by Paul Cudenec, who reads the article here
I had a couple of vivid and, I think, significant dreams the other night.
In the first of these my (deceased) parents turned up at my home bearing ancient suitcases and chests apparently full of my possessions. They looked very familiar and it seemed as if I knew what was inside each of them.
I felt I had to accept these items, even though I did not really have the free space – I managed to stuff one of them under my bed. I was left with the impression of being encumbered and cluttered, overwhelmed with stuff.
On awakening, my first reaction was that this was about the inter-generational mental baggage that is handed down to us all by our families.
I thought of a remark someone had made to me about the danger that the attitudes of our ancestors – a subject I had just written about – might actually represent a barrier to our direct individual connection to the Whole.
It was far too early to get up and so I went through a mental exercise of opening up each of these old suitcases in turn, sifting through the contents to check that there was nothing of importance, and then throwing everything into a skip outside.
Having achieved this to my satisfaction, I realised that there was probably a lot more in my own head that was responsible for this sensation of being cluttered and blocked.
I thought of what Malidoma Patrice Somé said, as cited in the aforementioned article, about his Western education preventing him from fully accessing traditional shamanic knowledge and I had to admit to myself how much my mind was full of incoming information, news and detail.
When I slipped back into dreamland I found myself looking at a terrible landscape. It was the countryside – with no buildings in sight – but a devastated, unrecognisable countryside.
It had lost all aesthetic charm and was even ugly. Tree stumps were everywhere around. The distant hills were planted with row upon straight row of commercially lucrative pines and even the stunted and hacked-about oaks nearby were in a mechanical line stretching away from me, rather than in an organic copse.
I was surprised by a terrible roaring sound to my left and turned to see flames bursting up into the sky behind some other trees. Alongside, I noticed a drilling rig and other unidentifiable industrial structures.
A small girl-child had materialised in my arms and, as we looked out at this hideous scene, I said to her: “Oh my god, they really want to do this to us!”
I knew at this point that the people behind this desecration of nature did not so much not care about the harm they were causing in their own self-interest, but that they actually took a demonic delight in destroying all that is good and beautiful, all that means most to us.
A small boy was now holding my hand, as well, and I said to the little ones: “We’ve got to stop them!”. Suddenly aware that it seemed a bit too late for that, I added: “We have to go back in time and do everything we can. With love in our hearts!”
We stepped through the portal and I woke up in 2026. I am getting on a bit now, but those children have their whole lives ahead of them.
