The dream was this: I was at an archeological excavation site, in a place of Anasazi or other Ancient Indian peoples, in the desert of Southwest North America. There was, to my left, a set of reconstructed structures. They were small columns, rather like one might see in ancient Greece, but there were only four or five of them and they were painted red and yellow and other bright colors, and they were upon a low dais with steps leading up to it. Scientists or historians or park officials had built them to show people what it had been like once in this place.

There was an Elder there with me, that I know in this life for real, and he was angry. He stomped up the steps to the columns -- each of which was perhaps only six feet high -- and he said, "How I hate this place! See what they have done here? They think they have 'reconstructed' what this place was about, but it is all false and hollow! This has nothing to do with this Place and what it is about!" And, so saying this, he swiped at the columns like an angry bear and tumbled them to the ground. They broke open and the pieces rolled about, loose and hollow. "It is not about this at all," he said. "They have no idea what it's truly about!"

Then I looked down to my right and saw there was a great area of excavations, and that there were many small bits of pottery and stone and tools here and there about the edge of it. I went down into the excavation pit and discovered that it was at the side of a great underground cave that went back farther to my right and ran all beneath the surface of the earth there. So I walked into the great cave.

I saw that it was very great, indeed, and that it had perhaps been carved by underground rivers over many millennia. I could see the flat, braided watercourses here and there, shining dully in the dusty darkness where light slanted into the cave from the area being excavated. I saw there were many natural shapes inside the cave, made of travertine and other minerals that are deposited by water in such a place. They formed enormous arabesques and intricate scrollwork and all manner of unusual shapes. I walked about in the cave, simply looking at all of this and thinking. I saw that there were other 'artifacts' from the Ancient peoples here and there, all of them in little heaps around the edges of the cave. It was clear they had understood the cave to be important and so come to be there. I realized that the archeologists were not looking at the cave at all, but only at the things people had left in it. They thought this was the important part, not the great cave itself.

Then I looked out and saw something else. Outside there was a great mountain that came down to the area where the valley of this cave was. It fell in a sheer cliff face of tan-colored sandstone. And in this cliff face, new-comer European people had carved and hewn a gigantic niche into the stone. The niche was so large that a medieval-type of cathedral, though smaller than the great ones of Europe, had been built into the niche. The result was that the cathedral seemed to be in the cliff face the same way that an Anasazi cliff-dwelling house is in a cliff face. I thought about this, for it struck me as odd that Europeans (probably Spaniards, I thought, because of where I was) had come to this place and constructed a cathedral in a way that was like the way the Ancient Indian people here had made their buildings. And they had built it in a place where the Ancient people had lived and left their traces, that now the archeologists were excavating. I wondered if perhaps those who had come later had been trying to "steal the power" of the place for their own, even though by that time the Ancient ones who'd lived here had been gone from the place for many centuries.

As I thought this, I was walking about slowly in the open end of the cave, where the excavation was, and looking here and there, pondering. And I chanced to go deeper into the cave where I could no longer see the cliff above me, but only the cave roof. The roof grew lower and it was darker, and I stooped a bit to walk on, still thinking. Then I stopped. I backed up. For, by chance, I had seen a small, squarish hole in the upper corner of the cave where the ceiling and the wall met in an angle. It went all the way through to the outside, like a window. And through this small window, I could see the cliff and the cathedral once more. Only this time, great wonder rose inside me at what I saw.

For there, in that small windowed opening, the waters of the cave somehow reflected what was outside.  They thereby superimposed the image of the cliff and its niche and the cathedral in that niche, upon the image of the cave and its shape and the twisting arabesques of travertine and other minerals in that cave. And they matched one another.

I understood at once that this was no chance similarity. The shape of the niche carved into the cliff matched and  reflected the shape of the cave. The shapes of the turrets and buttresses and ramparts and scrollwork of the cathedral matched and reflected the twisting, coiling, braided shapes of travertine and water and shining minerals within the cave. And I understood, at the same time, that no one had ever chanced to look out this small hole or window in the cave before, to see this.

Here was the puzzle: the people who had been here before, long ago, had come to this place and lived around its margins for a reason. At least some of it had to do with their understanding of the place's inherent power. And later, the new people who had come had carved a niche in the cliff and built their cathedral there for a reason, perhaps their desire to supercede the power the Ancient Indian peoples had perceived there. Each group of people thought, no doubt, that their reasons were their own. But at the time the second group of people came to build the cathedral, the Ancients were many thousands of years gone. The cave had not been excavated. No one then living knew it was there, or knew its shape, or knew the shape of the living waters and minerals within it. The European new-comer people could not have carved the niche in the cliff and built the cathedral there, in the shapes they had carved and built, with any conscious intent to match the shapes in the earth beneath them, of which they were unaware. Yet, the shapes they had carved and the shapes they had built reflected and matched those in the earth beneath them, unseen.

And there even existed a place where this could be seen to perfection, a tiny balance point that revealed the great symmetry invisible to human eyes for so long. For, until the cave had been opened to excavation -- long after the niche had been carved and the cathedral built -- there was no way that any human eye could have ever perceived it. Not until this very moment, and even then by  chance or accident.

In the dream, I laid a small offering beneath that little window-hole when I saw and understood. For what the window revealed to me was that something far greater than any of the people who had lived here was and had been moving in this place. It had carved the cave and laid the minerals down and called people to itself. It had called other people to itself and had moved their hearts to carve out a niche and lay stones down. And when the archeologists came, they had stooped over into the dust far to one side of all this Mystery and put their noses into the dirt and looked only at the bits of things the people had left behind -- and completely missed seeing what was truly Great and Mysterious here. And this Great and Mysterious thing was something Natural, moving through earth and water and human beings alike, in its own way, beyond my understanding.

Such was the teaching of this Dream.