Jeane: My dream seems to have been affected by my concern about my father, and whether he should go to see the doctor or not.
How that’s represented is that I seem to be in a different country, and I’m down in a coal mine with you and someone else.
Someone has taken a certain feminine energy and brought it into another part of the mine. I don’t know the best way to get the energy back. I’m wondering whether we should pursue it right now, or whether we should wait for it to come back, or whether we should get help with retrieving it.
I waver back and forth between these options. I don’t feel like I come to any conclusion about it.
John: First of all, the image places you in a foreign country, and in a coal mine. So right away we see that you’re out of your element, i.e., you’re not on your “home” turf.
A coal mine is also something that’s against a naturalness – it’s digging down below the surface, disturbing the bowels of the earth. So this image shows that you’re seeking to make decisions about how to handle this process, but you find yourself out of your depth.
The problem is, you can’t accept something on one level, and then seek to control it on another level. The bigger question becomes: Does the feminine have a right to micromanage something, when creation itself doesn’t?
The feminine, and her understanding within creation, has certain aspects of the masculine in her nature, so it’s easy for her to go off and think that she needs to micromanage or attempt to control something. Yet to do so is to narrow down the overallness that she naturally can hold in her being.
The feminine should not be doing that. She needs to leave things alone and allow them to be free. This goes along with the principle that the feminine has to know how to let something die. In other words, she needs the perspective to recognize what best serves the need of the greater overall.
If the feminine imposes her will upon something, she can stifle it, and, of course, your dream is indicating the ludicrousness of trying to do that. You’re already in a coal mine, so in one regard you’re accepting of something that’s an unnatural situation. At the same time, you’re rejecting something else, i.e., you feel something must be done to return the feminine energy. Digging a coal mine affects the wholeness of creation, yet the wholeness of creation is affected all the time as a part of the learning and evolving process.
The earth renders itself up in support of the human, so we can grow and learn. Animals, too, play a role in enabling the human to find its way. The feminine can’t then come in and make clearcut decisions about things because that would be overstepping her bounds, which is to uphold the overall. In other words, it would be attempting to dictate how that overall should be. That desire, which historically has been carried to an extreme by the masculine, is what gets us into trouble.
If everything is left to its own devices, it will find its natural course. We have to trust that. We have to know that. Of course it’s hard to know that in the face of circumstances where the power of what exists is so entrenched. But who are we to try to level the playing field on behalf of creation? That’s like putting ourselves forward as having some sort of superior consciousness, like a god.
In your dream you find yourself in a coal mine, and now the best thing to do is to just accept where you are and know how to let go. But instead you see yourself wanting to catch up with some aspect of your deeper feminine nature, in order to have a say about what takes place there. Some part of you thinks that by going to a greater depth inside, you’re going to know; but you can never really know.
This reminds me of the old story of the Zen master who’s approached by a woman from the village. She tells him her son got a horse, and asks “Isn’t that great?” The Zen master says, “We’ll see.” A few months later the woman returns and says, “My son fell off the horse and broke his leg – isn’t that terrible?” The Zen master says, “We’ll see.”
Then war breaks out between the villages, and all the men go to battle. The young man can’t go because of his broken leg. The woman rushes to tell the Zen master of this good fortune, and, of course, he says, “We’ll see.”
Basically this illustrates that we don’t have a broad enough perspective to truly know what’s good or bad. If we’re really conscious and neutral about events in life, we’ll just say, “I don’t know.” We have to wait and see, i.e., not be personally invested in the outcome, because it’s all part of a greater evolution.
