From Tlachitli to Titli a prophetic dream
by Dumb Like a Fox
02-02-2019
In recent years, God has been training me in the area of prophetic dreams. I'm not talking about visions of the apocalypse or something, but symbolic dreams by which God chooses to deliver an encoded message revealing his perspective on life choices, current events, etc. In retrospect, I see now that God was communicating to me through prophetic dreams from a very early age, but I had no frame of reference or training on what was happening. I would lay awake with a particular dream vivid in my memory, unable to stop thinking about it, but unable to understand the symbolism in it, so I would end up saying to myself, "Okay, that was weird!" and blaming the previous night's pizza for it.
However, once I finally woke up and smelled the roses, so to speak...discovering that certain dreams were messages from God...I began to cultivate the skill of properly interpreting them. Not all dreams are messages from God, of course, but with a little practice it becomes easy to distinguish which ones are. In my case it is the vivid ones with iconic imagery that stick with me when I wake up and refuse to go away until I start digging and praying and let God help me unwrap the package.
One cool thing about dreams is that they bypass the logic centers of your brain. Some people are afraid to feel confident that they hear the voice of God because they wonder if they are getting their own mind or imagination involved in the process. That is a real possibility, especially during waking hours. However, I have never been able to plan a dream or be in control of it. It is what it is. For me that takes the worry out of wondering if I somehow made the message up based on false information or bad theology or wishful thinking or something.
Anyway, last night I had one of those dreams and once I got it unpacked, the message turned out to be too good not to share. Here is the dream:
I am in a long narrow room-like place, with high walls, slanted near the bottom and the slants have seats built into them, like bleachers. I am with a team of people of various sexes and ages and we are using improvised weapons to violently beat on another team of people. For instance, In each hand I hold a piece of approximately thirty-inch long steel flat-stock and am using it to wale the daylights out of the people on the other team. They are doing the same to us.
Somewhere along the line, one of my team gets badly hurt (Shocker, huh? But it was like nobody expected that any serious damage would result from the "game"). I clack my pieces of flat-stock together to get everyone's attention and holler for a time out.
"Somebody got hurt!" I announce, pointing out my team member. Evidently, according to the rules of the game, everybody had three minutes or so before we went back to bashing each other. My injured female team mate had a traumatic brain injury, but somehow she was conscious and coherent. She explains that she also has a terminal illness.
As team leader I begin to think seriously about whether we should continue this game. I begin to ask my team mates their opinion on whether or not they think we should continue the game or quit. We only have a short time to make a decision, so I take charge, walking down the line, person by person and getting their opinion and reason for it. If they start to ramble, I cut them short. "One sentence, please. We don't have much time."
Some of them want to quit. Some want to keep going. In the back of my mind I'm thinking, "Even if we vote to stop, the other team won't stop. When the three minutes are up, they'll start beating on us, and we will have no choice but to continue."
Just about then, much to my surprise, the leader of the other team, a woman who projected an air of competence, walked up to me and abruptly announced that her team wanted to stop fighting. Amazed, I stammered the news to my team. As I turned back to the other team leader, she continued.
"One of my people...(pointing to another female, sitting apart from the rest of her team, dressed in a dance costume)...Zoey, here is a Titli dancer, and she wants to say something."
Zoey nods. "Yes, I'm a Titli dancer, and I would like to make a suggestion. Instead of fighting with each other why don't we dance together. I can teach everybody all the moves."
The dream ends with a tremendous sense of agreement and excitement that we can turn our destructive divisive game into a synchronized unified effort and that the arena of carnage can become a stage for creativity and beauty.
