John: To continue the discussion from our last post, The Price of Involvement, in that dream the image conveyed the realms of Nothingness, yet with a consciousness in relationship to it. It’s an image that seemingly depicts what it might be like when we pass away, or when we’re no longer in our physical existence.
How do you take and process, or even let go of, something that you feel isn’t in an overallness, but that’s intertwined into everything that exists and yet isn’t in a state of total peace and rest?
In physical life, we all have some fractured aspect of ourselves that’s askew and scrambling, and it’s askew and scrambling because we’re not in the pure light. We’ve incarnated into some quality or characteristic and, as a consequence, that quality or characteristic is compelled to something, or toward something, for a reason that’s unbeknownst to its nature, yet that ultimately would be back toward Nothingness. In our incompleteness we have this feeling, or a need to confront this characteristic as being some peculiar, strange state or condition.
This peculiar, strange condition carries a vibration that coincides with creating images and mannerisms upon which we give outplay into the world. But, if we’re not in a physical body and all there is is the Nothingness, how do we ever come to grips with that?
So, when I woke up from this dream I noticed that inside me there was a part that was still astir as a mood, or a tone, or some quality that couldn’t completely let go, i.e., it still reached out. I felt that as a type of suffering.
About nine years ago I woke up in a state where I couldn’t feel anything. Usually when we wake up we don’t have the unconscious depths anymore, but this experience was about something else. On a higher level, it would be a place of Nothingness. On the level in which I experienced it, I was no longer carrying the usual human nature characteristics that return when we open our eyes and wake up; it’s the part of us that starts processing what we are going to do in the day.
Whether that process is good or bad is not the point, it’s just the fact that we still carry this quality in our nature that is compelled forward. Well, when I woke up I didn’t have that part of me, and I was confused because we have to have something. So I knew that when I didn’t have anything, that I was dying on some level, and that’s when I started searching to see what was killing me. It was like somebody had just turned off all of the action in my nature, and that meant that I was dying.
It had to mean that because there was no probing out towards an idea of the future or of something that I had yet to do, or be, or feel. That compelled me to find and know something within that normally wasn’t possible because we’re always biased by how we see ourselves needing to be, or how we feel compelled to be.
This state or condition is described in one of the Upanishads, but from the opposite direction. It describes that when you pass away, the part of you that’s in a Nothingness, and an emptiness, is in a place or a state that has a freedom, at least initially, so you don’t carry any heaviness and your soul is able to be in that place and appreciate it and enjoy it.
Then, something comes up as a heaviness – like a mood or a tone – or something that can’t let go, which has a weight to it, or gravity to it. So you start to fall with this weight and this gravity. The Nothingness is a state where you might have existed for 1000 years, based on your good works or the higher energies you have taken on.
So you’re in an emptiness and then, at some point, you can no longer sustain that and you start to fall. As you fall, you forget, and as you forget you come more and more into this heaviness that’s part of having to manifest (physically), and this carries you all the way back into Creation again.
So that’s how it’s described, going in the direction from Nothingness into Creation or into existence, in the Upanishads, which are the oldest scriptures in the world. What I dreamed was kind of the other way around from Creation into Nothingness.
You dreamed it, too (see Free as a Bird), where you perceived all the heavy symbolism and you had to be in the state of Nothingness. Your imagery showed the symbols of death and the symbols of life, and in between you had the emptiness and Nothingness and the question was, could you be in that Nothingness and maintain it?
What I dreamed was the total conundrum of being in a state of Nothingness and still feeling something. Because there was no way to live it, I woke up with a heavy heart. How can we move about in the outer, in the lower self of our being, yet reach toward fully appreciating and going at the speed and depth of the higher self? It’s in that territory. It’s a very strange subject.
