Everything is dark. All around you the ground is disappearing. The old world is dissolving into oblivion. Fearfully, from the edge of this sinking country, you peer into the gloom. Since I have already crossed over, I can try to help. I take hammer and nails, tools that are reassuringly familiar to you—you know what they are for—and build just the suggestion of a hull. The important quality at this moment is trust.
You crouch in the prow as gently, from the other side, I tug the rope, pulling you across a river that is not a river, but, like the Styx, or Ovid’s Danube, the boundary between the known and the unknown, from the bank of one way of being to another. Slowly I must glide you over, so the transference is smooth. And you arrive here in a realm that looks like more empty darkness, but is in fact alive with possibility. There are none of the old structures here. Here is only a quiet and watchful presence: Love.
If love is what we are standing on, the supporting presence here, then it is the basis for all our actions now. Only what love engenders can appear. As the primary value, only love can arise. Anything unloving is not possible.
Given there are no established pathways, and nothing has been laid out for you to fit into, then how will you move forward?
With the others who are here, we gather in a circle, facing into this so-called darkness. Now you see it is gently gleaming, its surface broken into innumerable fractals, like a ruffled lake.
If love is the universal, with infinite individual expressions, then creation is the act of bringing from within to without, from imagination and feeling into being, which is the way of this new world, and how you will find your path in it.
But for this, you’ll need a bridge—an alliance or connection with that feeling that is the premise here, that shows you are in alignment, that you recognize the rules.
How you build this bridge is to look inside. Look within to your longing. It has the color of the purest good. Allow it to take shape without.
For me, it formed a golden spiral—the spiral built into every one of us, as our DNA. It appeared before me as a shining staircase. It was the golden hue I recognized. I understood I could never live without that color; existence would lose all meaning.
Symbols are the container of the uncontained, structure in the no-structure. The symbol of the spiral DNA staircase showed me how intelligence and spirit come into form, and how they will guide us.
I climbed the radiant staircase and at the top I found my own personal reflecting pool, a fractal of the gleaming surface from where I began. When I looked in, I saw everyone else doing the same through their own fractals, gazing back.
What a sense of community that gave! I realized was not alone, but infinitely related! I never tire of looking. Finding myself reflected back in an infinite variety causes an over-brimming of delight. There is no way you could ever conceive of causing harm to the self that you see is everyone else.
The symbol bridge that emerges from your own longing likewise forms your personal portal to the shared destination, connecting you to the rest of us on this plane-in-common of joy and love.
And now that we are united around the lake, looking in, our presence, attentive and burgeoning with something not yet born, contributes to what happens next: All the separate fractals smooth out into a single satiny skin. It rises in the middle, like a bubble, like an egg emerging, unfurling a curled dragon, which lifts before us, vast and iridescent. Every one of us sees it. It is a shared experience. Wonder and awe take us out of our individual selves into the mystery. Its birth is not colored with any sense of evil or fear—these are things from the old land we would have tried to apply to the vision and our understanding of it. The dragon is the shared expression that the presence here engenders, which is in service of life. It forms as an event not just in separate memories but also in our group lore, the start of a new cultural identity, for our eyes feasted on the same scene.
It’s not that we have any allegiance to the dragon, nor even that it means anything other than what it is. What’s important is how we feel witnessing it and participating together in its arising. Then, above us, as the emergence of an energy with form and consequences, see how the dragon starts to shape the space, not limiting it but giving it some definition.
There is nowhere else to go, since this is not a land; it has no borders.
The old dream is ending. There has always been something larger, and many other dreams,
and now this new dream.
You are invited.
Enter.
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