Why Not Murder

20. New Assignment

20. New Assignment

Cook and Maya were at the picnic table outside the kitchen. The wind was cold and very strong but was coming from the other side of the house whipping around the walls of the building wings creating a calm spot on the kitchen patio. The sun was bright. The women were warm, enjoying the reclusive spot from the weather. The gardeners were harvesting all they could from the outdoor vegetable garden and orchards before the nastier weather arrived.

Cook was saying, "The interpretation of the meaning in dreams for death, that death symbolizes change, and that death points to a guilty conscience, are connected. The existence of the ego is weakening for some reason. That reason can be a guilty conscience. A person's identity is their ego. Most often the evolution of an individual's ego happens gradually and so smoothly and is not resisted by the person so that the change is not noticed by them. An example of this would be growing up and maturing over the years. Very often, change is resisted. What will come after the change is not known and therefore can be scary. Change is the end of something and also a new beginning."

"In the case of a guilty conscience," Cook continued, "The broader mind of which the ego is but a small, however essential, fraction, knows that change is needed in the person's self-identity. The change needed is seen by the ego to be threatening its survival, the ego of one day strives to become the ego of the next. The ego is persevering but there is something pervading the mind which the ego absolutely cannot accept about itself. That is the guilty conscience. I hope I'm making these ideas clear. I find them very hard to explain. These ideas are not mine. Ideas don't belong to any single individual because all minds tap into the same creative force despite what patents and intellectual laws proclaim."

Maya replied, "It's becoming clearer to me for sure. I wonder though, how does the meaning of death in dreams relate to the life-death cycle and why does it seem that God and Nature do not care about suffering and death?"

Cook answered, "In my opinion the meaning of death in dreams and the meaning of death in the life-death cycle are the same: change. Our thinking only works in a certain way. Our understanding of the universe and everything that is included in it reflects the way our thinking has processed it. Even if all creatures had the same perceptions, like if everything that could be seen through all the different types of eye when the perceptions reached the brain were the same, the creature's thinking would organize and give different meaning to those perceptions entirely dependent on the way the creature's mind is able and given to think. This would result in different perceptions of the world. An ant's reality has little in common with our own."

Cook continued, "The body is the first shell of the ego. Birth is our break from our mothers and at this time a person's ego begins to identify with its own body. Identification with the body evolves through life as the person learns more about it and feels more of it. Essentially, over the course of the earliest years the break between a person's identity of its own being, and the being of the other or the rest outside of it, occurs. The survival instinct is born with the first heaving of our diaphragm and our sucking in our first breath of air. The survival instinct never wants to let go of the body, that first understanding of who we are, and the letting go of the body is the end of the individual ego. The mind of Nature and more so of God extends far beyond the limits of what our individualized survival instinct can comprehend. The body goes, the fundamental ego ends, and we call this death. All of the components of what we are, deteriorated to the finest degree, become so small that they are beyond perception and become absorbed into the state of nothingness which is the foundation of all being. This is a way our human thinking can understand it. We cannot understand without the concept of opposites. It's one of the rules of our way of thinking as much as cause and effect is another rule and subject verb object is another."