And What Do You Think, Dr. Freud?

So yesterday morning I wrote about a dream I had, in which Ken Wilber appeared. A couple of folks bit the bait and asked either what I thought the dream meant (head), or how it made me feel (heart). So here goes…

For those of you who didn’t read yesterday’s post, the dream involved making a sign to go on the door outside a workshop led by Ken Wilber. We were trying to prevent people from coming in after the presentation began, and disturbing the opening meditation. But when I made the sign, it turned out to have a different message than I thought it would have. The final sign said: “Follow your dream. Do It! But Do Not Enter: Meditation in Progress.”

How did it make me feel: Okay. Not ecstatic or joyous, but neither was it cause for sadness, anger, or anxiety. It’s a “good” okay, more than just a “neutral” okay. I had a sense of peacefulness. But mostly, it was simply a steady-as-she-goes affect that I woke up with yesterday morning. Now having said that, clearly the dream had enough of an impact on me to inspire me to record it in my blog. And perhaps what my “steady” feelings masked was a growing sense (by growing I mean I have been dimly conscious of this for some time now, not just as a result of this dream) that I have some sort of a date with destiny, when I will have to “enter the door” of a new phase in my life — one marked by contemplation and study (Ken Wilber workshop = study; beginning with meditation = contemplation) but where a crucial step to my success will be learning to nurture both of those qualities within me.

Attack it another way: Thanks in large part to the amazing and wonderful spiritual discipline of my wife, I meditate for a half hour nearly all days, and some days for an hour. In addition, driven by my own discipline, I study anywhere from an hour to two hours a day. Read between the lines: I am more self-directed as a student of mysticism than I am as an apprentice.  This is not to say that I resist my meditation practice (although on my worst days I do, but then again, on my worst days I don’t read either), but simply that I don’t have the inner fire for it that I do for study. To put in Hindu jargon, I am more naturally drawn to Jnana Yoga than to Raja Yoga. I believe in the value of Raja (meditation), but just simply default to Jnana (knowledge) as my most “natural” path.

Which leads to an interesting aside: there are four main types of yoga: Jnana (the path of knowledge), Bhakti (the path of devotion), Raja (the path of meditation) and Karma (the path of service). I think of these as the four major spiritual food groups. In other words, I believe an authentic and healthy mysticism ought to incorporate some measure of all four of these disciplines (which points back, ironically enough, to Ken Wilber’s integral theory. But that’s another rabbit hole).

So back to my dream. I’m called to “follow my dream” — literally in this case: to pursue the paths of knowledge and meditation. But what is prevented from entering, when the meditation is in progress? That part of me which is noisy and mindless: i.e., the part that naturally loves to study but naturally does not jump to meditate. It needs to be temporarily kept “outside the door” so that my more vulnerable meditation-self can grow and develop. One very practical way in which this plays out in my life: I have to be careful not to allow my meditation time to devolve into a half hour of discursive thinking about whatever cool ideas I happen to be learning from the books I’m reading at the time. I have to keep those thoughts — you guessed it — outside the door.

Only then can I do it. Only then can I follow my dreams.