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Sept. 14, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:26
413 Two Dreams Part 1: The Jesus Bunny
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Hi there, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope that you're doing well.
Thank you so much for tuning in again for a bit of a left-turn episode that we're going to do now, entitled Two Dreams, wherein we're going to have a look at some dreams that were posted on the board, the Free Domain Radio board, by listeners.
And this is, I think, the third or fourth time we've had a go over dreams, and dreams are particularly fascinating ways to To get into the soul.
And I use that in a colloquial sense.
I am, as you may have guessed from the podcast on religion, an atheist.
But I do believe that the depths of consciousness are very fascinating things to explore.
So we are going to have a look at some dreams that were posted.
And I know that the reason that I'm doing this in a video rather than in a purely audio podcast, I'm doing both.
It's because of the couple of thousand hits that we've now had, or I guess I've now had, of the videos on YouTube.
I don't know what's going on with Google Video.
I can't figure out how to count who's seen what.
I wanted to try and lure people over from the video site to the audio site, where I have 400-odd shows in podcast format.
And I wanted to do that by posting something that was a bit of a departure.
From what we've been talking about so far, which is largely politics and a little bit of economics, but a whole lot of philosophy to talk about some of the psychological aspects that are in the Freedom Aid radio shows.
So I know it's not going to be the most gripping thing in the world to watch me.
Analyze a Dream live, but I did want to give you a taste of what's available on the www.freedomainradio.com site.
And, of course, to invite you, we now have 209 members on the board, all posting feverishly, some fantastic ideas flying back and forth, some amazing insights.
And I'm certainly humbled by the smartness of the people around me.
So, let's have a look at this dream that was posted by...
A listener, and I did ask him if I could use this, and he said, no, no.
He said yes. So we'll go straight into it.
He said, this is a dream I had a while ago, and the title of the post is Jesus Bunny and a Canyon.
And I'm pretty sure you knew that was going to be the next topic, right?
And he said, I was walking with my two best friends and possibly my girlfriend.
We were in a desert-ish area.
There was also a rabbit or bunny with us.
And somehow I knew that the bunny was Jesus, hence the Jesus bunny.
I don't know where we are going, but I knew that we had to get the Jesus Bunny somewhere.
Somehow, suddenly, we were in a cavern which had an opening into a desert.
You could see into it from the desert, and the top of it ran along a part of the desert like a wall.
Inside this cavern, we were on a ledge, a very thin ledge, perhaps only one foot.
Beneath this ledge, there was an abyss.
Falling as far as I could perceive.
I presume I dared not look down, since I have no recollection of the abyss in particular.
In reality, I am petrified of heights.
My friends made it out to get off the ledge on the desert, and I presume so did my girlfriend and the Jesus bunny, but I was still in there, clinging to the wall, terrified.
I somehow got out to the desert with my friends.
I do not recollect how.
It may have occurred instantly.
Then we were trekking along in the desert, and we arrived at a huge canyon.
Although I don't know if it was supposed to be the Grand Canyon, that's the word that comes to mind.
At the other side was a city, which we knew we needed to get the Jesus Bunny to.
So we started building a bridge across the canyon.
Amazingly, we simply took large, flat rocks or pieces of paper or something and started going across it, putting one piece at the edge of the next.
Of course, I realize that in real life this type of structure is completely unsupportable and no one would do such a thing.
I remember being doubtful in the dream of the validity of the bridge.
The other thing that, of course, worried, actually terrified me, was that there were no ledges on this bridge.
So again, we had about one foot of walking space, no railing to hang on to, and an inconceivable fall if we lost our balance.
In real life, I don't have good balance.
But somehow, this bridge thing was working.
And the Jesus bunny was hopping or moving across it, and we were building it piecemeal as we went across.
Oddly enough, once on it, I wasn't frightened.
