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The Flux

Lately I haven’t been sleeping very restlessly, and I experienced a dream that must have started very early in the morning and seemed to continue for hours.

In a sense, the dream was very simple, and the continuation was simply a variety of ways that I approached the central experience.

In the dream I was with a woman who was on my right. I have no clear picture of her face and no sense of who she was. But I did feel close to her emotionally, and we were holding hands. Together we walked into a large building. I have the impression of it being a square tall block, like an old-fashioned office building, but quite nice looking and well preserved. I believe my woman companion had been in the place before. I say this because I was feeling slightly uncertain and she was feeling confident and supportive.

Inside the front door of the building was a wide passageway probably about 15 or 20 feet wide. Not far along this passage something completely filled the space ahead. It looked like frogs spawn, but much more ethereal, perhaps like patterns of energy with just a little material substance.

With no real hesitation the woman and I walked into this wall of energy. I believe we knew more or less what would happen – that we would be absorbed and become wholly a part of this life form. As we walked into it I was trying to analyse what was happening and what it felt like. I lost all sense of my body as a dense form, but I could still feel my partner’s hand in mine in a very delicate way – again like energy playing upon energy. Also, I felt that we could decide upon our own movement, and it seemed as if we were still walking within this life form. So, I knew we could walk out again and return to our solid body form.

From here on all sorts of speculations and perhaps what might amount to experiments on my part developed. I understood that when one entered this living moving energy it totally penetrated one’s being, and one’s body was transformed and healed of any weakness or irregularities. I also felt that it transformed one’s personality also. I was experiencing being in and out of the energy, and while out of it I felt great peace and well-being.

Later I realised that in contact with an individual one could merge with that individual and experience the same feeling, and the loss of the dense body form. I shared this with some people, and gradually came to realise that it was only when you had enough people in the group that a permanent energy flux, such as we had first walked into, could exist. So, I was going about trying to create another house with a permanent energy flux going on in it. If there were a lot of people involved, there would always be sufficient numbers within the flux to keep it active. But I realised one needed at least six people to give a large enough energy flux for others to see and enter. I also realised that people who had not entered the flux would feel threatened by it and would try to destroy it and the building it was in. So, I realised there had to be some level of secrecy.

 

What did you feel in this dream – or what emotions or feelings were experienced?

There were lots of feelings in this dream, but perhaps the major one’s were slight anxiety in approaching what I call the flux. Also there was a sense of excitement, wonder in being completely absorbed by the flux, and yet still maintaining a sense of identity. There was the feeling that I wanted to do something about this wonderful discovery. I wanted to tell other people, so I felt motivated to get other people interested or involved.

What is the main action or theme in the dream?

The theme is that of experiencing something new. It has secondary themes, of wanting to share the experience, of exploring this new experience.

What is your role in the dream?

My role is that of participating in something that the woman is taking me into or showing me. Then my role switches to that of organiser or perhaps teacher.

Are you active or passive in the dream?

I have several variations in the dream. First of all I am passively going along with what is being shown me – or could I say actively going along with what a shown me? But then I am active in organising other people to participate in the flux.

Are you meeting the things you fear in your dream?

Yes, because I felt anxious at the beginning of the dream, I can definitely say I am meeting that anxiety in going forward into the flux. So, I guess the thing that I feared was the unknown, the new, and I faced these things.

What is the background to the dream?

I can’t identify any particular background to this dream, except for the fact that I and constantly thinking about possibilities of the mind, of human existence. Of late I tend to have an image of this in that might be described as follows –as a human being I am a miraculous end product of life. My image is of a complex and wonderful vehicle with endless possibilities. Like any complex piece of equipment aspects of my possibilities can be stimulated or what about by initiating the correct command or stimulus. During my life some extraordinary things have happened. However, many of these are difficult to define in the sense of what triggered them. What is it I did, or was done to me, that pressed the right button to stimulate the result?

So, I have come to believe that in if only we knew how to approach and our own being we could produce the most astounding responses. For instance, my experience of my consciousness existing at a great distance from my body is one such example. The ability that happened several times to “reading” the personality structure or inner life of other people, is another. So, I wonder if this is a background to the dream. A sort of exploring of possibilities.

Can you amplify the dream?

This question suggests the standing in the role of the different parts of the dream. For instance the woman who led me, in the dream, appears as a person independent of myself. But of course she is an aspect of my dream, and therefore of myself. What part of my own feelings, my own perceptions of and thoughts did I clothe with her image?

So, if I stand in her image, if I imagine myself as her, how will I describe myself?

I am a feeling of pleasure. I feel alive and confident– alive with feelings, with hope. I know, from past experience, of this wonderful possibility that I am leading Tony toward. I want him to experience it for himself, to be able to move in and out of it easily. I am his hope and his positive feelings.

Now, if I imagine myself as the flux this is how I describe myself –

I do not have any one form. As energy and I can flow into or create almost any form, any situation. If I have a name, it is Possibility. If I have a direction, it is simply to Be. I am Tony’s experience of moving beyond the limitations of bodily form, of personality. He consistently explores in recent times the meaningless of thinking that his personality has any lasting reality. He sees it as something constantly shifting and changing, and the only reality the process of life that underlies existence. So, I am his experience, and his intuition, of the possibilities beyond the identification with the body and a personality.

Summarise

I guess I have already summarised in amplifying the dream. But to really state it in a few words, this is my exploration of what the possibilities might be as we relinquish our sense of identity with our body and personality. The dream affords me a realm of experience in which the holds of physical sensations and preconceptions are weakened. This allowed me the wonder of touching this beautiful experience. I have met this experience many times in waking, but my question is always, “How can I maintain this experience more fully while awake?” I am not sure if this dream is a reply to that question. I mean I don’t see that it is giving any concrete answers to the question. But it does suggest that I am “walking toward,” or moving towards this experience.

Past Dwelling Places

That is a phrase used in some features I write, ‘She or he was one of my past dwelling places’.

It is an indication that the subject has become aware of what is often called a past life – reincarnation.

The strange thing is that every natural thing is unique. As humans we all have a unique DNA sequence, a unique finger print, unique bodily features and also our personality, the thing we refer to as ME is also incredibly unique, having millions of life experiences that are completely unrepeatable – so how can anything be born again?

What I see is that our life is all recorded in what people have named the unconscious, the core self, the spirit, the akashic record, the collective unconscious and many other names. As such, as I am fond of saying,

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

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

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

Such collective memory creates a new being from memories that fit the time of its birth, the situation it is born into and the many past dwelling places it has known.

Example: I experienced a wonderful dream about a very ancient and large house. It was such a pointed and significant dream, for I looked through a hole in the floor of this grand old house and tried to bring up things belonging to my forbears using a rope, with no luck. But while exploring what meaning the dreamt held within it, I realised I had the key to be able to open the door to my ancestors’ belongings that were all hidden in myself, and I began to see what the message of my ancestors told me. But I had explored that way before, and quickly went deeper, finding myself in the great catacombs or cavern. As I walked I passed a gravestone a on my right, I suddenly realised myself as the woman who had been buried there.  It was an extraordinary experience to suddenly know myself as a woman and realise I as a woman had died in enormous pain of losing all the family, all that was dear to her. I felt her pain to the point of trying to gouge my legs and bleed to ease the pain.

After suffering such agony for a time, it gradually calmed down, and now it was no longer alive with her pain but was an empty grave, so I passed by it.

As we drew level with the tomb an enormous change occurred in me.  Suddenly I became a woman.  It was no longer imagination.  I was now completely experiencing myself as a woman whose tomb we had approached.  As such I was torn by an immense pain of loss.  As my complete identification deepened my body curled up with the pain as I was torn by wretched crying.  Suzanne told me my voice changed as I cried out again and again for release from the pain of losing all my children, my husband, even my parents.  My hands were clawing my legs in an effort to express the misery, and I was screaming that I could not bear to live any longer with such pain.  I cried out to God to take me, for there was nothing left for me to live for.  “Why?  Why did this happen to me?  Why has everything I loved been taken from me”

There was no response to these awful cries and tearing sobs.  But slowly a shift began.  It seemed to me as an observer witnessing this awful pain that by entering this place the spirit of that woman had woken in me.  But as she had died in such unresolved agony of loss, that is what was met when she awoke.  But gradually she realised she was alive again in a new way.  She began to recognise that I was holding her within me.  Because I was not frightened of pain and emotions, the misery could play itself out in me.  And because my understanding of what was happening flowed into her awareness, she slowly saw and felt her loss in a different way.  In fact, we were both realising she was experiencing resurrection, and that in turn meant there was no final death as believed by many.  Therefore, there was no loss as she had originally felt it.

At this point, something truly incredible occurred.  She and I both realised she was one of my past dwelling places.  But for her the viewpoint was slightly different; for she saw me as a continuation of a life that she had failed to be a part of because of the awful pain of loss. It had kept her from flowing into what was her future as my life.

Something very similar happens in nature. Most of us are familiar with flower bulbs which are often sold. As such thy have been planted before and produced flowers, but when we plant them they flower again and produced a flower that carried within it all that the bulb produced before, but also the countless generations before that, yet the flower that grows is not a reproduction of any that went before it, but a unique creation.

The Way of Mary

So the virgin posture of the soul is an attempt to bring about an inner state, an inner feeling of fertility and love towards your invisible and unknown potential – purity from preconceived ideas – the offering of your whole being as material for your potential to use in creating a new self – the act of supplication in which you let go of your thoughts, emotions and body, so they can be played upon as a piano or organ by Life. There should arise a feeling of warmth toward and desire for the unseen Life, openness to any possibility Life may have in store for you, good or bad, allied with trust. If you have a temperament capable of this, then make it an act of love, a real devotion, approaching ones darling.

Quoted From – https://dreamhawk.com/news/the-inner-path-to-christ/

110 Years of Youth Through Yoga

110 Years of Youth Through Yoga

PREFACE

WHAT IS YOUTH?

YOUTH REPRESENTS A STATE OF UNIMPAIRED

HEALTH.

WHAT IS YOGA?

YOGA IS AN ANCIENT INDIAN PRACTICE OF UTILISING THE PURE ESSENCE OF THE AIR WE BREATHE, KNOWN AS THE “PRANA”.

“PRANA” IS THE SOURCE OF ALL VITALITY UPON WHICH WE BASE OUR YOUTHFULNESS.

BY THE PRACTICE OF YOGA THE “PRANA” CAN BE BROUGHT UNDER CONTROL TO PRODUCE THE GREATEST BENEFITS — PHYSICALLY, MENTALLY AND SPIRITUALLY, AND TO RELIEVE PAIN AND DISCOMFORT.

