All I Want To Be Is A Monk

[Ruben Bailey]

I had a dream where I am in an interior room that is enclosed by glass. It appears that I can see out but nobody can see into the room or it may be that no one is aware of the space I occupy. I am feeling over looked. My aunt Helen (my Godmother in real life) wants to be just like me. Unlike the others, she is aware of the room and comes and stands just outside the closed door. In honor of the room she genuflects. In genuflecting she becomes a small parakeet. I can see her flying in the open space outside the room.

My friends and family notice that she has changed into a bird. They believe she should return to being a human. What they don’t understand or hear is her song. In her song, I hear her true desire which is to be the bird that she now is. Even though her plumage may be tattered from a long hard life and her size is insignificant, she is now finally everything she had ever dreamed of being; a bird. What they don’t understand is that in her insignificance she has accomplished what she has always wanted.

I shared this dream at the IASD conference in Montreal in my dream group. In the group a gentleman named Bob suggested the parakeet might be a symbol for a monk because there is such a thing as a Monk Parakeet. After the session I thanked him for his symbol. He then asked me to call him by the name “Sandman”. When he said the name Sandman a chills went down my spine as I felt a wave of subtle energy flow through me. I shared with him what I felt as the synchronicity of my meeting him and my previous dream where I met the Sandman which I titled, "The Jesus Man: A Gateway For Immigrants."

Well what does that mean for me. I looked up the word Monk and found the following:

A monk (Greek: monachos), derived from Greek monos (alone), in modern parlance also referred to as a monastic, is a person who practices religious asceticism, the conditioning of mind and body in favor of the spirit, and does so living either alone or with any number of like-minded people, whilst always maintaining some degree of physical separation from those not sharing the same purpose. The concept is ancient and can be seen in many religions and in philosophy. Asceticism (Greek: askēsis) describes a life-style characterized by abstinence from various sorts of worldly pleasures (especially sexual activity and consumption of alcohol) often with the aim of pursuing religious and spiritual goals. Indian religions (including yoga) teach that salvation and liberation involve a process of mind-body transformation that is effected through practicing restraint with respect to actions of body, speech and mind, whereas Christianity mandates that Jesus does this for them. The founders and earliest practitioners of these religions (e.g. Buddhism, Jainism, the Christian desert fathers) lived extremely austere lifestyles refraining from sensual pleasures and the accumulation of material wealth. This is to be understood not as an eschewal of the enjoyment of life but a recognition that spiritual and religious goals are impeded by such indulgence. Asceticism is closely related to the Christian concept of chastity and might be said to be the technical implementation of the abstract vows of renunciation. Those who practice ascetic lifestyles do not consider their practices as virtuous but pursue such a life-style in order to satisfy certain technical requirements for mind-body transformation. There is remarkable uniformity among the above religions with respect to the benefits of sexual continence. Religions teach that purifying the soul also involves purification of the body which thereby enables connection with the Divine and the cultivation of inner peace. In the popular imagination asceticism is considered a sort of perversion (self-flagellation by birch twigs as the archetypal stereotype of self-mortification) but the askēsis enjoined by religion functions in order to bring about greater freedom in various areas of one's life, such as freedom from compulsions and temptations bringing about peacefulness of mind with a concomitant increase in clarity and power of thoug

...describes a life-style characterized by abstinence from various sorts of worldly pleasures (especially sexual activity and consumption of alcohol). Need I say more.