But then when we were at most a quarter of the way over the canyon, a bridge extended from the other side, and small men, perhaps midgets or something like aliens, I don't remember exactly, took the Jesus Bunny, and the bridge reversed and descended and de-extended back into the city on the other side of the canyon.
At that point, our bridge collapsed.
But it was only me, and I was falling, falling, falling.
I remember being scared and praying.
Oddly enough, I landed in a large basin of water at the bottom of the canyon, and was fine.
I realized that in real life such a drop even into water would most likely kill you.
After I fell into the water, I went into some kind of bathroom, a restroom with multiple stalls and urinals, that had an entrance or perhaps opening at the base of the canyon.
I believe it was an underground restroom of the city above on the other side of the canyon, yet somehow it felt like a prison.
In the restroom, water was flooded to approximately four feet.
I think there may have been other people there.
In any event, I remember walking up to a urinal and urinating.
Except I'm not sure if there was in fact a urinal, as I may...
Simply have been urinating in water that was almost at the level that my pelvic area would start to be submerged.
This reminds me of the scene from the book Fight Club where Tyler stuck his phallus into a big bowl of soup that was for guests at a party and urinated in it.
Well, it was definitely a weird dream.
I'll talk to my girlfriend as I told her about it and ask her if she remembers anything I don't.
And, of course, I asked him for more details and he replied, add-on one.
Religious beliefs and a lot of rambling about recent heights-related experience.
I forgot to mention that I'm a Christian and hold beliefs about Jesus' pacifism quite seriously.
I realize that others disagree with this.
And yet I see some tension between this and libertarian retribution slash restitution, which I have attempted to bridge.
Also, five or six months ago, before this dream happened, which was perhaps three or four months ago, I think, my girlfriend and I were on top of a building at Simon, the business school I go to.
It was a nice view, but I got a little dizzy looking down.
There was a ledge you could sit on, and even approaching it.
Made me a little bit nervous, although the ledge was three or four feet wide.
My girlfriend, who was also afraid of heights, but not as afraid as me, I subjectively interpret it in a psychological way, got up on the ledge and started walking.
This petrified me, even though she told me there was a secondary three to four foot ledge just below it.
If I remember right, she eventually sat down with her legs hanging off the ledge, above the secondary ledge, and I put my arms around her because I was nervous about the heights.
This moderately quelled my nervousness.
Just over the summer in July, walking with my girlfriend at Stony Brook Park, I got quite nervous about kids playing on many of the mini falls where there were stones, and then five to ten foot drops into the water, which was shallow and stony.
We walked to see each of the three big waterfalls.
Oddly enough, we thought of walking to the edge of one, they're quite shallow, but lost her nerve when my girlfriend slipped on the way in the water.
We walked to the edge of a dry stone pot.
She then climbed down to a lower ledge beneath the edge, which also made me nervous, although...
We were also climbing upstairs to get to these waterfalls, which had no railing and had significant drops.
I usually stood on the outside left of her, though she usually likes me being on the right side.
And so there's more that this gentleman goes into, but I think we have...
Sorry, I dropped my piece of paper one moment.
We have enough to start on, I think, in having a look at this dream.
Now, when I sort of work through a dream interpretation, I don't claim to get, of course, all the personal facts right.
That would require quite an extensive series of interviews, but I think that there's enough here that we can begin to theorize about some aspects of this dream.
And so let's skim over some of the core mythology or imagery that's at work within the dream and see if we can't Help to understand what's going on in this dream.
In general, just very, very briefly, my general approach to dream analysis is to accept that dreams are working to get us to understand truths that are unpalatable or unacceptable to us.
And the reason that most of our dreams remain highly symbolic and at this kind of level is because we have, I mean, in the Freudian sort of paradigm, dreams are repressed wish fulfillment, and I don't quite follow it that far.
But what I will say is that we have natural beliefs, beliefs that are based on our experience, on our rationality, and on just being an intelligent human animal, a natural sort of ethics.
And then we have the ethics that are given to us by society.
