Okay, I’m back and ready to write. This is. my Inception moment, the sharing of my understanding of the “long haul” of our developmental journey, from stagnant pools and tape loops, to the flowing stream, and then back in another tape loop, and out again, is the journey of every river to the ocean…to going home.

Inception is about the. “dream team” going into the subconscious of Fisher to change the IDEA that is shaping his destiny. Fisher is taking over his dying father’s business and threatens to dominate the World, and this must not happen, so the Dream Team goes in.
Fisher believes his father is disappointed in him, so Fisher is bent of getting his father’s approval by outdoing the father, by taking his business to the next level, and by dominating the world would finally get atonement with the father.
The Dream Team replaces this IDEA with the IDEA that his father loves him, and this frees Fisher to be his own man, and he no longer has to follow the father hoping for approval and the shame of disappointing not only the father but himself.

All my life, since 1968 when I had my Inception moment, I’ve tried to see the context, the whole story, its universal pattern that takes form in the particulars of my personal history. Ah..here is where Joseph Campbell really kicks in as the “kicker” that wakes you up.
The pattern…the pattern is the message, not the content or local history of me. I am the universal pattern and the universal is me. In all my studies I just get a different look at this pattern, this developmental journey that we are all on…same journey, different faces, same universal, different content. Same cup, different soup.
When we finally see the pattern, we see because we are no longer attached to the particular history that is me. And yet I am still here, yet I laugh at the great joke.

The “kicker” in Inception was when you fall backward you would awake from the dream. The dream team had to build in “kickers” so they could all awake at the same time from the collective dream.
What is this “kicker” in my own life that wakes me from the dream of my life? Something must “knock me over” like a surprise. Death is always a kicker. Sudden loss is a kicker, can be a kicker. We have to want the kicker. The pain of the dream is a kicker. We just get tired of the pain. Zen is a kicker. Real gurus or masters are kickers. Therapists are kicker. Anything can be a kicker, even a movie. Conditions have to be right for the kicker to kick. The kicker, unlike the movie, can’t be planned. The kicker will always be a surprise, sudden, spontaneous, like the Sting, when you are surprised in your own perfect plan.

Yes…movie ends with a question. When the hero finally gets home and is reunited with his children (who have not aged), the top still spins….Is he in the dream he now wants. Is our dream the one we want? Is there still a kicker to come? Do I invite it? Do I fear it? Is the “kicker” actually built into development, so that when development or awakening stall, a kicker will automatically kick in. We either invite the kicker, to the kicker comes uninvited as a nightmare.
I have found that the spinning top will fall over, but like Russian Nesting Dolls, we just enter another dream, and again the stop spins until the “kicker” and it falls over, launching the next level of dream and another sleep, until again the next kicker. Life is a continuous awakening.

There are sudden dramatic awakenings, but always followed by another sleep; and then there is the slow awakening that has no huge breaks, but so gradually one may not notice it, like the frog who won’t leap from the water that is being every so slowly raised to a boil.

One must increase the fuse capability of the brain slowly to handle more and more energy or current. Otherwise you blow the whole house.