Two Priests, Three Dreams, Two Continents by Michael Cocks
Posted on 14 July 2020, 17:44
This blog is about three very interesting dreams of the Rev. Joakim Thoreson, a priest of the Church of Sweden in Gothenburg, a friend of long standing. As Joakim is a priest, let me abandon any “academic” pose and speak as the priest that I actually am. In my previous blog the strange story about the falling pot lids concluded with a poem by John Keble, including these words:
”Two worlds are ours: ‘tis only sin
Forbids us to descry
The mystic heaven and earth,
Plain as the earth and sky.”
(“Sin” being “missing the mark”. The “mark” is that spiritual and physical are two sides of the same coin.) We hit the mark when we surrender to what we can call God and be open to God’s guidance. We can see synchronicities as loving guidance from Spirit
Let us agree that we receive loving guidance.
We can look at synchronicities, and in fact at any events in our life and ask what Spirit is teaching us. The nature of the guidance may either through positive or negative events. Both kinds are necessary for our spiritual development. We can learn much from adversity.
Joakim and I will benefit from being aware of our guidance. That does not in itself make us “good” or “bad”, just more “aware”, more conscious participants in a process of spiritual sorting out, or purification.
But let’s come to Joakim’s three remarkable dreams (They are very detailed, so I will need to give their gist.)
Joakim in Sweden dreamed about something happening to me on the other side of the world.
Circumstances surrounding his first dream:
In actual fact, on a particular day I was visiting a close friend of many years standing. I wont go into the details, but my friend was in a severe emotional crisis. More than I had imagined. When I reached out to him, he screamed at me and drove me from the house.
That evening, when I had returned home, there was an email from Joakim. He had dreamed that I had suffered a “heart attack” and was in hospital, but that I had plenty of people to care for me. Through Spirit he knew that I had been attacked. In a way it was a metaphorical heart attack.
Through Spirit Joakim knows I have been attacked. But the incarnate mind of Joakim weaves a story to try and explain how it came by this knowledge. In his dream, fellow members from a congregation in Gothenburg Sweden were attending a church conference in Berlin. Joakim thinks he sees me across the table, but someone explains that I am back in New Zealand, but that I had suffered a heart attack
The lesson that I learned was to make this distinction between Spirit and the human mind creating an understandable context that makes sense of the information that Spirit gave.
Circumstances surrounding Joakim’s second dream.
My wife and I were attending the wedding of a grandson in the North Island. There were many people there, and I remember some impatience to find soda water and some cordial.
That very same evening I again received an email from Joakim.
He has dreamed that he and his family were there with us at a wedding, and that there was concern about soda water and drinks. Joakim and his family had been with us in spirit, and confirms this with an email received that day. Joakim’s synchronicity comes punctually. (It was of course wonderful to know that he had actually been with us in spirit.)
Now we come to the occasion for Joakim to send a third email.
One evening I had been having a long conversation with Dr Brian Cocksey of Auckland many hundreds of kilometers north of where I live. For many years Brian had been experiencing a constant stream of very credible synchronicities, including those with UFOs, which he had sometimes supported with photos. I was fascinated by them, even though they were very negative. Brian has premonitions of disasters, many coincidences relating to the Lockerbie disaster where a plane was blown up. I felt that I was gaining insight into the workings of negative spirit that it was just as real as the positive.
On my side of the conversation I had been talking about the teaching of Stephen, about a clergyman friend’s writing on Communion. But more especially about the last two chapters in the Book of Revelation, about the Cubic City of God being let down like a bride from heaven. It is an inspiring vision of a time where Spirit and the physical are seen to be two sides of the same coin. And this is the very thing that all synchronicity, teachings from Spirit, loving leading from the Good Shepherd, demonstrates.
My conversation with Brian ends. We say goodbye I look to see if I have any new emails. There is one. It is from Joakim, and he wants to tell me about a dream.
He says the dream seemed to take place in his parish church, and that the local priest was preaching, quite unlike a Swedish priest talking excitedly like an American evangelist.
Seated near the front on the right side of the church was the church caretaker called Steffan (Swedish version of the name Stephen) who was listening to the preacher and making comments, to which the preacher and the congregation listened with great attention. There were figures in white who seemed separate from the scene.
But there was play with four cubes that were connected with strings. At the door of the church stood a bride waiting to come in.
The parallels with my conversation with Brian Cocksey are obvious. The “church caretaker” Steffan giving his teaching. The four cubes suggesting the cubic city of God, and the bride standing at the door. “The cubic city of God let down like a bride from heaven”.
Joakim’s dream suggests a relationship to my conversation with Brian, but not full awareness of the Bible passage, which describe an ideal time when heaven and earth are truly united and seen as two sides of the same coin.
In the Gospel of St John, Jesus prays that his followers they may all be one. “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” Jesus also speaks of doing what he sees the Father doing in him.
Joakim’s dream suggests some kind of awareness that he is doing what he sees “the Father” or Spirit is doing in him. This what “Union with God” means, acting in harmony with Spirit, doing the works of Spirit. I keep referring to Stephen’s prayer: “Lord let me know that I am with Thee, Let me not separate myself from Thee because I am me” This non-separateness is the state of union with God. Cosmic consciousness.
It was a remarkable dream. But even more remarkable was the fact that Joakim had dreamed this TEN DAYS EARLIER. This illustrates the fact that the creative world of Spirit is beyond space and time. Thus Joakim’s dream appears to predict the conversation I had just concluded with Brian Cocksey.
And now about Brian Cocksey: I have said how fascinated I was with his very credible multitudes of synchronicies, all negative. Brian valued his negative synchronicities, and we kind of quarrel as to which were the most important.
Brian and I had an important relationship and this is shown by an impossible pair of coincidences.
One day after a long telephone conversation with me Brian looked out his window and saw a car with a number plate with the letters C O C K S, on it. My surname.
In a country of five million this is some coincidence for the car to be there at that moment.
On a subsequent day right after a similar conversation in a street nearby I saw a car with C O C K S E on its number plate. (I later discovered that the car was registered in Marlborough, hundreds of kilometres to the north.)
(I cannot begin to imagine how Creative Spirit brought about the synchronistic scenarios.)
But what is being pointed out?
That COCKS and COCKSE belong together. We cannot separate the positive from the negative in the All in whom we live and move and have our being. “Union with God” can indeed involve suffering what at least appears to be evil. Jesus, obedient to the “Father” and was crucified. (Evil) But he rose from the dead. (Good)
Brian Cocksey’s Questions arise: Who or what sets such guidance in motion? Creative Spirit? Perfected human spirits like St Stephen? Angels? We cannot define this because “The Lord our God is One.”
I was often frustrated by Brian’s finding such negative synchronicities. But what was their source? As I pointed out, crucifixion is negative, resurrection is positive.
Brian thought they came from the Egyptian god Ra. But as they came from the All, the God in whom we live and move and have our being, can we judge his “negative synchronicities to be “bad”?
I expect Joakim would agree with me, if I suggested we were both faulty, like any other human beings.
Joakim and I should not so much as to try to get marks for good behaviour, as to surrender to the cleansing flow of Spirit, leading us through adversity as well as happy times, if we will make spiritual progress.
“COCKS” and “COCKSE” are inseparable as we follow behind “The Good Shepherd”.
We find this theme in many hymns we sing in church. “Lead us Heavenly Father lead us” “God is working his purpose out as years succeeds to year.” You get the picture!
Michael Cocks edits the journal, The Ground of Faith.
Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr and Into the Wider Dream by Michael Cocks are published by White Crow Books and available from Amazon and other bookstores.
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