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Your Guru the Dream – Step Three

The dreams we looked at in Step Two had obvious themes. We practised defining these, and also used the word ‘I’ as a guide to important parts of the dream. Now we will take this a step further by asking what the themes suggest.

It is not worth working with this step until you have collected some of your own dreams and defined what themes appear in them. If you have already done this, take one of your dreams, look at what you have defined as its themes, and ask yourself how the themes apply to your waking life.

To illustrate what is meant, let us use Pam’s dream again.

I grew up in Barbados and lived with my mother in a shack. While I was there I started having a dream that I have had occasionally ever since. In the dream I was getting married and was at home dressing for the marriage, looking in a brown, peeling old mirror. The dream always ends here. Pam.

The two obvious themes in the dream are marriage and self-image. The question we are now asking is, how are those themes relevant to Pam’s everyday life? Or put another way, what is the dream suggesting by using these themes, and doing so in recurring dreams?

Obviously we are speculating because we do not have Pam with us to confirm on deny our conclusions. Nevertheless, the possibility is that when we put the idea of marriage together with the brown peeling mirror, we end with the sense of poverty. The image does not produce a sense of joy or success. Therefore the question you would need to ask yourself if this were your dream would be – Do I have a sense that I am not a good enough person to have a marriage partner?

I need to point out that the question is not saying – Am I doomed to remain single? It is more in the light of – Do I FEEL I am doomed to stay single?

This is a very important difference. The first question leaves the way open for change. Feelings can be changed. Viewpoints can be altered. But the second question is like a locked door. It is like saying, I am fated to remain single and there is nothing I can do about it.

These are important points and need to be carefully thought about and built into the way you look at your dreams. Later, ways of producing change in the situation will be used. At the moment however, it is enough that you define the themes in your own dreams and ask what relevance they have to your waking life. Becoming aware is itself a great move to change.

Awareness is a great force of transformation

This is so important we will work with another dream to deepen understanding of the process. This is a dream that is from someone known to me. We worked with the dream, so I have more information to share.

I was on a road that led up to the hospital I was put in at three. I felt a sense of an awful past as I looked at the road. Then I was standing on the edge of a precipice or cliff. My wife was about four yards away near the road. I stepped in an area of soft earth. It gave beneath my weight and I sank up to my waist. I realised the cliff edge was unstable and the whole area would fall. I was sinking and shouting to my wife to help me. She was gaily walking about and made light of my call for help. I cried out again. Still she ignored me. I shouted again for her help. She took no notice and I sank deeper, the ground gave way and I fell to my death.’ Barry I.

This is a more complex dream, but look at it and see what themes you can define before reading on.

Remember to look at how ‘I’ is used, and what the statements are saying.

The first statement in the dream is ‘I was on a road’. This suggests the theme of a direction, or going somewhere. Then comes, ‘I felt’. So there are important and difficult feelings. We could call this theme ‘difficult emotions’. What follows this is, ‘I was standing on the edge of a precipice’. So a dangerous situation is depicted. We could call the theme danger, or dangerous life situation. Some of the events that follow deepen this dramatisation of danger. But it is important to look at the statement, ‘I was sinking and shouting for my wife’. This could be called, cry for help. The last theme is death.

Without giving you any further information, what is your impression of the dream from defining the themes? Just being aware of the themes must bring some sense of what the drama is depicting. See if you can put this into words.

Knowing the dream and the dreamer, and years having passed, I have the advantage of hindsight. So it is important for you to clarify what your impressions are before receiving further information. That is not to say you should reach concrete conclusions. Any sense you arrive at of the dream should remain open to development through the absorption of new information or experience.

So here is additional information. Through being put in a hospital at three without his mother, Barry had a deep-seated fear that any woman he loved could desert him. We see this in his unanswered cries for help.

Also, at the time of the dream, Barry was experiencing extreme stress because his wife had, as he felt, become emotionally and physically distant from him. Therefore he was facing what he felt as abandonment.

So his fall shows a loss of any sense of bonding between him and his wife out of this fear. His death is the dying of his feeling of love and relationship, and the pain it causes. Barry did not manage to find change in this situation, and he and his wife later separated, with great distress for both of them.

Some of the subtler aspects of the dream are seen in the very first part of the dream where Barry says, ‘I was on a road that led up to the hospital I was put in at three. I felt a sense of an awful past as I looked at the road.’ Barry later went on to explore this past and the painful responses it had left in him in the present. He discovered that his pain at his mother’s absence was intense because at two he had lost his grandmother, who until then had been his principle carer. So the dream shows how this original loss left Barry open to enormous hurt at three, and then to unmanageable distress at the emotional and physical withdrawal of his wife. Barry did go on to heal those hurts, though not soon enough to prevent separation from his wife.

How much of that had you gathered from looking at the themes? However much you had gathered, try writing out a summary of what the dream suggests from what we have learned.

In 1900, when Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, the book provoked much hostile criticism. The subject itself, let alone Freud’s serious treatment of it, seemed a ludicrous one, not merely to other medical men but to many intellectuals trained in a rationalist tradition. Freud’s book, however, began the last of the series of revolutions in thought which, in the course of the 19th century, transformed man’s view of himself and of the world in which he lived. (Quoted from Dreams and Dreaming by Norman MacKenzie.

See Your Guru the Dream – Step Four

Your Guru the Dream – Step Two

If this is the first time you have started recording your dreams, don’t hassle them. Don’t rush full tilt at them by trying to ‘interpret’ them. They come from a different country than that of your waking mind. They speak a different language. They have strange powers, and point to landscapes and visions that ask wonderful things of you.

So some of what I write may seem wild. This may be because dreams arise and are experienced by a level of your mind or awareness that very few people have any concept or experience of – usually called the unconscious. Life dreamt in its creatures millions of years before even humankind awoke and developed self awareness or language. So to understand dreams we need to leave our thinking minds behind and go into our feelings and reactions – a much older level of awareness.

So at first, just get to know them. In recording them write them out as fully as you can. Do not skimp on words. Describe what you felt in the dream, what it reminds you of. If your dreams escape you easily, use a small hand held tape recorder to speak them into as you begin to wake. Transcribe the dream later – if possible into a computer file – your dream journal. I find it useful to use a voice recognition program to speak them onto the computer.

It is useful to have some sort of filing system for each dream, so if you have them on disk you can find those with similar themes or characters. Of course, characters such a s Dad, Mum, sister, brother, Jim or Sylvie your friends, are easy to find. But themes may be a bit more difficult. So if the theme of the dream was about relationship, loss and death, you could put in brackets (r* lo* d*). Later, as you build up a collection of dreams you could easily find all dreams dealing with relationship or loss, by searching for r* or lo*.

If you used a program such as dtSearch to do this, you could instantly see how many times a theme occurred in your dreams, and find each entry.

Becoming friends with your dreams – Themes

Thinking about the themes in your dreams is a way of slowly coming closer to your dreams, and of course, to yourself. For a practise run, lets look at the following dream. It is fairly clear cut. So define what you think the main themes are before you read the comments after the dream.

Feeling tired – exhausted – just lying drained of energy. I am conscious of people talking, saying I was ill. I thought I was just tired. Then asked what the matter was. I was told it was my heart, ‘dry and hard like a boiled egg’ they said. Found I couldn’t talk. Tried to write, wanted Alan to know that I loved him, but the pen kept drying up. Finger and feet began to get cold. An icy coldness slowly spread all over my body. A liquid warmth was then all around me. I thought I was haemorrhaging. A needle was stuck in my left arm and my chest was being cut open – it didn’t hurt. There was a lot of activity. They said I had gone. I was trying desperately to let them know I was still there. Then I was in a bag and sliding off a table. The bag was tied above my head. Then from the confined darkness I was free. There was a brilliant light all around. I could still see the sack with a body still in it far behind me. I was incredibly happy and full of energy. Trish L.

Well, what do you make of the dream? What is suggested by Trish’s hard-boiled heart? What does it imply that Trish is ‘gone’ but still there?

There are several themes here that are worth noting. The first is the theme of tiredness. Then there is the theme surrounding her heart and the inability to express her feelings. Perhaps we can contain those two by saying it is about ‘emotional dryness’ or coldness. Then there is the theme of death/life, neatly packaged together. And something that we might miss is that overall an enormous change is going on. Trish changes from feeling exhausted and dying, to being ‘incredibly happy and full of energy’.

This gentle relationship with your dream is so important, let’s look at another dream just for practice. It is a dream told to me while I was the dream therapist with London Broadcasting Company.

I grew up in Barbados and lived with my mother in a shack. While I was there I started having a dream that I have had occasionally ever since. In the dream I was getting married and was at home dressing for the marriage, looking in a brown, peeling old mirror. The dream always ends here. Pam.

This dream is not quite as obvious as the previous one. I use it because it will help you see how dreams use certain means to depict a theme or attitude. Don’t get confused by details. Ask yourself what Pam is doing, what are the overall actions or situations?

Well, Pam is thinking/feeling things about marriage. So that is one of the themes. When Pam told me the dream I asked her if she had ever got married. She said no. So that is a further clue.

Sometimes it is helpful to consider how the word ‘I’ is used. For instance Pam says ‘I was getting married’. The ‘I’ word is used to denote something we connect with strongly. If I take some examples from other dreams, we have, ‘I could hardly breathe’ – ‘I was in a room with my brother’ – ‘I was really terrified’.

What Pam says apart from the marriage is, ‘I was …… looking in a brown peeling old mirror.’

What might be missed here can be grasped if you think of the dream as a piece of drama, like a television film. What Pam is enacting is looking at herself with thoughts of marriage. What sort of image does she have of herself? It is of a country girl who can only afford a peeling brown old mirror. So the theme here is self-image. It is about how Pam may be seeing or judging herself.

Looking at them in this way, take some time with your own dreams. Even this simple step can be very revealing, especially when used with a series of your dreams. Often great insights arise from this alone.

Dreams cannot be defined under any one heading. Like human beings, they are enormously varied in what they express. Just as you cannot say the human mind is simply a system of memory, you cannot say dreams are just the reflection of experienced events. Your mind can also solve problems, predict the outcome of what you do, play with possibilities through imagination. You can create new ideas out of old memories, or replay disturbing events in order to find ways of meeting them constructively. Being the mental phenomena they are, dreams deal with all of these issues and more. (Quote from Dream Dictionary)

See Your Guru the Dream – Step Three

Your Guru the Dream – Step One

Your dreams can become vortexes of power to transform your life, and to enhance your perceptions. There is no ‘wave a magic wand’ route to this. It will not happen because you read a great book, or look at a good dream dictionary. Those things might help, but the real magic lies in whether you can enter into your dream in the right way. It lies in the difference between being merely curious, and really wanting to know. It matters whether you are a watcher of the sport of life, or a player. A player gets involved, struggles against difficulties, and works toward a goal. Extracting the magic from a dream needs just those qualities. You don’t need to be extraordinary to do that – just an ordinary person with some persistence and courage. If you have that and travel into your dreams, the rewards are like a key opening the door to a magical world.

I am such an ordinary person. I found the key. I opened the door. And I travelled in that magical world! I might be able to help you do the same.

Why would I want to offer you this without asking you for money? After all, it took me years of effort to discover the key, and bloody heartbreak sometimes to enter that magic world.

Well, part of my travels took me under the surface of the world. I went into that strange place of the spirit where all things connect. I saw that my life is interwoven with yours in ways that are beyond understanding. I know that if even one or two of you make that journey and find transformation, my life will be the richer, and the world will have more light and love.

And what’s in it for you?

Apart from dreams being the greatest school, the finest source of education in the process of life, there is the possibility of change. I went on the interior journey because my life wasn’t worth living the way it was. In the world beneath what is normally apparent to us, there are embodiments of your past, of your pains and your wonder. These embodiments confront you, and in meeting them you are transformed. The great myths of the past tell us of these meetings. They describe some of the adventures. But your journey is nevertheless unique. See Super Heroes and Mythical Creatures

First Steps

Before any great undertaking it is wise to prepare yourself. If you were going to climb Everest it would be good to learn how to endure in difficult circumstances, how to meet pain and emergencies. You would need to harden your body and mind, and know how to go without food, or survive with very little. But remember that the training is not the climb! See Intuition – Using It

We do not need those things, but it would be good if you knew how to meditate, how to explore or allow the subtle to be knwn and be aware of the feeling senses within you. It would be of benefit if you knew how to discipline your breath, to relax, to experience a wide range of emotions. If you have already used spiritual exercises, then your psyche, your soul, will be more fluid, more able to respond to the strange energies and upsurges from that huge world that lies just below the surface of your present awareness. If you are afraid of your unconscious and its strange ability to create apparently real worlds around you, then do not take this journey. There are many characters you will have to meet and integrate. There are deeps you will swim in, and childhood terrors you must look in the eye and unmask. If you have not already taken the path of discipline, and undergone the training of will and surrender, perhaps you can learn it on the way. You must decide that. I have nothing to sell. I am not dressing this in fine colours. Nor am I masking the splendour if it.

