Dreaming on the Bank of the River

Greetings one and all; I haven’t been very consistent here of late have I? Sometimes our lives take over and what might have ordinarily made its way to the monitor screen winds up written on life’s living parchment instead. Unless changes are effected in the medium of transmission the message won’t evolve. Well, of course, reality is the ‘backing screen’, not the colors that dance on it. Truth doesn’t evolve, only the conditions around it do. But all they do is change and change and change; no one screen capture in the kaleidoscope will present the truth more certainly than another. They are all just colors and shapes morphing into each other. If I were a purist I would just post a blank page every time I felt like I should say something.

I need to point this out. Somewhere between the things that I say and the things I don’t say there is an aperture. This exists where you are in this moment, where I am in this moment and in between all the seeming moments that seem to be different than the only moment we will ever be in. Our minds tell us things and we listen. It’s the degree to which we are able to objectively sift and discard that we actually possess any wisdom.

While we are resident in this body our senses are going to be telling us things. When we leave this envelope for another plane we will have others senses reporting on the conditions there. This goes on until the only sensation we have is that of the indwelling self; what I earlier referred to as the ‘backing screen’. The backing screen is the movie screen before the movie begins to play, or- if you prefer, after the movie ends, or if you prefer, that upon which the movie plays while you are watching it. It is what is real, the movie is not real.

When we were born, before we learned to walk, we saw things upside down. In order to learn to walk we had to turn the world around. Similarly death is where we find ourselves while in the body. We come alive upon leaving it. This is backwards too. Rather, we might call this ‘in the body death’ a form of dreaming. All of us have heard some version of this; life is but a dream, merrily, merrily. The dream itself works against our comprehending it as a dream. It insists upon its reality. What is not real, demands to be real. It insists upon our attention because that is the only things that keeps it alive. It is our attention that gives life to things and life is all about what we give life to and with-hold life from.

All of us know people who are be-deviled by something, or several. We surely have seen in our own lives how it is to be pursued by fear and uncertainty; to be tempted by experience and appetite. Giving in is not only a process of discovery but also an opportunity to test ourselves against the next visit. Every monkey on a man’s back started out as a small thought. We fed it and it grew. You can reverse the process. It’s an interesting thing to be faced with having to tell an imaginary tiger of your own creation that there will be no dinner tonight.

Deep in our minds live the archetypes; the real archetypes. Outside of ourselves are other archetypes; images that represent forms of authority that are connected to our understanding of the inner archetypes, to our understanding of ourselves. World leaders, religious figures, parents, school teachers, policemen; everything you can identify as something has some sort of a power exchange with you. By degrees we submit or rebel. It could be said that the truth can be uncovered by either extreme. Nothing that we see outside of us is the real thing. It is only symbolic of the real thing in the back of our minds; just like the Coca Cola ad says. And, of course, if anything isn’t real Coca Cola is near the top of the list. When your car battery connections corrode you can pour Coca Cola on them and they will clean the contacts. You might think about that.

I don’t know what is real and if I did I couldn’t tell you. I do have some idea of what isn’t real. It’s possible by having a penetrating focus on what is not real to gain some insight into what is real. What is real and what is important are two concepts that come up more or less frequently throughout the whole of this temporary dream. It is the mis-identification of what is real and what is important that accounts for all of our pain and suffering. The degree to which we insist, to which we demand that something be real and/or important, is the degree to which we suffer.

It may be that you were born to play a larger role in the collective dream. Most of us are not. When you think of all the important roles that have been played in history and how most of them turned out, importance may well be overrated. In most cases these are nothing more than object lessons for the audience. In other cases the audience understood it not at all. When you think of the larger roles that are no longer even remembered you have to wonder what importance really is.

In not such a long time to come you will be gone. Everyone you know will be gone. Everything you have will be gone. Every article you possessed in the dream, the environment you inhabited, will all be gone. The key to the process can be observed in nature. But even while we watch the process we generally do not understand its meaning. We don’t know what the meaning is when we watch nature fall back upon itself. There it is, there it goes and there it is again. Music is playing, people are talking. Sometimes they are running from explosions. Sometimes they are tumbling in the air. Sometimes they are sitting by the fireside. Sometimes they are praying and sometimes they are scoffing. How much impact does any of it have on the backing screen?

Somewhere within us something connects to something that understands everything. Without this connection there is little point to anything. Without this connection anything can mean anything until it changes into something else that “struts and frets its hour upon the stage.” We really are fools and clowns. And we can view it with compassion or contempt. However we view it that is what will be reflected back.

We can live our little life in the bubble of our self regard or we can live a larger life by allowing the greater portion of ourselves to be the witness. In that single adjustment comes a significance to our existence that cannot be measured by ordinary means. We have then not only an ever increasing degree of perception but the security of the eternal resident in our house of flesh. There is an indestructibility to our being that nothing can challenge. Why would we not want this more than anything?

We cannot sit still. We cannot let go and we cannot step out of the way. Somehow we have formulated an idea about ourselves and this idea stands in the way of our greatest accomplishment. It is the job of love to wear that away. We can accelerate the process or retard it. It will happen none-the-less. In the face of all our pain and anguish, fear and loss, this stands as the great promise and perfect destiny that we cannot forever avoid. Though we may be blinded by the light we will eventually see as a result of it.

Do we just let go? Do we strive with all the intensity we can manage? It works either way. Sometimes I have to smile when I think about another world and how we may one day consider where we were today.

Visible sings: ♫ I Need More Light ♫
'I Need More Light' is track no. 4 of 11 on Visible's 2001 album 'God in Country'
Lyrics (pops up)