It’s early in the morning. This week my attempts to write a blog haven’t gelled. I’ve run out of time. As I go in and out of sleep, I’m met with painful images, someone dear always dying. I finally decide it’s not worth it to sleep; it’s time to wake up and write.
Out of my dreams, the topic of this week’s blog that I’ve struggled so hard to pinpoint suddenly becomes clear. What’s been churning in the background of my waking and dreaming experiences is the positive partnership of the unconscious even when applying its most tricksterish of methods. Taking pen in hand, I acquiesce to the guidance of this most secret partner.
The many scenes of death and dying that I enter in my dreams force me to confront excruciating feelings. On the deepest level I’m led to encounter my greatest fears, the loss of all whom I most cherish. Encountering the fears, even in dreaming, is active recapitulation, as I’m challenged to stay present and fully live through the inevitable changes. I’m challenged as well, at each awakening, to not project the experiences and people of my dreams onto real people and situations. I must keep my experiences inside me. The twists and nuances of my dreams make clear that there is nothing “really” to fear. This dreaming experience offers another exercise to awaken to the nature of projection, to not get caught in its tricky web. This is another trial set up by my secret partner—the unconscious—to further my conscious intent: the way of truth; and the Tao of the dream is to further this intent by paying attention to the instructions encapsulated in my early morning waking and dreaming experiences.
My trickster partner knows I must write my blog, and as it has done hundreds of times in the past, it encourages me to awaken at just the right moment. This time it sets the stage by asking me to choose between the unpleasantness of its dreams or the tension of awakening without a clear topic. My dreams, however, become so unpleasant that there is no point in staying asleep and so I “choose” to awaken, delivered to this day with this experience to present.
The message here is that we all have our secret partner. How our secret partner confronts us can vary from the uncomfortable, such as what I encountered in my dreams, to gentle support. The challenge is to awaken to the fact of its presence, tricksterishly presented or otherwise, for it is present whether we are aware of it or not. If we choose to ignore it, it will simply continue to approach us with unpleasantness, asking us to face our greatest fears, to live through them, and experience them for what they truly are. If we choose to engage our secret partner and develop a relationship with it, we will be supported in our intent, that is, if the intent resonates with the wholeness of our being.
We cannot control the methods by which our secret partner will confront us, though we can certainly challenge them, and that we must do. It’s one of the challenges of evolving consciousness, to assert ourselves even in the midst of overwhelming odds, just as I did in my morning experience. That, after all, is our ultimate preparation for our moment of dying, to stay calm and awake, even as we are delivered deeper into life.
Staying awake,
Chuck