Being born two months prematurely and born dead – not breathing – the doctor threw my lifeless body aside and told my mother that I would be a weak child and she could have more children. So I lived to meet pain and anxiety. Later events etched it more deeply into my being. Therefore I lived with an almost constant ache inside me. I did not live with the hell that some people have, but it was enough to make me seek a way through. Fortunately I didn’t attempt to drug it away with alcohol, cigarettes or the numerous medical drugs now offered people. They offer no cure at all, only a life that hides ones inner reality. I believed there was a way through and became an almost fanatical practitioner of meditation and yoga. I didn’t find peace from them, but I did develop skills that could be used for the real work. That is what I believe most of such practices are, a preparation for meeting oneself more fully. At the time however, I believed that if I practised hard enough I would find liberation from my miseries. I didn’t, but I had started recording my dreams. Gradually, from my dreams a way toward wholeness was shown me.

The first of such dreams occurred at a time when I was pushing myself hard to practice a difficult hatha yoga routine. I was working full time, and running a business in my spare time. So to manage yoga practice I would rise at 5am. In the dream I was walking across open moorland, followed by a crowd of people. I was their leader, and was supposed to be leading them to ‘Salvation’. The only thing was, I had no idea in which direction salvation lay. We came to a barbed-wire fence and stopped. I was considering the best place to cross, when I noticed a rabbit beyond the fence. My dog was with me, and leapt on the rabbit to kill, but the rabbit fought back and bit his foot. My dog stood back respectfully, as he would if a cat clawed him. I now saw that the rabbit had turned into a huge and beautiful hare, with four pink furry babies. Then the hare spoke to me, saying, ‘Where are you going?’

I told him we were looking for God. He listened, then quietly said, ‘Turn back. Go back to whence you came’. At this I became irritable and said, ‘Who the hell are you to tell us what to do’? I felt this because in waking life I had read so many books with the opinions of so many experts and gurus, all saying something different, and not having found the way themselves. So I felt here was another ‘authority’ telling us what to do.

The hare looked at me gently and suddenly disappeared. Then, in a few moments it reappeared. This impressed me tremendously. I felt it was a sign of complete self-mastery. I knew the hare was the master. He then said again, ‘Go back, and carry on with your everyday life. Do not desperately seek the Kingdom of Heaven. What you seek is within you, it is yourself which cannot be found outside you. Your seeking only hides it. It will emerge as you grow from you life experience, for that is the great teacher.’ We recognised the truth of this and turned and went back to our village, to carry on our usual tasks, knowing that in time, we would find what we sought.

The dream was a turning point for me. It was not so much the content of the dream, though that was impressive. The power arose because in the dream I could feel my desperation to find a way through my misery. I felt the words of the hare penetrate me deeply, because they summed up my condition of desperate seeking, and yet seeking without a real direction. The hare spoke to my condition, and I recognised the truth spoken in a very deep way.

The practices I was using were like a drug, and so were very hard to give up. I had filled them with hope, and so letting go of them was a confrontation with my hopelessness. This was difficult, but it was the most real step toward personal change that I had taken. That dream is still a source of insight for me.

Your First Steps

The first step on this journey is to recognise that there is a source of information within you that knows with acute insight, what your life condition is, and what is the most important and effective thing you can do to move toward healing and wholeness. Even if you cannot accept this fully, you need to accept it as an experimental premise.

The next step is to recognise that dreams can be the means by which this information can be known. Again, perhaps you have to accept that on trust for a while until you discover its truth for yourself.

The third step is to start recording your dreams.

A dream is a mirror revealing your deepest self. Most of us now have experience, directly or through films, of the monitors that sit next to a sick person in a hospital. We know that on the screen of the monitor a visible image can be displayed of the patient’s heartbeat, their blood pressure, even their brain activity. Through ultrasound one can even see the body and movements of a baby within the mother’s womb. Your dreams are like those monitors. In the mirror of your dreams you can witness what is happening in your body, in your mind, and in your most guarded self and intuitions. The hospital monitor may show things happening in your body that you are usually unconscious of. Like the monitor, dreams show things that are deeply unconscious. In this way your dreams take you into the profoundly unknown of your personality and your felt but often unconscious links with the people and world around you. In the mirror of your dreams these things appear as external people and places depicting the subtle and otherwise unknown processes of your body, your mind, and your connection with others. (Quote from Dream Dictionary)

See Your Guru the Dream – Step Two

Your Guru the Dream – Step Nine

In an earlier step it was said that, ‘It is in fact a fallacy to say we can analyse a dream.’

This was said in context with the realisation that there are parts of your own nature of which you know nothing. This is why they are called unconscious. Not knowing what these parts of yourself are, there is no way you can think about them or analyse them until you have experienced them.

If you successfully used the ‘seed’ technique in the last step, you will have seen that you have a great deal of inner life that only becomes known when you listen to it. While teaching the ‘seed’ to a group in Somerset, UK, after a few weeks of practice, Julie, a woman in the group, told me something new had come into her life from what we had been doing. She said, “I never knew before that I have an inner life. This is such a wonderful thing for me.”

This wonder of your inner life is particularly accessible through your dreams. Having used the ‘seed’, you are now ready to start directly experiencing the inner life that is hidden within the drama of your dreams. However, if you are still finding your way with the techniques given in regard to exploring your feeling sense, and the ‘seed’, it is best to continue them until you feel at home with what they bring.

Remember that the keyboard feeling is important in this. With it you can open the door to listen to your inner life. Also, the practise of watching the screen of your body and feelings is part of that keyboard state.

Walking Into Your Dream

You need to try out several approaches now, to see what you can best work with. The first is what I will call Walk on Part. This is the simplest of the methods. It requires you to use exactly the same approach you used in the ‘seed’. In other words, to take the dream image or scene, and leave your body and feelings open to experience whatever arises. It is very helpful if you have a sympathetic listener to whom you can describe what you meet. But you can do this alone too.

Start by standing with your eyes closed in the middle of enough space to move around. About two or three square metres is usually plenty.

Imagine you are standing on the edge of your dream, like a film set, and you are going to walk into it. Before you actually step into your dream be aware of what you are feeling in your body and emotions. Your body and feelings are a screen upon which subtle changes and shifts will occur. It is this screen of body and emotions that will act as your monitor showing what responses your dream produces.

Now step into your dream. Literally step forward. Don’t hurry around. Observe what shifts of feeling occur, what memories or thoughts arise, what impulses in your body. These are all important. They are the way your deep unconscious communicates with consciousness. They are the language of the deep.

Carefully note what you experience from each part of your dream, from each character or animal. Then work with this in just the way you worked with themes – that is, by seeing how it links with your waking life and inner dynamics of your personality.

You can speak what you feel and find to your helper or to a tape recorder. You can enter into anything in this way, whether it is an animal, a tree, the sea or a house.

Your Guru the Dream – Step Eight

The exercise of the seed has several levels of usefulness. As already mentioned, it helps you to learn how to work with the feeling sense. This is a real working tool that opens the door to deeper levels of dreamwork. One of the most important of these is the approach used in Gestalt Dreamwork. Also the seed approach starts to expose you to what Jung called Active Imagination. Both of these methods will be explained and experimented with once you have learned to work with your spontaneous imagination.

So, to this end the second phase of the seed exercise will be explained. But to help you fully experience this, there is something useful to do first. This exercise is to tune you into how your body can move spontaneously, how simple that is, and what it feels like. In the last step it was mentioned that Carl Jung described a technique to allow the body to move spontaneously in order to access unconscious feelings more readily. His approach was to let the hands fantasy. The following exercise is an extension of this.

• Stand in the middle of your space with feet about shoulder width apart. For a few moments hold the thought and feeling that for the next ten to fifteen minutes you are giving up your own conscious efforts. You are allowing your body and feelings to express their own needs without you consciously directing what happens..
• Imagine that your body, emotions, memories, sexuality, are like notes on a keyboard, and that the keyboard of your being will respond to the lightest touch. In other words give yourself permission to allow spontaneous or unexpected movements of body and mind – don’t forget to leave yourself open to vocal expression too.
• Start by slowly circling the arms. Make the circles cross the front of the body. This will mean the right hand will cross in front of your pelvis as it moves left and upwards above your head.
• When you have the arms moving with ease, become aware of the shapes your fingertips are carving in space. Stay with this observation for a few moments, then notice whether your hands and fingers have any urge to create their own shapes in space. It may feel as if delicate magnetic pulls are directing your hands. If so, follow these delicate urges by letting your arms be moved by them. Let your hands and arms discover any movements or speed that satisfies you. Permit your whole body and voice to become involved if there is a tendency toward this.

 

If you experienced your arms moving in a way you hadn’t planned or directed in the last exercise, you are now ready to use the Growing Seed approach. Use this only when you have at least twenty minutes of undisturbed time and space.

• Repeat the step of finding a position and feeling of a dried seed. When you find a position and inner feeling that suit you, take the next step by letting yourself explore, with body movements, postures, and awareness of your feelings, what might happen when you as the seed are planted in warm moist soil and begin to grow. Continue your feeling exploration to find what will occur when you as the seed grow, put out leaves, blossoms and fulfil your cycle. Explore the whole cycle of the seed’s expression. Don’t think about what the growth of the seed means. What you are looking for is that you explore your own feeling sense in regard to the seed’s growth.
• What this means is that as the dried seed you wait with the open, keyboard feeling. Don’t make things happen. Surrender your effort. It doesn’t matter if no movements occur. The waiting and openness are the important things.
• It might be that as the seed you feel very strongly you do not want to grow. In which case remain in the form of the seed until you feel a change and an urge to grow, or until your session time is finished.
• When you sense the experience has finished, rest quietly for about five minutes and end the session.

 

The following quote from a letter I received gives an idea of the wide range of experience that can arise from this approach. Judith describes her use of this ‘seed’ approach to spontaneous movement as follows:

I am a trainee yoga teacher and have been teaching for three years. I have a small class of fourteen students who are keen and attend regularly. I decided to have my students try the seed approach to see how they would react. I explained it as well as I could, and the feedback I got was as follows – A man in his thirties said, ‘I felt I was in a womb. It was very comfortable, cosy and dark. I wanted to stay there. I didn’t want to come away – it was so peaceful. I have never experienced anything like it before’. He was very impressed.

A woman in her thirties felt like throwing her arms around and kicking her legs. ‘I felt I wanted to give birth and was about to deliver’. She didn’t fling herself about, but held back. I think it was a pity she didn’t let go. Perhaps I didn’t explain the whole procedure clearly enough for them to understand that it was entirely free movements. The majority acted out being flowers. Only one in the class thought it was a lot of ‘bloody rubbish’, her words. She didn’t even try. She thought she would feel stupid acting out a seed.

I was surprised at the outcome, and that so much should happen first time. I personally felt as if I became the bud of a crocus. I seemed to be slowly unfolding with difficulty. Not until I fully opened did I feel a great relief. The results of this have made me feel very positive in my outlook, and far happier.

As can be seen from Judith’s comments, the results of the seed exercise might be that you have a spontaneous fantasy, something like a waking dream. It is precisely for this possibility that the technique is practised. The aim is to get the doorway between your conscious and unconscious self swinging more easily, allowing previously untouched experience to surface. When you can use this well, then you can apply it to dreamwork.

See Your Guru the Dream – Step Nine

Your Guru the Dream – Step Seven

Tony Crisp

The exercises in developing the feeling sense in the last step are extremely important. As explained in the last paragraph of Step Six, the feeling sense is the ‘eye’ you can look through into your unconscious. As this eye, this sense, opens, you will be able to see into what was previously unknown, dark, out of sight.

With the development of this sense; with the skill of using it like a tool to reveal the obscure, you can approach your dream and become aware of the dynamic forces and workings of it. It will become a world of experience instead of a series of obscure symbols of strange drama.

