John: In this dream, I receive a call from a realtor who says that I’m not tending to things properly. I’m not sure what she’s talking about – I can’t place the scenario in my mind.
She tells me that the way I’m handling a piece of land makes no sense to her. She feels that “nobody does this,” and I shouldn’t be an exception. I ask her what she means. She says that this property has a person living on it, and I didn’t give that person permission to do so. The person’s name is Pilate, and he just decided for himself.
She’s assuming that I know all about this and that I should be responsible and do something about it. She feels I’m letting him superimpose himself on the space. There’s no contract or agreement, he has just moved onto the property and is acting as if he has a right to do that. She feels that I should put a stop to it.
It makes no sense to her that I’m not more attentive and responsible towards this issue.
Well, this dream underlies what I’m feeling, which is a sense that my attention is being shifted to a different perspective on life. As in my last dream (see Hitting the Linkage), where my view encompassed the whole world and my responsibility toward God and Creation, here that’s being challenged because I’m being confronted by responsibilities of a mundane variety. The realtor feels I’m not “doing my job,” in terms of the outer world, whereas I’ve just been asked to do my job as part of the universal.
As a human, can we fulfill both responsibilities – our day to day cultural life and our spiritual journey? Of course we can. And it’s never been more critical that we do so in within the culture. Going up on a mountaintop for a spiritual life is no longer the way. Our spirituality needs to be held within in us everything we do – shopping, working, etc. We need to make it our first priority and responsibility, and live our life through the lens of that choice.
What this dream is showing me is the lure of lesser responsibilities, in the sense that they can create noise in us that can make us forget our spiritual journey until the “problem” is resolved. But that’s not the way it should work. What is spiritual in us should also guide us in making our decisions every day. The realtor is in a frenzy over this problem, yet because I have a more universal perspective, I don’t see it in the same way. It’s less personal to me, and I can understand that it means very little in the scheme of things.
Such a perspective actually makes me very capable of dealing with the issue, because I’m not coming from an emotional place. It’s a matter of priorities.
In a sense, we don’t become spiritual through studies or knowledge, but by acting in a spiritual way – in everything. We are all spiritual beings, but we mostly act like planetary beings. It’s an easy trap to fall into because very little in our culture supports a spiritual life.
Yet just as there is God in everything, there is our connection to God (or Creation or the universe), or lack of it, in everything we think about and every action we make. Keeping ourselves connected is our first responsibility as human beings.
