Geetika Kohli
In the middle of the night, as I lay frozen on my bed, I felt terrified finding my weightless body speeding down towards the sun in the outer space. The enormity and the lucidity of my experience, something the west may comfortably term a ‘nightmare’, jolted me much after I was awake and circling about the rooms that occupy my being. At the outset, my psychology-conditioned mind ascribed the dream to all of the insecurity that weighs heavy down on my chest. But gradually over the days, I did see some light reach me.
It was not the first time I had had this dream. It had recurred albeit sparsely in my adulthood. The fact that I was slipping down to light and had no control over how I wanted to land or whether I intended to land at all, made it obvious that there were things lurking being my subconscious mind and that in a long time, I had not sifted through the trove.
I have always held that to dream is to unearth metaphor. What was it that I was not ready to see yet? The only way forward that I could create was to reconstruct the dream once again when I took to my bed.
This time, as I lay down and closed my eyes, I let my mind conjure images. First, an absolute blackness, an unmistakeable, infinite opacity, and then the emergence of several specks of sizeable light; I was floating in space. Far from sleep, I kept birthing celestial objects, and speculating turns I would have to take. This chasing of that indomitable light became the norm for some nights. It would glimmer and then be gone for long, as if it had never been there in the first place.
Its reappearance, I learned, though after long chunks of time, concurred with certain events in life. As I fought my way through the tyranny of ironies hovering about my existence, confronting loss and considering a new, lean identity, I found that this light would begin to show within me. Day or night, almost like a tangible hallucination, a tantrum of the retina in my eye, it would emerge, smile and pass by. It would submerge the current reality completely, drowning the setting – the room, the people, air and colours, my body and the force that it carried.
And when I awakened, it felt easier, like all was not lost. I realised that resurrection was the key, and was to be seeded into the loose earth of vulnerabilities and also, the concreteness of the fact that my spiritual seeking would be summed up by the new identity I assume, whatever time it takes to flower.
I have learned that we keep conditioning ourselves to chase after security throughout our lives. Whatever we earn in terms of knowledge, experience or material wealth is reinvested into the act of building a stronger shell that guards us against anything that may surface in the future. We are consistent with creating outwards of ourselves, for we perceive what is without, to be what we really are confronted with – a war, a struggle, a game, however, we may choose to define it, we see it as existing externally and believe that the goal of our lives is to thwart it by raising a tough wall. This, I reckon, is such a parochial outlook to living, that it takes away more from our beings than what we hold accrues to us outwardly. Simply put, it weakens our core when we do not nourish ourselves by introspection and courage, and merely work towards hiding in a sanctuary marked by money, transactional relationships, titles, and even our seemingly formidable presence on virtual platforms.
What we do not realise is that what is external to us is a superficial reality that would be toppled over again and again until we learn to look within ourselves. We would definitely, at different points in our journey, find ourselves at the crossroads that would demand we sacrifice some part of this ‘outward layer’, in order that we may move forward. The constant shaking of our world, the consistent relinquishment in favour of some unknown, may render the meaning of life even more confusing to some. This may further fuel the need to gather more, hoard more, and seekmore protection.
But I ask if the goal of life were to be freedom, can we attain it by mere acquisition, appropriation, addition? As one may understand by now, the cycle of sacrificing and attaining would continue endlessly. So, how long should we endure the free fall of our souls? What can be our reins when we seem to have disappeared into a maelstrom of attachment, expectation and desire? When the outer wall can no longer resist the force for change, what would anchor us?
We must acknowledge that even when we are lost within a whirlpool, we retain both our vision and the possibility to access flickers of awareness. Though we may be robotic in our pursuit of safety, we do slow down at times for we experience a dissonance. The act is not satisfying us. There is an innate want for clarity. It is precisely at this juncture, that we need to stop, and allow the questions to hook us, haunt us, and even humiliate us into accepting that the direction we have been walking in must be changed.
It is when we embrace our vulnerabilities that we can truly steer ourselves into a more resilient self. Denying the truth about us, forcing the consciousness into torpidity will lead to nothing but the lengthening of the dark tunnel we must march through.
In my personal life, I have learned to hold on to the dazzling light that visits me in dreams and otherwise. Although I may find myself trembling before its might, I have understood that there is no going back. I face it and allow it to bring my deepest fears to the surface. And then I perch myself upon the fire, burning, until I feel the sun has risen within my womb, until I am born anew.
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