So, let's unpack this a little bit. There are some personal applications that apply to my situation, and I won't get into that. But the message is based on universal truths and I'm sure each reader can apply it on the micro and macro scale in ways that you alone can best appreciate. Here are the symbols:
The Court: While showering after rising from my bed, I suddenly recognized the court in which we had been fighting. It was nearly an exact replica of the tlachtli court at Oaxaca, Mexico. I have attached a picture for reference. For those who do not know, tlachtli was a ball game played by Central American Indians (such as Aztecs and Mayas) in which the players endeavor by the use of only the leg, hip and elbow to send a solid rubber ball through two rings set vertically in the walls of an I-shaped court. It is said that for certain ceremonial games, the players of the losing team would be taken to the temple at the pinnacle of the nearest ziggurat where their beating heart would be torn from their chest and offered as a ritual blood sacrifice to the feathered serpent god.
Steel Flat-stock as Weapons: Steel is a combination of Iron and Carbon. Symbolically, iron represents human strength, obstinacy, fortitude, tenacity, and confidence in power. In the Bible, iron (barzel, Gen. 4:22) is a symbol of hardness and stubbornness. Isa. 45:4 says, using Hebrew parallelism of thought "thou art obstinate (Heb., hard), and thy neck is an iron sinew." Iron also stands for an unyielding hardness, as in Deut. 25:23, "heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron." Iron also connotes the qualities of boldness (Jer. 1:18), and permanence (Jer. 17:1). Carbon is the chemical make-up of all known life on earth. So the symbolism of weaponized steel, very clearly suggests a brittle unyielding strength based on earthly confidence and human resources without taking into account the heavenly and spiritual elements.
Violence: The symbolism is pretty obvious. It suggests conflict, manipulation, division, competition, and the struggle for dominance regardless of the damage it may cause to others.
Head Injury: This could represent a blow to our belief systems, our knowledge base or our headship, i.e. the ability to control a scenario.
Titli Dancer: I Google searched this term and discovered this review: "This leads us to the show “Veet- What beauty feels like” which was held at the PC Marquee in Karachi on 28th May 2009 showcasing a celebration of beauty and femininity through some of the finest ambassadors of Pakistani Fashion. A Catwalk Productions presentation featuring an exclusive dance performance choreographed by Omar Rahim and collections of Top Pakistani designers... In the world premiere of the opening performance entitled ‘Titli’, Omar Rahim brilliantly explored beauty through the metaphor of the life cycle of a butterfly. The dance depicted the struggle to grow, the desire to play and the dream to fly." Wow! Butterflies. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Ed Smith of Transformational Prayer Ministry said something profound. I paraphrase him based on my best recollection of his words. "The caterpillar doesn't struggle to become a butterfly, the butterfly struggles to escape the cocoon that it wove when it was a caterpillar."
Zoey: The dancer's name was Zoey, which we all know means life. Need I say more?
So, there it is! What rich symbolism! I will leave you to connect the dots in the way which speaks into your life most vividly. However, I think we can all recognize themes that apply to our families, our circle of influence, our communities, or regions, our nations, our world and our multiverse. Shall we all put down our weapons of steel that divide and hurt each other and let Zoey teach us the dance of the butterfly?
Oh, one more thing. if you take "lach" out of the word "Tlachtli" and replace it with an "i" we get the word "Titli". Is it a coincidence that the Hebrew word "lach" means moist, fresh, green or new? The word is used 6 times in the Hebrew Bible and each time, it is in the context of deception, naiveté, immaturity or weakness. Ezekiel 17:24 reads: "And all the trees of the field shall know that I the LORD have brought down the high tree, have exalted the low tree, have dried up the green (lach) tree, and have made the dry tree to flourish: I the LORD have spoken and have done it." What about the "i" that replaces the "lach"? Well, that was the shape of the tlachlti court. We are not to abandon the court when we recognize how we have been acting immaturely, divisively, and hatefully. No, we are to stay in the arena, but transform it into a dance studio to learn to work with those we have been bashing to cultivate reconciliation, forgiveness, unity, beauty and creativity. May God make it true for each of us.
by Dumb Like a Fox
02-02-2019
In recent years, God has been training me in the area of prophetic dreams. I'm not talking about visions of the apocalypse or something, but symbolic dreams by which God chooses to deliver an encoded message revealing his perspective on life choices, current events, etc. In retrospect, I see now that God was communicating to me through prophetic dreams from a very early age, but I had no frame of reference or training on what was happening. I would lay awake with a particular dream vivid in my memory, unable to stop thinking about it, but unable to understand the symbolism in it, so I would end up saying to myself, "Okay, that was weird!" and blaming the previous night's pizza for it.
