John: Our recent dreams have been indicating how something is meant to unfold in life. This next dream involves the image of a house and, in general, a house represents the wholeness. But there are certain parts of a house, like a porch, which can represent a kind of in-between state – it’s neither in nor out. So when looking at an image of a house with a porch, the question arises: “How does that part work in relationship to the whole?”
This dream also indicates that we need to be very, very careful in terms of any position we’re inclined to take about events or aspects in life, because we don’t have the full picture (and never will). Each of us, personally, is already affected by many things in the outer, and the degree to which we’re affected by such external things is the degree to which we’re distracted from a proper, inner listening center that can help us navigate our way through life in connection to the whole.
In this dream I step outside an older house onto a dilapidated porch. The porch door doesn’t close quite right. This is an old place.
You (Jeane) are standing there doing something, trying to get my attention. Instead of listening to you, I’m distracted by the setting. I’m noticing that the porch has bugs all over it. They’re not quite in the house yet, but they’re all over the porch and my attention goes into trying to clear out the bugs.
I can shoo some of them away, but others are almost invisible to me. I have to use my imagination a bit to kind of help guide them off the porch.
Of course, during this process I’m not able to hear what you’re trying to communicate because I’m distracted by this side issue.
So this dream is showing me that, until I can free my consciousness of all distractions (all the bugs), my perspective and understanding of the overall (the house) will be limited. The fact that I’m dealing with anything, in any regard, which affects my overall perspective, makes it impossible to follow the guidance from within (Jeane, in this dream image), or from creation, that’s there and trying to reach and direct me.
This image basically describes our predicament as humans. We are in a physical body, experiencing a physical life, yet we are designed to be connected with, and respond to, the universal energies that caused us to be. The only way we can “hear” that connection is to quiet the noise inside, and that noise is generally caused by our reactive psychologies, ingrained patterns, biases, and our view that we are somehow separate from everything else in creation.
How many of us can maintain the state of being at the point, where we recognize that we’re connected to everything and that we have to take everything into account? How many of us can be in the flow in a way that serves the betterment of the whole?
Again, it’s difficult because we have been trained by our culture to view life with a personalized awareness, i.e., what I experience happens to “me.” It may happen, but it’s not personal, and since we can’t know the full picture, it’s hard to truly understand why things happen through our partial view.
The feminine principle is the container and is capable of holding the overallness of life. The masculine principle touches down in the overall in a specific way, energizing possibilities. These principles work together in both genders and, when in balance, allow the holding and the doing potential of each of us.
At the same time, we’ve got to honor freedom of choice within the overall. That means that we are free to find our own way back to God, and so is everyone else. We are all free to choose to be included in the unfolding wholeness. We are also free to choose to exclude ourselves from the unfolding of creation. And we do exclude ourselves when we choose our personal, separated view over an integrated sense of Oneness.
This is why we see teachers being very, very careful in terms of interceding in the direction a student is taking. Teachers can only create hints, by the way they carry themselves, to cause a student to make a closer examination of the position they’ve taken and, hopefully, the student can hear that. If the student is too loud in themselves with their personal distractions (bugs) they won’t catch the hint. And bugs can compromise the integrity of the house (the overall life).
So the spiritual teacher can’t come right out and establish a “Ten Commandments” about things, because that hurts the natural flow of creation, it hurts the overallness, and denies the higher principles and higher consciousness from coming down and shaping things for each person.
Of course on one level of development, we do need to establish parameters, as in the case of a child growing up (see my dream with the courthouse conduct, Unfolding Naturally), or when you have new people coming in that don’t know what they’re doing. It can make sense that they be protected from their own folly. Yet in doing so, we also set in motion events that weaken, rather than strengthen, because the opportunity to learn from the School of Hard Knocks, i.e., each in our own way, is softened. The whole process of life is meant to shape us always into something richer and fuller.
Thus my criticism of anything I see in life that tries to regulate or order something. In terms of trying to create change in the world, it would be nice if we could all work with a type of consciousness where everyone pulled together, because we’d all reached a certain maturity in ourselves. But it’s not really meant to work that way. It’s meant to work in a natural flux, which is why we all operate at different speeds and are all at different points on our path back to God.
We need the wisdom of the elders who have trod the path, and we need the raw energies of those new to the journey in order to properly shape the evolution of the whole. A teacher, whether an external person or an inner guidance, has to honor our freedom of choice, and so can only help to facilitate an awakening. If we take the hint, it’s the awakening that brings about the change in us, and the world.
