Author Archive

Doors

 

So many doors

To get through

To meet each other.

There I was

Returning boots to C,

Awkwardly leaning over

The fence between us.

And she, opening her door

Looking slightly frail

Took her borrowed boots.

Then she reached for me

To kiss each other’s cheek –

A gentle eager thing.

And as she drew back

To close the door

I could see shining tears,

Making me wonder

What doors I would have

To knock at,

What bells ring

To meet her.

Or perhaps it was I

Who had closed doors.

The Ten Day Voyage

From The Politics of Experience by R.D. Laing

JESSE WATKINS is now a well-known sculptor. I am glad to know him as a friend.

He was born 31 December 1899. Went to sea in 1916 on a tramp steamer during World War I. His first trip was to North Russia. In the same year he was torpedoed in the Mediterranean. In 1932 he served in a square-rigged sailing ship.

He ended the Second World War (during which he served in the Royal Navy) as a Commander and Commodore of coastal convoys. During his career at sea he encountered shipwreck, mutiny and murder.

He has drawn and painted since early youth and con­stantly did so at sea. While ashore for brief periods he attended sporadically life classes at Goldsmiths’ College and Chelsea Art School. He has also written and had published short stories of the sea.

Twenty-seven years ago Watkins went through a ‘psychotic episode’ that lasted ten days. I tape-recorded a discussion with him about it in 1964 and with his permission extracts are presented here.

The material speaks for itself. It is an account of his voyage into in inner space and time. Its general features are not unusual, but it is unusual to have such a lucid account of them. Although the events are twenty-seven years old, they are vivid in his mind and constitute one of the most significant experiences of his life.

 

The preliminaries 

Before his Voyage began, Jesse had ‘moved into an entirely new environment’. He had been working seven days a week, until late at night. He felt physically, emotionally, spiritually at a ‘low ebb’. Since it is the voyage itself that we are concerned with here, we shall not go into the antecedent circumstances in more detail. Then he was bitten by a dog, and the wound did not heal. He went to hospital where he was given a general anaes­thetic for the first time in his life and had the wound dressed.

He returned home by bus and sat down in a chair. His son aged seven came into the room and Jesse saw him in a new and strange way, somehow unremoved from himself.

Then it began.

The voyage 

…. suddenly I looked at the clock and the wireless was on and then the music was playing -um – oh, popular sort of bit of music. It was based on the rhythm of a tram. Taa-ta-ta-taa-taa – something like Ravel’s repetitive tune. And then when that happened I suddenly felt as if time was going back. I felt this time going back, I had this extraordinary feeling of – er – that was the greatest feeling I had at that moment was of time going backwards. …

‘I even felt it so strongly I looked at the clock and in some way I felt that the clock was reinforcing my own opinion of time going back although I couldn’t see the hands moving —I felt alarmed because I suddenly felt as if I was moving somewhere on a kind of conveyor belt – and unable to do anything about it, as if I was slipping along and sliding down a – shute as it were and – er -unable to stop myself. And -um – this gave me a rather panicky feeling – –I remember going into the other room in order to see where I was, to look at my own face, and there were no mirrors in that room. I went into the other room, and I looked into the mirror at myself, and I looked in a way strange, I seemed as though I were looking at someone who – someone who was familiar but – er -very strange and different from myself – as I felt – – and then I had extraordinary feelings that I was quite capable of doing anything with myself, that I had a feeling of being in control of – of all my faculties, body and everything else, – – and I started rambling on.’

One sees the old and familiar in a new and strange way. Often as though for the first time. One’s old moorings are lost. One goes back in time. One is embarked on the oldest voyage in the world.

‘My wife became very -um – worried. She came in and told me to sit down and lie down in bed and be-cause she was alarmed she got hold of the man next door to come m. He was a civil servant and he was also a bit alarmed and he calmed me down, and I was rambling on to him, and the doctor came up – um – and I was talking of a lot of these feelings I had in my mind about time going back. Of course, to me they sounded perfectly rational, I was going back and thinking that I was going back into sort of previous existences, but only vaguely. And they obviously looked at me as if I were mad, I could feel – I could see the look in their faces and I felt it was not much good talking to them because they obviously thought that I was quite round the bend, as I might have been. And – um – then the next thing was that an ambulance came and I was taken off.

He was taken to an observation ward.

‘I was put into bed and -um – – well, I remember that night it was an appalling sort of experience because I had the – had the feeling that -um – that I was then – that I had died. And I felt that other people were in beds around me, and I thought they were all other people that had died – and they were there – just waiting to pass on to the next department…’

He had not died physically, but his ‘ego’ had died. Along with this ego-loss, this death, came feelings of the enhanced significance and relevance of everything.

Loss of ego may be confused with physical death. Projected images of one’s own mind may be- experienced as persecutors. One’s own ego-less mind may be confused with one’s ego. And so on. Under such circumstances a person may panic, become paranoid, with ideas of refer­ence and influence, become inflated with ideas of grand­eur, etc.

Some confusion of this kind need not be alarming. But who can say that he is entirely unafraid to die, or, if he searches his heart even further, that he feels entitled to die?

…          then I started going into this – – real feeling of regression in time. I had quite extraordinary feelings of-living, not only living, but – er – feeling and – er – experi­encing everything relating to something I felt that was – well, something like animal life and so on. At one time I actually seemed to be wandering in a kind of landscape with – um – desert landscape – as if I were an animal, rather – rather a large animal. It sounds absurd to say so but I felt as if I were a kind of rhinoceros or something like that and emitting sounds like a rhinoceros and being at the same time afraid and at the same time being ag­gressive and on guard. And then -um – going back to further periods of regression and even sort of when I was just struggling like something that had no brain at all and as if I were just struggling for my own existence against other things which were opposing me. And -um – then at times I felt as if I were like a baby – I could even – I – I could even hear myself cry like a child. …

‘All these feelings were very acute and -um – real and, and at the same time I was – I had – I was aware of them, you know, 1’ve got the memory of them still. I was aware of these things happening to me – in some vague sort of way, I was a sort of observer of myself but yet experiencing it. I had all kinds of feelings of – this sounds, because it’s nearly thirty years since I experienced it, it sounds a bit disjointed because I’ve got to drag it out of my memory but 1 want to be particular that I’m only telling exactly what happened to me and not embellishing it with any sort of imagination or anything like that. Um – I found that 1 had periods when I came right out of this state, that I’d been sort of moving into, and then comparatively lucid states I had, but I was reading – I read newspapers, because they gave me newspapers and things to read, but I couldn’t read them because everything that I read had a large number of associations with it. I mean I’d just read a headline and the headline of this item of news would have – have quite sort of – very much wider associations in my mind. It seemed to start off everything I read and everything that sort of caught my attention seemed to start off everything I read and everything that sort of caught my attention seemed to start off, bang-bang-bang, like that with an enormous number of associations moving off into things so that it became so difficult for me to deal with that I couldn’t read. Everything seemed to have a much greater – very much greater significance than normally. I had a letter from my wife. I remember the letter she wrote to me and she said, “The sun is shining here” – and – er – “It’s a nice day.” This is one of the phrases in the letter. There were a number of other phrases and I can’t remember all of them and I can’t re­member all of the phrases in the letter which evoked responses in me, but I remember this one. She said “The sun is shining here.” And I felt that if it were – that this was a letter from her, she was in a quite different world. She was in a world that I could never inhabit any more, -and this gave me feelings of alarm and I felt somehow that I was – I’d gone off into a world that I could never move out of.’

Although out of the safe harbour of one’s own identity anchored in this time and this place, the traveller may still be clearly aware of this time and place as well. 

‘You know, I was perfectly well aware of myself and aware of the surroundings.’

Jesse felt he had enhanced powers of control over his body and could affect others.

…. when I went to the hospital, because of this feeling, this intense feeling of being able to -um – govern myself, my body and so on, I said to the nurse who wanted to bandage my finger up: “You needn’t bother about that.” I took the thing off and I said: “That’ll be all right to-morrow if you don’t deal with it at all and just leave it.” And I remember I had this terrific feeling that I could do this and – this was – this was a nasty cut right down my finger. I wouldn’t allow them to put anything on it and they said, oh well, it’s not bleeding and they’d leave it, and the next day it was perfectly healed up, and because – it sort of – I put a sort of intense – er – attention on it in order to make it do that. I found that I – I tested myself with the man opposite me in this ward who was very noisy at’ times, he used to get out of his bed, he’d been having a number of nasty abdominal operations and I suppose it had affected him and probably had caused his breakdown. But he used to get up out of bed and swear and shout and so on, and I felt a bit alarmed about him and I felt very compassionate towards him, and I used to sit in my bed and make him lie down by sort of looking at him and thinking about it, and he used to lie down. And to try to see whether this – this was a -just an accident, I had tried it also with another patient at the same time and I found that he – that I could make him lie down.’

I would not too readily discount these possibilities.

‘I felt that I had sort of – um – tapped powers that I in some vague way I had felt I had, or everybody had, al­though at that time I’d been a sailor most of my life, I had not – I had read quite a bit when I’d been at sea but I hadn’t read any esoteric literature then nor had I since, I hadn’t read anything to do with, er – with – ideas of trans­mog-migration of souls or whatever you call it, trans­mog – transmig – reincarnation. But I had a feeling at times of an enormous journey in front, quite, – er – a fantastic journey, and it seemed that I had got an under­standing of things which I’d been trying to understand for a long time, problems of good and evil and so on, and that I had solved it in as much that I had come to the conclusion, with all the feelings that I had at the time, that I was more – more than I had always imagined myself, not just existing now, but I had existed since the very begin­ning – er – in a kind of – from the lowest form of life to the present time, and that that was the sum of my real experiences, and that what I was doing was experiencing them again. And that then, occasionally, I had this sort of vista ahead of me as though I was looking down -looking to an enormous – or rather all the – not looking so much as just feeling – ahead of me was lying the most horrific journey, the only way I can describe it is a journey – a journey to – um – to the final sort of business of – um – being aware of all – everything, and that – and the – and I felt this so strongly, it was such a horrifying experience to suddenly feel that, that I immediately shut myself off from it because I couldn’t contemplate it’ because it sort of shivered me up. I – it drove me into a State of fear, so much – I was unable to take it.’

‘Of the task that was still ahead?’

‘Yes, the that was the enormity of it, that I – that there was no way of avoiding this – facing up to what 1 – the journey I had to do. I had, I suppose because of having been brought up in the religious atmosphere, I had – my mother’s religious, not in the church sort of way but religious in a – in a real sort of way, tried to teach us something about religion and – er – the sort of attitude to life. …’

He had a ‘particularly acute feeling’ that things were divided into three levels: an antechamber level, a central world, and a higher world. Most people were waiting in the antechamber to get into the next department, which was what he had now entered:

… they were sort of awakening. I was also aware of a – um – a higher sphere, as it were. I mean, I’m rather chary of using some of these phrases because they’re used so many times – you know, people talk about spheres and all that sort of thing, but – er – the only thing

that I felt – and when I’m describing these things I’m describing more feelings – er – a deeper experience than just looking at the thing … an awareness of -um – of another sphere, another layer of existence lying above the – not only the antechamber but the present – lying above the two of them, a sort of three-layered -um – exis­tence….’

‘What was the lowest one?’

‘The lowest one was just a kind of waiting – like a waiting room.’

This was linked to the experience of time.