 

YOGA IN MANY WAYS IS THE POWER OF THOUGHT.

This “thought power” is directed by CONCENTRA TION, and it naturally follows that before you can intelligently direct THOUGHT POWER you must learn HOW TO CONCENTRATE.

The best time for concentration is first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

Spend at least 15 minutes, twice a day, and make it a regular practice.

Please do not do it only when you feel like it and miss two or three days at a time, and think you can make up for lost time by ‘doing double one day and a little the next. You must be persistent and consistent. You will find the continued effort will produce the quickest and best results.

The more perfect you become at concentrating the sooner the definite results begin to manifest themselves, and once you find you are getting results, no matter how slight they may ‘be at the beginning, then you will find yourself making rapid progress. You will have proved to your own satisfaction that you now have the knowledge and power to control and this will enable you to make your hopes, aims and ambitions become realities.

FOREWORD

ABOUT MYSELF ANI) HOW I CAME TO BE INTRODUCED TO YOGA.

No doubt you have recently read in your Daily Press, that I have attained the wonderful old age of ONE HUNDRED and TEN YEARS. I was born on July 11th and baptised November 10th, in the year of our Lord, 1829.

You will find the authentic records in the Register of the Church of Saint George, Bloomsberry, London. These have been confirmed by the authorities of the Westminster Hospital, London, who ‘have taken great interest in my general health, particularly my eyesight which started to fail me in my 109th year.

I have no doubt many people when they read that I am 110 years old, will conjure up in their mind’s eye a wizened old man, either being wheeled about in a bath chair, or bed ridden, dependent upon any kind soul to help me about.

Let me at once put you right on these points. I certainly am not decrepit and helpless—and can boast I am quite a long way from any such deplorable condition. I am still very active; my brain still has the quality of being able to function quite normally; my general health is excellent. I admit my eyes trouble me slightly, but with the aid of glasses which I only started wearing recently I can still do my own writing and get about unaided. I still enjoy my food and I am not a total abstainer.

My memory can take me back to the time when I was five years old. I have seen many changes during more than a century of the march of time, and during my calling as a journalist I have managed to meet many great people and seen unique sights in many parts of the world. My earliest vivid memory takes me back to the burning of the Houses of Parliament in London, also the ascension of Queen Victoria to the throne. I have conversed with the great Charles Dickens and the equally great Disraeli. I can remember the distressing illness of the Prince of (Wales (afterwards King Edward VII) and the great rejoicing of the populace of London when he recovered. There are hundred’s of other incidents in my life which to the ordinary person may seem outstanding, ‘but to myself just seem like simple events. But the episode in my life which I can never forget is the one that was the means of my introduction to YOGA.

I will give you briefly the outline of the remarkable manner in which I made the acquaintance of the venerable teacher of the Yoga philosophy, and to which meeting I at tribute my longevity.

It happened in India. I was making a visit to the Holy City of Benares in’ the year 1852, during a time when the natives were pouring into the town in their thousands to celebrate one of the annual feasts. I happened to be in the vicinity of a skirmish between some Hindus and Moslems, and seeing a mob beating a poor old man ‘unmercifully’, I interfered. As I was a white man my commands were obeyed and they left him alone, ‘but not before he had suffered severely and was nearly dying.

I got him removed from the crowd and helped to wash and bind some of his cuts and wounds.

This old man happened to be a Great Guru” (the highest grade of Yogi), whose name was Swami Ghakrananda.

In return for being instrumental in saving this man’s life, he offered me what he considered to be the greatest blessing one mortal can bestow upon another—The PHILOSOPHY of YOGA. He became my teacher, and at that time he was ONE HUNDRED and FORTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD.

You can now understand why I say I date my real life from the day I came in contact with that wonderful ‘master of the YOGA Cult. It is a system of philosophy combined with a series of ‘bodily, mental and spiritual exercises that have been practised in India for thousands of years.

Should take a period of eight weeks to complete.

Lesson 1.         TO PUT BODY, MIND AND SPIRIT IN TUNE WITH THE ETHER.

Lesson 2.         TO INCREASE MUSCULAR ENERGY AND IMPART BODILY VIGOUR.

Lesson 3.         TO INCREASE RHYTHM AND HARMONY OF BODY AND MIND.

Lesson 4.         SELF CONTROL AND POWER THROUGH MENTAL AND PHYSICAL RELAXATION.

Lesson 5.         TO REDUCE OBESITY AND PROMOTE LITHESOMENESS OF FIGURE.

Lesson 6.         TO PROMOTE BEAUTY OF TONE IN SPEAK­ING AND SINGING VOICE.

Lesson 7.         TO CHARGE THE ENTIRE SYSTEM WITH A SPECIAL SUPPLY OF “PRANA”, ENABLING IT TO MEET EXTRA CALLS ON PHYSICAL AND MENTAL ENERGY.

Lesson 8.         POWER THOUGH RELAXATION.

LESSON 1 – FIRST WEEK

TO PUT BODY, MIND AND SPIRIT IN TUNE WITH THE ETHER

On retiring, remove pillow and lie flat on your back; place your hands lightly on the pit of your stomach, close your mouth and through the nostrils inhale a slow, silent, deep breath.

Concentrate upon the idea that this breath is passing through the bones of your knees, the bones of the legs and arms, and thence draw it, in imagination, upward until it fills every part of the chest and lungs. Hold the breath there for five seconds, then open your mouth and exhale forcibly.

Inhale another ‘breath as before, hold it for five seconds and exhale. While holding the breath affirm to yourself in thought, “Through all my organs I am drawing vitality from the PRANA.” (This is the life substance of the ether that pervades this universe.)

The exercise as given will attune your entire system to the infinite potency of the vital force that governs all existence, and prepare you for further exercises that will expel all feeling of uneasiness, discomfort, and any pain you may be suffering in whatever part of your body.

Repeat this exercise 12 times. Then relax your limbs until they feel limp, and avoid all rigidity of the muscles.

Choose your easiest mode of lying clown, close your eyes and repeat ‘mentally to yourself, “Oh, I am so sleepy, so very sleepy; I can’t keep awake any longer.” Repeat this affirmation and you will fall asleep and enjoy a splendid rest.

On waking in the morning, again lie flat on your back without a pillow. Place your hands behind the small of your back and clasp them, raise your legs and feet and your entire trunk two inches above the bed, and inhale a quiet, long breath through your nostrils. Draw the breath up to the chest and retain it for 15 seconds. Then open your mouth and, expel the breath forcibly while you allow yourself to sink down limp and loosely on the bed.

Repeat this exercise 12 times. At first you will tied it rather difficult, but persist and it will come easily. You will feel all through your ‘body a sensation as of electricity passing through it; a tingling, glowing feeling. This shows that the influx of PRANA is benefiting you and is vitalising your system as nothing else can.

At the end of a week of these morning and night exercises you will be surprised at the effect on your features and on your general expression. Your eyes will ‘be bright and sparkling, your cheeks’ will have a healthy, rosy hue, your lips will be red, and, above all, you will go through your day’s duties or pleasures with a wonderful feeling of well-being, such as no drug or cocktail could impart.

These will be your exercises for the first week, BUT, 4 bear in mind that while you are doing them you must CONCENTRATE on HEALTH, VIGOUR and HAPPINESS. Think to yourself, “I am receiving the vital essence of the all-pervading PRANA; I am strong; I am vigorous; my youthfulness is returning; I AM IN TUNE WITH THE INFINITE.”

You will be surprised at the splendid results of the quiet affirmations. They are the most perfect form of auto suggestion and they cannot fall.

There is, however, one stipulation. YOU MUST FEEL COMPLETE CONFIDENCE IN THE EFFICACY OF YOUR AFFIRMATIONS. You must not only say to yourself, “I am strong, I am radiantly ‘healthy, my youthfulness is returning,” BUT YOU MUST FEEL SURE OF IT, and as surely it will all come to pass, and you will be a new being.

BANISH ALL DOUBT FROM YOUR MIND.

 

LESSON 2 – SECOND WEEK

THIS LESSON IS TO INCREASE THE MUSCULAR ENERGY AND IMPART BODILY VIGOUR.

You must always bear in mind that YOGA is spiritual mental and physical. But do not expect ‘big muscles’ when the physical part is practised.

After you have gone through the exercises as given in Part 1, begin the second week’s exercises (in addition) in the morning on rising.

First Position. Stand erect, ‘shoulders thrown back, arms hanging limp. Through the nostrils, inhale a long, deep breath. (Inhale easily; not by spurts.)

Send the breath through every part of the trunk. Hold it for fifteen seconds and, while doing so, repeat ten times to yourself easily, quietly, but with determination, “I am imbibing the God-given PRANA, the vital essence of which the Universe is composed and it is making me fit and radiantly ‘healthy, vigorous, youthful and attractive. Tarn health, I am strength, I am youth. Nothing can daunt me, I am master of myself, and I can banish all pain, all doubt and all worry.”

Now take a good, strong walking stick or club.

Clench the top of the stick firmly in your hand and lean on it. While you are doing so, bring pressure to bear on it from the wrist downwards with a slightly vibratory movement.

While pressing on the stick bend the head and the upper part of the body slightly forward and repeat to your self the affirmations as already (described.)

Then return to the original erect posture of the ‘body and again assume the stick-clenching attitude.

Repeat this exercise ten times.

It will tune up the entire muscular system and impart a feeling of splendid self-reliance and vigour.

Always remember—You must banish all doubts about the exercises doing you good.

 

LESSON 3 – THIRD WEEK

TO JNCREASE RHYTHM ANI) HARMONY OF BODY AND MIND.

Lie flat on your back on your bed after having re moved the pillow. Place your fingers on your wrist after the manner of a doctor and ascertain your PULSE BEATS.

Having done so, inhale the ‘ether as before directed, count three pulse beats while inhaling, count six pulse ‘beat’s while retaining, and count three pulse beats while exhaling the breath.

All the time, but especially so while retaining the breath, repeat the affirmations of health, youthfulness, vigour and attractiveness.

This exercise should be carried out fifteen times.

You will be astonished at the splendid, revitalising effect, but you must be particular about ascertaining your pulse beats and in breathing in time with them.

You may at first find it somewhat difficult to establish the correct pulsation, but persist a little and you will overcome the difficulty.

You will then have conquered the most important step on the road to perfect self-control, and remember perfect self-control means mastery over yourself and even over circumstances, always, of course, within the limitations pre scribed to human beings by a higher power.

The entire Universe is based on ‘rhythm. RHYTHM is the potent agent that keeps it going; without rhythm the Universe would go to pieces, and now that you have establish ed rhythm ‘between your bodily, mental and spiritual forces, the rest is in your hands.

