I am a hippie-dippie mystic Christian. This is the kind of weird thing that can happen when you relentlessly pursue truth and are okay with whatever you are shown, even if it doesn’t fit your existing paradigm. Things are really coming together for me. Today, I am thinking of three dreams.

1. I had went to bed feeling furious at some local conservative Christians who were holding signs about how God is displeased with homosexual individuals. I was really having some unkind thoughts about them. Then in my dream, God handed me a mirror. When I looked into it, I saw Fred Phelps, the now-deceased leader of the nutty Westboro Church that has the “God hates gays” rhetoric. This dream shocked me to the core, as surely I had nothing in common with “those people.”

2. I had been contemplating spraying the wasps in the Mad Kitty office house. My husband Greg had already sprayed them once, but many had persisted and continued to buzz around. I made a mental note to buy more wasp spray. When I went to sleep that night, I dreamed that I was spraying the wasps. As I sprayed, I became the wasp, and began to asphyxiate as the wasp spray hit my face. I woke up gasping for breath and reached for my inhaler. I decided not to spray the wasps. The next day, I asked God to take care of the wasps, and went across the street and politely asked the wasp friends if they would move somewhere else where they wouldn’t scare people. They did.

3. In another dream, I was a chicken. Specifically, a chicken in a chicken plant about to be beheaded. I felt sick with fear. I watched the other chickens die first, and then I knew it was my turn. I resolved to give my life bravely. This dream was the culmination of several other dreams I had had in which eating meat, especially in excess, was compared to rape and cannibalism. I also once had a vision of the roast chicken I was about to eat being a corpse. It was just a temporary little shift in reality that began to open my eyes. After the latest dream, I made the commitment to become a vegetarian.

What these dreams are all saying is that we are ONE. We are one with people we hate (so what’s the point of hating?) and one with those we love. We are one with the environment around us. If we could see the way reality is structured, with nothing being solid, but us all being swirling masses of atoms with space between, we’d understand how much we affect one another and how alike we all actually are. I believe Jesus addressed this. He says: But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.” He also states, ” I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Regarding this last example, if we look at someone lustfully, we deceive ourselves if we think our thoughts stop at our skull. Remember, we are energy, and that includes our thoughts, the waves of which can be measured with an EEG. When one thinks of someone lustfully, those thoughts go out there into the whole, and can even affect the one being thought about. I know this because starting about two years ago, I began to be able to pick up on this stuff. It is like involuntary mind-reading. I’ve had it confirmed enough times to be convinced that we have much less “privacy” than we think, lol.

I know this is not typical Christian stuff. But I’ve discovered one of the keys to freedom is being able to hold conflicting ideas together at the same time, because they might not actually conflict with one another at all. For example, let’s take the idea of sin, possibly the most unpopular topic of all time.

When we sin (behave in selfish, exploitative ways; think hateful and impure thoughts) we literally pollute the people and things around us, since we are all connected. If you are part of an ocean, you cannot decide to be poison and think it will not affect the rest of the ocean. And when a whole bunch of people are okay with being poison (producing and consuming pornography, abusing others, using people sexually, greedily consuming too many resources, etc.) then the entire ocean becomes yuk. I’ve learned that everything that the apostle Paul names as sin in the Bible is in fact sin — something I resisted for years and only came to terms with through dreams and hard experience.

So if we fulfill the great commandment — to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves (because that is EXACTLY what our neighbor IS!!), then we move back to the unfallen state of the garden. Where the lion is lying down with the lamb, where there is no hatred, political divisions or other false ideas. We cannot hate another without hating ourselves. (Yes, this applies to you, Trump haters! And also to you, Obama haters!) When we manage to love everyone, we are going to learn the most amazing thing — that we ourselves are so very very loved.

Here is where my Christianity really comes into play. I was completely unable to love everyone before I decided to surrender my life to Jesus. But when I realized how REAL He is, and how He is the most loving teacher ever, I said, “Flow through me. Use my life.” And that has made all the difference. We cannot do it on our own. Our lower-self/ego/selfishness is simply too strong for us to deal with without us choosing to be connected to the “true vine.” Without that connection, we wither away, lost and overwhelmed in the polluted ocean. Connect yourself to that ultimate power! What once felt like slogging through life will feel like surfing. 😀