The Scene
Some decades ago, in her more immature and salad years, Sally was bent, she tells, on advancing spiritually come hell or high water. At the time she was regularly visiting a well-known spiritual leader in Europe to help speed up her transformation. Several hundred other seekers and devotees were also regularly visiting this leader. They seemed advanced and perhaps they were.
The Context
At breakfast and during long daytime walks in the countryside and at drawn-out evening dinners, conversation revolved around “the light” so many were seeing. They saw this light in a variety of places: around others, in gardens, circling between the trees and the blue skies. Many of them saw the light emanating from the spiritual leader and/or filling the room where we met for blessings in the early evening hours. The light while usually seen by most as white was also seen by some as blue, or purple, or gold.
Her Problem
She listened to these accounts with curiosity and envy. She never saw this “light” and she wanted to badly! She searched for it eagerly, intensely scanning everything from trees to stones to the walls of her bedroom! You see she thought she needed to see it to prove to herself that she was advancing spiritually. After all, everyone else was seeing the light or so they said and she definitely was not.
Her Self-Delusion
So she prayed to see it, begged the Divine to let her see it, and to comfort herself no doubt began to imagine she was seeing at least flickers of it in the sky, in the corners of her bedroom, and here and there. She clearly was not spiritual, she thought, or she would be seeing it as others were seeing it: unmistakably other worldly, revelatory of Divine presence, lifting the self into moments of ecstasy, and bestowing wisdom and joy and insight into heavenly mystery. She was experiencing none of that. But she wasn’t about to give up. She called on the Source of mercy. Surely a person like herself who was obviously not as spiritual as she had hoped could be gifted with seeing the light too. She prayed some more!
The Outcome of Her Delusion
Days went by and it was getting so close to packing and returning home. On one of the very last nights, she lay in bed desolate at her failure to be honored with a visit from the “light.” She complained to the Creator: “Why won’t you let me see it?” Her prayers and tears were genuine. She continued to pray, and the agony of her failure salted her tears as they choked her with misery. She was going home desolate with despair and an utter failure. She wore herself out with worry and finally dropped into asleep.
Sally’s Dream
In the morning she woke up stunned by the clarity and unmistakable “Truth” of a dream she had been given. She was standing, she said, in a room which had a large door to her left. A brilliant pure, creamy, fierce light was pouring in the sides, top, and bottom of the door. And every side of the door was bending under the power of the “Light.” She was entranced by the fierceness of the Light, and yet the soft consistency of it. It was so white. It was blindingly white. She knew immediately and without a shadow of a doubt that if the door collapsed, she would be consumed without a trace. She stared at the intensity and rapture of the light that entranced her while blinding her. She wasn’t afraid, just very, very aware. And the starkness of that awareness jerked her awake.
The Transformative Power of Her Dream
She awoke and lay there forever! The lesson given her glued her to the bed with awe and the stunning realization that her self-delusion about spirituality was well — immense!
Final Outcome
She is eternally grateful for that amazing and blinding “Light” and for the awareness it gave her. The dream that revealed the impossible power and majesty of It made her grow up overnight. She understood that no human can see It in bodily form and live. No human can presume to see Its fullness. The memory of It so seared into her consciousness humbles her over and over and brings her to her knees with gratitude.
Through the gift of a dream, the Pure Source/the Universe had cleared her delusion and awakened her.
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