Crap of the World Distracting You from Your Power

This is a painting in a temple called Mulkirigawa.  

A demon is snacking away on someone, but no one seems 

to notice or care.  

I've been having a lot of dreams that are showing me how I get "distracted from my Zen," as a friend of mine says.  How I have the power to enjoy life and create what's most meaningful to me, but the Crap of the World wedges its way in and makes me forget that.  Here are a few of my recent dreams.

A man is in prison. A big inmate is torturing him. It’s almost like wrestling, but the other inmate has the advantage of being huge. He’s slowly pushing the smaller man into a stone bench and positioning himself so that the man (I’ll call him the protagonist) is being sandwiched between this massive body and the unforgiving stone bench. This will definitely hurt. Then the larger man is inching the protagonist’s head between the bars of the cell window. Once the protagonist’s head is wedged in there, the big man can do a simple twist and snap his neck. The horror is that it happens so slowly and the protagonist knows what will happen, a slow-building dread he can do nothing to ward off.

Except he does.  The protangonist says with all his earnestness and calmness, “I don’t want you to do this.”  

His desire is very pure, not tainted by fears (the "OMG what if it doesn't work!" or "What if I'm just kidding myself?" sort of fears).

Slowly, the big man changes positions. He will not kill the protagonist after all.

Did you ever beat a bully in school without lifting a finger? Realizing that the one thing the bully craved more than anything else was your reaction?  Remember the freedom of saying, "No?" and laughing, seeing the bully struggle to respond, not knowing what to do because you refused to play the only game he knew?

Yeah, it's kind of like that.  You remember your power.

***
And this dream was  a kick in the ass about not being distracted from the divine (which in this dream was symbolized by an advanced space culture) by stupid pop culture bullshit, the crap our society says is important.

D and I lived in a beautiful, old two-story house. We had installed in the attic a state-of-the-art home theater. It projected holograms that were fully immersive; our favorite was a giant squid swimming above our heads (more marine life!). It seemed like a great personal accomplishment–not just something we had bought.  We'd created this means to make our visions visible to others.

But then I got something even cooler than that! An iPad-like device was delivered to my house, sent by friendly space men. The device was something I should turn on when I wanted to talk. I might have to wait for a connection to open on their end, but they would get my message. The colors were very spacey–black, white, deep fuschia, deep green, cobalt blue.  The people were kind, gentle, and friendly.

Just as I decided I wanted to turn on the device, the actor Tom Cruise burst into my house! Tom begged for a place to hide because a group of obsessive women were stalking him. He wanted a place where they couldn’t see him. I felt kind of sorry for him so I agreed to let him and his handler go upstairs where our projector was. They didn’t give me a good feeling though, more like I was invisible once they had what they wanted. Unfortunately one of the women peeked in my window and saw, and then the fans were all trying to storm my house. Irritated, I went on the porch and threw them off, punching some and literally tossing them off the porch. One of the women’s husband showed up randomly–he was a lawyer and threatened to sue me for assault.

“Great,” I thought. “How did I get roped into this?”

I got into it because I engaged the stupid pop culture drama.  I was talking with alien beings--what an amazing, life-changing thing!  What would it mean for science?  But no, I got distracted by freakin' Tom Cruise (who is certainly not a favorite actor of mine) and his celebrity drama.  Is this like getting sucked into the Daily Mail website and going, "No way, Princess Beatrice did NOT wear those shoes to the Queen's Jubilee?!" Or in political theater, "No way, Mitt Romney did NOT just say that ridiculous thing!  OMG SO OUTRAGED GONNA RANT ON FACEBOOK!!!!!"

There goes your power--you just gave it to mass media and Facebook.  They say thanks, BTW.

***

And then there’s this one about using love to quell evil, and especially how evil will retaliate with threats and play on our fears.  Anything to distract us from what's real and beautiful and good.

My parents and I went to visit one of my mother’s friends. It was a snowy even and their house was built on a small cliff. The man who greeted us was dark-haired and had a wry sense of humor. I don’t know how I discovered that their teenage daughter was possessed. She lived in a sub-basement with bars on it, I assume to protect others from the demon. She was actually a very sweet girl but the demon, of course, was hateful. I started pouring love energy into her with my hands, similar to how I do energy healing in waking life. The demon hated it to the extreme! It made all sorts of threats but they were empty, and eventually it left the girl…

… and went into her boyfriend, who was staying at the house. The problem now was that the boyfriend was not sweet like his girlfriend. He had no compunction about using weapons. So he aimed a gun at me and I tried to duck and evade his aim. “Didn’t expect that, did you?” he said. Eventually I convinced the demon to use weapons other than guns and we were both using what seemed to be sledgehammers. But in the end, I used the same energy to drive the demon out of him, and when I woke, I realized the whole thing had a slow-motion, play-acting effect, as if I was never in any real danger and was only afraid that I was.

What exactly is this evil?  I don't pretend to have a succinct, accurate or comprehensive definition.  But I do know that it tries it's very hardest to make you forget your own power.  Just like a damned bully!