Hi Everybody! This is Leo Volont with a new Formal Blog (you can see that the Japanese Screen is up). This one is entitled “Horse Dreams”. SO, let’s get started.
1 Recently I did a video entitled “Friendship
Love and True Discernment” where I spoke of a Goddess-Like Hollywood Girl who
loved riding Horses. The Story she told involved a Spooked Stallion who took
off in a frenzied gallop, but whom she was able to calm down using a Gestalt of
soothing vocalizations and body language, and then she summed up her story by saying,
“They Understand, you know”. Well, I
mentioned to her at that time, long ago, that her story recalled to mind some
of the Horse Dreams that I had had just a few years before. Well,
since it had been such a long time ago, well, I was curious enough to
want to try to refresh my memory and so I dug around through my old dream files
and found one of those dreams. This
Dream came to me early on in my Spiritual Path, and so even I was wondering how
I’d explain it all now, if I gave myself some time to think about it. Well, let’s find out what I come up with.
2 My dream started as I came walking off the
Main Local Route and onto the residential street where I had grown up, but
there was a large overlay of unfamiliar details, as though the Reality Facade of
my Old Street hid about as much as it wanted to show, but the Dream brought it all
into view. Behind the row of Houses should have only been
a field before a forest, but where my Higher Dream Mind had set up a Fair
Ground. Featured was a Band playing
music, but belonging to the Band was a large White Stallion. He was a Talking Horse, and he’d challenge various
of the Fair Goers to ride him. No, the
Horse was not overly vicious, never resorting to Rodeo Style bucking to violently
toss off his Riders, but nevertheless he’d ride off with such speed and
intensity that they wouldn’t be able to hold on.
3 The dream
was also giving me a strange hallucination, that the Appearance of the Horse
was somehow superimposed over the Being of a Pig. Yes, such a Vision probably should have made
me wary and suspicious of this Horse, or whatever it was, but only looking at
his behaviors, well, he Ran, Reared, Stood, Whinnied and Shook its Head like a
Horse, so I was more Puzzled than Judgmental, and was willing to believe that the
Outward Appearances here couldn’t be all wrong.
So I preferred to think of the Horse as being a Horse.
4 Then the
Horse galloped up to me and ordered me to “Get On!”. Well, what happened next was surprising. In real life I had very little riding
experience and had never taken any horse all the way up to a gallop. But I suddenly got this intuitive flash that
gave me a kind of a Riding Plan, a set of Dos and Don’t, and from that I knew that
I should Not ‘sit’ down in the saddle but rather stand up in the
stirrups, and that during his initial dash from the start I should lean
forward against the Force of his Acceleration, and then keep my body at a
constant height above the ground. That
would allow the Horse to bob up and down beneath me, as though I were flying
straight and level above him, you know, using the flexures of my knees and
ankles to smooth out the ride. Yeah, it
seemed that the other riders were being ‘bumped off’ by the Horse’s savagely oscillating
saddle. Really, at the time I was still
young enough to remember all my bicycle riding, where, before hitting a bump,
it became natural to stand up on the peddles, simply in order to save myself
the beating the seat would have given me.
5 The Dream was,
after all, yes, just a dream, but the kinetic feeling I had was like I was
actually riding this horse well and it seemed somehow miraculous that I
knew what to do. My Hollywood Horse Girl
Goddess had often described the various riding styles, even getting up off her
lounge, next to the pool, to pantomime her riding on what must have been a very short invisible horse. Yes, her Demonstrations gave me a real sense
of Déjà Vu. Yeah, although it would’ve
been metaphysically impossible, somehow I felt that the Riding Instructions she
gave me several years later had somehow retro-ed back in Time to help me Ride Out
that Horse Dream. But, yes, if she
really was a Goddess, well, then anything’s possible, right?
6 But while in the Dream, my apparent command as
a Rider did remain untested in one regards, because I never tried to steer. So I
allowed the Horse his Head and gave him full rein to go where ever he
pleased. My wish was only not to be thrown, which I set
myself up to accomplish by being as accommodating as possible while not making
any demands the Horse might resent me for.