‘I wasn’t just living on the – the moving moment, the present, but I was moving and living in a – in another time dimension added to the time situation in which I am now. … The point I want to make is that I hadn’t got any ideology. The only ideological part of what I told you was the part where I went through the Stations of the Cross, because there I was sort of joining it up with an ideology at that time. I have often thought about what I went through then. I tried to make some sort of – um – sense out of it because I feel that it was not senseless – although I suppose to others about me I was – er – mad in as much as I was not living in this present time, and if I was not living in this present time I was therefore incapable of coping with it properly. But I had this feeling all the time of – er – moving back – even backwards and forwards in time, that I was not just living in the present moment. And I could much more easily go back than I could go for­ward because the forward movement was a bit too much for me to take.’

Such an experience can be extremely confusing and may end disastrously. There are no guarantees. Jesse experienced three planes of reality instead of the usual one. Apart from going through the Stations of the Cross he did not link up with any ideology. He had no map.

But he trusted his experience of having entered into a State of more, not less, reality, of hyper-sanity, not sub-sanity. To others, these two possibilities may be no more distinguishable from each other than chalk from cheese. He had to be careful.

‘I had feelings of – er – of gods, not only God but gods as it were, of beings which are far above us capable of -er – dealing with the situation that I was incapable of dealing with, that were in charge and were running things and – um – at the end of it, everybody had to take on the job at the top. And it was this business that made it such a devastating thing to contemplate, that at some period in the existence of – er – of oneself one had to take on this job, even for only a momentary period, because you had arrived then at awareness of everything. What was beyond that I don’t know. At the time I felt that -um -that God himself was a madman… because he’s got this enormous load of having to be aware and governing and running things – um – and that all of us had to come up and finally get to the point where we had to experience that ourselves…. I know that sounds completely crazy to you but that’s what I sort of felt at the time.’

‘You mean a “madman” in the sense that people in the state that you were in are taken to be mad?’

‘Yes, that’s what I meant, that he was – er – he was mad. Everything below him or everything below that got to the point where he got – er – had to treat him like that because he was the one that was taking it all at that moment – and that the – er – the journey is there and every single one of us has got to go through it, and – um – everything – you can’t dodge it. … the purpose of every-thing and the whole of existence is – er – to equip you to take another step, and another step, and another step, and so on.

Jesse felt that this experience was a stage that everyone would have to go through one way or another in order to reach a higher stage of evolution.

…. it’s an experience that -um – we have at some stage to go through, but that was only one – and that -many more – a fantastic number of -um – things have got to impinge upon us until we gradually build ourselves up into an acceptance of reality, and a greater and greater acceptance of reality and what really exists – and that any dodging of it could only – delays the time and it’s just as if you were going to sea in a boat that was not really capable of dealing with the storms that can rise.’

Eventually he felt he couldn’t ‘take’ any more. He decided to come back.

‘The nurse told me that sometimes I kept them awake at night by talking. And they – they put me into a padded cell and I said, “Well, don’t put me in here,” I said, you know, I said, “I can’t bear it.” But they said, “But you -we’ve got to try to do it because you make such a noise you know – talking.” So they put me into this place and I said, “Well, leave the door open”, so they left the door open, and I remember going through that night strug­gling with – with something that wanted to – some sort of – curiosity or willingness to open myself to -um – experiencing – this, and the panic and the insufficiency of spirit that would enable me to experience it. And during that time I went through – I went through the Stations of the Cross, although I’d never been what you might call a really religious person – I’m not now – and I went through all that sort of – those sort of feelings. Well the – all this experience became – went on for quite a time and I began to – they kept on giving me sedatives to make me sleep, and I – one morning I decided that I was not going to take any more sedatives, and that I had got to stop this busi­ness going on because I couldn’t cope with it any more.

 

The return 

‘I sat on the bed, and I thought, well, somewhere or other I’ve got to sort of join up with my present – er – self, very strongly. So I sat on the bed, I clenched my hands together tightly. And the nurse had just been along and said to me, “Well, I want you to take this”, and I said, “I’m not taking any more because I should – the more I take of that the less capable I am of doing anything now – I mean – as I said, I shall go under.” And so I sat on the bed and I held my hands together, and as – I suppose in a clumsy way of linking myself up with my present self, I kept on saying my own name over and over again and all of a sudden, just like that – I suddenly realised that it was all over. All the experiences were finished, and it was a dramatic – a dramatic ending to it all. And there was a doctor there who had been a naval – a rear admiral sur­geon – surgeon rear admiral, and he and I had become friendly because we talked about the sea from time to time. And this nurse came along and said, “You haven’t drunk that”, and I said, “I told you I’m not drinking it”, and he said, “Well, I’ll have to go and get the doctor”, and I said, “Well, you get the doctor.” Then the doctor came along and I said, “I don’t want any more of that sedative,” I said, “I’m quite capable of – of running things normally now,” 1 said, “I’m all right.” And he looked at me and he looked at my eyes and he said, “Oh,” he said, “I can see that.” And he laughed, and that’s what happened, and from that moment I had – never had any more of these feelings. …’

 

Jesse came through it.

‘But at times it was so – um – devastating, and it taxed my spirit to the limit, that I’d be afraid of entering it again. …

‘I was.. . suddenly confronted with something so much greater than oneself, with so many more experiences, with so much awareness, so much that you couldn’t take it. It’s as if something soft were dropped into a bag of nails….

‘I didn’t have the capacity for experiencing it. I ex­perienced it for a moment or two but it was like a sudden blast of light, wind, or whatever you like to put it as, against you so that you feel that you’re too naked and alone to be able to withstand it, you’re not strong enough. It’s like a child or an animal suddenly confronted – or being aware of – an adult’s experiences for him, for in­stance. The grown-up person has experienced a lot in their life time, they’ve built up gradually their capacity for experiencing life and looking at things – and – er -understanding them, even experiencing them for all kinds of reasons, for aesthetic reasons, for artistic reasons, for religious reasons, for all kinds of reasons we experience things, which for – if a child or an animal, say, were suddenly confronted with these things they couldn’t take it because they’re not strong enough, they haven’t got the equipment to do it. And I was facing things then that I just hadn’t got the equipment to deal with. I was too soft, I was too vulnerable.’

A person in this state may be ‘difficult’ for others, especially when the whole experience is being conducted in the quite bizarrely incongruous context of mental hospitals as they are at present. The true physician-priest would enable people to have such experiences before they are driven to extremities. Does one have to be dying of malnutrition before one is allowed a meal? Jesse Watkins was, however, luckier than many patients would now be, in that he appears to have been sedated comparatively lightly, and was not given any ‘treatment’ in the forms of electro shocks, deep-freezing, etc.

Instead, he was simply put in a padded cell if he was too much for the others.

If Jesse had had to cope with ‘modern’ forms of psy­chiatric ‘treatment’ as well, it would probably have been too much for him.

‘…I would have to-I felt as if I would give in and that I wouldn’t want to be aware of anything at all and I’d just sort of coil up and – um – stop existing as it were. I felt that I couldn’t take any more because I’d been through such – been through such an awful lot, and I suppose there comes a point where a person can only take so much and then they give up because they just can’t take it any more. And if I couldn’t have taken it any more I should have – I don’t know what might have happened -perhaps a feeling of sudden cessation and everything, and if – if they had done that to me I don’t know what I would have been able to – how I would have been able to cope with it, not being shut in that room and – er – of course the room itself, I mean, with the brown, padded walls and floor and all that. …’

I asked him what principles he felt should underlie the care provided during such a voyage.

‘…you are like a vessel in a storm. It puts out a sheet anchor which helps the boat to weather the storm because it keeps its head to the wind, but it also gives it a feeling of comfort – er – to those aboard the boat, to think they’ve got a sheet anchor that’s not attached to the bottom but it’s a part of the sea, that – er – enables them to survive, and then as long as they think they’re going to survive as a boat then they can go through experiencing the storm. Gradually they begin to – they feel quite happy with it even though the sheet anchor might have broken adrift and so on. I feel that if ever a person were to – ever to experience that sort of thing, he’s got to have – well, one hand for himself, as it were, and one hand for the ex­perience. He’s not going to be able to – I think, if he’s going to survive – to get away from his present level where he is .. . because of all that has gone before, and there’s gradually been a building up of – er – the necessary equipment to deal with the present situation for himself. And that he’s not equipped for anything more than that, not very much. Some people are equipped more for it and some are less – but he’s got to have some way, some sort of sheet anchor which is holding on to the present -and to himself as he is – to be able to experience even a little bit of what he’s got to experience.’

‘So there should be other people who sort of look after you. …

‘Other people who you trust and who know that you are to be looked after, that they won’t let you go adrift and sink. It’s – um – just a question of – you see I feel that – that this business of experiencing is a matter of one’s building up one’s own spirit. Because I remember -to take a normal analogy – of when I went to sea first I was a little boy of sixteen, and we went up to the north of Russia, and we experienced some quite extraordinary storms when the sea was washing over the ship and the ship was rolling terrifically, and there was no food, and I had never experienced anything like this in my life before. Because I’d never even been to a boarding school, I’d been at home, I’d been to a day school and never been far away from my mother. And the sudden impact of this rough and terrific fear-invoking life was a bit more than I could take at the time – and – but then, gradually, as I went into it more, then I first of all started sort of – by being – or pretending to be brave. Then I gradually be­gan to stand up to it, and the thing that gave me comfort sometimes was the fact that other people were taking it, they were living in this – er – environment and they ap­peared to be quite all right. They gave me no sympathy, you had no sympathy from anybody, and you were left on your own – er – resources to stand up to it. And I stood up to it and then, of course, looking back over the years I can remember sometimes when I had been quite afraid of very big storms at sea – um – but I thought – I often thought when I’d been through these storms I was equipped to deal with them then from experience – but I often thought back to those times when I was a little boy, when I first went to sea, the first week, – because during the first week I was at sea, we went through quite an extraordinary gale, wind, when the galley was washed out, there was no food, and everything was wet, and the ship was rolling about and we were in danger of being shipwrecked and so on – er – I was stricken with fear simply because 1 hadn’t got the equipment to deal with it. And that’s I suppose the nearest I can take in analogy of how I felt then, was – er – this suddenly faced with this -enormity of knowing. …

… .1 think that – er – ten days and what I went through

then, it certainly pushed me on quite a bit. And I re­member when I came out of hospital, I was there for about three months altogether, when I came out I sud­denly felt that everything was so much more real that it -than it had been before. The grass was greener, the sun was shining brighter, and people were more alive, I could see them clearer. I could see the bad things and the good things and all that. I was much more aware.’

There is a great deal that urgently needs to be written about this and similar experiences. But I am going to confine myself to a few matters of fundamental orien­tation.

We can no longer assume that such a voyage is an illness that has to be treated. Yet the padded cell is now outdated by the ‘improved’ methods of treatment now in use.

If we can demystify ourselves, we see ‘treatment’ (electro-shocks, tranquillisers, deep-freezing – sometimes even psychoanalysis) as ways of stopping this sequence from occurring.

Can we not see that this voyage is not what we need to be cured of but that it is itself a natural way of healing our own appalling state of alienation called normality?

In other times people intentionally embarked upon this voyage.

Or if they found themselves already embarked, willy-nilly, they gave thanks, as for a special grace.

Today, some people still set out. But perhaps the majority find themselves forced out of the ‘normal’ world by being placed in an untenable position in it. They have

no orientation* in the geography of inner space and time, and are likely to get lost very quickly without a guide.

* Orientation means to know where the orient is. For inner space to know the east, the origin or source of our experience.

In Chapter 5 I listed different features of such a journey. They seem to fit Jesse Watkins’ experience quite well. (When Jesse gave me this account, we had not had any prior discussions on this subject, and he had not read anything I had written.) But this is still only a tentative approximation.* Jung broke the ground here, but few have followed him.

One would hope that society will set up places whose express purpose would be to help people through the stormy passages of such a voyage. A considerable part of this book has been devoted to showing why this is un­likely.

