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The Hunger for Reality: Our Search for Essence, by Richard Harvey

(Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal.)

We have a great hunger. I don't mean obvious hunger—hunger for love, food, nourishment, a warm bed, a partner, a creative happy life. All these are valid hungers, and it is hard to be a human being without experiencing them. But, the hunger to which I am referring is not only greater, but also deeper than any of these. It is the hunger for what is real, for what is true—a hunger for the essence of life.

When you think about it, reality is the only feasible foundation for your life; it underpins absolutely everything. Take the hungers above—just a cursory list—you could have any one of them, but if it is not real, then what good is it?

Real or Not?
Take love. You meet someone who you like. You stay together for a while and the relationship deepens into love. But, a little way down the line, you or your partner becomes attracted to someone else. What has happened to the love? Is it real? Was it ever real? When you are cheated on, betrayed, or jilted, was the love real or not?

Then take food and nourishment. The reality of this today is surely without doubt. Only the most credulous of us are ignorant of real, organic, unprocessed, natural foods and their superiority in all ways over junk food, confectionery, candy, and convenience foods. Real nourishment is healthy, tastes good, and strengthens our immune system.

The Inner Experience of Reality
"Real" is what we want and what we need; instinctively and intuitively we know it. Now, would it surprise you if I said that reality as you experience it (mainly outer reality) relies on your inner experience of reality? When you are real within, the rest will follow. Stay with me if you are not sure.

You and I are born into a world that is not of our own making. It is a challenging world, possibly a hostile one, and one where our needs are almost certain to be ignored or sidelined. There may be many individual reasons for this: incompetence, ignorance, insensitivity, selfishness, busy-ness, but one universal reason is that all children have unrealistic expectations. From the cradle to puberty you expect all sorts of incredible things, perfect things, ideals of perfection. And naturally you are disappointed. How could you not be? You are disappointed, and according to your reaction to this disappointment you begin a lengthy and complex process of building defenses, ways to resist the pain of disappointment, the sadness and cruelty of a world that does not respond to what you need.

Your Essence is Spiritual
You could say that as children we are too close to heaven. Yet, the first seven years of life, at least, are characterized by the ordeal of corporal identity or incarnation.

You are in essence a spiritual being. I know that for some of you this will not be a surprise. But whether it is or not, take it in for a moment. You are a spiritual being in essence. You were born, and you found yourself with this appendage, this gross dependent: a body. You are spirit walking around in a temple that is attached to you, as surely as a crab is joined to its shell. This body defines you and your relationship to the physical, just as your spirit defines and occupies your body. Hence, we say that the eyes are the windows of the soul or we detect physical grace, ease, and flowing movement in the aware or awakened human being.

But before that is possible, we have to grapple with a truth: we have been hindered with a gross duty and responsibility to a body that, far sooner than we think or desire, is in an inevitable process of deterioration that ends in physical death. A human being has every reason to fear, worry, plan, and seek security in such a predicament! One thing is for sure: we are bound to die.

But wait! This physical death is only your own death if you are absolutely sure that you and the physical body are one and the same; that is, if you identify yourself with your physical body. Identifying with the physical body is very close to defining yourself as a separate self, a defended character, a mass of stories, experiences, judgments, and prejudices that comprise your character, what you are like, both hidden and apparent.

Fear of Death/Fear of Life
Now, fear of death is projected into your present existence as fear of life. In fact, the fear of death comprises all your fears, so it is the only one you really need to focus on and heal. Healing your fear of death is not as difficult as you may think; the key is to locate your identification. What are you? Who are you? Don't falter over this question or deal with it too hastily. Plenty of spiritual adepts in the East have spent their entire lives working with the discipline that's inherent in this question: Who am I? It is, in fact, the question—without some semblance of an answer what are you going to do, think, or feel that's of any consequence? What is the foundation of your life? What are you building on?

You may answer, "I am me" (fill in the gaps with experiences, stories, prejudices, thoughts, opinions, and so on) "in a world of others" (things, people, the earth, and so on; fill in the gap with everything that is not me). This may be how it looks, but it is patently untrue! You cannot possibly exist in a world separate from everything else, divided from the others. You are like everyone else—continually in context. Look at any photograph of yourself and what do you see? Other people, trees, a dog, sidewalk, beach, sky, clouds, sunlight, nature, a street. See what I mean? In fact, you do not exist without these things (and arguably they may not exist without you).

Identity, Separation, and Division
Yet, by means of a threefold process of identifying yourself, separating yourself, and dividing yourself, you have created the basis for a consensus reality that everyone more or less subscribes to. In other words, you are not alone; you have supporters—in your delusion.