And my Wisdom here was vindicated because the Horse did indeed have his
own preferred destination. It was a
Sandwich Stand across the Field on the far right corner near the Woods, so far
away from the rest of the Action that nobody was there but the Shop Keeper, an
Old Woman of Serious Disposition.
7 The Horse told me “Get me a Ham
Sandwich”. Okay, so I dismounted and
strode up to the Counter to place the order, but the Old Woman told me that
first she needed to visit the Rest Room.
Well, that made me a bit anxious about whether a Mood of Angry
Impatience might be a characteristic of a very Strong-Willed, Fast and Proud
Horse. But, as the Horse waited calmly, I
found I could begin to relax too.
8 After a short while the Old Woman returned
and made the Ham Sandwich, which she knew was for the Horse, but she included, at
no charge, a small side order of Sandwich Fixings for myself, apparently she
was concerned that I should have something to eat too. Now this time I was struck by the
impression that I had been both wrong about her and about the horse,
that both were kinder than I had judged them to be before. Then, as I brought the Horse his Ham Sandwich,
I realized he seemed entirely a Horse now, that the illusion of Piggishness had
vanished, and then it was that this main part of the dream came to a
close.
9 The Dream then seguewayed to myself becoming just
a Point of Consciousness where I was attending to my Father’s commenting on
this Dream. Yes, It was a Dream Critique within a Dream. My Father’s Dream Character was presented
elaborately as a stand in for Alistair Cooke, the dignified scholarly Old Man
that used to be the Host of Masterpiece Theater, an old BBC Series. He was dressed in Alistair’s suit, sat in the
same padded chair, and the Dream Scene used ostensibly the same
background of Library Book shelves as from the Masterpiece Theater’s original Sound
Stage. My Father was presenting the Thesis
that my Horse was internally a Pig but only because some Third Element was
missing from his mixture, which if once provided would make for a Fully
Integrated Horse. And there it was that the Dream ended and I
woke up.
10 Now what does all that mean? Well, although I was still young in this
Dream, just in my early twenties, well, this Dream still constituted something
of a Home Coming for me from College.
Where the Stage for the Band had been set up would have been right off
from my Family’s back yard. The Field
had been my playground all through my growing up. Where the Sandwich Shop appeared to be had
been a Cylindrical Water Tower, no, not
a large Bulbous Container being held up off the ground by tall steel legs, you
know, to give it the height it’d need to generate Water Pressure, but a Tank
going all the way down to the ground, being as wide at its Top as at its Bottom.
Yes, although the tower did not appear
to be atop of some obvious Hill, well, it must have been the High Ground for
the Community it would supply, and, yes, now that I think about it, there were mild
downhill stretches of road going in every direction from my neighborhood. And while I may have made that Water Tower
larger in my Childhood’s Imagination than in Actuality, still, it persists with
me even today that I grew up in the Shadow of the largest storage tank I’d ever
seen before or ever since.
11 I became curious about that old Water Tower and
so I brought up the Satellite Image of my old neighborhood on Google Maps, and I
hardly recognized the area. Everything’s
changed, with the old homes torn down to make room for more modern, more costly
houses, and it looked as though the original Water Tower had been replaced a
comparative Dwarf. But in the Dream, where
the tower would have been, there was just the Old Lady and her Sandwich Shop.
12 You know, if you’ve been following my Channel
long enough, the Dream Goddess Theme is a recurring one, and this Dream might
have been Her first appearance, manifesting as the Old Krone. The first observation I can make about Her,
well, it’s that She and her Sandwich Shop were substituted in for that
colossally large Water Tower, and Water is an often cited Symbol for
Life and Purification. Also, and this is
something I just thought about now, that we are now entering the Age of
Aquarius and Aquarius is “The Water Carrier”.
13 Then, this Goddess Symbol of the “Old Krone”, needing
to use a Rest Room, perhaps tells us that even the Gods have Necessities and
Contingencies they need to deal with, and therefore we can expect them to commiserate
with us, for as we must face our own Impossibilities, we know that they themselves
have their own Walls of Spiritual Laws they too must confront. Really, any Dimension, even the Higher Ones, are
defined by their Limitations, and even at the Very Top Peak of it All, we can
see that the Highest Transcendental God is limited by his utter Uselessness,
and Divine Bliss is but an empty Froth that floats above the Dark Deep Waters
of Substantial Existence.
