One’s heart sinks on opening the newspaper or computer. There is nothing to alleviate, nothing to counterbalance, the negative, the fierce abyss and clamor of what I can only call evil. By evil I mean a person who distrusts

his higher self and is out of touch with it. By evil I mean a person who has options, and chooses what will be beneficial for them and harmful to the community at large. The impression, moreover, is that collectively we are on a runaway engine and nothing can stop its accelerating pace of frenzied fear and panic any more than one can stop the unending lies with which the country is peppered. No one even reacts.

It is this background that must have an impact on our daily lives however secluded we live, however insulated we are by the nature of our work.

There is no way to avoid the omnipresent pall hanging over our houses, our land, and our families. No way to protect our loved ones from this plague of barbarism that is engulfing us. I do not think it is less so elsewhere. Why should it be? The world is a spiderweb, intricate to an exquisite degree, and we are caught, all of us, by its corruption, a corruption that we have created everywhere.

It is with this backdrop that the patient speaks of his preoccupation with a beloved brother from whom emotional separation has left him bereft. There would seem to be no way of speaking with this brother, any more than one can speak seriously to a Karzai or Zardari or Kadafi. No! One would be able to talk with them but at peril to your life, certainly at peril to your moral values. To touch them is like touching sticky flypaper. There seems to be no way to be free of the glue. America has gone abroad and spread mayhem, given away the people’s money by the billions with no end in sight and no way out.

PATIENT HISTORY

The patient is Frank, a 53-year-old man who is a writer and a director of commercials and whom we have met before in other essays of mine, “Tear Down the House,” “Roundabout,” and “Reflections on the Global Financial Crisis.” I am putting forward the patient’s dreams and thoughts about the dreams as the patient remembered it.

FIRST DREAM

There are two packets of seeds. I am immediately aware that the first packet is dead. It has no pulse. I am horrified by this in the dream, for some reason convinced that it means the death of my only brother. There is a second packet of seeds that I know is alive and has a pulse. I feel it. Yes, there is a pulse. Somehow I know that the pulse is 100.

SECOND DREAM

Plants have now grown. They are nearly the height of a young man that seems very much like my brother, but not quite. These plants are wide-leafed, tropical and strange. They have bulbous green ends that seem to be a combination of a potato and an onion. But my brother has reached his arms around one of the plants and is trying to rip it out of the ground, pulling it back and forth to tear it loose from its roots. He’s filled with rage and I call out to him, trying to calm him, trying to get him to stop, but he doesn’t listen to me.

ASSOCIATIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS

I had awful feelings about both dreams. In waking life I have a very contentious relationship with my brother who feels that I am living my life badly. He does not agree with the choices I’ve made. Much of this has to do with the work that I’m doing with Dr. Bail, my unwillingness to just live a straightforward life now, my divorce, my reworking my career in a major way, the belief I’ve expressed that dreams are a primary source of awareness, even knowledge.

Dr. Bail said that in the dream I am trying to talk about the dead packet as those things that are manmade. One example of this is agribusiness. Another is people living their lives (for instance my brother) according to human precepts, not truly living things. The second packet of seeds that are alive is from the Divine. These are the seeds that have always existed, have always been available to us and are not reworked for profit by agribusiness, etc. And, of course, these living seeds are a metaphor for all things that exist around us that are made by the Divine, not humans.

The plants that my brother attacks are those things that have grown from the Divine. They are a representation of the Divine Itself. In this dream my brother represents all those people who want to destroy what is Divine because they want to be God themselves. They want to be in control. But Dr. Bail pointed out that the Greeks knew all about that. The end for these people is never good. It will not be good for the people today who wish to supplant the power of the Divine with their own power.

He also noted that this Divine plant has the nourishment of the potato as well the tastefulness and many layers of the onion. A wonderful plant: nutritional, multilayered and tasty.

This dream captures so much of how I’m feeling right now as I look at the state of the world: the multiple wars in the Middle East, the brutally corrupt corporate bleeding of our country, unabated global warming, oil spills, the banking schemes, the real estate crises, the CEOs walking away from it all with huge bonuses, some of whom are now using that money to run for prestigious government office—governorships, the Senate—an awful time. The arrogant rich not caring about the growing suffering of those “beneath” them, in fact rolling back the laws that might have protected the less fortunate. All of this is a direct attack on what all the religions have, more often than not, made clear is the intent of God.

COMMENTARY

So the patient feels there is no way out in the dilemma with his brother. His associations to the packet of seeds, the dead seeds that had no pulse, was the agribusiness: big business giving the people false food instead of nutritive as had been available for thousands of years. There is further knowledge in the pulse of 100, certainly too fast for a human being. But it is symbolic in nature, meaning we should look at the number one, or the unity of the Divine. We have our food through Divine intent as all has been planned on earth by Divine intent. The choice is clear. If man chooses to go with the dead packet of seeds, he too will die from lack of nourishment of his body. If he will not die physically, his connection to Source, his soul, will perish and all that makes him human will die.

