All Dressed Up With Everywhere to Go Part 2: The Black Bow Tie of Discernment

Prelude

White tuxedo, black bow tie.  That was the odd costume I suddenly found myself wearing at the emergence of the Big Dream from the confused chaos of the seemingly mundane small dream that night.  I say "odd" because I have only one time in my life worn a tuxedo (at a brother's wedding decades ago) and that is not the sort of attire I aspire to;  blue jeans and a t-shirt will do just fine, thank you.  Even so, the black bow tie especially stands out for me as a symbol for the simple reason that I have owned only one tie of any sort in my entire adult life.  I find them vaguely repulsive at worst, strangely silly and superfluous at best.  The only one ever in my possession was a signed Jerry Garcia psychedelic tie given to me by Mr. Garcia himself in thanks for my volunteering at a fund raising event he had participated in.  I never wore it, and eventually gave it to an aging Deadhead I was acquainted with.  Thus, you can probably imagine just how odd it was for me to find myself in that  black noose while in the imaginal dream world.

Obviously a strong symbol here, so what would one associate with such a specific article of attire?  A few things come to mind - tradition, formality, constriction, pageantry, celebration, novelty, authority, sternness, silliness...hmm, some contradictions showing up here (btw, a bow tie also reminds me of the mathematical symbol for infinity, but I'll put that aside  for now).   If we're to tease this out it seems it's time to bring in the context of our destination, or more precisely the territory of our journey; the where amid all the every-wheres waiting in potential.  And that, of course, is the Imaginal Realm.  In that context an entirely new word symbol comes to me, one born of a particular necessity while traversing the various islands within that island nation - that is, the term discernment.

So now we have the black bow tie of discernment.

Fugue

I'll point out here that I'm not advocating the black bow tie of skepticism; or disbelief; or worse yet, cynicism.  To quote my dictionary:  to discern is to detect or perceive with the eye or intellect; to discriminate.  One might say, to discriminate between truth and fiction, to perceive what-is without agenda born of hidden or unhidden paradigm fixations.  Most skeptics and cynics can't see outside the box they've built around themselves, the paradigm they cling to.  I have a small story to illustrate this.

This story played out during the time of the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, close on the heels of 9/11.  The Bush administration was making a great effort to convince the American public of the necessity to embark on that war.  Colin Powell, a man respected and trusted by many from all sides of the political spectrum, was called upon to make the case.  At one point in a presentation to the presidential press corps he displayed a satellite photo of two trucks parked by a road in the Iraqi desert, stating that U.S. intelligence believed the trucks were carrying missile launchers armed with weapons of mass destruction capable of hitting Israel and even parts of Europe.  Later that evening Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, was asked by a reporter what he thought of this evidence presented by Powell. Annan replied "All I see are two trucks in the desert".

Kofi Annan was using discernment.  He saw trucks in the desert.  Colin Powell saw missile launchers with weapons of mass destruction.  It turns out Annan was right - no weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq.

One might ask in this light what the uses of discernment are within the Imaginal Realm.  After all, discernment is to a great degree a function of logic, a cognitive skill which some suggest does not apply to the island of the dream world, much less the island nation it inhabits.  Nonetheless, I would suggest discernment is an important tool to carry in your backpack on that journey.  When traveling among faeries and dead people and ascended masters a healthy dose of discernment just might be illuminating, and by default a bulwark against hazards.  And hazards there are.  When a channeled entity is met, one who has taken over the mind and body of a living person, are we to trust the message even if we accept the truth of the channeling?  I have personal experience meeting a self-proclaimed channeler who evaded questions and dissembled left and right.  Was he actually being channeled?  I have no idea.  But my bullshit detector, a great tool of discernment, was sounding the alarm.  I later found out his closest followers eventually abandoned him.  To use the analogy, they had been seeing weapons of mass destruction, then finally saw trucks in the desert.

But it's a two-edged sword, this tool of discernment.  It can, if not being used carefully, blind us to possible truths outside our hidden paradigms.  As a friend once suggested, in the Imaginal Realm one sits on the edge of that two-edged sword.  Does it cut our butts, or tickle them?

To be continued...