Usually, to tell someone they are a dreamer, is a bit of a criticism. It somehow means that they don’t have their “feet on the ground.” They may be, in the words of the Everly Brothers, “dreamin’ [their] life away.”
In the case of our spiritual guides, it means that they are great visionaries. As The Monkees would say, they are “daydream believers.”
My own dreams aren’t of that calibre and they appear when I am asleep at night. But they sometimes explain the meaning of a concept that I have not yet fully grasped experientially.
That was the case on April 06’13. My centre celebrates the 26th passing of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Among other things, we listen to Talk One of a series of talks entitled How to Manifest Enlightened Society, Boulder, December 26, 1980. Harald Dienes leads the post-talk discussion. He points out a vivid phrase — “glaring light of the Great Eastern Sun” — that Rinpoche used to illustrate the idea that we’d prefer to stay inside our cocoons than come out into open space where we may be exposed.
Listening to my brothers and sisters share opinions and views of this phrase triggers a memory of a dream I had had on April 05.
Dream
I and a friend are standing on a white beach looking out to the water. I am simultaneously standing beside my friend and can see our backs. I say “look at how blue the water is. Look at how yellow the sun is. Look at how red that [don’t remember what the object is] is!” The colours are so vivid.”
Next to that scene (stage left) is the exact same picture – the water, the sun, the white beach and some red object. But the colours are dull, washed out.
Notes
- the colours red, blue, yellow are primary colours = our own primordial wisdom; non-conceptual wisdom; primordial awareness beyond our own projections
- the sun = the mind of basic goodness, complete perfection, arises
- the colours are so vivid = when you actually see a colour, rather than your own concept of the colour, it is vivid, almost in a surreal way
- dull, washed out, pastel = seeing our projections, not the actual objects themselves
- simultaneously standing beside my friend and am also standing behind us so that I can see our backs = there is spaciousness such that I can both be with my friend and get another (wider) view of the situation
- the two scenes placed side-by-side = coemergent quality, that is, both wisdom and confusion arise simultaneously — which one will we pick at any given time?
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