vantage point

I had a dream the other night, I am sure motivated by seeing this amazing picture Mhedwi posted on Paulo Coehlo’s (The Alchemist) facebook page.  In my dream, a man was sitting on top of a high sand dune and watching a battle rage below him.  In the far distance, he saw caravans of supplies coming towards one of the army camps but it was on the other side of a set of sand dunes.  These dunes were not a barrier to getting the supplies to the army, they were just too high to see from the ground of the army camp.  In my dream, I was this man; I was in his head, seeing what he saw, thinking what he thought. 

I sat there watching the battle rage on, but I was high enough to not see any individual actions.  It was like watching GI Joe figurines posed in two jagged lines, facing one another, and every once in a while, you would see one figurine drop sideways.  I was in some form of a deep meditative state, because I was not overly concerned about anything I was seeing, just noticing what was happening in the precise moment, without any feelings attached to it.  Normally, I would have a response to fighting, people dying, a caravan with supplies coming, but somehow, I knew, that it was not my place to have an opinion, that this scene was being shown to me for my observation.  And, in that state, I understood something powerful.

When we are on the ground in our day to day battle that we call life, we cannot see the environment around us.  We are not high enough to have awareness of what is right around the bend (or on the other side of the sand dune).  We are stuck in these seemingly never ending day to day battles, having no idea if this is the day we are going to succumb or if supplies will make it today, tomorrow, or never.  We keep boldly facing what is before us and psych ourselves up to deal with the matter at hand, having no concept that an hour from now, a day from now or a week from now the entire landscape can and may shift or change.  That change could bring relief or bring yet another set of day to day battles.  And, with this realization, I understood in a new way, why spiritual leaders suggest you talk to “your higher self”, when you have an issue.  Because that part of yourself, sitting on the sand dune next to your personal battle, has the fuller picture.  That part of you knows when to push and when to stop.  That part of you knows that if you do the same thing today that you did yesterday, it will not work because the entire battlefield is different today.  And, those are things that we simply cannot know when we are on the ground.  Those things can only be known at a different vantage point.

There is a part of you that knows without doubt that everything is ok, just as it is, in this current moment.  For many of us, we do not sit in this place often enough, or at all.  But that place is inside each and every one of us.  Every spiritual and religious teaching has teachings that talk to the fact that even when bad things are happening, they are part of a greater plan for good.  Because there is an even higher vantage point than a sand dune, a universal vantage point, in which the small or huge sadness of today is one string, woven into an enormous tapestry called all people, in all places, in all time and space, and your string as small as it is, in one beautiful, important thread into the larger tapestry called our collective human experience.  That is the ultimate vantage point.  To understand that everything, every, single, thing, that happens to you has ripple effects on hundreds, thousands or maybe even millions of other people and that there is a higher order and a higher power who has all of that under control.  Your job is to spend time on a regular basis in that place within you that knows all is always ok.  Your job is to sit on the sand dune, with a higher vantage point, and look at your life, to see, that everything at every moment is just as it should be and something new is on the other side of the next sand dune.