Helping Evolutionaries Be the Change
[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]
In the face of escalating hatred and violence that is tearing at the seams of our country, many of us are left wondering how to be a peacemaker. How can we counteract the alarming anger and violence without engaging in further attack? How do we unleash the power of peace?
[A revised version of this post can be found on the Huffington Post.]
When I was in seminary I studied dream interpretation with dream expert and author Jeremy Taylor. One of Taylor’s foundational principles in doing dream work is that all dreams come in the interest of health and wholeness.
All dreams, even nightmares — which are bringing information so important to our wholeness that they scare us to get our attention.
With this election cycle, you may feel you are in the midst of a nightmare. Whether you experience it as a frightening curse or as a great blessing depends on whether you are willing to listen to and own the information it brings. So let’s get started doing some dream work, shall we?
On center stage of this nightmare stands the character of Donald Trump, whom you can see as an arch-nemesis, or a supreme spiritual teacher. My guess is you don’t need much help seeing him as the former, so I’ll focus on the latter: Donald Trump as a supreme spiritual teacher.
In dreams, each element or character symbolizes something in your own psyche. This spiritual teacher, Donald Trump, has made an appearance in your dream to show you in blatant terms what ego looks like.
The ego is nothing but a part of your mind that inverts reality, like a lens inverting the light that passes through it so that an object appears upside down. Of course, reality can’t truly be inverted—only your understanding of it can—which means ego is simply an idea you believe in, a lens through which you choose to observe yourself and your world.
Why do I say ego inverts reality? Because it upholds illusions while denying all that is true. The ego believes in separateness and denies oneness. The ego believes in fear and denies love. The ego believes in death and denies the permanence of life. The ego believes in hierarchy and denies the truth of reciprocity.
Thanks to Donald Trump you are able to witness the ego in a caricatured, exaggerated form. You are able to see how the ego seeks attention, how it perceives itself to be greater than everyone else, and how greatness for the ego rests on wealth, fame, influence, and the ability to dominate others.
By depicting the ego in such an unbridled fashion, Donald Trump is giving you the tools you need to detect these same ego tendencies within yourself, even though they might be present within you in subtler forms.
But he doesn’t stop there. Your spiritual teacher is also helping you see where the ego eventually leads: to animosity, division, blame, projection, violence, disregard for others. He is presenting you with a rare opportunity to decide for yourself whether you really want to elect the ego to sit in the Oval Office of your own executive function.
Now here is where Donald Trump’s teaching, blessed be his name, becomes truly sublime, demanding that you really step up to the plate of your own spiritual maturity. He isn’t simply giving you the chance to decide whether you want ego sitting in your own personal Oval Office. He is pushing the envelop so far that he is practically begging you to see through the ego act entirely. Let me explain what I mean by that.
Only the ego attacks, and the only thing it can attack is another ego. In fact, outside of the ego’s inverted, illusory world attack doesn’t even exist. So if you attack your spiritual teacher, who is so graciously showing you what you need to see in yourself, if you respond to him with anger, hatred and blame, you have in fact elected, inaugurated and installed ego in your own Oval Office.
But if you can see through your teacher’s ingenious, theatrical ego-charade and see the divine radiant Being that he truly is, a Being who perhaps for your own benefit has been willing to cloak itself, even to itself, in order to help you awaken, and if you can begin to see that the same divine radiant Being is your own true Self, then you will have learned what this nightmare has come to show you. When that happens, have no doubt, the angels will rejoice.
But let’s zoom out for a moment, because this nightmare isn’t just your personal dream. This is a national nightmare, a global nightmare, a collective dream. So let’s listen to what it is telling us about what we need in order to heal as a nation, and even as a world.
In the world’s dream, the United States is the Donald Trump of nations, and our spiritual teacher is helping us see how we must appear to others—believing we are better than they are, and that our wealth, influence, and military force make us great. Is it any wonder that such bravado would evoke attack from others who are caught up in the ego’s inverted world of hatred, division and violence?
