Traditionally, a spiritual journey entailed putting down our attachments to Earthly distractions, although that idea should be understood in the way of not letting them be our purpose and personal aim. We are human and we will have human experiences. What these teachings are pointing to is that our spiritual purpose should guide our interests and interactions – because everything can be done in a spiritual way, a connected way, a purposeful way. It is about elevating the reasons why we do what we do. (At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.)
John: If you’re true enough to yourself, then you realize that running that course, which may get glimpses, the glimpses are really, then, to a complete total letting go and the stopping, which is the stillness of the out-breath turning to the in-breath, and that the two have to come together: the out-breath turning to the in-breath, and the in-breath turning to the out-breath.
Those points of stillness, when they are one and the same, then there is no such thing as a journey, and there’s no getting caught on either aspect of the breath, either the in-breath or the out-breath. That’s what I had to dream about, that came together as a meditation dream, and was able to see that all of that can be done in one fell swoop – as opposed to having to dribble along, like everything seems to do. So we’ve got to hit the stillness behind everything, or we’re still in some part of the breath.
In the meditation dream, I noticed that it is now possible to experience a step, which could be a lifetime, because time as a concept is relative: it could be a lifetime, could be a moment, I don’t know. All I know is that it is now possible to experience a step that goes from bottom-to-top, or top-to-bottom, or however, depending upon how one inflects.
Maybe it doesn’t, but I don’t discount the fact that it can be done in both directions. And, in the past, you weren’t able to do it like that in one fell swoop, in the past there were multiple steps and with that came complications and delays.
I apparently dreamt this as a response to a question that was hanging in the air. The question has to do with, what’s the nature, or purpose, of the path? Is there a purpose, or a nature, of the path, something there that one has to adhere to?
And, as a result of this, there was like a reply, a type of reply. In other words, saying that it can be done in one fell swoop, which causes me to ponder: if going to the stillness, beyond the breath, the breath’s manifestation, per se, if this, apparently, transcends the journey of breath. And is a step, not ordinarily possible, but not in a process of waking up, and waking up, is possible now in one fell swoop – not the quality of a little bit this and a little bit that?
I say this because, in the dream, I saw the process as having been this in one great big swoop, instead of a process in which there’s a step, pause step, and no end denoted. So the scenario for this is I’ve apparently touched upon, in my reply to Dean, I apparently touched upon something that isn’t talked about because there have been spiritual illusions on the in-breath that had been predominating, and, correspondingly, as a counter reflection, the out-breath’s co-creation state lying in the way of stillness.
So what I saw is just one step without the usual fits and starts associated with the in-between-ness, which is a temporal quality. The reason I say this is because most Sufi paths work at the hiccups we carry on the breath, and not upon the interval of stillness.
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In this conversation between John and Ann, the territory of spiritual development is discussed. When one is on the spiritual path, the changes that occur on an inner, energetic, level begin to radiate outward. Other people may sense this new energy unconsciously, yet depending on their own openness, the energy can either awaken something in them, or it can cause an allergic reaction to the more potent processes at play. Navigating these changes can test of a person’s resolve to stay on the path. (At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.)
John: Have you been having good energetics in the morning?
Ann: Oh my goodness yes. It’s just incredible. Last week when you mentioned the shift, oh my goodness.
John: The thing about the energetics that one has in the morning is: do you ever feel like you are getting too carried away, like you’re on speed, too animated about things?
What do you think about that when you get like that?
Ann: Sometimes I think: what is that all about?
John: Are you okay being like that?
Ann: Umm, for the most part, but when I catch myself being way too speeded up it’s like there’s sort of an in-between state there, but when I’m too speeded up sometimes I’m usually okay with it, but then sometimes I have to just sit and relax a little bit and bring the energy down a little bit.
John:What you’re doing is you’re pulling it down and grounding it, and when you’re speeding up what you’re doing is you’re tending to get a little bit transcendent, or out of body, with the soul.
And so when you get a little ungrounded or out of body with the soul you tend to… you have an energetic speed and effectiveness and it’s something that is intriguing to others, but it’s something that you have to be a little bit careful of because around people that are denser, or have a more limited world, or are stuck in the need of power and control, you’re apt to ruffle feathers very quickly.
Ann: And lately it’s like it’s really happening with people around; I’ve seen that.
