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Seitai And The Healing Touch

Noguchi taught three approaches to the Japanese form of inner-directed movement he named Seitai. The first approach, katsugen-undo, is basically the same as what has been described as the open approach. My observation of it is that the only difference is the voice is not allowed so much freedom in Japan. In fact each approach produces slightly different results, due most likely to the cultural attitudes and group expectations and environment present.

There are three given movement/postures preceding katsugen-undo. In Japan these are performed from the position of sitting on ones heels. If this is difficult however, try them either from a kneeling position, or kneeling then sitting back onto a thick cushion or books. The movements are to produce a mixture of relaxation and tension after which one will have a desire to stretch and move.
Posture One

1 – From the position of kneeling and sitting back on your heels, or onto some books or similar thing to take your weight off your heels, place

your finger tips on your upper abdomen. This is just above your navel. The aim is to be aware of whether you are tensing your abdomen and aid you to keep it relaxed during the movement.

2 – Take a slow breath in and as you do so imagine you are filling your being not only with fresh air, but also with light and health. As much as possible feel the positive force of cleansing fill your body.

3 – As you slowly breath out let your trunk drop forward toward the floor, feeling relaxed and keeping the abdomen free of tension. Also, imagine you are breathing out all darkness and ill health from your being.

4 – As you inhale bring your trunk to the upright position again, once more imagining breathing in light and health. Continue this movement and breathing meditation until you feel satisfied with it and feel more relaxed. If there is any desire to yawn during these movements, allow it. This is much encouraged in Seitai.
Posture Two

1- The aim of this next movement is to produce tension in the body. From the sitting position breathe in fairly quickly and lift your hips no more than three inches from your heels. As you do this twist your trunk and arms to the left.

2 – Hold that tense position for a few moments then drop back into the sitting position with a quick out-breath.

3 – Repeat this turning to the right, and continue twisting to alternate sides until you feel satisfied with the movement.

4 – End by turning one last time to the right, to balance your starting turn.
Posture Three

1 – Next comes the last of the preliminary posture/movements. This is only performed three times, at the end of which you relax and allow your body to stretch or move in any way it wishes. Allow the movements to continue for about twenty minutes or longer if you are inclined.

2 – Place your thumbs across your palms toward your little fingers. Clasp your fingers around your thumbs tightly to form a fist.

3 – Raise your arms so your hands and upper arms are vertical, and your lower arms are horizontal. Take an in-breath and pull your head and arms back slightly to create a tension between the shoulders and at the base of the neck.

4 – Hold the tension for a few seconds then breath out in a gasp and relax. Do this three times and allow spontaneous movement.

Teachers of Seitai place a lot of stress upon relying on your own being’s internal healing functions. In the book Colds And Their Benefits Noguchi points out that people who are ill have often lost sensitivity to their body’s natural response. As examples he says that such people, on trying to relax actually tense their body. They are unaware of their natural feelings of tiredness, perhaps they bury them with artificial stimulants such as coffee. Their body does not expand and contract naturally, but is stiff and immobile. Their own healing processes have been denied again and again. The cure for this is to start allowing their spontaneous action again. Symptoms of illness must not be suppressed by drugs. Such symptoms are signs of the body trying to heal itself, so must be worked with rather than against. The aim is not to cure the symptom, such as a headache, but to heal the causes. Noguchi goes so far as to say that the really healthy person is always feeling slight feelings of illness because they are aware of their reactions to the environment, and are constantly adjusting to it.

Noguchi stresses that it is not the movements of Seitai which heal us. To do the movements mechanically as if they were the thing which healed, is to miss the whole point, and be a return to keep-fit. But once you have learned to allow your body to heal itself more vigorously, you do not need to practise. It is cooperating with the process of your being’s own regulating and growth forces that is important. As you gain experience of this it becomes natural and automatic in your everyday life, so doesn’t need ‘practise’. Noguchi defines the use of Seitai as a movement to train the autonomic nervous system. So if your body’s capacity to order itself becomes sensitive, your body will naturally maintain itself in a normal, pleasurable condition. This might be like a windsurfer who is much more sensitive to the movements of the board than an inexperienced windsurfer. So the experienced windsurfer is always moving into balance, and their adjustments are much finer.

Noguchi teaches that an open and receptive state of mind is needed, and this he calls ‘tenshin’. Anybody who has watched animals such as a pet cat or bird, can see that occasionally the cat will do certain stretches or movements. This is not because they have read a book about what the best exercises are. They do them instinctively. Babies have this open state of mind also, and they can be seen to make a great many of these movements and sounds spontaneously. Therefore, if you have a relaxed state of mind in which your body is allowed free expression, katsugen undo will occur by itself. Maybe you will start to stretch, yawn, or even scratch without thinking about it or directing the process.

For those who are so out of balance they are not aware of their body’s needs, initial help from another practitioner is useful. To this end Seitai has an approach named yuki – pronounced rather like you-key. It means to touch.
Yuki – Touch Healing – Touch Play

In the Far East there is a concept concerning human energy or life force which they call Ki. In China it is called Chi, as in Tai Chi. Noguchi describes Ki as the force behind the form of the body and its processes. He says it is the Ki that directs cellular processes, and causes them to grow in the correct shape and size to form our human body. The movement of our heart, for instance, is not the same, Noguchi says, as a piece of chalk being moved around. Our movements come from within, directed by Ki. In its expression, Ki is felt as our motivations. From these motivations we move an arm or leg. But more important still, without motivations, as occurs with some people who retire and lose their motivations, their being loses its health. Therefore, Noguchi says that instead of treating the shell, the body, one ought in such cases to treat the Ki and to restore the quality of its positive motivations.

Most ancient cultures have developed explanations of this subtle energy field within and around the body. Western science and medicine is now beginning to be able to demonstrate it also. Dr. Dolores Krieger, who is a professor of nursing at New York University became interested in the subject after studying the work of Oscar Esteban, a Hungarian healer. After studying with Dora Kunz, Kreiger was able to work with the energy field in effective healing. She went on to teach ‘therapeutic touch’ to nurses in a master’s level course at New York University.

Valerie Hunt, a professor of kinesiology at UCLA has been able to demonstrate the presence and importance of the energy field using a electromyograph. This is an electronic device measuring electrical activity in the muscles.

The Japanese teach that when you place your hands on another persons body, you respond to it. You will feel the energy field if you take time to watch your sensations with awareness. Sometimes your hands feel cold, or there is the sensation of ants crawling on them. If there is a cold response, it may be that there is a lack of vitality in that part of their body. You must continue Yuki – that is, directing Ki energy – until the hands return to normal. They also say that you will gradually learn to work with these subtle feelings with greater discernment through practise. Noguchi says that on the part of the person receiving Yuki there are observable changes. Their pulse rate increases, they feel more relaxed and sometimes sleepy. The effects are 1) relaxation. 2) heightened sensitivity. 3) discharge. There is certainly a very real help from Yuki, and at present there is much research into how such techniques can be used in healing the sick.

The way I was taught yuki was very simple and without any theoretical background. It is as follows:
The Practice Of Yuki

Yuki is practised with two people. There can of course be many couples using yuki at the same time. One person is the receiver and one the giver. The Japanese who taught me did not limit themselves with ideas of the healthy healing the sick. They used yuki because it was fun to do. But it can be used to help someone who is below par.

1 – The starting point is that the receiver can choose whether to lie down, sit or stand. They become quiet and receptive to the giver. The giver allows their own inner-directed movements, as occurs in katsugen-undo. But the giver holds in mind that what they are allowing is in response to the receiver. I have found a useful way to begin is to be about three feet away from the receiver and hold your hands out towards them as if warming your hands. From there follow the delicate urges to move. The idea is not to massage the person, but touch is allowed as you simply follow what your hands and body want to do.

2 – The receiver can also allow their own movements in response to the contact with the giver. In watching the Japanese use yuki, there were all levels of response. Sometimes the receiver remains very quiet, even sleepy. Other times both partners move into a lovely dance of responsive spontaneous movement and contact – or a fast moving play with lots of laughter. The contact may be delicate or full. Very often the hands of the giver do not touch the receiver, but move at a distance from them.

3 – The receiver is to be respected. In Western groups who were unfamiliar with ‘tenshin’ or waiting, on occasion I have seen the giver drop any openness to the needs of the receiver and consciously decide what ought to happen, and drag a receiver to their feet. The giver felt that was where they ought to go. The inner situation or movements of the receiver were thus completely ignored. This non respect for another person’s integrity is not the way to use yuki. The interaction between giver and receiver in yuki, if allowed to develop naturally, often shifts to a mutual giving and receiving.

The experience of yuki is one of the most delightful facets of inner-directed movement. Not only does it develop sensitivity in a relationship, but it also enables two people to discover a world of non verbal communication and meeting. It develops the sensitivity of responsiveness necessary in intimate relationships. Finding that the Japanese had developed this gentle way of strangers meeting and touching showed me an unsuspected side to their culture. Teaching it in the West people have sincerely thanked me for showing them how to discover their own beauty and flow in meeting another person.
Working With A Sick Person

The Japanese practitioners of Seitai say that yuki can be useful if a person is feeling unwell. If the person you are giving yuki to is actually ill, there need be no change in the way you give it. It is best if you have practised inner-directed movement for some time to feel easy with allowing spontaneous movement. It is enough to hold the sick person in mind and open yourself to what arises from within. It doesn’t even matter if physical contact is not made.

In Subud the movements (latihan) are sometimes allowed in the presence of a sick person. Unlike yuki, there is no attempt to touch the sick person. Members of Subud are not allowed to work with the opposite sex when giving healing or help with questions. This must be understood as being a culturally created difference. It is important to remember however that the different approaches demonstrate the significant fact that the process can work well in various settings and ways. The physical distance of thousands of miles in reality makes no difference. The biggest barrier is not distance or even degree of illness, it is the beliefs, convictions and limitations we live within.

Open to your inner-directed movements with the person in mind who needs support. It does not matter whether the person is near to you or many miles away.
Paths Of Wonder And Joy

The dimensions of experience you can meet within yourself through inner-directed movement appear to be without limits. If you have tried the different approaches described above and in the earlier chapters, you will have seen that a slight shift of attitude or a different image or question held in mind focuses you in another experience. This means that as long as you have established yourself in the basic open and surrendered process, you can reach into many different areas of your own potential.

The pathways described below are not necessary to use in practising inner-directed movement. Although the simplest form of the practice – the ‘open approach’ – is the most profound, because you are unique and have your own special needs, it may be that you get special help from using these pathways. Opening your being to allowing spontaneous movement is still the basis of each pathway however.

The Pathways do have a great power of healing and personal growth. This is because you are not just a physical body. As described elsewhere, your internal nature can become stiff and aching through lack of activity, just as your body does. The Pathways are designed to take you through a series of experiences that mobilise your being in a way difficult to find outside an extraordinarily full and wide life. If you work through these Pathways you will emerge feeling a very different person, and in real ways reborn. To get to this point it is not enough to practise each path once. You will need to use each one until you feel easy and fluid in it. If you are using the first one ‘Contraction and Expansion’, being easy and fluid means that you can move easily between the opposites, and any tensions or hesitation within the practice have been worked through. This does not mean you have to stick with one path to the exclusion of the others until it is perfect. By all means move around in them to add variety.

The paths are great sources of healing and personal growth. They will bring about a remarkable change in your experience of life and relationships. They will open doors to aspects of your own talents and love not previously met. They will take you into an awareness of what was previously invisible within you.

The Japanese Have Seitai

While teaching my approach to homeostasis in Japan I was introduced to another Oriental approach to self-regulation which is widely used in that country. It is called Seitai and was taught in its present form by Haruchika Noguchi. In Japan Seitai is thought of as a way of keeping healthy, but it has a particular quality about it which comes out in Noguchi’s teachings. He constantly stressed that you cannot understand what a human being is by dissecting one, or by trying to understand the function of separate organs such as the liver or brain.

For instance, he said that,

One person may find his appetite increases when he is in love, another may find that his heart rather than his stomach responds. Similarly, the same stressful situation may result in rheumatism in one person and diabetes in another. What causes these differences? Sonic individuals are so tough they are calm even with a million pound debt, while others become ill over obligations of only ten pounds. The physical tendencies of each person are different, and unless one takes ones stand on this fact the health problems of different people cannot be grasped.

Seitai’s starting point is from a completely different concept of health to that of a keep-fit class. In keep-fit, and in just about every form of exercise from yoga to weight training, there are certain movements or postures which are said to exercise particular muscles, or to be ‘good’ for the thighs, abdomen, etc. These are then applied or practised from outside, as it were. Seitai has the concept that our life process knows what sort, and how much exercise we need, and the exercise arises from within. In other words it is stimulated by our unconscious sense of our own needs, just as a sneeze is.

Let me quote Noguchi again to explain this. He says:

In my teens I started to guide people to health by means of what we now call Seitai Soho and Katsugen Undo, though at that time I had no knowledge of medicine or of the body’s anatomical structure. I did not know anything about the kind of food we should eat, yet I was able to lead people to health.

What was the basis for the guidance? It was that I asked myself why human beings stayed alive and what should be done to activate their strength to live. . . We find various excuses for suppressing ourselves and, without realising we are putting our innate powers for health asleep, we convince ourselves that we are weak and blame it on our surroundings, the food we eat or the hours we sleep, unaware that the real responsibility lies with us.

So Seitai creates a situation in which we listen and allow response. Noguchi taught that the spontaneous movements which arise as the response are the same as those occurring during sleep. Seitai considers whether our vitality and enthusiasm for life is active or withdrawn. If withdrawn, then it is encouraged to express itself again. Because a great deal of the suppressive factors in us are mental and emotional, Seitai encourages a strong and healthy confidence in ones ability to survive. If we fear we will become ill if a night’s sleep is missed, the anxiety creates tension which suppresses the defence systems of the body. If illness then occurred, would it mean one was naturally sickly? See Seitai please watch this wonderful video.

Put in another way, we are learning to allow the body’s own natural mechanisms, such as the eyes watering if dust enters them, and other such more subtle reactions, to function more vitally. Noguchi stresses that it is not the movements of Seitai which heal us. The symptoms of illness are the body’s own attempts to heal itself, and Seitai helps us work with that process. To do the movements mechanically as if they were the thing which healed, is to miss the point and would be a return to keep-fit. But once

you have learned to allow your body to heal itself more vigorously, you do not need to practise it any more.

Coming right up to the present, Rolfing, Primal Therapy, EST, Re-Birthing, Bioenergetics, all offer their particular genius to a culture convulsing with activity to become whole. Unfortunately most of these approaches offer their help through highly paid experts to those who feel in need of paying for it. The Expert/Patient relationship is something that is badly in need of renovation. As Laing suggests, what we need is not more experts and organisations, but something seen as a central function in a sane society. We need courage and faith in our own ability to move toward wholeness – and companions who will be with us while we experience the Journey.

But it is such a pity that whever you look eveyone poses as a expert and wants to charge money to teach. Yet Seitai is as natural as breathing.We seem to be polluted by the commercial influence.

