When a door is closed, look for one that is opening

 

In a difficult passage in my life, I was hell-bent on pursuing a certain project that I calculated would pay my bills and give me some room for creative expression. But every time I tried to push forward, I found myself blocked. Something inside me resisted my ambitions, and the world seemed to rebuff me at every turning.

Despondent, I sat down and tried to make sense of my situation.
    Suddenly, I had a clear vision of myself from a witness perspective.
    I saw myself beating on a heavy wooden door, studded with metal, banging my fists until my knuckles were raw and bloody. I saw myself pausing to take a few rasping breaths, seemingly exhausted, before pounding again on the door that would not open.
    Okay, that's how it is. Like many night dreams, my spontaneous vision was holding up a magic mirror to my actions and attitudes. Was that all?
    I felt a prickling sensation at the back of my neck. I found myself drawn from my observer position into the scene, which was more alive to me now than the family room where I was sitting. My second self was still beating his fists uselessly on the unyielding door. But the prickling sensation was guiding me to turn around and look at something invisible to him. I turned to my right, and saw an elegant, mysterious figure beckoning me with a crooked finger. There was a Trickster quality about him. He was standing in a beautiful archway. Behind him a winding path led up a slope among flowering trees into a landscape of beauty and abundance. I felt that everything I was seeking in life was through that arch.
    The Gatekeeper waited for me to grasp what he was showing me.
    My vision and understanding were still far from complete.
    If all this bright promise was waiting for me, through an open door, what was I doing beating myself bloody at the door that would not yield?
 

I turned to study again the situation of the Robert who was beating on the door. I discovered two things. While with one hand the Gatekeeper was beckoning me through the open gate of possibility, with his other hand he was holding that heavy, metal-studded door shut. The real shocker was that I could now see what was behind the door I had been desperate to open. The space behind it looked like a jail cell. I had been exhausting myself in an effort to put myself in a place of confinement.
    This powerful vision led me to make some radical life choices. I abandoned the project on which I had been working for months. Little by little, I found myself on the path between the flowering trees, in a world of ever-burgeoning creative possibility.
    The vision helped me to gain clarity on some rules for conscious living that work for me:

1. When one door closes, or won't open, look for the door that opens onto better things.

2. Before you push too hard, check whether you are at the right door.

3. Recognize that there is a Gatekeeper in life who opens and closes doors, and be ready to honor him (or her) and pay the price of entry, which may simply be a clear eye and an open heart.

Oh, there are a couple more. 

4. As long as you stand in your own way, you will find the world stands in your way.

5. The obstacle is the way.


#4 is borrowed from Henry David Thoreau: "As long as man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way."

#5 is borrowed from the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius

Drawing: "The Door That Won't Open" by Robert Moss

What Is In Your Way May Be Your Way

The Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius did not live the life of an armchair philosopher and was not fortunate in the character of his family or the state of his beleaguered empire.  Nonetheless, in the midst of the fray, writing to establish and maintain a witness perspective on the broiling events around him, he formulated two principles in his Meditations that seem to me to be essential rules of life. The first is that our lives are dyed in the colors of our imaginations.

The second (in the excellent recent translation by Gregory Hays) goes like this: "Our actions may be impeded...but there can be no impeding our intentions or their dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its purposes the obstacle to our acting.” In summary: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." [1]

What a magnificent invitation to upend our reflexive response to adversity and seek the opportunity in the obstacle and the gift in the challenge!

It’s not about telling yourself that it’s all good. It’s about making it good.

The obstacle in itself is less important than how we see it and respond to it. We have the power to choose our attitude and adjust our perception. Epictetus, another Stoic philosopher at the other end of the social spectrum from the emperor (as a former slave), counseled that when presented with an obstacle we need t step back and take a cool hard look: “Don’t let the force of an impression when it first hits you knock you off your feet. Say to it: Hold on for a moment, let me see who you are and what you represent. Let me put you to the test.”

This may not be easy in storm of grief or rage or bitter disappointment that come in the face of a letdown, a wound, a loss, a shaming or betrayal. We may have struggle to rise to a witness perspective and see the larger picture. This gets easier when we adopt the practice of looking back on our lives to see if something good came out of a bad situation. 