You have but to command, to affirm with absolute certainty as to results, and the health you have wished for, the youthfulness you have longed to see return, the attractive ness of features, and the lithesomeness of figure that you desire ALL WILL BE YOURS.

This is no magic, nor is it a fairy tale.

Follow the instructions carefully, and with your whole mind concentrated upon them in complete confidence, and you will conquer.

 

LESSON 4 – FOURTH WEEK

First Section.

SELF CONTROL AND POWER THROUGH MENTAL AND PHYSICAL RELAXATION.

Underlying every phase of the Yoga exercises, in’ themselves so extremely valuable, is a condition of calm and repose of mental and physical poise. This condition can be induced by relaxation of the muscles. The state of relaxation brings about a harmony between the physical, mental and spiritual elements of man that promotes not ‘only a condition of well being, but one of real power.

This relaxation is not very easy to accomplish. It needs great determination, and above all, it requires that you grasp the real meaning of the words, LET GO.

To be able to do this, you must lie down flat on your back and have the will to relax all your muscles. When these, as you will feel, are lying limp with your limbs as loose as possible, BREATHE DEEPLY and without effort three or four times. Breathe through the nostrils, and hold each breath for the count of six pulse beats. Then, without lifting the upper part of your trunk, roll over gently to one side, whilst relaxing as before.

Next, roll over to the other side, again relaxing. Mean while, imagine to yourself that all your body and all your limbs are loose and limp.

Let your arms swing loose from the elbow, shake the upper part of your arms around limp and loose. Then swing your feet alternately, loosely from the ankle.

Do the same with your legs, one after the other, swinging them loosely from the knees.

Now stand erect, relax your legs one after the other, allowing them to swing quite limp from the knee.

Raise your arms in a straight line over your -head and next let one leg after the other swing limp from the thigh.

Raise your left knee as high as possible, and then allow it to drop down by it’s own weight. Repeat this with the right knee.

Relax your head, allowing it to drop loosely forward, and then swing it backward and forwards by the motion of the upper part of the trunk.

Let the upper part of the chest fall forward quite limp.

Sit erect in a chair and relax your waist muscles. The result will be that the upper part of your body or trunk will pitch forward, as does a child’s when it falls asleep in its chair and sometimes slowly falls out of it.

These exercises impart a wonderful sense of repose; they are an invaluable antidote to nerve strain, and after a very little practice they promote a most invigorating feeling of strength and self control.

Attention must again be called to the necessity of affirming to yourself that you are receiving the desired benefit from all you are doing. All the time you are taking the exercises in the first part of this lesson repeat to yourself at intervals, “My limbs and my entire body are relaxed and limp, and free from muscular strain.”

 

In ‘the following part of this lesson REVERSE THE PROCESS.

Instead of relaxing them, gently stretch your limbs. This means contracting your muscles for a few minutes, after which you again reverse the process by relaxing them as you did before.

A simple hut splendid form of stretching is as follows—­Stand erect, your legs spread out apart. Raise yourself on your toes and stretch yourself out slowly more and more as though you intended to reach up to the ceiling.

Conclude your physical relaxation exercise by an exercise in PURELY MENTAL relaxation. Sit down in an easy relaxed attitude. Try to withdraw your mind from all outside objects, and turn them to your inward, your REAL SELF. Imagine yourself as independent of your body, but dwell on the realness of your individuality, your higher ego.

Realise to yourself that, mere atom though you are in the immensity of the Universe, you are a particle of the spirit, immortal and indestructible, eternal, a piece needed to fit into the structure of the Great All.

Turn your thoughts into that direction, and when you will to return to your ‘physical life, you will feel your body wonderfully refreshed. You will feel calm and strong and fit to undertake any task that may lie within the limits of your powers.

Your excursions into the upper regions of the mind have given you, so to speak, a renewed, lease of life, and in your revitalized state there will be no room for worry, for fear or even bodily pain.

Of course, you must not expect these results after one or two practices of the exercises.

YOGA is not miraculous. BUT—persist: have supreme confidence in your own powers, and sooner than you think, you will be surprised to find that you have really rejuvenated your life.

LESSON 5 FIFTH WEEK

TO REDUCE OBESITY AND PROMOTE

LITHESOMENESS OF FIGURE.

Lie flat on your back in bed, your pillow having been removed; take a long deep breath through your nostrils, and, in your imagination, direct the breath to the solar plexus, the region around the abdomen and the pit of stomach.

Repeat to yourself, “I am reducing my adipose deposit and my former lithesome figure is returning.”

Repeat this with a feeling of absolute confidence and certainty twelve times while you hold your breath, all the while kneading with your fingers and thumbs the parts indicated (the abdomen, the pit of the stomach, and all around).

Then raise your legs and your trunk as directed in Lesson 1 (morning exercise) and repeat the affirmations seven times.

At the end of a week of these exercises, if you carry them out as directed, and always in the spirit of absolute certainty and confidence, you will be surprised at the reduction in obesity and at the general feeling of elasticity in your limbs.

Do not forget that while you are kneading and rubbing the abdomen to draw it in and out easily without straining, at least ten times.

This helps wonderfully in the reduction of fatty deposits.

 

LESSON 6 – SIXTH WEEK

TO PROMOTE BEAUTY OF TONE IN SPEAKING AND SINGING VOICE.

Having done the exercises given in Lessons I and 2 while lying on your bed at night, in the morning adopt an erect standing attitude.

SLOWLY inhale breath through the nostrils. Retain your breath for five seconds. Open your mouth and exhale your ‘breath with a strong and vigorous push.

Repeat the intake and exhalation of the breath as directed.

Next, take a long, deep breath and retain it five seconds. Pucker your lips as if about to whistle. Then through the opening in your lips exhale some of the breath with a vigorous push, retaining some of the air in the lungs.

Then send out a little more breath and retain and exhale again until the lungs are quite empty.

You will find a great change in the tone of your voice, and remember the tone of your voice has a great influence upon the persuasive powers of your personality.

LESSON 7 • SEVENTH WEEK 

TO CHARGE THE SYSTEM ENTIRELY WITH A  SPECIAL SUPPLY OF PRANA, ENABLING IT TO MEET EXTRA CALLS ON BODILY AND MENTAL ENERGY.

Sit in an easy but erect position; close the left nostril by keeping the thumb and forefinger on it. Then inhale through the right nostril only a long breath and send it to the chest, the upper part of the trunk and then lower. HOLD the breath for ten seconds, and then expel it through the mouth. With finger and thumb then placed to close the right nostril breathe only with the left nostril.

REPEAT TEN TIMES, breathing into alternate nostrils. Then stand erect, take SIX LONG BREATHS, retain each breath during ten seconds, while swinging your arms backwards and forwards from the shoulders.

Once again affirm to yourself while doing this exercise,

“I AM SUPPLYING MYSELF WITH EXTRA PRANA TO COMBAT EXERTIONS BODILY and MENTAL.”

LESSON 8 – EIGHTH WEEK

 POWER THROUGH RELAXATION. See https://dreamhawk.com/yoga/relaxation/

Without concentration you can achieve nothing.

It may sound paradoxical, nay, even silly perhaps, but the fact remains that if you wish to obtain the power to concentrate, YOU MUST FIRST LEARN HOW TO DE-CON CENTRATE.

Try to imitate an animal—a cat, or a dog. Observe how they relax every muscle before lying’ down to sleep. That is what you must do.

When you retire, relax mentally so that you lose entire control, so to speak, over your body.

Just before this try to keep your mind a blank. Just lie down easily, carelessly even, and in the quietness of the night think to your self, “I aim at perfect peace and rest, my mind and body are equally relaxed and limp.”

The sleep you will obtain afterwards will be the only sleep worth having, for you will awaken from it like a giant refreshed and with a hundredfold greater capacity to concentrate on the different exercises you have received, and these exercises in their turn will enable you to live a freer, greater, wider, more joyous life than ever was yours before.

Let the thought ever uppermost in your mind be, “I AM, ‘therefore, I CAN and I WILL,” and health, strength and good looks will be yours.

For what are good looks, after all? Merely the outward sign of inward harmony, or in other words—OF HEALTH.

 

TO MY UNKNOWN FRIEND

 The exercises with which you have been supplied are absolutely certain to benefit you in every way you desire, as they have benefited many thousands. BUT REMEMBER that circumstances, conditions of living and environment are also contributory causes of our healthful state, or otherwise.

While we may not always be able to remove these en­tirely, we can do much to control their influence for evil, and turn it to an influence for good.

In the first and foremost place, we should always keep before us the vital importance of fresh air, by night as well as by day.

 

Secondly, the importance of drinking a sufficient quantity of water, a quart at least should be taken during the twenty-four hours.

The importance of the daily body bath cannot be over­estimated, morning and evening whenever possible.

Calm and restful sleep (as is assured by following the hints as given in the lessons, especially with regard to relax­ing the limbs before going to sleep).

Finally, as to diet. Do not worry about that and be guided by your own appetite. Eat what you fancy, but be sure you masticate your food thoroughly before swallowing, and rather miss a meal than eat when you are not hungry, simply because it happens to ‘be meal time.

Pork and veal are meats best left alone entirely. Eat plenty of fruits, salads, vegetables, nuts, eggs, butter, cheese~ but ‘very little meat at all times.

By following these simple rules you will maintain good health and ‘enjoy life to the full.

 

Charles Henry Arnold

Died in 1949

Having lived past his

119th Birthday

Therefore it must be accepted that he learned or knew how to live. Perhaps you, too, can learn how to live and enjoy long life . . . from his teachings as recorded in this hook.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Bare Bone’s Of Dreams

There is nothing in any dream that can hurt you, unless you run away from something. Running away is leaving yourself open to being a victim of whatever frightens you. So, always confront and conquer the danger in your dreams. If a bear is attacking you in in your dreams and in the woods, go toward the bear rather than running from it. If a person strikes you in the dream, fight back. In other words, combat and conquer your monsters rather than fleeing from them.

If a bear or critter is chasing you, it is only dream image and so what are you running from? If you drop the image if the bear/critter what you have is a feeling or emotion such as fear. And why are you running like crazy from an emotion?

And do not think, “That monster is bigger and stronger than I am, and it is frightening!!” It is our thoughts and fears that create the monsters inside us. So, of course you are stronger unless you cower in fear.

Example: I was walking up the several flights of stairs to get to the attic room. I was holding a small dog in my arms – one of those rather flat nosed toy dogs.

