How many ways can it be said before we really understand or, better yet, do something about it? A personal view of life and the universe is the very thing that separates us from it. The connections we seek, the oneness, the sense of wholeness is all within us. It’s built into our design. The only thing that can prevent it is thinking the world is about us, or should unfold in a way that suits us. When we think and act that way, we turn real gold into fool’s gold. (At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.)
John: So what has happened in this dream is, I’m in a vehicle that has traveled to a rest stop. This is a public rest stop, and it’s a place where people come, and go, and do whatever they do at a rest stop when you’re a traveler. And you kind of just take in what is offered at a rest stop, you don’t think anything of it.
Well, in this particular rest stop it’s set in kind of a rustic setting where there is this gorgeous rock formation that’s there. You can walk around it on all sides and part of it feels… it’s almost as if it’s man-made, and it’s almost as if it’s totally natural. That part is confusing in the dream.
Well, everyone who stops at this rest stop sees this, admires it, or appreciates it. It’s kind of like an artistic quality of the rest stop, but they don’t think anything more of it than that. But in this particular instance, the woman in my group she goes up and she breaks off a rock, or kicks something, and causes a rock to fracture off.
And she acts as if there’s gold in it, but it’s kind of more her imagination than anything. But I have to see it myself, and she makes the inference that maybe she ought to keep the rock because she knows it’s interesting, but she doesn’t even know why she’s saying it.
I look at the rock and roll it over and, I’ll be darned, there’s a huge speck of gold there. And I say, “Yes, you should keep this rock,” almost in confirmation to something that she wasn’t really all that serious about.
And so I walk around this rock structure, I think, to see if the whole thing is like this. You can walk all around it: it has four sides. And I kick at pieces of it, and none of it has any gold in it as I go around all four sides.
When I come back to where the spot was where she had done it, which had struck me originally when I looked it as highly fractured, it looks a little different, but I figure, okay, there’s gold here in this particular area, not on the other side, so I kick off another chunk.
And then I proceed to break it into pieces, to fracture the rock, to see if there is any gold in it – only this time when I fracture the rock, or do all of that, whatever I kick loose and whatnot takes on some sort of synthetic, man-made material.
It makes no sense to me that it could do that because her rock, connected to this, which was part of this rock, had gold in it. When I kicked the rest of this stuff and other parts of it loose, it’s synthetic. It’s man-made junk. It’s not even like rock anymore.
And so this has me completely baffled at how this can be, and I wake up. I can’t replicate it.
And so what is going on is, as long as I am free-flowing naturally, and I’m not indulging in the appearances around me, what I’m able to admire is like gold. However, as soon as I think that this is unique, and something to be personally claimed, that is when the potential falls away. That is when the whole thing breaks down into worthless, common, man-made materials. That’s what’s going on.
And the meaning is, the dream is saying that we live in a world in which we can look, admire, but must be very careful not to touch in a personalized way. In other words: indulge. What we see is there for everyone to appreciate and admire.
To try to personally appropriate this, in other words, bringing it out to the point where there’s even more there so you can personalize it, and then appropriate this, as if it can belong to us in a public rest stop, is when the whole thing loses its innate beauty and inner value.
Another way of saying it is, one has been going along and then one it comes up to a point where there is something that’s striking, that stands out, that had been ignored, or hadn’t been noticed before, and now that it’s suddenly noticed it can preoccupy one’s attention.
And when it does preoccupy one’s attention, then that preoccupied attention is an aspect of indulgence, or over-personalization, and that takes you back into the dense, or the man-made qualities of a limited perspective – as opposed to allowing it to be just as open, and free, and natural, and intertwined, and commonly appreciated.
To download this file, Right Click (for PCs) or Control Click (for Macs) and Save: Look But Don’t Touch
