1. I was driving a white inconspicuous car with a male and female passenger in the back seat. I was backing out of a congested parking lot drive way and went into a very deep ditch. The car slowly turned upside down and landed with a loud crash. I was conscious and able to move. I felt terribly responsible for the well being of the passengers. I called out, 'Are you both O.K. ?" The female with some irritation replied, ' I suppose we are." I then realized that my tongue felt strange. It did not want to move correctly when I attempted to talk. For a moment I feared I was injured and may never be able to talk normally again. But then it cleared up and I decided I must be O.K.
2. Two electronic square frames like computer screens were near me. They were side by side and they had the face and shoulders of a male and female respectively. I was in constant need of contact with them for my very life. I kept clicking a 'refresh' button to keep them present on their screens. These pleasant faced 'persons' were a real source of life and assurance to me.
REFLECTION: These dreams are harmonious in that they both emphasize the dual nature and importance of the male-female pair of mutual opposites. These are not ordinary Humans for it shows me feeling extremely responsible to them and also needing them as the source of 'my very life'. I take these as symbolic of the Sacred in my own personal experience. As they are the source of my inner and outer life I am responsible to care for them and it is my job in a sense to 'transport' them further into my own consciousness. I need to 'back them out' of the stale vision of God that is often present in mass society and religions. The culture has 'parked', thus settled into stale worn out conceptions of the Sacred. The Sacred needs to be transported to new and fresh levels of human consciousness. They travel in a white car signifying the Sacred always is pushing to bring light to Humanity and even to Itself. The Sacred is as likely to appear in the 'ordinary' inconspicuous as in the 'flashy'.
There are dangers of both Human and the Sacred falling into the pit and the whole process of enlightenment and of increased consciousness being set back. The Sacred is as dependent upon the Human part of this process as the Human is obviously dependent upon Them. Both the Human and the Divine can get exasperated, as indicated by the female's sarcasm, with each other but it is always a mutual team effort. The communication between the Human and the Sacred can never be adequately accomplished with human words, as my tongue problem indicates, but must be accomplished through the medium of symbol, of which the human dream is the most common source. I think it is safe to say that the Sacred texts of all world religions place a high value on the Human dream and also speak in symbolic language themselves.
The second dream emphasizes the first in this basic 'male-female' symbol of the Sacred. It also stresses that the Human is lost and hopeless without the input of the sacred to bring the human biological, mental and spiritual life. The human knows intuitively that s/he has a responsibility to seek a caring awareness of the Sacred. The dream implies there is a natural human tendency to seek the Sacred.(Not necessarily the Sacred represented in Creed or Institution, but the Sacred within. By this I am not downplaying formal Creed or Church for they each came into being originally from the Living Inner Sacred.) Tillich refers to this as one's natural experience of an 'ultimate concern'. It is the meaning behind the classical argument for God's Reality that is referred to as the "Ontological " Argument(the very idea of God often brings personal conviction of God). Jung confidently reported that the Human is 'naturally religious'. That is why he could say the he 'did not believe, he knew.'
One's growing awareness of the Sacred is a continuous unrelenting process with need to consciously come back to it again and again, thus I keep hitting the refresh button. Such a dynamic, rather than static, disposition toward the Sacred and the religious is the only way to keep the fresh and living source of God, the Collective Unconscious, from drying up and settling into an orthodoxy. Jesus spoke of " Living Waters that gush up to Eternal Life." Orthodoxy is the perennial unhealthy outcome of religion that seeks to seduce the Sacred into becoming a servant to the self interests and the 'desire for certainty' that humans mistakenly lust after. Orthodoxy is always an attempt to capture the Sacred and put it on display. Both dreams imply to me that the advancement of history, personal and collective, both Human and Divine, is fully anchored in the mutual concern, need and effort of both Sacred and Human.
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| The Divine Sacred Couple Is An Ancient Archetype |
The Sacred is just as at home in our human high tech age as it ever was on the shores of Galilee. To think that the history of Humanity and of the Divine are somehow restricted to or finally anchored into any historic event or person is to always fall into a pit of orthodoxy or idolatry. (For example this personal dream of a God Symbol, which lacks the beauty and culture of a long time consciously developed symbol, is not the Christ archetype of God most dominant in Christianity.) Many of followers of Jesus quickly fell into that perennial trap but I’m fully convinced that Jesus, the spiritual healer, teacher and advocate of the oppressed never saw himself that way. Tillich, as a protestant theologian, it seems was only barely able in his last writings to attempt a break from that element of orthodoxy. There are times that orthodoxy with its flaws must prevail, even for centuries or millennia, in order for humans to soak in certain collective experiences and lessons. But such times must always come to an end and new levels of consciousness and experience be embraced. I believe we are deep into such a time now. Jim Hibbett
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