Wednesday, October 25, 2017

The forgetful envoy

You are sent from your homeland on an important mission, to rescue something beyond price. You understand the enormous risks of this assignment, and you freely choose to fulfill it. On leaving your homeland, you are honored and mourned, because you are dying, for a time, to those who love you and know you best.
             The conditions of your assignment require you to put on the clothes and the habits of the country where you will operate. You must fit in with those around you and follow their ways. This is hard for you, to begin with, because the people here live as if there is nothing beyond their world of getting and spending. Their pleasures are tawdry and their drugs numb the mind, but you are required to pass for one of them, so you do as they do.
             In the miasmic conditions of this plane, you start to forget why you came here. Your memory of your homeland, of its achingly beautiful music and its true communion of souls, seems like a fantastic dream that is starting to fade away. You let those around you, in your new country, tell you what life is about and you act in accordance with their valuation of things.
             You join them in snickering at dreamers who rant of other worlds.
             Then one night there is a knock at your door. You open it, and feel a strange wind, like the beating of giant wings. The person framed in the doorway is strangely familiar. When he speaks, his words leap to your heart. I come from my Father’s house. He is here to remind you of the mission you forgot. You are weeping now, ashamed. He is not interested in your tears. Now you remember your contract, you are required to fulfill it.

This is my own version of a story I feel I am living. You’ll find versions in sources ranging from the Gnostic Hymn of the Pearl to Doris Lessing’s novel Shikasta. Perhaps it will speak to you too. I find it useful to believe (as Plato believed) that each of us agreed to a contract before we came into this world in our present bodies. The trick is to remember the terms of that sacred contract, and then to find the courage and constancy to fulfill them. I am grateful for the night, long ago, when I heard a knock on my door in the middle of the night and opened it to find a young man outside, his face shining like the moon. He said, I come from my father’s house. And the dream was more real than the life I had been living, in this sublunary world.



Text adapted from Active Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Libraty.


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