Core

The most important part of anything; a person, a machine, an organisation, a fruit, is the core of it. An apple is an example: the core carries the seeds, that are the most important thing as far as life is concerned. The same goes for the person who may believe their body, the external them, is the most important, but it is their core being that is the most important and carries their essential self. Basically your core is the deepest and most real part of you. Unlike your personality or everyday self which constantly shifts and changes, your core can never be dissected.

During the months of uterine life you went through the whole process of evolution in a condensed form.  From a single celled creature you developed into a multi-celled being, then on from that into a fish like creature with gills, then a creature that could move and have focused feelings and responses to experience, a mammal form.  Recently (2003) scientific proof, through the ultrasound scan, has shown that the unborn baby responds to sound, smiles, and shows all the features that are evident after birth. That mysterious and wonderful process of life that brought you to birth occurred quite without any logical thinking, any conscious effort or participation on you part except perhaps being careful what you ate, drink and what you  are at your core.

You share that journey from conception to birth in kinship with all the other life forms that exist with you on this earth.  But unlike most of the other creatures you developed self-awareness and can look back on your origins.

A single cell, which is a seed from which all life forms evolved from, doesn’t become old or die because it is immortal, for it keeps dividing and doesn’t die. In dividing it constantly creates copies of itself, but as it does so it gathers new experience, it changes what is copied, so becomes the ‘seed’ for multi-cellular organism. We all started from the original one cell, and we, you and I,  are the result of gathered experience.

No plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life you developed a new brain, and the memories, education and programming you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very ancient self.

Finding this very ancient self, hidden as it is by all your personal thinking and opinions, you find you are free from all the painful emotions, suicidal urges and personal hurts. To explore and find your core see Opening to Life

Nevertheless, even though you have attained some level of self-awareness, the process that brought you into being still functions within you to continue your existence.  Without it you would immediately cease to be.  In fact most of the vital processes within you still occur without any conscious effort or participation on your part.  Your ego, your conscious self, is a tiny and almost insignificant part of the process.  However, what you do, what you think and what you feel can enhance or interfere with that core process. For each of us are immersed in a ‘river’ of constant change. If you think about it you have been carried, pushed, impelled by this current as you were moved through babyhood, childhood, teenage and adulthood, and there are more stages of growth beyond adulthood. And as we passed through these changes we died to our old self in order to change to the new. It is the current of Life. This current then carries us on through old age and through the gates of death. All the time we are faced by decisions, and each decision directs us on a different path, helping to create our future.

So at night when you sleep, we return to our core self, and that brings healing and restoration. As we withdraw from awareness of our dense physical and we enter the transcendent experience of our core, the worn out cells, the tiredness we feel, which is the result of experiencing our body and the world, is healed. So sleep and the return to our core, and the action of the core on our waking consciousness through dreams, is vital.

Example: I remember that I was rather lonely and sad for no particular reason and I was going on a date with myself to the planetarium.  In the dark planetarium, the stellar night sky covered the dome like a real night sky.  There was a grand zooming out process.  Starting with a person in a house to his city, to his country, continent, the earth, the solar system, our Milky Way galaxy, and to Local Group (the cluster 10), to supercluster and at last to the observable universe.  Watching the earth and our galaxy disappearing into a point as the zoom gets larger into the cosmos, I was overcome with a surging emotion in my chest.  Instead of deepening my despair, a grand sense of relief overwhelmed me, a sense of gratitude, a sense of the Holy.  It is hard to describe or explain.  Opening the knots in my heart, tears surged up because…  it was so beautiful.  I was infinitely alone yet infinitely not.  Coming out to the streets of NYC, everything and everyone was a wonder.  We are utterly insignificant in the scheme of things.  And I was elevated.  The Earth is so beautiful and our lives are so precious in its fragility. Quoted from Grace Park, Honors Seminar Spring 2003 – Modern Physics and Myth – A Dream within a Dream

As human beings we have investigated and probed the core process to the point where we understand some of the ways in which it works, and some of the ways in which we can co-operate with it or interfere with it.  Nevertheless that Core still remains largely a mystery.  In fact with the development of the new investigations of physics, such as quantum mechanics, the mystery deepens. See Quantum Physics

Core Experience is an everyday part of your life. Without it your heart would not beat, your food would not digest, your immune system would collapse, and the miraculous interplay of transactions and processes that take part within your body and consciousness would cease. Nearly all of us take this for granted. It is fundamental to our existence. But mostly we remain unconscious of any real meeting with our core. Many of us have no sense of the wonder and transformation this experience can bring. Also there are many things about our Core that are often not understood or are misunderstood, that at our core we are male and female, and also we are not fundamentally our body. Sometimes these factors are simply overlooked, or not recognised as being deeply important. See Water Wonderland

In religious beliefs this was called the spirit.