However, once I finally woke up and smelled the roses, so to speak...discovering that certain dreams were messages from God...I began to cultivate the skill of properly interpreting them. Not all dreams are messages from God, of course, but with a little practice it becomes easy to distinguish which ones are. In my case it is the vivid ones with iconic imagery that stick with me when I wake up and refuse to go away until I start digging and praying and let God help me unwrap the package.
One cool thing about dreams is that they bypass the logic centers of your brain. Some people are afraid to feel confident that they hear the voice of God because they wonder if they are getting their own mind or imagination involved in the process. That is a real possibility, especially during waking hours. However, I have never been able to plan a dream or be in control of it. It is what it is. For me that takes the worry out of wondering if I somehow made the message up based on false information or bad theology or wishful thinking or something.
Anyway, last night I had one of those dreams and once I got it unpacked, the message turned out to be too good not to share. Here is the dream:
I am in a long narrow room-like place, with high walls, slanted near the bottom and the slants have seats built into them, like bleachers. I am with a team of people of various sexes and ages and we are using improvised weapons to violently beat on another team of people. For instance, In each hand I hold a piece of approximately thirty-inch long steel flat-stock and am using it to wale the daylights out of the people on the other team. They are doing the same to us.
Somewhere along the line, one of my team gets badly hurt (Shocker, huh? But it was like nobody expected that any serious damage would result from the "game"). I clack my pieces of flat-stock together to get everyone's attention and holler for a time out.
"Somebody got hurt!" I announce, pointing out my team member. Evidently, according to the rules of the game, everybody had three minutes or so before we went back to bashing each other. My injured female team mate had a traumatic brain injury, but somehow she was conscious and coherent. She explains that she also has a terminal illness.
As team leader I begin to think seriously about whether we should continue this game. I begin to ask my team mates their opinion on whether or not they think we should continue the game or quit. We only have a short time to make a decision, so I take charge, walking down the line, person by person and getting their opinion and reason for it. If they start to ramble, I cut them short. "One sentence, please. We don't have much time."
Some of them want to quit. Some want to keep going. In the back of my mind I'm thinking, "Even if we vote to stop, the other team won't stop. When the three minutes are up, they'll start beating on us, and we will have no choice but to continue."
Just about then, much to my surprise, the leader of the other team, a woman who projected an air of competence, walked up to me and abruptly announced that her team wanted to stop fighting. Amazed, I stammered the news to my team. As I turned back to the other team leader, she continued.
"One of my people...(pointing to another female, sitting apart from the rest of her team, dressed in a dance costume)...Zoey, here is a Titli dancer, and she wants to say something."
Zoey nods. "Yes, I'm a Titli dancer, and I would like to make a suggestion. Instead of fighting with each other why don't we dance together. I can teach everybody all the moves."
The dream ends with a tremendous sense of agreement and excitement that we can turn our destructive divisive game into a synchronized unified effort and that the arena of carnage can become a stage for creativity and beauty.
So, let's unpack this a little bit. There are some personal applications that apply to my situation, and I won't get into that. But the message is based on universal truths and I'm sure each reader can apply it on the micro and macro scale in ways that you alone can best appreciate. Here are the symbols:
The Court: While showering after rising from my bed, I suddenly recognized the court in which we had been fighting. It was nearly an exact replica of the tlachtli court at Oaxaca, Mexico. I have attached a picture for reference. For those who do not know, tlachtli was a ball game played by Central American Indians (such as Aztecs and Mayas) in which the players endeavor by the use of only the leg, hip and elbow to send a solid rubber ball through two rings set vertically in the walls of an I-shaped court. It is said that for certain ceremonial games, the players of the losing team would be taken to the temple at the pinnacle of the nearest ziggurat where their beating heart would be torn from their chest and offered as a ritual blood sacrifice to the feathered serpent god.
