Today I woke early from a troubling dream.  The images came from seeing elephant imagery in Buddhist art, and the 'trouble' from a timeless summer conversation on the porch of a meditation studio with my Buddhist teacher, Brian Arnell, and a friend.

I said that there could be no higher motivation in life than to aspire to be a loving person. Brian answered that while on a daily-life basis this is true, pure Buddhism would say that to make "loving" the highest goal is limiting because it only has meaning in reference to its opposite its opposite--hatred, or "not-loving."  He added that there is something "beyond" those competing values.

So, as I struggle to understand it, "love" is conceptually tied to a dualism that is conditioned on some kind of conceptual, conditional battle (good vs. evil). In Buddhism, there's a higher goal than anything dualistic, something called Nibbana, something that my familiar world of love, pain, and stories does not comprehend.  I felt threatened when Brian talked about something that touched on emptiness--I felt I could be annihilated in a bland, cosmic cream soup.  Do I really WANT enlightenment?

At the same time, it was a lovely moment. I wanted our gauzy summer talk to go on all night.We dipped in and out of topics; the moon was overhead. I lost track of time. (Thanks to Anne Arian for the lovely "gauzy summer" description.)

In the dream I had afterwards, someone was telling me about elephants: "If you cut an elephant into four pieces, it won't walk again, but there is a high rate of survival."  I don't know what says about quality of life!  Imagine trying to wash yourself with a trunk sliced down the middle.  The dream filled me with horror.  Did the "high survival rate" mean that the quartered parts would exist in a helpless, monster state, like living specimens in some veterinary equivalent of the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia?

In other words, it means that I find the whole Buddhist thing a little scary.  If I follow this path, is it the end of "me"?  Well, that's okay. I found Christianity scary, too, but not for the fundamentalist qualities that (say) The Simpsons and other pop culture icons lampoon so accurately.  Small minded literalism is actually pretty easy to dispense with.  But any spiritual practice that truly touches on The Divine will tug at the seams of one's patched-together sense of reality. (In the Bible, people who encounter angels tend to wet their pants.  Only in the Hallmark store are angels pretty beings who hang out on coffee mugs.)

Have you had "elephant dreams" that touched on fears about your spiritual life?