The blocks we encounter on our roads - whether they are in ourselves, in our circumstances, or both - may be teachers and helpers, as well as part of life's cycles. A block can drive us to discover a new direction, spur us to develop new skills and courage and stamina, or lead us to look again at what really matters in life. We may find that obstacles we encounter on our life paths can save us from compounding mistakes, make us take a longer view of our issues - and encourage us to shift direction and notice better options.

We may even come to recognize that there is a hidden hand that places some of these obstacles in our way. If we can make the necessary attitude adjustments, we may find, like Marcus Aurelius, that what stands in the way becomes the way. 

Sometimes the speed bumps we encounter on the roads of life are just a sign to slow down. Sometimes they look like solid brick walls, or mountains set in our way. Sometimes we feel we have come to a door that won't open however hard we pound, or however many keys we try.

I once had exactly that sense, of coming to a door in my life that would not open. I believed that everything I most wanted lay behind that door. But I simply could not get through. Frustrated, exhausted by trying, I slumped into an easy chair one afternoon and suddenly had a spontaneous vision of my situation. I saw myself beating until my knuckles were bloody on a great oak door banded with iron. Yep, that's how it was. 

A little movie clip began to unfold in my consciousness. It was the kind of dream movie where you are not only the observer but can step right into the action. Slipping into the situation of my second self I felt a kind of prickling at the back of my neck. I turned - now fully inside the vision - to see an elegant but Trickster-ish figure beckoning to me from some distance to my right. He was standing in the middle of an archway. Behind him was a scene of great beauty, with a lovely house on a hill above orchards heavy with fruit and flowering trees in full blossom. I knew, in that instant, that everything I was seeking lay through this archway. 

As I moved towards it, and then through it, I turned to try to understand the whole story. I noticed two things. While with one hand, the Gatekeeper was beckoning me towards the archway of opportunity, with the other hand he had been holding the door that refused me firmly shut. Behind that door, was something like a jail cell, a place of confinement. I had been wasting my energies in a vain attempt to put myself into the wrong place.

I carried guidance from this vision, with its dramatic and objective perspective, into my life immediately. I abandoned work on a certain project and ended a certain professional relationship. I soon found myself, in a creative sense, in that wonderful place of the flowering trees.

I learned from this experience something I believe to be relevant to all of us at certain times of challenge in life. When you feel hopelessly blocked, check whether the block is actually a signal to choose a better way forward. Behind that seemingly insuperable block may be a beneficent power - which I call the Gatekeeper - who is opposing your progress on the path your everyday mind has chosen in order to get you to turn around and find a better way. Schopenhauer wrote of how there can be a "conspiracy of fate" to prevent us from pursuing the wrong goals, He advised that "when fate opposes a plan with such obvious doggedness, we should give it up since. as it is unsuited to our destiny that to us is unknown, it will not  be realized and by wilfully pursuing it we simply draw down upon us the harder blows of fate until in the end we are again on the right track."[2]

This is only one of the ways in which our blocks may be our friends. We may be on the right path, but that path may include challenges that are necessary tests, requiring us to develop the courage and the skills to go forward. As Dion Fortune once put it, the block may be "thrust-block", like that used by sprinters at the start of a race. 

At every major threshold in our life journeys, we are likely to encounter some form of the Dweller at the Threshold, a power that challenges us to brave up and rise to a new level. Faced with such a challenge, and the inner resistance that comes with it, we have a choice. We can break down or break through. I am in favor of breaking through. Practice will teach us when that requires moving forward, despite the block, and when we need to shift direction and go around the block.

References

1. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations trans. Gregory Hays (New York: Modern Library, 2005) 60

2. Arhur Schopenhauer, "Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual” in Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philsophical Essays  trans E.F.J.Payne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974.) 218

Text adapted from Growing Big Dreams: Manifesting Your Heart's Desires through Twelve Secrets of Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

photo by RM

 

Word Gates

Gently rising from sleep into the grey morning, I saw what looked like a child's wooden alphabet block set within a frame. The front edge of the block had an ornamental red and green border. A word rather than a single letter was inscribed. I understood that when we could come up with an adequate story or definition for this word, the block will turn, and this will reveal another word requiring description. Each turn of the block would have tumbler effect on other blocks or components of the system.

    I cannot say how many words will come up before the block moves and provides an open portal to what all seekers aspire to know. I do not know whether there is only one block, or many, or an infinite number.
    I know that, behind the frame, the block is not a three-dimensional cube but extends into other dimensions. Despite its apparent wooden solidity, the face it presents may actually be a hologram projected from another reality. As I picture this I see the surface within the frame as one end of a structure, composed of many segments and flashing many colors, that somewhat resembles the Rosicrucian cross, in which the vertical shaft is longer than the arms, although in this case the structure is laid on its back.
   I cannot say the word that first appeared within the frame.
   I can give you two words, but I cannot say where they come up in the sequence:

     TIPU

     KARANDANSKY

   I can also say that at some level of this game, instead of defining unusual words, we are required to come up with the word that fits an unusual definition.
   Many of these words are not in the dictionaries of Earth.
   For example, there is a word that exactly defines the Tail of the Lion phenomenon, as described by Einstein in his famous analogy:

Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But I do not doubt that the lion belongs to it even though he cannot at once reveal himself because of his enormous size.

   There is also a word that fits the definition "something that is much bigger inside than outside" (and it is not TARDIS, the name of the machine disguised as an old police box in which Dr Who travels).
    Unlike Scrabble players, Dream Word players can't appeal to a dictionary. A rare few among us may have glimpsed something in the Thesaurus of Tulun - from which Einstein appears to have borrowed his description of the Tail of the Lion - but such works are not available when you need to reach across the table. So we must judge words and definitions offered in our Dream Word games by three criteria:

- The LD [Laugh Decibel] Level

- The OU [Outrageously Unexpected] quotient

- Whether they move our blocks

Seven Open Secrets of Imagination

The greatest crisis in our lives is a crisis of imagination. We get stuck and set ourselves up for failure because we buy into a limited or self-defeating version of reality, and refuse to see our situation differently.

    The answer lies within us, in the power of imagination. We are ruled by images; they are the “facts of the mind” (as the poet Coleridge called them) that turn us on and turn us off and program our bodies for wellness or disease. To live richer and more creative lives, we want to learn to choose the images to which we give energy and belief. We can do this by learning and harnessing the seven open secrets of imagination:   

1. If we can picture our blocks, we can move beyond them

Mandy was terrified of speaking in public, even in front of two or three people. I asked her if she could feel what was blocking her. She could; it felt like a choke collar. I asked if she could see that collar. She saw it as antique lace of the kind her grandmother used to wear. Once she had that image, she was able to work successfully to release herself from the choke-hold of a family tradition that held that it is the role of women to suffer in silence. When she found an image of her block, Mandy moved beyond it and claimed her voice.

2. The body believes in images and they can help it to heal and stay well

An image sends electrical sparks through your whole body. This shows up when brainwaves are recorded by an EEG. At the same time, an image sends a stream of chemicals washing through you. If you dwell on images of grief and failure, you are manufacturing “downers”. If you can shift your mind to a relaxing scene you produce a natural tranquilizer whose chemical structure is very similar to Valium. If you  summon up images of triumph, you mobilize neuropeptides that boost your immune system.

     In its internal workings, the body does not seem to distinguish between a strong image and a physical event. There is immense potential for healing here – as is increasingly recognized in the healthcare community, if we choose to give our focus to positive  images that are right for us. Where do we get those images? From happy life memories, and from our dreams, which are a great factory of customized imagery for self-healing.

3. If you can see your destination, you are better than halfway there

Harriet Tubman saw roads to freedom. She saw them in dreams and visions in which sometimes she was flying like a bird over landscapes she has never seen with ordinary eyes. She led 300 escaping slaves along those roads, guided by her vision maps, and never lost one of her “packages” to the posses and the bloodhounds.

     We want to grow a vision of possibility. We want to practice seeing and sensing ourselves enjoying the fulfillment of our heart’s desires, in our dream home, or our dream job, or with our dream partner or community. If we can grow a vision strongly enough in our inner senses – and if it is guided by the heart and the gut and not merely the head – then that vision has traction. It helps to pull us towards our destination.

4. The Big Story is hunting us

The Big story – the one that can give us the courage to get through whatever life throws at us – is hunting us. It makes itself known in dreams and through the play of coincidence. We allow it to find us by making a date, preferably seven days a week, with the most important book we’ll ever own: our personal journal.Writing a journal is taking a walk in the bush. The longer you write, the further you get away from safe places and much-traveled roads. You’re now in the wild. And you’re in that state of alert relaxation that is going to encourage something large and powerful that lives in the wild to leap at you from hiding and claim you. That’s how you get your big story, the story that wants to be told – and lived – through you. You go where it can catch you.