Toward this end I suggest using a method that appears in the Your Guru the Body series of lessons. What this method allows you to do is to experiment with a feeling-sense exploration of a symbol or an image. When you have learned how to do this, you can then apply this to your dream images. At first, however, it is easier to use a symbol that does not appear in your dream. The reason for this is that occasionally we have some resistance to looking at ourselves closely.

Not only is this an exercise for your feeling sense, but it is also a way to experience something that The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung suggested in working with dreams or the unconscious. He described a way of letting the body fantasy.

In exploring this method over many years I arrived at these simply but highly effective techniques. So you can consider it a success if some aspect of what arises is spontaneous or unexpected. But at first it doesn’t matter if the session feels mechanical and contrived. Having those feelings mean you are sensing what is happening, and you can thereby refine your technique with their help. By letting go of the controlling urge, you can let the spontaneous and creative part of you express.

Exploring Spontaneous Imagination

1- You need a space about the size of a single mattress in which to use this approach. It needs to be an environment in which you feel safe, and in which you will not be disturbed. Wear loose clothing in which you can move and stretch easily. When you are ready stand in the centre of your space and raise your arms above your head. Hold them so they are quite extended but slightly apart.

2 – With eyes closed, bring to mind the idea or image of an unplanted seed. It can be any sort of seed.

3 – Notice whether your body in its present posture feels as if it is expressing the form and condition of the seed. The aim is to consider how you and your body feel in relationship to the idea, and sense you have of the seed. Many people find, for instance, that having the arms extended does not ‘feel’ like an unplanted seed. Don’t struggle with this. It is just an experiment, play with it, have fun. Explore this feeling of whether your body feels like the dried seed

4 – If you do not notice such feelings of difference between your extended posture and the idea of a seed, try another approach. Follow the subtle urges of your body. Be aware of the gentle urge to breathe. As you tune into this, notice whether there are similar subtle urges in your arms and body to move. If so let them be expressed. Play with the feelings of what it would be like to have the shape of the seed; to be waiting for the right conditions to grow and express all your hidden potential of leaves and flowers. Let your body play with these ideas or feelings. Do not make this an intellectual inquiry. Use your body and feelings, even if this is a new for you. Explore in this way until you feel you have found a position that is satisfying. Take your time. Notice whether the arms and head are right. Would a seed that is not growing feel alert, sleeping, or waiting? See if you can find an inner mood that for you feels like a seed. Do not attempt to think the whole thing out or consider it scientifically. Let whatever feeling sense you have guide you.

Take your time with this. As the dry seed, are you asleep, are you waiting, what does it feel like inside you? Dwell in whatever you feel. Notice whether, once you find an inner mood that feels right, your body expresses this. Wriggle or move into what feels right.

Use this step several times during the week until you feel at ease with it. It only need take a few minutes each time.

See Your Guru the Dream – Step Eight

Your Guru the Dream – Step Six

We have moved slowly in learning how to look at your dream in two basic ways – themes, and projecting forward. In most cases, using these techniques may allow you to arrive at some insight into how your dream links with your everyday life and concerns. You might even have experienced something of the forces of your inner life similar to feeling currents pulling at you as you tried projecting the dream into greater satisfaction. But a dream is like an iceberg, only a tiny proportion of it is visible above the water. The water surface is, in this case, your conscious awareness. Even if you have looked underneath that surface using these techniques, there is still massive material left unseen, beyond what has been experienced.

However, the analogy of the iceberg is not a good one. The dream is not a separate block of experience. Perhaps the dream is more like a tree. Although when we look at a tree we might feel it is a distinct thing, and can be seen as separate from other growing things, this is an illusion. If you removed the tree from the earth, or from the billions of living bacteria, fungi and fauna of the earth, if you removed it from the sun and the weather, it would not exist. It is in fact not a separate form, but a part of a continuum, of a whole cosmic and planetary process.

Your dream is a web of connections

 

Similarly, your dream does not exist outside of your own totality as a person – your body processes, the flow of food, air and water through your system, your psychological and physiological makeup, your unconscious dependencies on other humans, your sociological connections, your personal awareness through language, and on and on.

David Bohm, one of the great modern physicists, argues that the way science views causality and connections are much too limited. Most phenomena or events are thought of as having only one or several causes. Bohm felt that a phenomenon could have an infinite number of causes. He gave the example of Abraham Lincoln’s death, with the question of what caused it. The answer might be given that it was the bullet fired from John Wilkes Booth’s gun. But that is only one of the end results. A proper list would include all of the events that led to the development of the gun, all of the factors that caused Booth to want to kill Lincoln, all of the steps in the evolution of the human race that allowed for the development of a hand capable of holding a gun, and so on, and so on. (Paraphrased from The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot.)

The depth and wisdom our dreams contain can only be gauged, an understanding only touched on, when we realise how our dream is a manifestation of our integration, our connectivity, with the web of life within our own being and around us. Realising this we might see that to communicate with our dream, to receive insight and experience from it, we need more than rational thinking and analysis. The dream arises from parts of yourself beyond any concepts you have of time and space, of cell division, of physiological, psychological and sociological function. If you do not have the concepts for these things, how can you think about them? How can you analyse them? It is in fact a fallacy to say we can analyse a dream.

So, we need another tool, one that can reach into our depths and portray what is found.

The sense beyond thinking

It seems quite clear that for millions of years the human animal lived without rational thought – which is a very recent thing – and they lived without what we call self-awareness. Julian Jaynes, in his book The Origin of Consciousness, suggests that humans did not have self-awareness until about three thousand years ago. Therefore the actions of our forebears did not arise out of thought, as we know it, or out of self-awareness as we experience it. It came from a feeling response, a directive from the experience of their unconscious which had its own wisdom gathered from countless generations. This feeling or intuitive response was probably manifested in direct impulses to act, or in dreamlike thought processes, or hallucinated/waking dream images. We know the mind integrates separate information by forming it into wholes, into a gestalt, and this was most likely one of the ways they arrived at extraordinary perceptions and creativity. For instance, the Norse legend of how the weaving of flax was taught to humans by a goddess, is almost certainly a description of a waking dream experienced by the person who invented weaving. Unable to reason, but having already noticed the separate pieces of information, such as the flax growing, then rotting to reveal its fibres, the person’s unconscious formed a new gestalt, maybe with the help of seeing woven baskets. So the person, while awake, experienced a vivid ‘dream’ or image thought process, in which the new idea is expressed as a goddess showing point by point how to weave flax.

To enter into communication with our dreams more fully, we need to arouse the sense our forebears used – the feeling sense, the experienced gestalt.

One of the clearest writers on this subject has been Eugene Gendlin in his book Focussing.

Gendlin suggests exercises that are helpful in becoming aware of the felt-sense, or if you are uncertain whether you have feelings or not. People often tell me that they are not sure if what they are observing in themselves is a feeling or a thought, and Gendlin’s approach helps this. He suggests:

1. When in a time of quiet, think of something or someone you love or think is beautiful. It can be a pet, an object, a person, anything.
2. Consider why you love what you have chosen, or why it is beautiful.
3. Notice what different feelings arise in you, how your body feels, when you consider what you have chosen, than when you think of something else. I find it helpful to think of the body as a T.V. screen you are watching. Before you think about your beautiful thing, notice what tensions or peace are on the screen. Take note of any aches and pains, any sense of tiredness or energy, and any attitudes such as boredom, or being pleased, which are there. Don’t try to banish these, just note them. Then bring to mind your chosen object and note what changes take place on the screen of your being.
4. See if you can find any words that fit what you can observe or feel. Let yourself feel what the words are about, and note whether what is on your screen changes, and what it is expressing. Then shift to thinking about something that is not beautiful and notice any change. Rudolph Steiner suggests doing this with something that is living, such as flower – then something that is dead, such as a piece of dead wood.

Try the above exercise a few times to see if you can note the differences in feelings and body situation.

There’s More

A series of exercises that help to define this important feeling sense, is an extension of considering oneself as a screen. With some space around you, and loose clothing, stand and relax unnecessary tension. Take note of what is then happening on your ‘screen’. Simply note, do not alter. Then think of a word such as ashamed. Hold the word in mind and note what changes occur on the ‘screen’, and what changes in body posture. Give this some minutes, then change the word to unashamed and note the difference. Try this with different words such as depressed/happy, failure/success, etc.

Most people, but not everyone, can find an easily noticeable change with the different words. Even the body posture alters. And the exercise not only helps us to note the different feeling qualities we have with each word, but also demonstrates how just holding a thought can alter our whole body and feeling situation.

Can you say it?

It is important to express what you experience in these experiments. I believe a good test of integration is that what you describe is understandable not only to yourself, but also to any casual listener. For some people the word and the feeling are very much connected.

Something that is very important is that when you look at your ‘screen’ and note what is happening, some parts of what are being experienced will be clear and easily put into words. But there will often be an area of what you notice that is not yet clear, not yet capable of being expressed. You are looking into a place in yourself that is beyond words. If you continue to observe it however, it begins to open up, to grow, as it were, to emerge from the darkness into awareness, and gradually becomes clear enough to join with words. That is the most important area. In watching it you are looking into what is unconscious. When it ‘opens’ the unconscious emerges into consciousness where it can be verbalised. Your observation of the place beyond words allows a communication between your deep unconscious and your conscious sense of yourself. If these exercises in contacting the feeling sense are used, you will have a wonderful tool with which to explore your dreams.

See Your Guru the Dream – Step Seven

Your Guru The Body – Part Five

Exploring your dream forwards is not used as a ‘feel good’ technique. That is not its aim. It is not an attempt to make everything feel okay. If that were its aim this would not be a master class in dreamwork. It would be more of a class in positive thinking and how to avoid negative feelings. As this is important time will be taken with it.

If you have a car and hear a screeching noise coming from the engine, it will probably not help to get a blanket and put it over the engine to deaden the noise. Nor will the noise go away if you get a spray can and paint the engine a nice bright colour. However, if you understand a little of how the engine works, then you might realise that the fan belt is loose, and tightening it will stop the noise.

This is not a precise analogy, but dreams can help you to understand what makes you feel the way you do, and also what has brought you to the set of experiences you face. With that understanding you can make real changes in your life. If we look at a precise example using the following dream, this will become clear.

I was at a very large school. Looking around I came to a large gymnasium. Near the end where I stood was a diving board, about 20ft. off the ground. Girls were learning to dive off the board and land flat on their back on the floor. If they landed flat they didn’t hurt themselves – like falling backwards standing up. I was sure they would hurt themselves and it was difficult to watch.

This was dreamt by Des, a man in his forties. If we look at the themes we can see that it shows a learning situation for the man, indicated by the school. Although Des doesn’t put this into words, he is in the role of a spectator, so is observing something that he can learn from. He is witnessing something that he finds disturbing, and as we read it, sounds risky. The girls are in fact taking a risk, but learning to do so in a way that does not damage them.

If we shorten this we can say the dream is about learning something linked with risk taking, about how that might be done without harm.

This become clearer when we realise that Des had recently changed from being an employee to becoming self-employed. He was feeling a lot of anxiety about where his next week’s income was coming from, and how long he could last living in this new way.

We explored his dream and he experienced the diving board as depicting the big jump he was taking into the unknown. He was afraid he was going to land ‘flat on his back’. In English this suggests loss of control, and being ‘on ones back’ links with illness or defeat. (The use of idioms in dreams will be dealt with later.) The girls, he felt, represented his daring, in taking his new step in career, and also his vulnerability. All this was easy for him to realise, but it didn’t take away his anxiety. Therefore we worked on carrying the dream forward while honouring his feelings – i.e. not pushing away any of his fears or resistances.

Des sat and relaxed, imagining himself back in his dream, feeling anxious the girls might damage themselves. He changed the scene slightly by turning the gymnasium floor into a swimming pool. This shifted the mood from one of possible danger to one of fun or play. However, Des could not feel that he could export this feeling of fun to his work situation. Of course it would make it slightly better if he could feel the new step was fun, but this was not very believable to him, so was not useful.

Then he had an urge to climb up on the board as one of the girls and dive off. As he did this he felt the full flow of his anxiety. Even so he managed to land on his back on the bare floor. So, like the girls in the dream, he climbed up again and repeated the dive. After running through this a number of times Des opened his eyes and smiled. He said, ‘It’s just a feeling. Anxiety, I mean. It’s just a feeling.’