In this particular type of journey, the direction we have to take is back and in, because it was way back that we started to go down and out. They will say we are regressed and withdrawn and out of contact with them. True enough, we have a long, long way to go back to contact the reality we have all long lost contact with. And because they are humane, and concerned, and even love us, and are very frightened, they will try to cure us. They may succeed. But there is still hope that they will fail.

* For a beautifully lucid, autobiographical description of a psychotic episode that lasted six months, and whose healing func­tion is clear, see Barbara O’Brien, Operators and Things (London: Elek Books Id, 1958).

The Licked Hand

I was raised in world which taught that God punishes you if you sin.

Yet slowly as I explored the deeps of life I stumbled on the heights of life and the blue skies.

With those visions I realised that what we have named as God is not a punisher but a power of love; a force that stands naked before us in beauty and shining – in fact the Naked Beauty.

It is us that are the punishers, for within us is that same Beauty, and as we twist it and hurt it till it bleeds, its pain is our own. Yet it still comes to us maybe like the dog we have not cared for, and with loving eye moves to lick our hand and our hurts.

And I, wanting to be a part of that Beauty, and feeling the pains I have caused it, open myself to its embrace.

Predators

Predators in dreams can indicate the sexual or someone or something that watches, plans and lies in wait to use you often in awful ways. Apart from animals that are part of natural cycles, there are human predators, men and women.

A police reports says, “A woman needs only to get a guy to consume a few units of Beer and then simply ask him home for no strings attached sex. Men are rendered helpless against this approach. After several beers, men will often succumb to the desires to sleep with horrific looking women whom they would never normally be attracted to. At other times these unfortunate men are swindled out of their life’s savings, in a familiar scam known as “a relationship”. Obviously this applies to men also.

Sex in one form or another is usually at the base of most dreams including the theme of predation.

I have lived alone for ages now – it means doing everything; keeping up with the requests; cooking, house cleaning; keeping the garden tidy; feeding the cats and odd jobs about the house; putting myself to bed – I sleep like a log; oh yes, and clearing up body parts left as gifts by my cats. Sometimes people complain to me that cats are such predators. And I have to smile, because cats are very open about their predatory life. But everybody especially humans and dog owners are tremendous predators, except they have all the enormous killing done out of sight and the results neatly packed up.

I know there are arguments against that – the red in tooth and claw, survival of the fittest stuff – but the great predators are in a symbiotic relationship in that they kill out the weak and so strengthen the species.

In recent years, a species of wild ducks were dying out. So wardens killed their predators, a species of hawk. To the warden’s surprise, the ducks were dying faster than ever. It was then found that the ducks had a disease, the hawks had been killing the diseased birds, and so helping the survival of the healthy ones.

A similar thing was discovered with herd animals, the predators aided the health of the herd.

But we are all predators, even vegans, for it is now known that plants too have a form of consciousness. According to David Attenborough, “plants can see…count and communicate with one another…react to touch and estimate time.” These claims are supported by the facts that plants turn towards the light, and even prepare themselves for sunrise by facing east in anticipation; trigger hairs on plants react to touch; there is even a social element in plant behaviour in that they fight enemies for territory and compete for mates in order to ensure the survival of the species. Even bacteria share information with each other? They share what they have learned even with species of bacteria that are different. They give each other building blocks of what they have learned. If they have learned how to deal with a particular substance that is poisonous to them, then they will pass that information on to other bacteria. They give what they have learned. That is so fundamental to life even bacteria do it.

But the so called primitive tribal people usually give thanks and honour the animals and plants they predate. Such honour means they care for what they take.

My Experience of Yoga

My Experience of Yoga

It is nearly 50 years since I sat on Newberry Beach in Combe Martin North Devon and wrote the book Yoga and Relaxation.  I was 33 years old at the time and I am now 81.  Looking back across those years I can see that my most powerful experiences in regard to the essence of yoga were met after I wrote the book.  Because of that I have wanted to revise it, or at least to add comments to what was originally said.  Out of that desire these notes have arisen.

One of the first important statements in the book is a quote, as follows.

“It is maintained that the study and practice of Yoga purifies the body, improves the health, and strengthens the mind; that, above all, it intensifies spiritual realisation. Every person with sound mind and body is capable of attaining Yoga in some measure. The earlier in life the training is begun the better, but it is never too late to start its practices.” So writes Theos Bernard.[i]

In the west we usually see yoga as a series of postures that people try to do perfectly. That is really a form of physical exercise, but yoga as it is described in the classics on the subject, such as Hatha Yoga Pradipka and The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali describe it as having very different aims, For there are 7 stages of Hatha Yoga, and postures is only the second stage.

To start with there are several different steps in Hatha (physical) Yoga, and they do not even mention the postures at the beginning. The first necessary steps are yama and niyama, that is followed by asanas, the postures. Then comes pranayama, breath control. The following steps are Pratyahara (subjugation of senses), Dharana (withdrawing the senses from external phenomena), Dhyana (remaining unidentified with body or mind), Samadhi (transcending the realms of body, mind and intellect), and Samyama (knowledge beyond the mind and intellect).

“There is not a single asana that is not intended directly or indirectly for the mind; however, for the advanced meditation practices of there are only two postures that are considered essential. These siddhasana and padmasana. The other asanas have been devised to strengthen different parts of the body and to develop the needed strength required by the rigid physical disciplines imposed upon the student… Posture becomes perfect when effort to that end ceases, so that there may be no more movement of the body. The requirement that the posture must be held for three hours is the chief difficulty and makes intelligible why it took so long to achieve it.” Quoted from Hatha Yoga by Theos Bernard

This understandably because – it must be kept in mind that these practices were devised centuries before the birth of this Western civilization and that they were intended to be used by those living in a very primitive material environment. The Yogi usually carried on his practices in a small cave or in an isolated retreat in the jungle. There were no conveniences; there was nothing but a stream of water and the need to cleanse the system internally. After one has mastered the technique, it will be difficult for him to conceive of a more convenient method.

Also it is interesting to note that the last levels of yoga, Samadhi, may be attained by using cannabis.

Although I followed these steps as fully as I could, I was working full time, being a parent to my children, and I couldn’t keep it up. As Theos Bernard who managed the whole demanding process says, it was usually done in a different culture where one had servants caring for your needs. But as I explained at the beginning I found a way by using a mixture of different approaches.

However, from yoga I learnt that in the West things have to be done to strengthen the personality or the ego – in other words you need to strengthen you and your will. For example, many people cannot stop eating because they are ruled by their instincts. So fasting is an excellent way of testing your strength. And by fasting I do not mean like Ramadan where the person simply doesn’t eat during sunrise and sunset, which in Africa was fairly early. Fasting means to not eat anything for several days. I did it for a fortnight when I started in my twenties, and now do it two days a week. For millennia humans have fasted for spiritual, emotional, and physical reasons–as a way to heal their bodies, reconnect to the sacred, regain a sense of life’s purpose.

I had the good fortune to come across Theos Bernard’s book Hatha Yoga early in my own quest for the kernel of the practice. Realising that the methods Bernard described were based on the ancient traditions I tried to follow the same path.  But at the time I was working full-time, running another business part-time and trying to be a father to my children and be a husband to my wife.  The traditional practice of Hatha Yoga Bernard describes arose in a culture that for many was not work dominated, and practitioners could be supported by servants or a community of people sympathetic to the discipline.  It needs a lot of time, courage, determination and great energy.  I made myself ill trying to follow that path. However it did lead me to an appreciation of what traditional Hatha Yoga was aiming at and how it was achieved.  It also gave me a means of assessing much that is called Yoga in today’s world, East and West. In saying that I pay homage to the masters of that ancient path.

(Perhaps the most ancient and honoured method of all originated in the East—the method of yoga, which, besides its avowed goal of spiritual enlightenment, seems to liberate the ego from its conscious limitations, making available the exotic fantasies of the subconscious. The witness of history and the testimony of thousands indicate that the system of yoga, if meticulously followed, can achieve this liberation. Unfortunately these results require years of persistent effort. Modern man, it seems, hardly cares to spend the time.) Quoted from LSD Psychoanalysis

When you press onwards to the other levels mentioned, one level leads to causing your body to vibrate or move spontaneously. Vibration and shaking is movement, and movement is one of the main signs of life. Life and growth are interwoven, and one of the first signs of massive personal growth or change is shaking or vibration in the body or pelvic movement or even the feeling of electricity running through your body. That was why the Quakers used that name, because they shook or quaked as they were moved by the Life Force, or as many people call it – God; also the Shakers had the same experience. So my aim was to release this with modern methods. I call LifeStream

There is no way – there is no path

The strange thing about yoga is that although one may make efforts to gain enlightenment, in fact we all have it and so there is no need to make an effort.

This life – of enlightenment – is just a describer, and one of the things it sees is that this state does not belong to anyone. It’s not something you can get from someone. It’s who everyone is. From here, the highest volume is the sound of the infinite ocean that we all are. Suzanne Sega.

Since there is nothing to meditate on, there is no meditation.

Since there is nowhere to go astray, there is no going astray.

Although there is an innumerable variety of profound practices, they do not exist for your mind in its true state.

Since there are no two such things as practice and practitioner, if, by those who practice or do not practice, the practitioner of practice is seen to not exist, thereupon the goal of practice is reached and also the end of practice itself.

-Padmasambhava

“Do nothing and let things happen. Oftentimes the hands alone can fantasy; they model or draw figures that are quite foreign to the conscious.” Carl Jung

Of course the above statements are made from a mind free from the restraints most of us live under, for a great Yogi, Shirdi Sai Baba in questioning his disciple said:

“The disciple is a being whose essential nature is Know­ledge, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Then there is no need to give him knowledge but simply to remove the veil of ignorance that hides the existent Knowledge. This, of course, is not to be done at one stroke, since the disciple is immersed in age-old ignorance and needs repeated instruction, perhaps through life after life. And what is this instruction through speech about what is beyond speech? Isn’t it like removing the cover? Ignorance conceals the pre-existent Knowledge just as water plants cover the surface of a pond. Clear away the plants and you have the water. You don’t have to create it; it is already there. Or take another example—a cataract grows on the eye and prevents a man from seeing; remove the cataract and he sees. Ignorance is the cataract. The universe is the efflorescence of the indescribable Maya, which is ignorance; yet ignorance is needed to illuminate and dissolve ignorance … Jnana is not something to be attained, it is eternal and self-existent. On the other hand, ignorance has a cause and an end. The root of it is the idea that the devotee is a separate being from God. Remove this, and what remains is Jnana. ( Jnana refers to pure awareness that is free of conceptual encumbrances – See The way of Mary)”

 It might make more sense if you read My Experience of Yoga – Buddhism – Going Beyond

You Cannot Have What You Deny Yourself

Nothing is Permanent Except Change

Imagine if you will a wonderful and complex machine that when you press the right sequence of buttons provides all your needs. In fact it can provide way beyond your needs. Out of it comes all the basics like food, a house, money to school your children and drive a fancy car. You could even manage one or two holiday houses abroad. And of course, if you know how to play this machine well, you may ask for things way beyond that.

Then – how could this happen – no matter what sequence you play, nothing more comes out. You are well and truly stuffed. The house has to go, along with the car, the holiday home, and definitely the yacht if you managed it.

Just in case you think this is some sort of fairy story, it isn’t! Huge financial institutions are collapsing or sacking staff. That is how John Hodges got sacked from a £300,000 a year job. He said there is no hope of him getting that sort of work again. So, yes, he has to sell house, holiday home, car, and so on. His wife will no longer be able to afford the expensive hair do’s, clothes, manicures, nanny for her children, and cleaner for her house. It goes further still and hits estate agents, car sales, clothing manufacturers, and all those who cater for the high income city workers.

