The Tightrope Walker – A Dream Story

I provide the following as a backdrop to this story. In no way is it meant as a scientific treatise. It’s just a story of a dream.

In this human form, which is a vehicle for awareness to awaken to itself, there is a single brain with two hemispheres: a left and right. They communicate and process information in different ways.

The left hemisphere is verbal, using language and logic and a linear narrative to tell its story, to arrive at conceptual understanding.

The right hemisphere is non-verbal, holistic, communicating through images, intuition, feelings and dreams, to arrive at non-conceptual understanding.

So-called western society, western education, and science in general tend to downplay, if not outright ignore, non-conceptual understanding. One might say there is a societal bias against right hemisphere brain. And as a product of this society, I learned to rely almost exclusively on left hemisphere thinking mind to make sense of the world. But that didn’t stop right hemisphere from doing its thing, day in and day out. And eventually, over much time, I learned to pay attention.

Recently I had a dream of a man walking on a tight wire holding a balancing pole. And I came to understand, the way one does in dreams, without rhyme or rhythm, that the tight wire represented the present moment and I was that high wire walker. And I needed to pay a whole lot of attention in order to stay on that high wire and not fall headlong into some horrific catastrophic expectation.

Gradually I figured out that the balancing pole represented conceptual duality, each end weighted with opposing assumptions and beliefs, right and wrong, about the nature of reality and illusion, about self and not-self, about form and formlessness, about awakening or dreaming, about mind and no-mind.

If one end of the balancing pole tipped over too much, I risked losing "my self” and falling out of the moment, on one side or the other, into the abyss of an imaginary painful yesterday, or an imaginary worse next moment. And as I “felt” the weight of that balancing pole in my hands and arms and shoulders see-sawing between countervailing points of view, “I” intuitively shifted from “thinking” to “doing”, in an effort to find my center of gravity, my internal gyroscope. I wasn’t trying to think about what was the right argument or point of view; I just didn’t want to fall and kill myself.

So I concentrated on carefully placing one foot after the other, and letting body find the center point, the still point that is quiet mind, where the push and pull of duality ceased. And in abiding in presence in the present moment, that tight wire miraculously morphed into a twelve inch wide plank. And just like “that” being in the moment became less terrifying and difficult. Gradually I lifted my concentrated gaze from that narrow high wire, now a twelve inch plank, and looked around at the present circumstances contained in the moment.

And I saw that the plank widened and widened until it was the size of a football field all around me and I no longer needed the balancing pole to get from here to there without stumbling over myself. I didn’t need that balancing pole to move around anymore, period. I could run, forwards and backwards, shift directions on a dime, and not fall out of the moment. It truly felt liberating and expansive.In the dream.

Staying in the moment feels difficult at first, if not impossible, for more than a few seconds or minutes, before thinking mind hi-jacks attention and yanks it out of “now” and into the “past” or “future”, if only yesterday or tomorrow. Of course, at some level, “not being here” is ludicrous, because when and where else are we going to be, really?

Yet left hemisphere thinking mind bias seems to happen a lot. To me any way. So whatever reminders and input right hemisphere provides now are appreciated.

Right hemisphere input is not infallible. It is as fallible as thinking mind, as apt to being conditioned as thinking mind. But finding a balancing point, a still point, in the present moment, however it comes about, fills me with gratitude. Because when “left” meets “right”, it's not a foregone conclusion that it always leads to a peaceful encounter.