The patient’s second dream is even more interesting in that these people, that is the movers and shakers of the world, the country, the cities, see that the tree yields a potato and an onion. Again one has to look at the symbolism of these two entities. The potato nourishes the body and has long been held as a staple for that purpose. The onion, with its many layers, is like the layers of the unconscious. It nourishes the mind and soul. As one peels the layers one after the other, we come to our higher selves and in this state of mind we can access the Divine. It is understood that peeling the layers of the onion involves the individual learning and working through all the problems, all the turmoil in his or her own life. There is a joy in being able to access Source that is hard to put into words. Perhaps Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” comes close to describing that feeling.

It is clear this brother represents the barbarians with whom one cannot talk. He represents the profit-minded who, though able to buy food, are poor and hungry. The dream reveals a wonderful symbol because try as he might he cannot uproot the tree. It is again the arrogance the Greeks knew and had written about so clearly. That tree cannot be uprooted. Man cannot uproot the Divine. Many have tried and all have perished.

ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY

I append my remarks because it has come to my attention, through the work of David DeGraw in his book The Road to 2012: Revolution or World War 3, that there is an international cartel of bankers that have in mind to impoverish the various countries which they control by manipulating the currency and with clever banking practices. That way they can hold these countries hostage. This is already known.

Enough documentaries have been made and distributed by independent filmmakers recording the painful destruction of the land, of the careless depletion and pollution of ocean resources as well as the pollution of the atmosphere. There are documentaries about multinational companies who have been buying water rights around the world, especially where water is plentiful and fresh. They have gone so far as to introduce to the natives of some of these countries the concept that if they want water they will have to buy it. The water will no longer belong to the people. This was stopped in one South American country by the courageous action of a few people who aroused and engaged the populous who put an end to this practice. Certainly these documentaries reveal a plan, put into effect many years ago, which has brought these unnamed individuals to a threshold of enslaving huge populations. It is further interesting that nearly all western countries are retrenching the policies of decades that ensured the citizens of security in old age and in illness. Strikes are currently going on in France, where the workers are protesting this retrenchment.

There is a great movement in this country to move the clock back to the policies of Depression days. Likewise in England. David DeGraw’s book documents this movement with astonishing accuracy, explaining in detail its unfolding.

I write this because I think it is exceedingly cogent to this essay and I remind everyone that such attempts to enslave have been a hallmark of civilization from the beginning of recorded history and probably before as well. In the past it was attempted by military means, and great military leaders are still remembered on the basis of their temporary success and the strategies they used to win wars. The fact that there have been such unending conflicts points to something in man’s nature or nurture that prompt this behavior. The good news is that none have truly been successful for long periods of time. Today this trend is continued by war. War is an outmoded vehicle and this is becoming more apparent in our bogged-down efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For this group of men war is good. As our ex-president once said, “War is good for this country,” but I noticed he exempted himself from actually serving in a war. So one must conclude war is good for you and me, not good for him, likewise his executive officer Mr. Cheney. War is good. It makes a profit for some but it impoverishes a country. The politicians can say that the people have to sacrifice for patriotic reasons. War keeps rivalries and hatreds alive. It stresses differences and inflames them and, to implement war, there is always the international banking scene; those in charge of making policy for the world, telling the puppets, supposedly prime ministers or presidents, what to do and buying the politicians to ensure that their policies are carried out by law.

The question is who are these people psychologically, for it is that unconscious drive that propels them from whatever strata of society they come. Fundamentally they are infants who feel their mothers are terrifyingly powerful. The key word here is terrifying. They propose never to be dominated by the likes of this kind of person. They have strong egos—all of these individuals have strong egos—that brook no interference about their ascent. A second path to preeminence is to become this terrifying mother and go forward with this energy, which in the adult world frightens everyone. Leaders like Stalin and Hitler were such people. They turned down the possibility of the art of love, for which all human beings have the potential. They plowed that under and turned it into the art of hate.

Mankind has reason to be fearful of this new assault on their freedom, for the impoverished, the diminished, have no freedom. Mankind then will be subject to an unconscious imprint that enslaves them and a conscious one that actually does so in their everyday lives.

The history of man shows that he has always looked outward to the conscious, to the intellect. It is now imperative for mankind to look inward to the great and infinite unconscious that can yield all the answers. When that day comes, world globalization will no longer be a word that brings disgust and loathing for what it has done to huge segments of the population. The time will come when it will suggest true fraternity, true amity, to all the members of this island, whirling in space, called the world.

September 2010