John: That’s kind of why it’s said that you kind of get to a point, if you’re not grounding yourself and bringing it down, you’re going to get to kind of a point where you’re going to develop maybe new friends, and alienate the older ones that are used to you – because you can’t be like that anymore like you used to be.
Luckily, I think it’s slow enough, and subtle enough, that it’s generally not that dynamic a principle of being that harsh, and it’s more along the lines where one buys the belief or illusion, that in the speeded-up sense that you’re at, that you can communicate this across to others.
You can go on that treadmill for a long, long time, until you realize that people are just lilting in the energetic that you are carrying in a speeded-up way. They learn that they only create anxiety with themselves when they fight it.
They know that they can’t readily accept it as them, but they know it’s not untrue because their body tells them it feels okay. But what it does is, to the degree to which you’re affected and communicating like this, you’re stimulating the etheric and you’re stimulating the unconscious in them, and often times you can make their world miserable for them and not even realize it, because you quicken something before they’re ready to be quickened with it.
And yet how can you be any other way? Now the problem is, if you’re yourself, and you’re doing this, what generally happens is you tend to take it on yourself in a self-conscious way, and you figure oh, I have to tone it back, I have to deaden it, I have to go slower, I have to become a little… you need to cloud yourself a little bit, shut down the animation and the speed.
When you do that then you get poisoned, because now you’re agreeing to go along with the lowest common denominator, so that doesn’t quite work. And so what happens is you’re animated in the morning, and then you find yourself having to comport with the environment that you’re in, and by afternoon you can be a complete idiot again. And then every day it’s like that and then you sit there and you will say, why am I throwing away this energetic?
And you are throwing it away because you are feeling that to live this, you’re doing something unnatural – and yet you’re being your natural self.
Ann: Isn’t that interesting how that works?
John: When you are in an acuity like this, you often times have senses of things that may or may not be quite true, in terms of your understanding of say something scientific or something, but on an energetic level, it is true. That’s why there were things that the teacher used to say that weren’t exactly always true, but on an energetic level, the vibration that she was in, was entirely true.
That’s why there are stories that are told, like the training that Moses went through with Khidr, where Khidr did all kinds of things that were, from an outward perspective, really wrong, and yet on a vibrational level it was what was important. The outer appearance was not meaningful, nor the detail necessarily was not absolute in any regard. It was just kind of like something that lilts across in relationship to the space that you’re in.
But the space that you’re in is what is real and that’s what needs to be heard. So if the space you’re in is such that it violates the space of someone else who’s more nailed down in their being, then you’re going to create lots of commotion and turmoil.
Where you will make something dangerous for yourself is if you happen to confront somebody who is fearful, because in their fear they may then take whatever it is that you’re doing, without saying anything, treat it as the enemy, and start taking defensive postures against it so that they don’t have to face something in themselves that they’re not ready, or able, to face – and that is a kind of ignorance.
Generally speaking though they just walk away from you. Generally the people you know are good people and they just realize okay, okay, okay out of my politeness, meaning them talking to themselves, rather than get all worked up about it, which is what they would have to do because you have gone and you’ve tripped something in their unconscious; they’ll just get up and walk away.
That’s what this new energy, you’ve got to be careful with, because this new energy coming in lends itself to a way of alienating yourself from others, because you can so easily blow them away and you can maybe perhaps get to the idea, okay, this is the way I’m going to be, and then if you’re like that, then you’re a wrecking machine in terms of how others bounce away from you, or bounce off of you, and have to maintain their motif so as to not be penetrated.
It’s kind of similar, if you think, to the principle of how meditation works. It’s a little bit along those lines. When you first start meditating your meditations are miserable because it’s garbage that’s coming up – and more so than usual because you’re giving things permission to be like that.
So then when you reach a certain freedom, and you start exuding that freedom, on an energetic vibrational level, now you become a force of nature that is doing this to others, right out in the open, no meditation involved. You’re bringing something straightaway right into life.
So what happens is a lot of people then get to thinking that they have got to be a bit transcendent. Instead of bringing it down, they have to be more transcendent, and if you get more transcendent you can take yourself out of life, and you could become something that’s not relatable by others, because you are not finding the intertwined similitude that goes beyond the appearances of the physical.
You’re not submitting yourself to finding that, to touching that; paying the price of whatever that is. So the more you can be in the physical, the more grounded you can be, the more you can carry across this transcendent state, which is like the statement now of, feet on the ground head, in the heavens, or something.
You can actually marry those two states as a Oneness.