When I asked him to expand on this he replied, ‘When I dive off that board I feel anxious. But when I repeat it over and over I start to recognise that it is like a tape playing. The feeling doesn’t actually do me any harm, it’s just something that plays in certain situations. What I learn from this is that feelings don’t harm me unless I hold onto them. I can have the feeling of falling flat on my back and get up from it and take another risk. It’s okay. My anxiety isn’t a reflection of reality, only of how I feel. There is a big difference.’

Des continued in his self-employment, with gradually lessening anxiety, and is still self-employed years later.

As you can see, carrying the dream forward doesn’t simply mean changing the scene to make it happier, it means exploring, trying out new things until you find something that really works, really helps you find a new relationship with what you are facing. When it works well, this is a wonderful technique. Allied with the definition of themes, it enables you to make the dream into a real personal workshop for transformation.

In moving the dream images toward satisfaction you will notice that there are points of change. For instance, an anxious feeling may change into determination; a feeling of being withdrawn may change into one of self-expression. Frequently we can recognise the first feeling as a habitual one, which is often a part of our conscious life. It is therefore helpful, using the image of the dream, to practice transforming the unsatisfying feeling into the satisfying one. Doing this allows you to break through walls that may have trapped you for years. This way lies greater freedom. (Quoted from The Instant Dream Book by Tony Crisp)

Bill, a man Hyone and I worked with in the counselling role, had felt since childhood that he was physically unattractive. He had developed this feeling about himself because his mother had never shown any pleasure in handling his body as a baby. All his childhood messes and dribbles had been treated as repulsive and dirty and these feelings surrounded him in his personal prison. We asked him to feel his need for making contact with us, and, when he was ready, reach out for us, but not to do so as a mechanical action. For ten or fifteen minutes he could not move. His walls of negative feeling were so strong, but gradually and with deep emotion, he came to us and held us, feeling our pleasure in response to him.

Your dreams afford you the same opportunity. Use them to move out of the prison you may have lived in for years.

Because this is such an important technique I will give one more example. Each person works slightly differently, so this gives you a wider frame of reference.

I am taking part in a horse race. I am on my horse at the starting gate, but I am held up as the others get away and have to ride up the side to try to catch up. The others are ahead and go over the first jump, but when I get to it the size changes and it looms above me. It is now a massive steel structure and there is no way I can get past it to continue the race.

In this dream the man, Pete, is certainly not passive, but an active participant with a group of people. But he is meeting a problem which is not resolved in the dream. When I asked him what he felt in the dream, he said mostly a sense of frustration and failure. These, he said applied to his life situation. He was in his early thirties, and had tried a number of jobs, but still felt uncertain about what he wanted to do. He had not maintained a steady relationship either, although he wanted to settle with a girl and have a family. ‘So I feel I’m part of the human race; I’m participating, as in the dream, but I got left behind at the starting post. I muffed school and never trained for a career because I was uncertain of what I wanted to do. Now I look around and see my friends way ahead of me, settled into work and marriage while I’m still trying to get going.’

We then worked on how Pete could alter the dream to find greater satisfaction? The dream had been created out of his own attitudes and emotions. So what could he do to create a different life experience for himself?

Pete saw himself in the race again and arrived at the jump. No matter how he tried he couldn’t reduce the size of it. But then he realised there were so many other options open to him. For instance, why had he created his dream as a race, with such a sense of competition? In the role of competitor, because of his beginnings, he couldn’t help but meet feelings of failure. But what if it wasn’t a race?

Once he realised this Pete could simply enjoy riding the horse. Then the image of the racetrack disappeared and Pete saw himself riding through countryside, enjoying feelings of pleasure at his sense of freedom.

The experience of changing a feeling of failure into one of pleasure showed Pete the situation he had been creating in his own life. While he was feeling a failure due to the attitude that life is a great competition that you either win or lose, he gave up exploring the opportunities and pleasures that actually existed for him. In reality, although he had no regular job, he had involved himself deeply in learning psychotherapy and counselling. This interest was very real for him, but it seemed to be no part of the competitive world he felt around him. As soon as he dropped his unconscious drive to compete, he allowed himself to be more seriously involved in counselling, and was offered a scholarship in the USA to further his studies. He is at present living in California.

Practice this step often. It is very rewarding, but does need some involvement of feelings. Use it until you deepen your experience of it.

Your Guru The Body – Part Six

Your Guru The Body – Part Four

If you have practised the previous steps until you can really experience spontaneous and creative movement, and perhaps feelings, arising, then you are ready for an approach that is as ancient as humankind. It is found all over the world in various forms, but it is presented here in a simple way. This step is called The Open Door. The approaches to this in other cultures and times will be explained in another step.

The open approach is an access to your whole self. Because much of yourself still awaits discovery, is still unknown to you, it is impossible to know just where to look to find your own wholeness and health. You are unique. You have a different background in family or cultural traditions than many others. You have personal and particular life experiences and different personal qualities of mind and body that make your needs distinctive. Allowing your being freedom of expression during inner-directed movement empowers your ability to work at and express your own special needs from your core self.

Despite the fact that virtually all the healing or helping professions or techniques attempt to apply cures or methods to us, it is obvious that we know our own needs and are largely self-righting or self-regulating. This is meant in the most down to earth and observable manner. Expressed in its simplest form, if you are hungry you have an urge to eat. Beliefs or fears may degrade that pure urge into other forms. Worries about weight gain; ideas about what is healthy food; habits perverted by trying to be ‘one of the boys – or girls’ – at business / club dinners, may achieve this degrading process.

By opening to what is innately within you without structure, you allow your being to gradually shed such degradations and return to an expression and recognition of your real needs. Because you are always feeling your own personal needs – as in the example of hunger – the open approach to inner-directed movement helps you drop preconceived ideas and social pressures. There may even be a process of clearing out the habits, fears and pains that have stood in the way of your own healthy self. Then comes the experience of meeting and accepting the real you. The ‘you’ that is both ordinary and extraordinary.

The adventure of truly integrating the culture you have taken in, and forming it into your own personal and living self takes time. It is not going to happen in just four or five sessions of inner-directed movement. But if used for an hour once or twice a week for a year, very real changes will be seen.

During the following practice, if there are changes in pace, allow them. The range of possible movements and forms of expression are so enormous it would be boring to list them. They include all tones of feeling from angry to loving and exalted – all vocal expressions from deep crying to imitation of the sound and feeling of foreign languages – all types of movement from the most exquisite stillness to frantic tribal dancing. These are some of the spectrum of inner qualities you are capable of as a healthy and whole human being. Sometimes people say ‘I have never expressed myself like this before, I wonder if I am bizarre’. The answer is that only whole human beings are capable of a wide range of expression that they can choose to end at any moment. It is the unhealthy person who is locked into compulsive and limited patterns of behaviour. Liberation is a sign of health. You are a keyboard, why not have all your keys available?

1. Prepare your environment of space, clothing, mood and music.
2. If you need it, put on some music that has energy but does not grab your attention too much. Use a couple of warm up movements to get your circulation more active and your body loosened. This step, as all the others, can be used alone or with others. In a group, this approach is sometimes greatly enhanced.
3. Stand in the middle of your space with feet about shoulder width apart. For a few moments hold the thought and feeling that for the next half hour you are giving up your own conscious efforts. You are allowing your being to express its own needs in its own way by opening to the WHOLE you.
4. Get the ‘keyboard’ feeling in yourself. In other words give yourself permission to allow spontaneous or unexpected movements of body and mind – don’t forget to leave yourself open to vocal expression too.
5. Start by slowly circling the arms. Make the circles cross the front of the body. This will mean the right hand will cross in front of your pelvis as it moves left and upwards above your head.
6. When you have the arms moving with ease, become aware of the shapes your fingertips are carving in space. Stay with this observation for a few moments, then notice whether your hands and fingers have any urge to create their own shapes in space. It may feel as if delicate magnetic pulls are directing your hands. If so, follow these delicate urges by letting your arms be moved by them, just as you did in the previous step. Let your hands and arms discover any movements or speed that satisfies you. Permit your whole body and voice to become involved if there is a tendency toward this.
7. When you are ready to finish the session, stop the movements and relax on the floor or in an easy chair for a few minutes. There is often a natural sense of an end of any theme that has arisen.

Using the open approach you will experience movements, themes, emotional expression and insights particular to your personal bodily, mental and spiritual needs. The more fully you express the more you learn to command the whole of your being. These are movement to wholeness.

To give some idea of the possibilities of the open approach, below are the descriptions by two people of their first practice, and one by Andrew, who had practised for about a year.

Fiona, a woman who allowed herself this liberation of the body for the first time, describes her experience as follows – “I found a quiet moment, spread a rug on the floor, knelt down with my head touching my knees and started running my hands through my hair – I have always found this very comforting. Soon I noticed myself beginning to wobble and shake, and it seemed so funny I began to laugh. I laughed without stopping for twenty minutes, rolling about the floor, on my face; on my back kicking my legs in the air; on my knees beating my hands on the floor. The tears rolled down my face, my voice became cracked, my diaphragm began to ache with unaccustomed exercise and still I went on laughing. Eventually I ended up by going round and round on the rug on my knees and elbows, banging my elbows on the floor in joyous abandon, my head and arms muffled up in my jersey which had slipped off me at some time, singing a wordless song of joy and freedom. Absolutely nothing mattered.”

Su had attended a seminar at which Tony Crisp explained how to work with the open approach. She describes her experience as follows:

“When Tony came to explain the process to the group, I had just reached the point of despair with my marriage. A few days before, I had taken the first step towards breaking it. From the first my experience of inner-directed movement wove itself, directly or indirectly, into my outer life. It was never a separate thing going on inside only.

Tony explained to us about letting whatever came, come. I did not understand too well, but lay down with the others and he came to each of us briefly and moved our arms, and left us lying. Perhaps two minutes passed when I felt a distinct twitching around my brow, which was repeated, and then it spread down my face, a downward pressing movement. My face was involved then in a big muscular movement, pressing down, seeming to flatten the face, and then spread down the body towards the feet. Gradually my whole body became involved in big waves of pressing movement that flowed down, lifting and tossing my legs, so that my heels were banging on the floor. Wave succeeded wave. I did as he said, and let it happen, using the skills to relax that I had learnt. I wasn’t afraid, although I couldn’t imagine what was happening to me. Instead I felt happy and elated, warmed through. I knew I had found something of great significance, but it was many months before I could put words to it. It remained an intriguing mystery, like a dropping away of chains, or a touching of promise, while I passed through the pain of divorce. I feel that my experience that day released considerable energy. It did not break my marriage – that would have happened anyway. But I received strength that I used for my needs at that time. Months later it came to me with the force of revelation, that I had been born that day.”

“I started that session by being led into various movements like setting up exercises, bending and squatting. A moment of stillness followed, and then suddenly I began to dance. No, that is incorrect. I did not dance; I was danced from within, for I didn’t know the plan of the dance. Nor did I understand it for many weeks afterwards. But now I will describe it with the understanding that came later.

I danced Creation. With great sweeping movements I gathered up material. With mighty breath I blew upon what was being gathered, and gradually a world was created. It was a great world which now, like Atlas, I carried upon my shoulders. But so mighty was this world I gradually fell beneath its weight, crushed and unable to rise. Yet there was something I needed call upon, something that would give strength if I but struggled hard enough and did not give up. So, like a trapped giant I struggled against the ponderous weight of my own creation until all of my resolve came together and released strength previously untapped. With mighty struggle, I lifted the world from my back to my chest. Then gradually I rose. Like a ball on the end of a chain I swung the world, at first slowly, but faster and faster. Suddenly and with relief I let go and the world was gone. It was the world of my own ideas, my own rigid moral beliefs, under which I had lain sick and defeated. The new strength was the release of the life energies causing self-regulation. And then it was as if I stood before the light of my own being, the cause of my own existence. Chains that had held my hands fell off and I lifted them to the light. Such a light! It was full of love and laughter. And a song of love burst from me spontaneously. It was love of life, of my cause. Then laughter came, for I had been such a fool, to crush myself with my own rigid morals, with my own emotions and strength. We were all fools, to crush ourselves with our own worlds, to chain ourselves with our own fears. But I laughed not just at myself, but with myself, for life was such joy, such pleasure, how could laughter not tumble from me?”