Remember too that John is only one of thousands in his work area, and loss of employment is nationwide in most sectors. So how will John and all the other women and men confronted by this huge change deal with it?

The magical machine that John could conjure his £300,000 a year from, and thereby his grand house, car, way of life, and advantages for his children, was constructed out of an economic and social system based on ever greater profits, exploitation, and greed. Bill Rhodes, senior vice chairman of Citigroup said that this is the worse financial crisis he has seen, and he has been involved in many. (5) Geraint Anderson writes that “the actions of certain ‘Cityboys’ brought this about by years of reckless gambling with other people’s money. (6)

It’s not just the economy

Because of the critical situation the world economy faces, the way of life many people knew has come to an end. But change confronts all of us. The world as it was in the early part of the last century has completely disappeared. For those of us who have lived a long life we have had to meet incredible social, political and technological change, devastation, loss and the emergence of a new world order. I lived through the second world war and know about change and loss, having experienced several economic crashes, marriages, illnesses and a world totally different to that of my childhood. Great lessons have been learned on the way. But now there are even greater challenges, and changes on a wider scale.

Many people see the greatest challenge as global warming. That is certainly an enormous shift we are all confronted by, but there are others. If you compare today’s way of life with what was happening even as little as thirty years ago you will certainly see there have been enormous movements in the shifting of national, economic and world power. Millions of individuals have also been at work eroding the old ways governments, businesses, the police and creative individuals worked. In 2000 Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson assessed that 50 million people in the US alone were quietly revolutionising everything from the way our land is cared for to the schooling of our children. (7)

David Korten (8) has led international resistance against corporate globalization. He points out that fundamental shifts are going on to change the way top down government and corporate power is being used. Ricardo Semler takes this further in that he has helped develop a fundamentally different way of running an international corporation, one based not on top level control, but by integration between all levels of staff, and the encouragement of creativity and innovation. (9) Those types of alterations to the very basic structures of our consumer society will bring about enormous transformations in the way we live, love and work.

But the future is always surprising and usually unexpected. As far back as 1958 Stanislaw Ulam (10) wrote that, “…. the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, …. gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”

That is a very challenging statement, but we can see for ourselves that the graph of technological change and invention is on a sharp upward rise at the moment. Taken from the earliest discoveries of tools, fire, the wheel and bows, the rate of change has slowly increased. In recent times it is rising faster than ever before and it is thought by some it will become vertical soon. That means faster and almost constant change. I notice that many of my friends get stressed by moving house, what will it mean if their life is facing constant change? 

Gerald S. Hawkins (11) called these huge technological changes ‘mindsteps’. He said, “None of the mindsteps can be said to have been truly anticipated, and most were resisted at the early stages. In looking to the future we may equally be caught unawares. We may have to grapple with the presently inconceivable, with mind-stretching discoveries and concepts.”

So, an unanticipated, mind stretching, challenging and life altering future is on its way. Some prophets of the future even think such a change might be overnight.

Our personal stumbling block might not be global warming or the loss of fossil fuels; it might not be population explosion leading to food shortages, or enormous economic and social change. Perhaps we can face unprecedented technological innovation and even enjoy it. Maybe extended life will be a joy instead of a burden, or the challenge of very different ways of relating, loving and working easily met. We might effortlessly accept the loss of our car, genetically modified babies and adults, or the emergence of artificial intelligence as it changes our world forever. But somewhere in all of that we are going to hit the brick wall of our boundaries, and we might hit it at speed. And then, where will you be when you can’t fuck around any more?

Personal Challenges

In connection with this I have personally faced many changes. I lost those I loved very dearly, experienced the breakup of two marriages, was homeless for some years, and unemployed during that time too – not through lack of skills, but simply because of my age. I remember indelible moments when, living in a small village, and having worked as a labourer for £13 a week in an attempt to keep financially afloat, and seen my wife groped by my employer, I quite my job and became unemployed again. Then, in an attempt to create my own employment I telephoned various venues to organise an event, but without success. Closed doors everywhere. My hopelessness and pain were so awful my whole body was trembling and wracked by the experience of apparent meaninglessness and powerlessness. Personal survival has been a struggle, and I know about meeting change. 

I remember a sunny day when I lay for hours in Port Meadow, Oxford, trying to find the roots of my desperate situation and depression of that time. As I looked deeply at who I was and what I felt, the gloom of my situation gradually got worse. I was estranged from a wonderful wife by my own doing. I had started a small business that was going nowhere and my finances were dwindling. I had in the past been very creative and yet at the moment it seemed all of that wonderful spring had dried up. It felt as if the person I had been had died, and in his place was a feeling of emptiness and disillusion. I often went to bed hoping I wouldn’t wake in the morning. After all, what was there to look forward to? The feelings were of being old, unattractive, with my body aching and awkward. The feeling of being old and decaying was very powerful. This was a part of and linked with the feeling that I wasn’t producing anything the world wanted. So I felt out of the mainstream and ambling along in avenues of disuse and decline. The feeling of not being able to achieve anything, of having nothing in me anymore that could attract acclaim, and of living among people who were themselves non-achievers, was very profound.

As the time went on I saw that I identified with people whose life had been torn apart because my own life had the same sort of background. So I couldn’t lie to myself and say that I was a high achiever or that I was different from them. The sense of being lost, of hopelessness and of not going anywhere got so strong that I could see no way out of it. It was like a real environment surrounding me. It felt like a true awareness of what was happening in my life, rather than a FEELING of what was happening. It was so real that I started to feel that maybe ‘this is it’. Maybe this is real and therefore I have to adjust to it, to accept it as the reality of old age and my life – I was 59 at the time. This must be what old age is about, I thought, and therefore it is escapism not to meet it and accept it. No wonder I wanted to die. I began to think that in the end, as one ages, one has to take second best. If it was real, and I was feeling it was, then there was no creative way out of the situation. I had missed the boat in career, in my teenage years by killing my sexuality, in my adult life because I had spent years trying to climb out of the pit of depression and psychological distress.

At that point it seemed obvious to me why I had been trying to find some easy place to live in and get old and die. No wonder I had no zest for life, no motivation. What is there to motivate toward if the world doesn’t respond to ones efforts? What is the point if there is no real contact with others, no love, no money, no opportunity to be a part of creative action in the world?

So the whole feeling at that point was there was no way through, that my life was now in backwaters, or even stagnant waters of which there was no way out. If there was any real lesson to be learned it was that I needed to accept this, not to fight it and feel distressed by it as I had been. If this is a new phase of my life, struggling against it only led to pain and conflict.

As I experienced all this I was wondering how to come to terms with being a second-class sort of person in a second-class life situation. I started thinking about all the potential and mental possibilities I had touched in the past. How could it be that I had come through so many things, transcended myself in so many ways, and yet at the moment I was locked in apparent decay and decline? Had all the past been an illusion? Had I declined so much that all the power and wonder of my previous growth was now lost to me?

I knew I had been capable of creative resolution of any problem, of any life situation in the past. Having worked as a therapist with so many people, and seen them move beyond apparently irresolvable problems, it seemed crazy to be so stuck. I knew from past experience everyone has an incredible potential to meet problems creatively, to grow and transform if they are daring enough to feel, to explore, to sense, to be capable of change and adaptation. So why had I been in this situation for years now? Why was I stuck in this place?

The question was like a bomb that exploded in me. It began to fracture the apparently real environment of gloom and death I was encased in. Having asked the question I could see I had got into a negative feedback loop. Because I had got stuck in this place I feared I was a failure, which produced the certainty I didn’t have the resources to change, which produced the feelings of despair, that set going the certainty it was real and the inability to move out.

I realised I was feeding back to myself images of failure and feelings of unattractiveness, and all the other negative feelings I met during the week. Instead of looking at them and seeing them as passing feelings, I had taken them as impressions of reality and was drowning in them. I had accepted them as true and started to live that truth. When that happened the events of my life confirmed the negatives and so it went on.

So I tried to find the way out of the loop. The only possible way I could find was the realisation that the loop has no end. There is only one thing to do, stop it playing. I needed in some way to grab it and stop the crazy recording. To help with this, to help grab the thing and kill it, I obviously needed to have realised it was untrue. If I still believed the loop to be playing a truth, then it would only strengthen the action.

I had realised years before that thoughts and emotions, as real as they seem, and whether positive or crushing, are only passing impressions. They shift all the time, and so are not the fundamental me. No feeling, or sense of myself, was anything more than a sense, a feeling, it was not me. So how could this feeling represent some sort of permanent personal reality?

Having seen that I asked myself what was now keeping me in the state of deadness. It was difficult and painful to see what the answer was. I had been party to creating an awful emotional and sexual distance between myself and my wife. It was hard to accept the part I had played in it, and that having created it I was looking for another partner. However, the hook, the paralysing force, wasn’t that. I had turned myself into a pillar of salt because I was denying two things. Firstly that my marriage was finished. In one way or another I had helped destroy it. Secondly that I desired another partner, but denied this to make out to myself that I was still married in a great relationship. The result – DEADLOCK.

The changes I faced at that time were loss of employment, apparent loss of creativity that over most of my life had led me to produce saleable ideas, loss of a great relationship, homelessness, loss of contacts that had been doorways to employment, and ageing. It was quite a load to face all at once, but I came through to an even better life than had existed previously.

What I learned in those years is that everyone has an inner genius that can meet any circumstance life throws at it. Although this is true, our personal genius is usually locked up and made ineffective by early education, social programming and personal fears or attitudes. This is so important it needs to be spelled out.

My experiences described above dramatically illustrate the situation, so let us look at it step by step.

1 – There are lots of ways we can react to a problem. We can run away, hide, make out it doesn’t exist by denial, try to get help from someone else, identify with it, fighting the situation, change position, find a different attitude, experiment with it to see what works, pray for guidance, get drunk or drugged, and so on.

My difficulty was both external – homeless, ageing body, and out of work – and internal – hopelessness, sense of being past my prime, etc. My early response was denial and identifying with it. I denied my marriage had ended, and that I was looking for another partner. By denying these things I had stopped myself moving on and being in a relationship with someone else. Within a week of really facing that denial I had moved on into another relationship. So the first step is to really look at where you are and who you are at this moment as honestly as you are capable of. Blaming other people or oneself doesn’t help. It needs you to examine the situation to arrive at understanding, not blame. My years of working as a therapist had developed skills of self examination, so this part may need the help of someone else who can help you cut through all the emotional crap and smokescreens we sometimes get lost in.

But the main point here is that I dared to directly look at and explore my situation. It is of no value at all to run away from difficult feelings or past pains, they simply run after you. You cannot escape from yourself.

2 – By identification with the situation I mean that I was sure what I was feeling was really true, was the real me. When I felt a failure I really believed I was. When I felt my body aching and depleted I believed I was an ageing and defeated old man. I am many years older than 59 now and my body is still fine and flexible, and I am relating to a woman 27 years younger than I.

Understanding what you identify with and what you believe yourself to be is one of the great secrets underlying how to meet challenges and change. Helen Keller, blind and deaf, didn’t identify with her physical handicaps but with who and what she could be within herself, and therefore creatively express in her life. (12) It is imperative in meeting change to identify with what is lasting and can survive change. Your body, thoughts and emotions are constantly changing, but the naked awareness that experiences all of that change never alters. Like a mirror it reflects ever shifting experiences, but itself does not change. This is the pearl of great price. Find it!

A lot of failure to meet change and challenge is based on the belief that we do not have the resources, personal ability, or power to deal with what we face or want in our life. I have met so many people who believe, for one reason or another that they are limited in their ability – maybe they got poor marks or were criticised at school – and so they live within that negative feedback loop as I called it. They believe it so they live it, and then their life apparently proves it is true.