See Seitai And The Healing Touch – Yuki – Touch Healing – Touch Play

Ronnie Laing Daring to Care

Someone who has had a very widespread and revolutionary influence on psychiatric and non-clinical therapy is R.D. Laing. His book The Politics of Experience, published in 1967, sums up his view of how the sane and the so-called insane can be helped by forming a supportive environment in which self-regulation can take place. He says in the book:

No age in the history of humanity has perhaps so lost touch with this natural ‘healing’ process, that implicates some of the people whom we label schizophrenic. No age has so developed it, no age had imposed such prohibitions and deterrence’s against it, as our own. Instead of the mental hospital, which is a sort of re-servicing factory for human breakdowns, we need a place where people who have traveled further and, consequently, may be more lost than psychiatrists and other sane people, can find their way ‘further’ into inner space and time, and back again. Instead of the ‘degradation’ ceremonial of psychiatric examination, diagnosis and prognostication, we need, for those who are ready for it, an initiation ceremonial, through which the person will be guided with full social encouragement and sanction, into inner space and time, by people who have been there and back again. Psychiatrically this would appear as ex-patients helping future patients to go mad.

What is entailed then is:

i A voyage from outer to inner,

ii from life to a kind of death,

iii from going forward to going back,

iv from temporal movement to temporal standstill,

v from mundane time to aeonic time,

vi from the ego to the self,

vii from being outside (post birth) back into the womb of all things (pre birth).

viii And then subsequently a return voyage from:

ix Inner to outer,

x from death to life,

xi from the movement back to a movement forward,

xii from immortality back to mortality,

xiii from eternity back to time,

xiv from self to a new ego,

xv from a cosmic foetalisation to an existential rebirth.

This process may be one that all of us need, in one form or another. The process could have a central function in a truly sane society.

Reich – Cosmic Energy and the Death of Gurus

Dr. Wilhelm Reich offers us a very different approach to this world of experience. In the 1920’s Reich gradually felt his way from an orthodox use of Freudian psychoanalysis to a more biological, physiological or energetic point of view. Not that he lost sight of the human soul, but he realised how much body, energy and personality are unified. By working with body attitudes or postures he found he could help the patient melt tensions and emotional blocks. By relaxing muscular tensions, flows of energy, movement and feeling were unblocked. Perhaps more than any other clinical therapist or doctor of his time, he recognised that a spontaneous, self-regulating activity or energy was at work in all living organisms. He says of this energy, which he eventually called orgone:

Contrary to galvanic electricity – it would function on organic material which is a non-conductor for electricity, and on animal tissues. Its function would not be restricted to isolated nerve cells or cell groups, but would permeate and govern the total organism. It would have to explain in a simple way, the pulsating basic function of the living , contraction and expansion, as it is expressed in respiration and orgasm. It would express itself in the production of heat, a characteristic of most living organisms. It would definitely explain the sexual function, i.e. it would make sexual attraction understandable. It would explain what has been added to the chemically complicated protein in order to make it alive. It would, finally, have to show us the mechanism of the symmetry of form development in general.

Gradually Reich developed very definite techniques, working with respiration, muscular tension and character attitudes. He particularly explored the place of sexuality individual, social and political structures. He helped people release their own self-regulatory process and work with it toward health and wholeness. As people learned this they experienced spontaneous movement, trembling, changed feeling states and emotional and sexual release. The actual results, as compared with those already mentioned in this short history, were no different to those in Shaktipat or in Mesmer’s work.

Nevertheless Reich brought a new openness, a new technical understanding to the subject with his genius. Unlike Mesmer he did not rest until he had pinpointed clearly what released self-regulatory action into conscious operation. He did not stop, as Mesmer and the gurus did, in believing himself and certain other special men and women were the channels of a cosmic energy which healed. Reich made the tremendous step, while yet remaining a scientist and clinical therapist, of seeing an integral law of human nature at work, and active in individuals quite apart from his personal influence.

In this Reich helped people in the present to begin a link with their spontaneous energies which earlier peoples had known only in a religious context. The deeply religious, surrendered attitudes so prevalent in the past are seldom found today in the West. Certainly not in the way demonstrated by the original Christians who surrendered body and mind to a force they trusted. Looked at in this way, even the Godly in the West are frightened of God’s power. Jung makes the statement that people in the West cannot find God because none of us can bow low enough. Philip Zimbardo and Carol Laderman are more typical of the fear we have as Westerners of the unconscious. We see in it possible madness, loss of self, and possession by unnamed urges and forces. Being unable to form the trust out of our religious convictions, Reich enabled people to meet this vital part of themselves from a different more acceptable starting point. The new standpoint is that which includes our critical and analytical intellect. To deny it in an attempt to emulate the East in approaching their inner life uncritically, would be to do ourselves a great disservice. Reich proved that as Westerners we can still touch our deep spontaneous energies while retaining our new-found intellect.

Mesmer – Father of Modern Psychotherapy

In about the year 1775 Mesmer, a qualified doctor three times over, began to experiment with magnets. He found that patients who had previously been incurable were healed when these were placed on their bodies. For a year he had a mania for experimenting with magnets in quite extraordinary ways. But within that period he realised the same healing results could be obtained without using the magnets. He found that simply by stroking or touching the patient along the line of the nerves, the muscles would begin to twitch. This twitching, he said, should not cause alarm, even if it led, as it usually did, to an intensification of the patient’s symptoms or even convulsive movements. Throughout these releases, noisy and explosive though they were, he saw how patients could experience a healing of the distressing symptoms.

Prior to this time these convulsive releases were considered to be the work of devils or spirits. This attitude arose out of Christian belief, and Jesus and the disciples clearly used the same technique. In the New Testament are descriptions of people cured by these convulsive releases. Mesmer is a transforming link with our own times because his approach to this phenomena was an experimental and evaluative one. Nevertheless he was still bound to the past by his belief that another human beings presence was necessary to act as a channel for a cosmic energy to reach the sick person. Thus he still remained, in this aspect, in connection with the guru as agent of change tradition.

Stefan Zweig, in his book Mental Healers, describes Mesmer’s way of working as follows:

With a serious and dignified mien, calmly, slowly, radiating tranquillity he would draw near to the patients. At his proximity a gentle fit of trembling would spread through the assembly. He wore a lilac robe, thus calling up the image of a Zoroastrian or Indian magician.

Usually no great time elapsed before one or the other of the company would begin to tremble, then the limbs would twitch convulsively, and the patient would break out in perspiration, scream or groan. No sooner had such tokens manifested themselves in one member of the chain, than the others too, would feel the onset of the famous crisis which was to bring relief. Some would fall to the ground and go into convulsions, others would laugh shrilly, others would scream, and choke, and dance like dervishes, others would appear to faint or sink into a hypnotic sleep. According to Mesmer’s ‘theory of crisis’ the malady had to be provoked into its utmost marge of development, it had so to speak to be sweated out of the organism if the body was to retain healthy.

The importance of Mesmer to the history of homeostasis is that, to the individuals who claim to have ‘discovered’ a new approach to human ills via abreaction, or say they have channelled a new cosmic force for the use of humanity, Mesmer stands as a direct contradiction. Three hundred years ago, despite his exotic dress and manner, he ran individual and group psychotherapy of a very successful nature. Although he thought of himself as a channel for a cosmic energy, he nevertheless recognised an agent other than technical psychiatric skill at work. Perhaps the ‘cosmic energy’ theory was not so far out either, as Reich revived it in new form in our own century. The work of Mesmer gradually moved into greater and greater complication — people dancing around trees for instance — instead of simplification and clarity. Out of it came Mesmerism which took the form of positive suggestion, completely leaving behind the aspect of allowing the organism to discharge its own tension and negativity. The spontaneous forces capable of self healing were ignored — even suppressed. The vainglorious power or forceful skill of the mesmerist or therapist took its place.

If you read widely enough you begin to see that throughout the ages, in the different religions and traditional practices of East and West, there was a certain similarity. This was not apparent unless you could see right through to what the fundamental essence of the practices were. For instance one of the books I read was the life of Anton Mesmer, the father in the West of what has become hypnotism and psychotherapy. What Mesmer stumbled upon was that, while experimenting with magnets on patients who had some physical or psychological problem, they began to tremble or experience spontaneous movements and often relived the source of their trauma and arrived at a cure.

When I put this together with the description of the Christian Pentecost or the practice of Seitai in Japan, I saw that fundamentally they were the same. With Mesmer he thought at first it was the magnets producing the release, but later discarded the idea and thought that perhaps it was his own personal magnetism. But when I compare that with what happened at Pentecost, and other similar practices East and West, I saw that fundamentally it was about the person relaxing and allowing spontaneous movements to occur. See Life’s Little Secrets

Mesmerism led to a perception among “therapists” that the entire social order could have resulted from suggestion. Many viewed mesmerism not just as a means of correcting the problems of an individual but as a means of changing society. Quite a few of the men who signed the early documents triggering the French Revolution were also members of Franz Mesmer’s Society of Harmony.

One of the responses of the establishment was to proscribe mesmerism, and later hypnosis. Mesmerism remained officially banned for almost a hundred years; it took the influence of the most famous clinician of his day, Jean-Martin Charcot, to bring it back to the scientific domain.

The approach started by Mesmer has never completely died out. While living in Russia in 1912 Sir Paul Dukes met Lev Lvovitch who used a self regulatory method to deal with a variety of illnesses. He would stroke patients limbs and induce shaking and trembling. In his book Unending Quest he describes the case of a boy whose legs were paralysed. “There was a broken exclamation from the boy in the middle of the room. ‘It’s b-b—beginning!’ The lad was quivering from head to foot so much that he had to hold on to his chair.” After several treatments Dukes observed that the boy’s condition improved, and in a few weeks he was cured.

Only in very recent years has any serious scientific work been done in understanding what takes place in this healing which arises from within — with or without the help of an outside agent. Despite this research there is still virtually no socially established ways in which individuals are taught to trust their own internal processes. People in the West, and especially those trained in the helping professions, are forever committing the crime against human nature of ‘doing something’ to it, and seldom letting ‘It’ do something to them. Nevertheless some individuals and groups have done a tremendous amount to make us aware of our lack, and point out ways of overcoming it. Freud does not leave us with any sense of there being a powerful and helpful self—regulatory action in us. He gives no sense of finding a transformative power with which one can work toward spontaneous analysis and self help. But in Jung we find again and again very clear reference to what has been named in this book as homeostasis. See Functions of dreams

LSD and Drugs

Because of the struggle our culture is having with drug abuse, it is necessary here to point out that a few of the ‘drugs’, notably psilocybin, LSD, Cannabis and ecstasy, all release self-regulatory experience. See Life’s Little Secrets

By that I mean that the usual threshold between the unconscious and the conscious allows the semiconscious to freely express its contents. As the threshold usually prevents things we cannot easily meet, or that have been repressed because they are linked with pain, the breach in the threshold can cause a lot of problems. Part of the problem is that things are released that the person has no understanding of and cannot deal with. This means that a lot of ‘ghosts’ are let loose that continue to haunt the person.

And I need to explain what ghosts are; they are things that are half realised traumatic experiences that as they are not dealt with continue in the person’s life, gradually corroding it. As an example a young man who took LSD as a form of social enjoyment, after taking it for several times, was in a pub and saw the Devil walk in. This so disturbed him he ran away trying to escape. He carried on trying to hide from the Devil and became completely obsessed with it. The devil is a symbol and needs to be met as a dream image and worked through, exactly as one does with a dream – i.e. an image released from what was unconscious in an attempt to help our conscious personality to become more whole. See Programmed; Techniques for Exploring your Dreams

It terms of inner experience the Devil is simply an image in which we clothe our fears – probably about sex, about things the person has done that he or she feels guilty about. If he had understood how the mind works and seen it as an opportunity to deal with his personal fears and difficulties it would have been solved straight away. But otherwise the ‘ghost’ had been released and will continue to haunt the person in one way or another. I suggest reading Peer Dream Work and Different Levels of your Mind.

So, if the person does not integrate what is released by the drug, marked disorientation occurs. What have been called ‘flash backs’ are the result of undealt with inner emotions and fears.

Some of the most effective work with the principle of homeostasis was done with LSD prior to its being made illegal. A number of psychiatrists were registered to work with it. To understand this positive side to these drugs, it is useful to read such books as Myself and I by Constance Newland; and LSD Psychotherapy by W.V. Caldwell. When compared with the literature on ‘tripping’, the tremendous difference can be seen between playing with and working with, the inner process of homeostasis-self-regulation.

See Iboga for the Treatment of Drug Addiction – Healing Cancer Using Magic Mushrooms

God’s Chosen People – The Way of Subud

Considering Reich’s work it is interesting now to look at the influence of Muhammed Subuh. He was born and lived in Indonesia, working as an accountant for many years. His main interest in life was to seek out some of the many gurus in his country, and attempt a deeper awareness of life’s mysteries and the nature of God. In his late twenties, in the year 1925, he experienced a vision while out walking. It seemed to him that a ball of light or fire rushed across the sky and descended on his head. He began to shake and tremble, and felt a powerful and divine energy had begun to work in his being. On reaching home he opened himself to the influence of this power and found spontaneous movements and experiences occurred. From that time onwards he frequently ‘opened’ himself to what he felt to come from God, and found that each time movements, sounds, and a wide variety of inner experience arose. He observed that the movements and experiences were ways in which his being was gradually cleansed and made whole. It was as if some influence were gradually guiding him through experiences in a direction he could not preconceive, but IT could. Also, his physical health improved, his experiences educated him regarding his and other peoples life on Earth, and he found his intuitive faculties enormously enlarged. Often he could also be instrumental in helping other people to experience healing. The film star Eva Bartok told her story in the newspapers at the time of her own healing in connection with Pak Subuh and her baby.

By 1932 Pak Subuh had discovered that other people who relaxed in his presence could also receive the same experience and be led through cleansing and integration. Groups of people in Indonesia began to practice this ‘opening’ to what they felt to be the grace of God working in their lives. The manner of these group experiences is like that described under Shaktipat. People found their bodies making spontaneous movements; they experienced themselves in a wide variety of ways, were led through catharsis and great inspirational insights. Like the Pentecostal approach, there was a tendency toward remaining on the symbolic level, and editing all but the transcendental.

The experience of being moved from within was called ‘Latihan’, which in Indonesian means to be moved, cleansed and disciplined by the power of God. But until 1957 comparatively few people were in these groups doing latihan. Those who were had mostly been using latihan several times a week for many years. Sometimes the length of practice was ten or fifteen years. These practitioners had found that their nature and body had been gradually changed by the practice. Their awareness and sympathies had widened. Problems had shifted, and in general they felt more in touch with the force or meaning behind their existence. At this point a European working in Indonesia – Rofe – asked to be introduced to the latihan. Rofe taught it to people in England who started an international centre at Coombe Springs. From there the practice went world-wide, and at one time the followers numbers were claimed to be 200,000. People of all nationalities, religious belief, political views and social status found they could experience the latihan. The lives of many were deeply changed by it.