Your Guru The Body – Part Five

Your Guru The Body – Part Three

With all our technology and scientific understanding we cannot create anything near the complexity and wonder of a living creature or a simple life form. Despite this, few modern human beings have much veneration for the process of life as it shows itself in their own body. There is certainly a growing attempt to work with the natural, but nearly always with readily formed techniques. As individuals we also frequently kill out what is natural or instinctive in us, perhaps even with our ideals of spirituality or environmental harmony. It is rare to find someone who will drop aside ready-made approaches, and listen to what their own being has to say without interfering. Even such apparently gentle practices as meditation, often have a very defined consciously decided goal. Listening to the body’s own needs and learning from it is real respect. It is an admittance that the process of life sustaining us, in its experience of millions of years, in its creative struggle, its countless lives and deaths, has something of great value to show us. It is also an expression of trust that the unconscious secrets of Life’s experience are communicable to our listening consciousness.

In the last step, the aim was to gain experience of allowing what was probably an unexpected movement. If you experienced your arm or arms lifting as if floating upwards, it probably felt quite strange. Practising it enables you to feel at ease with your body making movements without you consciously willing them.

Of course, your body is making lots of such movements. They occur all the time when you breathe, when your heart beats, perhaps even when you go to the toilet, sneeze, or vomit. But most of these you are used to. You have grown up with them, so to speak. If you had never had a bowel movement before, or never sneezed or seen others do it, and suddenly in your twenties you went to the toilet or sneezed, you might find it very disturbing. I know of people who have experienced a spontaneous movement such as you are learning to allow, and were so worried about it they went to their doctor to get a tranquiliser.

It is natural for your body to move spontaneously. The only reason it doesn’t do so more often is that we restrain it. In most social settings we usually restrain everything except what may be acceptable to others, expedient in the situation, or judged as correct. This means that you may not be giving yourself the freedom to allow your own creative imagination, or for your body to discharge tension through movement, experience your intuitive process, or experience your full range of feeling responses. In this way you gradually diminish yourself, blocking out much that is not of immediate use in everyday affairs.

The thread you are learning to grasp is the delicate balance of remaining conscious and critically aware, yet maintaining a keyboard condition in which your unconscious body-mind wisdom can express. This influence arises from what Jung and the Eastern masters called the Self. It is your fundamental level of awareness, your core self. Learning to allow the spontaneous movements is one of the ancient ways of listening to the voice of the Self – or as it is called in ancient literature, the Voice of the Silence.

At the moment, if you have used the two previous steps, you will have grasped the beginning of this thread. But what has happened so far is not very refined. So now we must learn to follow that thread as it leads into finer and wider experience, the following will explain why

The processes of life itself are about constant change. If our body could not go through radical internal changes to meet different temperatures we would die very quickly. It is a force of change that never stops. It is the power that has constantly moved you through babyhood, childhood, adolescence into adulthood, and will continue to push you through old age and death into life again.

I have never heard anyone say they were taught this at school. Yet these little secrets are life sustaining, and enable us to survive awful knocks and immense changes.

In 1885 the Belgian physiologist Leon Fredericq described it this way, “The living being is an agency of such sort that each disturbing influence induces by itself the calling forth of compensatory activity to neutralise or repair the disturbance. The higher in the scale of living beings, the more numerous, the more perfect and the more complicated do these regulatory activities become. They tend to free the organism completely from the unfavourable influences and changes occurring in the environment.”

That last sentence is an incredible statement. It says that innate in all of us is a process that automatically deals with the challenges our environment, our life, confronts us with.

A little later, in 1900, Charles Richet a French physiologist went further by saying, “The living being is stable. It must be so in order not to be destroyed, dissolved or disintegrated by the colossal forces, often adverse, which surround it. Everything in our universe strives to reach a state of Homeostasis or equilibrium. This principle applies to single individual entities to massive complex systems either metabolically, physically, socially or psychologically, even spiritually. By an apparent contradiction it maintains its stability only if it is excitable and capable of modifying itself according to external stimuli and adjusting its responses to the stimulation. In a sense it is stable because it is modifiable – the slight instability is the necessary condition for the true stability of the organism.”

It took me a long time of searching to find, in my own way of life, the wisdom in those two statements. It took me even longer to learn how to apply that in my life. When I did an extraordinary process revealed itself. I have written elsewhere about suffering depression and terrible exhaustion in my twenties and how I found my way out of it. And it was through dreams and life’s little secrets stated above that it was done.

In searching for relief from misery I tried many different things, relaxation, yoga, meditation , fasting, and diet among them. They promised to be helpful but something was missing that I only began to uncover when I started teaching relaxation/surrender. Some of those classes I taught were huge back in the sixties and seventies. To help people I would wander around the class and lift an arm or leg of some of those lying quietly relaxed. I lifted the limb to let the person have an enhanced awareness of their relaxed condition. What amazed me was that often the arm or leg was so rigid with tension it was hard to move. If I let go the limb would remain suspended. On asking the person how they felt they would say, ‘Fine. Really relaxed.’ They didn’t know they were carrying enormous tensions.

Are you relaxing or suppressing?  

It took me a while to realise what that indicated. You could relax surface muscles and feelings, but a mass of tensions were unconscious. Later I learned that such tensions had often arisen from difficult or traumatic past experiences, still locked in the body and emotions. By using relaxation techniques such as dropping the tension of the voluntary muscles or meditating on positive things, those inner tensions were being pushed back into the unconscious – undealt with. When left at that point, relaxation and meditation were a method of suppression and control, not of healing.

With shock I realised this was true of many things that were supposed to be helpful, such as meditation and positive thinking. What they often did was to calm surface feelings by controlling thoughts and body. They did not deal with the real difficulties that had been pushed into the unconscious. Their purpose was to quieten the conscious mind and the voluntary movements of the body, not release unconscious tensions.

I went on an almost fanatical search for what could be done to change that – to release the unconscious problems. The clue was, as Richet says, that ‘the slight instability is the necessary condition for the true stability of the organism.’ I gradually realised that to really adjust to the many knocks and changes we meet in life, our body and mind need to be capable of a type of ‘instability’. It needs to be able to move, to express freely, and to respond automatically or spontaneously. Yet all our cultural training and habits are about control and suppression. Governments also sometimes give huge threats to the people if they do not conform. All in all, we have in many ways been trained to be sick – as I was myself. And, amazingly, my doctor, to deal with depression and physical but undiagnosble pains, was telling me to take a drug, a tranquiliser, to maintain the status quo.

To deal with it is something we need to experience, not something we are taught. The simplest way of describing it is to say it is a process of allowing parts of ourselves to express that in everyday life may never have had opportunity to declare themselves. It is about surrendering our personal egoistic control, and trusting that our Life Process knows how to bring us to wholeness once we yield to It.

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” — T.S. Eliot

“Do nothing, but let things happen.” Carl Jung

In most social settings we usually restrain everything except what may be acceptable to others, expedient in the situation, or judged as correct. This means that we may not give ourselves the freedom elsewhere to allow our own creative imagination – our body, our real self  to discharge tension through movement – experience our intuitive process – and our full range of feeling responses. In this way we gradually diminish ourselves, blocking out much of ourselves that is not of immediate use in everyday affairs. We may in fact diminish our relationship with Life itself.

Later, I found in the writings of Carl Jung and J. A. Hadfield information about how this self-regulatory action also works in the psyche. Jung stated that the psyche is self regulatory. He said that if internal tensions can be allowed to be conscious, then something will happen internally to resolve the conflict. Jung’s student Marie von Franz says that we ‘must get rid of purposive and wishful aims. The ego must be able to listen.’ Jung also encouraged his clients to allow spontaneous movement. These exercises must be continued until the cramp in the conscious is released, or, in other words, until one can let things happen; which was the immediate goal of the exercise.” See Letting things Happen

What help was using T. S. Elliot’s advice to, “… be still and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing;” So for ages I sat and waited without hope, love or anything, and in doing so we tried to listen to see what our body wanted to do; what posture or movement our own internal feelings led us to. Then sitting with my friends one day in our experimental group I started to shake. I thought I must be cold so restrained the shaking. But at our next meeting it started again, and this time I was wearing a warm jersey, and in no way felt nervous, so pulled slightly apart from my friends and let myself really shake.

What happened was incredible. My body and my emotions discharged the whole experience of having my tonsils out as a six year old. My head pulled back, my mouth clamped open and my arms were in the position of being strapped to my side. Perhaps I had not been fully anaesthetised – I don’t know. What I do know is that I had carried that enormous tension and shock inside me from six until I was thirty five. Up until that day I had experienced a powerful neck tension that I had tried again and again to ‘relax’ away. My being didn’t need to relax, it needed to discharge in powerful tension, physical struggles and emotion. After this ’shaking’ experience there was never again a tension in my neck, a tension that had been caused by trying to pull away from the surgeon cutting my throat. However, it was not simply a physical tension it released. Powerful emotions were also discharged, ones that had created difficult responses to everyday life.

That is the guru of your body moving you, it leads to:

“Tony explained to us about letting whatever came, come. I did not understand too well, but lay down with the others and he came to each of us briefly and moved our arms, and left us lying. Perhaps two minutes passed when I felt a distinct twitching around my brow, which was repeated, and then it spread down my face, a downward pressing movement. My face was involved then in a big muscular movement, pressing down, seeming to flatten the face, and then spread down the body towards the feet. Gradually my whole body became involved in big waves of pressing movement which flowed down, lifting and tossing my legs, so that my heels were banging on the floor. Wave succeeded wave. I did as he said, and let it happen, using the skills to relax which I had learnt. I wasn’t afraid, although I couldn’t imagine what was happening to me. Instead I felt happy and elated, warmed through. I knew I had found something of great significance, but it was many months before I could put words to it. It remained an intriguing mystery, like a dropping away of chains, or a touching of promise, while I passed through the pain of divorce. I feel that my experience that day released considerable energy. It did not break my marriage – that would have happened anyway. But I received strength which I used for my needs at that time. Months later it came to me with the force of revelation, that I had been born that day.”

The next step is called Moving Sea.

You will need up to an hour to complete this step. The aim of ‘moving sea’ is to continue the development of body awareness and how you allow spontaneous movement. Once you have used this approach as suggested below, there is no need to go through the preparatory stages in future uses. For instance do not do the yawning and arm lifting. Go straight into exploring the water movements. This can be used over and over with enjoyment and gain. To start step two, stand in your space for a while and be aware of the movements of your chest as you breathe. As you observe this, every so often hold your breath out for a while and notice what it feels like as your body wants to make the movement to breathe in. Unless you hold your breath for a long time, the urge is quite subtle. As you become aware of it have the same keyboard feeling in your body as you had with the previous steps. Do this for about five minutes, or until you are satisfied. Remind yourself of the feeling of spontaneous movement by using the ‘arm against the wall’ exercise. Extend your awareness of how your body and feelings move spontaneously by simulating yawns and allowing them to develop into stretches or movements. Then stand in the middle of your space and close your eyes. Lift your arms from your sides and take your hands high above your head. Do this a few times noticing the difference in feeling between having the hands high or low. Do this before reading on. 4. Now relax with hands by your sides. Hold the idea of taking the hands up high again, but do not consciously attempt the movement. Take your time. Be aware of how your hands and arms want to make the movement. Or perhaps there is no urge at all to move your arms. The point is to avoid making a mechanical movement, and be aware of your feelings and motivations. This means watching to see if the sort of feelings that entered into your yawning and arm rising sideways exercises are in operation here. If this includes the rest of your body, or your arms go in another direction than above your head, or do not move at all, that’s fine. Explore this before reading the next paragraph. 5. If you need to, have some music playing that does not grab your attention. Stand in your space with eyes closed. Drop unnecessary tensions as you listen to the music. Hold in mind for a moment the idea that you are giving your body space to explore expressing the quality of water. There is no need to think about what to do. Let your body explore. Trust it to find its own way to expressive movements. It is important to be patient, to wait for something to arise by itself. Allow yourself about 15 minutes for this. Remember how gentle the urge to breath was, so allow any such gentle urges to move you. Remember too how your arms felt if they made their own movements above your head. If these urges fall away, stop and wait. It is okay if nothing in particular happens. 6. Take time to observe and allow the delicate motivations – magnetic pulls – directing your body to watery movement. 7. You may find you have resources of imagination you did not suspect. Aspects of water you hadn’t consciously set out to explore will be expressed in your movements. If you are expressing deep still waters, you will actually feel a deep quietness and power. Or if it is the power of rushing rivers, then a feeling of power will surge through your body as you touch your resources of strength and healing. The flowing feelings that arise are actually healing. Your Guru The Body – Part Four

Your Guru The Body – Part Two

This step builds on what you have already done. The aim of the first step was to explore what it was like to allow your body to express its own spontaneous movements. Although yawning can be controlled, it is one of the movements we make that is largely spontaneous. By using it we learned to listen to the urge toward movements that were not controlled by your own conscious decisions, and allow yourself to open to the yawning spreading to fuller movements than you usually allow. The results of this can be incredibly varied, so there is no right or wrong result.

