Thorns

Hi stiev

In the astral book there is something about thorns:
Pain, voluntary suffering, christic will.

Remember that it is important not to tell anyone of symbols that you have seen in your dreams, dreams are something quite personal, and i made the experience that i did not dreamed of such things for some time when i told someone.
You can also ask your divine parents (higher aspects of yourself) to give you an explanation in your next dreams.

Good luck with your experiences.
jonny

Thanks, Jonny5. This thing about not discussing any teachings we've been given frustrates me. I have also had the experience of not having any dreams for a period after I talked in detail about astral experiences. But how are we supposed to learn and grow totally on our own?

When I first came to this site I thought it was a discussion site about actual astral experiences. I thought it was a forum for practical self exploration and discovery. I became frustrated when I saw that people don't actually discuss their work, but (on the whole) the words of Belzebuub and other gnostic teachers.

I can see the purpose of this, and I respect it. If you chatter away about important truths, they lose their value. It is impossible to talk about love anymore because the word has lost its potency, and I imagine that spiritual experiences become less real when trivialised.and debated.

Also, we're mortal (merely intellectual), and we don't always know the answers. But how can we learn from dream symbols if they are foreign to us? I.e, if they speak in an almost foreign language of metaphor, symbol, myth, etc? Do we need years in psychoanalysis, as Freud suggested, just to uncover the meaning of one dream?

In one way, the teachings this site supports go totally against the modern western values I've been brought up in. Liberty, equality, fraternity, etc, must all give way to older truths and a hierarchical system of beliefs, and it's not encouraged to question them.

This seems like a very lonely path to me. I understand that you've got to put in a huge amount of effort to receive even the smallest spiritual fruits; gold does not come easy.

This is a hard path. I just wish the directions were a little clearer sometimes.

Hi Stiev,

I can relate how you feel. It is true that when we begin with this work we walk in the dark for quite a while and we do not always know where we are going.

With dedication we are able to gain more insights and more experiences and this all depends on how much efforts we put into it. Undestanding of these symbols, parables etc. is not something which comes overnight; it needs to grow and this takes time.

Although it looks like we do this work alone (which is true in a sense), we are also helped, but this help does not always come in the form that we expect. The Divine gives us what we need to grow, not what we want ourselves.

Gnosis is not based upon a system of beliefs, it encourages us to investigate things four ourselves, so we can stand on our own knowledge and experience and this is important. There is also no one on this site who can force you not to tell your dreams, this is entirely up to you.

I find that the courses given here provide a good basis in order to gain experience, to change ourselves for the better and to help other people who want to do the same.

Hi Stiev,

I had an experience once with needles in it (which is similar to thorns I guess). They weren't a good thing in the experience and I didn't want to get poked with them, they showed some type of negative influence but I'm not exactly sure how that influence would have affected me if I had have been poked with them.

It's easy to get caught up with resaying what the Master's say and I've done that too much in the past and turned things into beliefs somewhat, but I think there are a lot of responses on the forums which also have some really valuable personal experiences in them which can inspire us or help us with our work and astral practices.

As Martijn said, we're not alone. Maybe you could ask your Divine Parents for help to understand the experiences that you're having? Sometimes if I do that I get glimpses of what a dream or a symbol means in an intuitive, feeling sort of way.

Something else you could try is the 'o' mantra which is taught in the Self Discovery course, to strengthen your intuition so you can grasp what your experiences mean intuitively. I've also found the meditation on dreams practice to be useful for this, as well as writing down my dreams. Sometimes I know what a dream meant in retrospect, and writing them down makes it easier for me to remember them.

Sometimes I find the work hard because I can feel like I'm doing things completely wrong and I can't see the way clearly. Maybe that's part of the path too though. If we keep trying to do our best and keep reaching for understanding hopefully in time it will come and things will just get clearer and clearer.

All the strength!

David