John: In yesterday’s dream (see The Order of Things), there’s a part of me that’s still in the past, and this part of me has its burdens that won’t go away. I feel this burden as a discomfort that needs easing – I feel it like a burning inside that’s keeping me from progressing.
To begin with, I’m not in the right place in myself to sort things out. I find a friend (who appears as the dog that soothes my inner nature). The dog has yellow in its coat, which represents a journey to my inner nature. I don’t see this dog’s limitations, i.e., like the woman who noted it wasn’t a pure breed.
Instead, I’m just touched by its calm, gentle nature. This small lap dog’s demeanor is soothing and its presence doesn’t seem to obstruct me. In fact, I think it is enhancing the way I feel about myself.
I need to feel differently in order to make something click into place – to reach an inner recognition. I come to know that I’m pushing myself too hard and it’s affecting the habitat around me. Sometimes it’s appropriate to push; other times I can push myself too hard.
In other words, I’m not acknowledging that there’s anything wrong, but I seem to be probing, through my nature, faster than usual. I’m doing this to get an early start on the treasure to be had – represented by the premature melt-off that I’m causing by going for the crabs too soon – and that treasure is something to be gained on an inner level.
But it’s not the kind of treasure one is apt to find on the first try. Instead I find the dark side of myself – the crab in me. So on some level, I know there is a treasure to be gained, but in my impatience I’m harvesting the darker, crab-like parts of myself.
Most people are content for things to arise whenever they arise, but I’m digging this crab up earlier than usual – before the usual season opens. In other words, I’m not waiting for this process to unfold over a longer period of time, or according to the normal “weather patterns.”
In the dream, the man is explaining this early melt-off, but other people in the town don’t really notice it, other than to wonder why the weather seems different and that the runoff keeps happening earlier. On a deeper level, it’s being caused by my actions because I’m shaking up the status quo by probing deeper and deeper within myself.
What this probing is doing is unearthing the negative conditions in me (the crabs) as though they’re a treasure, which they are when seen as the next obstacle to be resolved or overcome in order to reach a breakthrough of noticing. Of course to do this I have to break these crabs out of their frozen condition and get the flow going, which causes an early runoff.
This is spiritual development. And for everyone working through their planetary-ego identity to get to the true treasure of their inner selves, the probing that is required has this collateral effect, i.e., things melting earlier than usual. From the outside view, other people see the effect, but they don’t quite know what to make of it. They just know things are moving faster, yet they can’t make the leap to see that the collateral effects are being caused by everyone who is probing deeper within while they remain complacent.
In fact many people might see these effects as violating the natural order of life – the status quo in which they have found their level of comfort. And all the probing, and unearthing, and melting cause things to be altered. It’s a form of taking personal responsibility, because there is no longer any type of effective enforcement of the “normal” from the outside. The changes are catching people by surprise and they don’t understand what it’s about.
There is more to say about this inner process, and we will explore that in our next post.
