When I was 24 years old, I joined a friend's business. Several months into the arrangement, things were not what they looked like from the outside. Or at least, it seemed that way from my perspective.
You see, John was a great salesman. Not slimy — no, not at all. Talented. Charismatic. He sold me on his company's vision, and then the details didn't quite match up with what was promised.
I assumed our dilemma was miscommunication at first. But then the moonlight shifted and it all began to look malicious from where I was standing. I'd ask John a question, and the words that would tumble out of his mouth were precisely what I needed to hear to make me think the worst of him.
It ended with us both furious at each other. I was so angry, upset, and hurt. I tried to be rational about it and see it from John's perspective, but nothing was adding up. I was young and insecure, and still trying to figure out what healthy boundaries were and how to enforce them.
I also had no concept of my own value, which is fairly common amongst women. On a completely separate side note, let me explain why that might be the case:
Our economy is a symbolic reflection of what we collectively value, and it's no coincidence that society rewards archetypically masculine skills while insisting feminine skills — those involving care, love, nurturing, fluid creativity — must come cheaply. Women observe hyper-competitive male Wall Street brokers and consumeristic businesses making a fortune. They also observe gentle social workers and primary school teachers making a pittance.
Every day, we watch our kind sisters get pinned against an economic wall and raped by the loud, competitive, dominant alphas. And once the masculine system has had its way with them, these women quietly get back up and care for the children, the sick, the poor, and the elderly — because grace and nurturing is Who They Are. To quote God again: "You have been told about the survival of the fittest and the victory of the strongest and the success of the cleverest. Precious little is said about the glory of the most loving."
From a lifetime of this programming, women subconsciously learn that society doesn't value the feminine polarity. Imagine if the brain consistently told the heart that its unique skillset was worthless, but the heart kept beating anyway for minimum wage because it was a heart, not a brain. Heck, I'm 30 years old and I'm still trying to figure out how to alchemize my fluid creativity and altruistic tendencies into solid financial security.
It's a neurosis I've fought all through my twenties: the belief that people don't value true zero-to-one artists in this world. You either dumb yourself down into an incremental one-to-n thinker who can solve well-defined short-term "material" problems to pay the bills, or society will let you starve while throwing rocks in your direction for being such a useless dropkick and "dreamer" who adds no value to the economy.
Venture capital is supposed to correct for this issue. But a 23-year-old with a failed fashion startup and no background in physics does not simply walk up to an investor and request funding to "reverse-engineer the universe" by herself, using fluid intuition, on a nebulous timeframe, thereby disrupting the industry of "God" for the collective good of humanity.
Case in point: this is my life's work — the result of over seven years of blood, sweat, tears, being misunderstood, ridiculed, underestimated, and investing every penny I've earned — and I'm giving it to you for free; not because it's what humanity wants, but because it's what humanity needs. If I starve in the process of producing it, then so be it. At least I'll end up with thighs like a baby giraffe. And, according to society's neuroses, a female can always derive some distorted sense of dignity and self-worth from that.
As my male best friend likes to say: "Nikki, you already have a monetizable asset: boobs. Worst case scenario, just sign up for OnlyFans and become an intellectual whore. Society might not value the unseen intricacies of your mind just yet, but they'll pay you by the minute to wear lace lingerie and fake glasses, and talk about recursive algorithms in a sultry voice while they all jerk off. So you do what you need to do for the greater good. You go ahead and mother the world while the world fucks you. We're all counting on your selfless service."
Anyway, back to my story...
The situation with John did not turn out well. I felt bullied. I don't like being bullied. I wasn't the weak little girl I was in school. I had grown.
Or at least, I thought I had. I pushed back, and so did he — both as stubborn as each other, both unwilling to shift our model of reality as we made the problem worse.
So I left in a fit of fury, yelling "fuck you" in my head. It wasn't my finest moment, or my proudest, or my wisest. I'm embarrassed to even admit it out loud.
It wasn't a coincidence that I seldom went to the doctors, except during the six months after John and I parted ways. As soon as the situation turned sour, I somehow found myself in the GP's office over and over and over again with a stubborn, recurring infection. Anger was poisoning my body, and my internal pain manifested as physical agony.
I tried several courses of antibiotics. The infection would briefly subside after each round, only to return a week later. I lived in constant fear that the pain would arise at any moment. Sometimes it was so bad that I'd just lie in bed and cry until the medicine started working. If nothing else, it made me appreciate what it felt like to have a healthy body — something I'd taken for granted my whole life.
I still hadn't bumped into John at this point in the story. Not once in six months. It's a small world, and I avoided places and events where I knew he'd be. I feel emotions very deeply, and every time I thought about what happened, all of the anger and hurt would begin surging through my body again.
