Foundations

What is fundamental in us is often so deeply buried we are unaware of it. For instance babies raised by animals never learn to speak or to become self aware. They remain an animal with all the behaviour traits of the animal that reared them. (See: Animal Children). Their foundations, their fundamental concepts, response to environment, sensory impressions, are totally different to a person who was taught language and social relationships with humans. So your foundations of your personality are the family behaviour patterns you learned without language, the culture and language you grew up with, and the uncountable things you learned almost unconsciously.

But there are foundations that go deeper than that. Your body is the result of millions of years of life on this planet, and of processes in the universe older than that. So your deeper foundations rest in the universe and it unfolding. Without the universe you have no existence. It and its origins are your foundation. This is the most fundamental sense of self we have – does life uphold or seek to destroy?

The foundations are what everything else is built upon. So poor foundations indicate what you have built of yourself is not secure. The natural and spontaneous part of your nature is the foundation of what you have become now as an adult. Not only were you born with an enormous natural wisdom gained through millions of years of evolution, but your newborn self also carried protective responses such as fear, anger, and sexual longing. The human is built on the foundations of the reptile, and that is built upon the mammal in us. See Levels of the Brain

Our parents are the very foundation of our development, of what we learn about relationship, about love and anger, about meeting the world and opportunity, we cannot become mature and independent individuals until we sort out our own foundations. That is why there is the saying, “Honour you father and mother”. It is not about them as external figures, but what they leave in you. See my parents

The void or nothingness as people call it is the source of our dreams, and the incredible wisdom it gives us. That nothingness is the Source of Everything. If we invite it into our lives openly we are truly enriched. It is the very foundation of our existence. There is an ancient book titled The Cloud of Unknowing. The unknown author invites us to stand in the Cloud of Unknowing and be blessed. The state of unknowing is the nothingness – the foundation.

Example: Then the throat pain became unbearable. I investigated it and I became aware of doom. If I didn’t fight it, doom would take over. I was weary of fighting it so I let doom take over and sank into the doom and it was then that I found myself at the foot of the great being and total acceptance of my life. Spontaneously, before I knew it I was offering everything as a sacrifice, including past mistakes and cock-ups, and that I had to do this. And then there were the images again of clefts: the earth, female genitals, undersea-ocean crusts opening and something, as yet formless, emerging. This, I suspect, is my creativity in the world.

Here the woman reaches her foundatioin by letting her pain live in her instead of repressing it and she found herseld at the foot of a great being – her experience of her foundation – and reclaimed her creativity.

Useful questions and hints:

What of my own foundations is my dream indicating and what is their condition?

In what way am I relating to the foundations?

Can I gather information about my own deeper self from this dream?

See touching core self – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Enlightenment