Several years ago I heard the late Richie Havens in concert. Toward the end of the show he recited a familiar children’s rhyme very very slowly with great inflection; so slowly that you were caught off guard when partway through you realized what it was he was reciting:

“Row! …..   row! ….    row    your  boat…
gently…    down    the  stream….”

By the time Havens reached the last five words – life is but a dream – the hard shell of this familiar verse, buried in your gray matter from your earliest days, had been cracked open to reveal its startling metaphysical message.

Another favorite singer, Beth Nielsen Chapman, reworked a couple lines and slipped it into her song Beyond the Blue, cryptically following it with some words in Sanskrit which I never payed attention to until this week when I happened to listen to the song again. I found the translation in her liner notes:

This life is but a dream,
This life is but a dream.
Go gently down the stream.

Is nind se, Prabhu, kya mujheuthaoge?
(From this sleep, Lord will you wake me?)
Is swapan se, Prabhu, kya mujhe jagoge?
(From this dream, Lord will you wake me?)
Tum hi mai dubu, Turn hi mai uthu,
(In thee I dive, in thee I rise,)
Tere sagar me, Tum hi me
(In thy sea, in Thee.)

A synchronicity ensued yesterday when I opened by chance to a poem of Hafiz’ (from the wonderful collection, “The Gift”) entitled “Forgive The Dream”. In it he says:

I understand the wounds
That have not healed you.
They exist
Because God and love
Have yet to become real enough
To allow you to forgive
The dream.

Six hundred years after the Persian poet penned his treasured verses, A Course in Miracles was published. It contains this eyebrow-raising sentence:

“the Bible says that a deep sleep fell upon Adam,
and nowhere is there reference to his waking up.”
ACIM (Text – 2.I.3)

According to the Course, we’re dreaming right now. And we “travel but in dreams, while safe at home”. Our greater Self is held safe and unassailable in God’s embrace, waiting patiently for the Dreamer to awaken. The path to awakening is spelled out in Hafiz’s poem: we must forgive the dream and we can do that when God and love become real enough to us. He instructs us to shift our attention from old thinking to true thinking:

You listen to an old alley song
That brings your body pain;

Now chain your ears
To His pacing drum and flute.

Fix your eyes upon
The magnificent arch of His brow

That supports
And allows this universe to expand.

“In God alone can my soul find rest”, sang David in his psalm. “Rest comes from waking, not from sleeping” , reminds the Course.

Our multi-faith music and meditation service this Sunday (July 20) will feature Hafiz’s poem and will include songs and chants to help us surrender to the One who calls us to awaken from the dream. Join us at 6:00.

A dream is only a dream. We will wake up. (Don’t you feel your eyelids beginning to flutter?) Until then, be sure to row your boat gently and merrily!

Peace and blessings,
Roger