The Relaxed Arm Test

The next technique to be suggested is called the Relaxed Arm Test. Whereas the yawning technique led to a type of movement you know from past experience, the relaxed arm test leads to something that may be quite different. It is used, as with the yawning technique, to help you learn to listen to your body and feelings in an open way. But more will be described about its possibilities after you have used it.

Something that is helpful though, is to hold your body in a way that might be called the ‘piano key’ feeling. This is a condition of sensitive balance, like the keys on a piano. A touch on a piano key causes it to move and the note to play. But as soon as the finger is removed the key springs back into place ready to move again if necessary. So the aim is to let your body and feelings be sensitive and relaxed, ready to be influenced by gentle internal urges. And of course, this was the reason for using the yawning experience. So just hold that feeling you allowed in letting yourself yawn.

So below is described how to use this step. Once more, approach it playfully. Enjoy it, and this helps what happens.

1 – Stand about a foot away from a wall, side on, so your right hand is near to a clear space on the wall.

2 – Lift your right arm sideways, keeping your arm straight, until the back of your hand is against the wall. Because you are near to the wall and your arm is straight you will only manage to lift your arm part of the way. So when the back of your hand touches the wall, press it hard against the wall as if trying to complete the movement of lifting the arm.

3 – Do not press the hand against the wall by leaning, but by keeping the arm straight and trying to complete the lifting motion. Using a reasonable amount of effort stay with the hand pressing against the wall for about twenty seconds.

4 – Now move so you face away from the wall, and with eyes closed relax your arm by your side and be aware of what happens.

5 – Try the experiment before reading on, and use the left arm afterwards. In fact try it a couple of times with each arm before reading the next paragraph.

What you have done is to attempt a movement. Because the wall prevented this, the body was not able to complete the movement you asked it to make. Therefore a muscular charge built up in your shoulder (deltoid) muscle. When you stepped away from the wall the arm, if relaxed, was free to complete the movement. So your arm may have risen from your side as if weightless, thus discharging its energy. Some people need several tries before they can find the right body feeling to allow the arm its movement. It is easy to prevent it moving because the impulse is quite a subtle one.

The technique enables you to learn how to give your body freedom to move under its own impulse. The way the arm moved, and the experience of an unwilled movement, is so similar to what we are attempting to learn, that you are thus provided with an experimental experience of the real thing. It is also an example of how the body self-regulates through spontaneous movement. That is, it discharges tension, or heals itself by its spontaneous movements and processes. It is therefore helpful either to practice the technique until you can do it, or use it a number of times to establish your relationship with the feeling of it. The sense of allowing movement can then be used in following the inner-directed movement you are learning.

It would be quite helpful to practice this experiment a few times though before moving on to the next.

An alternative way of doing this with a group is for one person to help another. This is done by the helper restraining the arms of the active person while they try to lift both arms sideways. After twenty seconds the helper tells the active person to relax their arms, and takes away their own hands.

Your Guru The Body – Part One

Shakespeare has Hamlet say, ‘What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god—the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!’

From before conception onwards the processes of life in us are miraculous. Through all the ages, and throughout the world today, nobody has fully understood how the body does what it does. It is still largely a mystery. And life is such that should we arrive at understanding of one level of how the body grows and lives, then a huge expanse of new territory would open, virgin and unknown.

Your body and consciousness are the mystery of life. If you approach yourself in the right way, doors open within you revealing depths of experience and understanding that lead you to become more than you were. Your being is the guru who can teach you the way to realise who you are, and guide you through the inner conflicts and shadows to greater wholeness.

To meet your guru the Body, you need to start at the very beginning. You need to find the thread that will lead you out of the labyrinth of your own mind and experience.

Here, in simple stages, a way is outlined to contact your inner guru.

Step One

The steps that are going to be described are based on two basic principles or assumptions. The first is that the way our body functions when we do not interfere with it is an expression of the basic realities or Reality of life. If you can also agree that our planet and all the life on it do not exist separated from the processes of the greater cosmos, then what happens in our body is an expression of cosmic processes, the great Creative Process – the Big Bang. See Big Bang

The second principle or assumption is that, ‘For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.’ (Mathew 18:20).

This is suggested as it has been found again and again that when two or more people work with the principles to be outlined in a sympathetic way, dimensions of experience open that are usually denied to individuals or to groups with closed minds and hearts.

In this first step we are looking for a ‘thread’. This can be likened to the thread that Ariadne gave to Theseus to guide him out of the Labyrinth. If we can grasp this thread it will prevent any stumbling about blindly trying to find ones way in this labyrinth of methods and theories. Just as the thread was given to Theseus out of Ariadne’s love. So this thread is the guide to your feelings, your intuition, and your rational thinking.

There are things you can do to help you take hold of the thread. Remember that the first principle is that the functions of your body are expressions of Reality, of the great Creative Principle. Therefore things that you sense in regard to your body, even illness, are sources of information about that Reality, and how you are relating to it.

A large percentage of your bodily functions are, however, unconscious. So in this first step the aim is to become more aware of things that lie near the surface of your awareness, but that you may not have given much attention to previously.

One of the easiest ways of doing this is to use what is called The Yawning Technique.

To do this you need an environment in which you feel at ease and can express yourself in any way without being judged, either by others or yourself. It is helpful if you can have enough space around you to easily move your arms without bumping against anything. Some people find quiet non-obtrusive music enables them to flow into what arises. Also, set aside ten or more minutes during which you can explore the technique in an unhurried way. When you are ready follow the suggestions below.

1 – Stand in your space and drop unnecessary tensions. Remind yourself that for the next few minutes you are going explore something you may not have done before. So let your body play. Drop the usual social controls we all keep our body restrained by. Let it off the lead.

2 – Open your mouth wide with head slightly dropped back and simulate yawns. I mean by this to act out the movement of yawning. As you do so notice whether a natural yawn starts to make itself felt. If it does, allow it to take over and have a really luxurious yawn. If a yawn doesn’t arise, keep making the movements until it does. Any following impulse to yawn again should be allowed.

3 – Let the yawns come one after the other if they want to. Without acting it out, let the impulse to yawn take over your body, not just your mouth and face. So if the urge to move includes the arms or elsewhere, let it happen.

4 – Give yourself over to the enjoyment of having time to really indulge your own natural feelings and body pleasure. If the yawning develops into other movements and stretches, let it. In the same way you would normally allow your body to express itself in a yawn, let it express itself in whatever other form of movement, postures or stretches arise. Maybe it will be noisy yawns, so allow whatever noises you want to make, however ‘silly’. If this flows into movements following the music, don’t hold yourself back. Or your movements might not follow the music, but have a direction of their own. This is play-time with your body, so enjoy it. You can do whatever your body wants to do.

5 – Until you feel ready to stop, simply enjoy or explore the movements and feelings that arise – even if what arises for you after the initial yawns is a desire to lie on the floor and rest. That also is you expressing your needs.

With two or three days between each session, practise this several times until you feel at ease with it.

It is very useful to keep a journal of what you experience, and any changes or new developments in what happens during these steps.

Link with Part Two

Do You Believe in Reincarnation?

Chris: Do you then believe in reincarnation?

Tony: I don’t necessarily believe in it in the sense of one’s personality being transported into another lifetime. But taking into account what was said about life being a balance between the changing and the constant, about the essence that lies behind the forms, and that the essence absorbs experience; taking that into account I believe the essence dips into different forms again and again.

However, I realise that sounds somewhat impersonal and I find my experience of it is not impersonal at all. I don’t think, for instance, that Tony as a distinct personality will be reincarnated at some time. What I do see is that Tony is a small part of the spirit that has existed throughout all-time. That spirit, of which I as Tony only reflect a small part, when I die will absorb the lessons of this life. At some other period that spirit will dip into human life again.

The reason I believe that is because I appear to have memories of past individuals whose lives link with mine in the present. There are aspects of those lives that influence this life.

But there is a way of thinking about this that I believe makes it reasonably straightforward. It doesn’t seem to be a mysterious thing, and I don’t know why people make of it such a mystery. If you look at a tree, you can see it incorporates many, many past trees. It didn’t suddenly emerge out of a vacuum, out of nothing. It has its present existence out of what existed in the past. Of course, because in our culture we still are labouring under the world view that the atom is the fundamental particle or material in the universe, we still see ourselves and a tree as simply a physical process. All our calculations about this leave out the factor of consciousness. Even trees have a form of sentience. They respond to light, to weather conditions, to their environment. Did Tony suddenly gain the type of awareness, perceptions, concepts suddenly in the here and now? Of course I didn’t. Thousands of people pre-existed me who gave words, concepts skills that have together formed who I am. There are ideas, longings, weaknesses and blindness of which I am a very particular mixture. As I have gained insight into my being it really does seem that I am part of a stream of influence flowing through history.

This same rose will never bloom again, but a similar rose will arise from the same roots..

In my life, the stream has bubbled up from under the surface again. It carries particular influences, minerals, qualities, from the past. Therefore I don’t believe Tony is a reincarnation of a particular being. But he is a working out of things from the past.If we look at a painting, we see certain colours on it.

That particular painting exists because of the texture, the minerals, the earth and chemicals that go into the paint or ink used. It is also a result of the movements, the skill the artist has put into it. It is an incorporation of all those things and many other things we have not mentioned. It is also an expression of the light that falls on it.

Without the light it is not apparent. In different lighting conditions it will change its character in some way.So the painting is partly an expression of a human being and their qualities and skills; it is partly an expression of the chemicals and minerals and surfaces involved. It is an extraordinary thing. When we look at it we are witnessing all of that. Maybe we don’t realise it; perhaps we don’t see all that goes into it. And of course, the painting is unique. There will never be a painting exactly like that. It might appear on the surface as the same, but there will never be quite the same mixture of minerals, chemicals, movements, human qualities, that entered into the painting.Our body is just such a work of art. It is an extraordinary blending of an enormous number of people. Not just our parents, but our forebears going back into prehistory. There is also the powerful influence of the time and period in history in which we are born. The culture we live in weaves itself into who and what we become. A child born in today’s world will be influenced by the extraordinary number of chemicals and additives, medicines and drugs, alcohol and nicotine, that are part and parcel of life today. They are all factors that go into the make up of who the person is and becomes. They are the chemicals in the ‘paint’ of personality.Then there are the unique events and circumstances of that individuals life. The people met, the relationships encountered, the opportunities and traumas that events bring. All of those factors are like the paint, the surface, the artistry and skill that go into producing a painting. The uniqueness of those factors reflects very particular colours in the light that is our life.Of course this is an analogy but I think it is a useful one. Light has in it every conceivable colour. It is the surface that the light falls on that brings out qualities. So it is the uniqueness of our body and consciousness that bring qualities out of the infinite possibilities of life. Innate in the forms of life are all the lessons and experiences it has gathered through unimaginable number of lives and creatures. The surface our body provides draws out of that infinite potential very particular qualities. We are the person we become because of the blending of all those unique factors.

How can anything in the present rule out factors from the past?

Chris: Well, people think that way because they see reincarnation as a certain thing. People think they have a former life as some particular person, and that person will be born again in a new situation.

Tony: I suppose what I feel about that is people often leave certain factors out of their thinking process. Everything in the present, whether it relates to agriculture, politics, religion or art, has arisen out of past influences and things learned. People see that and of course recognise their present life and feelings are connected with their immediate family and culture. What they often fail to see is that there are influences existing in them from the far past. So we can say that the present is an incarnation of the past in a new form. How is it we can’t say that I am an incarnation of the past in a new form? We are not an incarnation of a tiny bit of the past, but a whole spectrum of it.

So the wonder of this is not that Tony is a reincarnation of a particular past personality, but that Tony is an expression of something that has always existed, and carries past wisdom and experience.

But to really say something important about this for I see there is another view –

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 it see Opening to Life

As adults we believe we are complete and whole. But what I sense is that we are only an expression of just one phase of life, and out of us can emerge another being, carrying us forward into a different sort of existence, all that can arise  from you. A seed is a return to the source of life and it/our beginnings under the sun. Consciousness on our planet started in the slime of creation, the slime we return to, to procreate. And from that slime which is a vehicle for our seed to exist in, our awareness goes through the whole process of evolution as we develop in mother’s womb, the dividing of cells, the forming of structure and organs, the creation of a creature with gills, and on to a human type form ready to breathe air, carrying your seed onwards.