If we are to understand how modern men and women relate to homeostasis there are things we must be aware of in regard to the latihan, and the organisation named Subud. J.P. Barter, for instance, writing about his involvement in the latihan says, “We do not know for any certainty why the force which is received in Subud has been made uniquely available to mankind today rather than at some earlier period in history.” The statement is typical of the sort of historical blindness and spiritual pomposity that is common in the practice. Pak Subuh states that the experience is unique to him and new in the world. When I myself started a homeostasis group many years ago, based on Reichian work and Mesmer’s groups, a spy was sent from a Subud group in a nearby town to find out where or how I had stolen their latihan! That people like J.G. Bennet, a well educated man, and Barter, bright enough to write an orderly account of Subud, can accept such statements is a warning that the Western mind, in attempting to re-establish connection with the deeper layers of the psyche, can often revert to primitive attitudes, ignoring or discarding information and lessons learned through hard experience.

Dianetics – Co-counseling and Accessible Homeostasis

In the 50’s Ron Hubbard published a book about his work called Dianetics. It was revolutionary in its claims of self-help psychotherapy, because until then such healing had been firmly in the hands of specialists or cults such as Subud – both being jealous of their field and requiring either high fees or membership. In a readily understandable book Hubbard described how people could help themselves. The book gave details about re-experiencing childhood trauma, of remembering life in the womb, of full memory, and how childhood pain causes the person to function inefficiently. Unfortunately his work led to the formation of The Church of Scientology, which has signs of being another cult.

One of the offshoots of Dianetics, even though it fails to claim itself as such, is Re-Evaluation Counseling or Co-Counseling, which unlike Scientology, makes itself available to the public easily and at little or no cost. Also it clearly works with the process of self-regulation. In 1964 Harvey Jackins published a pamphlet called The Postulates of Re-Evaluation Counseling. In summary these postulates say:

· . . the essence of rational human behaviour consists of responding to each instant of living with a new response, created afresh at that moment to precisely fit and handle the situation of that moment as that situation is defined by the information received through the senses of the person. . . Each human with a physically undamaged brain has a large inherent capacity for this kind of behaviour. . .The natural emotional tone of a human being is zestful enjoyment of life. The natural relationship between any two human beings is loving affection, communication and cooperation. The special human capacity for rational response is interrupted by an experience of physical or emotional distress. Information input through the senses then stores as an unevaluated and rigid accumulation, exhibiting the characteristics of a very complete, literal recording of all aspects of the incident.

Immediately after the distress experience is concluded or at the first opportunity thereafter, the distressed human spontaneously seeks to claim the attention of another human. If they are successful in claiming this aware attention of the other person, a process of what has been called ‘discharge’ ensues.

Discharge is signaled externally by one or more of a precise set of physical processes. These are: crying or sobbing (with tears), trembling with cold perspiration, laughter, angry shouting and vigorous movement with warm perspiration, live interested talking; and in a slightly different way, yawning, often with scratching or stretching. Discharge requires considerable time for completion.

In actual practise two people contract to work together. One listens while the other talks over areas of pain or deep feeling and enters into discharge. They then swap roles. It is a very simple and effective technique. As such it cuts out all the negative aspects attendant on gurus and cults, while remaining highly effective and much more available.

The work of Dr. Caron Kent, as summarised by his book The Puzzled Body, while not as influential as some of the approaches mentioned, is nevertheless important. He began to explore homeostasis because of his own need by giving himself regular time at a typewriter and writing spontaneously whatever came to mind. In this way he found he began to contact areas of experience and feeling previously unavailable. He developed this in his practice as a psychotherapist into working with the body and feelings directly. He writes of his work as dealing with the self-regulatory forces, and deplores physicians and therapists who are blind to their importance. One of the interesting aspects of his work is that he took careful measurements of his patients and found that as they were able to allow their being to release its own self-regulatory process, their bodies achieved their growth potential. In adults head size changed radically, as with feet, chest, etc. Kent concluded that painful or non integrated experience interfered with the growth processes in body and personality. When such experiences were released and integrated, the growth processes were released to complete their work.

Christianity’s Unwanted Secret

Another impulse more embedded in Western culture, but perhaps less accepted today, is that begun by the early Christians. This is very definitely an example of a group of people permitting the self-regulatory action to express itself consciously. It is what we call Pentecostalism, and from the point of view of homeostasis, is in may ways similar to Shaktipat. The guru, Jesus, was the means of stimulating the release, or giving ‘grace’. Because we are acquainted with the dogmas and belief structure of Christianity in some measure, we can more readily see how a natural process, self regulation, can become deified and surrounded by religious symbols and ritual. Just as the views of Buddhism and shamanism edited what aspects of the unconscious were permissible, (i.e. in Vipassana it is not acceptable to go into ‘trance’ or be ‘possessed’. In shamanism it is thought ineffective if one only sits and remains aware of the flow of arising images) so in the Pentecostal approach, what is allowed must in some way link with Christ, God or biblical statements. Nevertheless, the ‘drunkenness’, speaking in ‘tongues’, the flow of cosmic energy — holy ghost — are all akin to Shaktipat and modern homeostasis.

Pentecostal Christianity speaks of gifts of the spirit. These are listed as the gift of: the word of wisdom; the word of knowledge; faith healing; the working of miracles; prophecy; the discerning of spirits; diverse kinds of tongues; and interpretation of tongues.

Most of these are easily recognizable descriptions of faculties of the unconscious. The unconscious is constantly scanning information and considering the highest probable outcome — thus prophecy. Access to universal aspects of consciousness allow the gaining of insights which might also account for prophecy, wisdom and words of knowledge. Speaking in tongues is a common way in which the unconscious expresses its feelings and insights. It is a level three expression in Van Rhijn/Caldwell’s levels of consciousness. When the ‘tongues’ are considered as symbolic expression they transform into meaningful words, just as dream symbols do. My experiments with such phenomena convincingly show the common link between these often considered unrelated phenomena and homeostasis.

Discerning of spirits means the ability to look into a human heart and see what is hidden there. Considering how much we can learn subliminally through body language and verbal cues, this is another straightforward unconscious faculty. But imagine a group of people all ‘worshipping’ as is described of Pentecost, when the disciples were taken to be drunk. (Acts 1:12 to 2:13) There were 120 gathered in a room, men and women being equals — “All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.” Considering present day Pentecostalism and other forms of homeostasis, this large group would include people who would be shouting in tongues, others would be crying, moving their bodies, discerning spirits, and generally creating a bedlam of noise. Any newcomer to the group, not having had explained what was being attempted — that each be open to the Spirit and be moved by it — might think the people were crazy or drunk.

Carl Jung Linking East and West

Ancient approaches to homeostasis were not always in the form of trance or possession though. Two thousand five hundred years ago Guatama the Buddha gave an impulse to the world which has developed a quite different relationship with self regulatory processes. In terms of homeostasis we can see these as Zen meditation. Tibetan Buddhism, the Chinese meditation described in the book The Secret of The Golden Flower, and Vipassana meditation. In these an open permitting state of consciousness is held. Thus the experiences described under Shaktipat may arise into consciousness. In the Buddhist tradition though, these are held back from physical expression and seen as illusory aspects of self which will pass away. As with Shaktipat and most of the older approaches, one seldom hears of people experiencing transforming childhood experience. The direct experience of ourselves in this way is more Western than Eastern, though definitely not our exclusive property. What is noticeable in the Buddhist tradition is more of an emphasis on introversion and withdrawal from the external activity. Thus, what is discovered within is seldom used to change social structure in the way described in chapter seven. But in its essence, Buddhism does not suggest this one sidedness of retreat. And in the techniques of Zen and Vipassana, especially in their Western adaptations, a really helpful approach to homeostasis is seen. Perhaps the most useful aspect of the training is in the opening and letting go of the ego, yet learning not to be lost in the forces and images which arise.

A very clear example of this is given in Tibetan Buddhism. Such teachings are very old. In her book Secret Oral Teachings of Tibetan Buddhist Sects, Alexandra David—Neal writes:

Liberation is achieved by the practice of non-activity,

say the Masters of the Secret Teachings.

What is, according to them, non-activity? Let us first of all notice that it has nothing in common with the quietism of certain Christian or oriental mystics. Ought one to believe that it consists in inertia and that the disciples of the Masters who honour it are exhorted to abstain from doing anything whatever? Certainly not. In the first place it is impossible for a living being to do nothing. To exist is, in itself, a kind of activity. The doctrine of non—action does not in any way aim at those actions which are habitual in life such as eating, sleeping, walking, speaking, reading, studying, etc. In contradistinction to the Taoist mystics who, in general, consider that the practice of non—activity requires complete isolation in a hermitage, the Masters of the Secret Teachings, although prone to appreciate the ‘joys of solitude’, do not consider them in any way indispensable. As for the practice of non-activity itself, they judge it as absolutely necessary for the production of the state of deliverance.

What then is this activity from which one ought to abstain? It is the disordered activity of the mind which, unceasingly, devotes itself to the work of a builder erecting ideas, creating an imaginary world in which it shuts itself like a chrysalis in its cocoon.

In the Buddhist meditation called Vipassana, the process of self regulation is allowed to let the flow of consciousness present ones innate images, fears, hopes and imaginings about life and death, and to recognise them for what they are — images, fears, hopes and ideas. In this way the attachment and even pain we experienced in connection with them falls away in some degree. That is liberation.

Buddhism and the Way of Liberation

A very clear example of this is given in Tibetan Buddhism. Such teachings are very old. In her book Secret Oral Teachings of Tibetan Buddhist Sects, Alexandra David—Neal writes:

Liberation is achieved by the practice of non-activity,

say the Masters of the Secret Teachings.

Aurobindo and Integral Yoga

During the early part of this century another great figure, in a field other than psychology, was exploring what resulted from consciousness opening to the self-regulating ‘evolutionary energy’. Writing and working from the dual standpoint of an Eastern yogi and Western thinker Aurobindo explains what he found in forty years of investigating the depths and heights of inner experience. In some approaches to homeostasis such as Pentecostalism, there is an emphasis on the transcendental, the higher potential of human nature. In other approaches the emphasis is on tile cleansing or catharsis of past experience, pain and conditioning. Aurobindo finds a balance between these two which well suits the name of Integral Yoga which lie gave to his system. In the book The Adventure of Consciousness, Satprem describes Aurobindo’s statement of how the ‘evolutionary force’ acts on one who opens to it. “We feel around the head” he says, “and more particularly around the nape of the neck, an unusual pressure which may give the sensation of a false headache. At the beginning we can scarcely endure it for long and shake it off. Gradually this pressure takes a more distinct form and we feel a veritable current which descends — a current of force not like an unpleasant electric current but rather like a fluid mass.”

To allow this spontaneously active force to work in us, Aurobindo tells us we must be quiet and open our restless mind or consciousness. In Aurobindo’s own words, “When the Peace is established, this higher or Divine Force from above can descend and work in us. It descends usually first into the head and liberates inner mind centres, then into the heart centre, then into the navel and other vital centres, them into the sacral region and below. It works at the same time for perfection as well as liberation. It takes up the whole nature part by part and deals with it, rejecting what has to be rejected, sublimating what has to be sublimated, creating what has to be created. It integrates, harmonizes, establishes a new rhythm in the nature.

. · The surest way toward this integral fulfillment is to find the Master of the Secret who dwells within us, open ourselves constantly to the Divine Power which is also the Divine Wisdom and Love, and trust it to effect the conversion. But it is difficult for the egoistic consciousness to do this at all at the beginning. And, if done at all, it is still difficult to do it perfectly and in every strand of our nature. It is difficult at first because of our egoistic habits of thought, of sensation, of feelings blocking up the avenues by which we arrive at the perception that is needed. It is difficult afterwards because the faith, the surrender, the courage requisite in this path are not easy to the ego clouded soul. The divine working is not the working the egoistic mind desires or approves, for it uses error to arrive at truth, suffering in order to arrive at perfection. The ego cannot see where it is being led; it revolts against the leading, loses confidence, loses courage. These failings would not matter; for the Divine Guide within is not offended by our revolt, riot discouraged by our want of faith or repelled by our weakness; it has the entire love of the mother and the entire patience of the teacher. But by withdrawing our assent from the guidance we lose the consciousness, though hot all the actuality of its benefit.

Your Inner Child

One of the tragedies of adult life is that you may have forgotten your childhood. You may still remember events and dates, but the intensity of feelings, the real insight into the world of childhood may be lost.

Can you remember how it was to live before time began for instance? The sense of time is learned. Prior to being able to speak, and previous to your concept of time, you lived in eternity. Days lasted forever. A week was infinite in its multitude of impressions and experience.

Can you remember your first love affair – with your mother? Being your first, its wonder or devastation has coloured all your love since. But if you can’t remember then you are living out the wonder or pain without awareness.

Discovering your internal baby and child is to find some of the great secrets of your life. Many of the decisions you make about work or sexual partners have their roots there. What may appear as destiny often starts from deeply felt experiences in your childhood. Who you consider yourself to be is not an immutable reality. Your genetic inheritance gave you a foundation, but what was built upon that was due to the events of your childhood. If you are not entirely satisfied with the results, a lot of DIY alterations can take place.

1 – You are going back along the time track of your life. Leaving behind the many things you have collected as you moved into the adult years – bank accounts, bills, mortgage, work, family responsibilities, dependents, the car, the musts and shoulds and should nots.

2 – Although you can target a particular time of your childhood simply by thinking about it for a few moments, leave it open. Stand in your space, with or without music, and allow

whatever movements and emotions arise. Do not be in a hurry. Sometimes it takes quite a time to gradually build the inner change necessary to recreate childhood feeling states. Remember that many years of childhood were without refined language. This means the experiences of that period were wholly physical sensation, movement and emotions. That is not to say you didn’t have a mind, but its perceptions were very immediate and not filtered through words and past associations. Give yourself time and opportunity to drop the top layers of yourself and your present habits of experiencing the world.

3 – Do not get confused by thinking that you have to act like a child to make this a successful experience. What you are doing is to give yourself time and opportunity to have an inner experience of your child self. So it does not matter that externally you do not act or speak like a child.

4 – The likely response is that you will experience some feelings, some event from childhood, that is important in your life because of its effect. As childhood is such a vulnerable period, to get to free flowing feelings on this Pathway may take time. The clearing of hurt emotions and attitudes might be necessary first. Nevertheless, this is an extremely worthwhile process.

5 – Many of your important habits were formed during your childhood. As an example – if you were an only child and had to spend much time alone, you may have got into the habit of suppressing your desire for company. If this habit persists it becomes felt as normal. In fact it is neither normal or abnormal, it is simply the way you have shaped yourself. In adult life you might therefore find it strange or difficult to be with groups of people. If this becomes a nuisance, and you want to change, it would be helpful to see this character trait as a habit rather than an immutable part of yourself. If you identify with it as yourself, there will be some resistance to change.

6 – It is important to consider what you experience in your childhood Pathway in the light of what habits it has formed. Many habits are very supportive, we might then call them a skill, such as language.

The baby and childhood pathway allows some of the most permanent and importantly positive life changes to occur through clearing the accumulation of emotional debris built up during early growth. Resistance to positive change often has its roots in this area. This is not only because of ‘emotional debris‘ but some of the most durable and defended habits were put into operation or developed in this period of your growth. The reason we generated these habits was nearly always out of necessity at the time. The habits helped us to survive – THEN – but may be self defeating and undermining today. Once their rationale is seen it becomes easier to change these habits.

