In this final installment of this conversation between Ann and John, the process of spiritual development through dream work is discussed, particularly in terms of how far the average human is from being able to open up to their own inner light and spiritual knowing. For the previous posts in this series, see Saying Yes to the Process, The Greater Part of You, and Loving Without Leaving Traces.
(At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.)
John: And the ultimate state or station is when there’s nothing that you’re not – you’re everything.
Your dreams feel fun, simple, and easy to look at and kind of portray and it feels wonderful to do it, it feels joyous to even do that.
Except I do have the trepidation now all of a sudden that one would be put through their paces if you start exploring more of this throwing off the garment of things, as your last image indicated. You want a divorce from all of that now, and the thing is, is that’s a big subject. How do you do that? That’s a big subject…
Because you don’t know what to annihilate.
Ann: Yeah, exactly. Yep, and you can get yourself into trouble.
John: If you annihilate the wrong thing you go backwards. How do you know what to annihilate? In other words, energy is neither created nor destroyed. It’s just in a different format all the time, and so what is annihilation even?
The word I’ve started to use is subrogation, which is a word that means where you’ve taken a particular energetic that has a deeper essence quality to it and you’ve twisted it in a way so that you can use it in an outer capacity way, thinking that that’s important.
A good example would be women who suppress their sexuality and start to take on and dress a little more masculine oriented so that they can be more objectively oriented in terms of the world and therefore they take on a different appearance. They sparkle differently. They don’t really glow, they sparkle.
They become more streamlined in their persona. It’s beautiful in it’s own way, but it is a subrogation from the glow. The glow is unconscious. And the sparkle is conscious in the outer, or thinks it is. But it’s limited. It’s very defined.
You take a person that’s like that and the kind of conversation you would have with them – they know where they’re going and what they want, and they can be wonderful people. But they have a definition.
And it’s probably why the teacher has indicated, that we’re not the best, there are a lot of people that are much more wonderful than we are, and what happened? Why aren’t they? Why not them?
It’s because they have sealed themselves in a particular way, and aren’t receptive, just like it’s said that ministers for example are probably the last, because they think they know something.
Ann: Isn’t that the truth.
John: This is an odd kind of process and, I don’t know how much more of this I can put up with sitting for four or five hours. Because my back will get sore too. I mean, I do my best to prop myself up – I’ve got blankets and pillows and good seat cushions and all of the accoutrements.
What I’m finding is different, is for the longest period of time I hated meditation. In fact, I wouldn’t do it. And somehow or another I dreamt. But now all of a sudden I can actually see what it means where a person can sit and go somewhere.
The teacher’s joke that, when their time is up, they just sit in meditation and, boom, they’re out of here. That actually can make sense to me now.
But before it was like you went through the motions in order to counterbalance something in the outer, and more often than not you disturbed yourself by doing that. And yet somehow or another you continue to do it even though on one way of looking at it, it was kind of an act of lunacy.
In my particular case I can justify the act of lunacy because it created interesting dreams. So I still have a means to the end. But, what if a person isn’t doing this? Where is their means to an end? It’s all lunacy.
I guess the time is coming when they pull the rug out from underneath that lie, that I was telling myself, because I’m starting to ponder and struggle with the idea of, yes, you dream into knowing, but what is it that you’re coming to know? How can you tell anybody this stuff? Who can understand this kind of stuff?
It’s now gotten to the point where we relate things based upon our ability to identify somewhere inside of our self, and the identification that we make inside of our self has to do with something that has a quality of substance to it.
And yet this process goes to a point of less and less and less substance, or definition, that can be found as a type of substance. So, how is it that you can comprehend it? And yet it gets like that and gets like that and gets like that more and more and more all the time.
That’s why I find it exhilarating to play with your dreams a little bit. Yes there are light bulb moments in some of the stuff I’m going through, but how do you twine it in? Your stuff can still twine in. If you go out on this whole “divorce” journey that you’re going to have to make, then you’re out in the desert again. Here you’ve been rescued from the desert, and you had the opals and the rubies piled high.
The palace that you find yourself in – the time will come when who gives a shit about the palace? It’s kind of a curse. Right now it’s very important, but at the next phase it will be in the way.
Ann: Yep, it won’t even matter.
John: Who would guess, you know, when you’re sitting at one point, who would guess that that’s even possible?
It’s kind of like a Rubik’s Cube to have to sort through. It’s interesting that you’re able to handle a lot of the stuff that we talk about because what’s interesting is your dream shows that you’re spared a lot of this… I mean, you don’t have to go and torture yourself with a lot of deep, hard meditation. You won’t have to go through this huge self-consciousness as whether you’re doing something that displeases something on some other level. Are you going through any of that?
Ann: Not necessarily. No.