The Mind Reaches beyond the Body

My most impressive experience of reacing beond my senses was during my first marriage. One morning Brenda woke and told me she had dreamt about the baby of two of our friends. The friends, who I will call Jane and Bob, were living about 200 miles from us. We knew Jane was pregnant, and about a week or so before the dream we had received a short letter saying their baby, a boy, had been born. We were not on the telephone at the time, so the letter was our only means of communication.

In the dream Brenda saw the baby and a voice from behind her told her the child was ill. Its illness, she was given to understand, was serious, and would need to be treated with a drug taken every day of the child’s life. The reason for this illness and the drug use, she was told, was because in a past life the person now born as the baby had committed suicide using a drug.

I didn’t take the dream seriously, thinking it was some sort of personally symbolic dream. But we couldn’t seem to extract any personal meaning for Brenda, so just in case I sent an account of the dream to Jane and Bob. About a week later we had a letter from them saying that the letter and dream had crystallised their already existing anxiety about the baby. It had not been feeding well and was fretful. On taking it to the doctor nothing definite could be found but special tests were made in hospital. From these it was discovered the baby was dying. It lacked an enzyme which was needed to digest calcium. To compensate it was given a drug, which it has had to take every day of its life to make up for the lacking enzyme.

I don’t think there can be any clearer example than that of the mind having some level of separate existence from the brain.

Having personally witnessed those events they are very real to me. But I do wonder at people who completely deny the possibility of what I have said. I wonder if there is some level of fear attached to it. In many cases there seems to be a complete denial in them, and there is always the suggestion that I, or other people like me, have made up such stories or have completely misinterpreted them in some way. All I know is that the child is still alive. He still takes his drug every day, and I wonder how they explain the fact that my wife stated all that information to me before the parents themselves knew what the problem with their child was.

In all this examination of whether there is awareness existing independently of the body, it is important to remember some fundamental things already said about our own present scientific philosophy. The first thing is that time and space were non-existent prior to the Big Bang. Secondly, Bell’s Theorem points out that sub-atomic particles exist in a way that transcends time and space. Therefore, the fundamental particles of your own body exist beyond any limitations of time, space and the three dimensions we see as ‘reality’. There is no better argument than this for the human spirit – an aspect of our nature that is not limited to time, space and death.

I have explored this more fully in The Brain Mind Split. Also, read Lynne McTaggarts book The Field for the latest researches regarding the fundamental level of existence, and how it absorbs and remembers all experience – in the UK – in the USA.

Chris: The other day I watched a program on the television in which a man was talking about his relationship with the recent Korean air crash. He said that he was a frequent air traveller, but before boarding that plane he heard a voice saying to him not to get on the plane. He said, “Look, I travel all the time. Why should I hear a voice like that? I think somebody was trying to tell me something.” His explanation of it was that he felt there was some sort of guardian or person caring for him. So I feel this is another example of what you are saying

The Mind Bomb – LSD

Doctor Hofmann died of a heart attack on April 29th 2008. He was 102.

In April of 1943 a bomb other than the atom bomb was being discovered and tested. It was the great mind bomb of this century, LSD 25. On that month the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, while experimenting with a derivative of ergot, the black fungus that grows on rye, felt strange and went home to bed. He describes what occurred by saying, “I experienced fantastic images of an extraordinary plasticity. They were associated with an intense kaleidoscopic play of colours.”[i] Hofmann deduced he had probably absorbed a minute amount of the substance he was working with. He returned to his laboratory and took 250 micrograms of the substance. (1 microgram or gamma = one millionth of a gram) This was ten times what was later found to be a potent dose. Hofmann must have realised some of the potential of the drug as he went to Stoll of the psychiatric clinic in Zurich and described what he had experienced. Stoll ran the first scientific study of LSD with normal volunteers and psychiatric patients. The findings were published in 1947.[ii]

Most Powerful Psychoactive Drug

The responses to Stoll’s findings were enormous. Further research confirmed that LSD was the most powerful psychoactive drug ever known. Thus, LSD was approximately five thousand times more effective than the already-known mescaline – which was being used to aid patients to release repressed emotions – and one hundred and fifty times more effective than the later-discovered psilocybin. At first the researchers felt sure the drug produced a temporary psychosis in those using it. The drug was therefore called psychotomimetic – imitating psychosis. This profoundly interested researchers as it was thought experimental insight might be gained into the profoundly disturbing illness schizophrenia. Later research led to an abandonment of the theory that LSD produced a temporary psychosis. Nevertheless, the drug was used throughout the USA, UK, Europe and the Middle East as a means of aiding the treatment of psychological or psychiatric disorders.[iii] In the UK Psychiatrists such as R. D. Laing, R. A. Sandison, and Joyce Martin, were licensed to use the drug with patients. Hospitals like the Marlborough Day Hospital had an active section treating patients with the drug.[iv]

Stanislav Grof of Prague established recognition as one of the foremost researchers in this field. Writing about Grof’s work, Talbot says “Traumatic memories that had haunted individuals for years were unearthed and dealt with, and sometimes even serious conditions, such as schizophrenia, were cured. But what was even more startling was that many of the patients rapidly moved beyond issues involving their illnesses and into areas that were uncharted by Western psychology.”[v]

LSD originally used for psychotherpay

Considering that Stoll’s findings were published in 1947, LSD usage in the period from then until the 60’s remained largely underground as far as the public was concerned. And in this underground chamber many other things were being done with this mind bomb than attempting to heal psychological ills. For instance in 1947 the US Central Intelligence Agency began experiments with LSD, often on unsuspecting victims.[vi] The research was partly to see if the drug could be used as a weapon of warfare. Because of its enormous potency, a small quantity of it placed in a reservoir could debilitate a whole town. Other areas of experiment also flourished. Once it had been realised that LSD did not produce a form or mental aberration, it was used to explore the realms of religious or transcendental mental phenomena. Golightly and Stafford report it as a means to help problem solving in engineering, architecture and other areas in which creativity and technical problem solving is necessary.[vii] Charles Tart describes its use in charting altered states of consciousness, as did John Lilley, who experimented with the drug while submerged in a sensory deprivation tank.[viii]

However, the bomb emerged from its underground bunker and hit people in the street, and penetrated educational institutes and the arts. Grof, on being invited to visit America to lecture and work wrote of his impressions:

LSD only later became a street drug

“The situation I found in the United States contrasted sharply with the one” [in Europe]. “Psychedelics had become an issue of general interest. Black-market LSD seemed to be readily available in all parts of the country and for all age groups. Self-experimentation with psychedelics flourished on university campuses, and many large cities had their hippie districts with distinct drug subcultures. The casualties from the psychedelic scene were making newspaper headlines; almost every day one could read sensationalist reports about psychotic breakdowns, self-mutilations, suicides, and murders attributed to the use of LSD. At the same time, the psychedelic movement was profoundly influencing contemporary culture – music, painting, poetry, design, interior decorating, fashion, movies, theatre, and television plays.”[ix]

The most representative of the social influence of LSD was in the hippie movement of the late 1960s. It was characterised by nonviolent anarchy, concern for the environment, and rejection of Western materialism. “The hippies formed a politically outspoken, antiwar, artistically prolific counterculture in North America and Europe.” Their drug inspired creativity “emerged in fashion, graphic art, and music by bands such as Love (1965-71), the   Grateful Dead , Jefferson Airplane (1965-74), and   Pink Floyd.”[x]

New worlds of experience

The bomb had exploded. For many it blew away mental and emotional limitations they had previously accepted as part and parcel of everyday reality. As an example, Constance Newland writes of her first experience:

I went through evolution, from the original explosion through primordial worlds in which I felt myself to be a reptile, a bird, a beast; on until the first independent thought was created in the mind of the beast. I stood up and walked to a mirror. I saw in myself the face of an ape – and also the master of the world. … Time seemed to be completely collapsible, and a strong feeling passed through me that everything that had ever happened or will ever happen was happening at this moment.[xi]

For some however, LSD brought entrance into an unexpected world of fear, and an introduction to deeps of previously hidden anxiety and mental terrors. But whether a healing experience, a new revelation of the mind’s power, or a trap door to a death pit, the drug played a part in the enormous social, artistic and sexual changes in the sixties. But it also put into large circulation a new social drug other than alcohol – cocaine, heroin and opium were not used by as many people at that time.

Differences of opinion about LSD

Although LSD is not classed as an addictive drug, it opened the door for a more public use of a social drug other than alcohol. It was the forerunner for many of the use of hard drugs. William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, and ex-addict, says lots of  “people take street drugs all their life to feel normal.”[xii] Some of the causes for addictive use of such drugs as heroine are – being born poor, and having abusive, addictive or dependent parents. Jonathan Kozol calls this the “sledgehammer of disposses­sion.”[xiii] One feels isolated and alienated. All ones responses appear to produce negations instead of social rewards. This leads to a constant sense of failure.

Burroughs goes on to say being in “the middle class carries the privilege of access to socially sanctioned drugs that are safer and more specific in their effects than street drugs.” [xiv] The middle class are therefore heavy drug users, but do it legally because they can afford medical and psychological counselling. They use drugs for the same reason as the dispossessed and alienated – to deal with physiological or psychological difficulties.

What then is an illicit, and what a licit drug? And “how might a substance like Prozac enter into the competitive world of business?”[xv]

To summarise, LSD and its entry into medical and social use has posed many unusual and conflicting individual, social and political questions. It was instrumental in leading to the social use of a psychoactive drug. Despite alcohol being a drug that has a long history as a basis for aggression, addiction, physical illness, broken homes, murder and manslaughter (i.e. drunken driving), it is still a legal drug. LSD, with a mixed but short history, is illegal. Despite its record as a healer, it is now only a ‘street’ drug. Changes are underway however. In the US the FDA is investigating Ibogaine, a drug similar to LSD, as a treatment to cure addiction to hard drugs.[xvi]

Bibliography and links

Iboga for the Treatment of Drug Addiction

The Addiction Library

ABC’s of  The Human Mind. The Readers Digest Association, 1990, USA. ISBN 0-89577-345-7

Burroughs, William. The Naked Lunch. Picador, USA.

Concise Oxford Dictionary. (c) Oxford University Press – Software, UK, 1992.

Grof, Stanislav. M.D. Realms of the Human Unconscious – Observations from LSD Research. A Condor Book Souvenir Press (E & A) Ltd. 1975, USA. ISBN: 0 2 86 64881 I Hardbound.

Infopedia. Funk & Wagnall’s 28-volume Encyclopaedia on CD-ROM, 1994, USA.

ISBN: 0 285 64882 9 paperback.

Infopedia UK. It includes Hutchinson’s New Century Encyclopaedia; Longmans Dictionary of the English Language; Hutchinsons Dictionary of Quotations; Hutchinsons Dictionary of English Usage; Oxford Concise Dictionary of National Biography; Hammond World Atlas; Hutchinson Info 96. UK. 1996.

MacKenzie, Norman. Dreams and Dreaming. Bloomsbury Books, London, 1965. Pg. ISBN 1 870630 82 3.

Newland, Constance. Myself and I. Frederick Muller Ltd, London, 1963.

Talbot, Michael. The Holographic Universe. Grafton Books, UK, 1991. ISBN: O-24-13690-1

http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v6n1/06129ibo.html – An information page about ibogaine.

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Notes

[i] MacKenzie, Norman. Dreams and Dreaming. Bloomsbury Books, London, 1965. Ch. 10 Drugs and Dreaming.

[ii] Source – Grof, Stanislav. Realms of the Human Unconscious, and Norman MacKenzie, Dreams and Dreaming.

[iii] See Stafford and Golightly. “LSD – The Problem Solving Drug.” Published by Award and Tandem Books, USA. Newland, Constance. Myself and I. Frederick Muller Ltd, London. 1963. Ling and Buckman. “Lysergic Acid and Ritalin in The Cure of Neurosis”. Published

by Lambarde Press, UK, 1964.

[iv] H. A. Sandison, A. M. Spencer, J. D. A. Whitelaw. ‘The Therapeutic Value of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide in Mental Illness.

