Variety: Genesis 28v12-16

12 Jacob had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 13 There above it stood the Lord, and he said: ‘I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. 14 Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. 15 I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’
16 When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.’  (Genesis 28v12-16)

The meditation below (by James Finley) does not seem to me (Nic) to be a definitive explanation of what is going on in the above passage, but it seems to be not dissimilar in what it points to.

I invite you to imagine that you are sitting alone in the middle of a well-lit room. There are no windows and no furniture in the room other than the chair you are sitting in…. As you sit there alone in silence, the light in the room slowly begins to dim. As the room dims, a light on the other side of the wall you are facing slowly becomes brighter and brighter. You begin to realize that the wall you are facing is not really a solid wall, as you had imagined, but is rather a gossamer veil that is becoming increasingly translucent in the light that is shining through it, filling the darkness of your room with an unfamiliar light.  

In the light shining out from the other side of the veil you see God, the angels, and the saints. They are all laughing and waving at you, letting you know how delighted they are that you can see them. You start laughing and waving back at them.  

Then God, the angels, and the saints pass through the veil to join you, rendering the room radiant with communal joy and delight in which your very presence begins to glow with the presence of God. Illumined and transformed in this way, God and the angels and saints carry you with them into heaven, just on the other side of the veil, where all are dwelling who have died and crossed over into God. Then God and the angels and saints carry you with them back through the veil, back to the room, now aglow with heavenly wonder and delight. Then, once again, they transport you back into the celestial realm, and then back again into the room….  

You are left once again in the familiarity of your earthly experience of yourself sitting there alone in the room, facing the wall. But while everything is the same as before, everything is, in an interior way, radically different. For you now realize that while, yes, it is true that, on one level, the wall you are facing really is a wall, … yet in the afterglow of the unitive experience that has just graced your life, you now know in the depths of your awakened heart that, ultimately speaking, the wall is no wall at all…. You have been graced with a fleeting experience of being immersed in God-immersed-in-you in a boundless communion that utterly transcends, even as it utterly permeates, the darkness and fragmentations of this world.  

James Finley