Example: Observed from the original all-encompassing self, the normal adult personality or self is a complicated, unpleasant contraption, loaded with superfluous gears and pulleys behaving in countless perverse ways which lead people to depression, anxiety and confusion. “Why all this complication?” asks the primitive mind. The split into self and non-self, with all the evolved gradations in between, betrays that original wholeness and delivers the mind to anxiety. Small wonder then the enchantment of mysticism, when the burden of self has vanished and all things rejoice in unity. How many ravishing accounts of transcendental experience owe their peculiar charm to this primitive condition? All is one, feels the child. All is one, says the mystic. Both child and mystic are at once very close to the center of their own psychic nature, and as far as they can get from objective truth. When a person looks into a mirror and sees his father, when the mystic feels at one with the universe, or when a couple in the ecstasy of orgasm feel their souls mingle—we may call it fusion, and refer thereby to the expansion of the walls of identity from the conscious ego to the subconscious self. “Subconscious self,” however, does not mean any magical universal entity, but simply the sum of mental content which, although it is a hundred, perhaps a thousand times greater than the conscious ego, is still within the consciousness of the subject.

Freud said that the process of dreams was trying to release sexual feelings, but the conscious self was often resisting the action through guilt or shame. That is an example of two wills working against each other.  In other words the Conscious will opposes the Core will or Life Will.  This is an important point so I will reiterate it.  You have two levels of will.  You have a conscious will and you have a will arising from your Core. So at times your core will may be opposed by what you as a person wish for, fear, feel or decide to do. See Waking Lucid Dreaming; The Life Will; Touching Your Core Self; Centre; We are Paralyzed; Archetype of the Animus and Archetype of the Anima

The human personality – the You that you call yourself, with a name, is only a tiny thing. It is moved and tossed around by all manner of drives, ambitions, emotions, fears, temptations, worries, love and desire with its pains and hopes; it is something we take so seriously and get carried away into awful situations; we take many sorts of pain killers to deal with ourselves. Things such as alcohol, coffee, medical drugs and street drugs, and yet we are still prone to break down, as can be seen by the number of people who need antidepressants or are totally lost in themselves. See Opening to Life

While we sleep our conscious self is largely or totally unconscious, and while we sleep our voluntary muscles are paralysed – therefore another will or motivating force moves our body. So we have a Conscious Will, and what I will call a Life Will. The first one we have experience of as we can move our arm or speak in everyday activities; but the second will takes over when we sleep. See Sleep Paralysis

This Life will can move us to speak, to move our body, and in fact do things that we cannot do with our Conscious Will. As Freud pointed out this inner will has full access to our memories. It can do so many other things that are described else where – See Edgar Cayce and the Cosmic Mind; ESP in Dreams.

For simplicity I have called this experience, of what is actually waking lucid dreaming, ‘LifeStream’. It would take us too far out of looking at dreams to explore it, but it can be studied within these features: LifeStream–People’s Experience of LifeStream – Life’s Little Secrets – Arm Circling Meditation – Journeying Beyond Dreams and Death

This Life Will or motivator has been active for millions of years and we see it working all the time in animals. We are partly split in half because we are often opposed to what our Life Will in us wants. So the only way to express what is good for us is in dreams when our conscious will is largely passive or we are restricted by being tied down.

Life Will created your body and pre-existed you as a person you know today. It was working in you prior to your ability to speak or know in the way you do now. But of course it has fantastic wisdom and skills, as can be seen in animals. Meeting your core self – the Life Will – in dreams such as seeing an alligator or crocodile, a whale or being in or seeing lava pouring up, are signs of meeting your real core. Often people feel frightened and try to escape it. This is because our personality is a very small and vulnerable thing and breaks down in depression, emotional pain and many other ways, and as it meets its inner vastness it often becomes scared. Opening to the Core; The Unconscious; Reaction to the unconscious

But in the end none of that is the core. Our identity as it is shown in many dreams is not a formed thing like our body. In its essence it is not even male or female, but both. Summarising such dreams, it is the sense of bodilessness, aloneness, loss of power and loss of our sense of identity, which bring so much fear in our dreams.

There are antipodes of human experience. At the tip of one is focused, self determining self awareness. At the tip of the other is unfocused void without focused identity which occurs in sleep. Strangely enough we experience both each day in some degree. The first while awake – the second when we sleep. Yet to face the second with consciousness feels like all the horrors of death and loss.

But facing it is important, especially in the second half of life. Although the unconscious carries the dark images we have of death, it also provides what feels like certainty about an existence which transcends death to those who experience it. This is presented as an awareness of existing eternally as part of the very fabric of life. In one form or another this is what those who dare to confront the dark images of death find beyond them.

Example: To my amazement a huge living and wondrous circle appeared on the wall. It was full of movement, everything dancing in time to music. At the very centre of the circle was emptiness, nothing, a void. Yet out of this nothingness all things emerged. There were plants, animals, people, hills, rivers and mountains all coming to birth. They danced out in their own individual movement, yet each unknowingly was part of the whole wonderful and intricate dance which made a great pattern and movement in the body of the circle. All danced to the periphery and there turned and moved, still in their ballet, back to the centre. At that centre they plunged into its oblivion again. But at that very moment new life sprang from it to dance once more.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Do I feel as if I have experienced my core?

What does my dream indicate about the core?

What can I extract from it?

See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Secrets of Power Dreaming –  Life’s Little Secrets