Life is gonna hand you lemons. Count on it. Making lemonade is passe. Look for clues instead.
I’d say I’ve had my fair share of lemons in life just like most people. I fought, struggled to understand why. What was I doing wrong? How to fix it? How to make a refreshing glass of lemonade, make sweet out of sour. As I struggled my way through it, I’d always find myself asking the question “Why?” Every “Why?” seemed to take me to bigger and bigger questions, so I’ve come to believe that life hands you lemons so you will start asking questions. Because most times, behind every sour lemon is a clue.
What started me asking the BIG questions of Life?
I’ve always had something bitin’ my butt, as they say. Something that made me feel I was supposed to be doing “something” but I couldn’t quite figure out what “it” was—no matter how anguished or intent I was to find out. I was teased (enticed?) with several dreams that were so striking, so mystifying, they could not be forgotten.
In one dream it was a calming voice from a cave behind me that muted my frantic fighting actions, “You Will Be an Organizer.”
What? When?
Another: when asked what my name was, I heard ‘me’ tell people my name was “Mesmarriah Miracle.”
What a miraculous name. Where did that come from? Why?
Yet another where an unknown man had ‘saved’ me and some women in some way. In the dream I was prompted to thank him and ask him for his autograph. He smiled knowingly and wrote vertically on a board:
G
U
R
D
J
I
E
F
F
Never heard of him. I spelled it out in my dream journal exactly as he had in the dream. GURDJIEFF. Wikipedia would inform me he was an Armenian philosopher and spiritual teacher some considered a mystic in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Why me and why that name?
In a third dream, I was flying through the air with a young boy on my back. I thought I was showing him the joys of flying when he made a move that made us even more aerodynamic. Surprised, I asked him, ‘how did you know how to do that?” And he answered: “I am the continuum. I am the beginning and the end.”
Heavy duty words to me! I had to look up ‘continuum’ in the dictionary to confirm its meaning. A continuum is sort of like it sounds—a continuous whole, but made up of elements that vary and change/grow almost imperceptibly to get from one opposite to another opposite…like the continuum that stretches from cold to hot. Good and bad stand at opposite ends of a continuum. In psychology, it’s the premise that to achieve peak physical, emotional, and mental health in an adult life, a person must be treated with great care during their infancy and childhood. The continuum of a whole life stretching between birth and death—made up of like elements that change/grow imperceptibly to culminate in the opposite.
Would you, could you just ignore dreams like that?
Spread out over years, these sporadic and intriguing dreams were fuel to the fire of finding answers to My Big Questions of Life. Each hung in my subconscious like a bright orange, freshly scrubbed organic gluten-free carrot, dangling just beyond my grasp.
They had to mean something. Were they clues? Were they leading me? Where to? I searched: nowhere on the entire internet was there anything comparable to the name Mesmarriah Miracle. When I related the story of this name to my son-in-law some 30-years later, he was sure someone already had that domain name. He checked. No one. Thirty years after I was given the name, no one else had it.
I’d never seen nor heard the name Gurdjieff before in my conscious life. But researching him revealed he’d written books, had followers who believed in his work—described as:
“Gurdjieff believed that people cannot perceive reality in their current condition because they do not possess a unified consciousness but rather live in a state of a hypnotic “waking sleep”.
“Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies.” P.D. Ouspensky (1949), In Search of the Miraculous)
As a result of this each person perceives things from a completely subjective perspective. He asserted that people in their typical state function as unconscious automatons, but that a person can “wake up” and become a different sort of human being altogether.Jacob Needleman, “G. I. Gurdjieff and His School”
As you read these first 14 posts, can you see why I might have had call to thank the man who saved me and request his autograph?
The little boy who is the continuum (or Continuum), is he the concept of God, the beginning and the end? (Except ye be as little children?) What was that saying to me?
Did any of these tie together? Were they the parts and pieces for a Purpose to Life? Were they stepping stones to where I needed to go next? Carrots, stepping stones, lemons, (aka Dots)—I had to think Something other than me or my conscious mind was involved. What was “it” (or “It”)?
I had to name ‘it/It.” I had to see if there really was “A Big(ger) Picture” to Life. Life lemons cannot be the end all, be all for life. There has to be something ‘behind’ it. There has to be something “more,” something to learn from it. With that as a guiding force, there will always be a bigger picture if you ask and look…turning lemons into clues.
If you are new to Mesmarriah Miracle, You might find it best to start at Post 1 and continue in numbered sequence, like connecting Dots.