14 And
Lastly, I suppose that by the Old Krone slipping me a side order I didn’t ask
for, well, that would suggest that the Gods are discerning enough to know what
we need even if we forget to pray for it, and the Graces are bestowed without
charging a fee.
15 There is also the Music that we would need to
account for, but it really didn’t seem to serve much more of a purpose than to
capture my attention. But I suppose the Music
here would suggest Angelic or Spiritual Influences. So that would mean that because the Horse
belonged to the Band, well, that would
make it something of a Spiritual or Magical Horse, wouldn’t it? But as a Symbol in itself what would the Horse
be representing? Well, we all have a
sense of what the Horse Archetype would signify for us, but the Big Question I
should need to answer is why I would see the Horse as a Pig. So, okay, let’s look into my Mind and see
what a Horse is and then what a Pig is. Well,
okay, I think that the Horse is the most noble and useful of all Animals, and
there has grown an Evolutionary bond between Horse and Man, really, Rider and
Horse, and that relationship goes back now over 5000 years. Just as
with Dogs and then later with Cats, Human Beings are now not complete anymore
without their Horses. Just look at how
we try to fill that Emptiness by assigning ‘personalities’ and ‘character’ to
our cars, motorcycles and airplanes, all of which Modern Times have made to be
our new ‘Horses’, and we can’t help but to see these inanimate replacements as
being ‘alive’.
16 I think
it would be interesting to recount Civilizations first encounters with Horse
and Rider. Yes, Ancient accounts tell
us that often People didn’t know what they were looking at when horse mounted Riders
first came galloping down from the Eurasian Steppes to terrorize the River
Valley Settlements, and we hear of reports describing their attackers as being Centaurs,
that is, Mythological Creatures that were Man above the waist and Horse
below.
17 Yes, it was a huge innovation for Humanity,
to subsume another Animal, making its Body an extension of our own. Yes, alone and left to his own two legs, Man would
live and die in the same Valley he was born
in, but turned Rider he’d crisscross a Continent, and we have the double scholarly
prongs of Archeological and Linguistic evidence to support this assertion, in
that the Indo-European Family of Languages, spawned by Barbarian Conquest, spread
concurrently with the Domestication of the Horse.
18 But what does a Pig mean to me? Well, to put it bluntly, pigs are Excrement
Eaters. Nasty, huh? Yeah, if you do a few cursory searches you will
not see ‘excrement’ as being a part of their preferred diet, but search
specifically for “Do Pigs Eat Excrement” and, yeap, they sure do. Now, today, we see pigs in the context of
Corporate Factory Farming with Feed Lots, and it’s cost effective enough just to
truck in the Corn, and we can assume that these Pork Producers would wish to
hide the unsavory fact that if left to themselves their Pigs could make well
more than one hearty meal from just a single serving of corn.
19 But now we should look at how most Traditional
Family Farms had operated throughout History, where the Pigs were not the
primary income source but just considered an efficient extra attached to the
Grain Farms and Gardens. You see, the
huge benefit of raising pigs would be that they could thrive on both Garbage
and Excrement, products that are generated across the entire Farming Complex,
from the Farmhouse to the barn and barnyard. Then if situated close to a village,
arrangements could be made to have all their ‘biomass’ waste carted back to the
Farm for free. Yeah, when I was World
Traveling, a common sight to see in the Third World was Cargo Bicyclists
transporting huge buckets of Excrement, which you wouldn’t need to see in order
to know what it was, and whenever I’d inquire about it, I’d be told it was “for
the pigs”.
20 Next, we must consider that we may be viewing
these Pigs from the Perspectives of two different Humanities, that is, one
Humanity that comes out of the Evolutionary Context of being Pastoral Nomads
whose primary honest incomes were derived from trade in sheep, goats and
cattle, or whatever animals they could
herd around from Seasonal Pastorage to Seasonal Pastorage. But pigs defy herding and besides that they
root up the ground which would destroy any good pastorage (and as we know from
Jane Austen that it’s always a crisis if the pig should ever get into the Garden),
and so it is that pigs must be penned up and so Pork is a meat source that can
only be produced from within Settled Communities and so Pork would become an
important part of the Civilized Urban diet.
