When I watched Thrive II, I had a particular ”aha” moment relating to a dream I had in 2019 which is a prominent feature in the book I am working on. The dream spoke to me on an individual level, but two years later I realized the dream is an essential part of the book, which I technically began at the same time I had the dream. In other words, the dream I had is also applicable for all individuals collectively.

The dream featured three states of consciousness or existence. I have been contemplating all the elements of the dream ever since I had it. I have understood the whole dream as presenting me with a process for shadow work, or psycho-spiritual evolution for the individual to engage in that will integrate the individual incrementally with his or her soul-self. The dream represented the process that I have gone through and continue to go through for my own psycho-spiritual evolution.

I have strained myself over the years to understand the dream from many perspectives. While I was watching Thrive II, about 15 minutes in, when Foster’s wife began talking about the torus, and I saw the image of the torus, a light went off in me—is the process in my dream shaped like a torus? Does the process represent a torus?

The process in my dream is cyclical, with three main internal states. The first internal state is externally-focused, chaotic and superficial. This state was represented by a village full of villagers (our external lives in this world). That is where I started off in the dream.

The middle state is a place that was called Havsgård in the dream. Havsgård is the state of silence, stillness, of emptiness—in other words, the eye of the hurricane, the center funnel of the torus. It is this state we achieve in deep meditation.

Interestingly, the third state is represented by a rock wall that must be climbed to transcend.

Once we reach Havsgård, the state of silence, stillness and profound peace, we connect with our soul-self, and anything we do or intend from that state is rooted in the authentic soul and yields peaceful and positive experiences for us.

From the state of Havsgård, we climb up the rock wall and transcend the chaos and delusion we were steeped in in the village. The state on the rock wall consists of the inner experience of joy, love, understanding, truth and wisdom—a state of increased integration with the soul-self. We can see all of the village, including Havsgård, from high up on the rock wall.

Then, as the process goes, we get thrown off balance while on the wall and fall back down into the village. Losing balance on the wall corresponds to an emotional trigger or some experience that takes us back into a lower state of consciousness. It basically means we lose our emotional balance and our peaceful state.

And so the process goes. The more we do this process, the more quickly we can get from the village to Havsgård each time we fall, and the longer time we can balance upon the rock without crashing back down into the village.

So I realized this cycle is shaped like a torus, a dynamic torus. From the village to Havsgård (the bottom of the center of the torus), up the rock wall/up the center of the torus, and then around back down again to the village outside of the torus center, albeit hopefully wiser than before.

It goes even deeper than this, because there is a whole part of the dream I am not including in the process, as I don’t think it’s relevant for people at this point in time. But I will say, that I have also connected the torus to a phenomenon in systems science called autopoiesis, which involves feedback loops. I’m afraid it’s too complicated to include in this post, but maybe I’ll have time to write a post about it later.

Just quickly I will say, feedback loops side-by-side create toruses at the edges where they meet one another—think about that. So a torus is like two halves of two different feedback loops, where the feedback loops come together.

So… if I may just speculate a little bit around this idea—it may be that evolution transpires by means of feedback loops (an idea I found in systems science). I can then apply that idea to the process of psycho-spiritual evolution. Let’s say I am stuck in the feedback loop of the village-Havsgård-rock wall, and keep falling back to the village… I need to explain about the rest of the dream to make my point–

The part of the dream I’ve left out is that, actually, the rock leads to a back stage area with stage doors that open out into an entirely different world—as if the rock wall is the line that the village-Havsgård-rock feedback loop shares with another, more elevated feedback loop that may exist, for example, in a higher dimension beyond the rock wall.

In my dream, I climbed up the rock wall, but I was not able to climb back down the rock to Havsgård from the rock, because of severe dizziness. I managed instead to get to the stage doors that led to the other side of the rock, where I really wanted to go anyway, and I left the village-Havsgård-rock feedback loop and went into the presumably more evolved feedback loop beyond the rock.