Part Two – helping and healing the hurt or wounded child

There are many ways in which we might come face to face with our damaged or traumatised inner baby or child. These might include the arising in your daily life of inappropriate responses to situations. In a warm and loving relationship you experience only pain instead of pleasure; you feel terror that your partner will abandon you; you hit out emotionally or even physically at the person who is actually closest to you; you withdraw from the world or lack any motivation to be a part of society or be in contact with others; you feel enormous longing to find love, but it never seems to be there when you relate to someone.

Example: The whole mass of emotions was triggered by not knowing when or if my loved one would come back – as happened in the hospital when I was three. That broke the seal and the rest just flooded out – weeks of it. Eternity of holding on, waiting for mother, terrified to let go because I would be consumed by anxiety and hopelessness. I dreamt of Ben who was an orphan – so represents the deserted feelings. (Ben was an adopted child taken on by D.; R. was his nanny.)

During this period I lost sense of time, and had to put up a poster on the wall on which I marked the days off. I did this to give myself some hope that time was passing, and this terror and torture would eventually end. Also I could not sleep. Sometimes at about 4 AM I would manage to sleep for an hour. Each hour on the hour I would try to phone Australia to talk with R. She was away visiting her brother-in-law, P out in the bush. So it was in fact impossible to reach her.

Those are signs of the undealt with emotions and pains of childhood, but there are many others. But one of the clearest indicators of the hurt baby or child within is from your dreams. Examples of dreams showing the damaged inner baby and child are as follows:

I am with my wife, taking a short cut through hospital grounds, but we are seen and reprimanded. “You must not take short cuts through hospital grounds.” Then I am in a strange old house. Under the floorboards I find many babies. They are abortions from previous girls living there. As I watch, one dried up baby body begins to fill up with blood. I can see its intestines.

A war was on. I was in London and bombs had blasted buildings. A baby had been injured, along with an elderly man with black hair.

I was in a hospital. A nurse passing by looked at my baby son and then suddenly looked again and said, “Did you know there is something wrong with your baby?” I told her I didn’t. She said she would prefer not to tell me, and to ask the sister. I knew this was because what she had seen was a serious illness.

Each of the dreams shows very clearly the image of an injured or sick baby. Two of them also take place in a hospital, linking the baby with the need for healing. In the first dream there is also the reprimand that no short cuts should be taken in the healing process. The second dream indicates real conflict and injury from the bombs, and also brings in the dark haired man – the dreamer’s father had black hair. The last dream again suggests the baby is in a serious condition, but in this dream the dreamer is not himself aware of it and must seek to find out what it is.

To meet these hurts and deal with them as an adult takes persistence, determination and some courage. In general people do not connect their current pains and behaviour with their childhood. Very often it is simply called depression, or the other medical and psychological labels that pathologise the situation. Drug treatment is usually the treatment used. Psychotherapy is another path some people take, those who do not want to cover their pain with drugs, alcohol or the other anodynes used in our culture. But this is only occasionally useful because to face the real pains of childhood takes more that talking over ones feelings with another person. It takes the willingness and ability to let what lies behind the pain and distortions of our present experience to surface. This is not an intellectual verbal process. The baby doesn’t think. Its feelings are not expressed in words. Its experience was one that involved it in total body sensations and passionate and all consuming hungers and emotions.

As I have said elsewhere, we do not understand the experience of swimming by talking about it. We only really understand it and the fears and feelings we might have in relationship with it be getting into the water and moving beyond the shallow water. So it is with the experiences we still hold in us from birth, infancy and childhood. To give an example of what this might be like a quote used in the feature on active imagination will be used again.

As I enter into the dream I connect with the child. She says she has got up from her ‘bed of pain’. I wonder what that means – The Bed of Pain. What does it mean – to me personally whose dream this is – that she was a malformed and tortured child? Without hesitation I begin to feel my connection with another person. I experience that being connected with another person is a fundamental part of life and procreation. If something threatens that connection, then life itself is threatened – the reason being, I am in the womb! To lose my connection threatens my life. But my life is threatened. I am expelled from the womb before my body and soul are mature enough or ready to be separated, ready enough to undertake life disconnected from the placenta. I was actually born two months premature. As I experience this I feel incredibly vulnerable. Each sound, whether a bird singing or a car going by, is a possible threat to my existence. I had been physically and psychically attached to my mother. Now the bond is broken.

I realise as an observer what is being felt, that the broken bond, the feeling of life threatening isolation, enormously increased my sensitivity to threats as a child and as an adult. It set me up for what happened at three when I was placed in a hospital and was deeply traumatised, feeling I had been abandoned. In itself the short absence of my mother was not as potentially traumatising as it turned out to be. But because of the birth experience I was already traumatised regarding abandonment. To be hit by it again increased the volume of it enormously.

Because I was born two months prematurely I wasn’t properly formed, so it was very traumatic to be separated as a baby. There was no intensive care unit in hospitals at the time. So I had to either survive or die, and I felt I was dying. I am trying to heal this huge wound at the moment. I feel the struggle of resisting what has happened to me. I cry out now as the adult with the feelings I am meeting from my baby self, that I don’t want to be born. I am not ready. I feel deeply alone. There is in me a sense that tells me I shouldn’t be alone. It is like something that pushes me to seek not to be alone. I feel lost. I’m not ready for this world. I’m feeling awful. My whole body feels strange and collapsed in some way.

In fact I do feel awful, like I am ill and can barely move, or move only with effort and concentration. I go on to cry out that I have felt awful most of my fucking life. I can see from the feelings I am meeting how my premature birth contributed to my lifelong feelings of being lost and cut off – alone. I have always called it independence, and perhaps seen the positive side of it more than the negative. But it has been a source of restlessness and a spur to seeking a bonding with someone. Of course I want to find the security of the womb. I want to know someone is deeply committed and bonded to me.

I am so alone. Even when someone loves me I can’t feel it. I want to change. I don’t want to keep hurting my wife by living like she isn’t there at an emotional level. But that is the feeling world I have lived in – who is there for me? I was part of something and I lost it. I was part of something that was good, and I lost it. I was a part of a woman and I lost her. I was rejected before I was ready to be independent physically or emotionally. Now I face this struggle just to exist, just to breath, just to be. This feeling of life being a terrible struggle just to keep going has pervaded me all my life. I’ve got to struggle to exist, just to keep alive. Got to struggle just to keep alive! GOT TO STRUGGLE TO EXIST – JUST TO KEEP ALIVE! GOT TO STRUGGLE BECAUSE THERE’S NOTHING THERE. I WANT SOMETHING TO HOLD ONTO. I’VE GOT TO STRUGGLE JUST TO KEEP ALIVE.

I cry like a baby. The question burns in me – Why is life like this? I cry again. Then I realise that at first when I was born I was too small and undeveloped even to be able to cry properly, so I couldn’t let out my misery. It is such a relief to cry now and be understood, to have it known what I felt at that terrible time.

I am aware that my connection with my stream of life has been broken – the umbilical cord. What I realise as the adult watching this, is that because of its proximity to the genitals, there is an unconscious connection made between the genitals and the link I seek to sustain my life. So even as a baby I am reaching for that connection with my genitals. I want to be fed. I attempt to reconnect through my genitals, but the pain of the separation is so acute even when I do try in adulthood, the pain of the separation turns me back. This is the story of the Garden of Eden. I was in the garden and was cast out. Now when I attempt to return, an angel with a burning sword turns me back. Not only was it painful every time I attempted reconnection, but I had the unconscious expectation to be fed, to be nourished. Instead of that every time I had sex I felt cheated, deceived and betrayed. I was not fed, but deeply sucked dry of what small nourishment I had managed to build up. I wasn’t fed, it seemed to me I was fed upon by a predator. Each sexual act was a betrayal, a predation, and a torturous pain. Yet I had to find my way to the garden again, because there lay the secret of my genesis and myself. So I would return, to be wounded once more. Thus the imagery of the spider who will kill. It is even painful to look back on those years of misery now. Why is life so painful?

It has to be said that paradoxically the meeting of ones infant self is not in itself painful. It is deeply emotional and powerfully active. Why many people fail to connect with what they carry within them of their infant and child is because they avoid, or do not know how, to feel deeply, to let their body express and discharge that degree of emotion, bodily movement and excitation.

Juliana Brown and Richard Mowbray, in their paper on Primal Integration describe this ‘regression’ as follows:

The ‘regression’ that we facilitate in Primal Integration is not about going back in time, but rather about becoming aware of your existing state of regression – about realising that parts of you have not grown up and moved forward into the present. In our view, most people are living in two time-scales simultaneously – past and present. Part of them will be living in the here and now. Other parts of them will be reacting to present events as though they were still ‘back then’, thereby confusing aspects of the present with the past.

Uncovering the ‘past’ that is still with you here in the ‘present’ takes real work and needs dedication over a fairly long period of time. It is a work that is desperately needed in the world and in society. Very few people, even those in high positions of government or society, have actually grown up in the full sense. They are still operating in the world either from promptings and fears from their earliest babyhood, or from social conditioning that is out of date and needs upgrading.

There are two major ways of dealing with our past negative heritage. The one most used is to go to a professional who is trained in helping you to access and release these packets of high emotion and energy, thereby experiencing them, understanding them and integrating them into your life of today. To find therapists who work in that way you could try looking up primal integration or holotropic breathwork on the internet. To follow through on that direction you will need to invest a fair amount of time and money in the work, and a lot of your own motivation.

Another direction, one the author took and knows well, is that of self help. In some exceptional circumstances this can be undertaken alone, but usually needs at least one other person to be a co-worker with. Better still it is enormously helpful to gather several people to work as a group.

Fundamental to this approach is the understanding that there is innate in you the process that is already trying to lead toward the experiences that can release the past you are still carrying. It is constantly trying to bring old hurts and injuries to awareness, but we block its action. It is important to understand this, and a description of this process and the basics of working with it can be found at The Fundamental Process. Perhaps the simplest and gentlest way of finding transformation and growth is through exploring your dreams. This should not be simply talking about your dreams, but actually exploring them and being ready to feel the emotions and past impressions involved in them. A method to do this is described under peer dream work.

If you had all the patience of a wonderful student, then the very best approach to meeting the depths and heights of your inner life would be as follows. These steps should not be undertaken all at once, but one at a time.

Learn to recognise that whatever you think is never comprehensive, and so can never ever be true in the fullest sense. When you think about anything you are only considering a tiny fragment of information. Only if you could hold all of the world’s knowledge, insight into all of the universe, might you arrive at any degree of truth. Therefore taking seriously your thoughts about success or failure, or who and what you are is ridiculous. Thinking is simply a handy tool helping us to move around in and deal with the tiny world of social and personal experience we live in.
Learn to recognise emotions as survival responses developed over millions of years. They are signals that need to be checked out, not absolute signals of truth. An emotion is not YOU. It is something YOU experience that in a few moments can swing into something quite different. Some feelings or emotions stay for long periods of time, but that is only because something is stuck inside us – such as an early childhood painful event. Depression is the shadows cast by lumps of past pain still stuck in our being.
Learn to relax. This does not mean learning to take time off from work to have ‘quality time’. It means learning to be aware of your habitual ways of relating to your body, inner feelings and attitudes. Learning to physically tense your body and then drop the tension is just a first step. Such relaxing of surface tension is just that – surface relaxation. It doesn’t touch the unconscious tensions. But it is a step on the way. Part of the deeper stages of relaxation require you to learn how to quieten your inner life, perhaps with breath control. See: The Slow Breath.
Become aware of how you are editing what you let yourself think, feel or do. Learn to let things happen. This doesn’t mean inflicting yourself on other people, but it does mean acknowledging what is in you, light and dark.
Observe what your response to deep emotions is. Are you suppressing any real depth of feelings? Can you allow yourself to sob uncontrollably or to laugh out loud and jump up and down like a child? If not what do you use to control yourself.
Develop a time and place where you are completely free to allow the irrational side of your nature. This is a sacred temple in which you can heal and grow. See: Life Stream.

A description of what it is like to meet your child in adulthood has already been given above, but that was a meeting with the experience of a premature birth. Meeting the child can be different in many way. Here is a description from a man in his early forties.

I married again when I was 41. Up until then I had never been in love, although I had been previously married and fathered children. In fact I had not been capable of love in the usually described way of really connecting with my partner. But I had been using my dreams to work through my childhood miseries and had begun to undo something that had caused me to cut off all emotional ties with my mother when I was about five. This had caused me to lack any growth in my relationship with a woman. I remained at the age of five emotionally. So when I did fall in love I did so with the emotional maturity of a five year old.

Fortunately I had some insight into what was happening as I experienced all the drama of feelings a child feels in relationship with its mother. I met intense feelings that drove me to want to be near my wife all the time. I would follow her from room to room like a dog for fear of losing her – not only had I cut off from my mother, but she had sowed the seed of terror that she would abandon me. Also for the first time in my life I felt intense jealousy and would turn up unexpectedly at the house to see if my new wife was with another man. The tricks of survival I had learned in childhood also surfaced. The main one was to shut down emotionally and distance myself if there were any threat to the relationship. And so with all of these and other powerful feelings I had to learn to recognise them as childhood feelings that were not good to have in my adult relationship and encourage the growing part of me to move beyond them. Of course that meant moving into and through emotional adolescence. Believe me, none of it was easy on my wife. Our poor partner gets hit by all the miseries of childhood we meet in our growth. See Life’s Little Secrets

The God Archetype

This archetype arises out of the paradox of human existence. If an ancient human being saw a modern adult step out of a helicopter, talk to distant people using a small decorated ‘stone’ (mobile phone) they held in their hand, and produce images immediately using a digital camera or video, they would believe the person to be a god. The paradox is that what the ancient man or woman saw as a god is a fulfillment or projection of their own potential. The ancient human is the forebear of the modern person. They had the potential in them to become and develop what we are and have.

A fundamental process of what we call the mind or consciousness is to give form or words to abstract experiences or things sensed. When we dream this becomes amazingly obvious. The emotions, conflicts, sexual urges we feel are put into imagery and drama in our dreams. If we strip away the images we are left with raw feelings and urges. The dream imagery makes it all so much more memorable and clear. If we experience fear while we sleep that might be memorable. But if we dream of being chased by a two headed monster like a snake, that imagery sticks with our waking awareness with greater intensity.

The point being made is that even the most subtle things we sense ‘out of the corner of our eye’ as it were, can be dramatically represented in imagery either while awake or asleep. While awake such realisations are called visions, but are expressions of the same process. See: hallucinations and hallucinogens.

The development of self awareness presented the human animal with an enormous and perhaps traumatic change. Prior to having any sense of being a person, the early human being was constantly directed either by instincts or learned behaviour common to the group. They didn’t have to make decisions or think about what to do. Millions of years of experience had etched instinctive responses into them. Also, tens of thousands, or even millions of years of collective learned behaviour was passed on in the same way mammals pass on skills to their young. As an example of how this works, a wonderful study of the African wild dogs showed the its power. The dogs had been wiped out in a large area and attempts were being made to reintroduce them. A documentary film showed two packs of dogs. The one pack were established, and had arisen from an unbroken line of descent and social relationship for thousands of years. The second pack had been reared in captivity and released in the wild with some support. The descended pack showed enormous social skills in acknowledging and supporting each other’s rank, in working together to hunt, in feeding the pups and mutually caring for them, and in sharing food with those who stayed to care for the young.

