April 9, 2022
Today, the man who had been frozen in the block of ice returned to me in a vision. He was quite handsome with black hair and a short, black beard and beautiful brown eyes. The connection between us felt distinctly brotherly; i.e., that of equals but without any sexual connotations. He appears to be a rare straight male who is perfectly comfortable, even welcoming of a homo like me. In the vision, I was sitting beside him on a wooded bluff overlooking a vast lake. It’s early springtime and the wind is chill and the grey-blue clouds on the horizon are dramatic. The trees are still bare of leaves because it’s so early in the year. It is quite beautiful.
He’s sitting next to me. I recognize his presence from yesterday. He smiles at me and reaches over to ruffle my hair before turning back to enjoying the view of the lake. Sitting next to him made me rethink the question of who rescued whom. Yesterday, when he was ‘trapped’ in the block of ice, I somewhat arrogantly assumed that my presence had freed him. Perhaps it was I who was also trapped? Certainly, while I meditated yesterday, I was aware of my heart feeling frozen, something I attribute to being closed down. I think I was closed off because I had a mistaken view of my invitations to the Imaginal. As I explained in my previous journal entry, I’ve been taking my experiences with a subtle pride, thinking that there is something special about me, something needed. Perhaps this is part of the truth but it’s also clear that I have a lot of learning to do. I think part of the reason I am called into the Imaginal is to continue my spiritual education. So, I am a student not an adept, although I suppose just having access to the Imaginal indicates some level of development.
In any case, during today’s meditation, the message was to just sit and relax and enjoy the view with my new friend. I did. There was a pleasant intimacy in our sitting, we were both available to the other, nothing hidden, no pretenses. Just simply being.
I thought this would be the entirety of the meditation but after a while the lake began to fade and everything became pitch black. And I mean ‘pitch’ in the literal sense of the word because the blackness felt like toxic, black sap. We were inside a vast tree, a deadly tree filled with poison. At first, I contracted away from the blackness because there wasn’t anything welcoming about it. But then my resistance faded and I allowed the pitch to soak into me, taking over. There was a neutrality about this toxic sap; it was toxic, sure, but its toxicity was a protection, a way of keeping out the unready. Nothing living could enter it without dying first. In this way, it reminded me of the dissolution that accompanies ‘dying’ into the Absolute. Everything must go, everything must be given up before one can die and be reborn into Being.
So, here I was with my friend in the middle of a toxic tree, dripping with poisonous sap. A fairly grim place but, like any good fairytale, there is a hidden treasure. In this case, I spotted a golden radiance before us that beckoned to me. We approached and what I originally thought was a doorway into another realm turned out to be, well, it did turn out to be a doorway but it was also a jewel. A jewel of amber, vaguely triangular in shape. Like amber, the jewel was not uniform but had imperfections in it, so places were cloudy, some were distorted but it was nonetheless beautiful.
I recognized this jewel as a doorway into the gold realms, the realm of the Sarmoun Darq and the golden city. It was dripping with precious honey, the wisdom of the Divine. Scarcely had I been able to appreciate the beauty of the amber realm when the jewel’s color shifted to luminous grey. This was the Ghost Realm, a place I’ve visited several times. It’s drained of color and is only grey-white but it possesses an austere beauty that I find captivating. Sure, the Ghost Realm is a dour place but it’s needed and it is a place of hope as well as sadness and despair. Next, the jewel shifted to emerald green and I recognized one of my home realms, the realm of the forest and my people–the wood elves, I call them–it’s richness and verdant splendor brought tears to my eyes. The jewel continued to pulse, shifting from color to color. Next came onyx black, the mysterious, satiny beauty of the Absolute and the Beloved, a gorgeously cryptic world filled with allure and depth. Then it was ruby–Griffin’s world–the realm of blood and sweet passion, juice and courage and lifeforce. Next amethyst and then sapphire. The jewel seemed to be a window into an unlimited number of realms, all unique, all filled with their own wisdom and all connected.
The meditation ended with us still standing before this mysterious, pulsing jewel in the center of an immense tree that was dripping with poisonous sap. I was reminded of the Norse tree of life, Yggdrasil, and the Nine Realms. When I googled the imagery afterward, I discovered that in Buddhist mythology these is a Tree of Immortality called Langgan. Langgan can refer to the tree itself and also the Langgan jewels which are described as any number of colors. Langgan is used in Buddhist alchemy, the elixir of which is poisonous and is supposed to bring the drinker death but also open the doorway to the realms of the Divine.
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