There’s not much we have not thought -- thought -- of doing. It’s all there, the good, the bad, and the ugly, morphing in and out of noticeability in the hermetic privacy of our own minds. The heavier or more bizarre stuff generally does its time in the less well-lit corners, feeding on back-door hits of attention from us. We toss the beast -- the smell and feel of which is never that far from our living quarters -- a bit of meat, perhaps while simultaneously engaging in “higher” activities, such as keeping up appearances, or trying to be nonjudgmental or spiritual.

But what we are really up to is staying out of relationship -- avoiding intimacy -- with what we find despicable, lowly, or at least unattractive in ourselves. We might even rationalize this distancing as being essential to the meditative practice of witnessing or dispassionate observation, as if separating ourselves from our less-than-flattering inner workings is somehow a spiritual act.

So what do we do with our personal yuckiness and aberrations, our demons, our unpalatable denizens? Do we house them, do we relocate them, do we try to bury or murder or disguise them? Do we play vigilant zookeeper to them -- letting them out to do our dirty work -- or pharmacological trough, or literary agent? To what degree do we reject them? Sure, they are not really monsters, but only shadowed leanings driven crazy by neglect and misguided handling, but if we truly saw them like this, how could we justify continuing our violence toward them?

A favored housing project -- at once an orphanage, holding tank, and trashbin -- for our personal monsters is the conceptual dropzone called Hell, although it could be argued that cultures (and lifestyles) quite unlike ours provide for us an even more convenient dumping ground for what we can’t stand about ourselves. In depositing so much of ourselves in those dirty foreign lands, in those ungodly religions, in those smutty back-alleys, and in that unseemly behavior of not-with-it others, we are literally all over the place, Humpty-Dumptied near and far. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men can’t put us together again, because the pieces -- each waving its own flag -- cannot by themselves see enough value in a reunion.

But the Real is not asking for a piece of you, but for all of you, not delivered as a forced coalition or a pablum of shepherded submission, but rather as a true togetherness, a totality, a dynamic wholeness willingly enriched by its factional frictions and difficulties and strange mixes, along with the intimacy cultivated between them. The point is not to convert the broken many into the Undying One, but rather is to recognize them as that One, without any prerequisite denial, annihilation, or homogenization of their diversity.

Trying to pull it all together -- especially when in the throes of spiritual ambition -- more often than not reduces us to overgoverned mush, so caught up in looking out for insurrections from within and below, that we do not sufficiently realize that it all is already together, already coexisting, needing not some heroic unifying effort, but rather only an openness through which becoming remains peripheral to Being.

Seek God, and you won’t find God, but only your dreams of God and what God can do for you, framed by hosannahs of hope. God comes more into focus when the difficult is turned toward and openly encountered, rather than just fled, drugged, lawyered, misread, or otherwise avoided. Limit God to what’s above, and what’s below will likely eat us from the inside out, injecting twisted bolts of passion into the cool of reasoned thought, spawning a toxic logic beneath the treads of which we’re so flattened that we can barely breathe.

So let your make-believe self out, and the Holy in, letting what’s between inside and outside give up the ghost. Let out every last pretender to the throne of Self, every last squatter and manufactured somebody, every wannabe “I”, every last habit that insists on referring to itself as us -- get them all out in the clear, not for obliteration or rehabilitation, but for exposure and illumination. Look at them milling around in the Holy’s Courtyard, dressed in their resumés, all lost and all wearing your nametag, all veteran actors in your dreams, ready to play their part in whatever you are currently dramatizing. They may even continue to play their roles when you awaken in and from your dreams.

Why? Because psychospiritual awakening is not a getaway from dreamstuff, nor necessarily an annihilator of it. If some monstrosity or horror is pursuing you in a nightmare, to the point that your fear shocks you into realizing that you are dreaming, choose to remain in the dream instead of fleeing to the “waking” state, and turn around and face what’s chasing you. Chances are that the feared whatever will change right before your dream-eyes into something more approachable or even vulnerable, but even if it doesn’t, the encounter is worth having, if only for the experience of ceasing to flee what you fear.

Sometimes the Holy will intrude in our dreams -- because that’s where we mostly reside -- inviting us to leave our slumber. But do not let your embrace of the Holy separate you from the subterranean, homely, dirty, and malodorous petallings of self -- they too ache to be known and touched, to be deeply met, without being made the subjects of some self-serving salvation game. Stop making them sit in the backseat, stop pretending that they are not your relations, stop treating them like weeds, or else you will just keep Humpty-Dumptying yourself all over the place, dragging what’s left of you to the nearest bar. But even in the dispirited downing of one more Soul on the Rocks, the Holy Wakeup Call still bubbles up, fluidly intact amidst all the frozen fizz and fuss, reminding us that this too is us.

The inherent inseparability of all that is is both the unraveller of every dream and the ever unbroken light out of which every dream is constructed. In our presumed separation from all in the dream that appears to not be us, we are threatened by even the suspected possibility of such inseparability, for the reality of it signals the nonexistence of us, at least insofar as we take ourselves to be.

But to consciously exist as the essence of that inseparability -- what Joy! To consciously exist as Being -- what Peace! To exist thus does not necessarily mean the end of our separate self-sense, but rather only the relocation of it, so that it no longer centers -- and masquerades as -- us. Being no more seeks to eradicate ego than does the sky seek to eradicate its clouds. In fact, it is only through allowing Being to center us that our individuality can fully flower -- then every last petal matters, including those with which we would rather not be associated.

Everyone and everything in our dream is us. Every object in our dream is us. Even the space between the objects is us. What artistry! We lie asleep, while our dreaming mind creates a cast of characters and objects, plus a fitting stage for them, with us typically getting the lead role. Put another way, we identify with the “I” of the dream, acting out the relationships between that “I” and everything else in the dream. So when the scary pursues us, we take it to be not-us. Yet when we turn and face it, we often discover that it is us in dark disguise, and that it was chasing us only in order to make contact with us. Intimate contact. And light enters, effortlessly clearing the dream, leaving us as we are, present in -- and as -- what we never truly left, but only dreamt we did.