one more thing before i die …
is
can I have (and ‘capture’/incorporate) this dream again? ~

i had a recent ‘relevant’ teaching dream. as usual, i can’t remember what happened, only that after losing all fear

(including, but not limited to: apprehension, thinking about, making plans, trying to avoid it altogether, reflecting upon, etc.)

of death, things were different.

perhaps, in the words of Krishna speaking to Arjuna, i had severed any and all tendencies to identify with the fruits of my actions. i’m sure that for all of us, there are at least a few kinds of fruit we’d all like to distance ourselves from.

things … different.
no, life wasn’t. things weren’t really different. the way i looked at things had changed. not that i would go so far as to say there was an element of celestial clarity, but, perhaps, a little. no, nothing at all was different, only that it felt i could sense infinity, continually.

i still bought groceries at the store, had to drive to get there, get out, walk, grab a cart, shuffle thru’ the store. but i wasn’t just in the store. i could still sense, feel, the mountains on the horizon, the breezes shaping the clouds, &, if i wanted, i could remember the smell of the ocean. and yet i compared prices of cans of cat-food, felt for the freshest avocadoes, assessed my coupons against the prices of different coffees.

interacting with other people at a meeting: though it was foggy and night was falling outside, the separation from sources of light did not hide anything. people stood out in crisp clarity. what they said conveyed (by my humble estimation) more than three times the meaning than that which was, surficially conveyed. i tried to act accordingly. and i’ll bet i didn’t ‘act’ nor seem any different than i would had i not had this new element in my make-up. the brick taken from the structure and replaced with what appeared to be an identical brick. except the brick removed was Fear Of Death and the replacement obliterated that Fear.

i would still get tired, and sometimes get hurt. but it was as if i had a different, no, not ‘shell’ but layer … no. not another ‘layer.’

i was lighter. layers (and/or perhaps shells!) were removed. less baggage, less clutter. and the over-riding sensation that, ultimately, there really was nothing to fear. i remember thinking as i walked down a sidewalk in the dream, that the absence of fear was a logical result of knowing that you have infinity along with and inside you.

and, of course, i woke up. grew up? again: no. but like so many things in life (increasingly so with the passage of time) i knew that I knew. but not any longer.  the person i was, uh, became in the dream is walled-off now, but like the pantheon of all possible personages within everyone of us, that person is there, somewhere.