I have a dream | A song to sing… When we were young, we had dreams, and perhaps unrealistic ideas about how to fulfil our dreams. Whether we have learned to live our dreams or not, they continue to inspire our choices and decisions in some way. When we become older and look back on our life’s journey, we might see that our feet have been drawing a map over the years: choices, influences, patterns revealing the basic character-structure, the seed of the personality.
“Schopenhauer points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.
“[This] idea appears in India in the mythic image of the Net of Indra, a net of gems, where at every crossing of one thread over another there is a gem reflecting all the other reflective gems. Everything arises in mutual relation to everything else…as though there were a single intention behind it all… Each incarnation… has a potentiality, and the mission of life is to live that potentiality. How do you do it? My answer is, ‘Follow your bliss.’” (Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth: read more at alexincyde.blogspot)
The sea, as the unconscious, is such a complex web of life, wild and wonderful, and every plant and animal and microbe, every droplet and grain of sand, all are the gems, organically or inorganically alive, and dreaming themselves and dreaming us, the mystery. We, too, are vital links in this web, pulsating stars. Trusting in it may enable each of us to live our own unique story, to shine our own living dream.
