First Explanation of dream 2-19-2024

Recently I have been focused on the concept of the Life Force, Unconditional Love and Skillful Means. Then along came the dream of February 19 which confused me, so I’m still looking at its symbolism and meaning, but I have no idea what the broom, rushes and alligator represent.

For the first time in many years I feel on firmer ground with my view of…well…everything, although I’m not ready to write the book titled The World According to Charles. One piece of the puzzle that remains has to do with loving a Creator, but I’m always perplexed by what the Creator is. If it’s consciousness, Ain Sof, or the Wheel of Life which turns because of karma and ignorance, how is one supposed to love that? If form is emptiness and emptiness is form…or the All That It Is is everything and nothing, what is there to love?

So, in the dream the aunt, niece and nephew suddenly have faith in God when they receive a vision from Him somehow telling them everyone is safe and protected. In my mental world I see this as subject-object consciousness because an objective God is outside of them and His word reassures them that all is well.

The Road I Know by Stewart Edward White

Once again I have returned to Stewart Edward White’s book The Road I Know in which he wrote about Betty White’s experience with the Invisibles and how they introduced her to the Life Force.

The Life Force, Betty was told, “is the vital principle that is the basis of all manifestations and energies that make up the universe. It is the underlying evolutionary power, force, life that makes things, and keeps them in being, in development, and in functioning. The highest expression of this force on earth indubitably is human consciousness.”

Further, “Consciousness is the one and only reality. We sense this highest of reality, but not broken into bits as is our own experience, but all-inclusive-and all knowing. Some people name it God: some people name it something else. That does not matter.”

Love and Participating in Life

Yesterday I read Erich Fromm’s “The Art of Loving” and typed four pages of quotations. Because the quotations are perfect in themselves it’s tempting to simply insert them as the entry.

An easy way out would be this approach: I liked this quotation: P 101 “If I want to learn the art of loving, I must strive for objectivity in every situation, and become sensitive to the situations where I am not objective. I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person’s reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears.”

Or, I could preface the quotation by typing, “This one hits home”: P 106 “To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern—and to take the jump and stake everything on these values.”

Or, I could introduce this quotation by referring back to last summer’s work when I researched the development of the ego from the pre-Axial days to the present. When Western society chose the quantitative view of the world we lost an important part of ourselves. Rational, logical, scientific thought trumped intuition and nature at every turn. Thus we ended up as Erich Fromm describes us today: P 73 “Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their ‘personality packages’ and hope for a fair bargain.”

Life, I’m discovering, is love in action. Or as Fromm writes, P 22 “Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love.”

To participate in the world means I must learn to be objective and not see everyone and everything through my narcissistic lens. It also means that safety and security cannot be my primary values. It obviously means I must observe my patterns and not react as an automaton. And, most important, it means I must have faith that if I pry myself out of the coldness of my self-imposed igloo I will discover that life is a joyous experience. When I’m no longer afraid of the world, I will participate and embrace it with love. There is an art to loving and an art to living which I, and we, can find by just being ourselves. The answer seems so simple: be awake and aware each moment and live with appreciation and love.

Needed, Wanted, Appreciated and Loved

After I discovered the details of my childhood illness, which I’ve written about in the previous entry, I began “thinking” differently. It was, in a sense, as if someone had removed blinders from my eyes. First, I realized I had always needed a “safe place” of my own whether it was a separate room in the house or an office in my business. Second, I realized that I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to control my exterior world including people, places and things. I believed that once my environment was peaceful and calm, once I had all the ducks in a row, so to speak, I could breathe a sigh of relief and be peaceful and calm myself. Since that in itself is like trying to control the weather, I had only brief moments of a truly internal peaceful state.

Now, as I was beginning to look at life differently, the words “needed, wanted, appreciated and loved” “came” to me as a mantra. I don’t recall when I began focusing on them, but suddenly I found myself either saying them aloud or thinking about them a lot. At first I thought about these feelings in terms of me. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, to feel “needed, wanted, appreciated and loved”?

Of course I immediately thought of Daley my short-haired pointer who died in November 2009. I wrote about her death in a previous entry in which I explained that she had been “my life”. Yes, she was a beautiful, spoiled dog, but more than that, she made me feel “needed, wanted, appreciated and loved”. When I returned home after being away on a trip she would cry, I presumed with happiness, when she saw me. How could I not feel loved?

I believe it was in a meditation when I was struck with a realization, which is probably common sense to everyone else, that in order to “receive” these feelings I must “give” them or “share” them. You would think that after reading a thousand books on spirituality, psychology and self-actualization that this would have been self evident. Sometimes I can be slow on the uptake.

How could I do this, especially since I’ve lived alone at the lake house for a year? I knew I couldn’t immediately start trying to “share” these feelings with other people because it would have been as scary as bungee jumping off a bridge, but I could start with dogs. I began volunteering at the Noah’s Arc no-kill animal shelter, attending dog adoption days and going to the shelter once a week to walk dogs around the property. A few of the dogs now recognize me, I think, and they get excited when they see me approach with a collar and leash.

The next step is rather far from my comfort zone. As I discussed this with my counselor she reminded me of all the people who are suffering in the world. Many have not even had a “Daley moment” which is how she refers to my having once felt these feelings. A previous consultant or coach used to refer to this step as just “walking across the street”. To me it’s more like crossing an abyss. It feels like in order to contribute I need to move to Calcutta and assist the Missionaries of Charity, but I can’t do that.

