Thursday, September 30, 2010

The path of blue lotus petals


We don’t need to wait for death to remember what the soul knows: how and why we came into our present bodies, and where we will go when we leave them. Dreaming, we remember. We dream, perhaps, of death as a wedding, a cause for celebration as we move towards union with the beloved of the soul. I have dreamed of birth as a funeral.

I hear the high, keening voices of the mourners achingly beautiful. I have never heard music so lovely on Earth; I have heard its melancholy matched only in a fado café on an old cobbled street in Lisbon. As I hear the voices, I see again the path of blue lotus petals. I suffer again the knife of regret as I share the last passionate embraces of those I must leave behind. I feel naked and cold when my garment is gently removed from me, leaving me skinless and fluid, glowing softly like a wandering light over the waveless sea. I look back and see a lion robe, lined with a sky full of stars.

I pass before the High Ones, on their high thrones. They approve the choice I have made, and its price. They counsel me with sweet sternness not to drink too deep from the cup of forgetfulness on this side or the other. They bring forth the envoy who will track me, and will speak to me in my dreams, to help me not to lose my memory and purpose in the miasma of the Earth plane.

She escorts me to the Pivot of the Worlds. I enter the portal and descend, quick as thought, to a place on Luna I have used many times before. The Moon priest greets me with his archaic smile, unreadable in that pale, moon-round face. There are armed guards everywhere, with the heads of jackals and the muscled bodies of armored baboons. It seems conditions have deteriorated since my last visit. Luna has always been a mixed environment, a place of illusion and swirling cross-currents. It has now become an active theatre in the contest between rival forces contending for the soul of the Earth.

The Moon priest helps me into my body suit. Part of me recoils from this limiting, this confinement to such a primitive form, with only one organ of generation. Yet this body suit is flexible and moves with my thoughts. If I want to be a lion, it will take lion form. If I want to sprout wings or extra limbs or suckers, it can do that. It pulls back into its default mode – that of a biped that cannot eat and talk safely at the same time – when my attention wavers. But this confinement is nothing to what it will be to take on a body of flesh and bones in the world below.

I relax for a while in the pool on the high terrace. I look up at the blue-white star, high above in the sky. It is eons since the experiment on Earth began, and it is constantly imperiled. We keep coming, because we helped to begin the game and must play until the final round.

I wonder how much of this I will be able to remember this time, in an Earth body. I swim down to the bottom of the pool. The water streams faster and faster, sucking me into a funnel. I am on my way.

Adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead (Destiny Books)

4 comments:

Savannah said...

This is exquisitely beautiful Robert, and just the message of which I needed to be reminded today. Thank you!

Robert Moss said...

Thanks so much, Savannah. Beautiful blue dreams to you.

Patricia said...

I knew I would find a story from you to help me work with this:
I'm driving home from work in blue tennis shoes, deep blue scrubs and a light blue top. I'm realizing that I can't remember a year in 25 years where I have not been working with a child who has traveled into death and back. Then I image my blue infant body not breathing and I feel it would be good to do re entry work and offer a feeling/sensation story and/or poem and an image or amulet or painting to this infant body of me. Something tells me it will help with some transition back. I hear, "Ah she collects blue", but don't really know if that's about the infant self or me now? Then I see in the days dream, vulture to the left of me. Rocking back and forth with ease as it stills in the current. Then a ways down the road I see heron flying SE flapping her wings and think I will search for a Robert story to help me with this. The day before I watched heron magnificently dart into the water. I failed to see her come back out because I had to turn and call my dog. But ran and found her in the marsh, standing as still as if she had done nothing so "dartingly magnificent".
Anyway if I can bring in soothing seamless images and sensations to this infant me, perhaps it will help my work with children. I feel steady enough now to work with emotions with this "time of me".

HUG to You Robert
Patty

Robert Moss said...

Patricia - Ah, the heron offers such teachings. Did you read my recent post at my other blog on Heron Signs? Here's the link - http://blog.beliefnet.com/dreamgates/2010/09/heron-signs.html

Hugs right back to you.