Elevator to Consciousness

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

DREAM that I am in an elevator just about to go up to the 5th floor, the door closes though I could hear 2 men talking loudly out in the hall. I pressed the ‘close’ button just as the door starts to open again. It closes without me seeing them. I was saved from the intrusion.

DREAMWORK:

The 5th floor reminds me of the fact that I am reaching the end of my 5th decade in this life. Other than that I can only relate levels to those of the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual, but the 5th one following these 4 I can’t say with any certainty what it might be. Perhaps the purely energetic?… The 5th dimension is one of timelessness and oneness-awareness, while individualized consciousness is still retained. Hmmm… that would be lovely!

Although I didn’t feel any wrong in wanting to preserve the ‘sanctity’ of the space I was in (the elevator), I did feel a bit guilty about forcing the door shut on the 2 men who wanted to get on the elevator. But now that I think about it, it was more a conditioned response (“That wasn’t very nice, was it?”) than compassion for the men.

The elevator imagery is tugging at me because I don’t have it nailed down for myself, even though I’ve had countless elevator dreams. So, what is an elevator to me? What goes up and down in me like an elevator? Consciousness. And my subconscious or unconscious wish is to go past the first 4 floors of the person, to the transpersonal or collective or the superconsciousness. The state of oneness is what I consciously desire.

The deeper lesson though, I fear, is one that has taken me a couple of days to own and admit to. Beneath the twinge of guilt I felt at shutting the door on those men (in more ways than one!), is the more expansive knowing that they were trying to teach me something. These men were the outside world, full of noise and activity and disturbing energy, with all of its pursuit and competition, push and shove, powers of oppression and aggression—exactly what I have been trying to shut out. Behind the thin glass of my pretend-safe world, I know I cannot shut the world out, that it does me no good to do that. Why can’t I just let them in, onto the elevator so to speak, and share my journey for a little while? Because I am afraid they will distract me, disturb my peace, somehow knock me off course or cause me harm. But like so many of my fears, it is anticipatory, a conditioned response, and nothing more than a fear. It is a story I made up to tell myself, that’s all, even though I may have learned it from someone else’s story. More precisely, it is my vulnerability telling the story, because it is still shaky, being newly ‘owned’ and brought into the light of my world, it is still learning how to stand up on its own legs.

Aaahhh, so that’s why yoga, meditation, qigong, zen, and dao have come to prominence ‘suddenly’ in my life recently—I need grounding. And although I’ve been aware of my lack of incarnation and rooting for a few years now, I also see now that it is an on-going cycle of construction and destruction, repair and maintenance, daily and perpetually. It’s finally sinking in (pun??!) which for me, means sinking down into the flesh and the earth, into the physical and material, the manifest and incarnate. I think that’s what they mean by late-bloomers. But I will bloom as the nightblooming cereus blooms, only once a year for a night or two, but gloriously and wholeheartedly (and wholebodily). Then it withdraws into itself again for another year. Hmmm… is that me? Is that my contentment? My vision of the life I want? Perhaps it is on some level… I sense a slight shift in this vision of my life that I’ve been cooking and refining, maybe it’s time to add a new spice…?? A dash of new configuration? A sprig of refreshed perspective? Mmmmmm!!!

I do digress in a grand way today… back to the dream… so the 2 men were teaching me about my vulnerability, and the prescribed remedy: grounding. Prognosis: Flexible boundary and free-flowing exchange of energy in and out of myself, and eventually, the 5th floor – Oneness.