two dimensional obstructions

My sleeping mind offered up an interesting dream the other night. In the dream, I was driving a car up a mountain. It was night and the road was windy, with sharp turns. In typical dream strangeness, or perhaps to add some levity, Dwight Schrute from The Office was sitting in the passenger seat. Halfway up the mountain, I noticed the moon to my right - a huge, white full moon. It was beautiful and I pointed it out to Dwight, who was not impressed. Then I became aware that I couldn't see the road anymore.

And I couldn't figure out what was wrong with my vision. I saw the inside of the car and I saw the moon, but had completely lost sight of the road. I was still trying to drive though...probably not the best idea.

When I woke up, I understood what was wrong with my vision in the dream. When I lost sight of the road and only saw the moon... it was two dimensional. It was a picture - as if a poster was applied to the windshield of the car. There was no depth to it, no other elements to the landscape, only the moon.

In our lives we have concepts that we carry with us like two dimensional posters. They blind us from a true experience with the world around us. We do this with people, with events, with institutions. There is something about our initial experience that strikes us and it blooms into something bigger - whether we have an attachment to it or an aversion, and like shorthand or lopping off one dimension, we see only that something.

Obviously, concepts are necessary. For example, our concept of fire keeps us from directly experiencing it because that would be painful. And as zen as I'd like to be, I don't want to have a direct experience with everything around me right now. That sounds exhausting and I've got a day job.

But there are times when I recognize the limitations of a concept and I want to move beyond it. The first step is to see my concept as self created and to stop believing it is the absolute reality. If I had stopped in the middle of the road, my concept of the moon wouldn't have been a problem. But I wanted to drive forward and to do that, I had to see clearly. I had to see the full three dimensional landscape and react to all of it not to one piece of it that struck me.

Sometimes our concepts cause feelings to arise - anger, fear, sadness. That can make it even harder to move past the concept and experience reality. My teacher often said "check your concept against reality". Just this action of looking at your two dimensional poster and thinking, "maybe this is not the complete picture" can be very helpful if you want to change the way you interact with your environment.

In my dream, I ended up driving off the mountain feeling more confused than scared. Which, honestly, is probably where I'm at right now in real life. There are concepts I'm trying to shake but they're quite entrenched. And as I write this, I remind myself that while my concepts create MY reality, my reality is not the only reality. If I want to move forward, I have to be willing to truly see what's around me, not just what I think is there.