The released pack didn’t have any of those skills. The information was not being passed on to them from a previous generation. They couldn’t work together. They fought amongst themselves instead of respecting leadership. They didn’t share food but fought over it. They all quickly died. The unspoken wisdom of generations had not been passed to them. They had no survival skills. Perhaps this reminds us of some people in our society today, and points to possible causes.

The arising of self awareness was like a massive new input impinging on this ready made wisdom early human beings lived with. When the split came and the new self awareness became more dominant there was a great sense of loss, and what had been an everyday part of them was now felt as distant or exterior to them. Because the instinctive or unconscious survival wisdom had been everything to them, their dream process of giving form to such an intangible, showed it as a great parental figure. It was the great Mother/Father out of which they had emerged. In fact becoming self aware was akin to being born, to emerging from an immense and ancient womb. This is clearly stated in story form in Genesis. It says, ‘And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig-leaves together, and made themselves aprons. And they heard the voice of Jehovah God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Jehovah God amongst the trees of the garden. And Jehovah God called unto the man, and said unto him, Where art thou’ And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’

If we take Jehovah here to mean the enormous ocean of mind, instincts and behaviour early humans were guided by, and the awakening to the arising of self awareness, then the fear is that of being swallowed up, of losing their new and vulnerable identity in that ocean of creative life. They were truly naked of the instinctive knowledge that had previously guided and supported.

Ancient races such as the Kalahari Bushmen in fact say their great fear is the loss of soul ‘ identity’ by being swallowed up again in unconsciousness. i.e. in loss of self awareness.Obviously this is conjecture, but it is conjecture based on anthropological studies, on the exploration of the deep unconscious in modern people, and in recovered experience from depth psychology.

The outcome in ancient and modern humans is that there is still a sense, an ‘out of the corner of the eye’ awareness of the enormous depths of mind within us shading right back to preconsciousness and even cellular life within. We sense this as the creative matrix out of which we have arisen. We sense it as having enormous potential. After all, if we have evolved from pre-conscious human animals, and they from ape like forms, a human could emerge from us that would be as god like to us as we would appear to an ancient predecessor. Therefore the god archetype is an expression of what we sense as our own potential and of the enormity of life and cosmic processes out of which we have existence.

The archetype itself, or what lies behind it, is beyond any one definition. But being what we are, and considering that we constantly try to define and give substance to such important processes, past cultures have given many forms and attributes to their expression of god or God. They have even at times defined aspects of what they experienced as the underlying forces of life and personal awareness, and we therefore have the gods and goddesses.

This archetype has a very powerful influence in everybody’s life simply because it is about our own fundamental potential and origins. How you relate to it shows the level of connection or conflict you have with your own resources and origins. It also shows how far you have come in your mature understanding of how your inner life functions. In some ways the difficulties and stages we go through in our relationship with our mother and father are similar to the acceptance, rejection, killing of, or deep dependence we have in relationship with what is called God. We may of course relate to this archetypal power in us like a child frightened of a parent; like an obedient child who wants to conform; like a rebellious child who seeks their own independence; like an angry or confused person who denies any link with their origins; like someone who has lost their memory, and so has no recognition of their ancestry; like an adult who has come to terms with their origins and has integrated into their own processes of mind and emotions, the matrix of strengths and weaknesses inherited.

None of us can escape the source of our own existence. There is nothing and nobody who is independent of the universe and its mysterious origins. We can, however, relate to it in many different ways. These ways are depicted in the New Testament as the manner in which people related to Christ. Taking Christ as a symbol of the cosmic web of sentient life, of our own innate potential,, people can love it, wash their hands of it, crucify it, ignore it, be healed by it, lie about it, offer themselves to it, worship it – and so on and on. The stance we take in our relationship with this larger life we are an integral part of, is the basic stuff of how we live, and the quality of our life.

Useful questions are:

Can I recognise that fundamentally my existence depends upon the creative processes of the universe, and that I am at base the potential of life?

How do I relate to that mystery of the divine or wondrous at the core of myself?

Am I taking responsibility for my own potential, or do I project it outwards as a god figure, or deny it all together?

Active Imagination and Dreams

Carl Jung several times described a technique for using imagination that allowed the spontaneous expression of unconscious material. Jung described active imagination as a putting aside of conscious criticism while we allow our irrational to play or fantasy. In relationship to a dream, this technique can be extraordinarily helpful and revealing. A way to learn the technique is to take a dream in which a fairly defined person appears. It can be a child or adult. One then sits in a quiet situation alone or with a sympathetic listener and purposefully creates an internal feeling or attitude which is non critical and meditative. It may help to imagine that you have dropped any critical feelings and are ready to listen with an open heart to a friend. The aim is to allow the friend to express without your intervention or direction. This attitude is applied to yourself. See assisted passage.

Having developed the right attitude, one then holds the dream in mind, imagining oneself back in the feelings and environment of the dream, then watching to see what develops. By doing this one is listening to the unconscious and observing how it intervenes and communicates with consciousness by introducing changes, imagery and feelings into our contemplation of the dream. You do not need to develop clear images unless these come easily. Just holding the idea of the dream is often sufficient. It is important however to realise that the unconscious expresses not only through the imagery such as appears in dreams, but particularly through slight and unbidden or spontaneous shifts in feeling states, in body sensations, in movements and fantasy.

Writing about this technique of allowing the unconscious to express through fantasy – Jung says in his psychological commentary on the book Secret of The Golden Flower by Richard Wilhelm (Routledge and Kegan Paul):

‘Nothing could be simpler than this, and yet right here the difficulties begin. Apparently no fantasy fragment is at hand – yes there is one, but it is too stupid! Thousands of good excuses are brought against it: one cannot concentrate on it; it is too boring; what could come of it? It is ‘nothing but’, etc. The conscious raises prolific objections. In fact, it often seems bent on blotting out the spontaneous fantasy activity despite the intention, nay, the firm determination of the individual, to allow the psychic processes to go forward without intervention. In many cases there exists a veritable spasm of the conscious.

‘If one is successful in overcoming the initial difficulties, criticism is likely to start afterwards and attempt to interpret the fantasy, to classify, to aestheticise, or to depreciate it. The temptation to do this is almost irresistible. After a complete and faithful observation, free rein can be given to the impatience of the conscious; in fact it must be given, else obstructing resistances develop. But each time the fantasy material is to be produced, the activity of the conscious must be put aside.

‘In most cases the results of these efforts are not very encouraging at first. Moreover, the way of getting at the fantasies is individually different… oftentimes the hands alone can fantasy; they model or draw figures that are quite foreign to the conscious.

‘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. In this way, a new attitude is created, an attitude which accepts the irrational and the unbelievable, simply because it is what is happening. The attitude would be poison for a person who has already been overwhelmed by things that just happen, but it is of the highest value for one who, with an exclusively conscious critique, chooses from the things that happen only those appropriate to his consciousness, and thus gets gradually drawn away from the stream of life into a stagnant backwater.’

It works best if you allow yourself to say, feel or move in any way that occurs, with the feeling that you can criticise later – but at the moment you are allowing yourself complete freedom.

The following example may help to illustrate this.

A few nights ago I dreamt I was with a group of people walking in a very dry, desert type countryside. It was like I imagine Egypt to be – or as I saw Israel. We were walking somewhere quite purposefully, but I was not aware of where the goal was. I was caring for a younger man who was not mentally alert, or at least appeared to need looking after. Our path took us into a rock tunnel cut into a huge rocky hill. The tunnel was large and with a well worn path, and with a high enough ceiling for us to easily stand. It was dry and comfortable. Well within the tunnel we entered a huge cavern which spread for over a hundred yards to our left. The others in the group were ahead of us and out of sight, but the young man and I stood and looked at the cavern which was not at all dark or dismal. What was so remarkable was that on the floor of the cave, entirely covering it, were thousands of shoes. I knew that they had been left by a race or tribe of people who had been on a great exodus. They had left their homeland and travelled through this tunnel. The shoes had been left as a sign of the great journey, the great change they had undergone – as if they had left all behind. I felt it had happened long ago. Rick A.

While awake Rick sat comfortably and imagined himself in the dream again, particularly in the cave. As he did this and observed what occurred spontaneously in his fantasy and feelings, this is what he experienced:

‘I worked a couple of times on the ‘desert/shoes and cave’ dream with H and K listening and helping me. While I stood in the desert I felt a warm relaxing environment – in looking at my life from this viewpoint I see I am relaxing, feeling I no longer need to restrict myself as much as I did in a ‘cold’ climate. I felt it related to a dream I had a long time ago in which I decided I was going to move to a warmer climate – i.e. not work stressfully until I die as my father did. Not be trapped by anxieties as he was.

I didn’t have clear responses about the rock, but I had a lot of feelings emerge in connection with the shoes, and a lot of imagery and memories. The shoes connected with my attempts to cling to roles in recent years – my difficulty in just BEING instead of trying to be ‘something’. If I look at my life from my old viewpoint, then I see I have been out of work. But despite this I have been very busy doing radio shows etc. to promote something I produced. I am not earning money in a set way though – there is no ‘hours pay for an hour’s work’. It is a different way of life, one in which I am occasionally earning money, but in between I must trust in the events of life as they come.

Here is what I said verbatim – I am seeing how some people live, and more than anything else what has impressed me – something I no longer doubt – is that people live in a mental climate or mental world, which is invisible, intangible and often not recognised. It is can be equally as imprisoning as living on Devils Island, or living back in the past like a black slave. It is just as real, just as awful as that, even though we can’t see it, yet there is evidence of it all around us. There is evidence in the lives of tens of thousands, of millions of human beings. They are trapped in this world of fears and darkness.

I have seen a most wonderful possibility. It is not mystical or strange. It is not weird or occult, or an absurd ideal one strives for. It is a very real possibility. I know because I have lived in the dungeon. I have been imprisoned and have seen others living in the prison. But now I have a taste of freedom. It is not the freedom based on having enough money, or living in the right country. It is freedom within myself. Therefore it cannot be stolen. It cannot be taken away by circumstances or a relationship. It is not that other people do not matter, but one is not tied because of them. Of course, one can destroy it oneself, or lose it by moving again along old pathways of thought and belief, or mistrust. All this I connect with the moving from one place to another, and the going through the tunnel.

Then, when I looked at those shoes I know something wonderful happened – something big – something that moved a lot of people.

At this point I have a spontaneous fantasy of killing, or sacrificing the young man who is with me. Although I deeply experienced this in the fantasy, yet I also found it difficult. It leads me to see there is something in connection with the cave I do not want to let go of, something I do not want to leave behind. I don’t want to look at this tomb thing. There is something I don’t want to see. I feel it is that I betrayed this young man – brought him here as a sacrifice. He put his trust in me and I betrayed him. As I say this I realise these were feelings I had when I left my children in the divorce. I felt I had sacrificed them to my needs. They put their trust in me and I betrayed their trust. And because in the dream the cave is a place of leaving behind something from ones past way of life, then what I need to leave behind is this sense of pain about feeling I have betrayed that precious trust.

I am ready to move on. I am ready to make this change. I am ready to let go of the past – I need help to unburden myself of all I have been – like these other people have with their shoes. The past is so powerful though. While we are still living in the old country there is still the sense that we can make reparation. There is still time to change, to make amends, to try to live in the past ways more successfully. One is making reparation by staying. But when one decides to leave – then I am faced by the finality of what I have done, and that it may never be undone.

I have mourned at that grave so long though. I have wept so many tears over it, to remain would be sickness. There are few tears to shed now, they have fallen in the past. There are regrets, but they are regrets that are not binding me or keeping me in the tomb. So in this way it is like the tomb one dies in or is resurrected from. All this I feel in connection with the cave and the enormity of what people have done here by leaving all behind.

So now I have the feeling that although I am ready to move on I am in a state of preparation – getting my bag packed, putting my kit-bag/rucksack on. I have left my shoes in the cave, paid homage at the shrine of the dead or the past. I have what may be an old pattern emerging though. In looking forward to change I keep expecting something amazing to happen. But the change is that I have made up my mind not to go back into the old rigid roles of trying to live in a particular mould – trying to be something in particular – struggle for recognition and making a name for myself ‘Personality’ and failing at it.

At this point I am realising something which I have stood in the middle of but never put together before or clearly recognised. It is that young people are confronting death. It used to be an old persons problem, but now young people are singing about death, they are drawing death in their art, they are frightened of death, they are watching horror films and dramatisations of violent death. I never realised before how much it has become a young persons problem to deal with. I also feel that my sons have confronted it recently. B. has died and come back to life. He literally acted it out in recent years and appears to now be emerging from the tomb. L. has met it in some way I do not understand so clearly.’ Rick.

As can be seen from Rick’s description, the amount of information arising from his active imagination far outstrips the dream itself, and also ties in with his everyday life and relationships. He takes it out of symbolism into direct statement. This is, however, not typical of how many writers present active imagination, and needs some explanation.

In describing active imagination, Robert Van de Castle, in his excellent book Our Dreaming Mind, quotes from Norma Churchill’s experience of using this technique, as follows:-

‘Help me’ I beg the serpent. He rears back, giving me a steely look with his mysterious sky-blue eyes. Then, he swiftly strikes my crippled foot and bites it with his powerful jaws. I nearly faint at the pain of it, and both my feet and legs turn black and rotten. I look at the serpent in astonishment.

One half of me glows with light, the other half is putrid and black with rot. Then in a flash, my legs and feet turn to diamond and light up my forehead.

This is typical of the traditional way of working with or experiencing active imagination, a continuation of dream like imagery, although now clearer and conscious. Often what emerges is very much like a myth or fairy tale, the person using the technique meeting dangers and triumphs as in a fairy story. So in continuing the technique they may even create a sort of personal myth. See The Different Levels of Mind.

One of the early books – The Old Wise Woman by Rix Weaver – describing a person using it, is just like such a personal myth, and is rather like reading a story. This has the function of clarifying and extending the dream and leading sometimes to great creativity in art and perhaps poetry. It also enables the dreamer to work indirectly with important issues in their life via the symbols. Thus the monstrous serpent in Norma Churchill’s early sessions could become something transformative.

For some commentators this is complete and sufficient. Indeed it is a great deal and a wonderfully effective process. From working with the technique over many years however, I believe there are stages beyond the experience of the symbol and personal mythology. If we look in detail at another dream and the work done on it, this may become clearer. I have included this very long and full example as it provides extraordinary insights into the nature of dreams and dreaming, as well as techniques of working and the possible results.

The dream took place in a large very old house or building. Jessica, my step daughter’s daughter was with me, about her present age, or a bit older, ten or twelve perhaps. We were in a very big room that was dark and full of ancient things, objects, maybe furniture. I think it was night time too, as I was holding a very large candlestick with about six or seven candles in it. We were being assaulted by the ‘forces of evil’. These had no particular form, but seemed very real and capable of physical damage, and overall had the stereotyped imagery of gremlins and soul sucking creatures.

I was trying to hold back the attack, Jessica was slightly behind me to my left. I was using the candlestick a bit like a sword, and the light from the candles was important in my defence. At one point I was lighting the candles from another candlestick. But the main defence was my voice. I was singing a powerful rousing song expressing positive life and being. But my voice was difficult to express and faltering. So I started to push the sound out forcefully, shouting out the song. I woke myself – or my wife woke me – because I was shouting loudly the words ‘Higher. Higher’, meaning I must make my voice higher and louder to push back the assault. Leon F.