When I arrived at the attic I put the dog down. But now the attic was empty and dark. I could feel my hair stand on end and my skin ‘crawling’. Actually I feel it all again as I write this. The feeling arose because there was an unformed dark shape creeping around at the far end of the room. The dog was really afraid and came into my arms.

Then the dark creature leapt at me, transforming into a massive mouth with huge fangs like a sabre toothed tiger and with an awful demonic face. Immediately I leapt at it in the same way and smashed against its face with my own huge fangs. This utterly disarmed it because it had felt, in its primitive way, to terrify me. It surprised me too that I could so immediately transform into a monster when necessary. Later I realised that I had often become something of a monster in real life, and that was how I knew how to become a monster in order to deal with my own inner monster.

Example: I was getting ready to leave and this dark haired guy told me I couldn’t leave, I felt scared and was going to leave anyways, he pulled out a pistol and shot me in the stomach, I fell down, but there was no blood. The thoughts in my head was, “OH NO”. Next thing I remember is that I was still on the floor in the same place and I got up and I remembered being shot but I didn’t seem to have any pain or blood and was moving normally etc. I started looking for a way to leave I was sneaking around trying not to get noticed so that I could get out of there w/o the shooter guy seeing me.

The interesting thing in the example is that even though she could see no hurt came from being shot, yet she was still scared of the guy with the shooter. And it is overcoming such fears that can release you from terror and hurts that haunt us.

So, removing the image of a dream you are left with the feeling that gave rise to the drama and images. So, be brave and you can understand the dream and become a different person.

A way of doing this is to realise that the images in our dreams are just emotions, thoughts and feeling taking on, or presenting themselves, as images and drama, and if you take away the images of a baby, a tree, or an animal and see what you feel you have the real meaning. This is so simple that many people fail to try it, instead they try to ‘think out or about their dream’. This may be because many people do not like to meet or deal with their real feelings and emotions. So, please take time with it.

So, after you take the image away and feel the feeling underneath it, ask yourself, “When have I felt this before – even years ago? What is the feeling about and what part does it play in my  life?”

 

The Welcome Page

The aim of this site is to help show you a way to healing and a full life. To make connections between your dreams and your everyday life; to discover more fully the powerful emotions and reactions that unconsciously direct your decisions and responses in waking. To help you discover the wonderful gifts that you may not yet have found in yourself. This is not an attempt to give you merely ideas to play with, to agree or disagree with, like fortune telling. It can lead to real insights which empower you to make more of yourself, and find your way through the many decisions with which life confronts you.

Useful Links

Tony’s Many Books

Latest Features

A Thousand Interesting Articles Here

What Are Dreams

Dreams – The Wonderland Of

Learn how to Explore Your Dream

 Tony Crisp – The Many Sides of T

Opening to Life

Psychological Vomiting

Does the Breakdown of the Brain Mean the Loss of Personality?

Ox Herding Pictures – An ancient path to freedom

Mountain Path

There is a Huge Change Happening

Intuition – Using It

Exploring Inner Space

What We Need to Remember About Us

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

Things I Want to Show You

Integration – Meeting yourself

What Is Offered In The Dictionary

Diet and Yoga for Prolapse

Exercise coupled with good nutrition will stimulate the muscles and restore their healthy function

“MY second son had a transverse birth. Only two hours before his birth did the doctor discover this cross position of the baby. The labour had thus been extended and lasted 37 hours. Subsequently, my wife suffered a prolapse of the uterus.

Medical textbooks describe a prolapse as a downward displacement of the uterus due to muscular strain and stretching during childbirth. The muscles that support the uterus are those of the pelvic floor. This is rather like the diaphragm which supports the lungs. The pelvic floor muscles are helped in supporting the uterus by eight ligaments. It is both the muscles of the pelvic floor and the ligaments which are stretched and, in not returning to their previous tension, allow the uterus to hang lower than it should. Sometimes its displacement is so much that it protrudes and has to be pushed back.

“In terms of human experience, prolapse is mostly one of pains in the groin, dragging down pains, backache, headache, and difficulty in walking. These become even more exaggerated if pregnancy occurs again before the situation has been righted. However, in many cases the cure is reasonably simple.

I have already said that it is the lack of elasticity and tone in the muscles and ligaments that is the basic cause of the situation. The cure, therefore, depends upon bringing back the necessary strength, elasticity and quality to the muscles. Fortunately, the recent nutritional discoveries and some of the ancient yoga methods give us very efficient tools to do this.

For instance, the science of nutrition tells us that calcium, working with vitamin C, enables the muscles cells to build strong walls, and to have a healthy tone or shape. If you bruise easily it means you lack sufficient vitamin C because vitamin C strengthens the capillaries that were bleeding and that produces bruising. Calcium, because of its part in strengthening structures, is also used in large quantities by ligaments and tendons. Therefore a lack of strength and shape occur in calcium deficiency.

Protein also plays a major role in giving muscles sufficient strength and elasticity to maintain a healthy posture. The muscles are themselves largely made of protein, and a deficiency causes posture slouch, tiredness and droopiness.

But one of the major nutritional elements that aids enormously in dealing with prolapse is vitamin E. Muscles and connective tissues, such as ligaments, break down when lacking vitamin E. Because the essential fatty acids, which are vital for cell structure, become oxidised and useless, cells begin to disintegrate. As vitamin E also makes it possible to use oxygen more efficiently, muscles can almost have a holiday and recuperate if there is a high level of the vitamin in the system.

Turning to helpful yoga methods, the movements we make stimulate muscular inter-relationship. In simple terms, if our bicep is out of condition, flabby, stretched,  undernourished or over-strained, as the pelvic floor probably is in prolapse, exercise coupled with nourishment will stimulate it to perform again its healthy function.

Exercise of a muscle stimulates the flow of blood to the area, quite apart from encouraging it to perform its function. As the blood carries the oxygen and nutrients the muscles need, and carries away waste products, the recovery can be greatly helped by such proper exercises. The reason yoga methods are particularly helpful is because, unlike keep fit exercises, they can work on the internal organs, not just the voluntary muscles.

The necessary exercises are as follows: Kneel on the floor on all fours. Now drop the head down and rest the head on the hands or arms, i.e., make yourself comfortable head down and bottom in the air. When you are settled, breathe in and out deeply a few times, then breathe right out and hold the breath out.  Without breathing in, expand the chest and pull the tummy in at the same time. This may take some practice, but keep trying as even a little movement is helpful. Move the tummy in and out until you need to breathe, then relax and breathe in. Repeat this for about five minutes, then stay in the same position, relaxing completely, for another few minutes.

This exercise not only directly moves and massages the uterus and pelvic floor, but also causes a vacuum in the pelvis which draws the uterus up. Because of this, you may find that, while relaxed, air is drawn into the rectum. Don’t worry about it, as it acts as a mild and helpful air enema.

In a similar position, but this time on all fours with head up, concentrate your attention on the area of genitals and rectum. Now pull in the rectum and genitals just as if you desperately wanted to go to the toilet, but were holding it back. Maintain’ this for about fifteen seconds, then slowly relax, then repeat for three or four minutes. This exercises the internal organs.

Lastly, lay on the floor, face up. Bring the legs up slowly and arc them over toward the head. Continue the movement to bring the hips off the ground. Bend your knees and bring them near to the head. Now support the hips with the hands, elbows on the floor, and bring legs back to point at the ceiling. This upside-down posture draws the organs back and up. It also drains old blood from the area, so that when you come down fresh blood enters the abdomen. If you are comfortable, hold it for up to four minutes, then slowly come down. But avoid this if you have high blood pressure or a bad heart condition.

As with the tablets, take these exercises every day and await results.

So, after all this, what specific things can be done?

First of all, take 400 i.u. of vitamin E daily. Take also, 500 mg of vitamin C, and a good Calcium and Magnesium tablet daily. Check your protein intake against a table of protein proportions in foods. If you are not getting approximately 70 grams of protein per day, take extra milk, yoghurt, wheat germ to bring up the protein intake. As brewer’s yeast powder is 40 percent protein, this is an excellent aid. If there is no marked benefit from the treatment plus exercises, increase the vitamin E to 400 to 600 i.u. daily. Vegans get plenty of protein especially if the introduce wheat germ into their diet.

 

Why Are People So Scared of Getting Mentally and Physically Healthy?

The force of growth is something we all experience but usually fail to understand. Each of us are immersed in a ‘river’ of constant change. If you think about it you have been carried, pushed, impelled by this current as you were moved through babyhood, childhood, teenage and adulthood. It is the current if Life. This current then carries us on, whether we like it or not, through old age and through the gates of death. All the time we are faced by decisions, and each decision directs us on a different path, helping to create our future. And this force of growth and change. and is fought like hell by many as we are afraid of such changes, especially getting old and facing death.

But this Force of Life is ignored by most of us, and they do not know how to harness its incredible power to heal them.

They are scared of getting healthy because people often avoid any change facing them, especially if it includes meeting themselves face to face.

As humans we tend to be afraid of almost anything. We see this in films where the dark suggests danger and fear, also we fear a hole into which we might fall, a shadowy figure, animals attacking us, especially snakes, other humans, ghosts and spirits, devils and demons, sexual feelings, and so on – but especially of the skull of death and our children dying. Often it is not just fear, but terror.

But most of us have painful traumas we haven’t dealt with. I only began to uncover this when I started teaching relaxation/surrender. In huge yoga classes, back in the sixties and seventies. To help people I would wander around the class and lift an arm or leg of some of those lying quietly relaxed. I lifted the limb to let the person have an enhanced awareness of their relaxed condition. What amazed me was that often the arm or leg was so rigid with tension it was hard to move. If I let go the limb would remain suspended. On asking the person how they felt they would say, ‘Fine. Really relaxed.’ They didn’t know they were carrying enormous tensions. Later I helped people relax  those tensions they had been totally unaware of, and each one had at it base a childhood or adult traumatic incident.

The load we carry of traumas was recognised long ago by Bunyan’s book Pilgrims Progress

I went on an almost fanatical search to find a non-medical drug way to deal with my misery.

In searching for relief from misery from depression and I tried many different things, relaxation, yoga, meditation , fasting, and diet among them. They promised to be helpful, but something was missing that I only began to uncover when I started teaching relaxation/surrender. Some of those classes I taught were huge back in the sixties and seventies. I slowly found a way to release and cleanse these enormous tensions.

Are you relaxing or suppressing?  