John: That’s kind of neat actually. I’ll describe the state that you’re in using another kind of path as an example, using Raj yoga, and under Raj yoga the term isn’t student, it’s aspirant.
It’s said under Raj yoga that an aspirant needs to stay an aspirant as long as they possibly can, because then they will go from aspirant to another kind of connectivity. They’ve gotten all of their questions answered, they’ve gotten all of the compliments out, and they can then do that wholeheartedly.
But what happens is because of the nature of our upbringing, where we identify with things with the senses, and everything has got to be about something else, as soon as the aspirant realizes that there’s something else wondrous to be had, they want to go from aspirant to student or whatever. They want it.
And so it is said that in Raj yoga what really wise is the aspirant who takes his time. Who takes and stays an aspirant and gets closer and closer but still stays as an aspirant, doesn’t reach to get whatever or try to get whatever there is.
But that can go farther than someone who reaches up because then you could get caught into the spiritual illusion of using the tools so to speak that you’re used to questing for things in the outer, kind of like trying to quest on the inner, instead of just holding out and beholding.
I’d never heard on this path it talked about like this, but this is a big theme in Raj yoga. You kind of know this fits, because on this path you’re just kind of left where nobody knows who’s a student and who is not.
And you come to know that you’re plugging in based upon this dynamic that you start to take on, and who knows, to a large degree one of those dynamics is probably illusionary too. It’s kind of like people still have their idea of what can be shared and what can’t be shared.
I still remember this gal, you know, I was asking her a question and I was kind of new and she says, “Well, I’m not sure I can tell you this, or I can’t tell you,” almost as if there’s certain things that can’t be shared, or can’t be revealed, or can’t be talked about because you’ve developed this idea of what can be said and what can’t be said.
Which is a type of sealant, which is a type of spiritual concept orientation that that person’s developed in terms of their idea of what the path is and what it is that they’re getting from it. It doesn’t work that way.
If something comes up like for example if you share a dream, I don’t go and say well gee, I better make sure I don’t tell her this about the dream because this could disturb her, or affect her. But the dream has its own language, and all I’m doing is trying to tell the language.
If I don’t tell the language right, you’re going to know it from a deeper level inside yourself, and it’s just going to fall by the way boards.
If I tell it right, it’s going to be like light bulb moments and it’s going to kind of like light a rocket ship a little better. There’s no such thing as trying to sit there and trying to figure it out, not when it opens like what we just described. Not when it opens like that.
However, every person throws their own defense mechanisms out there and when they throw out defense mechanisms, it’s loud, it’s dense. The clarity is subtler.
So that denseness snuffs it right out. It’s the way it’s designed, and may my mercy be always greater than my wrath. The designer flow flows. It just comes down and it flows.
If it comes down in a herky jerky fashion, which I’ve seen it come down like that. In fact there are a couple of people that I’ve talked to in which they’ll have a particular perception about something that I’ll contend with, and I’ll go around and around and eventually figure out how to point out that it’s not that, that it’s more like this, this is the way you look at it. They suddenly have a light bulb moment, they get it.
They get it at that point in time but they tend to fall back on their own perceptions again. Because it got jerked down and there’s a collateral damage that it got jerked down. This stuff has to kind of flow out. It flows out.
You hear what you’re able to hear. You can say it all, but who can hear it? It shows that we carry within our self a collective mannerism that carefully screens what we’re ready and able to hear for our own protection. It’s kind of a grace or a mercy quality in life.
In other words, that keeps us from being kind of destroyed. In other words, we bound around in a kind of protective sphere. There’s a certain degree of density that we seem to have ability to offset so that you only go into the direness of the density of things, and the negative, to a certain degree.
You’ve evolved maybe from plant or animal to this point and it’s pretty hard to devolve, so you only take on the density to a certain degree. You have something as a momentum behind it of protection.
The same thing is true on the flip side when you can be burned by the light or the clarity of things could be such that it could send you off on a tangent.
Yes, they’re kind of examples where the kundalini may open, which is a type of light clarity trying to come through, and it’s too much and it blows a few circuits and whatnot, but by and large for the most part, you have good defense mechanisms, you will have things in your nature that protect you.
Only when the person is mean can that be somehow or another violated. In other words, there are certain things I know I can say that would create irreparable wounds but that means I have a meanness to me.
You don’t do that, you absorb that. People don’t even know this is absorbed, you just absorb it. I’m sure people are absorbing stuff with me all the time and don’t even know they’re doing it.
We do that, but then it’s nice to bring it out into a shaping vibration, or in other words you could call it catching up with the divine vibration.
In other words the inner and the outer work so wondrously and naturally together – so naturally that nobody notices – and that’s why it’s invisible.
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