Real change happens when we act differently when faced with familiar situations. That is a core idea in making a spiritual journey because if we understand, and really believe, that there is more to life that what we see in our culture, then we must begin to act according to what we believe. If we want to “do no harm,” then the process doesn’t end when we stop being overtly mean, it continues into the details of not thinking angry or judgmental thoughts about others, or not respecting the freedom of others to live their lives, or even not letting plants die from lack of watering. Because in universal terms, such acts are all related. (At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.)
Jeane: I remember an early dream, one of the problems I had is I had this nice house and it was kind of laid out, you know, like a ranch house kind of like long, lots of gleaming dark wood in it.
And the problem I had, there was this woman, and then even this friend of hers, and when she came over I couldn’t get rid of her. It’s like she didn’t have any sense of how long you could stay. So I’d have to go find her and kick her out, and then I knew there was a time when she was even going to be coming with a friend of hers, but I didn’t want her to teach her friend that kind of pattern.
It was like to me there were certain times that you came, and a certain length of time you stayed, and I might tell her that, I might even holler it at her, but I’d actually have to kind of physically find her and like reinforce it that way, because it’s like she just didn’t get it – and it was making me nuts. That was the earlier dream.
John: The theme of the dreaming last night was being able to understand, handle, and grasp, and adjust to, and relate then as well to various levels, other levels. And so your having to contend with something that you normally may have just suffered along, whenever you, for example, had something that was awkward or inconvenient in your space, meaning the overallness that you have to be at home in, and in charge of, in relationship to how it is that you handle your overall perception.
And so the thing that has happened in the past is that you would subject yourself to, let’s say company or something would come like, say even to this condo, and at some point it would get to be nauseating, or hard to contend with, but you wouldn’t see that at the very beginning. You would only come to know this when something about the environment that you had to balance out, or be in charge of, became unbearable.
It would be like you could make allowances, you could try to adjust, you could try to do this, you could try to do that, this is how you would tend to handle it. But this was a level of beingness that was something you were still trying to catch up, and grasp, and know, naturally.
So what you dreamt involved having shifted to where you were ready and able to contend with all of that inside of yourself, or take on a level of beingness that, prior to the shift, was something that you still had to burn the dross off, in terms of accessing, and reaching, a quality of understanding so that you could conduct yourself with a balance in that regard.
Now what’s so odd and so peculiar is that we catch up with these levels by way of hurting ourselves. We don’t mean to hurt ourselves, we just don’t know any better. And when you make yourself miserable, that miserableness is felt in terms of how it affects the nature of the breath. And it’s at the levels of the in-breath that you access other levels, and so when you do something, or conduct yourself in some way, so that you shut that off, or cut that off, or pinch that off, and you notice that because you have found that you have reached a point of unbearableness in the outer that corresponds, then, to the way that you have sliced the breath, the receptiveness of a balance of the breath, that suffering of that, that imbalance eventually gets to the point where you have an understanding of it. And when you have an understanding of it, you’re able to change it. And when you’re able to change it, then you’re able to accommodate this new level.
And so you were at a point where you were dreaming a new level in terms of the cadence that is meant to be held in terms of the breath – which means you were shifting into this in the dream.
In the outer, you have been hurting yourself, not knowing or having a full grasp of what this was experientially, intellectually maybe, but not experientially. And now you understand it experientially. And so you were dreaming the difference, the distinction that exists in terms of how it needs to be in relationship to the breath, an overallness capacity that has to and needs to be always sustained.
Now, what’s also interesting is that you learn this first by subjecting yourself to the misery. And then that misery creates this loudness whereby you know how it is that it needs to be, or how it is when it’s wonderful, when that misery is gone. And so that puts you into the flip side almost like a rubber band getting stretched into a dourness, or a direness, within, then when that’s released you flip side into a balance and a cadence. And a part of you then is able to embrace and groom what it’s like to be in a proper and appropriate state of balance.
Once you’ve done that, then you have actually suffered yourself into what is a shift, a new level. So then when you dream it, you’re just confirming it, in other words, maybe there’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that that still has to be burned up. Maybe before it would be too loud and you would be too defensive because you’d have this reason, and that reason, whereby you were doing things that were abusive to the environment. But then when you dream something like this, now you’re bringing home and owning the understanding of this new level.
I described the process. The shift is not meaningful unless you bring it right down and function with it in the outer. That’s another important meaningfulness of living in the physical, is that you access this on the inside, and then you learn how to bring it through and live it in the outer. This is not something that you take and suffer, and suffer, and suffer, and suffer, and then when you pass away somehow or another you know better. No, you have to know better, and you have to know how to do that, and you have to live it now.
To download this file, Right Click (for PCs) or Control Click (for Macs) and Save: Living It Now
