Raymond L. Burton - The Happy Soul

What do you mean “Rabbit Hole”?

May 17, 2006

Journey of self-discovery and purpose of life.

It is a tall order, but one that calls to everyone. Some hear and respond, others seek solace in distractions to drown out the background noise. Like a wound that isn’t treated, the soul will call for attention. It was here first…and it wants out.

August 2/2005

The diamond way. A hand comes out of my chest holding all the fear and darkness contained within me. A swirling light manifests itself out of space and time and surrounds the hand holding the darkness. The swirling light interacts with the dark and turns it into a diamond; a prism to transform all basic elements of darkness to their natural forms of light. What was once fear and blackness returns to my chest as a diamond of light.

AND SO OFF WE GO! This is a recollection of a dream I had while we were in Las Vegas. No, there were no drugs involved, but I’m not claiming normalcy. I just wanted you to know that I am Joe Shmoe. I am as normal or not-normal as you are, and I am on a journey of self-discover to find my and everyone else’s purpose in life. I know that with the thousands of years of truly intelligent people that have come before me, someone must have the answers. We just need to find them again. No doubt this dream was spawned by the fact that I was reading Entering the Diamond Way: Tibetan Buddhism Meets The West.
This just goes to show you that answers come in bits and pieces and you never know where the next step is, or will come from.

While this opened up some interesting concepts for me, I wanted more. Something hands on that I could sink my teeth into. I was hardcore Christian until I joined the army in my early twenties and I knew I didn’t want to cover old territory.

So Shamanism It Is.

Something always seemed appealing about living close to the earth and I always feel peaceful when outside. This led me to think that I would try to understand shamanism. I had an interesting experience one time when I was in a bus stop in Dartmouth Nova Scotia. I was sitting in the bus stop and an older Native lady sat down beside me. She said she was I shaman (cant exactly remember how that one came up). My Christian upbringing automatically screamed “WITCH DOCTOR” but for some reason I didn’t feel any evil what so ever. As I recall what I remember the most is that we talked. We didn’t try to win each other over, we just talked. When she left she said something that has always stuck with me. She said “You are very spiritual for a white man”. Meant something to me anyway.

After the “Diamond Way” I thought I would pick up a book on shamanism and that book was “Secrets of Shamanism” by Jose Stevens. This was my first intro to this stuff, and it seemed interesting, and I learned a few things. One is that if you want to achieve anything, you must be able to specifically state what it is you want in any given circumstance before you can seek out how to attain or achieve it. Another is once you know what you want; you must know what to ask to receive the proper answers or direction.

I thought I was chasing wealth to achieve freedom so that I could find my life’s purpose. Now I feel that once you follow your heart, the money follows soon after word. Go figure.

Some day, if this makes no sense to you now, you will hit the wall. You’ll sit down and go “What now?” At that point you can pull the covers over your head, or jump down the rabbit hole. You can’t find something unless you go and look.

You and I are about to go looking…

Bring a Flashlight, rabbit holes are dark,

Ray Burton

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I looked to my left and saw the massive eye.

I trebled to my core.

I could hear the snorts and sniffs as I quickly ducked to the side of the window hoping I hadn’t been seen.

With each step the massive T-Rex dinosaur made the house vibrate like a massive subwoofer was playing in the distance. Around and around the titan circled. Sniffing, staring, trying to find the one thing that will slake its thirst for flesh.

Like a mouse under the talons of an owl I scurried to close all the drapes, hoping that if only the eye didn’t find me, that I would be safe. That glassy unblinking eye.

I didn’t know where the ancient beast came from, but now the house was full of guests. I think it came with them. They had no fear. The T-Rex dinosaur wasn’t there for them. They seemed oblivious to the fact that the colossus was even there.

******

I woke up from my dream with the feeling that not running from the dinosaur any longer will bring about a circumstance that I need.

I have had this dinosaur dream before, in one form or another. I checked back in my dream dictionary and saw that I actually wrote “don’t run from the dinosaur”. That was about a year ago. I guess from last night, I still have something important to learn.