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

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

I went on an almost fanatical search for what could be done to change that – to release the unconscious problems. The clue was, as Richet said, “that ‘the slight instability is the necessary condition for the true stability of the organism.” That means we need to allow the Life Process to make fuller spontaneous movements – we make them all the time as our Life Process causes us to breath and our heart to beat, to name just a few, but we are capable of much more. For as Life begins to heal us making spontaneous movement we may experience vibrations or movements we did not make consciously. This cause most people to feel great fear and rush to the doctor to stop it. When I started shaking I too went to the doctor. He decided I was working too hard ad need to take a sedative – I didn’t take it because we have all heard of it in our religion as Christians – it all started when the disciples knew it as Pentecost, as Seitai in Japan, Shaktipat in India, Mesmer in Europe, Wilhelm Reich in modern times.

The frantic search led me to the release. What happened was incredible. My body and my emotions discharged the whole experience of having my tonsils out as a six year old. My head pulled back, my mouth clamped open, and my arms were in the position of being strapped to my side. Perhaps I had not been fully anaesthetised – I don’t know. What I do know is that I had carried that enormous tension and shock inside me from six until I was thirty five.

Up until that day I had experienced a powerful neck tension that I had tried again and again to ‘relax’ away. My being didn’t need to relax, it needed to discharge in powerful tension, physical struggles, and emotion. After this ’shaking’ experience there was never again a tension in my neck, a tension that had been caused by trying to pull away from the surgeon cutting my throat. However, it was not simply a physical tension it released. Powerful emotions were also discharged, ones that had created difficult responses to everyday life.

That was an amazing experience, and from there on I could allow the process to continue its work on me. Gradually it ‘discharged’ the other things from childhood, and another medical operation, that had thrown my body and mind out of balance. But it didn’t stop at clearing out difficult past experiences, its process went on to expansion of awareness and growth – it moved toward making me more than I had been. All of that came about by allowing my being to express spontaneously without my conscious intervention, by allowing spontaneous movement and sounds, by surrendering or offering my body, sexual self, me emotions and mind to the life that had brought me forth; to the unknown of myself and trusting it.

After using it for some time I named it LifeStream. Try using Letting things Happen – Opening to Life – Integration

A woman’s first experience of LifeStream

I was especially struck by the sentence, “Don’t enter LifeStream unless you are prepared to enter into it fully and are prepared to be part of the long process” I had undergone what at the time was a frightening experience for me – leaving my body – it was while I was very ill in hospital, so I had apprehensions that similar things might happen again.

I was reassured.  Indeed they might happen again but it would be in a position to learn from them rather than for them.  I pondered for a while.  I was in a fairly depressed state really.  I badly needed help.  More than anything I wanted to help myself.  I decided to give it a try.  It was a serious decision, not made lightly, and I was prepared to commit myself as fully as I was able at the time to the process but I felt very apprehensive.

My attitude to LS (LifeStream) then changed.  I thought, yes, this is it.  It can’t be faked.  It is possible for someone to pretend it’s happening but that they would know they were pretending.  I had been afraid I was acting and pretending.  But when it came it very definitely wasn’t that.

To people coming into LS I would say not to base their expectations on anything you have been told or read about it.  It is very individual.  It is easy to be discouraged if you have been with very noisy people, and your experiences are not noisy.  It would be easy thing to believe, ‘I’m not having the real thing.’ This may be linked with me because it happened when I had given up.  I stopped expecting anything to happen.  After three months of, to me, nothing happening, but my lying there for ninety minutes listening to other people making a noise.  But in the way a lot happened because my feelings and thoughts had changed considerably in those three months.  I had gone through fear, contempt, attempting to cut it down to size, saying it wasn’t a valid experience for those people.  I was very much the outsider for a long time.  Then, when I had given up any hope something happening, it happened to me.

Rita Expresses Herself

“I was in such pain, and words having failed me I was pumped full of Largactyl and put in a psychiatric ward on my own.  And I became terribly aggressive, which I am not really.

When I could release all this in SR, I stopped being frightened.  I wasn’t so primitive.  I never actually attacked anybody else but I was very frightened I would.  I was so full of aggression it was going in and trying to get out.  Yet it seemed it was a force which didn’t necessarily need to destroy me or anybody else if it was allowed to get out.  I didn’t really want to kill anybody or myself.  It was the pressure in this force which was held back.

When I first went to the SR group I thought everybody had gone completely mad.  I was still quite paranoid, I think, and the place where we did SR backs on to the hospital where I worked.  I was very frightened doctors or nurses would come over, recognise me and think I had flipped again and I would get carried off and put inside.  I was very frightened but it has gone now completely.  Then, I stopped thinking people were mad after time.  They were not mad because they came together again at the end of the session.  It was just noise, and the actual experience seemed identical to those I had seen and experienced in hospital.  Then I started to think people were hysterical, in the sense that they were all acting out, and it was all very self indulgent and it didn’t get them anywhere.

I didn’t understand it, and this kept on for three months.  I kept going.  I don’t really know why, but I did.  Then it was Easter, and I went on a diet.  The children were away and I was in the house on my own, and I thought, “I’ll try this self-regulating on my own.  Maybe it’s being with other people stopped it”.  I went straight into it for an hour and half and I became like a tiny baby.  It was a very real experience.  It was really happening.  I felt like a baby.  I was a baby.  The sounds coming out were those of a baby.  Yet there was this marvellous bit of me which was still completely in touch with what was happening outside of the experience.  It was watching, and I knew I would be all right, I knew I was going to come out of it.  For me it was a real big breakthrough.  I stopped being frightened.  Up until then I had been stuck.  I was very frightened of making a noise.  Then some time later I had, not one, but two of pneumatic drills outside my house and I had the really big session making a hell of a noise.

My attitude to SR then changed.  I thought, yes, this is it.  It can’t be faked.  It is possible for someone to pretend it’s happening, but they would know they were pretending.  I had been afraid I would start to play act and pretend.  But when it happened it very definitely wasn’t that.

To people coming into SR I would say not to base their expectations on anything they had been told or read about it.  It is very individual.  It is easy to be discouraged if you have been with very noisy people, and your experiences are not noisy.  It would be easy to think, ‘I’m not having the real thing.’ May be with me it happened when I had given up.  I stopped expecting anything to happen.  After three months of, to me, nothing happening except by lying there for 90 minutes listening to other people making a noise.  Yet in a way a lot happened because my feelings and thoughts had changed considerably in those three months.  I had gone through fear, contempt, attempting to cut it down to size, saying he wasn’t a valid experience for those people.  I was very much the outsider for a long time.  Then, when I had given up any hope of something happening, it happened to me.

What SR has done for me, or what change it has made is a very major thing.  In a very real sense it had saved my life.  I had thought about nothing but suicide for three years, and that hasn’t happened since; but once, and I have been in some very sticky situations.  I have been very mad but I haven’t been what I call depressed or beyond hope.  I don’t hate myself as much now.  I didn’t have any self respect.  I have respect for myself now and I am a lot more choosy about relationships because of that.  I don’t feel people are doing me a favour any more by liking me.  I think I am a lot stronger.  People at work say I am alive, and friends have seen a big change in me.”

Example: I had a dream about two purple snakes, coming from different directions, one from the left and the other from the right. These started going after me, however I kept running and running from the centre, at times they would seem like they want to come together in the middle and attack me and I kept running. (Strange that nothing can hurt you in your dreams, for dream take place in, as in computer games, so remember that dreams are just like computer games in which you get very involved and face monsters and kill or be killed and nothing has actually happened – you are still alive and unhurt. But that is exactly what this wonderfully alive virtual reality of your dreams is, for we are all playing the game of life – the game we play in which we face or run away from the things that scare us; in which we explore the depths of our existence, develop the speed of our reactions, or learn how to love – or simply meet a reflection of our own weakness, terror and of course the wonder of your inner genius.)

Vomiting takes place because we have an inbuilt defence system that does its best when our body is attacked, poisoned or injured to deal with, repair or to balance what caused the difficulty. The process is called homeostasis – meaning any self-regulating process by which biological systems tend to maintain stability while adjusting to conditions that are optimal for survival. Or, if we put something harmful in us the process vomits it out again.

We are all subject to the forces of growth – it is one of the main functions of life. But because growth is a push toward change, change that we do not want to face, we often resist it, often without realising we are doing so. Psychiatrist say we have resistances to meeting the uncomfortable aspects of our self. A young woman who was anorexic dreamt of cutting off her breasts, suggesting trying to cut out the living process that was moving her into being a full woman. So such resistance can also relate to how we try to dissociate from our own process of growth and ageing.

The human personality – the You that you call yourself, with a name, is only a tiny thing. It is moved and tossed around by all manner of drives, ambitions, emotions, fears, temptations, worries, love and desire with its pains and hopes; it is something we take so seriously and get carried away into awful situations; we take many sorts of pain killers to deal with ourselves. Things such as alcohol, coffee, medical drugs and street drugs, and yet we are still prone to break down, as can be seen by the number of people who need antidepressants or are totally lost in themselves. Look around at the number of people who have to take anti depressant, or who have to use alcohol every day, or smoke or take other drugs – all means of not facing the difficulty of meeting self awareness.

Paul Levy writing about this says: “This process can be so extreme, so radical, that the ego experiences it as death …. This experience is related to the shaman’s descent to the underworld as well as the archetypal journey of the wounded healer. See Programmed

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 an immense step, and left us very vulnerable, and still does.

Many people as their awareness reaches beyond what they feel is their normal self feel scared. Such resistances cause us to create awful dreams and fears as a means of avoiding our own inner world and its wonders. We feel that we will be swallowed up and we will die. It is important to say that when we meet the experience of powerlessness through becoming aware of the hugeness of your Life, which we are usually unaware if, it feels like something alien or attacking, and it is a shock.

When we begin to meet the Hugeness that we are, we often react to it in our dreams or in waking with fear or panic. So we dream of being attacked by aliens or frightening creatures; or being swallowed by a whale or something huge, a tsunami, or even possessed by evil entities.

But textbooks seldom mention that the process is also active psychologically and is often called self-regulation. Jung, Hadfield, and people like Caldwell and Wilhelm Reich, have often written about self-regulation active in the mind and emotions.  Hadfield in his book writes, “Dreams are compensatory or ‘self-regulatory’. Hadfield says of this, “There is in the psyche an automatic movement toward readjustment, towards an equilibrium, toward a restoration of the balance of our personality. This automatic adaptation of the organism is one of the main functions of the dream as indeed it is of bodily functions and of the personality as a whole. This idea need not cause us much concern for this automatic self-regulating process is a well-known phenomenon in Physics and Physiology. The function of compensation which Jung has emphasised appears to be one of the means by which this automatic adaptation takes place, for the expression of repressed tendencies has the effect of getting rid of conflict in the personality. For the time being, it is true, the release may make the conflict more acute as the repressed emotions emerge, and we have violent dreams from which we wake with a start. But by this means, the balance of our personality is restored.”  See Self-regulation

Nightmares are an excellent example of Psychological Vomiting. for dreams are a process of self-regulation, and they push traumatic experiences that have caused us great emotional disturbance into our awareness as nightmares. But because we have an enormous tendency to pull away from pain we refuse to feel the fear or pain and so repress the nightmare.

