Tag: dreaming

It is Always Now

Mommy, they’re not growing yet!”  protested the child about the seeds he had planted with his mother three days ago.  “We put them in the dirt, and gave them water and light, and they’re not growing.  I need them to grow!”

His mother left the computer and joined her son at the planter they had set in a sunny window.  “They will grow,” she reassured him. “It just takes time.  We need to wait until they are ready.”

“Why do we need to wait, Mommy?  I don’t like waiting.  I want them to grow now!”

“We all need to wait sometimes,” she replied.  “I have to wait for you to finish getting dressed in the morning, and sometimes for you to put your coat on before we go out.  You need to wait for your friend to finish his lunch before he can play.  Waiting is OK.”

“I still don’t like it,” he grumbled.

“May I tell you a secret?” the mother queried.  “It’s about now.”

“What is it?” the boy asked curiously.

“In this minute,” she explained, “it is now, and you are saying the seeds are not growing now. Yesterday, you asked me if we could plant seeds now, and we did.  If the seeds grow tomorrow, you will look at them and say, ‘Now they are growing!'”

“So?” her son asked.

“I think,” remarked his mother, “that it is always now.  There isn’t any other time than now.  Whenever you are, it is now.  So, the seeds do grow now, even if we don’t see them right away.”

“Oh,” he replied, not quite understanding. “So, they are going to grow now?”

“Whenever they grow, it will be now,” she explained again.  “There is a big word that says what we do to help it be always now.  The word is patience.  Sometimes patience is hard, but as we grow, it gets easier.   Do you think we can practice having patience now?”

“OK, Mommy,” he answered.  Agreeing was easier than more complaining.

Giving his mom a big hug, he ran outside to ride his trike.

How can it be that whatever time it is, it is always now?  First, time is a mental construct.  It is a component of physical life and is so familiar to us that it is hard to conceive of a way things could be different from linear time, the past merging into the present and leading to the future.  In the world beyond, called heaven, the creative matrix, the Void, the pre or afterlife, there is no concept of time as we know it.  It is not only always now, but is always now with the past, present and future as we know them existing at the same time.  In that overarching aspect, it is truly always now; there is nothing else but now.

Our physical world, with which we are familiar, also reflects this.  It is said that the past is gone forever, and the future never comes.  The only thing real is now, and it is on now that our attention needs to be. In other words, it is always now.  We may remember what we call past, and imagine what we call future, but we do that remembering and imagining in the now.

Most of us equate patience with waiting.  We either wait as someone recounts or processes through their memories, or we wait for something anticipated in the future to appear in a form that our physical senses can perceive.  Sometimes it is a long wait.  Yet, if all that exists is now, then it follows that what we have wished for, hoped for, imagined is not something in that future that never comes, but in that “future” that is part of now, and that what we have wished for is now.  We have already received, and it is appropriate to give thanks for what we receive.

Patience, then, is the sister of gratitude.  Patience tells us that whatever we have conceived, wished for or imagined is already there.  If we maintain awareness of it through our gratitude, and do not cancel out the gift by changing our minds or hold it away by failing to understand the now and averring that what we have perceived with our minds is always in a future that never comes, then through grateful patience we will assuredly perceive what we have intended through our senses, so long as we are in this world.  Patience allows us to firmly center ourselves in the now.  Patience, like her sister Gratitude, is powerful.

The child’s seeds will grow, and the mother has correctly observed that when they do it will still be now.  The child is keeping patience by no longer probing the issue, insisting that the seeds are not growing, and by doing something else during the linear time of the world that Is elapsing for the child.  Not understanding the concepts, but still holding faith in the seeds and their growth, he quits worrying about it and occupies himself with something else until he is able to perceive the growth of the seeds with his senses.  He practices patience.

It is the same for us.  What we envision and hold in the now manifests.   In groups, the coalescing of the visions held by members of the group manifests.  The mechanism is the same.  It is always now.  We are free to cancel our visons by changing our minds, or to hold them away by placing them in a future that doesn’t arrive.  We need to keep focus without strain or worry; we need to practice patience.

We need also be mindful of what we envision.  It is a fallacy to imagine that our good can exist independently of the good of all, or especially contrary to the good of all.  The visions must first embrace the well-being of the Earth and its denizens, of the human species, of the various groups that inhabit the Earth, of our communities, of our families, and then ourselves.  By so doing, our visions provide multiple blessings, all of which we enjoy, as we are part of the whole.  What we nurture, nurtures us.  That vision, too, exists in the now.

Let us take heart as we develop our ongoing skill at practicing patience.  Let us also be aware as we use our minds to birth what is called “a new normal” that to create an order which is viable for ourselves, we must first create one that embraces the well-being of all.  Patience is, after all, a virtue well worth increasing.