5. There is a place of imagination, and it is entirely real

For each of us, there is a place of imagination – maybe many places – that are altogether real. One of these, for me, is a magical library of which I never tire. Any book in this library opens another world, and master teachers are accessible here.

    Spend a few minutes, any day you can, building your own home in the imaginal realm – a place where you can rest and relax and get creative ideas or receive healing or have fun with your favorite people. You’ll find this wonderfully restorative. You may also find that the stronger you build your dream place in your mind, the greater the chance that it will manifest in the world.

6. We can transfer a vision to someone in need of a vision

We have the ability to grow a vision for someone who needs a vision. After her hysterectomy, Dawn told me she felt “gutted.” I helped her to picture herself inside the blackened, hollowed-out core of an immense California redwood that had survived a forest fire. Despite the gutting, the great tree was vigorously alive, hurling its green spray towards the sky. Dawn made the redwood image part of her daily meditation, and it took on spontaneous life. She entered the blackened core one day to find it had become the nest of the phoenix, and felt herself rise, on shining wings, from the ashes of her pain and loss.

     We can work a vision transfer with one person at a time, or with a whole group or community. Great visionary leaders can wrap a whole people in their vision, as Winston Churchill did in the darkest days of World War II.

7. The stronger the imagination, the less imaginary the results

Imagine that you can make yourself incredibly small and travel inside the body and repair its cells structure and balance its flows from within.

    Imagine you can travel across time and visit a younger self and provide the counsel and mentorship that younger self needed in a time of ordeal.

     Imagine you can communicate with your self on a higher level, and get a wiser perspective on all your issues – and return with a road map that will get you where you need to go.

     Imagine that you can reduce pain with your mind, and can develop this ability to the point where you can dispense with meds even when undergoing root canal work.

     Imagine you can go to a place where you can review your soul’s contract – the set of lessons and tasks you may have agreed to undertake before you came into your present life experience – so you can now remember and complete your true life mission.

      Imagine a workplace that is no longer toxic or stressed out because people make space every morning to share dreams and check whether an innovative solution or a fun idea has come to someone in the night.

I have seen all these things accomplished, through the power of imagination.

What we can imagine has a tendency to become real in our bodies and our world.

So let’s imagine peace and healing, and remember the open secret that Rabindranath Tagore expressed, with poetic insight: “The stronger the imagination, the less imaginary the results.”

Text adapted from The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: J.R.R.Tolkien, "Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft Elves". The author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit was also a fine artist who drew and painted his way through his imagined worlds.

The Alphabet of Blocks

If we can picture our blocks, we can move beyond them. Three examples, from different gatherings I have led over the years.

Granma’s collar is too tight

Mandy was terrified of speaking in public, even in front of two or three people. When she seized up in one of my workshops, I asked her if she could feel what was blocking her. She said, "It feels like a choke collar."
     I asked if she could see that collar.  After a moment, she nodded and said, "I can see it now. It's a collar of  antique lace. It's buttoned too tight."
    "Does that lace collar remind you of anyone?"
    "My grandmother used to wear that kind of lace collar."
     Memories started spilling out, of the grandmother who sternly upheld a family tradition that girls - and grown women - were not permitted to speak truth to power, that a woman's lot was to mute her emotions and never challenge the man of the house.
      Once Mandy had the image of what was stealing her voice, and the family history that came flooding back, she was able to work successfully to release herself from the choke-hold of a tradition that held that it is the role of women to suffer in silence. When she found an image of her block, Mandy moved beyond it and claimed her voice.

Releasing Dad

I was leading a short evening program for a large audience. I drummed for a while to help people call up dreams or images from any part of their life that they might want to play with.
     A woman I'll call Norma put her hand up and said, "I got nothing during the drumming.
    “So what are you feeling right now?” I asked her.
     “Frustration.”
     “Where do you feel this frustration in your body?”
     She indicated her torso.
     “Put your hand on that place. Now I want you to follow your feelings into that place. Can you pretend you are moving into that place in your body?”
      “Yes.”
      “There is someone or something there. Do you see it?”
      “Yes. It’s my father.”
      “What do you need to do in relation to your father?”
       “I have to find out whether I can forgive him.”
       “What would you need in order to do that?”
       “I’d need to get my little girl back.”
       “I think she’s right there. Can you see her?”
       “Yes.”
       “Can you welcome her back into your life, and release your father?”
       “I’ll try.”
       There were tears now, and a fierce hope shining through the tears. In that moment of revelation, and self-expression, we all felt the potential for deep healing. Later, Norma agreed to write a letter to her father (now deceased) expressing what she needed to say to him, and wishing him healing and forgiveness in his journey. And she readily agreed to do certain things in her regular life - eating a certain sugary snack would be one of them - that would convince her inner child she would now be fun to be around.