21 So we can see why both the Arabs and the
Hebraic Jews, both sourcing from Pastoral Nomadic Lineage, would want to consider
Pigs to be “unclean”. A big driver for
their motivations must have been Economic, that Pork would undercut the Price
of Mutton in the Urban Centers. So going
in with the Barbarian Sword and telling a Conquered City that they can no
longer eat what they’ve always eaten before, but now must buy all their meat products
from Pastoral Nomads, well, we can see how the “Pigs are Unclean” narrative could
be very convenient excuse for those in the Sheep and Goat Industries, right?
22 Then, yes, at first glance we might think
that Humanity’s Collective Consciousness might have centered Itself from inside
the Civilized Settled Urban Populations, a biased predisposition in favor of
the best of all possibilities. But
an argument can be made for assuming that Humanity’s Character has been far
more greatly influenced by the Barbarians.
You see, the Heroic Ideal of the Barbarian Ethos largely evolved out
from the Pastoral Nomadic Peoples who were the first Horse Riders, and because
they were always traveling, they didn’t have fixed neighbors whose respect they
would need to earn and maintain, and so, any time before moving on to ‘Greener
Pastures’, well, first they’d look to steal anything worth carrying away, and then
carry it away fast enough on their horses so that no Civilized Peoples could
catch them.
23 From this the Riders became Raiders, evolving
into full time Predatory Bandits, and from there they evolved into
Conquerors. Then the Conquerors became the Aristocratic
Ruling Classes. Yes, a Social Moral
Religion can do much to civilize these Aristocrats, but the Barbarian Ethos is
in the Blood Lines of every King and Ruling Class, and it would be them who
would decide upon the Form and Quality of Humanity’s Social Ideals, and it's an
easy guess that their natural inclinations would to be Proud, not Pious.
24 Okay, so
if we can assume that there is already a kind of a Collective Consciousness subliminally
influencing Humanity, and if Humanity is Ethically split between the Social
Moral and the Barbarian Ideals, well, we would probably be conflicted, which is
what my Dream is probably demonstrating.
But, yes, while Asia seems to have an evolving sense of an
increasingly coherent Social Moral Ideal, well, the West is predominantly still
under the sway of the Barbarian Ethos.
25 Okay, so what does all that mean in the
context of my Dream, which presented the Horse as substantially just a Pig in
disguise. Well, what I think we are looking at is a symbolic accusation that
this particular Horse had abandoned its original Rider, the Hero of the Barbarian
Ethos. This apparently treacherous Horse
of my Dream was now seemingly setup to serve the Settled and Civilized Social
Moralists, that is, the despised Pig People. Yeah, the Pig Symbol might just have been a
Projection of Heroic Barbarian Contempt upon Social Moral Religious Ideals. Also, while I didn’t take a close look, my
guess is that the Band, the owners of the Horse in the Dream, were probably a
bunch of Hippies, which would have been fine by me, but my father would probably
have been predisposed differently. And
the Hippies did have a kind of a Social Moral Ideal, but unfortunately Hippies
never organized or created any lasting Institutions, (Because they were
Anarchists), and so when the fashions changed, the Hippies, and All the Good
they might have stood for, just faded out.
The Ideals of Peace, Free Love and Dope, along with whatever else the
Hippies collectively stood for, went the way of Bell Bottoms and even John
Lennon cut his hair while the rest of us cleaned ourselves up and went out
looking for jobs.
26 Yes, I can blame my father for Projecting Barbarism,
but as they say, “The Apple doesn’t fall far from the Tree”, and now when I
think back to my childhood, I did seem to be fully on board with the Barbarian’s
Heroic Ideal. For instance, when playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’
or ‘Soldier’, I was always either one Barbarian Ideal or the Other. And going to Church, from as early on as I can
remember, I’d feel an unspoken but tangible embarrassment. Yes, I would say my nightly prayers for my
Mother’s sake, but no friend would ever catch me praying, and as for the
Clergy, well, I wondered that Men didn’t leave such a soft and fussy profession
for the Girls, seeing the Religious Vocation as waste of a good sack of
balls. Really, I endlessly wondered why
all the Dads in the Church didn’t relentlessly tease the Pastor for being such
a big sissy boy. It all seemed quite
beneath my dignity. It was a case where
the Proudest Man in the Room was the Youngest Boy.
