The great Christian contemplative Bernadette Roberts once said (I’m paraphrasing) that the goal in the spiritual journey is to find center – such as in the eye of a hurricane – and to attach yourself there (as opposed to the swirling winds).
And if you did that, that the crazy intensity of the hurricane would soon be absorbed into the eye and one day there would be no more eye because there would be no more hurricane. She called this the “no-self condition”, but I imagine others would call it Unity or Non-Duality.
Over the last decade, I’ve had several dreams about finding center.
Can’t say that I’ve found the eye yet but something sure wants me to. LOL! Here are three of them:
- It is a cloudy, still and humid day. Feels like a thunderstorm approaching. I walk out onto a long dock. I am all alone.
A waterspout forms offshore – like a tornado made of water. I have never seen one before and am transfixed. The waterspout moves seductively across the ocean. Back and forth but moving closer and closer to me at the end of the dock. As it approaches, I can’t believe what I see. There is a woman who looks like a Goddess at the center of the waterspout, and she is looking at me. Smiling broadly. I can feel the power and intensity of the swirling waterspout but can’t take my eyes off the Goddess at the center. I am frozen at the end of the dock. The waterspout hits me with great force but then… Silence. Great peace. I and the Goddess are fused at the center of the waterspout, and all is infinitely still. Silence. Stillness. Then the Goddess moves on. Down the beach, the powerful swirling mass of water with the Goddess at the center. She smiles sweetly back at me with a wave and silent communication that we will meet again. - A Goddess is spooning me from behind.
She has long slender white arms with long slender fingers. She is reaching around me and adjusting what looks like a small round radio dial in my belly. I can’t see her face but observe her fingers at work. She seems to be trying very hard to find a very subtle faint station – her long slender fingers moving with grace and subtlety. She finds the very subtle station she was looking for and my body erupts in pure bliss. She briefly loses the station. I am barely breathing. And then she finds the very subtle station again and again my body erupts in bliss. - I am walking the grounds of my old elementary school.
I come to a tetherball pole and begin to punch the ball hard. Harder and harder. Watching the rope whip around the pole tighter and tighter. I was good at this game when I was young. I was good at all games when I was young. Competitive and intense. I played hard and played to win. But it seems like this passion and enthusiasm for sports and competition is waning. Now I feel alone. And sad. A woman appears and tells me to go back to the tetherball court and to look closely for my “purpose”. I look closely and see an intense game going on between two fourth graders. Two boys really pounding the ball. But where is John? The woman tells me to look closer. I look at the faces of both boys and do not recognize myself. Again, the woman tells me to look closer. I still do not see myself anywhere. But just as I am about to give up, I see it. I see myself. I see my face, fused with the tetherball POLE! In the center of the pole. In the center of the game.