The Alphabet of Blocks

At the start of another gathering, I again drummed for a few minutes, inviting invited everyone to allow a dream, an image or a memory from their lives to come to them. A man in the group told us he got nothing, even though he had been doing inner work for a long time, journaling dreams for twenty years.
    I asked, “What are you feeling?”
   “I’m blocked.”
   “Where do you feel the block?”
    He indicated his heart area.
   “Can you describe the block?”
    It’s huge. It’s a cube.”
    “Is it like stone, or metal, or maybe wood?”
    “It’s wood.”
    “Could it be an alphabet block, like kids play with?”
    “That’s what it is. It’s an alphabet block.”
    “How old are you when you get close to this block?”
    “I’m four years old.”
    “Can you see yourself, helping your four year old self to make a word?”
    “Yes. We’re making the word D R E A M.”
     He readily agreed he would buy a set of wooden alphabet blocks later that day and that he and his four-year-old would play with them.

Before you push too hard, check whether you are at the right door

In a difficult passage in my life, I was hell-bent on pursuing a certain project that I calculated would pay my bills and give me some room for creative expression. But every time I tried to push forward, I found myself blocked. Something inside me resisted my ambitions, and the world seemed to rebuff me at every turning.
    Despondent, I sat down and tried to make sense of my situation.
    Suddenly, I had a clear vision of myself from a witness perspective.
    I saw myself beating on a heavy wooden door, studded with metal, banging my fists until my knuckles were raw and bloody. I saw myself pausing to take a few rasping breaths, seemingly exhausted, before pounding again on the door that would not open.
    Okay, that's how it is. Like many night dreams, my spontaneous vision was holding up a magic mirror to my actions and attitudes. Was that all?
    I felt a prickling sensation at the back of my neck. I found myself drawn from my observer position into the scene, which was more alive to me now than the family room where I was sitting. My second self was still beating his fists uselessly on the unyielding door. But the prickling sensation was guiding me to turn around and look at something invisible to him. I turned to my right, and saw an elegant, mysterious figure beckoning me with a crooked finger. There was a Trickster quality about him. He was standing in a beautiful archway. Behind him a winding path led up a slope among flowering trees into a landscape of beauty and abundance. I felt that everything I was seeking in life was through that arch.
    The Gatekeeper waited for me to grasp what he was showing me.
    My vision and understanding were still far from complete.
    If all this bright promise was waiting for me, through an open door, what was I doing beating myself bloody at the door that would not yield?
 

  I turned to study again the situation of the Robert who was beating on the door. I discovered two things. While with one hand the Gatekeeper was beckoning me through the open gate of possibility, with his other hand he was holding that heavy, metal-studded door shut. The real shocker was that I could now see what was behind the door I had been desperate to open. The space behind it looked like a jail cell. I had been exhausting myself in an effort to put myself in a place of confinement.
    This powerful vision led me to make some radical life choices. I abandoned the project on which I had been working for months. Little by little, I found myself on the path between the flowering trees, in a world of ever-burgeoning creative possibility.
    The vision helped me to gain clarity on some rules for conscious living that work for me:

1. When one door closes, or won't open, look for the door that opens onto better things.

2. Before you push too hard, check whether you are at the right door.

3. Recognize that there is a Gatekeeper in life who opens and closes doors, and be ready to honor him (or her) and pay the price of entry, which may simply be a clear eye and an open heart.

Oh, there is one more. 

4. As long as you stand in your own way, you will find the world stands in your way.

I confess that #4 is borrowed from Ralph Waldo Emerson, my favorite homespun American philosopher. The original version is: "As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way."

Photos (c) Robert Moss. Doors at the Albright Knox Museum in Buffalo, NY, Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, at the Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul, Vyšehrad, Prague, and at the exit from the harem at the Topkapi Palace, Istanbul.