Meeting the Demons

I had a long dream in which I was looking at sexual relations and seeing that there had to be something more than just physical sex. I was clarifying that apart from that one needed, or I needed, to be creative in the relationship. I didn’t mean sexually, but in terms of creating some change in the person’s life.

It is about the uncovering of something that was experienced a long time ago and there is a felt guilt about it. There is something that hasn’t been integrated or passed away, it is still there, and it has to do with, I believe, a relationship of some sort. Whether this is a relationship with something in myself, or with somebody else I don’t know.

I begin to feel as if I am opening to something of immense power. I have an image of myself seated and almost glowing with this power, and oriental people are backing away from me. They are not doing this with fear, but with something of the attitude or feeling one might have when you stand near to a big fire and it is too hot to be close to.

As this feeling deepens I have a strong sense that ‘being’ – just sitting without effort or any attempt to ‘be something’ – has immense power. As I experience this I feel as if my body, my being, is radiating immense power. It is not a destructive power, but like the warmth of sunlight that penetrates and warms. I can see there is a difficulty in understanding this because in my culture ‘being’ is not recognised as powerful. Power is associated in the West with dominance, with doing something or being something actively and outwardly remarkable.

I experience it as quiet radiance and sureness. It is a freedom from being trapped in habitual motivations, fears and desires. It seems to me that by being, you are no longer letting your energies flow away into the throng of activities, entertainments and diversions that most of us get involved in. Ambition, sex, searching, desire to be loved or admired, sought after, are all, from this perspective, ways that ones energy flows away.

There now occurred a massive flow of imagery and experience that was like being taught something. It continued the theme of being and the expression of energy. I will try to describe the richness of what was met.

I could see and experience that because, in this period of my life, I was refraining from going out in the world for socialisation, to avoid loneliness, to be entertained, to express an ambition or seek a sexual partner, all the energy that would have been spent in those ways was being concentrated and charged up, like a battery.

Such energy will attempt to flow in habitual channels – the normal activities and diversions people enter into. It will flow into and enliven old traumas, and make alive the fears, pains and fantasies those traumas give rise to. So it could lead to neurosis or worse. It could also lead to fantasies of spiritual power or experience. It is, after all, the stuff of life, and is incredibly creative. It brings life to whatever it flows into, whether that is good or what we call evil.

However, if one has learned to stand in naked awareness, dropping away the multitude of images, desires, ideas of advancement and achievement, fame and fortune we are assailed by or entertain, the energy starts to do something very different. But as this happens consciousness confronts all the racial fears, and resistances that usually trap us in the limitations of human self awareness. Mostly we retreat from such spectres.

Mostly we are daunted and terrified, not only of the most glorious in us, but also of all those ancient terrors – the dark, threatening people, the unknown, any influence that threatens to change us, pain, deep emotions or ghostly fantasies of demons, death and dragons. So as I went deeper into myself all these rushed at me in what felt like an attempt to turn me back from realising or experiencing something.

When I simply saw them as spectral images meant to frighten one, rather like a horror film that, although with awful images, is simply a play of light on a screen, I broke through into recognising something I had never previously seen so clearly.

This takes courage, as those centres of other dimensional contact are guarded, if that is the right word, by instinctive fears, and terrors that ones ego, or psyche, will be torn apart. This is of course what is happening, as the usual boundaries of ‘self’ are being melted, and a wider awareness emerging. It is this that confronts one with a sense of death, because a form of death or dying is being experienced. One – ones present view of the world – needs to die to allow a winder awareness.

This begins to unravel the import of my dream of uncovering the dead body. Ancient things have been buried in ones body. Just as old temples and buildings have gradually been buried by earth over the centuries, so aspects of human life that were everyday and conscious are now buried and unconscious. This is why one needs to have developed the skill of naked awareness or lucidity – to know you are dreaming, or lost in the imagery of fears or fantasies.

I felt that something in the body had been hurt a long time in the past, not just with me, but with humanity, and this is why so many of us are blind spiritually. This is what I see in my dream. And at first I wonder if I have done something to cause this. But as I penetrated the feelings, and it was just like that, penetration of layer after layer of imagery and fantasy, then I began to see that the guilt I felt was not personally caused. It was a guilt that was part of my culture and society, part of the very fabric of the religion I have been raised in. The guilt connects with the most fundamental aspects of existence. It connects with love, with sex, with just living and existing in the world. I see also that in today’s world it is also guilt ridden about an ever increasing number of things such as weight, food, being a parent, hurting the planet, being responsible for everything. We are often feeling guilty for being an ordinary human being.

The dead body is my own life energy that has been killed or buried. Guilt dug the hole and buried facets of myself. An upflow of realisations lead me to see that because of this deadness, this everyday desert of life filled experience, many people seek activities that excite and challenge them so much the excitation breaks through the barriers, if only for a little while. For a while they are vitally alive. I have the image of the Tunnel of Love type of environment in which ghostly scenes, darkness and loud noises stimulate old instinctive feelings – and of course the sexual opportunity of being alone and in the dark. But for many there are things like racing, sexual encounters, sailing rough seas alone, and so on.

At this point I experienced a fantasy in which a young Spanish or Mexican type of woman comes to me. She is a female who identifies very much with her own physical charm and sees herself as desirable and able to ‘turn on’ men’s sexual desires. She does all her ‘charm’ with me but I don’t really feel anything. All I see is that she has this opinion of her power, and when it doesn’t work she goes away in disgust. It didn’t call anything out of me, and I wonder if this is because there is nothing there to react. But I see that I am so often in the observing mode, and noticing what people are doing; and with the woman I could see she was trying to use her sexual charm as a form of getting her way with men. As I could see this consciously it didn’t work.

Suddenly I swing to asking who or what are the beings who appeared in my dream as those who were above the clouds in other dimensions. It seems as if I can hear them in my mind and they laugh. They say, “We are the ones who wove the pattern of your life – your thoughts, your behaviour and the society in which you live. We are the ones who wove it, and you sense us behind your life. This age is about recognising the very foundations of your existence, and turning back and honouring those great men and women who have shaped the world of mind and matter you now live in. Also it is about adding to them in some way if we can. Adding to them with our life experience, our art, our love.

I gradually went deeper into the experience, and realise that I had now ascended into “Heaven”. But heaven wasn’t a place one went to after death, or out of the body – it was the condition of letting go, of living without the security of rules, morals, beliefs, but trusting the flow.