The Gift
A friend recently told me about a numinous dream she had just before a major life change and gave me permission to share it here. (Papaji was a renowned Indian spiritual teacher in the Advaita Vedanta tradition. Prasad is food that is first offered to an esteemed teacher, Guru, or deity, then consumed.)
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The Gift
By Alison Walker
You know when a dream is important. You wake up and it is as if you just had the dream prior to waking. It is still vivid and alive in your body and your heart. It is still vibrating within you.
I dreamt that Papaji came to visit me. He looked so young with a slim body and dark hair. There was no mistaking him as Papaji. He came to me offering me prasad. As I took it, he said “Swallow it all.”
I awaken with a sense of wonder and awe. Was this a dream, or a visitation?
A few days later I met with Papaji’s western wife, Ganga Mira. I shared the dream with her. Immediately she said, “This is a visitation.” We both felt so moved we wept.
The visitation keeps giving. It is full of potency and unfolding wisdom.
Each day is to be swallowed without knowing why to anything. Each change or event might have a question within it, but in swallowing it there is the question, “Who is swallowing what.”
Moving across the world to live once again in Australia challenged any idea of how things should be. Nothing I thought, proved to be right. Swallowing it all means being the life that’s being swallowed, and who is it that swallows?
When life flows and is received just as it is, there is no one there that receives anything. Life flows, and as flow, everything is accepted without thought. A surrender is allowing, accepting, and absorbing everything. No one is there to resist or know better. “I” is swallowed whole in the vastness, the emptiness and richness of life.
Unexpectedly facing two operations in quick succession after arriving in Australia, it was an intense time, but supported by the message of the visitation. All this too is to be swallowed, the pain, the fears, the body identity, death. No choosing the menu! Everything that is happening moment to moment is to be swallowed whole and to be received fully as simply a flow of change.
Then, what peace is here, in the centre of the supposed worst and best. It is always here when knowing anything is dissolved with the one who knows!