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John: In our last post we looked at a complex and interesting dream that Jeane described (see Trouble on the Way).
In it, she was struggling with protecting a woman (a feminine aspect of her) from her husband (the raw masculine energy in her), while trying to make progress along some train tracks (a spiritual path).
So as the scene begins, there has to be a grasp of the situation, and that’s where you start in the schoolhouse. There you come to understand things (school) and to what degree things are out of balance, or elusive (the surprise of the woman leaving her husband).
Now, there’s a certain protection in that space as it initially opens up. But when that protection is removed and you have to go out into the world on your own (you step out the school door), you quickly find that you’re no longer safe.
This is just like the opening scene in a play, because there are phases to this that are part of what’s evolving.
There’s a scene in which the overall scenario is not being fully appreciated, shown by the two men distracted by getting their pants altered. What that image signifies is, how does one “wear” the particular unfoldment? The masculine aspect (of those two men) is obviously not being attentive in the same way that your feminine aspect is being attentive.
That difference causes a kind of amnesia gap, but in another scene it’s recognized that things are on the move, and that those from the schoolhouse are now able to shift and go to a whole new place.
Then there’s the whole idea of whether all of this is happening safely, whether there’s protection for all this to unfold naturally. There’s something in your whole sense of things that isn’t properly covered.
In other words, how does the security exist in relationship to a number of things, and especially in relationship to this one woman who still has a shadow condition of things affecting her in such a way that she loses the balance, the protection, the way of feeling herself, in relationship to what’s been presented, or this attempt to awaken?
So you have all these different aspects emerging at the same time. You have an understanding that’s being brought through, and you have a protection within that process.
As a consequence, you have a shift in terms of things being able to progress to something more, i.e., the next destination. That’s the schematic, that’s how it’s supposed to flow. It’s like a three-step process.
The question is, is it complete? What about the woman (a feminine aspect of you) who has something going on that causes intrusions, in the way of the raw masculine energy looking for her and still trying to disorient things?
What’s the flip-side of that? The flip-side of that raw energy is something that has become almost too pacified, which appears at the end as a woman who has a gay husband, showing you that something has been left out. Something is yet askew.
You have the entire flow. You have a process all laid out, and yet you have these idiosyncrasies, these little complexities to sort out.
Jeane: I was feeling the feminine balance wasn’t quite there yet.
John: Well, is it the masculine/feminine? It seems to be shifting octaves between one extreme and another. In other words, it has a masculine with overly raw energy (the angry husband) that then becomes something that’s too pacified (the gay husband). It’s almost as if the middle ground is skipped.
There’s the process of unfolding (changing your lives) and yet there’s this part that‘s acting up, which has to be included somehow. If it’s not included, then you get something that’s too pacified because it’s missing that energy.
In other words, you can’t get where you’re trying to go without all of it, i.e., all aspects. So this shows that something is not being dealt with or taken into account. The understanding of how it needs to proceed is there, but the addressing of a certain kind of energetic that’s needed – that’s not quite figured out.
And how is this to be figured out? Well, the hint is that there’s some sort of fear that still exists. There’s some sort of reaction that’s still percolating in the background of what’s unfolding, which operates as a distraction.
Consequently the whole flow forward is jeopardized by these deviations, and that’s where the question of the protection comes in. In other words, you’re losing a kind of a cadence (you’re always trying to catch up), but still moving in a way that you need to move, but you have these issues to resolve.
The purpose and wonderfulness of a dream like this is to reveal to you that, in a process, there are things you have to be careful not to leave out. And you have to look at the attitude you use to solve them. I mean, you show a certain judgment toward the raw energy – of trying to exclude it.
But you have to allow a certain degree of that in and be okay with it because it’s part of the process. When you try to shield things from that energy, you end up trying to move forward in a way that isn’t quite right or safe.
So how does the process consummate itself, in terms of taking on the whole, so you don’t eliminate the raw energy of things or have a judgment or reaction toward it? Why would you have a judgment and a reaction to it?
Well, it would be because you have a belief or viewpoint that, somehow or other, it (the raw masculine energy) needs to change. But does it? Or do you (the feminine) have to change to accommodate it in some way? Because without it you end up with something that isn’t quite right. It turns passive, which implies that the kundalini energy, which is essential for truly going home, has been compromised in one way or another.
It’s an interesting dream, with a whole movie-like scenario to it.
