A Gorilla in the Midst

I was visited by a beautiful silverback gorilla a few days ago during a meditation that sought to resolve a painful recurring issue in my life. Sometimes animals in visions do talk, but without speaking a word, he modeled a grounded state of being that my body understood and mimicked without hesitation. My muscles spontaneously discharged all the stress they were holding, and I wept with the kind of comprehension that only comes from a complete systemwide shift. I got it. Breathing with him, I felt the resolution of something that had been stealing all the pleasure off my plate for as long as I could remember.

James Hillman says in his book Dream Animals, “A snake is not a symbol.” When we are visited by something alien and wonderful in visions or dreams, there is a terrible inclination to immediately try and make sense of it. The conscious mind is always trying to make itself comfortable, to keep things within the parameters of its own limitations. So instead of allowing ourselves to be moved, affected, by this representative of a more natural state of being, we immediately paste a label on its forehead, in our minds or in our therapy sessions, and overlook the being itself. It’s a terrible elision.

Imagine if you had traveled all the way from wherever dreams come from to visit someone and they completely ignored you and talked only about you -- or worse, altogether forgot you were standing there. You’d probably hang around for a while feeling awkward and disappointed, then amble on to someplace more welcoming; and the person you had visited would be left with only an incomplete contraction of the invitation you were trying to convey.

When I’m frightened, I want answers. But a mystery solved inadequately makes me feel robbed, some part of me knowing that I have missed an important opportunity. It is a terrible loss, as if poachers had come and turned my beautiful dream friend into a pile of souvenirs, forcing me to buy back cheap mementos of an experience I wouldn’t let myself have, a place I never really visited.

So the more moments I can spend not knowing who this creature is, not deciding what he means, not penning him in with interpretations that make me less uncomfortable with the -- well, the 500-pound gorilla in the room, the more I feel the hum of an immense apparatus deep inside me coming to life. The tiny point in space that is what I know of myself connects up with the grid of potential from which we are fashioned and for brief moments I feel what is available to me. This is what it means to ground.

Ironically, this is one of the lessons to be learned from a gorilla, possibly the most grounded being on the planet. But if I had been looking for this lesson, trying to figure it all out, I would not have gotten the message.