Humanity and the Ground of Being

While in Iowa I dreamed one night that I was to attend lessons with a famous voice teacher. There is more to the dream than I can remember. I entered the room with another singer and her pianist, who was to play for me also. The teacher was a younger man than me; I was already grey haired in the dream. He also wore a swallow tail coat, with tails that were unusually long. I don’t remember anyone singing during the lesson time, but we did talk. He was there as part of a voice symposium being put on by the university. The location seems to have been more or less Atlanta.

Another singer and her pianist came in at the end of the lesson to take their turn. They immediately greeted me like a long lost friend. I couldn’t recognize them, but then realized the pianist was a childhood choir director or mine who had also been an excellent pianist. Later I introduced Ruth to the voice teacher, but stumbled over her name. I felt the fear of confusion in a high pressure moment. I thought I was confusing Ruth with another friend named Ruth, so I began searching for the right name, “Mary” – no, that wasn’t right. She teased me for it, and I said defensively, “Well, I’ve only done this once and you’ve done it a number of times!

There was subway travel in the dream and that seems to indicate to me tunneling back into other realities. A good deal of the dream seemed underground. Recalling it, I realized the two people to whom I assigned names didn’t look at all like the people in actual life. Ruth looked like someone entirely different than who she is and my waking mind finds more similarity with Ruth Singer, though I didn’t think of the person as being Ruth Singer in the dream.

The dream seems like a subconscious attempt to make sense or pattern out of what seems unrelated past events and associations. It seems like an attempt to draw elements of my life together into a meaningful whole. I can see possible echoes of events during the previous day, notably the reading we did before sleep and talking about Elvira’s past events.

Uncertain identities and location seem to indicate an attempt to pull entirely disparate experiences together into something from which the mind can find some sense or pattern. My life can seem like a series of unrelated endeavors on one level. Some of the dream may have come from my talking so much last night about my work in Atlanta and people I knew there, something I haven’t done very much. We are like amoebas swimming in a vast sea of experience, touching first one particle of experience and then another. Our identities are fragile, this perhaps brought up by discussion of bi-polar and multiple personality individuals.

How do we build a strong sense of individuality without a secure sense of past and supporting personalities? Most people have what seems to me to be an unbroken thread of past relationships and associations with a fairly straight forward purpose to their lives. But this is from my perspective and it may not seem so to them. My life seems fragmented with segments ended with broken love relationships, my life centered on singing, teaching and then social work without a strong uniting thread. I try to delve into the past to bring more value into the present.

Again the book we are reading comes into focus. Aila becomes re-identified in each community she visits; she now tries to pull all those experiences together and delve into the ancestral past in her dream in the white cave. She doesn’t know her original identity. She senses from dreams that she has circled back, led by Creb, into a primeval community home. The rock poised to fall for centuries now threatens to entomb them all.

Certainly revitalizing some past relationships may help me pull things together as it did during our recent visit to Atlanta. I can reawaken communication. Writing though is the chief means for me to pull the threads of experience together to draw on their combined power. Living only the day to day experience of mostly work related endeavor and things specific to our home in Great Falls may be only fragmenting without the energy of writing to draw the strands of experience together. Writing is like the stitching that unifies sections of a quilt into a pattern or at least into a whole made of unrelated colors and designs.

Writing causes me to search through the scrap heap in ways and with an intensity I wouldn’t expect. The selection of textures and colors is unplanned and seems to happen almost as though the elements selected themselves. It sometimes seems as though another voice writes through me in that I don’t usually have the synthesis or even the content of what appears on the page before I start writing. Occasionally something will shape itself entirely in my mind and I then have only to write it down. More often though it is a gradual unfolding as it is this morning, with a pattern unfolding as I go. In this case the pattern seems to suggest or even demand itself.

I don’t have a sense of outside voice this morning. The sense of another voice may be an illusion created by a deeper element of my mind speaking through the purely conscious mind to find expression. If so, then the cohesion, or the artistry to make it, is already within me. I want to be aware of the extent to which this connects me to the ground of being and how it may allow the ground of being to have voice through what I write. The possibility of such a thing is there, even if reflected from other spirits on to me. But it then becomes a part of self as our separation from the ground of being is an illusion, or probably so.

To me it is possible and even probable that the ground of being has or had no pre-concept of what it was doing in engendering the limitless variety of creation we might encounter in the universe and that we can certainly encounter on this planet. It seems likely to me that the whole thing was or is more organic than intellectually intentional, more female than male – though certainly not polarized in such a way. While certain principles must work within this unfolding it seems to me that it is humanity alone that gave voice to them. The Ten Commandments and all such things are therefore purely our creation in spoken form, or perhaps more effectively, the expression of all being through us. What they express however is much more simple than the ten specific statements, or others like them, would indicate at first.

The essential thing or message from the ground of being comes from what it is and what it exemplifies not from what it says. Cohesion has to be the guiding principle, enriching everything with energy from everything else. Giving out in a profusion of forms for all situations and not holding back in any instance from exuberant manifestation of all possibilities for living things. What is common for the artist in such creation is love, joy and an exuberant treasuring of the work purely for the wonder of it all. This, I think, is what the ground of being would share – to be filled with wonder and love for all things and by extension to base all our actions on that love and wonder. Jesus comes close to this when he simplifies all the law into one principal: “treat others as you want them to treat you!”

It is at least simple and effective, even though the expressed wonder of creation appears only in a few parables. The Buddha also states is quite simply, though that tradition also develops a myriad of rules to govern conduct, moving away from source connection into pure community regulation. The Tao is also as simple.

All this shows the great teachers had connection with the ground of being and its outpouring of creative energy constantly giving birth to all things. Humankind alone in our experience is responsible for pure destruction. This in itself is a grave warning to avoid our grandiose sense of individuality and superiority in creation and to concentrate instead on our relationship with and through all things and our grounding in the source of all being.