John: In this continuing look at your earlier dream (see Separation Anxiety), the imagery is showing a disconnection between different levels of you and your attempts to remedy that.
The first part – out in the orchard, not allowed to go “home,” a possible divorce – has to do with different inner levels that are trying to make themselves known or visible to you, but they are not succeeding. You carry these elements as part your nature, and the imagery is implying that changes are needed. You don’t yet know how, or why, or what – all you’ve been able to catch up to is the sense that something is amiss or incomplete.
So, the images show everyone disconnected – the daughter and mother, husband and wife, the inability to get together for a meal, a natural disaster, and then the lost boy. Nothing is really going as planned or coming together in a way that is productive or useful.
These events show that things are changing, but you are unable to bring them together. In these shifts you are meant to let in or through information that will show you how everything comes together in a new way, but you are not open or connecting to that information. That’s why things get more and more confused.
When you don’t allow for the new information, your only option is to turn to old patterns or ideas about what to do. So you don’t have the open quality to your heart nature. In other words, you’re not able to take in the wholeness of the situation – you just end up with fragments.
The best you can manage is to formulate ideas that you think address the problems to some degree; you formulate these from your perceptions, your mind, and from how you see yourself. The problem is, that’s not deep enough. Something else needs to be done so that you can catch up with all of the levels and all of the components that are trying to be made known to you.
When we don’t connect to the flow of things, we become separated and then must rely on our fallback position, which is a self-reliant, “I have all the answers,” ego-based view of life. The dream is showing this pattern or mannerism in you. The scary thing about this mannerism is, it’s just a knee-jerk reaction in terms of finding a solution. You’re doing the “best-you-can,” but you are acting from an imbalanced state. To your inner heart, this feels like you’re lying to yourself.
Whenever we do something that is “the best we can possibly conjure up,” in terms of making sense of a dilemma, what we are really doing is re-ordering the pieces according to our limited perception. There’s no way we’re going to get it right.
We then begin to formulate a rationalization to explain it, or to convince others or ourselves. Basically, we have abandoned all the levels of information available to us, and acted from the narrowest (personal) possible understanding. It’s really a defense mechanism that takes us away from a heartfulness inside that those other levels give us.
The other levels can often leave us feeling unsettled – as if it’s all too much – so it’s a common human response to come up with an easier way, which is to shut off the flow, rationalizing that it makes everything better or makes us feel safer. Of course, it does just the opposite.
It’s a lie to ourselves because deep down we know that it doesn’t make sense, but we don’t let that part of ourselves get the memo. That’s how we proceed.
This dream is significant because this is a process that we all use all the time, but we tend to not notice it. Life offers us situations that can help open us up to more, but if we feel that that territory is too frightening or too different, we make a determination on how things “should” be. That determination is a compromise.
And such compromises will affect the way life will unfold afterwards, with perhaps the same issues coming around again, at some point, to give us another opportunity to make a breakthrough. We have turned a very natural process into an unnatural outcome.
