Symbols - What does heaven look like
The Long Route Home
Many myths tales and legends use allegorical descriptions to describe the heros/co-creator’s path. Often it involves sea journeys and treks across the desert [or both]. A remarkable number of visions during this period do involve the sea and water or at least rivers and floods and so on as well as deserts. Occasionally a person will undertake a journey in the air in the form of a migrating bird, there will then be numerous dreams about birds and flying.
In order to see this better we need to go back to the diagram of the Egg. Those on the heroes path or the co-creation path go round the egg to get to the Creator and Created section. They do not go ‘up’ their soul cone, like the Mystic, merging at the centre, they travel round the Egg. Note that this is both a figurative journey and if executed in dreams and visions takes on a literal quality too.
When travelling by ‘water’, the person undertaking this journey usually finds he has dreams or visions which involve boats. There may also be strange dreams and visions related to the fact the water level is above the earth level.
The Odyssey is an allegorical journey of a hero figure (Odysseus – Greek, Ulysses - Roman) on his heroes path. He too undertakes the journey by sea. Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is an allegory of the spiritual journey which takes place in the desert and the air. Jonathan Livingstone Seagull takes his journey entirely in the air…..
Although I have shown the journey as though it was taken at one level, it is clear from a number of observations that although one can do this [symbolically of course], there are many who also aim to get ‘higher’ as they travel going from water, to air and then up to the aether level – so that their final resting place is where they prefer to be. If you prefer your final resting place to be on an island at sea level, you stay at sea level and travel along this way, but if you wish to aim higher you ‘climb’ ascending – as you go by more heroic deeds and more acts of co-creation.
In the Odyssey, the poem describes Odysseus’s long journey home following the fall of Troy. It takes Odysseus ten years to reach Ithaca after the ten-year Trojan War, twenty years in total.
The enormous time span involved serves to emphasise that it is the journey itself that is important not the arrival. During the journey he endures a huge number of tests as well as dangers. The process itself, in other words, is more important than the continual drive to get to the end. Paulo Coehlo’s Alchemist also very clearly explains this. [I won’t quote from the book, it is better to read the entire book to understand the idea].
Practically every ‘hero’ story is in effect an allegory of a person going along this route. Not all of them get it right, which makes the stories that much more useful.
Observations
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- Barbara Cane's mother
- Beausobre, Iulia de - and the crystal canoe
- Böcklin, Arnold - Die Heimkehr (The Homecoming or The Return) 1887
- Cash, Johnny - Lead me gently home Father
- Cohen, Leonard - Going home
- Dante - Inferno [egg shape]
- Dickinson, Emily - Time feels so vast that were it not For an eternity
- Dr Yvonne Kason and the plane crash onto the ice
- Fleetwood Mac - Sara
- Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballe - Guide Me Home
- Freddie Mercury and Queen - Too Much Love Will Kill You
- Frost, Robert - Never tell me that not one star of all
- Gentling the Bull – 06 Returning home on the back of the Bull
- Get the suitcase out from under his bed
- Hamilton, Dr Allan - Harry and his heart
- He picked up my nephew's bike and said, 'That's it, I'm off'
- Heine, Heinrich - The North Sea - The sunbeams were playing
- Hesiod - Works and Days - The five ages of man
- Hodgson, Roger – Breakfast in America - Long way home
- Hodgson, Roger – Open the Door - Open the Door
- Hugh Brody – Maps and Dreams - Jimmy Wolf
- I See Dead People: Dreams and Visions of the Dying - Dr Christopher Kerr - TEDxBuffalo
- Keats, John - The Tapestry of Life
- Lalla - I’m towing my boat across the ocean
- Lyon White's Mum Peggy talks to her dead father
- Martine Alexis from Swansea and her childhood NDE
- Masters and Houston
- Mircea Eliade - Alaskans - Following the Road of the Dead
- Mircea Eliade - And the Manacica people
- Mircea Eliade - Australian aboriginal beliefs on death
- Mircea Eliade - Kahuna ascent of the spirit on death
- Mircea Eliade - The Tibetan Book of the Dead
- Mircea Eliade - The Zhi Ma Funeral ceremony of the Na-Khi of Southwest China
- Monroe, Robert - The place of pure peace
- Moody Blues - Haunted
- Nigerian girl sees her distant dying father
- Norse - The Night journey
- Orbison, Roy - 1985 Coming Home
- Peter Gabriel - Solsbury Hill
- Plato - Republic X - 06 Tale of Er
- Previn, Dory - Mythical Kings and Iguanas
- Samuel Rogers - Man's going home
- She died peacefully with a smile on her lips
- She wants to go HOME
- Spender, Richard - Laughing Blood - Sussex defence
- T H White - The Once and Future King
- The 96 year old man and the car journey
- The Book of Taliesin - The Battle Of the Trees - 08
- The death of Katharine
- The Dying lady who wanted to go shopping
- Vaughan, Henry - The Pursuit
- Yassawi - 07 from HIKMET 11
- Yeats, W B - Collected poems - As I came over Windy Gap
- Yeats, W B - Collected poems - The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams