A Race Half Run

Sunday, January 2, 2011

DREAM about someone named Darwin Mekabali… I was part of a race or marathon, with a girlfriend or someone I was following because the run was in the city where there were always crowds of people about, and I relied on seeing my race mates to know where I was going. We were running indoors through buildings and such. Before the halfway mark (how I knew that I don’t know) I changed my mind and decided to turn back, but I’ve lost sight of my friend, a tall angular girl. I turned back on my own anyway, and that was when I met up with Darwin Mekabali, but the details are lost to me now…

DREAMWORK:

According to my jiffy web research, the nearest thing to Mekabali is ‘meka bali’, bali means to come back in Hindi (how interesting that I'd decided to 'come back' in the dream!), or offering; can’t find the meaning of meka, but found ‘meka bali’ as a reference to an offering involving a goat.

The race brings to mind immediately of the rat race I was part of for most of my adult life, although we did not appear as rats in the dream, surprisingly enough. I suppose that speaks to my labelling it strictly as a rat race, even though it gave me financial independence, a sense of purpose for a time, a livelihood. I still hold much resentment against it, as if it cheated me, robbed me of something. It’s as if I was led, or misled, the way I’ve come to see it, with the proverbial carrot, the golden promise on the hook of ambition, only to discover that it tastes like paper when I finally got a bite. I feel deceived, swindled of my youth, and worse, denigrated as a life. I feel used as a pawn by some behind-the-scene powerbroker (was it God? Patriarchy?), one rat amongst billions weaned on the milk of fear, trained to seek rewards in small doses of pleasure.

I feel BETRAYED. (Yikes!) Betrayed by Life, by God, by the power that was supposed to protect me, nurture me, guide me from birth. Not to throw me to the wolves and watch me fight for my life, only to haul me out of the ring when I was dying. I don’t care that pain and suffering is the only way we learn and grow. I don’t care that I am too small to see the Big Picture. I was innocent, too young and unprepared for what was to come. Is it out of unconditional love that parents throw their kids into the water so they might learn to swim? Surely that’s not the only way. What about regularly scheduled swimming lessons, given with gentleness and patience?

But even as I rant and rave for 2 paragraphs now about this (I had no idea it was inside me!), a part of me is admitting that perhaps I was offered that, but I turned it down, as I spurned what’s safe and conventional and opted for the path of the rebel, the contrary, the tragic hero (not a heroine!) I was too proud (still am, at times), too afraid to be weak, and hindered by the armour I had put on, to surrender to anyone or anything, in any way. So if I was betrayed, it was by my self, my ego.

So, I was not exactly the pathetic little rat victimized by the powers-that-be that I’ve always casted myself as… And I did abort the race not so long ago… but who was the girlfriend I was following like a beacon in the sea of humanity? I think she was wearing a red cloth square with her number on it, looking rather professional, but I don’t think I was. So even in the rat race I was a follower, didn’t really know where I was going, and although I could follow along when I was a member, there was no one for me to follow when I wanted to drop out of the race. I was on my own… Certainly this was the way it felt to me. I felt alone in taking the road less travelled, even though I knew others had already gone and some are on the road with me (Michael, for one).

Who is Darwin Mekabali then? Darwin means only the father of the earliest evolution theory to me, a pioneer in our species’ common pursuit to know where we came from, perhaps in order to find out who we are. Although his self-inquiry appeared to have been limited to the scientific and material, I believe he wanted to know it even more so on the spiritual level, but the state of christianity had already strayed far from its original intent and practice that he gave up on his first-chosen studies in theology.

Is my dream Darwin telling me to explore the physical plane? No, but to connect the physical with the spiritual, intellect with innate knowing, earth with heaven—mend the split, is that it? No, not only that, but specifically through self-inquiry for the entire species, for all human kind, just as Darwin had done. His work altered the way we regarded ourselves in the context of the entire world of creation (as necessarily egocentric as it was that our species is the centre of the universe), so perhaps in the same way this new Darwin I met on my way out of the rat race will be the new visionary out of whose mind and spirit a new synthesis of how we see ourselves in the universe, in Life, will come.

Mekabali is still unclear to me, if it is meant to be Hindi—am I to study Hinduism? Yes! Hmmm… this is new… I’ve had no interest in Hinduism so far… Is it something specific in Hinduism? Yes. Sacrifices and offerings are sacraments of a spiritual practice, of which there appear to be many in the Hindu way of life... If I may take a leap with what I've gathered so far, I would surmise that my dream Darwin's last name, family name, the name of his (my) collective is 'rituals with sacrifice and offering'. That is their way of life, and ought to be mine, where I am headed, who knows, perhaps to Bali...:D