3 – When these people know about the many different things I have done in my life they think I am a special person, born with those talents. But that is another excuse for them to fail. I am actually the son of a shop assistant and factory worker, and was thrown out of school early having failed at most lessons. At twenty one I still didn’t know the alphabet and couldn’t write a proper page of text. However, even from childhood I believed my personality was a tiny part of what I knew about myself. I believed that there is a bigger self that gives me life and has infinite potential. So when I wanted to do something I just got on and did it. Like a bird that has never flown before but jumps out of the nest, I spread my wings believing that whatever it is that enables this nestling to fly will come to my aid if I actually call on it.

Whether that is actually true doesn’t matter. Such philosophical arguments are pointless. What matters is that if we believe it we gain extra power; we call on latent resources we would otherwise never access. How many times have you heard about a person, in an emergency situation, doing the most amazing things? If you wonder why, it is because they called on their enormous reserves without the silly question of whether they could do it or not. So the fundamental strength here was to recognise that there was a creative core that could find a way through the life problem I faced.

4 – We are not alone in the world. You and I are not alive out of our own cleverness or power. Something you are barely aware of keeps your life ticking over, your food digested, your temperature steady, and it did all that from conception onwards completely without your conscious help. Of course, you can interfere with it by overeating, poisoning your system with alcohol and junk food, and abusing your need for rest and love. But even then it tries to keep going.

So you are not alone in your attempts to survive. That incredible wisdom that is millions of years old with experience of life on this earth, and has met just about every calamity world changes, meteor strikes, ice ages, droughts, floods, changing continents and disease can throw at it, is within you at this moment. Also you are part of a web of life. It is a living responsive system. It is not a mechanical and mindless machine as used to be thought. Everything you think feel and do in some way touches everything that is. Some years back, wondering if that were some cosy thought and belief I had I challenged ‘life’ to give me some proof of my connection with everything. Within a minute the doorbell rang and the man at the door spent hours with me excitedly talking about the mystery of life we are surrounded by. The point being made is that when you reach out for change or a goal, ‘life’ in the form of its many millions of living creatures, responds in some way. As soon as I shifted from my stuck beliefs and feelings things changed, opportunities began to appear, my connections with others widened.

Recognising you have a creative core that is bigger, older and wiser than your conscious personality; shifting your identification from the ever changing world of your thoughts and emotions to the naked awareness that you fundamentally are; daring to look at yourself and your situation honestly and with the courage to feel uncomfortable memories and feelings; remembering you are never alone or disconnected, no matter what your situation; allowing love to express and be accepted in whatever degree you can tolerate – these are the great secrets of facing the challenges your present and your future bring.

Recently I asked people to share with me how they met difficult life situations and survived. A woman, B.B. told me the following.

After thinking about your question and my life – to start with my troubles began when I heard that my husband had left me and was marrying a Thai woman and having a child. All that without telling our children. Then two of our kids attempted suicide, myself being with my daughter as she went through the next 24 hrs, not knowing if she would live or die. My son in Australia sealed himself in his flat, put the gas on and was lighting cigarettes. Then I met a brother I never knew existed. All that on top of adjusting to leaving a long marriage and being back in UK after 16 yrs in Australia was a huge overload emotionally.

How did I cope? Well, I had had the good fortune in my early adult years to meet a man who gave me time during a difficult period of my life; who taught me about framing what was happening, like taking a pause, holding the story of what was going on. He showed me how to check out my thoughts and feelings, to give me a sense of control and power; to take notice of my dreams and how to understand them; to listen to my body and listen to life, noticing what they were communicating with me. He helped me understand what we are and how connected we all are, and that staying in touch with myself, rather than running away with drink or drugs, that a lot of people in emotional pain do, myself included before we met. Lots of love B.

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Snake Dreams

OR – THE UPRISING AND DESCENDING DIVINE ENERGIES

Lately I have been waking or woken with a flood of new insights about human life and living it. It involved my sons snake dream and my own snake dreams, because two days ago I dreamt I saw a medium sized python crawling along beside me. I immediately caught hold of it behind the head and held it at the same level as my head. I carried on involved in whatever I was doing, and occasionally forget and let it go. When I realised I was no longer holding it I caught hold of it again, but realised after about three times that the snake no longer tried to escape, and its head remained at the position I had left it, so I took my hand away and the head remained at the same place and level as I carried on moving about.

It is interesting that my sons snake also lifted its head and spoke to him. The lifting was seen as important by the insights I had.

The importance of this is emphasised by several snake dreams experienced over many years.

Here is the first one that I think is important.

Dreamt that a snake – a huge python—had raised me. I had the sense that it had cradled me in its coils when I was a baby, and that it had taught me without words how to survive. This was a sort of jungle/life wisdom.

The snake I have come to recognise as an expression of the reptile brain we all have, it is the fundamental biological energy – our life source. See Reptilian Brain

This basic part of our brain still deals with fundamental need food, procreation, survival and the fight or flight instinct – i.e. dealing with fear and threat. Such basic behaviour is looked after in babyhood by this brain. MacLean was early in demonstrating this brain but prior to MacLean’s findings it was assumed that the highest level of the brain, the neocortex, dominated the other, lower levels. MacLean, and since him others (Earl K. Miller), have found this is not so. In fact Miller was recently able to demonstrate that the older brain learns fast, and it gradually ‘trains’ the prefrontal cortex. So the dream is spot on, our first learning is from our reptilian brain. Such instinctive learning is, as suggested, probably a form of  jungle or basic life skills.

My second example was dreamt sometime in the 1970’s.

“I was in a huge cathedral, the mother church. I wanted to go to the toilet / gents. As I held my penis to urinate it became a snake and reached down to the urinal to drink. It was thirsty. I struggled with it, pulling it away from the unclean liquid. Still holding it I walked to a basin and gave it pure water to drink.”

This I see as an expression of a new life skill. I say this because it was a real struggle to pull the snake/penis up.  I had to do something new with my sexual feelings which had tormented me, even possessed me, so I had to learn to develop another relationship with them. The struggle lifting up the snake was an expression of the struggle that began the process of liberation. I realised over the years that there was nothing wrong with sexual feelings, but many humans remain simply as a spark of awareness dominated by their animal – reptilian – instincts. Many become sexaholics, alcoholics, poweraholics, moneyaholics, gobbleaholics, and all the other human traits many of us have no control over.

I see my sons snake being able to stand up and speak as a sign that his long years disciplining his appetite for food broke the hold the reptilian instincts had on his consciousness, and opened the door for consciousness to explore other levels. That it spoke to him shows his awareness had opened the ability for him to be aware of this primal level of his being and understand it in fuller degree.

The mother church I see as exactly what he has done; personal self awareness, our personality, becoming aware of the process of Life in him. We often feel it like a religious experience because it is – in other words a meeting with the Creative Forces of our being.

The writers of the New Testament understood this when they wrote. “…it will flow rivers of living water.” The pure water the snake/penis drank is, as far as I can understand it, the amazing new understanding and insights that flow through you as you open to it.

Later still I dreamt: “The last few nights I have experienced being very awake. It is again like being more awake in sleep. Or like it was as if I were experiencing intense cleansing or integrating activity, most of it connected with femininity. I can remember several of us walking down a road. We came to a church, on the left. Instead of entering we walked past to another church, this was the original or Mother Church, much older. We went into this church.

Just in the door was a raised platform – or rather, the church proper was lower than this balcony. We stood looking down into the church. It was of granite throughout. There was no furniture, all solid rock. The floor and the end of the church was massive granite. I cannot remember anything being where the altar usually is, only the impression of massive rock, polished smooth. The floor did have designs and words etched in it deep though.

I became filled with the spirit. It was like an intense emotion and power flowing through me, and it led me to sing and pray and speak.”

This I feel is an extended view of the basic meeting with the Creative that is within us, not an external God – neither male or female, but the basic rock or foundation of us. Into the rock are designs and understanding etched deep into our being, for we all have such understanding of our place in creation if we are humble enough to bow so low – looking down into the church which is our body – “don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.”

To sum up, our body is your experience of Life itself. Life is the Mystery, and you are partaking of it or in it. We are seeds of that Mystery, but are still growing in our understanding or awareness of what we are. The basic level of our awareness is our basic instincts – the reptilian. Older cultures knew this and gave it various names such as kundalini the snake, chi the life force, shakti the primordial creative cosmic energy and many other names.

In many cultures, including the Christian, say there are seven levels of our being – in the Christian they are the seven churches, in Judaism it is represented by the seven candles, but often the kundalini is shown as a snake with  seven heads. It is expressed as energy, which if only allowed expression at the lowest level may never open up the other dimensions of our possibilities; for at the base is infinite potential.

Each level is opened, as depicted in the dream, by pulling or lifting up the basic energy or drives of our body. Often it is describe as a massive denial of our natural urges, but I feel that it only needs a discipline as shown in the Ox Herding pictures, where our natural urges, the buffalo, is gradually tamed.

1	2	3

 

4	5

The first image shows the person wandering through their life experiences without any awareness of the animal they are. The second image he sees traces of another part of himself. The third image he actually is aware of his animal influence. The fourth illustrates the struggle he/she has with it. The fifth shows it is no longer a struggle – but there is more because the series has ten stages. See Ox Herding Pictures

I believe the first stage is the awareness of the inner animal that has been dominating us. The second is taming it and so on. It need not be a terrible fight.

Basically the snake needs to go in the hole and stay there without moving.

OR

“When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner as the outer, and the upper as the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male shall not be male, and the female shall not be female: . . . then you will enter [the kingdom].” Quoted from ‘The Gnostic Apostle Thomas’

The Curious Mind

We have been told again and again that the Life Force or Kundalini, when released from its old patterns of instinctive animal expressions such as the urge for sex, the urge to over eat, or even to grab as much of the worldly treasure as we can and hold onto it, rises up the trunk awakening other centers until it reaches the top of the head.

Example: As I did so the colours got lighter and lighter. It felt as if something was going faster and faster. Yes, kaleidoscopic patterns were moving and changing faster, speeding up and getting lighter. First of all just colour, movement and intensity, then it burst into a direct awareness of energy in my being vibrating faster and faster. I could feel it moving upwards each side of my spine, actually vibrating. It got more and more intense until suddenly it felt like the energy had cleared all its pathways and was vibrating at tremendous speed without barriers. It was an incredible experience yet at the same time not at all strange.

Example: Then the landscape changes. There are trees, plants and animals in brilliant colour. I wonder what this means, and the landscape begins to spin until the colours blend and shimmer. Suddenly my body seems to open to them, as if they are spinning inside of me, and with a most glorious feeling, a sensation of vibrating energy pours up my trunk to my head.

But because we are all dual creatures and so live in a dual world, ‘upwards’ is always balanced with ‘downwards’. Even our brain has two halves with different functions which balance each other. We as human beings are deeply involved in such duality and often are lost in struggles to balance it – it is sex, female and male.

So the downward flow of the Life Energy is as important as the upward flow, but is generally overlooked. Strange because it is firmly rooted in Western culture.

Matthew 3:16: “And Jesus, when He was baptized, went up straightway out of the water; and lo, the heavens were opened unto Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting upon Him; and lo a voice from heaven saying: This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” Both the rising and the descending are shown in the quote, “… when He was baptised, went up straightway out of the water.” He was down in the water and so rose up out of it. Then came the descent of the dove.

The quote is lost in symbolism, but because patterns are repeated in all levels of life we can see the same in plant life. In a seed its energy is latent until placed in the right conditions where it potential can express. Then from a fundamental place it first roots into its source of nourishment, in the human seed into the wall of the womb through it roots/placenta. Then it unfolds upwards and eventually seeks another source of energy to complement its potential which it has gathered from the past gathered from all its forebears. No plant or tree grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all its gathered experience.