Things like, obey your leaders.
Things like, conformity is bad, but you have to conform to society.
And things like, respect your parents, believe in God, believe in your country, honour the troops, all this kind of stuff.
Stuff which is not very logical, of course, at all, but which we are generally taught from a very early age.
And so this conflict between the natural ethics that is the common sense stuff, that's how we actually live our life, which is like we don't go around punching people or raping people or stealing or murdering.
And then, of course, we have all of these other layers of belief, which we kind of examined in the podcast series on politics, which are directly contradictory.
To the ethics that are held within ourselves, right?
So people say, you know, there's lots of social myths about, not myths like not true, but social sort of stories about standing up against evil and having integrity and believing in your values and believing in what is true and standing up for what is right and so on.
But at the same time, a near crippling kind of conformity is generally taught within state schools and to some degree within families, right?
And so there's lots of contradictions.
We're also taught, or we sort of believe, in the integrity of the natural information that is presented to us through the evidence of our senses, right?
So we don't naturally believe in things that we can't see, smell, taste, test, or whatever, and also things that don't make any kind of logical sense.
It seems very unlikely that without being taught, for instance, about a Christian or Muslim god, that we would believe in such fairy tales.
But of course they have to be heavily inflicted on us, So there's an enormous amount of contradictory ethics that float around in society, which is one of the reasons why I think that spending some time examining and unraveling them is really a worthwhile pursuit.
You want to sort of unravel your mental knots so that you can live a little bit more cleanly, a little bit more simply, with a good deal more integrity.
I think this is enormous value to go through as a person.
And so we have these natural ethics within ourselves that I've been sort of trying to delineate or provide rational proof for or support for in these recent podcasts.
And at the same time, we have all of this nonsense that is taught to us by our parents and our teachers and our priests and by society as a whole and, of course, by the media as well.
And so dreams represent, to me, our sort of natural ethics, and they have to come to us in metaphorical ways because we consider them to be unpalatable or unacceptable.
Or the consequences of...
Believing in a more rational and objective set of ethical guidelines are unpalatable to us.
This is very important as well.
If your parents, for instance, are religious and authoritarian, I guess the two would be somewhat synonymous, but if they're religious and authoritarian and, for instance, they're paying for you to go through your college, Then the question becomes, what is going to happen if I start to live by rational ethics to my family, to my social circle, to my extended family, to the people I grew up with in any situation, to my current relationship with my professors, or maybe I'm married in the way I've raised my children.
Does that have to all change?
Well, of course it does, right? I'm not going to pretend to you that ethics is some sort of abstract cloud world where you go and live in in your spare time.
Ethics is core to how it is that you should live your life, in my opinion.
And so when we have these natural ethics within us that are empirical and logical and don't believe in all these nonsensical abstract constructs that people feed us when we're young, gods and states and classes and all this sort of nonsense, patriotism, countries, virtue of the family...
Virtue of culture. All of this nonsense that we get fed to us goes against the natural grain of our common sense morality.
If you can see it, it's real.
If you can't see it, it needs some additional proof.
And if the proof doesn't make any sense, then it's not true.
This is not that complicated, despite the fact, of course, that I spent quite a few podcasts on it.
Anyway, we'll come back to that another time.
So, dreams represent our natural selves, what I call in my general podcast series on psychology, the true self.
The true self is the self that is created through uncluttered interaction with reality through the senses and logic and so on.
It doesn't believe in ghosts or goblins or gods or teachers or parents or anything like that.
I mean, it believes in them as in teachers and parents exist, but not in their innate virtue.
Just for sort of breathing, they get all of the ethical pluses that you could imagine.
And so we have this kind of natural morality within us, this common sense, simple morality, and it gets heavily cluttered and messed up by people who tell us lots of falsehoods.
And, you know, whether they know they're falsehoods or not is not particularly relevant here, and we do talk about that in the podcast series, But My Parents Were Nice, which you might want to check out at freedomainradio.com.