Steel Flat-stock as Weapons: Steel is a combination of Iron and Carbon. Symbolically, iron represents human strength, obstinacy, fortitude, tenacity, and confidence in power. In the Bible, iron (barzel, Gen. 4:22) is a symbol of hardness and stubbornness. Isa. 45:4 says, using Hebrew parallelism of thought "thou art obstinate (Heb., hard), and thy neck is an iron sinew." Iron also stands for an unyielding hardness, as in Deut. 25:23, "heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron." Iron also connotes the qualities of boldness (Jer. 1:18), and permanence (Jer. 17:1). Carbon is the chemical make-up of all known life on earth. So the symbolism of weaponized steel, very clearly suggests a brittle unyielding strength based on earthly confidence and human resources without taking into account the heavenly and spiritual elements.
Violence: The symbolism is pretty obvious. It suggests conflict, manipulation, division, competition, and the struggle for dominance regardless of the damage it may cause to others.
Head Injury: This could represent a blow to our belief systems, our knowledge base or our headship, i.e. the ability to control a scenario.
Titli Dancer: I Google searched this term and discovered this review: "This leads us to the show “Veet- What beauty feels like” which was held at the PC Marquee in Karachi on 28th May 2009 showcasing a celebration of beauty and femininity through some of the finest ambassadors of Pakistani Fashion. A Catwalk Productions presentation featuring an exclusive dance performance choreographed by Omar Rahim and collections of Top Pakistani designers... In the world premiere of the opening performance entitled ‘Titli’, Omar Rahim brilliantly explored beauty through the metaphor of the life cycle of a butterfly. The dance depicted the struggle to grow, the desire to play and the dream to fly." Wow! Butterflies. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Ed Smith of Transformational Prayer Ministry said something profound. I paraphrase him based on my best recollection of his words. "The caterpillar doesn't struggle to become a butterfly, the butterfly struggles to escape the cocoon that it wove when it was a caterpillar."
Zoey: The dancer's name was Zoey, which we all know means life. Need I say more?
So, there it is! What rich symbolism! I will leave you to connect the dots in the way which speaks into your life most vividly. However, I think we can all recognize themes that apply to our families, our circle of influence, our communities, or regions, our nations, our world and our multiverse. Shall we all put down our weapons of steel that divide and hurt each other and let Zoey teach us the dance of the butterfly?
Oh, one more thing. if you take "lach" out of the word "Tlachtli" and replace it with an "i" we get the word "Titli". Is it a coincidence that the Hebrew word "lach" means moist, fresh, green or new? The word is used 6 times in the Hebrew Bible and each time, it is in the context of deception, naiveté, immaturity or weakness. Ezekiel 17:24 reads: "And all the trees of the field shall know that I the LORD have brought down the high tree, have exalted the low tree, have dried up the green (lach) tree, and have made the dry tree to flourish: I the LORD have spoken and have done it." What about the "i" that replaces the "lach"? Well, that was the shape of the tlachlti court. We are not to abandon the court when we recognize how we have been acting immaturely, divisively, and hatefully. No, we are to stay in the arena, but transform it into a dance studio to learn to work with those we have been bashing to cultivate reconciliation, forgiveness, unity, beauty and creativity. May God make it true for each of us.
From Tlachitli to Titli | Dumb Like a Fox
Reviewed by TerraZetzz
on
2/02/2019 10:00:00 PM
Rating:
Reviewed by TerraZetzz
on
2/02/2019 10:00:00 PM
Rating:
