John: In my dreaming, the theme was having to deal with the parts of oneself that need to open up.
What prevents us from opening up to our inner connections is our indulgence in the senses, and our ego-identity, and all of our psychological mannerisms that we have learned to present to the outer world. This creates a shallowness that chokes off the depth we have inside us.
Another way to say this is, we can feed our egos and our personal needs, and feel ourselves separate from the universe around us, or we can experience our spiritual connection, through a greater inner depth, to everyone and everything around us. They are mutually exclusive. The degree to which we allow our old patterns and psychologies to dictate our view of life, is the degree to which we cut ourselves off from our innate universal connection and spiritual guidance.
So, how can we constrain the ego-based aspects of us that we use to navigate this cultural society? It can be compared to an unruly child who has to be taken under the authority of a parent in order to stop its willfulness.
As any child grows, they begin to question which limitations are important and start to find their own way. As they emerge from the shadow of their parents, they come into their own, in a combination of what they have been taught and what they naturally have inside them. They learn to function within the greater design.
That’s what we see as a normal process, in the outer, in terms of growing up, but it can be stated in another way in terms of the inner, which is what my dream does.
In this dream, a person has financial resources available to him. He’s not yet an adult. His parents monitor his development. The resources, over time, have diminished and he comes to feel the loss of that stability. In other words, his parents are always pruning him and guiding him (his funds are diminishing), and the day arrives when he has to be allowed his freedom.
Under the guidance of the parents these financial resources were not allowed to consume his identity. He wasn’t yet at a point where he knew how to handle them without getting lost. Over time, the degree to which the indulgence is still a latent pattern that he can’t shake off, there’s a sorrow over the loss, i.e., he has trouble letting go. He gets increasingly frustrated with his parents.
The time arrives when all this young man has left, just before he’s on his own, is $10,000. Clinging to that resource he unconsciously realizes that he’s distancing himself from his parents.
Finally, his mother says to him, “I know you feel you know more than your parents and are angry at us for what has happened, so I have decided to quit interfering. You can do what you want with the money left. You’re on your own.”
Isn’t that a strange dream?
The dream is causing me to see that I’m overly involving myself with current financial conditions at the expense of my inner development. I used to do that much more than I do now but, then again, to what degree do I still allow that indulgence?
That’s always a question: I may have come a long way, but what greater depth am I still cutting myself off from? What I’m cutting off in myself by this mannerism is the linkage to Creation – to the feminine. So a frustration has set in.
The frustration comes from me (the young man), yet at the same time, the parents (also part of me) realize that at some point I have to break free because that indulgence closes things off. The feminine sees this more than I do.
In other words, I’m letting the indulgence dictate. We all do this: we cycle around and create an internal dialogue with one of our psychologies and we go around and around with it and it has a hold on us.
The time has arrived where I have to take this inner state and own it, as something which has been handed out to me as the thought of God. In the mishandling of it (the money and the psychology), it becomes my curse, so to speak, to do with as I want.
The challenging question is, can I take that step and not let go of the connection I’m meant to have with Creation that’s of utmost importance? Because one has to manage do both.