Leon’s first insights into the dream came about almost immediately. As the dream had woken him, he went to the toilet. Then describes the realisations he reached on getting back into bed.

Back in bed I let myself sink back into the mood of the dream to recapture it. At first I was still lost in the overwhelming feeling of being submerged by the creatures and the ‘evil’. I couldn’t find any sense of strength in myself to ward them off. In the past I have often had a sense of something in myself that can never be harmed by such creatures, but not this time. Then suddenly, as I was wondering where the power of transformation lay, Jessica was older, with sexual characteristics. Through this she related to me differently, causing a wonderful flow of positive feeling energy to move right through me from feet to head. This completely and effortlessly dissolved all the evil. I was then led to understand that the evil was the forces of life in myself, such as the clear flow of sexual response I was feeling in connection with Jessica, that had become dammed, and had stopped flowing. This caused it to turn back upon myself in a negative way. The attempt to stop myself ageing is one of the causes of such evil. I can see where this arises from. In being with Jessica recently I find her direct youthful sexuality delightful. She has no hesitations about expressing not only her affection, but also her love of being able to cling tightly physically, with her legs locked around my waist, obviously with the early stages of her sexual pleasure flowering. Leon F.

Two days later Leon explored the dark haunted room using active imagination. Here is his verbatim commentary.

As the room I feel I have always been here. I have existed for a long, long time. There is a way people have reached me in the past. They have used magic or ritual to get to me to find what treasures I might have. Many were unsuccessful. They were lost. They wandered. I am surrounded by a dark land. I am in a land of darkness. Many have wandered and been lost in the land of darkness. Nevertheless some found their way to me and even then they may not have succeeded in carrying away anything of value. Even if they did nothing is lost, because I am a magic place. I am an ancient and dangerous place. Leon does well to be afraid.

If I explain, if I tell you what I am – I am a palace. I was a wondrous palace. I am only a ruin of what I was. This building. This part of the building wasn’t a ballroom. It wasn’t an eating place. It was a place where certain things happened. It was a place where many people left things. They came here and they gathered and they left. It was a place of exchange. If you could bring something here, then you could take something away. Or you could take something away if you gave something.

There is an old story that has to do with how humans sold their souls. That is a degradation of what I am, what took place here. I am a place of exchange, not a place of selling. You would give something of yourself and gain something.

As myself again I realise this is the story of the sleeping beauty. As I stand in the room and hear its story I realise that I am ancient. In the past I lived in a way that destroyed something that was a treasure. The treasure has been put to sleep. What was once a palace is now a ruins and I am ashamed. I was a prince and now I am like the prodigal son living with the pigs. All my senses tell me of is the life of the body, but what was put to sleep was my life in the spiritual world. So I am facing the dark things I did in the past and finding my way through them. Then my darkness and ruin will be made into light and beauty again. Now suddenly it feels as if something is happening in my forehead, as if my eyes are being transferred up onto my forehead. Or the ability to see is being transferred to my forehead. As if I need to learn to see again.

As can be seen, the mythology and the personal symbolism is very strong. Such spontaneous fantasy in this form is probably an archaic method the psyche uses in attempting to heal itself. This may account for the fact that such stories are found worldwide and have arisen in all ages. Not only are they healing – helping to make whole – individually, but as they may be dealing with distress or conflict that is experienced by many other humans, so the stories may also be healing in a much wider social sense. Thus the stories of religion were told over and over with great effect. Today the use of films may have a similar effect.

The level of symbolism and mythology is one many people tolerate in meeting themselves. To turn the symbols into here and now insight requires another step. Without it the psyche may be finding a level of helpfulness, but there has been no true insight and understanding into the real experiences and situations that lie beneath the dream. Therefore there has been no real integration of unconscious content, and no complete healing.

Leon felt unclear about what had emerged so far. What he had seen was fascinating, promising great wonders in his life, although critical in saying he had lost something of the greatest value. But having waited for such mythological promises in vain, he approached the dream again. Here is a verbatim account of this next approach.

I see that in the dream I am holding a young woman who is potentially a sexual partner, and I am protecting her – my sexual feelings – from anxiety. This leads me on to what is partly fantasy in images and partly speculation. In it I am a young teenage boy at a fair. There is a ghost ride nearby, and I know all the sounds are fake. But I could take a girl in there and go along with it a bit to get close to the girl. So as the teenage boy I am feeling my newly emerged confidence and understanding of the world. But there is another side to it which is the held back feelings that made it difficult to shout in the dream. So I see an element of fear in myself that I have not really acknowledged, so still causes me to lack confidence in some degree. I wonder why I didn’t say all that when I first worked on the dream.

I explained at this point to my wife, that the fantasy at the fairground had in it the sense of not being as good as other blokes. I see this as arising out of the realisation that as a teenager one has attained a new level of experiencing the world. This is partly about the more implicit relationship with the opposite sex, but it is also the development of a much more rational, technical mind. One has understood more thoroughly many of the previously ‘magic’ underlying principles of the modern environment, such as electricity, amplifiers, recorded sound, films, TV, computers etc. As a child there was no conceptual framework on which to hang any idea of how those things functioned. In this sense they were ‘magic’. So my sense of not being as good as other blokes comes from an internal measuring gauge of what others at my age had achieved in the area of my development. This is purely an unconscious thing. It was never something I was aware of at the time, only now as I explore the dream.

Something now happened strongly. I reacted against seeing that my own fantasy had suggested that there was yet more of my past, perhaps a hurt teenager, or a hesitant teenager, still to deal with. I felt like saying, ‘Oh come on Leon, you’re not going to get hung up with yet more childhood pains are you?’

I decided to go on despite my impatience, and was confronted by trying to find out what was the right approach to this teenager. I tried various attitudes – ‘Ah, that’s the mother’ – or ‘Hi, what is it your feeling at the moment?’

Now I am both the questioning adult and the youth. As the youth I express fantasies of the young girl and have strong sexual desire. The imagery quickly goes into plant like symbols of sex. The vagina is seen as something wonderfully attractive to push into. It appears very much like a matted, hairy flower, or something covered in fibres. This is very attractive in a hairy, musky way. It isn’t a hairless young vagina. Rather it is the fully developed sexual organs of a fully grown female/plant that I want to push into and burst open in. But then he/I imagine that if I get near to this wonderful brown hairy vagina a spider comes out.

I paused at this point and thought about the dream, and how I had wondered why, having broken through the fearful images in the past, I had not done so again in this dream. It was also curious that the day before I had brought a spider back from a trip out, and B’s fascination for spiders, and R’s repulsion.

I met the hesitation again about looking at further personal difficulties, but once more decided to take time with listening to and allowing the feelings I was meeting. I realised there was definitely something to deal with. I remembered from the car trip out on Sunday the intense urge I had of looking at almost every female. What struck me at the time was how strong it was, and how some of the women actually looked around questioningly. I felt I was, am, looking for something. I feel that some of the women pick up something of my intensity. I even thought I could get myself into a fight if their man caught me looking like that, but it didn’t put me off at all. There is definitely a connection between this looking and the dream, and of course what I am feeling as a difficulty.

There are important issues here regarding using the technique that Leon is not explaining but are worth clarifying. Twice Leon has met strong feelings that made him want to give up looking at himself in this way and uncovering the insights. He looked at these feelings objectively and decided to continue. One of the reasons much active imagination remains completely at the symbol level is because to go beyond symbols would produce powerful feelings of resistance. These might be felt as fear, as uncomfortable physical sensations such as sickness or headaches. Sometimes in dreams, as in Leon’s, such resistances present themselves as forces of evil, which if the person is frightened of, manage to preserve their hidden treasure or territory. The castle, full of the past, is thus kept inviolate. Most frequently however, resistances are felt as powerful and difficult feelings such as tremendous unease or emotional pain. As we have a natural tendency to avoid anything painful or unpleasant – as we do when we automatically pull our hand back from something hot – our painful or uncomfortable and maybe self critical past is kept unconscious, or else only met in a symbolical or intellectual way. See: Fourth example in car for illustration of resistance felt physically.

Also Leon has built into his everyday life the ability to observe his own behaviour in a questioning way. He really does want to find out why he feels and behaves in the way he does. So he doesn’t explain away his intense interest for women on his trip out. Rather he looks at it and wonders what it means, what it connects with. So this detective like attitude and the gradual putting together of clues through observation is important. But so is the desire to break through the symbols. In terms of the story of the Sleeping Beauty, Leon has taken on the role of the daring prince who cuts through the dangerous briars that so many others have been lost, torn, and died in. Only the daring and strong can get through. In a sense this is a part of the way the psyche manages to regulate itself. Unless consciousness, the daring hero or heroine, has the strength to meet itself more directly, the person cannot get through the defences, the resistances.

In fact just prior to exploring the dream more directly Leon had this following dream, showing graphically the changing relationship with fear. As can be seen, it illustrates not only his traditional fears of the unconscious, which he now identifies with as his own and therefore not as something attacking him externally, but his new rational and investigative observations are shown as the modern group.

I was a vampire or werewolf – actually the word lycanthrope was one I was using in the dream – and I was also a group of people who were going to catch or deal with this werewolf. As the werewolf I was very traditional and bent on bringing gloom and terror into people’s lives, injecting them with my ‘venom’. But as the group of people I was completely opposite, very modern and technological. We had no fear of the ‘lycanthrope’ at all. We surrounded it and despite it trying to do its evil thing with us, we paralysed it with electronic gadgets that affected its nervous system. We weren’t bent on destroying it, just catching it.

Now back to being the werewolf. When these people didn’t flee in terror at my evil posturing and snarling I was really upset. I wept as I recalled my thousand years of creating havoc in communities and in the lives of individuals. My tears were because it was sad to see the passing of such wonderful superstition and its attendant fears and terrors. I had loved the dark ages. I guess I was/am a traditionalist.

As the group of people we wanted to use the ‘venom’ of the lycanthrope. It was as if it had some genetic effect upon people. So we injected some of it into adults and children. The result of this was mostly seen in children in the dream. Small children were now safe to allow to roam the streets of violent cities at night – after all, who is going to attack a vampire or werewolf, even if it’s a nipper? So the one-sidedness of the werewolf was now balanced by human qualities, and vice versa.

In a humorous way the dream gives a graphic picture of Leon’s changing relationship with his own unconscious. The last part about the children being injected is very important in that it suggests the vulnerable aspects of Leon’s inner life are now strong enough to go into the dark without being hurt. So Leon is ready to expose vulnerable parts of himself that before might well have been unready to be revealed. To continue with his narrative of exploration:

I realise there is something I am looking for, and I don’t find it in my wife, or at least I don’t sense it in her. It is a frightening thing and partly exciting. This leads me on to fantasising a struggle with a young woman. It is about wanting to have sex, but seems to be some sort of power struggle. The image was of a smart very confident and aggressive young woman. She was attractive and attracted, but her approach was one of attack, so to have a relationship I needed to fight her. What I appear to be facing is that I have the sex drive, but what I am facing is a monster. In fact I had the image of a huge spider that could come out from hiding and drag me helpless into its lair, its many eyes shining. I’m afraid.

It’s not that my sex drive abates, but within this fantasy you have to time it just right. One must wait for the ‘beast’ to become passive then dash in and plunge into the wonderful hairy cavity. Otherwise the ‘beast’ will rip you apart. It is exactly like the horror films one sees of the monster that drags men or women back to its lair. It is actually all about my fear based on past pain.

Leon is now facing his fear and is partly recognising this has to do with childhood, and certainly connected with his relationship with women/his mother. But as can be seen, although the feelings are strong and real, it is still couched in powerful symbols. He presses on and his fear switches to aggression. This is an incredibly important swing. Unless the aggression emerges the fear often remains a paralysing force, and the person remains in symbols. In a real sense, the fear hides the aggression. When the aggression is released the person can move into the next level of experience.

The me who is watching this doesn’t feel frightened, but I do feel ready to be aggressive. I feel like saying, ‘I’ve got the measure of you, you bitch. I’ll kick you in the cunt if you get in my way. Fucking bitches like you, I know what you want. You’re like the walking fucking dead’. But as this anger emerges I asked myself here what the women want.

The fantasy becomes myself walking along a street, the hard looking confident women are there laughing and calling remarks – ‘Come on big boy, I know what you want. Here it is between my legs. You want it, come and get it. – No not you, you little nipper, get out the way.’

I sense there are two parts to me. There is the part that laughs at this, and might even reply – ‘What you? I could fuck you and ten like you.’ But there is also the anxious part, the little nipper, who isn’t even recognised as a man.

The confident part recognises that all the talk is bravado and sex play talk, and could walk up and say, ‘Come on then, you and me, here, get your knickers off.’ But I think back to the first eager woman I met when I was seventeen. More or less she said, ‘Come on, let’s do it!’ She was a beauty but I ran a mile. I was so scared I never went back to where I met her, and that was the anxious part of me expressing. So that is the type of fear I am facing. I don’t seem to be facing that fear much now, but there is still something in that area bothering me or else I wouldn’t have had these fantasies.

The two aspects of Leon’s experience are highlighted in this part. He is coolly observing and ‘catching himself at’ whatever he is feeling and fantasising. But at the same time he is allowing and not interfering with very deeply felt fantasy expressive of behaviour he would not allow in his everyday waking life. This, and having allowed the aggression, produces yet another change. As he proceeds suddenly the symbolism and fantasy stop, and he drops into what he is sure is a direct regression, an experience of things that happened to him in his infancy.

I went into the feeling of trying to help the teenage part of me that was still back there in that fear. In my development I seem to have gone around a problem in some way, but I need to go back and deal with this part.

Now I feel I have let myself slip right into an experience of the biological sources of fear. I see that struggling for ones life is one of the fundamental sources of fear. In looking at this I feel I am not struggling for my life though. I don’t say this as a positive reaction, but as an assessment of how I actually feel. So I wonder what is going on. Maybe I struggled for life some time as an infant, but I don’t feel locked into that at the moment.

Suddenly I regressed to being a young child and started crying about the dark. I didn’t like the dark. When asked about my fear of the dark the fearful part of me was gradually able to formulate the fear or feelings into words. This was difficult though as I so completely felt the feelings of childhood, and had no words for what I was experiencing – ‘I just don’t see why I should have to sleep alone. I don’t like being alone. I don’t like being in the dark alone. Why do I have to be in the dark alone? Why? I don’t want to be in the dark alone’

I had the memory at this point of my parents sleeping together at the other end of the house, leaving me feeling distant and isolated. Gradually as the involvement with the young me deepened I saw how I dealt with this fear. I lived in my mind. By focusing on a point inside my head and keeping it blank, I could let an image of a moving pattern of coloured light occur. I said, ‘I’ve got a light inside me. If you’ve got a light inside you then the darkness isn’t so bad. It’s colours and patterns. Now I’m not so afraid.’ That was an incredible statement as so much of my life has been given to living in my mind.

I’m not sure if all babies feel like this, but at the moment I feel like a cluster of cells. As such I am very open to attack by other cells or things like bacteria or viruses. Not that I have a name for such things. I feel almost like some living creature in the garden, sensing it could be attacked by things and feeling anxious. I am aware of all the noises – of birds and people – around me, and how many things could attack me. So I am very vulnerable. Things could eat me.

