.. Episode 19 of the What's Arising Podcast

Our world is going through unparalleled change. We can all see it coming. Already, we see signs of decay, destruction, control and censorship, among other things. Are there other possibilities? What might arise from the ashes? What is the new world are you attracted to co-create and step into?

In this podcast I share a sequence of 3 dreams that seemed very prophetic about world changes. The first two dreams confirmed what I sense as unavoidable and difficult, dystopian times ahead. In the third dream, I was shown the birth of a new world, filled with hope and possibility that is already being birthed among the chaos and control. The 3rd dream invites us to give our attention and affection to nurturing a new united world that will rise from the ashes of the old. To nurture the new world, we will each need to expand our wholeness and give our unique gifts. Doing our own shadow integration work and learning to BE in community with each other in healthier ways will be essential.

Video links:
⁠Shadow Integration Work: ⁠https://www.wisdomways.net/shadowintegration/
⁠Cohering Community Program⁠: https://www.coheringcommunity.com

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Transcript

Welcome once again to What’s Arising?

This episode is going to be a little bit different from the others because it is about three dreams I had about a week before recording this video. They felt prophetic in a sense, and I believe there is important information in them for all of us.

There certainly was for me as I began to understand their meaning. In many ways, they confirmed something I already knew.

I invite you to stay around for the explanation of the third dream, because that is where the promise is. That is where the hope is. That is where I am inviting all of us to go, including myself.

There are three dreams: a first world, a second world, and a third world. These dreams all came together, one after another, and they all felt connected.

Before I begin, I will ring my bowl so we can enter the energy of this reflection, relax, and become fully present. I invite you to connect with yourself, with the world, with all of creation, and with your dreams.

[Music / Singing Bowl]

Some years ago, I used to analyze my dreams. Then I stopped, and since then I have not remembered very many dreams unless I really pay attention to them.

But last week, I had three dreams early in the morning. One came right after the other. I would wake up, remember the dream, go back to sleep, and then another dream would come. They all seemed connected. They all felt important.

They were not wildly confusing dreams, the kind where you wake up wondering how you could ever understand them. These dreams had a connective thread. I could sense the symbolism and felt there was something meaningful to receive.

So I will share the dreams one at a time, and then I will offer the meaning I see in them.

The First Dream: The Decaying Mall

In the first dream, I am in South Africa. But I am not outside in South Africa. I am not on the savannah or in nature. I am in a mall area — a business mall, a covered area that would have once held many shops and businesses.

At one point, this place had been vibrant and healthy. It was a human construction that had once been full of activity.

But in the dream, it was dark and derelict. It was run down. Hardly anyone was walking around. It felt depressing and disintegrating. There were a few shops, but they were not alive. The whole place felt dark.

My friend and I walked down to the end of the mall. There, we found a doorway. We knew there was a concert inside, so we opened the door and went in.

Music was playing. There was a song, harmony, and a wonderful concert by what felt like a jazz or blues band with a couple of great singers. It was so good that my friend bought tickets for some of her friends so they could come back another time.

For the most part, that concert room was the only real color in the mall. It was the only place of excitement, happiness, and life. But it was closed away in one small corner of this derelict mall.

The mall itself was human-made. There was no nature there. It was a dilapidated old building.

During that part of the dream, knowing I was in South Africa, I also knew I needed money. So I exchanged money and received a large wad of rand, the South African currency. I put the wad of rand in my pocket.

Then I woke up. I remembered the dream and thought it was strange. I assumed I would forget it, and then I went back to sleep.

The Second Dream: The Sterile IBM Building

In the second dream, I am in Calgary, Canada, going into the IBM building.

This was not accidental symbolism. I worked for IBM for about thirteen years. In the dream, I am entering a new IBM building with my friend.

There is extremely tight security at the entrance. Everything is checked. There is a full body scan. I have to give them my wallet. They flip through it and record everything inside.

I still have the wad of rand from the previous dream, which is interesting. They take it, count it, and I assume they confiscate it.

Finally, they let us into the building.

The IBM building is stark and completely white. There is no color at all. It is pristine, clean, sterile, and white. It does not feel like home.

There are employees working there, and our guide into the building is a woman I knew from South Africa. In real life, she was a very nice person. But in this dream, she is the boss of this structure.

Every employee in this white building hates her.

She is controlling. She manages everything. There is the same energy as the security at the entrance — control, censorship, and fear. Everyone is afraid to say something. Everyone talks behind the boss’s back and tries to hide things. There is a lot of unhappiness and disgust in the place, despite the fact that it is clean and everyone has a job.

