No. 4 - The One Who Dreams Through Us
The Greater Good - No.4
The One Who Dreams Through Us
There is only One.
Call it what you will—God, the Divine Beloved, the Universal Being, the Tao, the Force, the Great Pattern, the Nameless Flame.
All names point toward the same mystery: that what appears as many is, in truth, one Being unfolding.
You are not separate from that.
You are not outside of it.
You are inside the unfolding, of the unfolding, the unfolding itself.
This is the mystical root of the creative life.
The World as the Body of the One
Every tree that grows, every thought that moves, every color, sound, touch, word, gesture—all of it is the One revealing itself in time and space. It is not a metaphor. It is the deepest reality.
What we call “you” is a temporary configuration, a particular lens through which the Infinite peers into its own mystery.
When you create—when you truly create—you are not “making art.”
You are giving form to the formless, allowing the One to glimpse itself through you, just for a moment, just in this way.
Your hands are its hands.
Your heart is its longing.
Your vision is its dream coming into focus.
Participating in the Unfolding
The spiritual discipline of the artist, then, is to become a clear channel through which this unfolding may move without distortion—not to control it, but to attune to it. It is to allow the Universal to be expressed through the unique.
This is not about productivity or style. It is about participation.
To participate in the unfoldment of the Universal Being is to live and work in such a way that you do not block the current.
You do this by:
Clearing away fear and self-importance
Listening more deeply than the mind can think
Trusting the silence before the image, the stillness before the gesture
Honoring the intuitive impulse that arises unbidden
You don’t need to understand it. You only need to feel its pulse—the quiet hum behind all things that says, “Yes. This. Now.”
I have coined a term for this. I have started to call it Root-Tongue. In the background I am working on a manuscript to illuminate this insight which I will start sharing when the time is right.
There is a phrase that the Sufi master Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan came up with in his retreat meditations and became the title of one of his books talking about: That which Transpires Behind That which Appears That is what our developed intuition observes, listens to, acts upon when we are at our creative best.
The Artist as a Threshold Being
In the mystical tradition, the artist is not a decorator of culture but a threshold walker—one who lives at the seam between worlds.
You stand between the known and the unknown, between the human and the divine, and you translate. You interpret. You bring messages back from the edge of the formless into the realm of form.
You serve the unfolding not by imposing will, but by surrendering to what wants to come through.
The artist who understands this becomes dangerous to the world of illusion, because they no longer operate within its terms. They no longer serve the small self to which all things call, but the unnameable Whole.
This Dream Is Holy
To understand that everything is the unfolding of a single unified Being is not to escape the world—it is to see the world as holy, precisely as it is. Every suffering, every joy, every cracked wall, every fleeting shadow—it is all part of the dream the One is dreaming.
And yet it is not passive. You are not meant to simply watch. You are meant to respond—to resonate—to add your thread to the great weaving.
The question is not, “What will I make?”
But “What is being made through me, and am I willing to let it be born?”
The Real Work
The real work is not on the canvas. Not on the page. Not in the music or the movement. The real work is the refining of the vessel—your heart, your mind, your body, your being—so that the One may move freely through you without distortion, without noise.
This is the deeper discipline. This is the true apprenticeship.
Not to fame. Not to style.
But to the One who dreams through us all.
Let your life be that dream made clear.
Let your work be the whisper of the Infinite
reminding the world that it has never been divided.
It has only forgotten that it is One.
These may be some of your most significant words ever. Thank you for them. I am reminded of a quotation from the late Lalo Schifrin: “The key is not to imitate life, but to create it anew.” And the featured artwork of J. Cirro Thomas is a beautiful example of pictorial collage, too.
Thank you for a very timely article. Your words resonated with me....I'm in a bit of a creative and life funk and this reminds me to get my spiritual life, thoughts, and creativity back in order. Thank you...thank you.