By Mary Ziemer ©  2013

Beloved gaze in thine own heart

The Holy tree is growing there….

—William Butler Yeats

 

Yeats’ plea to his beloved—to gaze into her own heart and look upon the Holy tree growing there— echoes the call to the heart of the ‘Lucid Surrender’ experience. Like the roots of a tall, leafy tree, the hidden roots of Lucid Surrender extend into our earthiness, our physical body at rest in sleep, ‘planted quiet in the night’. With the initial joy of lucidity, we move through the trunk of inner Beingness, into the void, ever deeper into our hearts, until our consciousness branches out, becoming ever finer, and more subtle, able to hold light—’the changing color of its fruit’—and to transform light into new life in the waking world through the Spirit‘s breath, giving life melody, magic, and mystery.

 

So I invite you to gaze into your own heart, to stand before holy tree that lives growing there, to still your mind, focus on a holy name or sacred song, and enter into a Lucid Surrender dream with me of ‘The Tree of Life’:

 

With lucidity, I bow my head, and, suddenly, my being feels “free” of my physical body and, oh, what fine release on the black light….My invisible “arms” open to the black winds as if I were a kite stretched across the sky, but then it feels as if an unseen being reaches from behind me, pushing my “hands” together ever so gently, palm to palm, as they would appear in prayer.

 

I feel the being‟s gentleness and intelligence and say “Thank you” for this reminder of where I need to return my focus: I begin to sing a sacred song. Delight dances delicately around and through me. In the luminous blackness, I cry out: “I know you holy beings are there.” With this, tiny specks of glittery light surround me and I know each speck holds a being of light. They move like flocks of starlings across the black.

 

The movement finally stops and before me, spread across an infinite, expanse there emerge concentric rings against the black full of an intense red. A desire to immerse myself in the red takes hold, and I wonder if the colour green will appear next. But instead bands of deep purple fill the outer rings. “Red and purple,” I think to myself, “These are the colors of royalty: This is the Divine!”

 

Even so, it feels hard for me to let go of the mental position of wondering what will happen next. As I struggle with my thoughts, from the centre of the concentric rings, there emerges a branching tree of red. “The Tree of Life!” I exclaim. The branches rise up and reach out to include me in their reach until I feel lifted up on the red leafy, branches and the black into a non-lucid dream.

 

 

At the heart of Lucid Surrender, in a numinous encounter, we gaze into our own hearts, and become one with the light of the Holy Tree growing there. With bodies rooted in the earth and a consciousness reaching to encompass the highest ‘heavens,’ or multi-dimensional levels of consciousness, we can feel ourselves, like trees, each one an axis mundi, a world-axis, linking the material and spiritual spheres, enacting the inner psycho-spiritual synthesis of transforming matter into spirit and spirit into matter. And, like characterful trees, in manifestation, each of us expresses universal qualities through our individuality.

 

Through Lucid Surrender, with the ‘surety’ of ‘the Holy Tree,’ we know the ‘hidden root’ that draws from an essential awareness of unity in multiplicity, of a deep love, flaming up in the ‘circle of our days’. In lucidity, we discover the magic and mystery nested in the holy branches of our dreams and within the reaches of our hearts.