The world is littered with terrible stories of what people were willing to undergo, or worse, to impose upon others, because they were so convinced of the rightness of their position. The mechanism of deep commitment is a good one, and natural to us, it’s just that it mostly get used in the wrong way. What such passion should be used for is to defend ourselves from anything that tries to derail us from our spiritual, or purposeful, path – something greater than ourselves – rather than to defend any manmade concept or our personal identity. (At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.) This post was originally published in September 2018.

Jeane: My first dream has a duel-like quality to it. In other words, there’s a man and a woman in a rectangular room, with no furniture, and other people can come and observe. I think there’s even like a one-way mirror or something. And they’re across from each other, and it feels like they’re about to engage in a duel, and that the stakes are pretty high. And it has to do with one’s reputation more than anything else.

The duel I guess will be verbal. There’s someone that comes to observe and see if some words or things that he’d spoken were going to be used, but then the man who begins it’s almost like he just walks around with a certain intent and so you can tell that he’s saying something. He’s directing energy in a certain way, but it’s all nonverbal, and there just seem to be several episodes of this going back and forth.

At one point when the woman kind of begins another round of this, she’s so certain about her position or something, she’s even willing to give up what she’d gotten in a divorce settlement, not from the person she’s dueling, in her life. It’s almost like she’s willing to give up all these things she’s had. I guess just because she feels like her point is really correct.

And so that’s the most I think in some ways I can say about the dream, because there would be times when you were expecting to see what the kind of battle between them looked like, but it was all nonverbal.

John: This is a dream that’s pointing out how you can get caught up in taking on an absolute-type position inside yourself, and little things can have an absolute quality to them in that you don’t mean it to be that way, but they can get a hold of you and affect how you see yourself, or perceive yourself, in terms of relatability.

The need to have to express yourself in a particular way, or to look a particular way, or to be interesting in a particular way, those are all afflictions that can get a hold of one’s attention and cause one to project, or feel that they have to project, a particular appearance or mannerism.

When you get like that, or when you carry that quality of having to maintain an appearance in a particular way, that appearance, that mannerism, is what is important. Any need to have to maintain something like that stands in the way of letting go.

What’s interesting is the time that you have a dream like [we’re currently seeing the teacher]. When it comes to the teacher, can you really be empty? If he were to talk to you, can you really relate in a way that doesn’t have to put on a particular kind of mannerism, as a veil, that you’re comfortable wearing – or think that you need to wear? Can you really be open and free, or do you have to come from a particular identification in order to be comfortable around someone who leaves things so wide open that that can be unnerving to your nature?

So it’s a dream in which, what aspect of a nature, or mannerism, are you still holding onto, and projecting? And having to then feel that, to recognize that. And it even has kind of like a shadow effect in there, in that whatever it is and however it is that you project yourself, still with the idea that that’s how you’re expected, or you feel that you’re having to expect yourself to be taken in as an appearance, to the degree to which you do that, sometimes that’s considered okay, as long as you watch that.

And you watch what you’re doing to distinguish yourself from the total letting go. You’ll notice if you listen to people they all do that, each person does that, and the ability to take and be immersed in a space, and an overallness, requires you to let go of a context or mannerism that you maintain or feel that you have to portray yourself.

And thus are these various techniques to try to get you to realize that what you’re doing is just a matter of projection that stands in the way of being in a state of totality, in an overallness, like the technique of listening to someone to the point where you actually can be who they are. You can assimilate who they really are as an essence.

Which means rather than reacting or having your mannerisms that come up on your own that get in the way, as they are projecting their mannerisms, you learn to recognize how to hear them, to be them, at a deeper point of essence – by just being totally receptive to where they’re coming from. That’s being a good listener, but more than being a good listener you’re getting out of the way of yourself in terms of how you have to respond or appear.

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