Inner
Symbols
“Dreams
are first and foremost an invitation from the unconscious for
relationship with consciousness; or an invitation from the Self to
the ego.”
Jerry
Wright
Meister Eckhart wrote,
“When the soul wishes to express herself, she throws out before
her an image, and then enters the image; engaging the image, we
engage the soul.” One place we can experience this is through
tuning-in to our dreams; more specifically, to the images in our
dreams. Let's take, as an example, the wolf image from my dream over
the weekend. This was a large wolf with black-tipped fur. It was
standing on a hilltop looking down at me—the dream ego. My response
was to be startled, shocked, so much so that I came fully awake. My
entire body was tingling, as if I had come upon on a real wolf in the
wild. My hackles were up so much that I could feel them. It took
some time for this physical response to lessen enough for me to fall
back to sleep.
The wolf in my dream was
majestic, commanding. If I look at that wolf-image as a
representative of my soul, or a message from my soul, it would show
me my fierceness, my wildness, my feral instincts. It would instruct
me to respect those, because they hold a great deal of power. Now,
you may ask the question, “Haven't we humans worked for thousands
and thousands of years to overcome our instinctual nature? Isn't the
goal to keep it under control?” And, you would be right. We have
attempted to tame it through external laws and religions, and by making our
wild nature unacceptable, even punishable. But because we have not
understood the strength of our own inner symbols, we have only put
fancy clothes on them. They still have immense power, but now they
are acting as free agents—they are off the leash, so to speak. The
nature of a wolf as a symbol includes this: she is highly protective,
capable of intelligent thought and planning, loyal to her tribe, and,
yes, fierce. But, she acts in the best interest of her pack and not
as a loose cannon.
Because we have lost our
connection with our symbolic inner world, we are living it out
unconsciously—by warring with each other, by toting firearms (today's equivalent of fangs and claws), and
being reckless and brutal in our relationships. When kept
unconscious, our wild-self will come out in destructive ways. Every
single day in America, one-hundred people are killed by guns. In the
states with the weakest gun laws, like Alabama, Alaska, and
Louisiana, guns kill four times the number of people killed in strong
gun-law states. That which we refuse to make conscious, such as our
killer-instinct, will not simply go away. It will act in murderous
ways against whatever it perceives as a threat.
Our soul is trying all
the time, in everyday occurrences, to show us what is within us. It
tries to communicate in ordinary ways with our ego consciousness to
impart its ancient wisdom. But we have to be present and listening.
Are you Present and Listening to your soul?
In the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment