Bigger Than Belief: death, dreams and knowing

Friday 21^st June 2013

On Wednesday night, or early morning, I woke up suddenly and briefly from a short dream.

It was day time, and I was in the modest home of a stranger. I was standing in a very short ‘hallway’ of sorts, and the white door into the next room was ajar. I peered around the edge of the door, and there was a man standing on a chair and placing a noose around his neck. I couldn’t see him clearly and I didn’t move closer, but he was white and possibly middle aged. He looked around, suddenly very still and smiling awkwardly.

“What are you doing?” I said in a schoolteacher tone. We didn’t know each other and yet there was absolutely nothing strange about this.

“Oh, oh,” he said, and pulled the noose back up over his head, smiling and shaking his head slightly from side to side.

 “No, it’s not what it looks like, I’d never do that.” He kept smiling and I smiled too. I said something like “well you better not be” and stood looking at him for a moment. And that was it.

 I woke up feeling agitated. My thread-through silver earrings itched. I pulled them out so fast and hard that one of them landed somewhere near my bed on the ground. I wondered if it meant anything and immediately fell back to sleep.

The following morning, a Thursday in New Zealand, I went to the dairy to get eggs and milk. I stopped and looked at the front page of the paper and shivered all over.  A burglar in Hamilton had broken into someone’s home and ‘bumped into’ the body of a man who had hung himself. The burglar was so traumatized that he rung the police himself. I told the lady in the dairy but she looked at me with an artificial smile that barely concealed her boredom.

Later in my car, driving and talking out loud to my ‘higher power’, I asked about suicide. Many belief systems that originate in organised religion warn against suicide - one idea being that you will only have to deal with all that suffering again in the next life. A reply to this question came quite quickly as a stream of consciousness, perhaps simply the result of some of my own experiences and beliefs thus far. Last night before I went to sleep I tried to write it down. The writing itself wasn’t mind blowing, but I liked the message. This isn’t all of what came to me, but perhaps this portion will be useful to someone:

We don’t want people to suffer. If belief systems prevent people from committing suicide, then that’s good, but we are bigger than belief.

Beliefs shift and change.

Humanity shifts and changes beliefs, and therefore realities and ‘non realities’, possibilities, other realms …

Some beliefs are useful for preventing unnecessary levels of suffering … but as things evolve you find belief itself somewhat irrelevant. The pure presence of ‘I’ that is in All far exceeds anything you can perceive.

I am named, but nameless.

I take form, but am formless.

To feel and know ‘me’ is to awaken. There is less need for belief - there is instead knowing.

Pure knowing

and

this means that what worked in one moment

may not be right in the next

Remember

 Shifting, moving, flowing

Nothing is static

Nothing is solid …

Creativity flows freely

You are

Productive

And enlivened

You are in tune

    And beyond the structures

            Of belief

Structures of belief are useful

For a time …

And so that was the gist of it. I was comforted by these thoughts. I liked that phrase  - ‘bigger than belief’. I also played around with the idea of something also being ‘beyond belief’.

It has now been a month and two days since I got back from Vipassana meditation in Kaukapakapa, Auckland. A month ago today, The Rooster let me know, via a phone call, that he was choosing to be with someone else. This would normally have shattered me for at least six months. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to having someone be unfaithful to me, yet ‘technically speaking’, that wasn’t the case. I had to keep sitting with what ‘really is’ instead of making up all sorts of shit in my mind. So I thought we were getting back together? Boo hoo, life goes on.

For some reason yesterday, an image of him with his menopausal missus flashed into my mind. I saw her in a long leather coat and ‘shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather …’, standing straight while he shivered naked at her feet, his tiny little plait scraped back behind his balding head. He’s crouching and foetal at her feet, peering up her coat, his eyes shiny and hungry for something he hopes to find.

I felt happy. I realised that they probably make a lovely couple, very well suited. The thought of them together brings no envy, but instead, gratitude. Someone said to me “it must feel bad to come in second” and I laughed my arse off.

“Oh I didn’t come in second. I won.”

Perhaps I’ll even be friends with him one day. I doubt it, but hey, stranger things happen. Like a burglar bumping into a lonely corpse in the night.

May you ‘win’ that which brings peace. May your day be filled with moments that are genuine and connected. May your beliefs be useful and up-lifting. May humour brighten the darkness. 

Love Cxxx