Suddenly this went on to a strong feeling of not wanting my mother near me. I feel she tried to kill me. ‘Don’t touch me. I am DANGEROUS!’

If you are very vulnerable, one of the great defences is to make creatures feel you are dangerous – so I am being very dangerous. I am a little curled up ball, but I am trying to give off feelings of being very dangerous.

Once more I met the part of me that is saying – ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, not more bloody crap from childhood to deal with!’

My response is – ‘I’m sorry but there is more. Here I am, sorry again. I’m fucking sorry for my life again. – Anyway, I’m not sorry about you little baby. I’m here to listen to you and to love you.’

As the baby – ‘I don’t want anybody near me. I’m dangerous. Keep away.’

How old are you, little dangerous being?

‘I’m three. I’m only little. But I’m dangerous. I will KILL YOU if you get near me. I’ll bite you or something.’

Well, little dangerous three year old being, I think that you are very lonely. I don’t want to hurt you. It’s okay if you come near me, but I am not going to make a move toward you. So there is no need to be frightened. But you can come to me if you want to, and you can go away if you want to. I am here and I love you. When you are ready you can come if you want to.

‘If I am alone who is going to look after me. If I’m dangerous I keep people away. I’ve got to wait until my mother comes back. I’ve got to survive until she comes back. I don’t think she will ever come back. I don’t think she ever really wanted me. She didn’t come back.’

Your mother actually came back physically. So I am wondering why you are feeling she never came back. She says she was deeply worried about you. Why do you feel she didn’t come back?

‘If she had loved me she would never have let me be alone for so long. How could anybody leave me for that long? She never ever came back after that. (referring to being left in a hospital when three). She is dangerous. She might do it again. I don’t want her near me. I want my real mother. That’s not this woman who says she is my mother. I want my real mother. I waited and waited for my mother. Every woman I look at to see if it’s my mother. Is that my mother? Is that my mother? Perhaps that’s my mother?’

In what followed Leon gradually developed a closer relationship with this vulnerable young part of himself that had been imprisoned in the dark dungeon of childhood pain for several decades. The child gradually accepted Leon as someone who loved him, and was willing to leave his defences and his prison. From these insights Leon realised that if his REAL mother ever came along – i.e. a woman who showed him love – he would not dare to actually allow himself to bond to her. In his mind his natural mother was not his REAL mother because there was no bonding. But if his REAL mother came along, that is, a woman showing him warm love, he knew his natural mother would never let his real mother take him away. So he lived his life in the torment of looking for love but never allowing real bonding, even in his marriage.

There is a point in the experience where Leon skipped past something that only later was realised to be of extreme importance. It is where he says, ‘I’m not sure if all babies feel like this, but at the moment I feel like a cluster of cells.’ Later he describes this further by saying, ‘If you are very vulnerable, one of the great defences is to make creatures feel you are dangerous – so I am being very dangerous. I am a little curled up ball, but I am trying to give off feelings of being very dangerous.’ In fact Leon still hasn’t got to the source of his fear shown in the dream as the forces of evil in the ancient building. If he had stayed with symbols he would not have got as far as he has, but now another step is necessary. He needs to go once more into his unconscious to see whether his young self is in fact rescued. He realised this need when he had the following dream.

I was in a hospital ward with two of my family. One was a child, probably male, about eleven or twelve years old. The other was possibly a woman, adult. A male doctor was examining the child. There was no sense of disaster or anxiety. The doctor then stood up and took off his white gown. This seemed natural and necessary in the dream, as he had changed position. So he was naked, revealing that his body was not a normal shape. I had the impression this was a situation he had been born with. He was quite short, almost an ovoid shape, with a bull neck and round head, but flatter from front to back. I felt a sense of admiration that he had achieved so much with such pronounced physical difficulties.

Suddenly a female nurse who had seen me staring at the doctor’s body, said to me, ‘You’re not good at it are you?’

I didn’t at first understand what she meant, and she said that I wasn’t good at seeing misshaped bodies. I started to explain that it wasn’t difficulty but interest, but she said something else which I had to ask her apologetically to repeat several times. I finally understood her to be asking me a question – ‘Do you want a bad one or a fair one?’ She meant did I want to see someone with a really badly distorted body, or just fairly distorted. I think she herself had some abnormality.

I followed her along the ward, trying to explain that I had seen malformed bodies before, but she took no notice. As we arrived at the end of the ward nearest the door, to my left I saw a pile of washing moving apparently under its own volition, rearranging itself and folding into a neat pile. Then I looked to my right to a line of beds and realised the children in the beds were doing this using some sort of mental control. They were all incredibly malformed. As I approached they giggled and one of them said something like, ‘Well, just lying here gets boring, and it gives us something to do.’ I understood what she said implied that because of being trapped in badly misshaped bodies, the children had gradually played with their mental faculties and broken through the boundaries most people live within. They had thus discovered these wild talents.

I went and sat on the end of one of the beds – the children were all girls – and I felt very warm to them. I put my hand under the bedclothes and held one of the girl’s legs affectionately. They were so eager for any affection one of them managed to squirm from her bed under the covers to the bed I was sitting on, and get into my arms. I held her very lovingly and there was a great feeling of pleasurable warmth between us.

After some time I moved to put her back in her bed. It was difficult because her body was so injured. At one point I fell onto her bed and her head banged mine, revealing awful scars or clefts in the back of her head. I was afraid of hurting her, but it didn’t seem to. But when I put her down she really went for me verbally with abuse. I felt this was some need she had because of her frustration. I let it pass and she stopped and we reaffirmed our relationship as before. That is, a communication that could develop further in the future.

This is a very moving dream mixing both tragedy and a great deal of love. Something that becomes apparent as the dreams are put together with Leon’s comments are that the dreams are very literal in many ways, although this is not seen until they are understood. Leon explored this dream, and as can be seen, by allowing fantasy the unconscious gradually weaves meaningful images with incredible art and dexterity. But this takes time and so patience is very necessary. The description that follows is shortened from over three hours of work.

The fantasy begins by presenting images with an Eastern suggestion. At one point there are images of the fat Buddha of China. I feel that I haven’t understood what is being presented at this point, but realise that something is emerging that I am watching for.

Now the imagery gets more specific and I watch/experience an exquisite Japanese ritual of meeting, touch, massage, that is leading to sex. The beauty of it is in understanding how wise and artistic the whole approach is. I see it is to lead the awareness out of being bound by everyday affairs. It diffuses concentration on particulars of external life and gradually opens the senses to feel and allow pleasure. It helps the mind to drop fixation on externals and allows it to drop boundaries until one senses oneself as in a semi dream state. This allows sex to be not just a particular thing, but something that connects ones body with a huge process which one shares with all nature. Ones partner is not simply a human being, but the very essence of the female principle, merging with the male principle.

I laugh at the way the unconscious presents imagery. It is so wonderfully versatile, sensitive, artistic, crude – a master of imagery. The laughter is because the fantasy now presents me with the view of a hot dog/sausage being fried slowly in a pan on a stall. As I watch I feel/realise that this is the heating up of the male sexual feeling, getting one excited, the preparation for sex seen from a different perspective.

Still another aspect of sexual preparation is now presented in the imagery, once more in an Eastern Japanese environment. I see myself being challenged by another male, and this is to see if I can arouse my aggression to defend myself or meet another male’s aggression. Can I be a fully aroused male? My feelings rise and I experience readiness to be aggressive. It seems to be part of mobilising all the range of feelings to meet the woman.

Now I start to get nearer the woman and have a distinct awareness that the woman should be allowed to be the Queen – at least at such times. When the master of the house goes to the woman for lovemaking, she becomes the queen in her own domain. She is the mistress of her own house. I saw it in the imagery of China, where the master visits one of his concubines, but on entering her house he must allow her dominance. She is allowed to direct the process. I wonder if that is why many women decorate their bedroom in a rather extreme feminine way. Perhaps they are saying the bedroom is their domain. In this domain the man approaches the woman realising he is approaching the power of the woman, which must be respected, even worshiped.

So as I approach the queen, she is hidden behind curtains. From her hidden place she orders her servants to prepare me for her. She says ‘Prepare the lord.’ This means I must be bathed and perhaps anointed, maybe even fussed over by other females to get me into the right feeling state, as already described.

I wonder what all this has to do with the dream and the malformed girls. So I go back to the imagery of the dream to check it out. I meet the young girl and the imagery blends with what I have just been fantasising about the queen. The girl says, ‘You thought I was helpless. The anger she displayed while malformed has become adult power. This assures me the spontaneous fantasy is in connection with the dream in some way I do not understand yet, so I carry on.

I am now getting nearer the woman. I realise the aspect of myself that has been hurt as a child is suspicious. It could easily lead to dominating feelings that this whole preparation is a plot to lead me into a trap. This is not a troubling feeling and I pass on. As I accept the approach of the queen I experience a subtle buzzing which starts in the area of my genitals and fills my whole being. It is not simply a physical sensation in the sense of something vibrating my body, it is also a feeling of pleasure. It produces a sensitivity, a state that responds more excitedly to any external contact. I have a feeling that this is like being the genitalia of a plant or some natural thing in that I have the awareness of how my whole being is connected with what is happening. I am vibrating in connection with the opposite – the female. My pelvis was vibrating and shaking with this. Somehow I feel that my vibrating, my fullness with life in its sexual phase, stimulates the female, and she in her fullness stimulates my aliveness. If she is dead my aliveness gains no response and so doesn’t fully express or realise itself. I go to meet the queen alive in heart, in mind, in genitals. Suddenly the feelings shift.

This wonderful example of the movement of fantasy shows just how the unconscious can apparently plan a course of presentation if we have the patience to follow it and let it gradually unfold its theme. Another point is that none of the fantasy or the mythological symbolism is actually unconnected with what Leon is about to meet.

I connect with the child in the dream. She says she has got up from her ‘bed of pain’. I wonder what that means – The Bed of Pain. What does it mean – to me personally whose dream this is – that she was a tortured child. Without hesitation I begin to feel my connection with another human being. I experience that being connected with another human being is a fundamental part of life and procreation. If something threatens that connection, then it is life threatening – the reason being, I am in the womb! To lose my connection threatens my life. But my life is threatened. I am expelled from the womb prematurely, before my body and soul are mature enough to be ready to be separated, ready enough to undertake life disconnected from the placenta. I was actually born two months early prior to intensive care units. I feel incredibly vulnerable. Each sound, whether a bird singing or a car going by, is a possible threat to my existence. I had been physically and psychically attached to my mother. Now the bond is broken.

I realise as I experience this that the broken bond, the feeling of life threatening isolation, enormously increased my sensitivity to threats as a child and as an adult. It set me up for what happened at three when I was placed in a hospital and was deeply traumatised. In itself the short absence of my mother was not as potentially traumatising as it turned out to be. But because of the birth experience, I was already traumatised regarding abandonment. To be hit by it again increased the volume of it enormously.

I wasn’t properly formed, because I was born two months prematurely, so it was very traumatic to be separated as a baby (this was before babies were taken into intensive care). I am trying to heal this at the moment. I feel the struggle of resisting what has happened to me. I cry out that I don’t want to be born. I am not ready. I feel deeply alone. There is in me a sense that tells me I shouldn’t be alone. It is like something that pushes me to seek not to be separated. I feel lost. I’m not ready for this world. I’m feeling awful. My whole body feels strange and collapsed in some way.

In fact I do feel awful, like I am ill and can barely move, or move only with effort and concentration. I go on to say that I have felt awful most of my fucking life. I can see from the feelings I am meeting how they have contributed to my lifelong feelings of being lost and cut off – alone. I have always called it independence, and perhaps seen the positive side of it more than the negative. But it has been a source of restlessness and a spur to seeking a bonding with someone. Of course I want to find the security of the womb. I want to know someone is deeply committed and bonded to me.

I am so alone. Even when someone loves me I can’t feel it. I want to change. I don’t want to keep hurting my wife by living like she isn’t there at an emotional level. But that is the feeling world I have lived in – who is there for me? I was part of something and I lost it. I was part of something that was good, and I lost it. I was a part of a woman and I lost her. I was rejected. Now I face this struggle just to exist, just to breath, just to be. This feeling of life being a terrible struggle just to keep going has pervaded me all my life. I’ve got to struggle to exist just to keep alive. Got to struggle just to keep alive! GOT TO STRUGGLE TO EXIST – JUST TO KEEP ALIVE! GOT TO STRUGGLE BECAUSE THERE’S NOTHING THERE. I WANT SOMETHING TO HOLD ONTO. I’VE GOT TO STRUGGLE JUST TO KEEP ALIVE.

I cry like a baby. The question burns in me – Why is life like this? I cry again. Then I realise that at first when I was born I was too small and undeveloped even to be able to cry properly, so I couldn’t let out my misery. It is such a relief to cry now and be understood, to have it known what I felt at that terrible time.

I am aware that my connection with my stream of life has been broken – the umbilical cord. What I realise as the adult watching this, is that because of its proximity to the genitals, there is an unconscious connection made between the genitals and the link I seek to sustain my life. So even as a baby I am reaching for that connection with my genitals. I want to be fed. I attempt to reconnect through my genitals, but the pain of the separation is so acute even when I do try in adulthood, the pain of the separation turns me back. This is the story of the Garden Of Eden. I was in the garden and was cast out. Now when I attempt to return, an angel with a burning sword turns me back. Not only was it painful every time I attempted reconnection, but I had the unconscious expectation to be fed, to be nourished. Instead of that every time I had sex I felt cheated, deceived and betrayed. I was not fed, but deeply sucked dry of what small nourishment I had managed to build up. I wasn’t fed, it seemed to me I was fed upon by a predator. Each sexual act was a betrayal, a predation, and a torturous pain. Yet I had to find my way to the garden again, because there lay the secret of my genesis and myself. So I would return, to be wounded once more. Thus the imagery of the spider who will kill. It is even painful to look back on those years of misery now. Why is life so painful?

Seen from this level of experience, that of the uterine baby, God is a projection. You were in connection with a great creator, the mother. You were at-one with the creator, but now you have been cast out of the Garden of Eden, so you have lost your contact with God, the creator in whose bosom you had existed. Perhaps that is why I searched so long for God.

This made me wonder as the adult why I have got so close to many women, but never had sex with them. Why did I get so near and withhold myself? The response from my baby feelings were – ‘I don’t want that. I don’t want to go through that pain again. It’s partly physical pain. I’m not ready to eat. Don’t you understand? I cannot eat. I’m hungry all the time. I couldn’t digest milk properly because I hadn’t properly finished development. So I’m starving. I feel like I’m dying.’

I realised as the observing adult that with today’s technology I would probably have been intravenously fed. But then I was left to survive or die.

In the midst of this feeling of being alone, disconnected, not bonded with my mother, and starving to death, suddenly there was a change. I had the sense of a higher being understanding my condition, trying to help me. This higher being engulfed me in a feeling of love. I felt this right through to the root of my being and immediately responded. The response was several loud cries of what sounded like a baby bawling. But as the baby I knew I was giving a signal that I was bonding. The cries were a bonding signal. I wouldn’t cry until I was in the presence of someone I could bond with. I felt my mother had been frightened of my weakness, had thought I was dying and had not opened her heart to me. So only now did I bond.

