The heart’s abode is outside of time and space, therefore it transforms
“I have been a seeker, and I still am, but I stopped asking the books and the stars. I started listening to the teachings of my soul.” - Rumi
In a meditation dream, I get overwhelmed by feeling that I am responsible for society. It’s too much, so I remain in a state of confusion about the collective consciousness. There’s so much going on around me and I’m trying to take it all into account. I cannot sort out where I stand in this, so I move away from the collective and notice that I feel better.
I shift towards dealing only with the download that is specifically allocated to me. By moving away from the collective consciousness, I am able to come to grips with my own responsibilities. In the meditation dream, the time has come to return to the collective consciousness. There’s mail I’ve collected and catch up with all that involves me and I choose not to focus on anything else. I remember that I have an obsolete mailbox back home that I haven’t used for a long time. It was designed to hold only the mail that affects me. I realize that it will be interesting to see and I wonder what has accumulated in it. I have a sense that if things have been done properly this mail should have been discarded.
It is my general experience that aspects of the collective unconscious have slipped to me in spite of my handling my own responsibilities. It feels awkward to visit the collective consciousness and I consider the ways I’ve developed my own independent focus. I wonder to what degree will I be pulled back into a never-ending entanglement with it and I question if I am strong enough to hold my connection to permeation. Will the collective consciousness tear me down?
“That’s the meditation for you,” I’m told in the dream. The message this dream contains is about the heart, which feels the heat and the burden of what is imposed on it by the overallness of the collective consciousness.
I realize that a thread exists and it has to do with being free and yet I stay in time and space because it is familiar. Under the spell of the collective consciousness’ malaise I am in a state of overwhelm. But if I maintain my own focus and hold my attention then there’s a different sense of responsibility from the one that’s overwhelming to me. I understand that we may glimpse reflectively with focus and attention, and that this is less possible where the heart is lost in the malaise of never-ending projections in collective consciousness. In the malaise the heart changes. It is nice to visit the collective consciousness, but only to the degree in which the projections are absorbable. I must not be eaten up by it.
My partner dreamed that she was involved with a person whom she went out with in spite of feeling they were very different. She wanted to see the affect the encounter would have on her. In the dream she and this person left something extremely valuable behind. She did not know how to retrieve it or of what use it could be if she did retrieve it. Her sense was that she was disoriented and out of sync.
She and I relate this dream to how time and space work: the sun, for example, casts radiance on the earth and begins a cycle which is the consequence of the sunshine on water and then soil. This single action of the sun casting radiance is what makes the whole world unfold.
Considering that actions such as these are what brings forward the next cycle of action, I realize that there is also a previous cycle of what has run its course. There is always a need for the new. I wonder if we may always live in time and space. I recognize that we have to understand how time and space relate to each other. I sense that we need to move forward in a very different way, perhaps a new way, but we cannot do so for as long as we are impervious to understanding what time and space are.
Interpretation
Which came first, spatiality or time?
To reach greater levels of what we are capable of we must accept time and space on all of their levels as they play a part in our amnesia --and our awakening. It is similar to the quandary of the chicken or the egg. If you’re talking about humanity as a whole, the Naqshbandi Sufis say that inner moves into outer. When we hang on to, or get attached by the outer it brings suffering and collateral damage caused by whatever moves through it. This activity of space and time expresses itself through individual and collective consciousness.
Many people experience life in the outer amongst the collective consciousness as a malaise of the heart. As a result, some give up their wealth, return to living in nature, or move to a cave in order to shift their spatiality and accommodate more levels of their heart. All of these actions of sacrifice are invented ideas that demonstrate that changes we make to spatiality have an effect on our actions.
This shows up in how we deal with one another. Oftentimes, we take the view that we ought not say something to another because we feel the person is not capable of handling what needs to be said. We fear that their reaction will shock or alarm them. But from the view of time and space, a person’s reaction is not shock and alarm, and whatever the reaction it’s neither one of acceptance or rejection. The shock and alarm, and acceptance and rejection they may express is what is taking place in spatiality. That is to say that it is a reaction of the body.
Our spatiality is coming forward as we continuously evolve. What’s appropriate for us to introduce is whatever spatiality shows that it can accept. The emptiness of time can’t blow its gifts through special density. And in manifestation time and light burn up.
A person who is dense and lacks subtlety will suffer more collateral damage than someone flexible and open. The poles of time and space have their influence in matter and we twirl in the dance as actors.
There is a way to glimpse outside of time and space. We need only reside in our heart which is the heart of the world and the universe. This heart sits outside of time and space. In this way the heart is transformational: our heart may soar while the body remains in the malaise and a part of the collective consciousness.
Suggested Contemplations
In real time as you live your life in the outer notice when you feel reactive. Stop and center your attention in your heart while knowing that your heart is free of the constraints of time and space. Feel into the reaction you are having from this vantage point and observe the differences in your experience.
In moments when you wish to confront something that offends you, or when you wish to shift someone’s view by adding a view of your own or taking an action, be aware that you exist both in the heart (outside of time and space) and on the ground in which you’re governed by time and space. Consider what your intervening may bring forward. Think not in terms of offending or supporting but in terms of bringing through something. Consider now how you may shape your actions to be best received.
In our dreams time and space are different from how we experience them in our outer lives. Upon waking after a dream, return to the dream and take note of how time and space may have presented in ways that defy reality in the outer. Why might a dream be presented this way? Is there a message threaded into the way that time and space is presented?
“One went to the door of the Beloved and knocked. A voice asked: “Who is there?” He answered: “It is I.” The voice said: “There is no room here for me and thee.” The door was shut.”- Rumi
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