| Dear John, In his autobiography, The New Path, Swami Kriyananda shares a fascinating dream: “I was living with many other people in a torture chamber. For generations our families had lived here, knowing no world but this one; the possibility of any other existence simply never occurred to us. One awoke, one was tortured, and, at night, one found brief respite in sleep. What else could there be to life? “The time came, however, when a handful of us began to think the unthinkable. Might there, we asked ourselves, just possibly be another, a better way of life? Moments snatched when our torturers were out of earshot, and we could share our doubts with a few friends, served to kindle our speculations. At last we determined that there simply had to be an alternative to being tortured. A small group of us decided to rebel. “We laid our plans carefully. One day, rising together from our tasks, we slipped up behind the torturers, slew them, and escaped. Sneaking cautiously out of the great room, fearing lest armies of torturers be lying in wait for us outside, we encountered no one. The torture chamber itself, it turned out, occupied only the top floor of a large, otherwise empty building. We walked unchallenged down flights of stairs, emerging from the ground floor onto a vast, empty plain. Confined as we’d been our whole lives in the torture chamber, the horizon seemed incredibly distant. Joyfully we inhaled the fresh air. Gazing about us, we all but shouted the previously never-imagined word: ‘Freedom!’ “Before departing the building forever, we glanced up at the top floor, scene of the only life we’d ever known. There, to our astonishment, we saw the very torturers we thought we’d slain. They were going matter-of-factly about their business as though nothing had happened! Amazed, we looked to one another for an explanation. “Suddenly the answer dawned on me. ‘Don’t you see?’ I exclaimed. ‘It’s ourselves we have conquered, not the torturers!’ “With that realization, I awoke. I felt that this dream held an important message for me. The torture chamber, located as it was on the top floor of the building, symbolized the human mind.” |
