Bible Interpreted In Dream Symbols

From the time I was born, I learned about the truths recorded in the best-selling book of all time - The Holy Bible. I was a babe of only a few weeks when my mother and father took me before a tent full of literally thousands of people so my grandfather, a faith-healing evangelist, could dedicate my life to the Lord. So began my acquaintance with the supernatural, the meta-physical.

My initial recognition of a connection between dreams and the Bible came not in partnering the two but rather in wanting to know the meaning of my dreams. I came across the story of Joseph and his brothers in the Old Testament, how he saved himself from slavery by interpreting the dreams of the Pharaoh. Having many dreams myself, some which troubled me, upon hearing this I believed I might have found my savior in a beloved minister. Surely if Joseph interpreted dreams, Rev. Rhode could as well. It was not to be.

This disappointment came only a few months before the darkest period of my life. I was entering the creativity of adolescence with little insightful guidance for my spirit. Don't get me wrong, I did very well by all outwardly determinable means, in most cases a model daughter, but I was spiritually adrift. In a most undisciplined fashion I rebelled against that which I did not understand. What I didn't understand the most was the inconsistencies in a religion which produced, from where I had placed myself, a great deal of hypocrisy in its adherents. For years in my deceitfully-independent mind, Truth became dogma, guidance became coercion, love became manipulation. Off to college I went looking for the answers to life among strangers. The Bible was a book I never opened, but I took it with me all the same.

Months went by. My understanding of life did not improve, in fact a profound depression was setting in because the purpose of my life eluded my grasp. Shortly after graduating from the university, I took a class in metaphysics as a favor to a friend. We had been studying several weeks when the president of the school visited us and agreed to teach our class. We were quite honored by his visit and quite excited by the prospect of learning directly from him.

As fate would have it - or luck, or change, or God's will, they all refer to the workings of Universal Law - the lesson of the evening was the nature of consciousness and the structure of the mind. For the latter he drew a diagram of the mind on a blackboard explaining there are three divisions of the mind: the Conscious Mind, the Subconscious Mind and the Superconscious Mind, each having a purpose, function, and duty to perform in order for the whole mind to thrive. For the nature of consciousness, he pulled out a Bible and began to read a story I had not heard for years.

I immediately felt a hardening, the residue of years of practicing shutting out rhetoric which piqued my conscience. The practiced resistance pushed away even at the mention of the Bible. Thankfully I was not trapped by prejudice to the extent that my mind would close down. My mind went to the acts. I knew this was not a Sunday School class and I was no longer twelve years old. I did some quick admitting that night. I knew from experience that the Bible contained Truth. I just didn't understand its contradictions, and no one else I knew did either. That was why I had put the book aside, seeking truth elsewhere. Now, ten years later, I had an opportunity to revisit what I had been told was 'original sin', the woman eating the fruit from the tree in the Garden of Eden.

What I learned that night is presented in these pages in much the same way Dr. Jerry L. Rothermel gave it to our class that night over a quarter century ago.

-Barbara Condron

College of Metaphysics