just an average person and I’m in a parking garage. There is a man there – a dignified businessman in a suit – who has a bicycle as his means of transportation. It’s time for him to take this bike back out onto the street, but he doesn’t trust himself to do it.
What’s odd about this garage is that there’s an embankment that falls off to one side and you have to walk along the edge very carefully. Then you have to back the bike through the door. If you don’t know how to do that you could fall over the edge and never get it out. He’s afraid to try for fear of falling off the edge.
So, here I am, an average Joe, and I’m looking at what’s involved from his perspective, not from my perspective. I’m getting into his paranoia and his concerns and I can feel that they are being exaggerated.
I advise him on how he could proceed, but he won’t proceed. He’s reluctant. So, I say, “I’m so confident in what I see that if you want, I’ll do it for you.” This causes him to snap out of his reactivity for a moment.
He replies, “I’ll have to think about that,” which means he’ll just go into another kind of paranoia. I say, “I’ll give you two minutes to decide, no more.” He replies, “I believe you can do it, so go ahead.”
I take the back part of the bike off. I see a door off to one side, so I take the back part of the bike through that door and there is a little place that joins the outside and I shove the back part of the bike out of the parking garage. I didn’t even know about this door earlier – it wasn’t part of the plan.
However, the bulk of the bike won’t fit out that way, so I have to do what I had originally planned and go along the narrow embankment edge. So, I have to shift, from his fearful eyes to my knowing eyes, and the whole thing looks effortless to me – once the reactivity is taken out.
So, without even thinking I walk from one end of the parking garage to the other along the edge, as if it’s no big deal, and realize all I need to do is repeat that process with the rest of the bike.
When you put these two dreams together, what they are showing me is that I need to deal with life as it exists. In both scenarios, expectations color my perception of what should happen. In both instances, what should be an effortless process is made much more difficult because of what I bring to the situation in terms of reactivity or expectation.
If conditions are awkward, I can still go that route. Things don’t have to unfold according to my expectations, or timetable, for me to be connected. I need to drop these self-imposed limitations. Mostly these perspectives are never about serious issues anyway, they’re just mental distractions or old patterns. When I feel the strength from within, I’m able to proceed effortlessly; the problems just fall away.
So, on an energetic level, when expectation and reactivity fall away, the part of me that’s in emptiness, or in freedom, takes over with ease. It changes my experience of everything.
When this knowingness from within is reached, everything becomes simple for us. When I drop my projections about how I think things should proceed, it allows what is meant to be to occur naturally. The connection then is to a greater overall state that is simply there, without anything to complicate its overallness.
