The Evangelical Universalist Forum

A dream

Practices Christian Living
#1

Last night I dreamed my little mother was in an old age home. We were in a large dining room. Someone began to sing a chorus and mum joined in. A few held hands and began to do a very wobbly dance. I was worried because my mother is so unsteady on her feet. Then her face suddenly lit up and she craned her neck, gazing at the ceiling. I glanced up too and saw nothing but white paint and plaster. “It’s impossible to take it all in!” she said in rapture.

The scene changed as they do in dreams, and I was holding her as she died. I wasn’t sad, and her old face was beautiful. I thought, “Why could she see beyond the ceiling, but I could not?” I remembered the story of the man born blind, how Jesus restored his sight with a word. And I thought, “Our blindness has nothing to do with sin, neither our sins nor the sins of our forebears. We are all blind for a time so a greater glory can be revealed.”

It was one of those rare golden dreams whose aura follows you into the waking world. Unfortunately, translating direct experience into words inevitably robs the experience of power, but until we are healed and can once again speak mind to mind (we are all deaf and dumb, as well as blind), what else can we do?

#2

That’s beautiful bro :slight_smile: Thanks for sharing :slight_smile:

#3

There was a dream I had once where I was a boy in my old house, and I began going down towards the garage/basement…
It got darker and darker, inside and out, as if the world was ending… outside the garage door on the street there were some rather shady looking people, and I was afraid, and I ran up the stairs towards my room, where it was just as dark, even darker… and my fear was growing… but then suddenly, outside I heard something like children laughing and playing, and then a voice saying tenderly, ‘there is now no condemnation in Christ Jesus…’

And that’s when I woke up.

Pretty cool, huh? :slight_smile:

Matt

#4

Very cool. Golden dreams like this are very rare. Perhaps it’s the sub-conscious having a good day. Perhaps its more than this… Who can say? But I take them very seriously.

In another forum, a poster said, “If you dreamed of flying elephants would you take that as true too?”

I replied:

Here’s Gronk, back in the stone age. In a dream one night, he has an Aha! moment. The fog parts and truth becomes clear. He’s the first and only troglodyte on the planet to realize the earth goes round the sun! Of course he can’t prove it. He can’t get others to experience it. No one else shares his insight, nor do they have the imagination to grasp his claim, or even the inclination to try. He politely suggests they prove him wrong. They point to the sun as it rises in the east. Gronk rolls his eyes, sighing profoundly. A diplomatic misjudgment. Next day, they feed him to the crocodiles.

If a dream feels like an Aha! moment, I judge it to be true until shown it cannot be true.

#5

Hi Alan, this is beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

What else can we do?

That’s a good question.

#6

Trying to put experience into words is a sort of incarnation. A humbling. When I speak or write a word, my thoughts become vibrations in the air, or black marks on white paper. These things are united to me, yet distinct. When God speaks a word, his thoughts become a man. In both cases, much of the glory is left behind.

#7

Yes, God in some way exists as pure unlimited potential. The blank paper waiting for you to capture your thoughts represents unlimited potential. When a word is written, the unlimited potential is reduced, humbled. So it is with God. He spoke out of unlimited potential and His words created an instance and the instance was a reduction, a humbling. So too, Jesus humbled himself, moving from a state of unlimited potential to a specific man living in a specific time and place. Every layer or level of humbling limits the possibilities of what can be. At what level do we now exist? As you have said well, the one where it takes much effort for us to express our thoughts to one another. We must use our senses, eyes, ears, touch, etc., to communicate. Perhaps one day we will shed the confines of this level and no longer be encumbered by its humbling instances. Where we can share mind to mind the unlimited potential that we are now forced to constrain via writing and speaking. I believe one day we will be free.

#8

If the universe is teeming with intelligent creatures who have not fallen into sin, perhaps they can communicate directly, mind to mind, just as I speak to God using only my mind. If so, things like TV, mobile phones and the internet are prosthetic attempts to compensate for our inherent blindness, deafness and dumbness. This would explain why SETI stubbornly fails to find alien radio signals etc. Why would telepathic creatures bother with radios?

(In similar vein, the Book of Jubilees (in the Ethiopian Canon) tells us that animals could speak, before the Fall of Adam. Very Narnian. I’m half-tempted to believe it :slight_smile: )

“On the day you eat of it, you will die.” Suppose that’s actually true, that Adam did die that very day. He was thrown out of Eden (the realm of Life) into the outer world (the realm of Death:thistles, thorns, sweat, pain). In him, we all became prisoners, bound, crippled, blind, deaf and dumb. We are spiritual corpses. Mere wraiths. This universe in which we live isn’t the real world, but a shadowy purgatory in which the dead stumble about, blind etc. If so, we ourselves are living proof of life after death.

#9

Hahaha! Yes, I like it! Life in the dead zone. Perhaps everything about our lives is a compensation, an attempt to live as though the shadows are real. Even our notions of God himself, a total compensation for a reality we are presently unable to comprehend. We characterize God through our blindness and view heaven as a slightly modified version of our dark world. We expect our fallen world paradigms to carry forward largely intact into the next age.

A light shone in the darkness but the darkness did not comprehend it. Instead they carried on constructing their religions in an attempt to rule the shadows. So, we spend much of our lives in fear of things that are not real attempting to avoid futures that will never be.

