I have been dreaming again. Last Saturday, we published the following dream with our Soulbyte for the day, after the Paris attacks, as it clearly foreshadowed what occurred in Paris on Friday night. Here it is:

On Thursday night, I had a numinous dream in which a huge energetic force sucked all energy from the earth, destroying all of nature, revealing what lay buried in the depths of the earth, a large coiled cobra. Then a giant tidal wave came and washed over everything, bringing a new order. I stood calmly as all of this took place around me. After the tidal wave I calmly walked away, followed by the cobra, to higher ground, but all that had been was transformed. The valley that had been a river was now the ocean, transformed from the personal to the universal. This is what I understood as important now: the new world order is universal love and compassion.

Last night I had another dream in which I heard a loud booming voice say: Kill the cobra in the bathtub! At first I thought it ridiculous, there was no cobra in the bathtub! And secondly, I couldn’t kill anything, let alone a cobra, the symbol of spiritual awakening and universal consciousness in my earlier dream!

Upon reflection, I realize that is exactly what must happen. We must kill the cobra in the bathtub. Not to be misconstrued as killing the enemy, but as per the following meaning:

If we are all spirits living a human existence our challenge is to bring spirit fully into our human lives. To do that we must suffer. There must be sacrifice. Think of Christ on the cross, Buddha under the bodhi tree, Jesus in Gethsemane, all examples of suffering leading to enlightenment.

Marie-Louise von Franz, in Shadow and Evil in Fairytales tells a tale of a white horse that guides and protects the protagonist. The white horse tells the protagonist that in order to be saved in the end the protagonist must cut the horse into pieces and throw its severed parts to the four directions. The protagonist is horrified at the idea of killing this beautiful horse that has been its savior and companion, but at the crucial moment does the deed and all is well. Now, back to the cobra in the bathtub.

In the first dream, the cobra followed me and now it’s in the bathtub. It went from the ocean, the collective unconscious, to a small body of water, a bathtub. It’s in too small a container. The bathtub is personal consciousness, a small body of water over which man has control. The cobra in the bathtub is under control of the ego, though its real home is the ocean, the deeper, uncontrollable unconscious, which it longs to return to. Thus, a cobra contained is madness bursting to be free. It is the urge to go to war.

When the cobra followed me out of the ocean in my first dream, it was foreshadowing what was to follow if the natural balance was not maintained. In the first dream all was as it should be, nature restored to balance, though greatly transformed. The cobra, in following me, was hinting that there was more to come.

The truth is, the cobra doesn’t belong in the bathtub, it belongs in the ocean. In its containment it is going mad and thus has to be killed. Out of the sacrifice of the cobra will come healing, for the snake is a symbol of healing, yet it is also a symbol of destruction. The cobra specifically has a helmet-like mantel that when expanded means it is about to strike, so watch out!

The cobra is like the Goddess Isis that Chuck wrote about in his blog this week, a symbol of the dark and the light, life and death, destruction and healing. The lesson is that these contrasts must be kept in balance. And the greater unconscious does not belong in a tiny bathtub, as the human ego is quickly overwhelmed. It can only take in the fullness of what lies in the collective unconscious a little at a time or it will go mad. This happens to people who experience true reality in visions and overwhelming insights, they often go mad.

So what does this have to do with ISIS and world events? The lesson is that we must rid ourselves of the ego attitude that the cobra in the bathtub signifies, it is too powerful and unwieldy. We are kidding ourselves if we think we can contain this madness. We must sacrifice its deadly urge to strike, its dark side of hate and destruction and find the healing answer in love. We must all kill, within ourselves, the urge to go mad with hatred. We must overcome our passion for destruction.

Yogananda’s teacher, Yukteswar when confronted by a deadly cobra that rushed angrily at him, with hood expanded, conquered it with his love.*

The ego continues to toy with the cobra, wondering how it will tame it, but we must remember that the cobra is deadly. It will not be contained and nothing the ego comes up with will subdue it. Kill the mad cobra by seeking refuge in love, which releases the healing power of the snake, and then the Goddess energy returns to natural balance, as shown in my first dream.

The Soulbytes and the Message from Jeanne this week have all been about stabilizing the ego and remaining focused on what is right. Monday’s audio message implied that those who pray are innocent at heart, i.e., it is not Islam that is the enemy but the disenfranchised, misguided and misdirected youth unable to find meaning in today’s world.

As Hermann Hesse stated when the German youth were being drawn to antisemitism preceding World War II: “…the form of [antisemitism] with us now among misled German youth does a lot of harm, because it prevents these young people from seeing the world as it is and because disastrously it encourages the tendency to seek out a scapegoat on which to blame everything that goes wrong.” **

We must keep in mind that we are spirits living a human existence and as such we must each create our own bridge from the spirit realm to the human realm. I bring what I learn in my channelings and my dreams, daring to speak of what comes through me.

Much as I would rather just recoil back into my own little world, I feel the obligation of these dreams and messages as they ask me to leave my comfy quiet and put out what comes through. I have, after all, resolved to walk this path of spirit more fully. It is what we must all decide to do now.

The messages are clear: Love, which will only fully release from the the healing power of sacrifice, is the answer.

Jan

* Autobiography of a Yogi, p. 98.

** Portrait of Hesse, Bernhard Zeller p. 98