Mushrooms and Hallucinogens

Hallucinations and Hallucinogens

Magic Mushrooms

Things That Are Helpful to Know

A Man’s Experience With Mushrooms

LSD – Hypnosis – Meditation – The Dream

Working With Psychedelics

It Takes Time

Exploring Inner Space

 

Hallucinations and Hallucinogens

I had experience of working therapeutically and in exploring ones hidden depths with LSD and primarily with psilocybin. At that time it was talked about as only for dropouts. Yet at that time it was also licensed for therapeutic use, and I experienced it as such with the psychiatrist R. D. Laing. But now it is part of todays world and big businesses are funding it and researching with it. See https://compasspathways.com/ for an entry into the future.

Drugs such as LSD, cannabis, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote and opium, can produce hallucinations. That is because they allow the dream process to break through into consciousness with less intervention because many people do not deal well with nightmares, and so can be knocked over by that. If this occurs without warning it can be very disturbing. The very real dangers are that unconscious content, which in ordinary dreaming breaks through a threshold in a regulated way, emerges with less regulation, and without the safety factor of calling it a dream. Fears, paranoid feelings, past traumas, can emerge into the consciousness of an individual who has no skill in handling such forces. See Masters of Nightmares – Shaman

Because the propensity of the unconscious is to create images, an area of emotion might emerge as an image such as the devil. Such images and the power they contain, if they are not being integrated in a proper therapeutic setting, may haunt the individual, perhaps for years. Even at a much milder level, elements of the unconscious will emerge and disrupt the persons ability to appraise reality and make judgements. Unacknowledged fears may lead the drug user to rationalise their reasons for avoiding social activity or the world of work. See Waking Lucid Dream

A real treat is to see Fantastic Fungi – Playback – Netflix

Because such drugs can produce what people often term hallucinations, they can be experienced through any of the senses singly, or all of them together. So one might have an hallucinatory smell or sound. To understand hallucinations, which are quite common without any use of drugs such as alcohol, LSD, or cannabis, one must remember that everyone has the natural ability to produce such images. One of the definitions of a dream according to Freud is its hallucinatory quality. While asleep we can create full sensory, vocal, motor and emotional experience in our dream. While dreaming we usually accept what we experience as real. An hallucination is an experience of a ‘dream’ occurring while we have our eyes open. The voices heard, people seen, smells smelt, although appearing to be outside of us, are no more exterior than the things and images of our dreams. With this information one can understand that much classed as psychic phenomena, psychedelic and religious experience is an encounter with the dream process. That does not, of course, deny its importance.

Example: ‘I dream insects are dropping either on me from the ceiling of our bedroom, or crawling over my pillow. My long-suffering husband is always woken when I sit bolt upright in bed my eyes wide open and my arm pointing at the ceiling. I try to brush them off. I can still see them – spiders or wood lice. I am now well aware it is a dream. But no matter how hard I stare the insects are there in perfect detail. I am not frightened, but wish it would go away.’ Sue D.

Sue’s dream only became an hallucination when she opened her eyes and continued to see the insects in perfect clarity.

There are probably many reasons why Sue should experience a hallucination and her husband not. One might be that powerful drives and emotions might be pushing for attention in her life. Some of the primary drives are the reproductive drive; urge toward independence; pressure to meet unconscious emotions and past trauma and fears – any of which, in order to achieve their ends, can produce hallucinations. An hallucination is therefore not an ‘illusion’ but a means of giving information from deeper levels of self.

Many people have hallucinations and find them a great addition to their senses and their understanding if themselves and the world. But a great number of people who experience them are terrified and experience a mental breakdown. I want to make clear that when they express so devastatingly, it is because the person has  lived with tremendous tensions and conflicts and has never learned to deal with them, so enormous inner pressure builds up and they burst through one’s defences like a dam bursting and a flood occurs. See Relax

Given such names as mediumship or mystical insight, in some cultures or individuals, the ability to hallucinate is often rewarded socially.

Example: I waded into the lake and suddenly realised that something strange was happening. Visions occurred stronger and stronger the further one went into the lake. I also realised that all the others had been in the lake and immersed in the visions. As I pressed on I knew that most people became so involved in the visions they lost grip of their purpose to walk on. I had the visions, but found I could maintain the decision to go forward – i.e. most people lost sight of physical surroundings and became absorbed in the visions. I somehow had an ability of seeing the visions and the physical world, of working in the physical world, at the same time. The end was a vision on my right of a huge and splendid mountain range, with snow. It shone with light. I knew it represented eternity. Yet I pressed on to get the water. I felt I would from now on always have a vision of the mountains with me, along with the wonderful feelings it produced.

 Example: “When Leary exclaimed that the experience of the mushrooms had changed his world, he was not exaggerating. Nearly everyone who has taken the psychedelics will grant the same. The psychedelic experience will certainly be qualified and regulated; it may prove too dangerous for general use; other and better ways to the mind may be found. But nothing on earth can contradict or minimize the opportunity it offers to explore the very citadel of meaning, the human mind.” Quoted from LSD Psychotherapy.

Example: Her constant wetting herself, which had been with her every day for several years, stopped after the second LSD session, a very violent one, in which she became disoriented and called continually for her mother. But then she went on to a great deal of  character change. She had been a thoroughly dull and boring person, a narrowly moralistic, unimaginative child. She stank of urine most of the time. She was a “straight A” student in school. During treatment she changed so that everyone, relatives and friends, as well as her mother and herself, noticed it. It wasn’t so much “spectacular” as it was profound and convincing. She was by no means free of problems, but became so free and creative and so much more outgoing and generous, that it was clear her behavior was springing from something spontaneous within herself.

If you are going to use such drugs you should either be raised in a culture holding information about their use, or at least educate yourself in how the dreamworld works, and learn to explore your dreams before taking the big plunge.

See: Methods of Awakening – Healing Cancer Using Magic Mushrooms – LSD Psychotherapy –  Shaman –  What we Need to Remember About Us – Life’s Little Secrets – out of body experience – Integration – meeting oneself

Carmine from USA says – Do we really need researchers to tell us about the effects of these substances? Surely many tribes/civilisations throughout the world have told us of these things for centuries. How clever these scientists have been to report other peoples findings and claim that they have “discovered” these properties. People have used these substances since well before any documented evidence and in the past they have been derided as being dangerous and unpredictable  by ‘reaserchers’. Now, we have suddenly discovered that they could be useful. One word – Leary. Another word – imprisonment. Are we gonna arrest these researchers and treat them in the way Leary was? Nothing new, just another example of standing on the shoulders of giants. In the year 2013 isn’t it a bit embarrassing that we’re still paying no attention to wisdom that has been handed down to us for many, many years?

See: Answer to Critics; Talking with the dead; esp and dreams; out of body experience.

 

Things That Are Helpful to Know

The real heroine or hero of the inward journey that comes from exploring dreams and incorporating them does not remain in a symbolised version of themselves. They do not accept the Devil as an exterior agent, or Christ as an outer and perhaps historical character. They do not accept their dreams at face value, but are ready to face themselves with the courage necessary. For it is an uncomfortable journey to actually see oneself. It is a demanding climb to have ones awareness stretched and widened beyond ones personal limitations in order to include a vaster experience of yourself. Therefore there are inbuilt or personal resistances to actually having direct insight.

It helps to be clear about this point of allowing fantasy if one understands the way completely unconscious inner events gradually emerge into consciousness. W.V. Caldwell, writing about the way Van Rhijn has defined the levels of consciousness says there are four stages. It says that dreams come from a part of us that is not known – unconscious. To become conscious the impulse has to travel through levels of our mind:-

a] The deeply unconscious physiological process, such as cell generation and digestion. Problems which cannot move more fully into consciousness and so are held at this level become psychosomatic pains or illness. This becomes clearer if we consider human life in relationship with other life forms. A plant for instance might have some sort of bacterial illness, but would not be able to bring that to awareness. In a sense many things which occur to us, although they are very real and definite, never become a part of our conscious life, but always remain in the ‘plant’ level. If they are to move from ‘deeply unconscious physiological process’ to becoming known consciously, there are stages such events go through.

b] As the physiological or psychobiological process moves nearer consciousness, its next level of expression is postural or gestural. Thus we may express our deepest hidden feelings in an unconscious body posture or movement. Not only our feelings express in this way, but also our physical tone or health shows in our postures and movements. Even the plant droops if it needs water.

c] Next, when something moves from the gestural to the next stage of expression it becomes a dream or a dream image or symbol, which although it may not be understood, is now entering the arena of awareness. It is still a part of the move toward consciousness. This is sometimes called the mythic level, and is something we see working in producing religious thinking or myth creation. It still remains at the symbolic level.

d] At this stage, what had been deeply unconscious, then symbolised, now rises into consciousness and is capable of being verbalised or thought about and analysed. If one had attempted to verbalise something in level two it would have been so far outside of consciousness as to defy description. Also, when looking at these levels or stages, they suggest that the dream process is a means by which deeper stages can be portrayed to awareness in order to make them known. Therefore, by working with the dream process we can tap deeper levels of awareness and make them known. 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.

When this level is reach you can describe a dream in a way anyone can understand.

An interesting example of these four stages and how someone can work through them is given by 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 the psychosomatic and 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 man’s conscious attention, and the spontaneous self-regulatory/dream 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.

It is also important to realise that you are dealing with intelligence, even though it is unconscious. The unconscious has a much wider awareness that our conscious and logical mind, and asking it for clarity if what you experience is not clear is very useful. In fact while you are allowing the spontaneous to arise you can ask any question.

 

A Mans Experience Taking Mushrooms

As can be seen from the levels described above. dreams are from the very depths or ocre of you and are almost to your rational self, but are still in symbolic form. So in a sense if you are working at trying to understand your depths and deal with them exploring a dream is a huge help, most of the work has already been done. This can be seen below in this man’s exploration of his dream

I dreamt that Pete Taylor was in my father’s shop in London. Someone had shot him in the bicep and I was trying to help him. I had a small box on the counter and there was antiseptic  or blood in it, and I put the hurt muscle in it hoping to heal it. When the gunshot flesh in the antiseptic but the blood bubbled and effervesced, becoming hot. I felt the flesh would not be of any use now, but wasn’t sure. In the end though I was considering cleaning away the injured flesh from the arm (left arm I think). All I could see were the sinews with a small amount of flesh on them – no muscle in between. But I began to feel that gradually new cells might grow and develop into a new muscle – granulate.