And so when we have either a great deal of social and economic cost to getting rid of silly beliefs that we have, i.e.
will I offend my parents and will they pull funding for my school, just sort of to make an example.
Or if I live with integrity, am I going to end up alienating my professors and flanking our teachers and flanking out of school?
Am I going to have to ditch all my socialist, irrational, mystical friends?
I mean, well... I'm not going to kid you.
Well, you know, probably. Probably you will have to do those things if you want to live with integrity.
And all I'm saying is you don't have to do any of those things.
You don't have to confront the people in your life.
You don't even have to live with integrity, but you want to make sure that you're aware that you're not living with integrity if you hang on to corrupt people within your life.
And I'm sure that you've got a great, somewhat of a sense of this from the videos, but I go into this in more detail in my podcast.
Okay. So we have these kinds of natural ethics within us, a simple, clean, normal, healthy, rational, empirical ethics, and then we have all of this nonsense that's layered on top of us that's kind of damaging to us, right?
It's like if you have simple beliefs in eating, like, you know, eat what tastes good in moderation, and then you get yourself all messed up with, you know, heavy dieting and bulimia and so on, it's the same kind of thing.
We have a natural desire and natural processing, and it gets all mucked up with all these falsehoods.
And the reason that I'm talking about all of that is that I'm going to take a swing at this dream, to whatever degree of success I can, I'm going to take a swing at this dream, and it's going to really be based on this kind of analysis of dreams, that dreams are trying to tell us something a lot more simple than the convoluted abstractions that we generally have been raised to believe in.
And of course in one of these, one of these is religion and Jesus, right?
Now, This dream is about a parting of the ways from a community.
So I'll sort of go into some of the metaphors at work in here and we'll talk about how that sort of all starts to fit together.
So of course this gentleman is starting out in the dream, walking along with his two best friends and possibly his girlfriend.
And they're in a desert.
I mean, this is very important.
It's very important to understand. When your unconscious is manufacturing a dream, just think of it as like a director.
A director can choose any location.
Your unconscious has kind of like an unlimited budget and a Steven Spielberg kind of auteurism.
And so why a desert, right?
Everything that's in a dream, like everything that's in any piece of art, Is there for a reason, and because it could be any particular location, but it's one location, that's very important to understand.
And of course, there's lots of metaphors around Jesus.
Jesus spent 40 days in the desert and ended up being tempted by Satan, and so on.
So, he starts in a desert with his friends.
Now, the fact that he has friends in this desert, and the friends are in the desert, It's pretty important as well, because what it means is that he's not in a place where he can stay.
A desert is a very important metaphor in a dream.
It's a place where you just can't stay.
So that's an important thing to understand.
He has to be on the move.
You can't pitch tent and stay in a desert because there's no water, right?
Of course, water figures quite a bit later in the dream.
So the first thing to recognize is that he's in a place where he can't stay and he's in motion with other people.
And the other people are not calling to him from an oasis, so they're not part of his future, they're part of his past.
he's walking out of the desert with his friends so they're part of his past and they're part of an arid, empty, non-fertile, non-hydrated, unsustainable environment so this would be, I would guess the people that were his friends or his family, his community when he was growing up who taught him to be a Christian it's a desert, it's something you can't sustain and he obviously has a natural bent towards integrity which I enormously applaud
and of course a great deal of intelligence so that's going to cause some problems in his somewhat blind in the question of blind faith or blind prejudice towards a particular religious paradigm now So...
Then you end up in a cavern.
He's in a cavern and he's on a ledge.
The ledge goes down into an abyss.
He is there with his friends and he doesn't look down.
He's in a cavern so he's now enclosed and he's on a ledge.
So, what this suggests to me is that, you know, when you go from the outside to the inside in a dream, it's usually the case that you're going from a social or external environment into your own interior environment.
