Dream: I am finding my way in an unknown city in winter, in a fog, on snowy streets, around construction, on a bike. It is treacherous and unclear whether I am going somewhere or just out for exercise.

This is a reminder that the spiritual transition in which I find myself (see the last two posts) is likely to be difficult and unpleasant at times. The Jim Marion consciousness map calls the transition from the Psychic stage, where I have been for about 25 years, and the Subtle, where I suppose I am heading (though what’s ahead on the map is about as clear as that slippery, foggy road in an unknown city) is marked by a period of turmoil called the Dark Night of the Senses. He said it isn’t always painful but it often is, because any darkness your soul is carrying gets dredged up for you to see, experience, and deal with.

Indeed I have had several bad dreams recently–one frightening, one disgusting, and others just distressingly chaotic. Wouldn’t it be great if all the unpleasantness gets dealt with in my dreams, and waking life continues to be as rich and serene as it has been in recent days?

I’m not counting on that. In fact, preoccupation with my place on the map is a temptation to compare and contrast, an ego exercise. I come back to gratitude for the experiences, the change, the sense of progression. The map is good for help in recognizing signposts but it only makes sense of what I have already experienced and am experiencing at the present and, in a general way, the meaning of the journey.

I am noticing a suspension of the judgment habit. Church yesterday was different because I came to it differently, open and unjudging. I felt the energy of the group after being away for several weeks. The sermon and the music flowed through me with few barriers, no hooks to get things stuck on. I had a good committee meeting afterwards, everybody cooperating and offering to do their part.

This morning during meditation I experienced the weight of myself and the matter surrounding me as being rooted to the earth by gravity but as part of a continuum that was all God, melting and evaporating up into energy and beyond. In reverse it was the sense of being condensed down, dripped from God, as if God was the cloud and I was rain. I was finding it difficult to sustain this sense with my eyes closed so I opened them and checked the timer, 2 minutes left. I spent those minutes with my eyes open and the perception continued, the trees both rising up and dripping down. The air was still and misty, preserving this sense.

The idea that matter is the condensed state of God, of pure thought, comes from my reading but the experience of that was new.

The dream of night before last suggests there is difficulty to come, the way will not be smooth as I bike over the icy, unfamiliar roads that are under construction. But that does not matter until it matters.

Meanwhile, today I am continuing to enjoy being nonjudgmental. In most things, that is. Sitting in a waiting lounge this morning I saw these artificial roses, arranged in a vase half full of plastic “water” –truly offensive to my aesthetic sensibilities. It called forth my full, judgmental wrath against fake flowers.