Christine – I felt I was way off but my intuition seems to have given up recently - maybe it needs to rest for the Christmas holidays.
That was a really good insight you got into your dream and explains it well.
I think our whole view of ourselves and what we are is incredibly screwed up. Our reactions to things like duality are a lot of habitual responses arising from our education and the paradigm we are trapped in. See
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/archetype-of-the-paradigm/Habits are a wonderful aid and a terrible support system all at the same time. After three years of living an agony of despair and having searched my unconscious for the sort of childhood trauma that could cause so much pain, I eventually tried another approach that led to a dream. I was in a dream group and they offered me a turn to explore my dream. The result was I saw that I had torn myself apart searching, and there was no ‘cure’ for such pain. This was awful to see but it led me to give up completely and I became so quiet, almost not breathing – and then like an experience of enlightenment I knew I was free. It lasted three days, and in that time I saw that it was habits of judgement that had been put into me through the culture I grew up in – you are either good or bad; you are either a bad father or a good one; you are either a shit poor husband or a really good one; you are either worthy of Gods love or you are not – and if you are not you have to work bloody hard to make amends.
No wonder I and so many of my fellows were living in such misery. We had unwittingly created it by believing all that rubbish. I realised in that wonderful three days that I could change the habits of thought and belief. See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYYXq1Ox4sk It took me years to realise the truth behind a wonderful experience I had in LifeStream in which I had gone through throwing off a world – really, on my shoulders like atlas – of religious beliefs I had inherited that had caused me years of illness, and now stood before a wonderful light. But I still have manacles and chains on my wrists, and said with great passion, “Please take these chains off me!” And the Light replied, “Tony, I love you. I would never put chains on you, you put them on yourself.”
Quoting you, “To not judge others I think I have to choose not to judge myself first and that would require some conscious, deliberate work.”
As for how God sees us, well it is not as an outsider who judges or condemns us. People are so mixed up when considering God. They either totally disown God because they cannot find any proof; or they treat it like something they have to look to outside of them. “I know God because at the core of my being I am that very mystery of life, sprung from the creation of the Universe. I know God daily because I am aware of myself. I am willing to bathe in the great depths of my experience, the passions and terrors, the hurts and awfulness of my own past deeds. If you don’t know God from direct experience, it’s because you don’t open yourself wide enough to the glory and the shit, the pain and wonder of life. God isn’t an intellectual idea”. Quoted from
http://dreamhawk.com/inner-life/i-dont-believe-in-god-i-know-god/My experience is that Life/God, when we really open to our core, is the very self that we are and we have kept projecting it outside of us. It is something that is beyond description but is Love, without judgement, without blame; and it is there all the time. We do not have to be wonderful paragons of virtue to know it. We are, after all, little life forms struggling to grow. All we have to do is to say, “Life/God, I love you and please help me to know you.”
I feel all this because I am that blissful union of Krishna and Radha. In myself I know the union and the love. I have been and am that sweet love forever joined. That the very creator of the universe can take on flesh, as it does every time a baby is born, brings me to my knees. This is beyond belief. Yet that is what I am seeing and experiencing as the truth. That is what I am experiencing in myself. I know that in this very existence, lost as I am in the sensory experiences of the world, and my feelings of isolation and physicality, I am at the same time, at the same moment, the godhead itself.
Tony