And so, in the outside world, there is a desert, and on the inside, in the introspective, in the soul, there is a chasm which you can barely stand in because the ledge is only one foot wide, which falls...
To an abyss. So we have two situations here which are non-sustainable.
One is the desert where he has to leave for fear of dying of thirst.
And the other is a cavern where he has to kind of get back to the desert.
And there's a ledge where he can fall forever.
And of course the fall is also associated with A lack of faith in God.
Obviously, Lucifer is the head angel when he began to have doubts about God, fell, and this was, of course, the creation of hell and of Satan and of the other devils.
And, of course, the fall of man is involved with the eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden.
I have a podcast on that one as well called, I think it's called Fleeing Eden, which you might want to check out about as well.
So... On the outside is a desert and on the inside is an abyss.
So we have two arid, empty, lifeless areas.
And I would say that introspection is impossible when you buy into an external mythology.
When you believe in an external mythology, you no longer explore yourself.
You're now exploring the imagination of people who came before you and the kind of dictatorial imagination that's mistaken for the real world.
So when people believe in God and so on, Then it's their imagination that you're exploring.
So your inside kind of gets excavated and hollowed out.
Because you're not exploring your own internal mental processes and imaginations and creativity.
You're simply manipulating the symbols that have been created and given to you by other people.
So it's empty inside.
It's a desert on the outside and it's empty inside.
So at the beginning of the dream he has an external desert and an internal cave and an abyss where he again can't stay.
Now... His friends leave before he does.
Again, this is very important.
His friends don't have to do that in the dream, because it's his dream.
They can do anything that they want.
So in this case, his friends and possibly his girlfriend are in the cave with him.
He's terrified of heights, and we would assume that because they're his friends, they know that he's terrified of heights.
And so they should be there to help him, but they don't.
It's very important in the dream.
Everything that happens in a dream is indicative of something very important.
So his friends don't help him in the cave.
They just bugger off, and he's left to fight his way out, or to find his way out, or to get his way out, living in terror, alone on a ledge, facing an abyss that he can't even look down.
So if he falls, he's going to fall forever.
This is usually a metaphor for a personality wherein the ego strength is not strong enough to give up on illusions.
So if you believe a lot of stuff that people have told you, like religion or statism or stuff public school teachers tell you or nationalism, patriotism and so on, if you believe all of that stuff, then your insight has kind of withered because all you're doing is living in the fantasy world of other people rather than having a real identity of your own.
Usually, when you're in a situation in a dream where you look down and it looks like you're going to fall forever, the dream is indicating that you do not have the ego strength to give up those illusions, that it's going to be quite dangerous to you.
It's going to be dangerous for you from a psychic standpoint, from a psychological standpoint, that you're not ready yet.
The dream is talking about that.
First, he's in an outside desert world, and then he starts to introspect And his friends come with him, but then they balk because they can't see his emptiness any more than he can see his own emptiness.
So he's left alone.
His friends leave him.
And that's important, right?
They leave him behind when he's afraid of heights and hanging on a ledge.
These are not good friends, right?
The dream is very clear about that.
These are not real friends.
And, of course, there is a question about the girlfriend, which we'll get to as well.
So you get to a canyon.
Now, of course, a canyon is a unity of the two, right?
At the beginning, he's got a split in his topographical landscape, his psychological landscape.
He's got a desert and he's got a canyon.
Sorry, he's got a desert and he's got a cave with an abyss.
The two are separated by the roof of the cave.
Now he's coming to something that's got slightly more integrity to it, because he has a canyon in the desert, right?
So it's no longer bounded by the lid of the cave, so there's slightly more integration between these two, right?
So it represents progress of sorts.
At least he can now see down into the abyss, although he's still terrified of falling down.
There is progress in terms of bringing these images together in a productive way.
Now, he's got to get the Jesus Bunny across this canyon to this city, so he starts to build a bridge with his friends, and the bridge is composed of large flat rocks or pieces of paper.
