Impossible Dreams

So I finally upgraded. All exited, I go to get creative with my blog, but alas I can't get anything to function. Just plain ineptitude, ignorance or what? Eventually I had to concede to defeat and send off a help note. There are times in one's life that one has to concede to defeat. Lay down the arms, withdraw to regroup yourself, take stock of your losses and see how to go forward. With dreams it is the same, when do you decide that your cherished dream is an impossible dream? Yet to give up on our dreams also means to give up on life.

"On one hand, dreams are clearly a necessary ingredient for our mental and emotional well-being. 'A life based upon a dream has a special vital quality,' Daniel Levinson (The Seasons of a man's Life) writes. 'Any other is at best a compromise and at worst defeat.' Without a dream we loose our hope and drive, and sometimes even our health - not a good state in which to pursue a contemplative practise. ' does any man doubt,' asks Francis Bacon, 'that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations and the like, but that it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things?'

At the same time, our dreams can also disappoint and torment us…What is necessary to realise - and this is the key - is that we cannot drop our dreams at will. Even if it were possible to do this - and, try as we might, it is not - shedding hopes and attachments prematurely can be a blunting experience in our spiritual growth, and even an emotionally dangerous one. It's not in the long run that we must give our dreams up; it's that at a certain point on the spiritual journey our dreams give us up…This change comes about in its own time, as part of a process. It grows on its own. We need only to plant the seed, and keep it nourished with the water of hope, contemplation, and struggle. Until someday it blooms spontaneously like a plant in a well pruned garden." Harry R. Moody & David Carroll

I think that Anais Nin reached this point in her life when she wrote the following beautiful passage: "Having gathered together the fevers, the conquests, the passions, having pulled in the sails of my ever wandering ships of dreams, having garnered, collected, called back from the Tibetan desert my ever roaming soul, having rescued my spirit from the webs of the past, from stranglehold of responsibility for the lives of others, having cured myself of the drugs of romanticism, surrendered the impossible dreams and called back an exhausted Don Quixote, I close the window, and the door… The body and soul rests in their moorings, the anchor is no longer dragged against its will through an uprooted life which must learn both to keep afloat and to stay moored without pulling unreasonably at the forces of gravity which keep it from shipwreck. Sancho Panza, the diary, grows fat and well-nourished, but Quixote cannot alone carry out its vision of a perfect and human world. For the first time I have conquered restlessness, my imaginations does not wonder to all the far places and towards all the far strangers, questing, expecting what? For the first time my body and soul are together…I can bear to listen to music, it is not an provocation to more adventures, a pursuit of ghosts, a tracking down of mirages, an embracing of the void. This is no mere interlude to an unceasing hunger and curiosity but a possession of the present and the near I have neglected, and now for the first time I appreciate the haven, the repose, the softly closed window and the door which say; " Everything is here, in the present, on earth." Let distant ecstasies and imaginings no longer lure me on."

Life is full of ironies, she could not have reached that point of peace without pursuing her dreams and hunger. Each of us experience life differently , yet each of us are born with a dream, that drives us. What seems to be the death of a dream is often just a pause, a quiet moment in the storm, for our deeper dream to reveal itself. Life is a mystery and only by living it to the best of our abilities will come to realise fragments of our own mysteries. A pause to go ever deeper into the meaning of life. When do you give up on your dreams, you don't.

There was once a magician of great standing and reverence, who called his apprentice, who had completed his apprenticeship. "My son, you are now schooled in the High Art. I welcome you into our fellowship." The apprentice glowed with pride. "You now think you know everything and have learnt all you can...But you will know, in time, that you had to learn everything to know that it is all of no use. The Divine joke is that many years of magical training are finally discovered to be quite irrelevant. But this truth is only gained by experience, and not through discussion or mere play of words.

tags: magic  dreams  spiritual