Eye hath not seen nor ear heard what God has prepared … and we will all love Him.

#10

Just as I am about ready to give up on this forum something truly amazing like this thread comes along and draws me back in.

Wow, just wow! thank you Allan, David and Matt for what you have shared here.

Like you said Allan, it is so isolating and frustrating trying to communicate with words, spoken or written. Sometimes I think I’m losing it, but I imagine a reality where all things are so filled with the life of God that everything is alive, really alive. And it will not matter what the capacity or size of our brains are, even if you are a paramecia with no brain–or even a rock, because all things will have the full share of the life of God freely given and accessible to them. Every aspect of the universe from the subatomic to the galactic will be made alive by the full indwelling presence of YHWH. Everyone and everything (and “things” will no longer be mere things) will know and understand one another profoundly and empathetically. Words will not be needed. All things will be reconciled in one cathartic moment of seeing and knowing one another and then real life begins.

What you said about dreams brings to mind something I have recently become aware of: Quantum Consciousness. This is a theory of consciousness that is not recognized by standard reductionist science which sees consciousness as simply a process generated by the brain which is understood to be a complex computer with switching neurons and neuro-chemicals creating the experience of consciousness. Stuart Hameroff (an anesthesiologist) and Sir Roger Penrose (one of the leading mathematical physicist in the world) have offered an alternative explanation of the basis of consciousness. What they are proposing is that within the neurons are cellular structures called microtubules that through quantum entanglement (this is where two subatomic particles though separated by huge distances instantaneous effect and communicate to one another) is where our consciousness, and especially our subconsciousness is derived.

Even a simple one celled creature, the paramecia, which doesn’t even have one neuron (it does have microtubules) can find food, mate and move towards the light. Why? because it is connected to a vaster, deeper reality that gives it the ability to experience life. So much more so when all of the universe will be filled with resurrection life at the appearing of Jesus the Healer. When the wellspring of life that exist at the very smallest levels of reality rises up to the macro reality of galaxies, stars, planets and living creatures to heal and transform the universe into an unfathomably incredible and wonderful reality. Not God on high above, but God from the foundation of the cosmos coming from the vanishingly small, and least, to fill and bring the creation to its completion.

So when you speak of the Golden dream, this is more than something occurring just in your head (as reductionist science would have us believe) rather it is you brain tapping into a deeper and larger reality. What is now perceived as a dream will at the appearing of Jesus become manifestly real as your mother said, “It’s impossible to take it all in!" That infinite ocean of life giving, creative potential that only wants to give himself away and empty himself into the creation: And all will be filled with the life of the creator and made alive in ways we can barely imagine now.

#11

In some way it must be true that God is the only true consciousness. How could there be another outside or independent of His? We believe that God knows all our thoughts and if this is true then it must follow that our consciousness is some subset of His. For now God knows all our thoughts but we don’t know all of His. Currently our “subset consciousness” has been subjected to futility. It exists in its own tiny sandbox known as me, myself, and I. It knows not of whence it came nor of what it will be when set free from the bonds of futility. Instead, it reasons, mostly in the dark world that exists not in reality but in the confines of its own illusions and selfish obsessions.

But fear not, our dark shadowy world of illusions will be burst wide open to reveal the truth of what has always been - God is one, and the one and only.

“For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.”

“As for me, I will see Your face in righteousness;
I shall be satisfied when I awake in Your likeness.”

When we awaken there will be transparency. We will know as we are fully known. We have inklings of this now, as in Allan’s dream, premonitions, intuition, etc., where by grace we tap into the stream of life outside of our own sandbox. The “down payment” of the Holy Spirit is the promise that we will one day participate fully in the life stream of consciousness.

Retribution will not free us. The dismantling of our sandbox walls will.

#12

Adam’s death in Eden cut us off from the spiritual world. We cannot directly experience another’s mind except by miracle (as with Paul’s vision). We live alone, in quarantine, our minds a vast, dark, silent place. Long hallways, locked doors, curtains drawn, the air foul. But the Lord of All has chosen to live in this very house. He is on his knees, scrubbing the floor.

“In my Father’s house, there are many mansions…” (Hey! It’s bigger on the inside!)

One day, my squalid ruin of a mind will be transformed into a mansion. God himself will take up permanent residence. Can you even begin to imagine what it will be like to have your mind filled, I mean seriously filled, with the glory of the Lord Most High?

#13

If we became dead to God in Eden, we became even deader after Babel.

What were those people thinking, building a tower that reached into heaven? When they finally touched the sky, what then? Did they plan to cut a hole through the firmament and tunnel into God’s world. (Like the Kings of Numenor, were they planning an invasion? Was the tower a seige tower?) If they couldn’t sneak past the dread Angel who guarded Eden’s gates, maybe they could find another way, an easier path that didn’t involve thorns, thistles, and the sweat of the brow…

Or perhaps they planned to shatter the sky, release the “waters above” and drown the whole earth? Some sort of suicide pact? That would show God what they thought of him. That would make a name for themselves!

Whatever their motivation, God confused their language, and we became even more splintered, alienated from one another in flesh as well as in spirit.

But then came the miracle of Pentecost, and for one glorious morning the curse of Babel was lifted. A foretaste of all that’s to come.