Those were the first two dreams.

Both dreams had a connection to South Africa, so I began to reflect on what that symbolism meant before moving to the third dream, which was the hopeful and important dream.

The Meaning of the First Two Dreams

When I began to reflect on the first dream, I wondered: Why South Africa? What is that about? Why is this place so dark?

Dreams often pull symbolism from past experience to help us understand something. My first experience in South Africa was many years ago. The evening I arrived, or perhaps the next day, my sponsor — the woman who appeared in the second dream — took me to see Johannesburg.

We drove into the centre of Johannesburg. At that time, it was not a place people were really supposed to go. I do not know what it is like now, but then it was falling down, decrepit, and very poor. There were fires lit in the streets with people huddling around them to stay warm. You could sense darkness and crime.

I remember one tall building, an old skyscraper that had once been occupied by a business. By then, it was derelict and empty, and squatters were living in the rooms. There was no elevator, so people had to walk up all the stairs to their rooms, carrying water and supplies.

It felt like a dark and frightening place.

As we drove through, my sponsor told me to hide anything valuable under the seat so no one could see it through the windows. People were looking into the car as we passed. She explained that if someone saw something valuable, they might signal someone at the next stoplight, who might then break the window, reach inside, or pull us out of the car to steal it.

This was not a nice place. It was not a place where many South Africans would go, even in the daytime. At night, you simply would not go there.

After that experience, I returned to my hotel room and began to weep. I cried for about an hour.

I could feel apartheid.

That is what the experience was about, and that is what the dream was about: apartheid, meaning separation. Deep separation.

South Africa had officially overcome racial apartheid, but another kind of apartheid had been recreated. People moved from one fenced and protected compound to another to stay safe. There was still deep separation between white and black, rich and poor.

To me, it became symbolic of the whole world and our deep sense of separation.

I wept and wept because here, in what is often considered the cradle of humanity, if we could not work out unity and cooperation, what hope was there for the world?

So in the first dream, the symbolism was about separation.

Over the past hundred years or so, through the Industrial Age and the technological age, humanity has moved more and more into separation. We have moved into left-brain thinking and into an unhealthy masculine, control-based, technological society.

And now we are experiencing the breakdown of that world.

The mall represented the technological and consumer structures we have created. Those beautiful malls where we would shop, consume, and buy things in order to be happy.

But in the dream, everything was crumbling.

I believe we can already see the early stages of that crumbling: in institutions, health systems, politics, polarization, fractured communities, blame, shame, and the chaos of the internet. If you feel as I do, and see what I see, there is a sense that things are decaying around us.

This world is not sustainable.

It was beautiful while it lasted. There was color there once. And in the dream, some color still remained in one small room. There was still music. There was still some life. But the civilization built on consumerism, materialism, and unsustainable technology was dying.

Even the money in the dream may have represented this. The rand, and perhaps money itself, may symbolize a monetary system that is losing value and decaying through inflation and instability.

Then came the second dream.

South Africa appeared again, and again it pointed to separation. But this time, the dream showed another world — not the old world that is crumbling, but a new pristine world.

This second world was technological. It was an AI world. A digital world. A surveillance state. Highly controlled and censored. Everyone had to stand in line.

To enter this world, everything had to be checked, monitored, scanned, and recorded.

This world is already beginning to appear. We can see it coming through AI, surveillance, control, monitoring, perhaps even through control of money and what we can buy or spend.

Some people may buy into this world and help create it because they believe that with all the destruction happening, things must be controlled. It may be a fear-based attempt to prevent chaos. Perhaps some of it is well-intentioned. Perhaps some people believe that if everything is falling apart, we need to create a new system, a new money supply, stronger laws, more control, more censorship, and more bureaucracy.

But the promise is that if everything is controlled, sterilized, and put in order, everyone will be happy.

In the dream, they were not happy.

The employees in the sterile world were not happy. I was not happy there either.

So these are two alternative worlds coming into being.

One is the destruction and decay of the unsustainable consumer world. The other is the fear-based reaction to that collapse: a technological utopia, perhaps imagined by those who believe AI and control systems can save the world because human beings cannot.

But that is not a colorful world. It is sterile. It lacks soul. It is controlled. It is not a happy world.

So where is the place to go?

What hope is there?

We can choose to hang out in the remnants of the mall and listen to the remaining music. In some ways, that is not a bad alternative, as long as there is still music.