Now, I do know that this gentleman is attending a university.
He studies on the side.
He reads a lot of articles and so on, and of course there are The stuff that I put out is obviously rationalistic, hyper-scientific, atheistic, and so on.
And I know that he's listened to a lot of the podcasts and probably read a lot of my articles.
I'm not saying it's just me, but there is a bridge that he is trying to build.
So he's trying to merge.
He's trying to get to the city.
He's trying to get over to the other side of this canyon using blocks of paper, which would indicate books or would indicate reading.
He's trying to build a bridge from the desert to a city.
He thinks that's his destination.
So he feels, and what I would say is this is a metaphor for...
Is that he believes that the more he studies, the more he learns, the closer he's going to get to God.
So he's trying to build a bridge across a canyon to get to a city, the City of God.
It's a famous book by Augustine, and it's something that is generally talked about in terms of religion.
So he's trying to build a bridge across to this city using knowledge, using books, using learning, and he's trying to get his friends and he's trying to get the Jesus bunny.
Obviously the Jesus bunny is an Easter reference, resurrection and so on.
The Easter bunny is, you know, death and resurrection is very common in these kinds of things.
And so he's trying to use knowledge and learning to build a bridge from the desert of his past to the city of God that he wants to get to.
And then what happens is he feels, again, it's very narrow, right?
It's a very narrow space, but he feels no fear where he should feel fear, right?
This is sort of very important.
He feels no fear when he is crossing this bridge that is composed of these pieces of paper or rock.
And of course, if you're going over a huge canyon on a one-foot-wide bridge with no railings or anything, then it would be logical, I think, to feel fear.
So the fact that he's not feeling fear indicates a dissociation of some kind.
It's not a healthy thing to feel no fear when you're in a situation of having fear.
The dream is pretty specific.
And of course, the fear is realized as we move forward in the dream.
So, the interesting thing that happens then is that these dwarves or aliens build, like he's sort of building, he's building a bridge over to City of God, and then a bridge extends from the City of God, these guys race up it, grab the Jesus Bunny and vanish back to the city, leaving him in mid-air.
This, I think, is quite important.
As he gets closer to the city of God, which is where he wants to get to, where he wants to get to, then people race towards him, rescue the money, and then the bridge collapses and he falls.
This is, I think, quite important.
If you've ever been close with religious people, you will find that as you go down the path of knowledge towards enlightenment and rationalism, they will initially be interested in the way that Augustine was when he began working on his texts in the 12th century or something.
But as you continue to gain and talk about facts and you begin to get exposed to more scientific and logical kinds of theories about reality and about the world and about psychology and so on, then you will absolutely be rejected by these people, right? So they're, hey, you know, great, he's thinking, he's learning, that's wonderful, but as you continue to think and learn, you will end up being rejected by the religious people.
With the possibility that's not very high, that some of the religious people will join you in your journey.
But of course that's going to move them further away from the religion, from the city of God that's in this dream.
So this is important to understand that the dream in the bridge that's coming from the city of God, the little guys who run up it are mutants or dwarfs or aliens.
They're not... Healthy, vibrant, vital human beings.
Again, very, very important.
The dream doesn't have to make them into mutants or dwarves or aliens.
It could make them into, I don't know, like Brad Pitt-looking fellows who are shiny and confident and happy and so on.
And so the fact that the dream is putting them out as mutants means that mutants live in the city.
There is a distortion.
There is a warping. There is a negative aspect towards living in this city.
And they don't want you to get there.
The people who live in the city do not want you to get there, right?
Because they build a bridge to you, they snatch the Jesus money, and then they run away and your bridge collapses.
Let me just make sure I've got that correct.
Bridge extended from the other side, and then the bridge reversed, right?
You have a religion with you, with the Jesus Bunny.
You're trying to get to the city because that's your goal, and you say it's to get the Jesus Bunny there, but this person is religious, and so he has this aspect.