I started working on my dream that evening. I had tried working on the whale dream already, but it produced nothing. But as soon as I thought of Pete Taylor realisation after realisation began to pour into my mind, and I saw I had found the right key.

Interpretation

As I began entering the dream I realised I had met Pete on a walk a few days before in a wood with my children, and heard Pete shouting outside the wood I was in about, “The Lord Jesus Christ,” in a mocking voice. I stood still waiting for Pete and his friends to pass by – Pete being outside of the wood in a field. As I was entering into these feelings from the dream point of view I realised I avoided Pete because of pride. I hadn’t wished to be associated with Pete. Pete, who had a lovely daughter but who had failed at marriage; was a good musician but had failed to do anything with his skill; started businesses but failed at working for himself – failed. Pete, I felt was a failure.

Suddenly I realised with shock that I had tried to avoid meeting Pete because pride was my defence against my own failure. I was hiding away from my own sense of failure.

But Pete had actually come into the wood so we met, and I saw he was keenly ‘chasing’ a young French woman, Katerine.

I was exploring the dream upstairs on our house then wife came up and I explained this, and the talking helped the flow of realisation tremendously. Pete, who failed at marriage but was chasing after young girls, as I had seen him chasing Katerine. Yes, no wonder I didn’t want to associate with that part of me, who couldn’t make it in marriage but chased young women. Pete was living out all the things in me that I despised and tried to keep hidden, even from myself. But now they were out in the open and it was painful.

Then a whole mass more came. I saw Katerine as a little pro who was holding herself back, but wanted to wag her fanny everywhere.

Pete, the one who was in battle with his father and who constantly fought authority tooth and nail. He had got to make it alone to prove how much better he was then father/authority. What a waste, when one could have worked together to accomplish more. Conflict wastes so much effort due to the countless retreats.

Now it was coming thick and fast so I went down to my wife in the kitchen as it was so helpful to talk.

Yes, it was my father. The shop was the important point in the dream. It was in that shop our conflict had come to a head. It had been there always. The thing already seen about how my father used to show me his school books. He didn’t praise what I did, just showed me how good his work was, how neat, how few blots. But in the shop, he had set my pattern of behaviour, stamped it out.

Because I had never received praise or support from him – my symbol of authority – I had pulled away and gone on along a path of life that he had no understanding of. I went on to my wife about how I had stacked the potatoes in the shop for him as well as I could, but never a word of encouragement – always wrong.

What a fucking waste. He was so desperate for success himself he was trying to squeeze out a few drops from me too for the sake of his pride, to prove to England how much better he was. He was still fighting the battle of the school room, because he was too scared to punch the kids on the nose, so he wanted me to be a success to prove his own value. So, from then on I was in conflict with him, trying to prove how good I was, how much better than him, never able to co-operate at school, and work, or in my marriage. I had to keep on at my wife over nothing to prove how good we were. What I did for him was never good enough, never enough. What would get a word of praise? What would suffice? I didn’t understand what he wanted of me. So, I kept on at my kids like he kept on at me. Trying to attain the unattainable instead of a little warmth and love. Dad, you fucking killed me right back then. I sobbed uncontrollable with the pain of experiencing it.

What a waste. My schooling ruled by rebellion because I had to make it alone and “differently” not co-operatively. Anything to fight authority, my father. And I had to fail too, even in my efforts to achieve, because if I succeeded dad would fall to pieces, feeling what a failure he was as a man and a father. I needed a Dad so I dared not succeed. I had to fail if I wanted love. And the reverse side of conflict with authority was the cringing underhand crawling to gain love and approval.

Later I succeeded as an author and psychotherapist, having faced the pain of not knowing a father’s love.

The damage to the bicep, to flesh was the whole area of my life that I was trying to save and heal, but which I needed to let go of, and wait for the new muscle tissue to grow. How does one start again at 40? Is it with patience to let the new tissues and strength grow?

My left arm is my support system, my confidence to do things in the world. I am right handed so do things with my right hand, but support everything with my left – hold the paper as I write; hold the nail as I bang it in with my right. So, the damage to the muscle was the injury to my supportive confidence through my relationship with my father. As all this was felt I sobbed uncontrollably. I wept for the lost years, the wasted years of my youth. I was convulsed with the pain of not having been loved by my father. Tears fell from me for the failure of my life. I would never have believed one could feel so much pain about something missing in one’s life. I had always thought to feel that much pain you would have needed to be beaten or abused in childhood. My father was kind, but he showed no warmth. And that was as bad as being beaten, perhaps worse. I had been severely beaten at school, but it hadn’t scarred me like this.

  

Working With Psychedelics

In a more youthful period of my life I sat with many people as they used the psilocybin mushrooms (magic, or as they were called in the west country ‘liberty caps’) and LSD. What I learned has important repercussions for anyone using or planning to use the mushroom,  ayahuasca, LSD, or any other psychedelic agent.

If you haven’t realised that everything you experience when using a psychedelic is a symbol, as in a dream, and if you are not used working with symbols and dreams and have not learnt to see beyond the symbol to what it represents, then you are not prepared to enter the a half world of the dream world, such as ancient people lived in and understood. But for the western mind it is simply a dream that you do not understand. It will be intriguing even uplifting, but it needs another level to climb to make it useful to you. For the drug opens the possibility of dreaming while awake, which also means the door opens to nightmares where you meet the fears and terrors you have never meet or dealt with. Other hallucinatory substances such as ayahuasca should also be seen as both healing and as stated in the Wall Street Journal, “They can be dangerous. And should be avoided by those who are bipolar or schizophrenic, since it has been known to trigger psychotic episodes.” See Pandora’s Box – Waking Lucid Dreaming

People often think it is just depression, anxiety and other psychological difficulties that are what the psychedelics are used for curing, but that is a great mistake, because many physical ills as in this young girl are also cured by them. Her ‘incurable’ psoriasis was cleared in three sessions.

Many ancient and wonderful cultures lived their lives in this symbolic world and their rituals and practices give rise to symbolic statements. Here is a statement from a young Native American undergoing an initiation – “On the eighth night, another big bird appeared to me and I determined to accept its gift, for I was tired of waiting and of being confined in my little fasting wigwam. In my dream of this bird, he took me far to the north where everything was covered with ice. There I saw many of the same kind of birds. Some were very old. They offered me long life and immunity from disease. It was quite a different blessing from that which the chickadee had offered, so I accepted. Then the bird who had come after me, brought me to my fasting wigwam again. When he left me, he told me to watch him before he was out of sight. I did so and saw that he was a white loon”.

Those people were so deeply immersed in their connection and associations with the animals that the vision was understandable. The same applies to Christianity which was all told in symbolic language and so for many people has no meaning – unless they can meet and take the next step. To do so they will need the strength mentioned already, for I have witnessed people who took double or treble the amount necessary and had no effect for fear of what they were seeing. Or another person who as the drug started working recoiled in horror and begged for it to end. Or others still who took it many times as an interesting pastime, until one day they met something that they felt was a horror and never again used the drug. See Masters of Nightmares – Christ – The Inner Path To

Of course they have all entered the dream world with their barriers weakened and so experienced a waking nightmare, and because they could not escape it by waking it was awful. Yet nightmares are a way of presenting a healing catharsis. But it is only healing for those who can face, as I learnt to do, to be strong enough to meet what had been a terrifying experience, but was in fact the way to freedom.

How do we get from not knowing to knowing?

I am of course still writing about the use of psychedelics. And a person I once dealt with is a good illustration of the difference the approach can make. He was a young man working in an unskilled job in a hotel. His girlfriend had approached my wife because as the girl explained her boyfriend was taking mushrooms every day and she felt he was going mad because he had changed so much. She was frightened for his sanity and asked if we could help him.

As I understood it the drug was continually releasing things from his unconscious which if not met in the right way leads to complete confusion and elements that are fine in the unconscious, shut safely begin the enormous resistances the conscious personality usually has guarding it, but without that protection it was subject to enormous attack. It was exactly these features of my own unconscious that had led to depression and suicidal feelings. Meeting them in the right way had led to their removal. It isn’t that the unconscious is a dangerous place – not at all – but the things that are put into it by parent, culture, media, and even religion can lead to enormous threats.

So we agreed to see the young man. I thought that if I could show him how to work with the symbols he met it he would carry on and find health. He arrived and took the mushrooms before arriving. He was talking about the film of a man who collects payments and was on a beach, The Repo Man.

For a number of  years I was involved in teaching at a commune and there were many using psychedelics. I started helping a young man because he seemed to be lost. So I started helping to him explore a dream, using the technique explained in Peer Dream Work. With guidance he soon began to break through the symbols into the underlying emotions, and as he felt these he saw what they meant. It related to his grandma’s death something he had never deal with and had a lot of feeling about. He realised that the beach was a place he could be in contact with his grandma and he felt all was well and he was at ease with her death and his part in it. This is a shortened version of what happened.

Afterwards his girlfriend told us with very great feeling, that he was normal again and the change was wonderful, because she feared he was going mad. But after a week he was taking the mushrooms daily again without trying to understand the images he faced. The result was he was slipping back into his previous condition.

The Details                                                            

Todays way into this inner awareness might be through the use if micro doses of psilocybin. Despite earlier concerns, research has found no link between the use of psychedelics and later mental illness or suicidal actions. In fact, in some reports, these substances were associated with a lower rate of mental health issues. A micro dose could be from 0.2 grams as an experimental dose.

The mushrooms – you may be able to Grow Your Own

To be able to meet what after all is yourself, but a self you have not yet discovered, is what I have described dream images are, for they are like icons on a computer screen. The images or feeling we experience are not like real life. Because a dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear. The images ARE LIKE ICONS ON A COMPUTER SCREEN – so you have to ‘click’ on your dream images to make them come alive. Thinking about them doesn’t work. You need to open yourself to the magic of them. You have to ‘click’ on your dream images to make them come alive. Thinking about them doesn’t work. You need to open yourself to the magic of them.

The aim here is to show you how to move through and use the different aspects of YOU – your emotions need to be alive and responsive; you mind need to be open to the new, the VERY new that your dreams present you with; also the dimensions of you. So I am listing some exercises for you to try – use them until they work for you.

The first one is the Breathe Meditation. It is different to the previous breath control, and is aimed at seeing if you can get your emotions moving and mobile.