[v] Talbot, Michael. The Holographic Universe. Grafton Books, UK, 1991. ISBN: O-24-13690-1

[vi] The Hutchinson New Century Encyclopedia – Helicon Publishing Company, 1996. CD-ROM version – Infopedia UK.

[vii] Stafford and Golightly. “LSD – The Problem Solving Drug.” Published by Award and Tandem Books, USA.

[viii] Tart, Charles. Altered States of Consciousness. Doubleday Anchor, USA, 1969, Dr J. C. Lilly. Centre of the Cyclone (Paladin, UK, 1973)

[ix] Grof, Stanislav. Realms of the Human Unconscious.

[x] The Hutchinson New Century Encyclopedia – Helicon Publishing Company, 1996. CD-ROM version – Infopedia UK.

[xi] Newland, Constance. Myself and I. Frederick Muller Ltd, London. 1963.

[xii] Burroughs, William. The Naked Lunch. Picador, USA.

[xiii] ABC’s Of  The Human Mind. The Readers Digest Association.

[xiv] Burroughs, William. The Naked Lunch. Picador, USA.

[xv] Burroughs, William. The Naked Lunch. Picador, USA.

[xvi] http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v6n1/06129ibo.html – An information page about ibogaine. Also – The mystery of ibogaine: can an African  psychedelic cure addiction? Nadis, Steve. Omni, July 1993 v15 n9 p14(1).

The Initiation of Ageing

In our own times we are living far being the age reached by most of our forebears. This is a new thing socially, and even governments are having to rethink policies and the economics of it.

But it is also a new thing for us individually. Many of us do not have the ready made responses to it handed to us by our own family. What often happens is that we try to take into this new dimension attitudes relevant to early periods of our life, or attitudes extracted from morals and ways of life lived in past ages. So we see people having radical plastic surgery, hormonal replacement, drugs to aid sexual performance, and other practices attempting to prolong youth – or the appearance of youth. We see this when the elderly try to relate in ways as if they had the motivations, life situation or needs of the very young. But with the accumulation of experience that comes with old age our relationship with the world changes. If we are lucky enough to retire with a reasonable income, yet another world of possibilities opens to us that were in most cases never there in earlier years. However, underlying all that are other physical and psychological activities that bring radical change.

It helps to understand this if we look back to the changes we met during adolescence and then the middle years. As we approached adolescence our body and hormonal system went through enormous shifts. Under the impact of such new currents of changed hormones our body transformed. And underneath that obvious level of change, massive psychological shifts and adjustments were taking place also.

Dreams, giving us insight into these underlying processes of our maturing psyche as they do, during teenage reflect the challenges being faced at a personal level. Challenges such as learning how to deal with the drive that pushes us toward relating to the opposite sex. Many do not manage to make this shift, to meet this challenge, and may go off into adjustments or avoidances such as anorexia or homosexuality.

What is important here for the subject in hand, is not whether you agree with that, but whether you can stand witness to the fact the processes that led to whatever direction in life you took at that time were largely spontaneous. The pressure to change arose from within. It came from the release of a hormonal, glandular and brain shift. What you did with it in particular; how you responded to it may have been more personal, more idiosyncratic. Perhaps you deviated from the norm in some way.

All of that we see as normal, as natural, as an outflow of the natural processes of life itself. But strangely, in Western society anyway, many people do not look at ageing and the changes that arise in the same way. An enormous fight takes place in many of us to ‘stay young’, to do battle with the internal forces that lead to ageing. And what I want to point out is that the natural processes that underlie adolescence and the flowering to full womanhood and manhood, are also at work in ageing.

Gardeners who work with seasonal plants can see this each year as they watch the seed burst into life and extend itself in growth – (conception through to birth and childhood.) Then comes the movement toward forming buds. (Adolescence in the move toward being fertile.) After this a most extraordinary period of beauty and physical fullness follows as the flower opens and is fertilised. (This is wonderfully seen in the bursting fullness of young breasts, the longing to be fertilised and to fertilise expressed as ‘love’ and the production of ones own seeds.) But after all this the plant slowly dries out and dies when it has reproduced, or attempted to.

That is nature at work. It is also nature at work in our own ageing. And just as there were underlying psychological processes at work deep in the psyche preparing us for adolescence and full maturity, so these same processes are at work as we age.

This preparation for ageing and dying are as full and rich as the movement toward maturity and procreation in whatever form it takes. We are, at this level, initiated as deeply into death as we are into life. The experience of it is just as rewarding and compelling as the growth toward womanhood or manhood. But unfortunately, in our attitude of seeing ageing and death as some sort of enemy that rips away all that is wonderful and of value, many of us run from these inner processes, and fail to work with them or even be aware of them.

Perhaps if some of what is met is outlined though, it might be that you can recognise in yourself some of this amazing journey.

Self awareness – being reasonably aware of what we meet physically and in our life events – means that what happens is felt as deeply personal. To understand this consider the example of the plant given already. Imagine, if it had self awareness, what it would feel as its blossom forms, and its flower unfolds. But really you don’t need to imagine it, as you know from personal experience what it felt like as your body unfolded its potential and your flower – your genitals – became functional in a new way.

Each of us met that process in a personal and slightly, or radically, different way.

When it comes to ageing we also experience this very deeply – but again each in our own way. For women in particular their flower withers in menopause. But for men and women there is a loss of much that was incredibly important and satisfying or painful in the middle years prior to the time the body starts to radically change.

So a sense of loss or losing is one of the first things met. And this can emerge in each life in different ways. For some it is loss of physical ability. For others it is loss of social standing, or work opportunity, of ones children, a meaningful role, of sexual attraction. But above all it is the loss of an identity. It is the loss of the concepts of our self based on a younger, more vigorous and sexually fertile person. So in most cases it presents us with an identity crisis. The question of who we are confronts us in an almost mythologically dramatic way. In other words we are the hero or heroine who has made this long journey, fought many battles, faced monsters and challenges, and now, having completed the tasks, instead of the golden fleece or the holy grail, we find an empty cave or an inner void.

If we haven’t in fact fought the battles and faced the monsters – managed to mature into a full man or woman and achieved either procreation or some social or even financial success – the void we face will be very immediate and powerful.

Nevertheless, the initiation into ageing and dying has reward for all of us, not simply the glorious in battle and motherhood.

This is a critical point on the journey of change. Perhaps the reason it is so critical is that although adolescence has been met billions of times in our race, and patterns of behaviour are etched into us regarding it – either genetically, socially, or through behavioural responses we learn from family – meeting advanced old age is new.

However, there are still trails left by people in the past. Tribal people especially gradually developed rites or rituals helping the individual to work with the process of ageing and dying.

Often, when people meet the identity crisis of ageing and the emptiness of losing what is falling away, they attempt to return to an earlier time in terms of behaviour. They may still try to be as sexually potent as in the past. Very often they attempt to develop a relationship in the style of a time when they were capable of having or fathering children. They want a relationship full of the promised future and ‘romance’ that had real meaning when they were younger. They may want to become – or maintain or return to being – an important figure in their society or family. They may want to maintain the same role with children, with work, with opportunity, that they had in earlier times.

But times have changed. When you age you are a different being and have different opportunities. Your glandular system is bringing you a different perception of life, a different response to events.

Just as the preadolescent gets glimpses of the years ahead in what their body is doing, so the ageing person gets glimpses of what we can call death – an identity, a consciousness, a personal awareness not completely identified with the body. Although it is not obvious, if it can be faced and experienced deeply, the wonder of that new identity, what Buddhism calls the diamond body, the imperishable self, is there in the emptiness, in the void, in the empty cave.

This new experience of oneself, not easily attainable, but there waiting if we dare, can be described as nakedness. In India there is a tradition of there being four stages of life, and the last stage is named as that of the sanyassin or renunciate. This may sound very outside of our way of life. But if examined it is simply a description of what we face in ageing and meeting death. Gradually we are stripped of the many things we took to be our real self – our potency in the world; our sexual attractiveness; our role, our power to move things. If we can face these things falling away we come to see that they are no really who we are in essence – and the essential self is what we might call a naked being – naked in the end even of a body.

Yes – the initiation into ageing and dying is an introduction to the loss of physical life. You are allowed to look beyond the boundary and experience the bliss of being unburdened by all the weight of the body and its responsibilities. You consciously know the wonderful freedom, while still alive, of that nakedness.

Just as earlier years prepared you for adolescence and maturity, so now there is a process readying you for ageing and dying. It takes a bit more in conscious participation than the move to adolescence, but it is there working in you.

There are many ways of working with this process, of honouring and learning from it. Perhaps the first step is of course to acknowledge it as a force in ones life. This means honouring the ageing process and trying to listen to what is unfolding in you and what it tells you through your dreams and intuitions.

These intuitions or growing pains can easily be repressed, or drugged away with prescription drugs. Here is one man’s description of one such experience of his ‘growing pains’.

I went through a sort of emotional collapse at this point in my life, because my whole orientation toward independent survival had led me to avoid any prolonged ‘love’ for a woman. I have often thought that the love that has never faltered and been no effort is that for my children. That is probably one of the factors making it such a difficult experience for me when they grew into adults.

At one point I dropped into a blackness, an emptiness of meaning and motivation. I realised on the other side of that wall how I had learned to love ages ago. It was simple and I was doing it already. At that time I felt strongly that all the new breed, my children especially, would need to learn how to die. It was like a process of transformation such as a caterpillar goes through. In our life today there are stages of growth and points of massive transformation as one period of growth ends and another stage begins. Learning to die is a method of passing through the transformation into the next stage of growth, and I was carving a path for my children if they attempted the further stages of growth.  Nick.

To expand on what Nick says, his emotional collapse was an experience of letting his old self die, and also learning to let go to it to make way for a new self. For him this meant letting go of love as he had known it – a possessive love for his children on which he had built his identity. This new love he saw he had begun to learn in past years. But being able to die, to let go of the past and the identity of the past, is what he felt was a great and important skill.

David, during a waking dream met the following.

My breathing sometimes becomes very slow and that is happening to me now. It seems even at times as if it has stopped, and everything becomes very still. As this is happening I feel this is what it is like to be dead. My body is so still  it disappears, and all that is left is bodiless awareness submerged in enormous emptiness or space. Space and great quietness. It feels like my body has given up life, becoming incredibly still and empty. There is a paradox in this experience because it feels as if I, my sense of self, has melted away, and yet there is still a very definite experience of existing. I suppose what has stopped is what I have called movement. The movement of thinking, of feeling, of longing or hoping for things. The constant rising and falling of the chest, the sense of movement and activity of the body, usually immerses our consciousness in a world that we take to be all there is. This experience of death where the body is no longer moving allows consciousness to spread out or to know itself as spread out beyond the edge of the body and the enormous sense of location that breathing and movement and physical sensation gives us.

When you lose your body you can begin to move around in another dimension of experience. Without the body you exist in the world of the dead. But I am just a learner in this world and I need to take time and allow myself to experience it. I need to be in this experience for a while to learn. For months I have felt this quiet emptiness and falling away of motivation. It has felt to me as if I have lost everything. This wasn’t painful or frightening, but it was disconcerting. It did feel as if the usual things that interest us/me in life, that entrance us with life’s events and experiences, had dropped away. And of course in this present state I was now more fully experiencing, that is exactly what had happened. Everything had dropped away. All the activities of life, or its inducements, had fallen away. My body had gone. It was dead. All that was left was empty naked awareness, without form, not even in a dream landscape. So I asked myself what is there to find? What is this condition? Is this empty quietness an eternal situation? Is this it?

We call this reality death. And often that has an awful face for us. But I am feeling it as joy, a most wonderful joy. It is here in the darkness I am experiencing – that joy. The waves of this gentle joy flow through me. It is like floating in a subtle ocean and my consciousness, my being, is gently lifted and moved by the waves of this quiet joy.

The waves of that joy are big, lifting me high in a coloured spectrum of rippling, vibrating radiance. My being is the waves. I am myself waves of rippling sparkling radiance. At the same time my awareness can switch back to what is happening with my body, and it is shaking, vibrating with energy flowing through it. As this happens it really seems as if my body is being absorbed into the energy. This feels to me as if my body is melting and becoming part of the emptiness that is rippling through me, that is me. The great waves of life are absorbing my personality. It is being broken down just as our body breaks down food we eat and digest. It is drawing me back into itself.

Yes, there is a path already opened for us to take if we allow it into our waking life. It has been formed by the many who have already lived, aged and died. If you care to take it you will meet them, and you will hear them say, “Welcome home!”