But then the people who live in the city turn out to be mutants.
They come and snatch Jesus and leave this guy behind.
And then he falls.
This is very important.
He wants to get to the city.
He thinks it's a good thing. But the dream clearly points out it's not a good thing.
And again, you have this betrayal.
People leaving him behind on a ledge.
Now in the first one, in the cave, his friends and possibly his girlfriend leave him behind.
And then he makes his way out to the canyon.
But in this aspect, he's not so lucky.
He's more extended now, because he's starting to learn.
He's starting to read about non-religious theories, or anti-religious theories, although I'm not anti-Christian anymore than I would be anti-leprechaun.
He is now in a state where he's trying to learn and starting to learn, and these people build a bridge out to him and snatch the bunny and then leave him behind again.
People who he thinks are his friends, he wants to get to the city, they turn out to betray him, and he's not so lucky.
He can't go back. He can't go back.
So the whole dream is about moving forward, and he's building this bridge across to this city with books or with learning or with knowledge.
But then when the Jesus bunny is snatched from him, when he begins to have a crisis of faith, you can't unlearn what you've learned.
You can't unlearn the English language.
You can't pretend that you don't know the words to happy birthday anymore.
And so you can't unlearn what it is that you've learned.
So he doesn't have the option of going back along the road of learning that he's come from.
He falls. Now he falls to what's at the bottom of this city.
And there's lots of complicated stuff in here.
I won't get into it in too much detail because I'm already at 31 minutes.
But he falls down and doesn't die.
So in the first, he has an abyss in the first one.
Now he's got learning, he's got knowledge, he's got the ego strength to survive a fall.
The fall being the giving up of the illusion of religion and the virtue of Jesus.
And the virtue, of course, of all of the people who told him about religion.
Because religion is not about virtue.
Religion is about money and control and so on.
Organized religion, as we've talked about.
And so he then has the ego strength at this point, although it's terrifying, to look into the abyss, to look down and to fall.
And he falls into water, which of course has a kind of resurrection and a kind of baptism to it.
But what's very interesting is that he goes into a bathroom.
So again, there's sort of more water. Now, the bathroom is supposed to be at the bottom of this city.
And in the bathroom he's thinking of taking a pee.
He takes a pee but the water is kind of up to his waist.
So it's like he's peeing into his own environment.
He's peeing into his own circumstance, his own physical environment.
And that's kind of interesting because he's actually made it to the city.
But the city isn't anything.
The city isn't anything that he thinks of.
And the interesting thing is that the dream clearly points out that the people who live in the city are midgets.
And down at the base of the city is water that for him is waist high and for a midget would be over his head.
So he's outgrown the water.
He's outgrown a sort of primitive way of living which is entirely underwater, entirely out of the clear air, entirely slow and immobile.
In water you can't really run or anything like that.
I don't really quite understand the whole peeing thing, but certainly it's a kind of self-soiling, which he's now conscious of.
If you just live in water, then I don't know if a fish even knows that it's peeing, or a fish even pee.
But I'm not going to try and guess what that all means.
That's a little bit too much for me to get at the moment.
Certainly I could ponder it, but the time is running a little slight.
And so...
Definitely there's hostility in it, because it reminds him of a scene in Fight Club where the Tyler Durden character pees in a soup and then hands it out to people and so on.
And, you know, from that standpoint, it certainly could be seen that people who are supposed to be giving you something nutritious and healthy, like a bowl of soup, who've actually peed into it, could be analogous to people who are trying to give you something healthy for your mind, which is truth and knowledge and wisdom and virtue, and who are soiling it with their own projections, right?
With their own fantasies, with their own beliefs about religion.
And this actually is bad for you, right?
Drinking pee isn't good for you, I can imagine, even if it's in a nice consomme.
And so we actually do have, I think, a fairly clear dream.
And the dream is really around a journey away from religion.
