Nandi on Another Plane

 

Real magic is the art of bringing gifts from another world into this world. We do this when we go dreaming and when we remember to bring something back. We can also walk the roads of everyday life as conscious or lucid dreamers, learning to recognize how the world is speaking to us in signs and symbols. In night dreams and conscious excursions, we get out there; we go near or far into other orders of reality where the rules of linear time and Newtonian physics do not apply. 

Through synchronicity, powers of the deeper reality come poking and probing through the walls of our consensual hallucinations to bring us awake. Sometimes they work to confirm or encourage us in a certain line of action; sometimes they intercede to knock us back and discourage us from persisting in the worst of our errors. Sometimes in those special moments when the universe gets personal we understand that those who live beyond the veil are simply asserting their presence and letting us known we are not alone in our conscious universe.  

I just pulled from my journals a small episode in which we see a dream spilling into ordinary reality and feel the play of greater forces in both realms. The dream could be tagged as precognitive but there is something going on that is surely more important than merely seeing a future event, which I think goes on in dreams all the time though few of us notice or record these experiences, let alone take advantage of them.  

I did not understand the dream until I was on another plane, quite literally. In the dream I drew a line on a statuette of a bull, near a giant statue of the same bull. I knew in the dream that the bull was Nandi, the bull of Shiva, but on waking I had no idea why it featured in the dream. 

The next day I drove to the airport and started out on trip to Europe. On my second long flight to Paris, my rowmate was a pleasant woman from India. She told me she was traveling to rejoin her family in Bangalore, her home city, because her mother had been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. Our conversation immediately went deep and the space we shared continued to deepen over several hours during that overnight flight. We talked about death, and imagery for healing, and many elements in Hindu religious beliefs and practices. We spoke of Yama, the Hindu death lord, and Ganesha, the opener of doors. Then I said, "Nandi". 

My rowmate smiled with her whole being. She told me there is a temple of Nandi in Bangalore , with a giant bull statue carved from granite. She added that she keeps a miniature statue of Nandi close and regards him as another important protector and gatekeeper. We discussed some specific pujas (offerings) her family might now make to call on support from the greater powers according to their traditions. 

The woman from Bangalore said, "Are you sure you weren't born in India? I feel you are here tonight to remind me of some of the deepest beliefs and practices of my own tradition about how to approach death and the sacred." 

It was one of those moments when you feel the nearness of the Otherworld; that the sacred and the profane are forever at play together, that the realms of mortals and the Shining Ones are, as they say in Ireland, fighte fuaight, "woven into and through each other". I was asked in a recent interview, "How can we know more of the Otherworld?" I responded, "Start by recognizing that you are already inside it."