A dream: I was sitting in my uncle’s car, a car that was not road legal but able to drive. My grandfather asked me to deliver him the bags of oats in the back boot and on the back seat. I started the car but was having difficulty getting it to reverse up the driveway. 

Let’s go through this quickly. I’m sitting in something that’s useful but not used properly (the general self). The archetypal wise old man asks me to deliver sustenance.

Looking forward and trying to figure out how to get this crappy car going I see a man walking past the front gate; he stops and walks through the gate as if he’s a ghost. He approaches the driver’s window and says ‘you have to tell them’. I have to tell them what, I ask. Who are you, what are you talking about? He replies, I am you; differently.

Then I say, I don’t understand, what do I have to tell them? And he looks at me confused, as if the question was absurd and said, how can I know and you not, we are the same.

Then I woke up.

I took out my phone and wrote the following in my notes app. The words just came. It was a rather strange experience.

What is our will? Most surely it is the uniting of our soul with the universe around us while still alive. Whether we live in a rural area bursting with life; flora and fauna or in a soul-crushing city which is still full of life, albeit not exactly a healthy way to live, we still see the constant emergence of life that is ever-expanding and ever-present.

We know this, we see this, we experience it but we’ve become oblivious to the wonder and mystery of it. Yet we know deep down it’s there and that we should indeed appreciate it on a deep, or soul level.

What is this? Some call it the silent knowing, others intuition, others yet, the call of the soul. It is our will, our only real choice in this life, to choose to bask in the glory and wonder of existence.

Everything else is futile and ends in death; that is the temporary nature of our existence during every moment of our short lives. But we can cheat death too for as our inner depths come forth and we learn to see the wonder of it all we become what is immortal and even if it is to be just momentarily it is enough for us to know that all is fused together and connections deeper that we can fully ever know and all is, indeed, one.

To end then, if I may be so bold as to offer an exercise. Say the words aloud; I am awake, I am alive, I live in the mystery of life.

Use it as a mantra, as something to meditate upon, as a banishing even…use it how you see fit. It is a meagre gift to you.