John: We left off the discussion of your dream yesterday (see The Lost Essence) with this paragraph:
“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.”
This is the development struggle: We’re born into a physical body, into a physical world. We’re designed to realize, at some point in our lives, that we are here for a purpose beyond the society and culture we find ourselves in. When we have that realization, we must begin to let go of all the aspects of our (ego) identities that serve us in the culture, but keep us separate from the wholeness that everything else is. Spiritual development is anchored in this process of letting go.
And we don’t have to do it on our own or without guidance, because the truth of who and what we are is inside of us – if we will only listen. When we can catch up to it or hear it, it’s with a type of hearing that’s beyond our physical senses (that only correlate to the fabrication of the outer world in front of us). When we hear this inner voice, it somehow slices right through, so we begin to react less and less to the push and shove of the outer world.
And your dream showed a magic quality where you accomplish this letting go by going “poof.” Instead of identifying with the external aspects of the image, there’s a part of you that can just go poof. It shifts, you let go of the top deck and appear in the lower cave – in the depth of you – where you’ve let go of everything. Thus you impose no effect from the outer on the guidance you receive there.
You probably set the image in the desert because you have a sense that time has stopped here, in the Holy Land. The Bedouins in the area haven’t changed much in 2,000 years. There’s a bit of contamination with the tourists, and a degree of mechanization that’s occurred, but their approach to life and the land is pretty much the same.
The ground here is the same as it’s been for millennia, and there’s nothing to be done with it. But in your dream you take that desert and you pop the bubble by making it into something that flows, as if on the water, and then you attempt to pop the bubble again, so that whatever is there to see just goes poof, and in that is your complete overallness.
You’re not able to maintain this state, though. This might be where your essence sits, i.e., you’re in physical reality, but you’re actually somewhere else. That’s how the great teachers always are. They’re compelled to be here and they participate in the magic of things through those whom they help to extricate from their ego identity and the life of illusion.
The degree to which a person is able to do something outside of the personal, is the degree to which something is facilitated into the whole. But the degree to which a person stays with their personal view, is the degree to which things cannot happen and, therefore, are lost to the whole.
When we humans allow something to come through us (without prejudice), it’s like we become a conduit for an essence to manifest into physical life. That’s a service into life and into the whole, which the human is designed to perform. It’s how the future is processed from the energy worlds into manifestation in the physical worlds.
But typically, we humans just process our own identities, and egos, and patterns, so even if we connect to a new essence, we turn it into an old act. That’s when that essence is lost to the whole. We have to get out of the way of life, to really become a useful part of it.
