Question: I dreamt that I was outside my parents' house and I saw an old friend of mine whom I had known before I was a disciple. He brought back a sort of bad state in myself, but I was playing with him. All of a sudden a large, powerful purple eagle came down from the sky and attacked me. I killed it, and I felt the most powerful force that I have ever felt in myself.

Sri Chinmoy: You know the significance of an eagle. An eagle flies high, but its consciousness is very low. It is like a seeker who pretends to be flying very high while he is meditating, but his consciousness is in the lower vital or in the gossip world or somewhere else undivine. When you saw your old friend, who was still in the consciousness that you had before you entered into the spiritual life, your old undivine life all of a sudden came forward and attacked your spiritual life. The undivine life has a kind of arrogance and a feeling of superiority. It is not only the divine life that feels it is superior. The life of aspiration feels that it is the real life, but the life of desire, the undivine life, feels that it is the real life. Your previous life was a life of desire; there was no aspiration in it. Although you used to lead a very unaspiring life, inside you there was a feeling of superiority. You felt superior to people who were not doing as you were doing. You felt that they were all fools, that they were not experiencing anything in their lives; you felt that either they were cowards or they did not have enough sense to enter into the adventure of life. That kind of pride you had. Just as the eagle flies high but has a very low consciousness, so also you were going up and becoming proud, haughty and arrogant, but your consciousness was on a very low, low plane.

Then all of a sudden, because you accepted the spiritual life, your soul came to the fore. Since you accepted the spiritual life soulfully and consciously, your soul used its power and destroyed the eagle. The eagle represented the false way of climbing. The soul will let you climb up and soar above, but in a true way, with aspiration, and not the other way, with desire and arrogance and a negative, destructive feeling of superiority. It was your soul's light that destroyed your undivine qualities in this dream.