“No, Charles,” my counselor says, “just be in the world. Everyone wants to feel needed, appreciated and loved. If you take down your barriers and take off the armor, you will begin hearing and seeing how, even in small ways, you can help others and share these feelings. No special skills are required, just be yourself and be available.” And so I’m trying to begin: baby steps to the door, baby steps out into the world; baby steps to helping others. I know I shouldn’t end an entry with a cliché, but it’s true that a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. I’m trying to take it.

Why We Live

Why We Live

In less than a month I will have lived at the lake house for a year. One goal was to have read one book per week which I have almost done. Although, having fallen a little behind, this past week I read three: “Love Relationships” by Charles Thomas Cayce and Leslie Goodman Cayce and two books by Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov: “Man’s Subtle Bodies and Centres” and “Angels and other Mysteries of The Tree of Life”. Today I started two more books: “Ecstasy is a New Frequency” by Chris Griscom [which I may not finish] and “How to Live or A Life of Montaigne” by Sarah Bakewell.

In addition to reading I had planned to spend hours in meditation with the goal of attaining unitive consciousness. Okay, I do have a confession to make. Despite reading many, many books on Mahayana Buddhism, the Kabbalah, and other religious paths, I secretly hoped this second, but primary goal, would allow me to gracefully exit human existence. “Chop Wood, Carry Water, Enlightenment, Out of Here.”

So, for many reasons, I have my doubts that unitive consciousness will happen within the next three weeks. And I’m also rather certain that should it happen I won’t “flame out” as some Buddhas have chosen to do. One sure reason is because I have spent as much time vegetating in front of the television as I have meditating. My saving grace, however, has been twice-weekly telephone conversations with a counselor.

When we started our sessions in December 2010 my intuitive counselor psychically saw me as a balloon floating above my body. This, of course, made sense to me since I saw no reason to inhabit the body and participate in life. Why?

As we talked about this aversion to being human we looked at childhood experiences. Nothing was unusual except a severe illness when I was five years old. Well, as “chance” would have it, I found the nurse who cared for me at the time; today she is 82. Since both my parents are dead and my brother is unable to remember much about it, she was my sole source of information. In a letter she told me that I had had a reaction to penicillin and was taken to a local Catholic hospital where I received the last rites. There she, named Mary of all things, helped wrap me in sterile gauze and placed me under a wire mesh so no bed linen could touch me. Anyone entering the room was required to wear sterile outfits. When the gauze had to be changed pieces of my skin, toenails and fingernails came off with it. Of course, she wrote, you cried a lot!

Slowly the gates opened. This might explain my sensitivity to pain, my unwillingness to inhabit a body, and my desire to leave the world. I experienced suffering and it is imbedded in my cellular memory. I suppose it left me with the life-long quest to find some answers.

I “trust” my counselor as I try to finally answer the questions why we suffer, why we live and why we choose to have this earthly experience. It is, she says, because “it’s worth it”. Living is an “exquisite” experience. Yes, there is suffering but there is also love and beauty. Love is what gives us the strength to move mountains because someone needs help or because what we can do helps the world.

This has inspired me and I’m now looking in new directions; instead of focusing on suffering and trying to avoid it, I’m thinking that there are many people who are suffering as I did but have no one named Mary to help them. This changes everything!

Love and the Consciousness Shift

I’ve always struggled with the belief that you have to “love yourself” before you can “love others”. It seems to me that our society is in the mess it is because of the “me first generation”. Doesn’t self love lead to narcissism, selfishness and greed?

Then yesterday I began having a different understanding. First, the English language is handicapped by only having one word for the feeling of love. Love applies to all the following: I love potato chips, I love Mack’s pizza and I love my wife. Second, there is the ego form and then our true identity as Oneness. It’s this second understanding that changes everything.

Each morning as I do the Jewel Tree Meditation I mentally go through the steps of wisdom: study, individual thought, and finally meditation. The meditation portion deals with the question “Who am I?” At first the rational mind answers the question with superficial answers such as the reflection in the mirror or the body and mind. But, in actuality, if the answer can be observed then it’s not really who I am. Eckhart Tolle answers the question by saying we are the “space” or the “field” in which forms appear. Ken Wilber and many others answer it as the “Ground of Being”. The perennial wisdom answers it with “Thou art That”. Others use the terms “All that Is” or “Oneness”. From this broader more inclusive perspective it would be impossible not to love ourselves first. Here we are not loving the ego or separateness but loving ourselves as life itself.

Also from this perspective the Golden Rule takes on a whole new meaning. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. From the viewpoint of the ego this rule is almost a guide for self-protection stating, basically, be careful in your actions because they may boomerang back to you. But from the larger understanding as one entity it means something entirely different. Since we are all one, any pain inflicted on others, including animals, is pain we inflict on ourselves. We may not realize at the time it if we are enveloped in a belief of separateness, but when we “evolve” to a higher understanding our actions will appear before us and cause distress.

Now, I understand all those previous paragraphs are a lot of “thinking” to describe a “feeling”. But that’s precisely where the consciousness shift is taking us. We are developing through the rational thinking stage to a more integrated feeling one. We are getting out of our heads and into our bodies in order to experience life in the Now, in this moment.

The consciousness shift is taking us into our hearts, breaking down the barriers, removing the fears, and inviting us to love, beginning with ourselves.