I remember something that happened many years ago with a Chinese teacher that was the inheritor of a lineage that he did not want.
He worked within the parameters that society prescribed. He was very powerful and influential; very robust, resourceful and intelligent.
He had also gone beyond all moral constraints but still worked within societal parameters so as not to be ridiculed.
The meeting with this Chinese master occurred when I was around 17 years old. I went to some of his kung fu classes just to check it out. I didn’t see anything unusual at first, but then one night he appeared within my dreams.
I saw him explaining to one of his devoted students and she was saying, ‘but what about Taoism?’
He looked at her and waved his hand as if snubbing her and said, ‘forget Taoism.’
And as he said this she became shocked and he began to laugh, pearls of laughter, which were intoxicating.
He then noticed me in the dream watching him. He said,’ come with me ’.
The dream scene suddenly disappeared and I was at a great distance from him. What I saw him doing didn’t shock me but made me laugh to a depth that made me realize what he was doing was the sanest actions I have ever seen.
He was pointing at people; taunting and ridiculing them, laughing at their being offended at his actions. He looked at me while pointing and laughing and said ‘these people are insane, but the information I was absorbing was more than what the dream scene was portraying. Within his laughter he was breaking patterns and fixations in terms of my perception on a social level.
One of the most extraordinary experiences that I had with him was that I found myself in a dream, waiting for him to teach a group of people kung fu. As he walked in the room he pointed at me. He said to me, ‘what do you think we should teach today?’ and he held a short staff up and said, ‘I think we should teach short staff today. What do you think?’ as he was pointing straight at me. The dream ended.
At this stage I thought I was having normal dreams with him, but on the next day, in his kung fu class, he was to show me that he was an extraordinary dreamer. As he walked into the room he pointed at me and said the exact words that I have stated above:‘What do you think we should teach today?’ I think we should teach short staff today. What do you think?’
From this point onwards I learnt that there are two types of teachers that appear within dreams. The first is like this Chinese teacher; they teach within the parameters of a known construct and somehow within that construct break the conceptual boundaries through sounds and movements that can be assimilated years later retrospectively as ones personal knowledge.
The other type introduces you to the essence of the universe. They subject you to energy and you directly know through that experience. But the wild contradiction here is that the only way to explain the energetic anomalies that have been assimilated through experience within the confines of this construct, is to bend the parameters through language so that others may assimilate through words and gestures that have more meaning than appears; not apparent until they review the experiences retrospectively years later, or until something within awakens to the sensory data presented.
And to me this establishes that we are within a dream here within this living construct and that the words and gestures are exactly the same as a dream, but the assimilation of that can be mistaken for something else here!