Here is something I found that was interesting at http://www.jungiantherapy.com/dreamwork.shtml.

If the dinosaur is, as Whitmont and Perera say, a “pre-human energy” that the ego experiences as “‘monstrous’ or archaically primitive,” it may be that this energy is potentially valuable as a compensation for some maladaptive attitude of the ego. This energy is reptilian and prehistoric. That is, it is not from the personal unconscious but from the collective unconscious. It may be that the ego needs not to repress or escape this energy but to engage it and integrate it. This ego immediately assumes that the dinosaur is harmful - that it intends to devour and swallow the ego. It never occurs to this ego to wonder (much less to inquire) whether the dinosaur, as a special variety of instinctual energy, might be helpful - that is, whether the dinosaur might energize the ego instinctually and transform consciousness.

How might the ego engage this energy? With the assistance of a Jungian psychotherapist, the client might employ the method of active imagination and address the dinosaur. The ego might actively engage the image in a dialogue. In such a conversation, the ego would not simply assume that the dinosaur intends to devour and swallow it but would inquire, with curiosity, exactly what the dinosaur does intend. It would pose this question and expect the image to provide an answer. Images that emerge from the unconscious have intentions. The general intention of the image is to contact and impact the ego. A specific image has a particular intention, which is to contact and impact the ego in a distinctive way for a precise purpose - which, from a Jungian perspective, is to compensate some maladaptive attitude of the ego. In this respect, active imagination is a method to ascertain, experientially, just what the particular intention of a specific image is - in this case, what the intention of the dinosaur is - so that the image might then compensate the attitude of the ego and transform consciousness.

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On second though, training could wait. A flashing smile had caught him in his tracks. A tilt of the head and a subtle hair flip had the usually sure-footed Lumen stumbling over himself. It was Venustas that had him in such a mess. She was the physical manifestation of Gods thoughts on beauty. Now instead of tripping over himself he looked like a buck, startled from an afternoon nap. “Good morning Lumen”, sang a melodious song from a heavenly creation. Nothing was the reply, but a sheepish grin and a convulsion of his head he did manage. Forgetting his hand was encased in a chain mail glove, he slapped his forehead as she disappeared around the corner. He didn’t know what he should have done, but he knew THAT wasn’t it.

He loved training but uphill wind sprints in half armor was a bear of a drill. It followed close behind a pushup, squat, jump combo they did as a friendly competition for drinks at the pub after training. Unfortunately if you played hard enough to win, you were usually too busy getting rid of stomach contents to be interested in filling it up with ale.

As intense as the training of a knight was, he loved the total focus and oblivion like trance that such a single pointed activity brought him. No matter what troubled him, Lumen could always attain a peacefully focused state when under extreme exertion. When the energy ran low however, the waking monkey of a mind would return. If only he could be at peace while still. Maybe like training, peaceful stillness was something that needed to be practiced until it could be done as easily as battle. With that thought, Lumen took a break from training and sat in the shade of an old massive oak. He leaned back and let the bark scratch an itch. Wit a couple of shifts back and forth like an old bear, he got comfortable, closed his eyes and the clang of heavy armor faded into the distance.

He sat on the edge of a cloud, his metal shin guards reflecting the beams of sun. As far as he could see, galloping rays of blinding sun jumped from peak to peak, petal to petal of endless apple blossom sky. He looked on in amazement at the surface of a sea above land. In the depths, below the surface of where he sat so much was happening. Up here, when taken in as a whole, it was all but an exhalation of a massive leviathan living in a time much slower than ours

The trees looked as hairs on its back, moving in the ocean currant. The hills and ravines as features of an entity that has experienced time since it started. Looking on this world from such a view brought deeps questions up.

“What is important? If I know what is important to me, what makes me happy, then I can plan to conquer the foes that keep my treasure guarded”. The breeze of a hawks wings swept past and the sensation brought him to waking.

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