Only now, it was tinged with guilt and shame. As time went by, I realized John hadn't been malicious — I'd been blind, and so had he. In retrospect, the situation was an optical illusion. The Moon card in the Tarot represents this lesson.
One night, about six months after our dispute, John appeared in my dream. I walked straight up to him, looked him in the eye, and said, "I'm sorry. I was wrong, and I'm sorry." The moment I forgave him, and forgave myself, I felt lighter.
I woke up.
I crawled out of bed.
I commuted to my co-working space, still thinking about the dream.
You see, my dreams sometimes have a habit of leaking out into physical reality. The prophetic ones usually involve emotionally jarring events: being 11 years old, eating lunch, having a sudden, overwhelming vision of my father breaking his leg — only to find out that evening that my father did, in fact, break his leg that afternoon. Or having a strange dream involving my grandmother's cat standing on a table, staring at me and miaowing for help while her face burned and crumbled into black embers. The next day I went out to lunch with my mother and told her about the strange dream. She said, "I didn't tell you why I'm in town for the day. I have to take your grandmother's cat to the vet to be put down. She has cancer on her nose and it's spreading up her face. It's time to say goodbye." My grandmother was devastated.
As it turns out, the dream with John had a particular energetic texture to it — a texture I was familiar with. When I get a textured vision that plays in my head over and over again, it tends to mean something.
Anyway...
That afternoon, in physical reality, I was sitting in the common area of my co-working space, eating lunch. And suddenly, there he was: John. He was talking to his friend by the barbeque. I hadn't seen this man in six months, and then he just happened to show up on the day of my eerie dream.
I immediately recalled a passage from The Holographic Universe...
Although Ullman believes such findings are evidence of the underlying state of interconnectedness Bohm is talking about, he feels that an even more profound example of holographic wholeness can be found in another aspect of dreaming. That is the ability of our dreaming selves often to be far wiser than we ourselves are in our waking state. For instance, Ullman says that in his psychoanalytic practice he could have a patient who seemed completely unenlightened when he was awake — mean, selfish, arrogant, exploitative, and manipulative; a person who had fragmented and dehumanized all of his interpersonal relationships. But no matter how spiritually blind a person may be, or unwilling to recognize his or her own shortcomings, dreams invariably depict their failings honestly and contain metaphors that seem designed to prod him or her gently into a state of greater self-awareness.
Moreover, such dreams were not one-time occurrences. During the course of his practice Ullman noticed that when one of his patients failed to recognize or accept some truth about himself, that truth would surface again and again in his dreams, in different metaphorical guises and linked with different related experiences from his past, but always in an apparent attempt to offer him new opportunities to come to terms with the truth.
In that instant, I knew what I had to do.
I stood up and walked over to John.
"Can I have a word?" I asked.
He looked at me apprehensively. Or was it disgust? Hate? I don't know.
"Sure," he said. His friend returned to the barbecue to get another sausage.
I looked John straight in the eye, just like in my dream. "I'm sorry," I said. "I was wrong, and I'm sorry."
He looked surprised. He didn't return the apology or anything. I guess that would have been nice for my ego. I thought we were both wrong, both blind.
But I didn't apologize for him. I apologized for me. And in the moment of that decision, the ball of anger melted in my mind. The infection that had plagued me for six months completely disappeared from my body and never returned.
The voice of a Sufi mystic whispered in my ear. "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about."
Why don’t You fix the world, instead of allowing it to go to hell?
Why don’t you?
I don’t have the power.
Nonsense. You’ve the power and the ability right now to end world hunger this minute, to cure diseases this instant. What if I told you your own medical profession holds back cures, refuses to approve alternative medicines and procedures because they threaten the very structure of the “healing” profession? What if I told you that the governments of the world do not want to end world hunger? Would you believe me?
I’d have a hard time with that. I know that’s the populist view, but I can’t believe it’s actually true. No doctor wants to deny a cure. No countryman wants to see his people die.
No individual doctor, that’s true. No particular countryman, that’s right. But doctoring and politicking have become institutionalized, and it’s the institutions that fight these things, sometimes very subtly, sometimes even unwittingly, but inevitably… because to those institutions it’s a matter of survival.
And so, to give you just one very simple and obvious example, doctors in the West deny the healing efficacies of doctors in the East because to accept them, to admit that certain alternate modalities might just provide some healing, would be to tear at the very fabric of the institution as it has structured itself.
This is not malevolent, yet it is insidious. The profession doesn’t do this because it is evil. It does it because it is scared.
All attack is a call for help.
"Time" is not a continuum. It is an element of relativity that exists vertically, not horizontally.
Don't think of it as a "left to right" thing — a so-called time line that runs from birth to death for each individual, and from some finite point to some finite point for the universe.
"Time" is an "up and down" thing! Think of it as a spindle, representing the Eternal Moment of Now.