But that is its past, it’s potential, but to grow it needs the energy it receives from the sun, the descending energy, enabling it to gather new experience and hold in any seeds it produces. That is plant growth, here is an example of human growth.

Example: I began to realise, or be shown, in my inner world, what had happened. My past practice to grow had unbalanced my Sun and Moon. My moon that had predominated. This was the Life Energy I had released in a past session, the vegetative God of the moon. That is, one aspect of the one Life expressing through evolution – expressing from deep within matter and the body. This is like the energy locked in a seed which grows it until it reaches up above earth. I could see why Reich called his method vegetotherapy – because the energy released was that bound up in the vegetative system of our body, in our emotions, muscles, sexual organs and glands. And although I had released this to a fair degree, I had hardly touched my Life of the Sun god or released it. This was the descending power of Light.

What had been a conflict now resolved itself. I had been polarised in the negative side of the Life energy. The cold, inward, in drawn, lethargic, inactive aspect. I must now open to my positive, outgoing, hot, digestive, fiery Life. This I did, and the Sun was on top of my head, and the Moon at the base of my spine. For a while they were separate, but then I knew them as one Life expressing into two ways, and my Sun and Moon merged. Now I could surrender to the one united Life.

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

This Life will can cause us to spontaneously speak, to move our body, and in fact do things that we cannot do with our Conscious Will, all that while we sleep and dream. The duality of our two wills can work together to move the conscious personality to greater balance. See Self-Regulation – Homeostasis

The next is a man’s experience during a session in which he surrending his whole self to the life force. I understand such experiences to be the way our being works, again within its duality, as a self regu;ating process. I define it as follows:

Example: Gradually the moans subsided after my body had twisted and shook and struggled, crying out in the struggle. The moans stopped. A slow dance began in which my fire of life lifted up and the divine fire descended into my being.

And now a very graphic dream of the downflowing energy.

This morning I dreamt I was in a house. I believe other people were in it too. From beyond sight in the sky a thin crystal clear column descended into the house. It looked like water but it had the consistency of a gel. Also it did not flow down in a torrent as water would, but flowed slowly downward into the house. I felt it was the descent of some special influence or substance coming from dimension beyond our own, and connected with non physical beings. It was about three inches across and I stood underneath it at one point.

As I stood there the gel slowly covered me and I felt that when I was completely covered I need not breathe. I guess this was rather like being in the womb. I wanted to share this experience with other people so I imagined them standing under the column.

Then I became slightly lucid and for ages existed in a condition in which I experienced being in a wonderful condition of peace, receiving the down flow of influence of the column of gel.

On using the method of identifying with the column and ither if the dream images, the man experienced the following:

“I am a column that is flowing from way, way beyond here. My feeling is that in identifying with the column and touching this huge stillness. It seems as if it is trying to tell me something. But it is difficult for it to get the words. But eventually the words came, the words formed themselves in my mouth. They did not flow from my head as usual, but from deep in my body, thus the difficult for it to form the words:

‘I met life in you.’

There was again a struggle to say something here but it did not come out clearly.

“I am a flow. I am like anything that moves. I can give. I can love. I can touch. I am touching life in you. I touch – like that! I am touching your life. I am giving love.”

So, I am saying to life, “Flow into me. Be me. What the hell is my life worth anyway – I give it to you. It is yours. Have it! What is our everyday life anyway? We eat, with sleep, we work at tasks that are probably quite meaningless in the big picture, we have sex, and what is the point of all that? I would sooner my life was part of the meaningful whole. Here I am.”

Now a most extraordinary thing happened. I experience feelings of being made love to, but not through the genitals, but through my head right the way through my being down into my genitals. For a long time it felt as if I didn’t need to breathe, and in fact I seemed to exist without breathing for quite a long time. There was a feeling of tremendous quietness. Inside something gently moving through the openness in my head down my being, flowing to my genitals. Once there it was like it opened something. It changed something. Then, gradually, that influence of change started moving up my being. I could feel it particularly touch and change things in places like my solar plexus and my heart. When it reached my throat I could feel it tickling and opening something there. It really felt painful as it went through these places, particularly as it reached into my head. It wasn’t a physical pain, but it felt as if something deep inside me was being stretched and opened, and that stretching was painful at a subtle level. I cried out in the pain. I wept. I cried out in pleasure – the mixture of pleasure and pain, just as if I were being made love to in a wonderful and delicate and yet painful way. As it touched and passed through my head I cried out, “Why? Why?”

Then it said, “It is finished. I love you.”

	Sri Aurobindo was one of the great explorers of the inner world of humans. His writings are prolific, but his thought and work are masterfully expressed in a smaller format by Satprem in the book Sri Aurobindo – The Adventure of Consciousness. It is well worth reading, but here is a quote that spells out the descending Divine Force.

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.”

Listening Skills

Listening is incredibly important because if we do not learn it we may miss hearing the intuition that would guide us in the most satisfying direction in life. Perhaps we miss hearing the many things the person we are going to marry or start a business or work with or our family is telling us, or even what our body is telling us about how it feels when we eat what we eat. Often we are so busy thinking our own thoughts that we completely do not hear what our children or those near us are telling or demonstrating to us.

As an example, “I was early morning, and my youngest son Quentin was still asleep so I left him and took the dog for a walk. When I came back I found him awake, sitting in my other two the boy’s bedroom in the chair by a sleeping Mark – my eldest son. He had obviously found an empty house and sorted out the only company he could find. His comforter firmly in his mouth, and a bag of animals in his hand, he was sitting quietly. When I came in he scolded me for having gone without him. Later as I was getting the boys sandwiches and taking Quentin to the toilet, he said his legs had gone off and he needed to be carried. I refused and said he could perfectly well walk downstairs. We argued this out and he gradually walked downstairs shouting, but at the kitchen door he refused to walk any further, and feeling irritated I said he could jolly well stay there then.

Later in the day I suddenly realised what he had been so clearly demonstrating to me and the meaning of his little drama. I saw how because I had left him alone he had been afraid and had sat with his sleeping brother as his only armour against this fear. He was really saying, “Dad I was frightened and alone when you weren’t here. Please come to me to show you really want me. Come and pick me up so I can see you love me.”

Blind fool that I am, I couldn’t see this, and now my tears of regret poured out in deeply felt sobs. I wanted to get to Quentin so quickly, to tell him I was sorry, and show him I loved him.”

But here are ways you can learn to listen and observe.

In life we take in so much information. I see in the webpage https://neurotray.com/ that, “The human brain can process up to 11 million bits of information per second. This is the natural processing capacity of the brain, including the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious mind. However, the conscious mind has a very limited capacity and it can handle anything from 40 to 120 bits of information in a second.

Since the information that is incoming to us is usually so large, our brains can sometimes make use of cognitive shortcuts that can cause unconscious or implicit bias. This may have serious consequences on how we perceive others and act towards them.

If we process all the information, it will be too much for us to handle at once. Moreover, it would be nearly impossible to process all the information incoming at us in a logical, rational manner. Or we’d be questioning every decision we make. Thus, the human brain takes cognitive shortcuts and sometimes makes decisions on the basis of heuristics, aka “rules of thumb”.

with various options under the conditions of scarcity, they would choose the option that maximizes their individual satisfaction. Alas behavioral economics explains that humans are not rational and are incapable of making good decisions.

That is why learning to listen can be an extraordinary thing, because our unconscious mind  tends to

You will need a partner who also wants to learn this skill or is sympathetic.

Step One: Sit with your partner in a comfortable way and in a setting you will not be disturbed in. Decide who is going to start, and what the issue is you want to explore. Only deal with one issue at a time, not all the pains you might have.

The partner who is going to speak now says what they need to without any interruption – that means NO interruption. If you are the one speaking you say what you want to and take your time, for you can talk about anything in an explorative way.

As the listener you do not respond until your partner has finished. Then you repeat what you understood was said. This is not a game of win or lose. It is about real working partnership, so if your partner does not agree that you understood what was said, they should repeat the bits you failed to grasp until you can repeat clearly what their statement was. Very often we don’t listen, but are just waiting for them to finish so we can put forward our own argument. This requires us to actually take in what our partner is saying and what they need.

You then change roles and repeat it the other way around.

Step Two: When you have learned how to do that to your mutual satisfaction you now actually change roles. You get up and sit where your partner was sitting. Then you see if you can be them as fully as possible. This is not about repeating what they said accurately, it is about sympathetically or even empathetically seeing if you can feel what it is like to be them, and speak or express from that place.

The first step was about learning how to listen and actually hear each other without argument or conflict. This step is concerned with learning how to understand your partner, to stand in their shoes. It might take a while to learn, but believe me you have it in you to do. You cannot live with someone and have any degree of relationship without absorbing an enormous amount of insight and knowledge about them. Maybe it happened out of the corner of your eye, unconsciously, but it happens. Now you are tuning into it and letting your partner see and know how much they have entered into you. As with the other skills, it needs practice, but you can do it. See Explorations in Wonder

Repeat this until you are mutually satisfied. This may take many sessions, but it is a pathway to real communication. It leads to the recognition that your partner is not you. They are a wonderful unique being who you have chosen to be with. From the understanding arrived at you can begin to make adjustments to how you deal with each other and others. As one woman said, ‘When I tried to explain things to my husband he would just grunt. In fact that was the nickname his friends gave him, ‘Grunt’. If I was enthusiastic he would tell me to shut up and be quiet. But now I am with a man who listens and appreciates me. He explains his difficult responses if we meet them, and tries to understand mine. So, I feel so much love and support now.’

Heart to heart communication between family, friends and associates is still a problem for many people. Some further tips on creative and healing listening are:

1) Take time fairly frequently to really share your feelings. This involves exposing what you feel, your vulnerabilities and failings in some degree. If you find it difficult to talk about such things as love, sex or anger try using an analogy. A client, when asked what his difficulty was with his wife appeared to talk about something else. He told how he often went to lean on his garden fence, and sometimes a woman neighbour goes by and they talk and laugh together. He obviously didn’t know how to define his problem, but the story told it all. He needed more times of happy talking and laughing with his wife.

2) We all want to be heard, but often we don’t let our partner finish a sentence or explore their theme. We don’t participate, or maybe we pull back because feelings other than positive one’s disturb us. It is enormously healing to be able to accept your partner’s pains as well as happiness. So, a great way to help them unfold their feelings is to ask questions that show interest, and not criticise or pull back from their difficult feelings. Also, what are they suggesting ‘between the lines’ of what is being said, and what is their body language saying? Occasionally summarise what words and body have revealed and give feedback.

3) Have controlled arguments when needed. We cannot agree with each other all the time, and creative arguments can unveil important realisations that were lost in difficult feelings. Such creative arguments can only occur if you both avoid blaming your partner for what you feel. Better to say ‘I’ instead of ‘you’. Avoid criticism, contempt and defensiveness. Keep in mind what you are trying to resolve, and that you ARE trying to resolve it rather than win an argument, so take stock every so often.

4) Great and deeply satisfying communication is a skill and needs us to learn to meet each other from a different standpoint than we may have learned in life so far. It is not simply conversation. It is communication. To emphasise this it is worthwhile suggesting you spend a certain time together in this way. For instance most of us are reared in a way that suggests things can be right or wrong, and that we are either good or bad. These types of judgments and attitudes do not allow great communication.

Supposing, as an example we say to a child, ‘You are really naughty.’ If we took time to really examine what was happening, it might be that we felt anxious or angry about what the child did. So, creative communication needs you to say just that. ‘I felt really scared when you did that.’ Or perhaps, ‘I am feeling so tired and vulnerable at the moment I keep snapping at you,’ instead of, ‘If you don’t stop upsetting me I am going to kick you.’

