Vanity thought #1427. Clear and present danger

It’s a name of an old movie starring Harrison Ford, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it and, according to the Internet, its plot has nothing to do with my story today, yet the name fits. It’s about danger, this danger was clear and inescapable, it was present, but the strongest clue that reminded me of this phrase was that words “present” and “president” are phonetically close, with just one differing syllable, and the president played a central role there.

It was a dream, replayed twice and with reference to an earlier incident in exactly the same place, and the idea was that this time we’d get it right and it would end differently. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the first version, only the last, but vividly, and the original was always something from the history and not the dream.

So, I was on the presidential team, we were traveling to Nepal, arriving at Kathmandu by what looked like either a boat or a train. There are no trains in Kathmandu, of course, it’s too high up in the mountains, and certainly there are no boats, and the place didn’t look much like real Kathmandu, but that was the operative word for the place throughout the dream.

We arrived at the low lying entrance to the city, which was sprawling up the hillside with old temples competing with modern industrial structures for the domination of the hilltop. “Hill” is probably not the right word to use here because it was very high and long, stretching to the left as far as the eye could see, and probably had a plateau starting at the top. The industrial buildings there created the impression that this was where another, powerful and potentially threatening civilization beyond the visual range while the city leading to it was a typical Indian/Nepali conglomeration of low rise houses crowding narrow streets with open sewers where westerners have pavements.

Our base of operations and command and control center was near the entrance to the city, it felt safe and impenetrable, teaming with marines and all kinds of high tech weaponry and surveillance tools, but we’ve never actually seen it, we just constantly kept in touch with them trying to rescue us when things went terribly wrong.

For that matter, the Secret Service detail wasn’t visible in my dream either but I put it down to clever terrorists’ tactics, there was just presidential entourage which included one highly decorated officer, others were plain useless. I suppose we were preparing for some sort of a reception parade because even the president wore some sort of a uniform, white suit with some medals or something, but not military. Ladies were all primed for the occasion, too.

In the beginning we were in a train carriage because it felt like we had no freedom to change our course, or maybe it was a bus following a predetermined route, we were staring out of the windows, taking the sight of the abject poverty of the general population, crowded streets, and general lack of civilization. Then we were diverted and separated from our security detail and our driver had to follow his own instincts and advice we got through the comlink with the base. Everyone panicked, we were trying to escape the streets and get into an open space but it was useless. I think at this point we were in a motorcade and were losing cars one after another, stuck not in traffic but simply overrun by ever present crowds, they just couldn’t move fast enough through it to keep pace.

We got deep into the city, far away from the base and from where physical help was, we didn’t see the enemy, there was no shooting and no one to shoot at, but if we stopped the curious onlookers would just swarm our vehicle and try to get inside just to see what’s there, like human ants. Perhaps a couple of secret service agents was still there but their presence was inconsequential.

We realized that we were only drawing attention to ourselves and a vehicle like ours stood like a sore thumb in that slum of a city, we needed to hide. In an open space we could have been picked up by a helicopter but in the streets the enemy was always dangerously close, only a few feet away, separated by glass windows. Were those people our enemy? Probably not intentionally, but whoever planned this operation counted on them being there and causing us to panic.

This is where two versions in the dream started to diverge. In both we got off and continued running on foot but in the first the president was captured or lost, I didn’t see it but that was the impression, while in the second we lasted much longer and possibly survived, it ended with a slim hope.

We started noticing members of the team working on our capture, they had walkie talkies and they handed us from one agent to the next, pretty soon we could spot them in the crowd just as they could spot us. There weren’t very many of them and we thought we could try our luck on foot, hiding with the crowd that was supposed to expose and intimidate us.

Initially it worked and there was a short chase through the streets in the first version. The president changed into a Hawaiian shirt that looked close enough to what tourists would wear but we weren’t very lucky. A group of westerners still stood out and we had to split. We tried to maintain a visual contact still and move in the same general direction but the agents were quickly onto us and forced to change our route simply to avoid running into them. We lost the president and that was the end of it and a start of a dream replay.

This time I was aware of what happened and how the enemy operated, the dream spent much less time on the preamble and dived almost straight into the chase. At some point there were three of us – the president, the officer, both in uniform, and me in a Hawaiian shirt.

First, the president and the officer swapped their jackets, while still in the vehicle, we were trying to give our enemies a false target and thus give time to the actual president to escape. The officer knew what he was doing and was ready to sacrifice himself and it was a very noble gesture. When we split we kept touch with him for a while via coms but then lost him. He could have survived, he was like one of those super agents with ninja powers in the movies who can escape from anywhere.

