This Dream You Are Having Matches Everyone's Dream, and the Result Is the World

from my flickr photostream

I’ve just been reading Bede Griffiths. He writes, commenting on the Bhagavad Gita:

“Each chapter of the Bhagavad Gita concerns a particular yoga. This first chapter is called “the yoga of Arjuna’s despair” and it is significant that the experience of despair is a yoga; despair is often the first step on the path of spiritual life.. It s very important to go through the experience of emptiness, of disillusion and despair. Many people do not awaken to the reality of God, and to the experience of transformation in their lives, until they reach the point of despair.”

This speaks to the our search less as accomplishment, and more as letting go of a certain kind of effort. My brother after a life-altering accident said that he’s grown closer and closer to God “Because it is completely impossible to make it through a day without His help.”

I can’t claim to really understand this, but I have witnessed it, and experienced it in fits and starts. God is not who and what we believe God to be. It’s always something else……

Again, from "River of Compassion"

So on the battlefield Arjuna sees that his enemies are his friends and relatives. there is Bhisma his grandfather's brother and Drona, who is his guru, his teacher, and Arjuna realizes that he is divided against himself. That is the human predicament. In the battle of life, we are divided against ourselves and the point is that there is really no solution to the problems of life on the human level. As long as Arjuna is simply confronting the battle by himself, there is no answer. It is only when Krishna, the Spirit, the Lord, begins to counsel him that an answer can be found. What is demanded of Arjuna, and what is so difficult, is that he has got to fight. He says, "I shall have to kill all these, my relatives and friends." This is the problem. When we are asked to give up the world and to fight against our instincts, passions, and desires, it looks as though there is nothing left and it seems as if one is in a desert.

This highlights one of the perennial problems of spiritual life. we give up Egypt, we give up the world and the pleasures of the senses, we give up appearances and go out into the desert. Our state then is that we have lost the world abut we do not seem to have gained anything. That is why Arjuna is in despair. He throws down his arms and refuses to fight because there does not seem to be anything to fight for. Even if he wins he will only have killed all his enemies who are also his friends.

What we all have to learn is that there is no answer on the human level to the problems of human life. As long as it is a question of the human soul, the human body, the human situation, there is no answer to be found and all we can do is throw down our arms and say, "I will not fight!" Only when the Spirit within begins to speak does the answer begin to be found.

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"Being a Person" by William Stafford

Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.

A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.

Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone's dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn't be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.

How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.

*

Descended from Dreamers

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Li-Young Lee

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And what did I learn, a child, on the Sabbath?

A father is bound to kill his favorite son,

and to his father's cherishing,

the beloved answers Yes.

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The rest of the week, I hid from my father,

grateful I was not prized. But how deserted

he looked, with no son who pleased him.

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And what else did I learn?

That light is born of dark to usurp its ancient rank.

And when a pharaoh dreams of ears of wheat

or grazing cows, it means

he's seen the shapes of the oncoming years.

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The rest of my life I wondered: Are there dreams

that help us to understand the past? Or

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is any looking back a waste of time,

the whole of it a too finely woven

net of innumerable conditions,

causes, effects, countereffects, impossible

to read? Like rain on the surface of a pond.

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Where's Joseph when you need him?

Did Jacob, his father, understand

the dream of the ladder? Or did his enduring

its mystery make him richer?

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. . .

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Why are you crying? my father asked

in my dream, in which we faced each other,

knees touching, seated in a moving train.

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He had recently died,

and I was wondering if my life would ever begin.

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Looking out the window,

one of us witnessed what kept vanishing,

while the other watched what continually emerged.

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from Behind My Eyes

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