Or we can buy into the technological world and become trapped in a white, sterile society that wants to come into being in some form.

But both of those worlds are based on separation.

The Third Dream: The Birth of a Third Way

In the third dream, I am telling a friend about a room I have been in before. It is a cool room, playful and magical.

There is a doorway with a window, and I point through the window. I am not sure what is in there. There are a couple of other rooms. The last time I was there, there were moose inside that I was petting. I did not look up the symbolism of moose, and I am not sure why they were there, but this time there were no moose.

We enter the room, and twin calves have just been born.

They are beautiful young calves, just born as we enter the room. They still have birth fluid around them. They are wet and shiny.

One calf approaches me. I assume the other twin goes to my friend.

The calf that comes to me wants so much affection. It is like a puppy dog. It wants to be petted and rubbed. It licks my hands and rubs against my knees, as if to say, “Notice me. Notice me. I am here.”

These calves are black and white, like Jersey cows, with mixed patterns of white and black. Dark and light together in one whole being.

The experience is fun, playful, rich, and full of life.

There is another calf next to my leg, an older calf. I am surprised to see it. It also wants attention, and occasionally I give it some. But it is an old calf that never grew up. It is green in color. I am not fully sure what it means, but perhaps it represents something moving out of my life, or out of our lives. Perhaps it is some older focus I had around spirituality or other work.

Most of my attention is drawn to the newborn calf. The old green calf receives some attention, but it also feels like it is in a place of letting go.

To me, this third dream represents the birth of a third way.

It is a beautiful choice that is coming up through the middle. A choice for each of us to come into unity.

The black and white of the calf represents the integration of light and dark. It is the integration of the shadows we have disowned, bringing them back into wholeness and owning all of our being. It is about bringing our gifts into the world.

This is an integral world. A world of love, acceptance, caring, trust, affection, giving, and receiving.

This new world is not based on separation. It is based on unity.

This is the place that felt like home.

The calf had just been born into its new home. And it has already been born. It is already here. I see it in the world. Perhaps you see it too.

Unity wants our attention.

The newborn calves, the twins, felt like an emphasis. This is important. Pay attention. This is an alternative to both the white sterile AI world and the derelict past of consumerism and materialism.

This is a whole place.

The calf is inviting us to be born again into a new world.

The cow is a sacred animal in many traditions. It can represent the Divine Mother or the divine feminine. So again, there is a caring world being symbolized here. I noticed myself nurturing the calf almost as if I were a child. There was innocence, affection, and love.

It could have been a lamb, too, representing innocence. But here, the calf represented a loving society, a living society, in contrast to what we can currently see in some of our possible futures.

Choosing the Third Way

In conclusion, there is a current world that is dissolving and dying.

Do not hang on too tightly to that world. There is not much life left there. If we cling to it, we will likely experience decay, fear, anxiety, chaos, and entropy as the mall falls down.

I also encourage you not to get too attracted to the AI technological world. Do not get sucked into its promise. It may offer safety for a while, but it is not a soulful world. It lacks spirit. It is controlling. It is still an external world of projection, control, and censorship. There is no freedom there. It is a collapse of individual and collective freedom.

And then there is this amazing third world that wants to be born.

This is an integrated world.

In many ways, this is what all my work has been about. The shadow work, and to some extent the belief work I did before, has been about integration. Perhaps that older work is the green calf I am also letting go of. But the shadow work, the integration work, and the love work are what feel most important now.

The second part of my work is Cohering Community.

That is about looking at the polarization within our communities and forming small, deep, trusting circles. Together, we can build the capacity to step into this new world that the calf is showing us.

An integrated world.

A world where we care, trust, and love each other.

A world where we co-create and discern together what wants to be created among us.

This is a world of circles where individuals are whole, the circle is whole, and there is a level of collective insight beyond what any one of us could see alone. Collective insight can drop in to help us create a whole world filled with oneness, home, and interconnected circles.

These circles can correspond with each other in wholeness and help rebuild society from the bottom up.

That project is called Cohering Community.

I meet people almost every day online who have similar visions of oneness, bringing things together from the wholeness of the individual, to the wholeness of small groups, to the oneness of society.

Not a top-down society, but a heterarchical and self-organizing group of people operating from their gifts in service to the world.

Join me in Cohering Community.

Let’s dream together.

Let’s dream in the new world.

Let’s nurture the calf that has already been born.

Let’s come together and see what powers and possibilities can arise.