See Contact – Meeting Your Partner

I Don’t Know

You know

You know

You know,

I don’t know.

You know, I don’t know.

You know, I don’t know.

You know, I don’t know.

How to tell you.

You know, I don’t know,

How to tell you.

You know, I don’t know,

How to tell you,

That I love you.

You know, I don’t know,

How to tell you,

That I love you,

For I loved you

For so long that I can’t tell.

Copyright © 1973 Tony Crisp

Devils Are Only Sick Angels

A young university student was puzzling about what unique subject he could research to get his PhD. He looked through the subjects already done by others, and saw that nothing was recently research about magic, in particular, invoking the Devil.

Being a diligent student, and with facilities of university libraries in the 2040th century, he went to work, finding such a lot of ancient information. Clearing a room where he lived he drew the magic circle and symbols on the floor, slowly gathered the instruments, incense and candles needed and started learning how to pronounce the incantations.

What Is The Unconscious

The term unconscious must be taken to represent many functions and aspects of self, rather than something we can neatly define. Therefore, we might think of the term as being like the word BODY, which means a whole spectrum of organs, functions, chemical processes, neurological events, systems, cell activities, as well as ones experience of these.

In general, a helpful way of thinking about the unconscious is to realise its function in memory and skills. For instance, a mass of your experience is presently not in your conscious awareness. It is therefore unconscious. But if I pose the question – What is your present home address? – what was unconscious a moment ago becomes known and communicable. Millions of bits of other information lies unconscious in you at any one moment, along with skills not being accessed, and other functions not used. So in this sense your conscious self is a tiny part of your total potential.

There is also an action of the unconscious level of mind that scans our life experience, and indoing so synthesis what it finds andlinks it with a process we cannot understand with our conscious thinking. It acts as a feeder of informatioin for a cosmic awareness, and yet keeps the individual as well. It is a huge paradox that we cannot grasp with normal everyday awareness.

With our individual self, it attempts a healing process in the psyche, the personaility, and through these urges us toward actions or experience that is more expressive of our total self rather than the one-sidedness of conscious viewpoints. Dreams not only reflect this drive arising from wholeness, but also present potentials we have which we ignore because they lie outside our daily experience.

But because dreams arise from the unconscious, and dreams transend the normal by not being in one locality as waking consciousness is, the unconscious is also the home of the transcendent.

Many modern physicists, working with the information arising in experiments with quantum theory, tell us that our view of the world is based upon our blindness, and is very limited, and through its limitation, unreal. Yet this view we take to be the REAL universe.  The implications of the theorem are enormous. Something can be in two places at once. Apparently distant objects, or people, are intricately linked in an immediate way. There is no separate existence as we previously thought. Our view of the world is not one supported by the facts of physics. Time and space are transcended. David Bohm, an eminent physicist, goes as far as to say that all things in our observable universe are inextricable linked. Nothing has separate existence.

In wider awareness you leave the limited view of the three dimensional world most of us are trapped in, and enter a world beyond time and space. So forget the clumsy explanations of telepathy and precognition, for they are explanations from the body’s limited senses. Beyond time we are aware of all time, past, present and future – all at once. So we do not look into the future, but are it. Our body life is to learn important lessons by being locked in time, space and our body, with its gender and limitations.

It helps to think of the unconsciousness as an ever shifting, growing and dynamic source of personal awareness. because it transcends time and space, and is a huge potential, it can let information drip into the individual mind, as long as that mind can drop preconceptions. In a way the future, viewed from the individual mind, slowly educates the smaller individual mind.

But some of us are born with the ability to see into other dimensions, I call it Waking Lucid Dreaming. Such people as Eileen Garrett, an Irish born woman who had what was called psychic ability that she gradually explored; and Edgar Cayce an amazing man who was truly a natural genius. The Irish, Native Americans and many native people have the gift of seeing more than others. See Waking Lucid Dreaming

But as the cosmic mind of the unconscious creative life process is formless, it expresses these new ideas to individual minds in forms it understands. We see this is psychic abilities, so if a person believes in spirits, saints or great individuals. the new ideas will be shown as coming from those forms.

Awareness moves or is known at different levells or different ways. As a person we may be aware of a difficulty or illnes that has no physical cause, a psychosomatic illness. Often this type of illness is an attempt to deal with the psychological difficulty causing it. So allowing it to express, as described in LifeStream can let it begin to surface, that allows it to move to the next level, which is expressing as a gesture or partical posture or even as strange mmovements by the limbs. After that it expresses as dreams which are symbols which can be explored. This is still not a full release. The last level is when what had been deeply unconscious, then symbolised, now rises into consciousness and is capable of being verbalised or thought about and analysed. This often is accompanied by strong emtional feelings or expression.

An interesting example of these four stages and how someone can work through them is given by Wilhelm Reich. When the abdominal tensions of a patient were released the man found his body making spontaneous movements. These were allowed and the movements gradually led the man to take on the posture of an animal – he and Reich both felt it to be a fish. This puzzled both of them as to it meaning, but as the movements continued the man first realised he felt like a fish caught on a hook and line, then suddenly, that was how he felt in regard to his mother.

As can be plainly seen, the first level is seen in the example as the man’s unconscious abdominal tensions, built into his physical structure. When these are loosened and considered by the mans conscious attention, and the spontaneous self-regulatory process is allowed to function, level two manifests as movement and gesture. This moves to level three where the movements are recognised as a symbol – the fish. Then the fourth level, insight and understanding are achieved when the man realises the fish represents previously unconscious feelings he has about his mother. At this point he can verbalise and analyse. I believe that being aware of such facts enables us more easily to open ourselves to the process of self-regulation and trust what it produces. It is not by thinking about a dream that makes it known but by working with the process that has taken it from the psychosomatic, through the postural upwards to the dream level. See Opening to Life – Lucidity – Life Will and Conscious Will

See Dimensions of Human Experience – Opening to Life – Lucidity – Life Will and Conscious Will

 

Life Will and Conscious Will

In life and sleep we have two powerful actions working in us. The first is our waking experience based on having a body, its limitations, vulnerabilities and a particular gender. Our second is the power that gave us life and continues to express as spontaneous movement in dreams, in our breathing and heartbeat – our life. This I have given the description as the Life Will.

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

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

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

This Life Will or motivator has been active for millions of years and we see it working all the time in animals. We are partly split in half because we are often opposed to what our Life Will – our natural instincts – in us wants. So the only way to express what is our best interests for us, is in dreams, when our conscious will is largely passive or we able by being passive and receptive to allow the Life Will to move us, speak through us, exercise us and generally expand our awareness and so grow as a person.

Life Will created your body and pre-existed you as a person you know today. It was working in you prior to your ability to speak or know in the way you do now. But of course it has fantastic wisdom and skills, as can be seen in animals as instinctive knowledge. Such knowledge, that allows all life forms to do the amazing things they do, is not by our conscious thinking using words, but by a form if direct knowing and abilites learn from their peers. But when that is added to our own conscious awareness our ability to know is magnified enormously, as demonstrated by Edgar Cayce already mentioned

But we have to remember that having a personality with self awareness is a very new thing and has only existed for a short time. Before that we were like animals that lived only in the Life Will – what we usually call instincts. So the development of self awareness was and is an immense step, and leaves us very vulnerable, and still does. Look around at the number of people who have to take anti-depressants, or who have to use alcohol every day, or smoke or take other drugs – all means of facing the difficulty of meeting self awareness.

That is actually the story of the Garden of Eden. At first we were all living in an instinctive Life Will state, having no decisions to face and all directions automatically handled instinctively. But when we left the our instinctive condition/the Garden of Eden, by having developed our own will, we felt naked and afraid – in the words of Genesis. See Secret Bible

So we are in a situation in which we have only a limited awareness instead of the amazing wider world of the unconscious – the Life Will when allied with our personal awareness. We are in general very small creatures, and when we begin to meet the enormous world that we left in the Garden, and we meet it with human personality, it often frightens us because we are so unused to it. See Opening to Life

Tony Crisp – Many Sides of T

Listed below are the several links about Tony

Despite the wonderful things I write about here. I wish to stress that I am an ordinary person, who has lived a very ordinary life, working at such things as a photographer, nine years as a kitchen porter, and then many years as a plumber, decorator and handyman. I learned from my experiences that every person has within them the wonder that I was privileged to experience. I feel that nobody should make out they are in some way better than others, or more spiritual, for as I saw, we are all born with the same amazing potential. Okay some of us carry a very heavy load, but that doesn’t make them less superior.

I had very little education as I was asked to leave school as soon as I reached fifteen. I believe that any education I received has come from reading and from the wonder of learning to be like a keyboard on which something more inclusive than my normal personality could play.

The only reason these experiences came to me was that for nine years I tried to become an open heart. I allowed all of my emotions and physical feelings, pleasure as well as pain. I tried to learn not to repress emotions or hold my breath as so many do. As Jung said, “Do not edit what emerges. Do nothing but let things happen.” That is what I tried to learn for nine years before I broke through.

A Dream That Changed My Life

Autobiography of a Premature Baby

Biographical Information

Call of Nature

Catherine and Tony

 Chris Campbell Interviews Tony

Correspondence Between Emily & Tony

Criticism –  Answers To

Did I Become An Alien?

Dream Exploration – An audio example of Tony exploring a dream 

Features Found on Site

Follow Me Up the Mountain a video of Tony really revealing his feelings about his life’s work.

Going Beyond

House of the Ancestors

How I Became A Virgin

I’m Not Normal

Integration – Work on others

Interview by Maxine Birch With Tony

Interview with a Sex Worker

Interviews with Tony

Life’s Little Secrets

Lighthearted look at my teens

List of Tony’s Poems

Lucidity

Lumpkin – The Baby Who Became Tony

Meetings with the Christ

Mind of a Newborn

Parenting Yourself

Recovery from a Life of Pain

Remembering My Birth

The Awful Pain of Loss Transformed

Things I Wished I Had Had Been Taught Earlier in My Life

Thrown out of school 

Tony’s Biographical Information

Tony’s Books

Tony’s Experience of Stroke

Tony’s Poems

Tony’s Photographs

Tony’s Stories

Tony’s Story – 8 Months After His Stroke

End User – An Unusual Life

Vicky’s interesting Communications With Tony

Videos of Tony

What is the most interesting dream that you have been asked about?

Yoga and Relaxation

 

Parenting Yourself

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 loved mother/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.

So, I had to learn to parent myself in way that I could raise myself into a non dependent, non-grasping and non-jealous adult. I had a sort of mantra which I held in mind when things got tough – “Love without grasping – Power without breaking or bending other lives – Wisdom through which love can flow.”

To be able to parent oneself you need honesty to see the faults your parents live in, raising you, and also to be capable of seeing your own failures in raising any of your own children. Strange as it may seem, most of us are often terribly judgmental, impatient and angry with ourselves, and so this would be a tragic thing to raise yourself with. Also we are awful at admitting our own faults, all of which make us inadequate parents, and not good at self parenting. The fundamental needs of childhood are almost never met by modern parenting within the environment of today’s commercial and industrial world. See Ages of Love

But through simple self-observation one gradually arrives at a form of insight which leads to a transcending of oneself as you stood prior to the insights. One may even arrive at a massive altered state of awareness – an insight into the impermanence of your present personality, and the experience of liberation arising from it. See Self Observation – Opening to Life

Lucidity

 

	When I was 15 I started a new phase of the long journey of my life – I am now 83. At that time I experienced something extraordinary – I went to sleep but remained awake. At eighty I am still discovering the depth of meaning in that experience – no, it was not lucid dreaming, for in that condition people are still lost in their dream images and are only slightly awake.
Tony at a bit past fifteen

I want to explain step by step, because we are all lost in a form of dream, for I am writing about Lucidity – a clear understanding, allowing them to explain simply.

