John: My dreams begin with this image: I’m talking to a person who works at a box office in an old building. This building is not as developed as it could be, and I recognize that it has a lot of potential.
The person indicates that this place, in its current condition, does $400,000 a year in sales. I remember thinking: That’s one way of looking at it. It sounds pretty good, but I know that to try to change it comes with the complexities of ownership, or of getting too close to something.
I also know that a local developer has an interest in this place; he’s already positioning himself to buy it. If he recognizes this as a diamond in the rough, I guess I should too.
Out of curiosity, I check the revenue coming in on other parts of the building. One business is doing well after two years, while another still has some sorting out to do.
Well, as I register all of this, I notice the degree to which it catches my attention or imagination. Because this dream involves me feeling in my chest the energetic that arises whenever I consider doing something in an outer capacity.
Thus, I weigh the effect of involvement upon my heart. My best insight comes from how that feels, and it influences how I see any future involvement.
One particular magnetism sucks me in directly, as if I have a role that needs to be played. Another energetic has me cheering for its success in the hands of another. What I’m noticing is that if I leave it for another, to what degree am I envious? Do I look at this as missing out on an opportunity?
The purpose of this dream is to get me to recognize that there’s something meaningful behind how we pulse with our recognitions in the external world. The outer is meant to reflect the inner – it flows through us. Yet we tend to grab onto it, as if it’s ours.
Such identification personalizes the energetic, when it should be left free to intertwine into the whole. That’s how a human being is meant to process energies.
Whenever I steer the energy in a particular way, i.e., feel that it’s just for me, I take the divine impulse from a state where it’s able to feed the whole, into a condition of personal involvement. I suffer, and life suffers, when I do that.
When I feel the energetic grab in my chest, it means I’m personalizing the impulse. The personalizing causes me to miss out on it’s inner potential, which deprives life of what it needs to evolve in a new way.
For the impulse to remain pure, I can’t be dwelling in it. I have to be in it, but I can’t dwell in it to the point where I identify with it and therefore choke off or withhold what’s meant to flow. The dream is showing me that I, as a thought of God, carry a unique quality that comes through me, but that I’m still trying to grab it and separate it in some way.
The other extreme is to ignore the impulse of energy and to keep it in the unconscious; the impulse remains as an inner hiddenness. That’s why when we dream we actually have impulses coming through us. If we don’t remember our dreams, then we don’t pull them through into Creation.
At the same time, as we dream, we’re also are getting ideas, or we’re coming under certain orders, essentially, about how to better conduct ourselves in the outer.
If we take that and utilize it in terms of some personal advantage, then we’re taking that Light in for our self, as opposed to taking it in for the whole.
When we dream, we’re causing something to come into an awareness from a hiddenness – from a subconscious level. If we release that into life, we also have to simultaneously live it, in order for it be visible.
But again, in the living of this, we can’t be get consumed by it or it doesn’t go into the whole – it stays separate. That’s the difference, and the significance, of being in the world, but not a part of it.
In other words, the business of the spiritual path is for us to realize, through trial and error, that a given energy is not for us alone, it’s intended for the whole. We’re only a conduit and, as a conduit, we just pass the impulse through.
If we don’t, then nothing changes. Any personal identification is a way of denying something from coming into life.
