February 2, 2022
(I hope you realize that I try not to disparage myself too much for these accounts. As I’ve noted before, they sound pretty corny when I’m writing them down but the experiences themselves are anything but corny. Such is the way with encounters in the symbolic realm.)
I realized this morning that I got part of it wrong yesterday: Originally, when the sheep demon/lost soul found me, it was the human soul who appeared as the sheep. The demon I didn’t encounter again until yesterday and he showed up in the classic way one would expect; i.e., red skin, horns, wings. So, to recap, much of the work of January 31 and February 1 was with the human who was taking himself to be a demon and his demon companion. I took the human soul away and left it under the protection of the old god’s wolves and then went back to the demon, leaving him eventually in the gold and white city, restored to his angelic form.
Today, I found myself back with the wolves in the winter realm where I’d left them guarding the baby sheep. I discovered that while I’d been away, not only had the wolves not devoured him but he’d changed into a human baby lying on a soft, white fleece. I thanked the wolves–who are quite funny because they both don’t seem to have access to what we would call a heart but who are nonetheless capable of kindness in their own way–nuzzling them against the neck and picked up the babe.
Not much time passed before the restored angel from yesterday appeared in the air above us. He appeared much like you would expect an angel to look: Winged, glowing, beautiful. He picked up the baby and held him in his arms. Part of me wondered about what I’ve read in Henry Corbin’s stuff, you know the part where he talks about humans and angels being paired. I thought this was nonsense but this experience made me rethink it. I don’t take the position that all humans have a ‘guardian angel’ but it’s possible that some do.
We weren’t done yet, though. I expected that the angel would depart with the baby, both of them having been restored to goodness. But that’s not what happened. I should preface this with admitting that I find Christianity’s focus on good and evil to be incredibly boring. I just don’t view the world that way. It’s not that I dispute the presence of evil; I dispute the oversimplification. In my experience, I’ve never met anyone who was completely evil. Further, reducing everything to a battle between good and evil perpetuates the primitive split in our souls. Our souls aren’t purely good and probably never were. There has been a fall from grace, perhaps, but it’s not a fall into evil.
Anyway, as the angel and babe prepared to leave, I felt the arising of another being from within me. This one was a being of awesome power and size. It seemed to emanate from within my ‘chest’ in the vision, taking the form of a giant dragon. This dragon was semi-transparent, its scales like thin obsidian shards. The obsidian was clear, black and radiant at the same time. I interpreted this dragon to be a symbol of the eastern concept of yin and yang; i.e., both darkness and lightness combined into one.
The dragon was huge and powerful and arrived with much fanfare but it didn’t attack the angel or babe and neither the angel nor the babe appeared to be afraid of it. When it opened its great jaws wide and flames erupted from within, spewing forth upon the angel and baby, the ‘fire’ was light and dark and transformed them both into beings of lightness and darkness just like the dragon. This felt like the bestowing of a gift, a symbolic healing of the rift between good and evil.
At that moment, I understood the meaning of true neutrality. Neutrality has been arising in my experience a lot lately, particularly when I’m meditating. It shows up as a desire (or lack of desire) to simply be without prejudice or preference. As experience arises, I allow it to simply be experience without doing anything with it. My ‘job’ is simply to sit and allow everything to arise as it does. This is the essence of non-doing. I suppose one term for it is choiceless awareness.
I understood more clearly why the old god, the god of life and death, chose me in my previous life: Life and death, yin and yang, light and dark, good and evil - they are all welcome, all present, all the whole. There is no separation, no preference. There is, however, one big caveat to this: *I* have no preference but the Divine does. It is the Divine who is the sole actor in the universe and ‘it’ makes its preferences known by acting through my three centers. The Divine craves more truth, more closeness, more selflessness, more compassion, more love, more mercy, more…insert the essential quality of your choice. The awakened one sits on the knife’s edge of neutrality, allowing all experience to unfold without preference or prejudice and the Divine acts through them.
I may be taking myself to be more than I by referring to myself as an awakened one but that does feel like I am. Or at least I am one who is awakening. (I don’t think there is ever any endpoint to awakening.)
The dragon’s gift is the possibility of neutrality, the possibility of holding all of experience without preference or prejudice. If one tilts toward good or evil, one is no longer present. In a sense, one is betraying the gift of being human. One of the reasons that humans are such marvelous beings is that we have the capacity to hold all experience, regardless of how good or bad it is. Like I said, good and evil are concepts but neutrality simply is.
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