Freeing Yourself from the Lion’s Jaw
Two Dreams, Two Hands, Two Prayers, Two Rhythms, and Two Lessons on What to Do With the Beast of Mind
Brad dreamed we were traveling in a car on a country road:
We were with another couple and the other man was behind the steering wheel. He was unquestionably driving too fast. I shouted for him to slow down, warning we would crash. In that instant the car turned into a train, a cog railroad engine pulling one car of passengers. It, too, was moving too fast and we feared it might derail when it went around the sharp bend of a mountain curve. I moved from the back of the train to the front seat and sat next to the train’s engineer. “Slow it down, right now,” I demanded. The engineer agreed and brought the train to a walking pace. Now moving very slowly, the surrounding landscape changed to the African bush.
From the train we could see one wild animal after another. I stuck my hand out the window to point at a lion and announced to everyone, “Look, there is a lion.” I didn’t notice how close I was to it and within seconds his jaw opened and clamped down on my pointing finger.
I knew that if his jaws came down any further, my finger would be bitten off. The engineer warned me, “Stay still and don’t move. Don’t startle the lion.” At first I thought this was good practical advice, so I started to freeze. Then something came over me—an inspiration to both remain relaxed with my pointing finger in its mouth while moving the other hand, my right hand, to reach for its belly. Gently, I tickled the lion’s underside. I didn’t want to over excite him, nor did I want to be so subtle that my touch was not noticed. The lion was distracted by this surprising pleasure and in that moment, his jaw opened. That’s when I pulled out my finger.
I was so excited about being released from the lion’s jaws that I began to pray with gratitude. But my prayer was unlike any I have expressed before—it was two prayers voiced at the same time. I shouted, “Do it, do it, do it . . .” with a steady beat and melodic tone while throwing in an offbeat, syncopated prayer line of “thank you, thank you, thank you . . .” that almost threw my first prayer off its rhythmic track. These two rhythms–one predictable and entraining and the other intermittent and erratic–filled me with the emotional, spiritual electricity of n/om.* Like handling the lion with two hands, the left hand steady and the right hand in surprising motion, I was spiritually cooked by two contrary yet complementary prayers.
A Benevolent Double Bind
The next day we discussed the vision, underscoring how the mind is often like a lion that bites whatever is placed in front of it. We recalled the old Buddhist warning not to mistake the finger for the moon to which it points. We also remembered that the cybernetician, Warren McCulloch, restated the teaching: “Don’t bite my finger; look where I am pointing.” Teachers repeatedly have a finger bitten by students who clamp down on a single pointing metaphor, idea, or action that is only a part of the entire scene. The mind grabs hold of one bit of information it likes or dislikes and then (dis)misses the whole from which it came. This makes teaching a frustrating and sometimes risky occupation.
The vision brought a lesson: Rather than freeze and allow the trickster lion of mind to distill and still what would otherwise be a moving interaction, hold steady while also tickling the underbelly of the beast. When skillfully done this double action creates enough confusion, humor, or delightful surprise to loosen trickster’s talking jaw and release its conceptual hold. Neither fight nor surrender to the biting beast. Instead, remember it takes two of everything you’ve got—two hands, two prayers, and two rhythms to co-handle the lion of trickster mind.
Please Don’t Feed the Lions
The same night that Brad had his dream, another person in the Sacred Ecstatics Guild dreamed that she looked out her window and saw a pride of lions with baby cubs staring back at her. Unsure at first what to do, she thought they must be hungry and so decided to feed them. This dream, especially when coupled with Brad’s, reminds us that we must be careful about feeding any wild creature, especially the insatiable and undisciplined mind of trickster. This is true even when it appears innocent, sweet, and hungry.
Feeding trickster is another way that teachers satiate their own natural, human hunger to please and appease, measuring good teaching by the number of lions who keep coming around for an easy meal. But feeding the trickster lion of mind only readies the beast to later eat more than you wish to offer.
Two Dreams, Two Lessons
Don’t feed the lion, that is, don’t placate any insatiable trickster hunger, whether your own or others’. And, if you find your mind has bitten a pointing finger and lost touch with the luminescence of the moon, there is more choice than to surrender, fight, or flight. Don’t forget that you’ve got two hands capable of delivering a surprising co-intervention that frees you for more transformative action: cooking a two-rhythm, two-winged prayer. Doing so will take you to the big room and fill you with the sacred emotion and electrified motion of n/om—the only thing that truly satisfies your deepest hunger.
-The Keeneys, July 8, 2019
* N/om is the Ju/’hoan Bushman word for the vibratory life force and emotion from the Big God that makes the body shake.