The Dreamseller_ The Calling - Augusto Cury [94]
“It was the voice of the foundation. Unlike all the other parts of that mansion, the foundation didn’t want to be the greatest, the best, or the most important. It wanted merely to be recognized as part of the whole.”
I strained to understand what the mysterious man was trying to reveal, but it was difficult. But then it started to be come clear.
“When I heard the voice of the foundation, all the other parts of the house condemned it vehemently. The safe was first. Bursting with pride, it said, ‘You’re an embarrassment to us. You’re the dirtiest part of this house.’ The conceited roof said, ‘No one who has ever entered this house has even ever asked about you. You’re completely unnoticed.’ The beautiful paintings declared arrogantly, ‘You’re ridiculous to suggest you have any worth, at all. Just accept your lowly role.’ The furniture was adamant: ‘You’re insignificant. Just look where you’re located.’ And so the foundation was rejected by all the other structures of the home. Humiliated, shunned and without any way to go on being part of that building, it decided to leave. And what do you think the result was?” he asked the crowd.
They all answered as one, even the children in the stadium: “The house collapsed!”
“Yes, the house caved in. My house, which represents my personality, caved in because I dismissed my foundation. When it collapsed, I shouted at God: ‘Who are you, and where were you when my world collapsed? Do you not intervene because you don’t exist? Or do you exist and you simply just don’t care about humanity?’ I fought with the psychiatrists and psychologists. Fought with their theories and medications. I fought with life. I thought it so unjust to me, nothing more than a bottomless well of uncertainties. I fought with time. In short, I fought with everything and everyone. But when the foundation made itself heard, I was heartened, enlightened. And I understood that I had been profoundly wrong. More than anything else, I had fought with my own foundation. I had cast aside my values, my priorities.”
Hearing that explanation, we finally began to comprehend some of the secrets of this fascinating dreamseller.
He started to understand himself when he was able to interpret his hallucinations. The safe, he said, represented his financial power, which he had always valued. The roof was a metaphor for his intellectual capacity, which he had prized greatly for helping him overcome so many difficult tasks. The works of art represented his prestige and fame, and the furniture, all the luxuries and comforts in life.
“But I betrayed and neglected my foundation,” he said. “I swept my love for my wife and children under the rug of my activities and mounting concerns. I gave them everything, but I forgot to give them the one fundamental thing that I had regarded only as trivial: myself. My friends were barely a consideration and my dreams were forgotten completely. How can one be a good father, a good husband and a good friend if the people we love are excluded from our agenda? Only a hypocrite could believe it, a noted hypocrite who so many held up as an example.”
He said bravely that he hid his mistakes, his shortcomings, his stupid attitudes, which represented the dirty part of his foundation, but which were also fundamental to the structure of his personality. Now I understand what he meant when he said that whoever fails to recognize his shortcomings has an outstanding debt to himself and to his humanity.
I began to further understand why this man had had such an affect on me. To get through to me, he had to be more than an ordinary man. He had to be more than a thinker, more than a brilliant mind, more than a teacher of uncommon sophistication. A man with those qualities might have attracted my admiration, but he wouldn’t have captivated me as he did, wouldn’t have broken down my prideful ego. The dreamseller had to be someone who had known the darkest valleys of fear, who had been mired in the morass of psychological and social conflict, who had been torn apart by predators