John: Well, your dream showed you feeling strong enough to go back from where you came, because you were armed with a sense of knowing. In my dream, I see myself back at a class reunion, without such strength and knowing.
At the gathering of my classmates, I notice that I can’t really relate to any of them anymore. It’s almost like I don’t even know them – they seem so bland and the energy seems so stale, The whole thing seems so boring.
The first two days are like that, completely empty. In spite of that I stay for the third day because that’s the day we all get together for a class meal. I find myself sitting at a table feeling just as I have for the first two days: I can’t relate to anyone; the situation feels empty, as if some energetic quality is missing.
At some point, before the food is served, I get up to take a walk and get some fresh air. Suddenly I see an old friend in the distance and I feel an upsurge of energy.
The friend I see is a man who has a golden heart – he works in the community to make a difference as a leader, and he’s very generous with his time and his openness. But that’s not how I knew him back in school – he was more of the football-captain type: popular, but perhaps not that bright. He was very grounded, rooted even. But that’s not how he has emerged. He has changed. He must have always had it in him, because he has become quite a good person.
So I yell out to him to get his attention. He sees me and as I approach he slumps down next to the wall as if all of a sudden he’s gone into a state of despair. He says, “Don’t do this to me. Don’t come back.”
He is speaking from the heart. He’s saying something that’s very hard for him to say. A tear even wells up in his eye. I can see that he’s being very genuine. He continues, “You’re just going to get beat up again.”
I’m a bit taken back by his statement. I thought I was just greeting an old friend. He reads it as me trying to fit back into the old world again. In other words, he was the one person that I thought I could relate to; none of the others had the vibrancy or the openness. It was all so shallow.
So I take this story of what happened – because I’m still shocked by it – to a relative who lives in the area who has been telling everyone that someday I would return to my roots. When I tell him the story, my relative confesses that he has been spreading this story of my return and he starts to cry as well, but his crying is more from a sense of loss for what can never be again. He even cries more than my schoolmate.
He can’t let go of his past and that influence weighs upon him. He tries to be as good a person as he can, but he sees everything in terms of black-and-white; that’s just how it is for him.
This dream is showing that I’m vacillating when aspects of my past get stirred up. When it happens, I’m not able to sustain a quality of the heart we’re all meant to be able to sustain. That means I’m not able to stay true to who and what I’m meant to be.
This dream has created a conversation between aspects of my physical past and the heart of my past, which has moved on to a more genuine realness. The divine heart is saying I should stay with my higher self, where I’m able to take a step forward.
In other words, I shouldn’t try and fit into aspects of life that I’ve moved on from. It’s warning me not to go through those travails and difficulties again. Don’t go backwards. Don’t go into the past. Don’t try to wrestle with the things that send me off on a tangent.
Yes, these aspects have a hold on me, but to return to the old ways of being is to risk being beaten up all over again, because the energies that I experienced still live in those realms and can be reactivated.
So we have another good example of how our dreams can help guide us on our spiritual journey. We really can’t go home again, at least not in the familiar sense of that phrase. Yet a spiritual journey is really one of finding our way back to our true home. That’s an area that we can delve into more deeply tomorrow.