I knew someone loved me. I knew they understood what pain was and were not afraid of it or of death. This pierced me right through. It was my grandmother, but to me it felt like some higher being who had reached out of the unknown to help me. (Actually my grandmother had lived with physical injury all her life, and given birth to thirteen children. She died when I was about eighteen months old. She took over my rearing one day when she found I had fallen out of bed and my mother had not known it. I was completely cold, and she never let my mother care for me after that. So I have been told.)

The bonding cry was a signal to say ‘I recognise you! I recognise you! I’m bonding to you. I’m bonding to you! Someone recognises me. I can cry now because I am in the presence of love.’

As the adult watching this I felt there are instinctive things that have been built into us over millions of years. The baby must not cry out while lost or abandoned as that would attract the predators. Only when it is touched by the love of the bonded person can it cry its pain, because then there is no danger. Possibly this became built in because these are the babies who survived.

As the baby I felt in the presence of a superior being who is far beyond me as I am at the moment. This I felt was an instinctive response, so in this sense religion is a genetically coded response pattern to relate the baby firmly to its carer. But the impulse at this level is reality based. It leads to bonding and an attempt to communicate with the higher being. If that is correct, the continued religious impulse into adulthood, might arise out of the unfulfilled instinctive impulses in the baby. Later religion become a more abstract thing in that it looks to an abstract God instead of a real one, like the mother or carer. This might be because within the image is the possibility of getting what you lacked. That is, feelings not found or satisfied in childhood.

I also felt that I needed to be carried near the body for ages. I was out in the world alone too soon and needed a lot more skin contact, to be as near to a womb condition as I could have. But it isn’t just the physical closeness. I needed to feel that someone was emotionally linked with me and in command of the situation so I could relax, otherwise I am on my own trying to survive – can you believe it, a tiny baby feeling it has to survive on its own resources. Of course it does have resources. If it is lucky it might call up the mother feelings in a truly caring person and give the instinctive signals to create bonding. I was one of the lucky ones in that my grandmother did this for me. Where my wife works in a children’s crèche mothers leave their baby all day – unbelievable!?

Leon has connected his dream imagery with his actual history. He has done this not in an intellectual way by reasoning about it, but allowing material that was deeply buried in him – the ancient building – be directly experienced. The malformed doctor and children depicted his own psyche twisted by the pains of a premature birth and the sexual misery this led to later. These were transforming experiences for Leon and led to a slow growth away from past limitations and depression.

As we learn active imagination, it can give us other ways of entering into the life of our dreams and therefore our unconscious. We can imagine ourselves AS the dream character, or even as the objects or animals, and allow ourselves to experience and speak from their viewpoint. We can, in a playful way develop a conversation with the dream person. Ask them what they are doing; why they appear in our dream; what do they represent of oneself? With a little practice the dream characters can come to life for you if you can let yourself play or free-wheel a little. We can enter the dream and carry it forward from where it stopped, imaging what would satisfy us, and thus becoming more active in dealing with our own inner and outer life.

This does not simply relate to the psychological traumas as the example above might suggest. It also leads, once we clear away childhood trauma and pass beyond symbolism, into direct insight into the wider experience of life access to our unconscious opens to us. See: peer dream work; processing dreams; yoga and dreams.

Buddhism and Dreams

The story of Gautama Buddha’s life (567- 487 BC) starts at preconception when his mother, Queen Maya, is said to have dreamt that a six-tusked elephant pierced her side with one of its tusks. This produced an immaculate conception. She understood the dream to mean the resulting child would become a monarch whose domain was the world. The Buddhist scriptures contain mention of five of the Buddha’s dreams, and also include dreams of his father, King Cudhodana, and his wife, Gopa.

The fundamental aim of Buddhism is to find liberation from the things that bind consciousness to illusory concepts of oneself. This goal, called Liberation or Nirvana is sometimes described as the blowing out of the sense of self or ones ego. This should not be thought of as a killing of oneself psychologically, but rather an untangling of our fundamental self from the many influences it is usually enmeshed in. Part of this is the illusory view we have of the world. Buddhism does not see the world itself as an illusion, but the emotions and concepts we hold which provoke our responses to the world are seen as the illusion. Therefore dreams are not thought of as being illusions, but depict the illusions of our everyday experience of life. The very nature of dreams are expressive of the complicated realm of fears, longings and mental concepts we are deeply enmeshed in. Nightmares especially show how deeply involved our waking self is with the internal world of passionate feelings and imagery.

Example: I am trapped in a bricked room with no way out and I shout for somebody to help me. Then either a big bird or a creature with long arms tries to catch me, and I scream. My flat mates used to help me, as I would wake the whole house with my screams. They describe my screams as blood curdling. When I awoke I would be extremely upset, heart pounding and sometimes crying. Twice I woke up sitting on the windowsill trying to open the window, and as I was three floors up you can imagine this was not a very pleasant experience. Another dream I have is that somebody is chasing me or attacking me, and I try to scream but nothing comes out of my mouth. I try and try to scream but nothing happens, when in fact I am actually screaming the house down. Karen S.

Example: I was walking around alone when I found myself in a graveyard which was half under water, like a paddy field. It was dusk and as I looked at the grave stones each one had engraved on it S. J. SMITH – my name – nothing else. The dark water moved slowly between the stones – lapping round them. I woke terrified and couldn’t stretch out my hand to turn the light on. Sarah S.

Example: Three men with clubs were chasing me but never actually caught me as I believe I woke in terror. I was determined to tell myself it was only a dream and the next night as they were chasing me I remembered it was only a dream and lost all fear – stopped running – turned to face them and said ‘This is only a dream, you can’t hurt me,’ and with that as they came closer they faded into nothing and I never saw them again. Mr. S. C.

Example: But then the threatening creature dived into me to devour me from within. Then I felt as if I might deal with the creature was to have the meditative state of holding on to the nothingness that was my centre, and not feeling panic at it’s attacks. In fact apart from the gory imagery, there was nothing to be frightened of, as the creature was only attacking my dream image of myself. As I wasn’t identified with this, it couldn’t hurt me. That was the end of the dream.

But later I explored the dream and it aroused a great anger and hatred for what my mother did did to me, which led to this wild devouring anger inside me. It took a while to release it using what Tony describes as Lifestream, but when it was finished I felt I understood why she did what she did and I felt forgiveness.

The examples show the sense of reality existing for the dreamer at the time of the nightmare. In fact the terror is often only banished slowly by the dreamer realising that it was simply dream images, which are like a magic mirror reflecting the state or condition of our own inner world! The last example in a simplified way shows the liberation that arises by recognising the source of what we had taken to be reality. Buddhism is saying that much of the workings and influence of our inner world goes unrecognised, so we are an unconscious prisoner of our mind and emotions.

In Tibetan Buddhism the way to enlightenment or Nirvana is spoken of as being a path on which one penetrates the illusory nature of waking consciousness, dreams and dreamless sleep. To do this with waking consciousness one must arrive at a state of awakening from ones usual ‘dream’ of, or response to, everyday life. In other words a radical shift occurs in how one sees life. Usually one takes all ones emotions, ones thoughts and physical sensations so personally, and as a sort of reality. Yet no thought is ever the thing it is about. We think of the future sometimes for instance and might go through agonies of worry. But the thoughts are not the events that follow. And when the events themselves arrive, we can respond to them in countless different ways. Therefore to take thoughts and emotions as if they were real in a stable sense is an illusion. Recognising this not as a philosophical concept but as an experience is like waking up. See Dream Yoga.

Another form of awakening occurs within the experience of Liberation itself. It is the awakening from the experience of thought and the mental world. This also pertains to dreams in that within dreams we are totally immersed and identified with this internal mental life. The following example explains this.

Example: For some weeks I had been practising a meditation in which I slowed my breath. Then suddenly one day my thinking stopped. What this felt like is extremely difficult to describe because all of us have lived in this world of thoughts and emotions all our life. We are so immersed we don’t even recognise it – rather like the story of the fish who doesn’t know what you are talking about when you mention water. It only knows it has been in the water if it jumps or is lifted out one day. This is how it was for me. I had never known that ‘I’, ‘me’ could exist without thoughts. The freedom was wonderful, almost as if I had arrived at a different world or universe, and was looking back at what I had thought was the only way of life. To have this alternative gave me a new way of responding to life, because thoughts are so clumsy and can only deal with tiny pieces of experience. So our view of things is limited to what we can think with words. Beyond that are immense spreads of experience not limited to defining concepts. Mary P.

Dreams often express this theme of an awakening, especially in people using some forms of self inquiry. The following dream and description depicts this.

Example: Have just woke from another of my recent unusual dreams. In it I was first in a street being manhandled by a group of rowdy men. I did nothing to defend myself or fight back, and they pushed me onto the ground and poured spirits, alcohol, over me and into my mouth – saw this in the film The Elephant Man.

Then I awoke alone in a room. Or perhaps it is more correct to say I came to, because I felt as if I had been unconscious for some time. I didn’t know the room or where I was. I had the sense it was partly to do with business or a shop. The phone kept ringing and the calls were for me, and I wondered how people knew where I was because I didn’t know myself.

This dream may not seem much in itself, but in linking with some powerful feelings I am meeting in everyday life it becomes part of some inner process working in me. This is because I keep experiencing the feeling of having woken up. The only way to describe this is to say that I honestly thought I was Pete who has been born, grown up, had children. I took all his worries and pains, all the events of his life so seriously. I was totally involved in it all. But now I feel as if I am something that has always lived. It went to sleep and its dream was Pete. While it dreamt of being Pete it was utterly involved in the events of Pete’s – my – life as if they were real. But now I wake up to realise the importance given to them was unreal. This is almost exactly like waking from any deeply experienced dream. On waking the dream is not unreal in that it was an experience, but the attitude toward what happened is quite different. Pete W.

Various forms of meditation or practice are used to aid this process of waking up in life and in dreams, principal among them is Vipassanâ, which aims at constant self-awareness. This form of self witnessing gradually allows one to catch oneself in the act of getting lost in fantasy, in thoughts, in the ever shifting tides of emotion and sexual drive. It is not an act of denial, but an awareness that enables insight into behaviour to arise.

Example: I was in a prison cell with two other men. We ate, slept and defecated in the cell. I was standing at the bars of the cell, and had the impression of having been in the prison for years. I was shouting and cursing the people who had put me in the prison, full of hate and self pity. Suddenly I realised that my years of shouting had availed nothing. The only person who was upset by it was myself. I was the victim of my own anger and turmoil. I dropped the attitudes and was free of them. Years went by and one by one I dropped other habits of emotion and thought with which I had trapped and tortured myself. I realised I could be totally free within myself. One morning I woke and sat up on the mattress on the floor that was my bed. The last ghost of inner entrapment fell away. A fountain of joy opened in my body, pouring upwards through me. So intense was it I cried out. The cell mates called a warden. They stood looking at me as I experienced a radiance so strong I felt as if I must be shining. I was aware my joy poured into them, although they thought I was mad. Nothing would ever be the same again. Andy.

Such self-awareness enables one to slowly avoid getting caught in the waking ‘dream’ of long sojourns into such things as guilt, depression, and emotional pain arising from childhood patterns. This is because one becomes aware of just how such internal events arise or are triggered, and one can make a choice of whether one wishes to ‘re-play’ them again, rather like deciding whether to play a CD. Perseverance with the process cannot help but produce an entrance into areas of experience that had been deeply unconscious. Ones life history is brought to consciousness piece by piece. There is also the attempt to remain in the self-aware state even while dreaming. This is not an attempt to control or repress the action of dreaming, but to ‘see through’ it to the underlying processes creating the images.

In the Buddhist literature the story of Milarepa tells how he meditated for eight years alone in a cave. Through these years of discipline he was able to remain lucid while asleep and dreaming. He says, ‘By night in my dreams I could traverse the summit of Mt. Meru to its base – and I saw everything clearly as I went. Likewise in my dreams I could multiply myself into hundreds of personalities, all endowed with the same powers as myself. Each of my multiplied forms could traverse space and go to some Buddha Heaven, listen to the teachings there, and then come back and teach the Dharma to many persons. I could also transform my physical body into a mass of blazing fire, or into an expanse of flowing or calm water. Seeing that I had obtained infinite phenomenal powers even though it be but in my dreams, I was filled with happiness and encouragement.’

The awakening and the penetration of consciousness into what were the dark places of our being, leads to the realisation that, in a way that is difficult to accept until we experience for ourselves, we are the Creator of our own inner life, and Co-creator in the external world. Our dreams are created unconsciously out of mental and emotional factors that are usually deeply buried. For instance a person may have had a traumatic experience in childhood which leads to their constantly being afraid of closeness in a relationship. But the memory of the original event, and the powerful emotions leading to decisions about behaviour, are no longer conscious enough to review. They therefore give rise to reactions and dreams which may be puzzling, but are usually explained away by the dreamer. The dreamer may say something like ‘I don’t like men – or women. I don’t like to be near them.’ If they were aware of the sources of their reaction they would rephrase it to say, ‘I had an experience in the past that was painful, and out of this I now avoid relationship. Beyond that pain though, I want to be close and in touch with others.’

Nevertheless, in the widest sense, one is creating ones own life and dreams, even though being unconscious of how and why. The penetration of consciousness into these realms of hidden behaviour enables the process of creativity to become more directed.

Of course this self-formation needs to be understood in connection with Buddhism’s aim of dissolving the rigid boundaries of the ego, and finding insight into the illusory nature of our self image. We therefore need to realise that self-formation means not only creating our own inner life and responses to the external world more capably, but also the ability to dissolve what we have created, to realise that the source of all form is the nothing that at the same time is everything.

Example: I felt a very real power working in my body, but could not define it. The result was that my breathing slowed down until it stopped – how long for I do not know. This produced an experience of personal thoughts and feelings slowing to a standstill also, leaving stillness. Accompanying this was the sense of myself being in an ocean. As I floated in the ocean I began to be lifted by a large wave. I expected to get to the top of the wave and plunge down again. At this point the breath was taken in and it stopped. So when I came to the top of the wave it was so immense I floated at its peak on and on forever.

In trying to describe this I have to use the image of a great mural painted on a cliff face. The mural has trees and grass, animals and humans. I am one of the humans and have stepped out of the mural to become three dimensional. Being three dimensional is everyday life. When I reach the top of the wave and the usual ebb and flow of breath and consciousness stops, I step back into the mural again. I fade into the background of life again and disappear. This is wonderful. I sense this is what happens when one dies. The personal sense of self recedes and there is a blissful merging with all things. I want to stay there forever. I want to go into this ocean of blissfulness. I feel that I could stay there for a hundred years, and if I then took a breath I would emerge from the mural again and take up my everyday life just as I left it, except that events will have moved on. I want to do this. P.D.

The dissolution is Nirvana. The ability to dissolve self in this way may not be possible until we can master or penetrate the processes that work toward our formation. The secrets of our creation are in the unconscious, the mysterious world of dreams. Thus the need to wake in sleep, or if not that, to wake up from the dream of our life. See: dream as spiritual guide; Life’s Little Secrets; What we need to remember about us.

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Tony Crisp