Having supporters is a comfort and a consolation, and it tends to be fine until one of two things happen: dissatisfaction or crisis.

Some dissatisfaction or crisis is necessary to propel you into inner work. Something provokes the conviction that this is not enough and you want more! (And this "more" will lead you to reality.) Inner reality demands an archaeological dig to skillfully clear the layers of emotional-behavioral patterns, restrictive life-statements, repressed emotions, and deeply-held protective beliefs that cover your essence. Your essence is intact beneath these many veils and waiting for you. It is as I have written in my book Your Essential Self: you awaken to a most welcome stranger, your true self.

The Gifts of Life
What people most want today falls into four broad categories:

• Love and partnership
• Money and pleasure
• Attractiveness and popularity
• Health and long life

Once you are living from your essence, these and other treasures come to you and you are showered with the gifts of life—attractiveness, confidence, authenticity, genuine heartfelt-ness, compassion, feeling, kindness, soulfulness, charisma, creativity, and purpose.

This journey of self-discovery is enormously challenging, but the curious thing is you get everything you want. When you survey the desires of people today, the way they go about getting what they want seems transparently misguided. It is there within you for the taking!

Connect with Your Essence
But, if you don't have yourself in reality, then you don't have anything, because no one is here to possess it. Thus, when you are rejected in a love relationship, for example, doesn't it really hurt because it re-stimulates your inner rejection of yourself? When you are ambitious for more money, could it be because you don't have access to your inner treasures? When you are seeking to improve your outward appearance at the gym or through dieting, what difference could it make if you learned instead to love yourself?

So, look inside first and then look outside. Connect with your core, your essential self inside, before you start superficial manipulations, alterations, and interferences that don't actually work in the long run.

Gillian's story
Gillian was a young woman in her late twenties who came to see me for psychotherapy. Her problem was her grief at the end of her relationship of some two years. As we explored her sadness, her regrets, and her resentments, we stumbled on an entirely new subject. It was her relationship with her father. For some weeks she had maintained that her daughter-father relationship was positive, close to ideal. This made me suspicious. As her trust in therapy and me deepened, she revealed that her father had loved her as a small child but around the age of ten he had taken her off his knee, where she remembered she used to sit and chat with him, announcing that she was now, "too old to cuddle." This hurt the child Gillian enormously. She was bereft, and although she couldn't share it with anyone she expressed her grief alone in her bedroom at night. Through her soul-searching she tried to make sense of her father's rejection. Eventually she arrived at one inescapable conclusion, the only one that made any sense and which of course exonerated her beloved and later idealized father from blame: she was unlovable.

When we make discoveries like this in early life they form guiding dictums for our lives. They become inner law. We unconsciously become guided by these formative experiences and seminal beliefs. Thus, Gillian believed she was unlovable simply because her father rejected her.

Unconsciously, for the next almost twenty years, she had followed the implications of this life-statement (that she was unlovable), which brought us to the present and the demise of her latest relationship.

Looking back, she realized that sometimes she had been rejected and at other times she had rejected her partners, since she had absorbed the full experience from both sides of the relationship dynamic between herself and her father. We had to return more than once to this poignant memory of her father taking her off of his knee. But, eventually she understood clearly that she didn't have to live according to the emotional conclusions she had drawn from this early experience.

A Return to Reality Gillian returned to reality—or really arrived in it for the first time. Without this archaeological dig she may never have realized that she harbored a deep belief in her own unlovableness, and her relationships would have failed as a result.

Setting Up an Inner Practice to Discover your Essence
To set up an inner practice through which you can develop your essence by feeding your hunger for reality, follow these steps:

• First, out of respect for your decision to delve deeply into your inner world, allot a certain amount of time each week to inner work. But please don't overreach! If fifteen minutes is possible for you, that's good. If thirty minutes, that's good, too. Don't aim for some length of time you will find difficult to stick to.
• Second, create a special place or a corner of your room where you can have a notebook and some thoughtful, precious, meaningful objects. Now you can begin.
• Third, recall important episodes from your early life. Write them down if it helps you to connect with them. Draw pictures, too. You should have an inner work notebook specifically for this purpose, and it is your private workbook.
• Examine your work for what life-statements can you glean from these episodes. You read how Gillian made sense of her father's rejection by taking the responsibility on herself and exonerating him. What did you learn from your early memories about life, relationships, time, money, love, sharing emotions, men and women, giving and taking, teaching and learning, self worth, and values?
• Finally, progress your contemplations throughout your life right up to now. Ask yourself where and how these life-statements have acted on your journey through life and affected you.

Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal. Copyright Llewellyn Worldwide, 2013. All rights reserved.

I had a disturbing dream that I hope you can help me interpret. I dreamed that my husband went missing for a few days, and then he was found dead. He had committed suicide by jumping off a cliff. I didn't find him but I was called to identify him. He was lying face down in a pool of water and long grass. He still had his work uniform on, and this detail really stood out from the others. My father-in-law was in the dream too; he was the one who phoned to let me know that my husband had been found dead. I remember this dream as clear as day. I woke up in the middle of the night in lots of tears. My husband and I did have a big argument before we went to bed that night; I'm not sure if that had something to do with the dream. Thanks!

Rachael

Astrea:

Death in a dream rarely means death. In most dreams, death signifies change or a need for change. Dreams prepare us for our destinies. Often the object of a dream (in this case your husband) can represent a different person or the need to take a new and different attitude about something. Like the Death Card in Tarot, it represents spiritual awakening or a change of mind or circumstances.

It certainly isn't unusual to dream of the demise of someone after we've had an argument with them. Our subconscious minds can find all sorts of ways to bump someone off who annoyed us right before we fell asleep.

Dreaming of your husband committing suicide is unsettling, but since you had an argument that night, it's not surprising. In your dream, you wanted extreme change to happen, but you didn't want to be responsible for causing that change, so he killed himself instead of you taking bold action.

From your description of your dream and your reaction to it, my guess is that you argued about money and/or other material things. When we dream of a death after an argument with someone, it often indicates that person is being inflexible abut financial matters.

In your dream, your husband leaves you in the most terrible, irreversible way possible. This is even worse than being abandoned, for you are left behind to deal with and take over every aspect of your shared lives forever. You felt abandoned after your disagreement, and your subconscious mind came up with this dramatic symbol for how you were feeling.

When we're upset, it's common to dream of abandonment in various ways. In lighter dreams, we may get lost from one another, while in heavier dreams, death is a powerful symbol for our intense emotions.

In your case, I think your Guides and Angels were giving you one of those It's a Wonderful Life experiences via your dream. You were seeing what your life might be like without your husband in it. This was to make you appreciate what you have with him more, not to frighten you. This dream was designed to make you more tolerant of him in the future.

I don't think your husband is planning on checking out on you that way or dying anytime soon, so I doubt you have to worry about that. You seem to have a strong, well-developed personality, so I have to assume he does too and that your argument was just a bump in the road of marriage.

He needs to listen to your opinion more and keep a more open mind. You need to be more patient when you explain your views to him. Those are the changes your dream was trying to indicate to you.

*****

Susyn:

Our dreams are where we work out our greatest fears. They also lead us beyond our anger or upset to the truth of how we really feel. In this case, it seems your subconscious was responding to how angry you were about the argument by illuminating how important your husband is to you. The fact that he was found dead, presumably by his own hand, suggests that he too may have been upset by the argument.

I do not believe this dream was a premonition or a harbinger of things that will actually come to pass. Instead, I feel the events in the dream are symbolic of other issues.

You do not go into detail about the nature of the argument you two had, but if it was work or money-related, that could explain why your husband was found in his work uniform and why this stood out to you in the dream. You might have felt he was not living up to his potential at work or that he was taking actions that might actually cost him his job, hence the appearance that his death was caused by his own choices.

This dream might also be a sign that your husband needs to change jobs. The demands of his current job may be too much, and could be contributing to the arguments the two of you are having.

Your father-in-law's presence in the dream speaks to family ties. It could be that you are noticing a lot of similarities between father and son.

Upon closer investigation, some of the images in your dream might reveal certain aspects of your husband or your life together that only you would be able to connect. You may want to write this dream (and others of this nature) down in more detail. Then you can look at each aspect of the dream as a separate factor and try to connect it to circumstances in your life. When you make those associations, you may then be better able to interpret the dream as a whole.

Keep in mind that our dreams fulfill a wonderful purpose in that they can alert us to deeper feelings, troubles or concerns we have been unable to address consciously. Because the two of you argued before you had the dream, this could be the reason it seemed so intense, and why it continues to linger in your mind.

I'm sure that once you awoke, you discovered your feelings of anger had dissipated and the two of you made up, which could have been the greater purpose of this dream. Also, if you feel that certain aspects of his work ethics or job need to be addressed, you'll be able to see what they are more clearly now, and help him make some important changes.

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.