Now picture leafs of paper on the spindle, one atop the other. These are the elements of time. Each element separate and distinct, yet each existing simultaneously with the other. All the paper on the spindle at once! As much as there will ever be — as much as there ever was...
Excuse me, but I have to interrupt you again here. What about the person who is sick, but has the faith that will move mountains — and so thinks, says, and believes he’s going to get better… only to die six weeks later. How does that square with all this positive thinking, affirmative action stuff?
[...] The person who has the “faith to move mountains,” and dies six weeks later, has moved mountains for six weeks. That may have been enough for him. He may have decided, on the last hour of the last day, “Okay, I’ve had enough. I’m ready to go on now to another adventure.” You may not have known of that decision, because he may not have told you. The truth is, he may have made that decision quite a bit earlier — days, weeks earlier — and not have told you; not have told anyone.
You have created a society in which it is very not okay to want to die — very not okay to be very okay with death. Because you don’t want to die, you can’t imagine anyone wanting to die — no matter what their circumstances or condition.
But there are many situations in which death is preferable to life — which I know you can imagine if you think about it for even a little bit. Yet, these truths don’t occur to you — they are not that self-evident — when you are looking in the face of someone else who is choosing to die. And the dying person knows this. She can feel the level of acceptance in the room regarding her decision. [...]
The entire medical profession is trained to keep people alive, rather than keeping people comfortable so that they can die with dignity. You see, to a doctor or a nurse, death is failure. To a friend or relative, death is disaster. Only to the soul is death a relief — a release. The greatest gift you can give the dying is to let them die in peace — not thinking that they must “hang on,” or continue to suffer, or worry about you at this most crucial passage in their life.
So this is very often what has happened in the case of the man who says he’s going to live, believes he’s going to live, even prays to live: that at the soul level, he has “changed his mind.” It is time now to drop the body to free the soul for other pursuits. When the soul makes this decision, nothing the body does can change it. Nothing the mind thinks can alter it. It is at the moment of death that we learn who, in the body-mind-soul triumvirate, is running things.
All your life you think you are your body. Some of the time you think you are your mind. It is at the time of your death that you find out Who You Really Are.
My horse died when I was seventeen. It was like losing a member of our family. Anyone who has had a pet will understand the bond I'm talking about.
He was my world; my childhood best friend. I used to make him cakes out of carrots, iced with molasses for his birthday, and decorated with chaff for sprinkles. I'd sit in his paddock and read him books when the weather was nice. And when a storm was raging, and the lightning was flashing, and the thunder was roaring, I'd sneak out in the night and ride my bike to his paddock just to comfort him. I'd find him in his little shelter, terrified. But he'd nuzzle my shoulder, and I'd give him a hug, and we'd both know that everything was going to be okay.
That's the thing about pets — they see you for Who You Really Are. No illusions. No polish. It's like they see right through you. They see the Truth of things.
And to see someone with such clarity? Unimpeded by your own insecurities and ideas of right and wrong? That was love if ever I felt it.
He was always kind to me. He was always around. He was always up for a little adventure: a picnic, a trail ride, a game of horseball played with broomsticks and beachballs; a round of jousting played with pool noodles; a quiet afternoon plaiting daisies in his mane.
And then I thought about his dead body lying in the ground, eyes lifeless. Gone. Entropy gently ripping his flesh to pieces; bacteria feasting on the adorable lip that used to quiver with delight when I scratched his wither in just the right place.
I believed the materialist lie, and it was agony. My mother took me out of boarding school for a few weeks when it happened. I couldn't function. The head boarding mistress told me to stop crying, "get over it," and go back to class — as if the depth of love I felt for this creature was a nuisance; as if expressing anything human in this robotic world were off-limits.
That's The System our society has built — a system that actively belittles and represses emotion, but has no problem letting that emotion explode in a flurry of fists when a man beats his wife to a pulp behind closed doors. God forbid our short-sighted education system teaches (and values) a "feminine" skill like emotional intelligence.
Nothing is painful in and of itself. Pain is a result of wrong thought. It is an error in thinking.
A Master can disappear the most grievous pain. In this way, the Master heals.
Pain results from a judgment you have made about a thing. Remove the judgment and the pain disappears.
Judgment is often based upon previous experience. Your idea about a thing derives from a prior idea about that thing. Your prior idea results from a still prior idea — and that idea from another, and so forth, like building blocks, until you get all the way back in the hall of mirrors to what I call first thought.
All thought is creative, and no thought is more powerful than original thought. That is why this is sometimes also called original sin. Original sin is when your first thought about a thing is in error. That error is compounded many times over when you have a second or third thought about a thing. It is the job of the Holy Spirit to inspire you to new understandings, which can free you from your mistakes.