This person specifically says that he believes in Jesus, that he believes in the pacifism of Jesus, and he has trouble with some of the libertarian ethics around retribution.
And what was the other phrase that he used?
Retribution... And restitution.
Retribution and restitution.
So, in the dream, you know, he starts in a very primitive place, a place that's unsustainable and a place with companions.
And then he ends up in a place where he's alone.
He's kind of gotten to the root of the city of God, which is a toilet, right?
I mean, I think that's a little savage, but we need to accept these things that our unconscious is telling us so that we can find balance.
Sometimes the unconscious will overstate the case if we're really resistant to it.
But he's trying to get the Jesus bunny to the city.
He gets snatched from him.
He gets left behind. His friends have vanished.
His girlfriend has vanished. And then he ends up falling into urinals and sort of peeing himself in his own environment.
But he's able to look into an abyss because he looks down when he's climbing the canyon.
He's able to fall and he's able to survive the fall and to see what's on the other side.
And so, of course, when we give up illusions, the reason that it's so frightening to us is because we know that they're false and we know what's on the other side of giving up illusions, especially heavily socially sanctioned illusions such as a belief in religion and so on.
So, down at the bottom, he's been clearly betrayed by his friends in the cave and he doesn't notice it.
And then he clearly gets betrayed by the people who are building the bridge and snatching the bunny and leaving him to fall.
And he's not noticing it either.
And the last thing that I'll say about this dream is that I certainly would question, I would ask this gentleman to question the value of virtue and loyalty of his friends, and possibly even more painfully, I would suggest that he looks into the behavior of his girlfriend because if he's afraid of heights and his girlfriend is doing things that make him nervous without talking him through it, without helping him, without whatever, then that's not necessarily the most considerate thing either.
By the by, also I'm aware that this gentleman, his girlfriend, has left her home because her mother is overbearing and unbearable.
That also probably has some bearing on the dream as a whole Because the Christian virtue of forgiveness, and if your enemy asks you to walk a mile with him, walk two, and if he asks you for your cloak, give him your shirt as well, that is quite contrary to what is going on between his girlfriend and his girlfriend's mother, wherein an interpersonal relationship is found to be unsustainable due to corruption on the parental side, which is quite common.
Then his girlfriend is certainly not going by the ethics that he goes by or professes to believe in.
So his attraction towards libertarianism and a more rational kind of philosophy is directly contradictory and is beginning to expose to him The hypocrisy of what goes on in religious circles, where knowledge is claimed that doesn't really exist.
And he's getting down to the root of religion, which is that he's outgrowing religion, and I think that the dream is telling him that you can't go back, you have to keep pressing on, and what you need to do is to recognize that you've now gotten to the root of something, and it's really quite unpleasant.
It's really quite horrible.
And it is a horrible kind of recycling of bad things to pee into your own water.
And so I would say that to recognize what's at the root of religion is quite important.
To recognize that you can't go back is quite important.
And to recognize that if you do take on a rational kind of philosophy, you are going to come into direct conflict with religion.
With statism, with patriotism, with your family, probably, not necessarily definitely, but probably, with your friends and so on.
That once you go down towards the path of trying to become enlightened and trying to think for yourself and learn for yourself, it's an enormous amount of social hostility which comes out of that from other people.
Because they know exactly what you're doing.
They know exactly where you're going.
They just don't want it.
It's one thing for you to fall off the...
The bridge over the canyon.
But what happens when you begin to really learn the truth about the world is other people feel like you're pushing them down an abyss in a cave.
And that's usually quite... They really quite can't handle that because it feels like a kind of murder.
It's quite a difficult process to go through, but well, well worth it on the other side.
I'm sorry that I didn't get to the second dream.
I will soon. And I'll also try and figure out this peeing thing, because I'm not totally satisfied with what I've managed to get out of that.
But I will do the next dream, which was actually posted before this one, in the next podcast, and see if I can't sort of suss out the wee-wee.
Thanks so much for listening.
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