resisting the powers that be – Dreaming into Knowing

John: In my dream, I’m dealing with the specifics (a masculine view) of what it’s like to work with a person who doesn’t have a grasp of what it means to be awakened to life, from within.

Everyone struggles to make things make sense, even if it’s a lie they’re telling themselves. Everyone tries to fit life into certain parameters, and we do this because we generally don’t know any better. We don’t have any experience of something being awakened inside, which would enable a deeper view.

If someone comes along and tells a person about something that’s beyond their experience, about how there’s something real at some deeper level, unless they’re open and can make that leap in understanding, it can be dangerous because it threatens them and challenges their belief system – putting them in a position to defend it.

If a person is open, this new information can begin to bring down the veils and barriers upon which they have conducted and organized their life. But if they’re not open, and what’s said runs counter to what they have set up for themselves, they’ll feel threatened. Then they have to defend their worldview or else they’ll have a breakdown.

This is where people get righteous in their beliefs and adopt defense mechanisms to support their concepts. This can make them dangerous. This is why so much of spiritual truth remains hidden, and is only found by, and able to touch, those who want to be awakened. What is in us has to awaken very, very gradually, otherwise it will cause the opposite of opening up, i.e., shutting down.

In that reactivity we get all the dire things that happen in the outer, which we witness in the breaking down of the world. It’s a reaction against anything that defies the norm of a person’s, or a society’s, concepts. Through history witches were burned at the stake and heretics of one form or another were killed to protect the “norm.” Even the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was an act meant to prevent the spreading of ideas that upset the status quo.

In your dream, you started out in a dark, desolate place, where you didn’t have any inkling that there was more to life than driving around in circles (for this reference, see The Unawakened). Then, suddenly, something more awakened (the baby) and that “something more” caused you to become more conscious of choosing to take on a responsibility within the greater order of things and the greater balance of things.

And you do that by relating from, and working from, that space within that has awakened. It’s a step away from seeing the outer world as being all that exists. You no longer have to defend the outer context as real because you know better.

So, through that image, we can see how an aliveness can work from within and take us from what had been something dark and dense into a type of quickening.

In my dream, I’m looking at the particulars of what it’s like if someone gets exposed to an awareness when they don’t have the parameters to understand it. In other words, there isn’t the experience awakened, or opened up, in them. Why that causes such danger in life is because that consciousness, that awareness, when it’s recognized for what it is, is seen as the enemy of the lower self.

The lower self, then, isn’t able to have the experience of the higher self, so it has to fight back. It has to do everything in its power to prevent this higher aspect from coming through because it appears to it as some “demon possession” or some other alien force.

In the dream I find that I’ve returned from a trek, and I’m now in a city in which everyone in the city knows who I am. I’m accepted. I’ve been on a journey and they know that it’s about something meaningful, and they accept that, even though that’s as far as they’re capable of understanding it.

But, in this city is a police officer who doesn’t understand any of it; he hasn’t learned how to appreciate whatever it is that I’ve done. Just my being there interferes with his perception of how things need to exist, so because he’s trying to protect his conceptualizations, he’s looking for anything he can find to have me arrested: if I can be taken out of the equation then his view of life can be asserted.

First he harasses me in the street, hoping I’ll do something to give him cause to arrest me. When that doesn’t work he makes up a new law with which he can justify arresting me. One of the ideas he has is a vagrancy charge.

Now, wherever I go in the city I have to have a reason to be there. If I don’t, then I’m doing something wrong. This is a rule he cooks up in his head, which gives him cause to stop me.

So I’m in the city, sitting at a table, and he can’t touch me because everyone there vouches for who I am. He has to bide his time, waiting for a reason.

I decide to walk around the city, so he makes up a rule that if I step into an area where I’m not invited, I’m violating the law. I stroll up a street that has a dead end. Even though I’m not doing anything to create a disturbance, he thinks this is enough to harass me.

When he comes up to try to arrest me, I see a table over to one side where there’s a seat open, so I walk over and ask if I can sit down. If they say no, the officer could impose his rule about vagrancy or something and I could be locked up. But the people there say yes, which means I haven’t strayed or done anything out of the ordinary. I sit down.

