Horse Dreams

 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.