The First Step

The first step is to realise that we are probably all almost totally blind, deaf and senseless. That is because now it is shown that we are only aware of 1% of the spectrum of light, we can only hear 1% of audible sound, and our sense of smell doesn’t even get near to what dogs and cats can detect. So, we live in a dimmed down awareness of the world we exist in. The amazing sense we do have is self awareness and a complex language.

That is strange, because if you ask anyone, “Who are you?” they give answers such, “I am a woman” or “I am a male” – both of which are descriptions of their body, not of their SELF. Or they say such things as I am the President, I am a loser – an alcoholic – a child – an electrician – a father – etc. all descriptions of their activity, social position or their age – never the vital description of who they are fundamentally.

The reason for that inability is because we are all asleep to what we are.

 

The Second Step

I took the second step when I began to explore memory. Realising that scientific investigation found that everyone dreams several times a night, and I wondered why most of us cannot remember any dreams, or very few of them. Knowing the experience of totally waking up in sleep and that we were missing half of our life experience, I investigated how memory works. I wasn’t from studying what others had said about memory, but by observing it, a sort of field study. I carefully analysed how I recalled things. I saw that a very special state of mind is necessary. This became obvious when we try to recall ordinary memories that usually are so available. Or if in a situation such as an exam, where questions need a speedy reply, and a great deal rests upon being able to answer, one might very well find known information beyond recall due to one’s fear of forgetting, or overactive attempt to remember. This is often due to feeding into our memory system a wrong re-call stimuli. Or, put more simply, we may feel sure the name we are trying to remember begins with ‘B’ and we are searching through the ‘Bs’; while in fact the name is Miller, and thus should have been called up under ‘M’. So holding the ‘B’ in mind has actually blocked the memory. Then, as soon as we drop the search. and thus drop the blockage, up pops the right name.

Therefore a strong desire to remember is as blocking as the fear of failure. Particular emotional or mental biases are also causes for blocking. Also the search is conditioned by information that is thought to be right, such as our search through the ‘Bs’.

So, remembering a dream in this way is a tremendous break through into the immense and hidden world of our consciousness. This method of penetrating the great mystery of sleep also makes nonsense of the many meditation techniques with a formed goal in mind. I learned much later that Carl Jung, in writing a commentary on the traditional Chinese meditation method – The Secret of the Golden Flower – said, the great secret is to do nothing but let things happen.

The question I asked was – What did I dream or experience during my sleep?

Having formed the question, one now has to realise that as one has never been conscious of the answer, one is looking for information one has never known. Therefore, all attempts to search for the answer must be avoided, as one does not know where or how this information is filed. The question must be held steadily without even a hope of response, or fear of failure. We have to leave ourselves wide open to all images and ideas. I can only describe this as standing in a stream of images and ideas, letting them all drift past without interference until the right one comes. When the actual memory comes, there will be an immediate realisation that this was a dream, despite all the other images. Why this is so I cannot explain. But just as, when the right name is remembered, there is a feeling of sureness, fitting the name to the face; so there is immediate sureness fitting the memory to the question.

 

Results

The results soon appeared, and I could magically conjured up what was previously invisible. Soon another unsought result began to appear – lucid dreams. It seemed that breaking open the seal of forgetfulness, had taken awareness into the dream world itself.

The following example is fairly typical of the dreams I had.

“My family and I got out of our car. As we talked I realised there was a motorbike where my car had been. I said to everyone, ‘There was a car here a moment ago, now it’s a motorbike. Do you know what that means? It means we are dreaming.’ So I asked them if they realised they were dreaming. They got very vague and didn’t reply. I asked them again and felt very clearly awake.”

As you can see, I was awake but clearly still in the images of dreaming. I know many lucid dreamers will say their own dreams are full of meeting with great people of the past, or they can change the images to whatever thy wish. Wonderful, but they are still locked in dream images.

But it didn’t take long before another level of lucidity appeared.

“In my dream I was watching a fern grow. It was small but opened very rapidly. As I watched I became aware that the fern was an image representing a process occurring within myself, one I grew increasingly aware of as I watched. Then I was fully awake in my dream and realised that my dream, perhaps any dream, was an expression in images of actual events occurring unconsciously in myself. I felt enormous excitement, as if I were witnessing something of great importance.”

In remembering my dreams I broke through the barrier between our conscious self, our personality and the unconscious. In doing so I was still dealing with dreams and their imagery. However, you cannot keep digging without going deeper still. Carl Jung said what we find within us is as natural, as limitless, and as powerful as the stars.

There is a whole universe to discover within you. Go explore it!

 “I felt a slow dawning of something soft and beautiful in me. It emerged from a deep silence and filled me with a feeling of radiance, as if my being was gently shining. I literally felt and saw a shining light from within. I felt certain this is the direction I am going, and this radiance would alter the way I relate to others and also penetrate them. I felt I could love easily and without grasping, and it didn’t matter what happened in the relationship.”

 

Steps Onward

I began to see and understand, that what we call our personality, is a tiny point of awareness dipped into the sensory experience of the body. Behind that point lies an immensity that in one sense is not at all mysterious. The immensity is there for all of us to see as the existence and workings of our body and consciousness, that we are mostly unaware of.

Also, over the years, I experienced a growing sureness, that we, our sense of having separate existence, our personality, is a tiny part of a huge and powerful under-being; a being that is incredibly creative – after all it is the creative action that brought us into our life and continues to keep our body and mind working – and with wisdom beyond our understanding, but is not an intellectual or word based consciousness.

The next barrier to pass through was dream symbolism. People try to understand their dreams by thinking about them, but dreams arose millions of years ago in creatures without any ability to think; they were creatures who reacted and had only a small behavioural range. We too are living life forms whose dreams arise out of the ancient workings that are how Life has dreamt for a long time. Here is how the Life process deals with this when it is allowed to surface.

 “I was dreaming and woke up in sleep. I was then aware of being in the level of dream images and wondered what was beyond it. Immediately I was in another level in which I could directly observe the subtle energy workings of my body. I saw that I had a slight infection in my lungs, and observed how  it was like  watching fluid moving through a plant. It was a healing action. Then I also observed how the energy between my trunk and head was blocked slightly in my neck. In trying  to understand what the block was I realised it was an attitude I have of being proud or stiff necked. If it were not dealt with I could see it would lead to a serious  illness in my neck.”

In that one short experience a massive amount of information is shown. Firstly there was no dream imagery of a person and body, but there was direct insight that was otherwise unavailable. I had never before realised I was ‘stiff necked’. I had certainly had several neck problems, but had no clue what caused them; and the information that if it were not dealt with I could see it would lead to a serious  illness in my neck was serious. In later explorations I several times saw maggots coming out of my neck and saw that if these were not cleared it could lead to cancer. They were later cleared by using Opening to Life

As can be seen it  is this level of  insight that can radically change one’s life. But there is still more.

 “I became lucid in my dream and realised that I could move deeper. I was already at the level of seeing into the inner workings of the body so asked the question is there anything else. Suddenly I was plunged into bodiless awareness. I had been here many years previous and so I was at ease  with it. In the past I  had seen that this was the apparent nothingness that is the primal level, and out of it everything flowed. But being curious I asked if there was anything beyond this. I was amazed at what happened next. I was at  the same time bodiless, space less and timeless existence, and also here and now in everyday waking  life. I had always thought that the physical existence and the holy of holies, the Core Self, were completely and utterly separated and beyond each other. And here I was experiencing the marriage of such enormous opposites.

It was like Blake described it, “To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.”

 That is true lucidity.

 Summing Up

• In life and sleep we have two powerful actions working in us. The first is our waking experience based on having a body, its limitations, vulnerabilities and a particular gender.

Our second is the power that gave us life and continues to express as dreams.

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

• This Life Will can move us to speak, to move our body, and in fact do things that we cannot do with our Conscious Will. As Freud pointed out this inner will has full access to our memories. It can do so many other things that are described else where.

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

• Life Will created your body and pre-existed you as a person you know today. It was working in you prior to your ability to speak or know in the way you do now. But of course it has fantastic wisdom and skills, as can be seen in animals.  See Life’s Little Secrets 

The experience mentioned at the beginning is:

In 1952, when I was fifteen, and already deeply interested in the possibilities of the human mind, I took a course in deep relaxation. It was a postal course by Willian Ousby titled Self Hypnotism, but it was actually advanced relaxatiion. I practised every day for three months, tensing my muscles, relaxing them, then passing my awareness over and over my body, dropping the feeling of tension. After three months I was quite proficient. One evening, after coming home from dining out with friends, I went to bed thinking I would leave my usual practice, but in the end decided to practice even though it was late. After going over my body several times I suddenly lost my right arm. I had no sensation of it other than space, hugeness. Then I lost my left arm, and – my whole body. It was like falling through a trap-door into the stars. I had no sense of having a body. Thoughts had ceased, except for a murmur apparently a thousand miles away. Yet in blackness, in immensity, in absence of thought I existed vitally as bodiless awareness. We think that we are our body because we have no other experience of our existence. So, we identify with our body and so are terrified of dying – which in a sense is what we do every time we go to sleep and leave our sense of a body behind.

After that day I could for while repeat the experience almost any time I sat down and used the relaxation technique. I felt at the time, and still believe it correct, that I had fallen asleep yet remained awake. Waking, critical awareness, had been taken through the magic doors of sleep into a universe it seldom ever sees – deep dreamless sleep. See Dimensions of Human Experience

I realise that what I describe must seem like a strange and even imaginary world to many people – except that it isn’t. But many people do not give three months of their life in everyday practice at the age of 15 to break through the barriers of our physical senses. Looking back I realise that I had dropped every thing – I did nothing and let things happen. At the time I had not really grasped the how and meaning if it. See Criticism –  Answers To

A few more experiences gained in the same way. 

“Suddenly, toward the end of exploring my dream, I leaped beyond anything I had ever experienced before. I knew just as clearly as in ordinary life I know my name, that instead of being someone separated from everybody else living a certain day in time, My real self was a river that flowed through all time. I had always existed and was involved in all history. With an amazing heightened awareness I could see the influence from this timeless self flowing through all my present life, subtly shaping it. The things I had chosen to do or work at were all connected as a working out of ancient or timeless influences, or an attempt to change them.”

“I am in a landscape and notice that everything is brown; the whole world is brown and lifeless. There is also a feeling of solemnity or dullness. I have enough lucidity to wonder why the world of my dream is so brown and dull. As I ask this I become more aware of what feeling the brownness expresses. It is seriousness – with no room for humour or fun. The feeling deepens, real enough and clear enough to look at and understand. I see it is my father’s attitude to life that I have unconsciously inherited. I realise how anxious he always felt about life, and how I took this in. That is how I became a ‘brown’ person. I see too that I do not need to be either brown or serious anymore.

Then the landscape changes. There are trees, plants and animals in brilliant colour. I wonder what this means, and the landscape begins to spin until the colours blend and shimmer. Suddenly my body seems to open to them, as if they are spinning inside of me, and with a most glorious feeling, a sensation of vibrating energy pours up my trunk to my head. With this comes realisation. I see how stupid I have been in my brown, anxious existence, how much life I have held back. The animals and plants are the different forces in my being that blend into energy and awareness. I feel I am capable of doing almost anything, like loving, writing a song, painting, telepathy, or speaking with the dead. This sparkling vibrating energy is life itself and can, if I learn to work with it, grow into any ability or direction I choose. I wake with a wonderful sense of my possibilities.”

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

True this has dream images, but such enormous truth is shown. But the real lucidity is done while fully awake, by penetrating dream symbols, or learning to switch between bodiless, space less and timeless existence, and the here and now everyday waking  life.