MY OWN WALKING - December Journal 2025

 

I rarely remember dreams, if I do they are recognisably similar in nature. The one's where you are trying get somewhere, but constantly frustrated in your endeavours. I usually find when in this dream state, I am semi-conscious of what is going on but unable to really influence the direction of it, or relieve the frustration of the pursuit. I had one of this style of dream recently, and though I recognised the form of it, this one felt slightly different in what it highlighted.

The set up of these pursuit dreams are I'm usually travelling to a particular place. Here, however, I was trying to visit an old Buddhist friend, who I'd lost contact with. The frustration of the journey was in my progress being impeded by a whole series of things being subsequently lost, address books, bits of paper with telephone numbers on, and eventually my phone is stolen. Just when I'd think of a new way around one loss, another happens. Lines of communication were repeatedly failing, in all directions I was becoming lost. At this point I woke up, agitated and on edge. Every time I tried to relax and go back to sleep, this frustrating series of losses just resumed exactly where I'd left off. My psyche was stuck on repeat, as if it were insisting on something that it wished to emphasise.

It is tempting to over analyse dreams. I'm also aware of how ever so slightly tedious it can be for others to hear about them. But bare with me on this one. These dreambound archetypes, on attempts to return, reconnect or revive something, they have a human frustrated core to them. Indicative of a view that returning is, in itself, this inherently futile thing to do. Any temptation to look backwards is always through rose tinted spectacles at the past and a yearning for its semi-mythical return. What will emerge is uncertain, on the one hand you could get the beauty of The Renaissance out of it, or the empty delusional sloganeering of Make America Great Again, on the other. Whatever the outcome, it is through our idealising of it, that we misperceive, or misremember what the past was actually like. An entirely new thing is created out of the conditions present in any one moment in time. One of which distorts memories of the past through those tainted spectacles.

What caught my attention in this dream, however, wasn't just in the returning, but the emphasis on the regaining something lost. There was a whole series of things being lost or stolen. The lost Buddhist friend, the lost address, the lost phone. Any loss is a little palimpsest of our mortality, and with any demise comes grief, doubt and denial. Nobody deals with loss very well, we want them or it back, somehow. Loss leaves a hole in the fabric of normality that seemingly requires mending. And this did start chiming in with something that has been on my mind of late. My own close proximity to death last year, has made the gaps and omissions in the life I lead more apparent. 

Whatever we chose to do in life can feel positive as we strike out in a new direction. What isn't always as cogent at the time, are the things we still love that regrettably we've had to leave behind, through the taking of that decision. The ending of love affairs are like that. Though our lives move forward riding on an optimistic wave of what we gain from our renewed liberty, this sometimes leaves behind a murky unresolved loss churned up in its wake. Years later that loss may encourage your mind to start reflecting on whether there may be any benefit in revisiting the old haunts and refuges of past love affairs. Spiritual or otherwise.

When I decided to leave a Buddhist Order nearly eight years ago, any reluctance to do so rested on the loss of the Sangha ( a community of spiritual friends ). And once I had submitted my resignation, what lingered on immediately afterwards was the desire to locate a new Sangha. As this proved an unfruitful pursuit, after about two years I stopped even thinking about looking for one.  And as I written many times before, I have since viewed the singular path I've chosen to take, as being one that has the lack of a Sangha inherently built into it. That's the story I've composed, that I tell myself in order to let it go, to make it all feel easier.  But this does not mean I don't still sense my need for one. And this bobbed back up to the surface again recently.

When you leave any situation there can be a process of emotionally and spiritually letting go of relationships built up over many years. Also a feeling within oneself that your departure might have betrayed their trust and the basis of the friendship. One has often betrayed ones own aspirations to be a good and faithful friend too. So there is this rending apart from one's spiritual friendships. The reduced proximity, the actual physical distance becomes analogous to the spiritual drift opening up between you. You are not in the regular purview of their world, as they are not frequently in the purview of yours. There is a mutual, and perhaps reluctant, bursting of what once was a bubble of like mindedness. I no longer encounter these friends in my daily life and vice versa. Hence, most of them lapse through lack of regular contact.

When I have returned to my old Buddhist Centre, it has been with mixed feelings, and the way people related to me appeared similarly mixed. There was an uncomfortableness with how to be me in that context, and others seemed reciprocally unsure how to be with me. So any passing thought of returning I may have, ends up feeling overwhelmingly overthunk, that I just mentally close down at the thought of it. They have moved on. The situation has moved on. Reality has moved on. I have moved on. It's not as if you can realistically return and everything slips neatly back into exactly how it was. Too much unshared time has passed. 

' You cannot step into the same river twice' remarked Heraclitus sagely as he idly paddled in the Lethe. Nonetheless, for me the absence of spiritual friendship lingers. The how, the where and the whether too of returning, persisting as these muttered noises off stage. Frequent ghosts unable to find a place where they can either be fully set down, or be resolved by the passing shadows of their former lives.