But what might happen if this Donald Trump of nations were to suddenly see through its own ego act? What if it came to realize that this exaggerated ego that likes to call the shots, flex its muscles, and flaunt its wealth isn’t its true nature?
What if it saw that its greatness doesn’t reside in riches or military might, but rather in its capacity to know and express right side-up reality: that we are all on this planet as an interdependent community of equals?
If that were to happen, the world’s dream would change in the twinkling of an eye, and Donald Trump, peace be upon him, would have accomplished his task. How, then, could we be anything but deeply grateful that he has deigned to be among us, helping us open our eyes to what we truly are.
If you liked this article and want more insight into the absurdity of ego and empire, be sure to read my book No One in I Land: A Parable of Awakening, available on Amazon . “A page turner! Intelligent, powerful and surprisingly humorous” ~Amazon Reviewer
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If you’ve landed on this website, chances are you’re a spiritual explorer, as am I. I hope you’ll look around, and if what you find here resonates with you, perhaps we are meant to travel this journey together.
First, let me tell you a little bit about how I landed here, starting with the photo you see here.
That’s me, kneeling in the labyrinth. It was 2010. I was in Denver, staying with my mother who was in hospice. About the time I learned of her cancer diagnosis, I also learned—through a series of dreams, synchronicities and intuitions—that it was time for me to leave my vocation as a pastor. It was time for me to step onto an unknown path.
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In the dream Thunder and Lightening came to introduce me to their daughter Rain. Rain was in her late 20’s, a thin woman, dressed in a knee length tunic made of long torn strips of fabric in muted hues of light blues and greens, exactly the colors, I discovered, of Van Gogh’s painting titled “Rain.” She looked like the colors of the painting, except that this was not Rain falling on a French countryside in 1889. The woman, Rain, had streams of watery soot that ran down the strips of cloth. She looked quite ill. Thunder and Lightening saw that I saw that and they asked me, as only parents of a very sick child can, “Pray for Rain. Please pray for Rain.”
I have been praying for Rain for the last several years. Praying, not that Rain come, not that it rains, but for Rain herself, daughter of Thunder and Lightening. Sometimes I meditate and then when my thoughts are dancing around a little less, I invite Rain into the quiet space. I sit with Rain and listen. Sometimes she speaks, usually she’s quiet. I have sometimes prayed for her soot streaked dress, held out my hands to allow a wave of small kindness to wash through the poison. It was then I discovered that the black rivers weren’t just on the cloth, they had seeped into Rain herself, ran in her blood. This week, I want to make a healing place in my garden for Rain, a place where she is welcome, a spot to rest in, soot streaked and all.
We know, of course, why Rain is ill. The sulfur and nitrogen from our cars, factories, and sources of electrical generation have changed her. Yet Rain, in order to be who she is, must fall. Rain cannot not Rain. This I can tell you from the times I’ve sat with her, she grieves when she falls. She knows she is ill and she does not want to carry the poison in her blood into the trout filled streams or the mountains’ trees or the soil’s loam. She knows, also, that she’s needed.
Praying for Rain is not about results. There’s no “so that” in this prayer. It is, if anything, about taking ourselves out of the mode of efficacy and entering into the place where we are unfettered enough in our thoughts and assumptions and desires to hear what is: the world, whom the Lakota call mitakuye oyasin, “all our relations”; brothers and sisters who fly and swim, who hop and run and crawl; Mother and Father, Earth and Sky; Grandparents, among them, Lightening and Thunder; and, of course, their daughter, Rain.
So we pray for Rain or for Earth or for that particular Cardinal or Finch or Tree outside our window. We pray for them, not as one in charge, but as one of them; a being of sentience, intelligence and beauty. Who knows, we might surprise ourselves. We might discover that it is we who change.
Lawrie Hartt is a dreamer and tender of dreams. She works with those seeking healing and a soul-filled life, listening for what will assist the journey towards balance, beauty and sustainability. She has been a spiritual counselor, retreat and workshop leader for over 25 years. She co-teaches SoulWisdom with Patricia.
