I had a dream when I was a child. I was lost in the desert. I came upon an oasis with a single tree. Two people were there. One was sitting on a rock. Next to the rock was the tree with a man hanging on a branch, with one leg crossed over the knee of the other—like Odin, the Hanged Man of the Tarot.
The man on the rock told me he was Master Jesus. Master Jesus pointed to the hanged man and said, “This is Master Socrates.”
I was there in the oasis in the middle of the Dreamlands, and two Masters, of two different lineages, were before me. Master Jesus said, “Stay here.” I felt happy about this. But then the Hanged Man, Master Socrates, came down and with a fierce and wild look in his eye said, “Go away!” I was torn. Both were Masters giving contradictory commands.
I asked, “Which one should I follow?” With a sly grin, Master Socrates approached me and said, “You must obey both.”
And I did! And I became, at that moment, one with cosmic consciousness—having, for a moment, realized the unity of the fundamental nature of my innermost self, whose essential quality is always to go, to voyage, to move, and to dream—with the fundamental nature of the consciousness of he who sleeps and is never anywhere, never changing, never born, never dead, never existing and never moving. The unity brought an understanding, for a moment, of that which had been hidden to my human consciousness.
What an astonishing moment of awareness!