That leaves the officer a little confused because he thought he had me. Then another person come and sits down at the table, and the officer tries to get this new person to say I don’t belong there. He’s desperately trying to impose his authority against me so he can get rid of something that doesn’t make sense to him. He feels righteous in terms of what he’s trying to do.

This is an important subject, so we will continue this discussion in our next post.

John: I am sitting at a dining room table with my friend. At another table nearby are some local county officials. I’m telling my friend that the county has a new plan for what they feel needs to happen. My friend doesn’t care what the county has planned, because he feels they’re just there to facilitate life, not tell us what to do.

He’s being emphatic that they’re part of a system, but that the ideas need to come from us. I tell him that the county wants to impose these new changes, but he doesn’t want to believe me. So he gets upset and wants to argue about it.

Then I say to him that it’s easy to confirm, because the county officials are sitting at the next table. So the way I recommend proving it is to offer them some coffee, and see what they have to say about the coffee. If they won’t take the coffee, even when you offer it to them for free, then you’ll have your answer.

Now, my friend has gone over to the county officials to see if what I am saying is true. In fact, they begin to make a mockery of it, and he starts to lose his composure. Once he sees that the whole setup is a phony, he turns around, takes his coffee cup and smashes it to the floor. He says he isn’t going to buy into this deception.

So, the meaning of this dream is that real changes into life need to come through a human being, from inside to out. When that is denied, or even sabotaged, by outside forces, creation life becomes a lie. In the dream, both men are aspects of me, so it portrays an inner struggle.

Everything in the outer world seems structured to undermine the evolution of our consciousness, which means it has always been a lie. It has always been designed to decay and fall apart. When the collective consciousness (the system itself) decides what is to be imposed upon a human being, it reinforces a process that keeps us dumbed-down, so that we remain in a state of helplessness, cut off from what we really are inside.

And what we really are inside is connected to something else – something much greater. So a person can live in the world of the illusion, in an almost amused way, but you can’t seriously buy into it. When you find that you are taking all of this stuff seriously, you are treating yourself the same way as the “system” treats you – you are snuffing out your clarity and originality.

What the forces of the outer want for themselves – and those forces are a conglomeration of all the me, myself, and I’s that go around in life – is only what they deem acceptable. So the divine principle, which comes from a place so much bigger, is buried.

So, this dream is a denial of everything. It is saying that what doesn’t come through us into the world – meaning anything that is imposed upon us from without – is of no real consequence from a universal perspective.

We must begin to understand that whatever we put our attention on in the outer – meaning material pursuits – is not a reflection of the way it really is, no matter how much it may appear to be. It can cause a strange feeling of disorientation in us, because it’s very hard to let go of the idea that our lives are supposed to make sense in a purely physical way.

When we get a peek at what can unfold through a human being, when we connect to the higher levels of ourselves, it can reveal to us that our obsession with our physical existence – from our appearance, to our car and our house and our job – which dominates our attention 99.9% of the time, is a huge betrayal of the true possibility of human life. And we begin to ask ourselves, “Why would we want to settle for so little?”

And one of the first emotions is one of confusion, because we are so tied to the outer world that it is difficult to let go of it, yet we have seen enough to know that there is so much more that is possible, and that’s so magical. So do we continue to live in the illusion, or do we change the way we look at, and interact with, life?

It’s just like a person who shows a deep patriotism for the country they’re from, as if there’s something really unique about that country relative to the rest of the human race. That’s an elitist attitude, or bias. Or like people who are loyal to their own school – feeling that it is superior to other schools just because they went there.

We seem to tell ourselves these strange lies. We make attachments to things that have no real meaning, perhaps because there is so little in the outer world that does have meaning. So my dream describes that struggle to not surrender to the meaningless attachments that we are expected to accept as what’s real. It shows the frustration of resisting “the way things are.”

Yet ultimately that’s the most important fight, because the attachments we can make to the higher aspects of ourselves are so much more gratifying, and true, and universal. They open up possibilities to us that are unimaginable in the outer world. But it’s not always easy.