Jeane: This dream has the muted colors of the desert, as found in the Holy Land, where we’re visiting.
In the dream it feels like I’m on a ship, but the actual visual is more like I’m at the top of a mountain. I want to get a certain treatment, or have something take place, and it seems like I go way down into a cave.
I see myself telescoping down into this cave, and then back up to where I was. I think I’m on a ship, but I never really see a ship; I just see mountains.
I keep going down to this cave-like room where I go with other women to get some kind of treatment. Then it feels like those treatments have run out. I have to figure out where to go next.
John: You’re playing with the overallness of how you connect to an energetic power that flows through everything.
As you start off it’s not obvious to see that the power is there, because you’re in a setting like a desert, i.e., desolation, wide open spaces, etc. It looks like that on the surface, but the dream carries a quality, or a way of being from inside you, in which it’s just like floating on water or on a ship.
In other words, it’s not a struggle, it flows. There’s motion, there’s movement, and if you’re in a ship floating on the water in a dream, you’re in something, in an overall way, and you’re flowing with it.
You can be on the upper part of a ship where you have to contend with steering, navigation, and other details, which is more masculine. The bottom part of the ship is where you deal with the fact that you’re into the depths of it all, which means you’re connected and intertwined, and that’s the feminine overallness.
There’s a confusion that exists, though. You have the outer, earth energy of something in terms of creation (desert and mountains) and then you have the flow of the water element, and then you have the inner depth (the cave) that makes all of that come together.
So you’re taking two elements, earth and water, and you’re bringing them together into what? Into something of an essence. All of the elements (earth, air, fire, water) can flow out of the ether, but as long as you personally identify with a situation in the outer world, then you’re not actually letting go to the overallness. This is a very subtle thing to pick up.
If the only image you were looking at is the image of how things are, or what’s meant to be, or what to do next, or how does something work – if all you have to look at is the image of you being in a desert area with mountains, that would be kind of confusing. Or if all you had to look at was a ship on the water, not knowing anything more, that too could be bewildering.
But if you put it all together to where you’re able to make a shift and nothing is a limitation, and it’s all taken into account, then that’s like taking the elements of earth and water into an essence that you’re perfectly comfortable with.
So, how is it possible for you to unfold an essence, taking it from the inner into the outer, without the outer imposing some sort of limiting effect on it? It’s like you carry something deep inside – the essence of all that is, before it was even created – and now you’re in something that’s been created out of that essence (the physical world), and you can’t find the essence anymore.
If you had the essence at your disposal, you wouldn’t be taking the outer world seriously. You would realize that it’s a fabrication. Your dream almost awakens you out of the external trance by jumping from the state in which you have an awkwardness in the outer (the desert), to a greater ease in a boat, and an even greater ease when you let go of the responsibilities of the boat and go to a depth within the boat.
All of this is progressing somewhere, and where it’s progressing to is a total letting go of everything. When you totally let go of everything, then it has no hold on you. When it has no hold on you, then you’re in a nothingness, and yet you’re in everything. You can’t see it as a nothingness as long as you see it as having some sort of existence and presence that you have to contend with, or you have to cause to happen in a particular way.
There’s more to say about this fundamental concept, and we’ll continue our discussion tomorrow.
