John: Your dream, Safety in Containment, showed a way of portraying an inner Nothingness, and a way of portraying something emerging from that as an excitement. Your struggle or challenge was to incorporate, or contain, that excitement, i.e., to maintain an inner balance, otherwise the excitement could express in the outer as an over-the-top, “Bollywood” extravaganza.
My dream shows that process through very different imagery. Your approach used the feminine perspective of containing the whole as a way to provide safety for this higher-self process. My imagery, from the masculine perspective, reflects on the personal responsibility required to provide safety for this inner process.
I start off trying to look at something as it first emerges. I’m traveling along a highway in Egypt. I’m staring deeply into a forest area that I’m driving past and as I look out the window of my vehicle. I see the trees are really high and the foliage underneath is very dense.
If I’m focused enough, I’m able to see that there are animals that exist, or hide, in this foliage. No one has paid attention to these animals, and the light doesn’t reach very far down into this area. It’s been left in a primitive state; it’s natural and unaffected. In contrast, I feel contaminated, while everything there is as it has been.
Because it’s in Egypt (and this type of place isn’t common to Egypt as a whole) and inflation has greatly affected everything and taxes have been raised, the government has recognized that whole areas of the country are under appreciated. It’s decided to make an allowance for hunting in areas like this forest where no one has hunted for a long time.
In other words, they’re talking about easing the hunting tax. Whenever you increase taxes you can hurt something from developing, so the government is imposing higher taxes against the common way of being, and lowering taxes for those who want to go hunting in these areas where no one has ever gone before.
As I reconcile this, I’m fascinated by this natural setting, which I can see hasn’t been disturbed, and I know, as I search the animals in my memory, that no one has ever shot anything in this area since 1965.
This dream is indicating that I need to look beyond the obvious, or beyond the common view, if I’m to reach the inner depths where there’s a mystery that has yet to be revealed. In other words, our identification with, and focus on, the mundane and surface aspects of things has gotten us to the point where we don’t recognize this greater part of ourselves that can reach out and touch, and take into account, all of this other, deeper level that hasn’t been acknowledged or seen.
The purpose of the dream is to compel me to recognize, as a type of naturalness, areas that I don’t know about, where my energy can naturally emerge. It’s like a spark, or magnetic, or electrical inflection that we’re able to access – that can come through us. In the dream, as I drive by this deeply forested area, I actually feel drawn to it.
The key, of course, is to not indulge in this “hunting trip” to a point where it emerges into life as an unreal, Bollywood expression, i.e., we color it with our personal patterns, biases, or mannerisms. At the same time we must recognize, almost like a voice, almost like a communication, that there is this area of inner vibration (hidden, as in a deep forest) that corresponds, that we can make note of, and is an aspect of our uniqueness.
This vibration is coming out of the emptiness, or the Nothingness, which is a state prior to manifestation. So, it’s in this inner area that there’s an electric or magnetic linkage, which has the sensation fascination that enables us to access something that’s specific to our own inner nature.
On a deeper level, this type of energetic connection is the key to bringing the consciousness of the inner and outer together – for the purposes of Creation.
For each person, the corresponding inner-to-outer vibrational connection is different, and it becomes knowable by the excitement that is invoked on an inner level. That’s why one human being can never sit in judgment of another human being’s way or mode, because each of us has to find our own inner connection, our own path back to God.
To say that another path is wrong is to impose a trauma, or create a wound, because that judgment will have its inhibiting or negative effect. We are all meant to find this naturally quickened aliveness, which is unique to each of us, and awakens us to our participation in Creation.