Peace, Diane

Dreaming Our New Reality

The old man sat quietly alert on the rock outcropping near the top of the hill.  The dry air, warmed by the late morning sunshine, stirred lazily around him, ruffling his white hair, and caressing his closed eyes.  Behind him, at the foot of the hill, the tribe patiently continued daily tasks as if nothing were going on.  They were awaiting the old man’s return.  Before him spread the expanse of grassland.  In the distance, a herd of bison nibbled on the sere grass, vainly searching for a few green blades.  None of this caught the attention of the old man.  His focus was inward, away from the arid, heat-permeated landscape surrounding him.  The old man was sensing rain.  Within his trance, he could see the dark clouds approach, feel the damp breeze on his skin, notice the slight drop in temperature, smell the droplets of a deluge, hear distant rumbling thunder.  The rains were coming.  He KNEW that, knowing in a way that belied the logic of drought surrounding him, of grass waiting like tinder to catch the first spark.  The old man had been there since dawn, going ever deeper into his trance, sensing ever more strongly the coming of rain.

Towards sunset, the grazing bison looked up.  The breeze had stilled for the moment; dark clouds began to form on the horizon.   The bison stopped grazing.  They began to circle, calves in the middle for shelter.  The old man paid no attention. The dark clouds grew, and the wind began to pick up.  Lightning split the sky, and thunder rumbled over the bison.  Clouds obscured the setting sun as the storm increased its force, soaking the dried grass and the parched earth.  The bison lifted their heads in welcome to the rain.  Now the wind blew strong over the old man, who was still sitting quietly.  A clap of thunder woke him from his trance.  A deluge from the sky washed over him as he stood up and began the walk to the encampment.  Dancing children approached him, frolicking in the rain.  The old man entered among the people.   “It rained,” he said.

The old man had been dreaming rain.  He was the tribal shaman, trained from adolescence in the ability to enter the invisible realms the aborigines call “dreamtime”.  From those spaces he would heal, divine, and call to the tribe what was needed.  Rain was needed at the moment.  He was an expert in these skills.  

These skills are not, however, potentially limited to shamans.  Each of us possesses the possibility of using our focus, our imaginations, our understanding and creative inner gifts to do, individually or collectively, what the shaman had done.  We can create ceremony, sing what we wish to create, draw it, sculpt it, write it, or sit in focused meditation.  We can even simply speak the truth we wish to see.   We do not need to be trained shamans operating alone.  Collectively, our smaller individual acts coalesce into a larger effect.

There are certainly many intertwined issues that face us in this moment.  An election is over, but we cannot all sit back and relax and assume that the “old normal” will now return.  The “old normal” is gone; what will ensue from the current chaos will be the result of what we collectively dream.  We have work to do.  What do we wish to see?  For example, most of us wish to be free of the coronavirus.  Do we wish to see everyone mandated in masks?  Do we wish to see everyone required to receive experimental vaccines and tracked to make sure we do?  Do we believe that governing from the top to “take care” of everyone, controlling them even as they are relieved of responsibility for addressing things themselves, will be desirable? 

One priority is the well-being of our planet.  The coronavirus is one virus. Even if it is manmade, as some say, more are in waiting from nature if we do not address the healing of the earth.  It is interconnected.  I believe we wish to see ourselves, generally, healthy, free to interact with each other, living in cooperation with nature on a healed earth, inhabiting a healed social order in which we can care for and trust one another.  I believe we would like an economic order in which everyone can provide for him/herself and his/her family with the work of hands, heart, or mind.  If these things are what we wish, we need to envision these things instead of trying to figure out what we need to require others to do and how we will make them do it.  We need to cooperatively envision the result, not the means.

There is temptation to turn passive, believing that there is nothing we or anyone can do to affect the present or the outcome of things.  Such a stance leads to being taken over as a source of energy for ways which are not ours.  There is also temptation to believe that raising anger and marching in the streets, perhaps rioting, will change things in the direction we wish them to go.  The fact is that if the negative challenges are met directly, head on, the result will be more of the same, perhaps dressed in different clothes.  We must use the indirect way, the way of the old man who “saw” the rain and then it came.  Each of us has a piece of the future to imagine. Each of us has a creative way of expressing that (and yes, even cleaning a house can be a creative expression, when it is done with the loving consciousness we envision).   What is your thought?  How do you wish the world to be?  How can you dream that and express your dream?  It takes us all.

We live in a world bounded by time.  Humans have created this concept and been caught in its web.   Time cannot run backwards.  We cannot return to the time before COVID-19, or the time before 9/11, or the time our grandmothers tell stories about.  We must live in and act in the present, with all its problems that surround us, and also with all the beauty that still exists if we pause and relax long enough to notice it.  What our future will be depends on how we orient ourselves now.

May we awaken to the creative power we all embody, and to the focused, reverent application of that ability.  May we all dream a world which includes a healed Earth restored to its beauty and harmony, and a social structure which recognizes the full humanity of all of us and supports just, compassionate, and reverent ways of interacting.  We are the shamans.   It is time we worked. 

Peace, Diane