27 But, remember that Third Element that my
Father had spoken of? Well, what could
be added to the Mix that would redeem my Horse into being fully genuine? Well, at the time I never did figure out any
kind of an answer that would ring true for me.
Remember, I was involved in the Traditional Transcendental Style of
Spirituality for so long, where the Methodology is rather to strip factors away
until one is left with Absolutely Nothing and then THAT would become the answer,
really, just negating the Problem. But
here something would need to be Added and so I was left at a loss as to what
that could be.
28 But now that I’m a Spiritual Dualist, a
believer in Light vs Darkness, of Good vs Evil, well, that fills my
Intellectual Quiver with a lot more Arrows.
But I am also a Philosopher who realizes that Social Morality is an Aesthetic,
and not a Logic that can be reduced to Axiomatic Principles, but nonetheless
Aesthetically based Moral Systems can be Creatively Designed to achieve beneficial
objectives, worthy in themselves even if we can’t prove why. The Conceptual Structure that could manifest
such a Social Morality would be what we call an Idealization. The Third Element would be an Idealization.
29 So, my thinking is that the Horse could be
made whole if it could embody an Idealization to either replace the symbolic accusation,
or to deflect the projection, that it is a Pig. And such an Idealization could only be
concretely manifested through discipline, training, and what Horses are really
the most good at, taking Journeys and learning what the distant lands have to
Teach us. This would be a kind of Idealization
of Adventure, the Quest for Challenging Endeavors. An Ideal such as that would be at least as
Manly as Heroic Barbarism ever was, but without all the unpleasantness of Rape
and Rapine.
30 Yes, in the coming years I would have various
dreams of riding that Horse, once even at some formal riding school where the
horse and I had been rather adept at circling barrels. But the last important Dream I had regarding
my Horse started with this this Wise Old Man confronting me with his objections
that my Horse would pause too often to graze, and would stop too long in midstreams
to drink water, and such delays would impede my Journey!
31 Well, I was really a bit puzzled by that. Does not the Horse need to eat? Does he not need to drink? Time must be made for accommodating the
Necessities of Life, right? Yes, usually
I listen to the Wise Old Men in my dreams, but this one seemed like a Pushy Old
Crank. But he did make me think about my
Horse and so I ran back to the Camp to find him, and there he was. I found him self-abandoned in Deep Sleep in
a patch of flowering clover.
32 Really the scene was quite Archetypically
Idyllic, with green puffy trees and Spring flowers everywhere, and billowy white
clouds in a crisp blue azure sky. And my
Horse was like the beautiful Jewel in the Setting of that Dream Scene. I loved that Horse, but, yeah, maybe we were
both a bit on the lazy side and much of what we thought to be the Necessities
of Life were perhaps a bit more necessary than they strictly needed to be, and my
Horse was beginning to look a little bit too plump. Also, at the time I
had that Dream, I had decided to quit a Cult that had bogged me down for the
last 20 years, and I started thinking
for myself again. Yeah, remind me to do a video about that sometime.
33 But that
Dream of Blue Skies and Clover wasn’t finished yet. There was a trail ahead of us; a perfectly
straight trail going up a slope and continuing on into the far off distance, waning
away to the slenderness of a thread at the outer edge of my perspective. But it
was more a gradual ridge than a Mountain, and nothing that a Good Horse
couldn’t climb. So, yeah, we’d have a
long journey ahead of us, but we’d get to where we were going as long as we’d
just keep on moving.
So I guess that Horse Dream from a half
Century ago was perhaps about presaging this Long Journey, my Adventure in
Advancing the Cause for a Civilization based upon the Aesthetics of a Moral
Social Ideal of one kind or another.
Yes, and I suppose that determining the Details of such an Aesthetic
would be part of the Journey.