The team chasing the president got smaller but they were still on our tail. Another problem was that the president was significantly shorter than the officer and still had a military uniform on. This president, however, was clever and resourceful, like Harrison Ford himself, and he soon ditched his jacket and got himself a shirt from one of the vendors lining the streets. I followed him closely but not close enough to suggest that we were together to onlookers. We could spot the agents with coms in the area but who knows how many others were there and we didn’t want to attract attention of anyone.

We dove into side alleys hoping to come out in totally unexpected places and merge with the crowd there but turned out it wasn’t such a good idea. The alleys were the place where street merchants prepared their wares, they were passable but not meant to walk through for the general public. Technically, they were “streets” with houses on both sides but they have been covered above to save merchants from the rain and the elements and therefore they were dark, dump, and extremely dirty. People were cooking everywhere, everywhere there were push carts, some alleys were for butchers only and running into those was horrible, and, of course, people could still see us because we just didn’t belong.

Streets parallel to the main one were okay but with significantly less foot traffic so hiding there was not a good option either. Agents were closing in one us even if they didn’t make the move yet, didn’t break into an actual chase. I saw one who was always on our tail, though, clearly being guided by his informants. The president changed the shirt one more time but I didn’t think it was helping. He just couldn’t hide.

And that’s the point of the dream – I don’t know why I was on the president’s team but out on the streets I became invisible. I saw it several times when agents simply looked over me and didn’t think I was one of the men they’ve been looking for. I assumed everyone else in our party got captured, if not for their value then at least as leverage but I, however, looked useless. They just couldn’t imagine that this particular westerner in a colorful shirt and with an absent look on his face could be connected to the president.

The president himself, however, was very different. Everything about him had a sense of purpose and urgency. He exuded energy and confidence, and he looked important. There was nothing he could do about it because that’s how he projected himself into the world. If behaved any differently he wouldn’t be a president.

If one suggests that the president could have pretended to be a chill out westerner taking in Nepal’s ambiance the answer would be that after all that he has done to become the president this image was simply unfeasible. His karma affected his demeanor in such a way that it was impossible to hide. Mine didn’t, as I’ve seen myself as I am in this dream, not as someone else. Contrary to the president, it is impossible for me to pretend I care much about anything in this life and so the pursuers didn’t see me of any value not only to themselves but to the world in general.

This is how the illusion gets us – because we want something from this world, strive for something, try to become something. This attracts everyone’s attention and creates both enemies and so-called friends. It immediately creates a dual vision of good and bad according to how it affects our progress.

Illusion doesn’t affect those who have no interest in anything it has to offer and, luckily for me, in that dream I was one of them. Somehow being on president’s team and helping him escape didn’t affect my basic outlook on life, which was dictated to me by Kṛṣṇa conscious devotees. I wasn’t personally afraid of capture either, I just had a feeling that it would be very unpleasant, probably something like what devotees in Vraja feel where there are no actual demons. I knew that I would be always protected even if I didn’t think of Kṛṣṇa much, or didn’t pray or chant.

As time goes by I unavoidably try to rationalize this dream and fill fading details but I don’t think it’s such a bad idea. I don’t think the dream had any mystical messages in there to miss and so understanding those feelings and thoughts and preparing to deal with them in real life could be useful.

Take the plan itself – our attackers didn’t go for a frontal assault but rather used the urban terrain in a way that our security hadn’t anticipated. Crowds in the streets were as much of an obstacle for them as they were for us. We were trying to escape in the open where we would have a firepower advantage while they were driving us into dead end places where we could have been overwhelmed and eventually overpowered naturally. It worked, the last sight of the president I had was when he ran into a crowd of locals who didn’t look very sympathetic to tourists. It was off the main streets and if they turned on him there would have been no help coming, that community looked completely cut off. I, on the other hand, decided to turn into a different direction down an empty street but at lest I looked inconspicuous there, like a tourist who lost his way, not a target of a terrorist manhunt. The president running into that crowd was a goner, I thought, but it was too late to stop him.

Later on, when trying to find him, I saw these no-go butcher areas again and I was horrified to see something like remains of a human carcass, skinned and discarded along a pile of animal innards. It could have been the president but it could have been my imagination playing tricks. Unfortunately, I didn’t see how the story actually ends in the dream, as it usually happens.

Bottom line lesson I’m trying to learn here is this – we are slaves to our desires and it is much safer for us to give them up and rely on Kṛṣṇa for protection. He might not come as a knight in shining armor, He’d just make māyā lose interest in threatening us. When we want nothing from her she has no power over us. When we give up bodily identification we stop seeing other beings as our enemies but rather see our feelings and perceptions as results of our karma carefully presented to us by Kṛṣṇa Himself, and He wouldn’t do anything to actually hurt us. When “dangers” come we would then ask Kṛṣṇa what He wants us to do about them rather than fighting them off ourselves.

It’s a concept which is fairly easy to understand but much more difficult to practice, but even then understanding must come first, so there, this dream is a good start.