To Peter on dreams and dragons

[Guest guest]

Peter wrote:

 

....Wow, as I am writing this, I realize She just answered my prayer from

yesterday! I did not know how to help someone who came to me who has an

incredible religion-based guilt complex. He's Protestant too, I

believe. He's been beating the crap out of himself over being sinful and

feeling extremely guilty and angry with God. I tried everything I could

think of to help him, but ran out of ideas. I had to turn it over to

Mother, which I should have done immediately but thought I could do

something myself to help him. I was wrong. Anyway, with this dream, I'm

just now seeing that perhaps Mother may have wanted me to encourage him

to start giving selflessly to others to get out of his own misery! That

would surely help him. Thank you, Mother!...

Dear Peter ~ I can imagine Mother laughing affectionately about your toilet

bowl dream, but it seems a very apt metaphor. So, in India, it is the Lotus

rising from the muck, but the idea and reality are the same. Out of the dross

of our human frailties, something beautiful and pure may grow if we care for

it, water it, weed it, or, in the case of the toilet bowl, clean it.

 

I am a recovering Protestant and Catholic, and it took a long, long, long,

long, long time for me to get the bats (of guilt, sin, badness, evil, etc.) out

of my belfry. When a thought it put into the mind of a child over and over

and over, and reinforced with powerful symbols (such as hell, the devil,

etc.), that child may find it very difficult as (s)he grows up to feel or find

anything good in him/herself. When reading about your friend, it occurred to me

that selfless service may be a concept a bit too foreign to him to start off

with. Maybe it will help, but most of my life I selfless served everyone, and

I still believed I was bad beyond repair.

 

If you went through a process yourself of altering this belief system, it

might be helpful to start with that. You know, like ... "I know how it is to

feel so rotten about yourself; I felt that way about myself for a long time."

"This is what helped me; maybe it will help you too because I don't want to see

you suffering unnecessarily from the grief that this feeling of badness

causes you to have."

 

In my own case, it was a long process. Today at the Art Fair, there was a

woman at a friend's booth, and she had a small dragon. At least she said it was

a dragon. She was selling the eggs. I really wanted to buy some, but with two

dogs and two rowdy kittens, I didn't think it would be good for the eggs.

But I told her my story of coming to terms with my "shadow," which is the part

of ourselves that we, for whatever reason, believe is bad, evil, beyond help

or redemption, etc. I was suffering so much from this deeply engrained belief

that it was almost unbearable. This was before I knew anything about Amma,

but I had read some books on Eastern religion that gave me a sense of hope

because the books made it clear that, in that culture, the basic premise is

that

people are good, and that it gets covered over in various way, but the path

is to reconnect with one's own true self.

 

One day this idea came into my mind ... it was about the dragon. In Western

culture, dragons, like snakes, are BAD, to be killed... Somehow it occurred to

me that I needed to make friends with my "dragon," with that part of me that

I hated. The dragon became the symbol/image for me of all that badness, and

then I decided to make friends with the dragon. The dragon was no longer

frightful, bad, evil, something to fear. No, now the dragon was my buddy ~ he

would carry me places far and wide on his broad back; he would protect me when

I

needed help; and we would sit together and toast marshmallows over his fire

breath.

 

How this simple shift transformed me, I don't know, but it did. I took some

time to get all the bats out of my belfry, but, once I had made friends with

the dragon, I no longer felt I was bad, evil, hateful, etc., etc., etc. To

feel that way is the worst kind of suffering, so anything you can do to help

your friend will be a boon. Just remember, that for someone who is still in the

throes of really believing all this (which I was not), it is very hard to

make the shift. But it can be done, and your friend is very luck to have

someone

like you who cares so much and wants to help.

 

Jai Ma,

Linda

 

"Love and beauty are within you.

Try to express them through your actions

and you will definitely touch the very source of bliss."

~ Amma