Touching Your Core Self – Part 4

When the Core process in us that produces dreams is allowed expression in our conscious experience it carries with it the same sort of power and phenomena we see in dreams. While we dream we are totally immersed in what is being experienced. We live in a full surround virtual reality that produces in us the conviction that what we see and experience is outside of us and is real.

We also need to remember that the dream process expresses in symbols. If we put this together with the experience of the full surround virtual reality of the dream, then we can say that our Core expresses its wisdom, healing process or insight in the form of apparently objective people, scenes and events that symbolise its message. In his book The Forgotten Language, Erich Fromm points out that the language of symbols is as old as humanity, and is universal. He says:

Symbolic language is a language in which inner experiences, feelings and thoughts are expressed as if they were sensory experiences, events in the outer world. It is a language which has a different logic from the conventional one we speak in the daytime, a logic in which not time and space are the ruling categories but intensity and association. It is the one universal language the human race has ever developed, the same for all cultures and throughout history.

He goes on to say:

For the people of the past, living in the great cultures of both East and West, there was no doubt as to the answer to the question of whether it was important to understand this language in our waking state. For them myths and dreams were among the most significant expressions of the mind, and failure to understand them would have amounted to illiteracy. It is only in the past few hundred years of western culture that this attitude has changed. At best, myths were supposed to be naïve fabrications of the prescientific mind, created long before man had made his great discoveries about nature and had learned some of the secrets of its mastery.

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Erich Fromm

See Notes on Fromm

Because of the work of such people as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and a host of anthropologists, we now know that the great myths of the world that lie at the heart of religion, are not to be taken as historical facts. They are immense creations of the human unconscious, the human Core, as it expresses the mystery that it is.

If we return to the consideration of what it is like when we allow the Core to express into consciousness, we can begin to understand from what has been said that it can be a very powerful and moving experience. As with dreams, it can be deeply felt, it can be expressed in symbolic and apparently objective events, and it can open realms of experience previously not known.

However, it is not my desire to make the experience of the Core sound mysterious. But in very simple language, such experiences can be likened to the process of growth we see in a plant. At first there is only a seed. As the seed grows it begins to express what previously was only a potential, a latent possibility. Even in its growth it may reach a point where it seems to have expressed all that it is. Then suddenly something new and perhaps beautiful happens, a bud forms and a flower opens. But even that is not the end, for after the flowering seeds may form. Of course, this is an analogy, and it represents the fact that as human beings we may feel that we have reached our full growth. However, the experience of your Core reveals that there is so much more of you to flower, so much more to bear fruit.
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When we condense the great myths of the world and the great dreams of men and women to their essence, that is their message. They tell us that as human beings we have an immense potential. We have within the possibility of the emergence of a new human type – a new woman and a new man.

So let us look at what people have found when they opened to the action of their Core.