The Breath Meditation

This is more of a meditation than an exercise, but is important in mobilising inner feelings that lie behind movements. When you begin this meditation, do not be in a hurry to open the hands to let the feeling of pleasure radiate out. In fact, let the hands be as spontaneous in expressing what you feel as you can. It may be that your hands thereby move a great deal, or very little. If there is an urge to move the hands in other ways than suggested allow this to happen.

1 – Stand in a comfortable balanced position with the hands in front of the chest, palms together and eyes closed.

2 – Imagine that as you breathe-in, the air is fanning a small glowing coal inside the chest. The incoming air makes the coal glow gently, and you breathe slowly and with awareness. This coal is just a symbol of the subtle pleasure sensations generated by slow purposeful inhalation. If you can be directly aware of this pleasure, dispense with the image of the coal.

3 – In either case, let the hands indicate the amount of this glow or pleasure. Let them do this by moving apart, so if the pleasure is intense the hands reach wide. As you exhale and the glow fades, let the hands come together. But if there is little felt, then the hands remain unopened.

4 – If you find your hands and arms respond then let a feeling or warmth or love flow out to everyone, and as they pull back feel as if you are drawing in what others give you in this subtle way.

5 – If you have managed that and felt it working in you, then and only then let you energy move upwards, and eventually downwards so you get the sideways movement flowing into the up and down energy flow. Let your being show you how.

But if you have not got anything from it persist until you do. Do it day after day until you can feel a response, and then work with it.

If you managed that the next exercise is to get you ready to receive the impressions to move and express spontaneously that exploring your images will release in you. To understand this you need to understand the two wills in you and what they do.

The Two Wills

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

This Life Will or motivator has been active for millions of years and we see it working all the time in animals. We are partly split in half because we are often opposed to what our Life Will in us wants. So the only way to express what is good for us is in dreams when our conscious will is largely passive or we are restricted by being tied down. An example of this who dream they are healed and unable to move because a being, demon or some dark force is holding them. But it is not a dark demon but our own body working to protect us. Without it we would wander about and injure ourselves because we are asleep. A part of the brain controls our sleep paralysis. We can overcome the paralysis while awake and so have a waking lucid dream. See LifeStream; Functions of dreams

Arm Circling Meditation

This is a useful technique to learn the first stages of allowing your inner being to express spontaneously. It is a way of gradually loosening tensions and blockages. But must be practiced several times to really feel your way into it.

It is good to try a preparatory exercise first, one to give you a direct experience of spontaneous movement.

But it is also good to get the feel of something that is easy to do first. A simple way you might be able to learn the beginnings of this it may help to first learn how to yawn spontaneously. You can do this by acting out a few yawns until they come spontaneously. Let them come and let the rest of your body join in if an urge to stretch comes. This is to learn how to recognise and allow your body and feelings to express spontaneously. When you can allow spontaneous yawns and stretches, then try the arm circling. 

Spontaneous Arm Movement

This is a simple and enjoyable technique which gives a direct experience of spontaneous movement. You need to stand about a foot away from a wall, side on. Start with your right side. You are going to lift your right arm sideways, but because you are near the wall you will only manage to lift it part of the way. So when the back of your hand touches the wall, press it hard against the wall as if trying to complete the movement of lifting the arm. Using a reasonable amount of effort stay with the hand pressing against the wall for about twenty seconds. Then move so you face away from the wall, and with eyes closed relax your arm and be aware of what happens. Try it before reading on, and use the left arm afterwards.

For some people nothing happens. In which case I suggest you loosen your arms by consciously moving them to get your blood circulating, then try again.

What we have done is to attempt to make a movement. Because the wall prevented this, the body was not able to complete the movement you asked it to make. Therefore a muscular charge built up in the deltoid muscle. When you stepped away from the wall the arm, if relaxed, was then free to complete the movement. So possibly your arm rose from your side as if weightless, thus discharging its energy. Some people need several tries before they can find the right body feeling to allow the arm its movement. It is easy to prevent it moving because the impulse is quite a subtle one. The point of the exercise however, is to learn a relationship with oneself in which a subtle impulse can express. The movement the arm makes, and how it feels to experience an un-willed movement, is so similar to LifeStream we are thus provided with an experimental experience of the real thing. Therefore it is helpful either to practice the technique until you can do it, or use it a number of times to establish your relationship with the feeling of it. This sense of allowing movement can then be used in LifeStream itself. See Water Wonderland

Arm Circling Movement

For the next exercise you need sufficient floor space to move easily, or even lay full length if necessary. It also helps to have loose clothing. You start by standing in the middle of your floor space, giving yourself time to explore what you feel and experience. Start by circling your arms. Take the arms above the head, down the sides of the body fairly slowly, with the arms fully extended, then upward crossing the front of the trunk. In the full movement the hands are then forming wide circles that cross the front of your body. This arm circling is simply to help you learn how to allow spontaneous movement. It is a way of working with the natural forces within you.

So, as you are circling your arms with eyes closed, bring your awareness to the shapes your hands are making in space. As you become aware of the shapes the hands are carving in space, watch what feelings you have as to how you would like to move. Give yourself permission to doodle, to make any sort of shapes your feelings or body incline you to. Allow any sort of posture or movement, as active or quiet as you like.

If they arise, allow sounds to accompany the movements, and allow whatever feelings accompany them. Hold the attitude that what you are doing doesn’t have to make sense. Nor does it have to comply with what other people might expect of you. Realise that you are allowing another part of yourself, perhaps a non verbal part, or a facet unknown to the rational mind, to express.

With a non critical watching attitude, relax and let your body and feeling sense direct what happens. There is no need to fiercely concentrate in order to wipe the mind clear of other influences. But you may need to relax the part of the mind that always needs to know beforehand what you are going to do. See The Keyboard Condition

This is not like creative dance, in which there may exist a personal need to produce something pleasing for others to watch. With this exercise you need an open area in which your inner being can make its own adjustments, and movement and feeling has a chance to express outside of rational criticism and demands of everyday life.

Give yourself at least fifteen minutes in which to explore what spontaneous movements and feelings emerge. Below is a summary of what may happen in this practice.

Although the movements may at first appear haphazard and irrational, if you allow them to continue without criticism, they usually express – perhaps only over a period of several sessions – a particular theme or point.

Like a dream, the theme or drama often symbolises your life situation, or something within you, such as the remaining emotions or attitudes from past experience, or a creative realisation. Or the movements may be expressive of the body’s own need to release energy or mobilise itself and its urges.

There are obvious stages or depths to the experience. Movement is often the first. Feelings and fantasy can then combine with the movement. Only with a few people do they occur without each other. If met in the right way the movements, fantasy and sounds can lead to insight into what is being expressed. In other words the symbolic movements, if that is what they are, can give way to rational understanding. This is not because one has thought out a plausible explanation for what happens. It is because your critical, conscious mind has watched the spontaneous working of what usually only occurs in dreams while you are unconsciousness. This gives automatic feedback to the unconscious mind and it can speed up it processing and problem solving. A communication takes place between the unconscious and conscious mind.

If what emerges is symbolic then it is help to ask the spontaneous process to clarify what it represents. The first time this happened to me I didn’t understand that the movements were symbols. I experienced creating a huge world which was so heavy it crushed me, pushing me to the floor and paralysed me. Slowly I gained strength, stood up and threw off the world. It was three months later, as I was describing the experience to a friend that realisation hit me like a wonderful insight. The world I had created was one made up of religious rules that in fact had made me ill trying to live them by controlling everything. The spontaneous Life Process in me had given me the strength to see them and cast them off.

 

It Takes Time

Magic Mushrooms

‘They broke my mental shackles’: could magic mushrooms be the answer to depression?

Josh Jacobs

From The Guardian

A liberty cap mushroom (Psilocybe semilanceata), known for its hallucinogenic properties, grows in a grassy fields where animal droppings occur in many moorlands throughout the UK the USA, Mexico and other countries.

New trials have shown the drug psilocybin to be highly effective in treating depression, with Oakland the latest US city to in effect decriminalise it last week. Some researchers say it could become ‘indefensible’ to ignore the evidence – but how would it work as a reliable treatment?

There are several more Magic Mushrooms – here are a couple more.

 

 

Lying on a bed in London’s Hammersmith hospital ingesting capsules of psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, Michael had little idea what would happen next. The 56-year-old part-time website developer from County Durham in northern England had battled depression for 30 years and had tried talking therapies and many types of antidepressant with no success. His mother’s death from cancer, followed by a friend’s suicide, had left him at one of his lowest points yet. Searching online to see if mushrooms sprouting in his yard were the hallucinogenic variety, he had come across a pioneering medical trial at Imperial College London. See Hallucinations Visions and Hallucinogens

Listening to music and surrounded by candles and flowers in the decorated clinical room, Michael anxiously waited for the drug to kick in. After 50 minutes, he saw bright lights leading into the distance and embarked on a five-hour journey into his own mind, where he would re-live a range of childhood memories and confront his grief. For the next three months, his depressive symptoms waned. He felt upbeat and accepting, enjoying pastimes he had come to feel apathetic about, such as walking through the Yorkshire countryside and taking photographs of nature.

“I became a different person,” says Michael. “I couldn’t wait to get dressed, get into the outside world, see people. I was supremely confident – more like I was when I was younger, before the depression started and got to its worst.”

The trial, finished in 2016, was the first modern study to target treatment-resistant depression with psilocybin, a psychedelic drug naturally occurring in around 200 species of mushroom. To varying degrees, Michael and all 18 other participants saw their symptoms reduce a week after two treatments, including a high, 25mg dose. Five weeks later, nine out of 19 patients found that their depression was still significantly reduced (by 50% or more) – results that largely held steady for three months. They had suffered from depression for an average of 18 years and all had tried other treatments. In January this year, the trial launched its second stage: an ambitious effort to test psilocybin on a larger group and with more scientific rigour (including a control group, which Michael’s study lacked), comparing the drug’s performance with escitalopram, a common antidepressant. The team has now treated about a third of the 60 patients and say that early results are promising for psilocybin.

Imperial’s current work is among a string of new studies that a group of professors, campaigners and investors hope will lead to psilocybin’s medical approval as a transformative treatment. Others soon to begin include an 80-person study run by Usona Institute, a Wisconsin-based medical non-profit, and a trial at King’s College London, as well as a 216-person trial that is already under way around the US, Europe and Canada, managed by the London-based life sciences company Compass Pathways. Robin Carhart-Harris, head of Imperial’s Centre for Psychedelic Research and a Compass scientific adviser, believes psilocybin could be a licensed medicine within five years, or potentially even sooner. “By about that point,” he says, “it would be like an irresistible force, and indefensible to ignore the weight of the evidence.”

Psilocybin mushrooms have been part of religious rituals for thousands of years. The Aztecs of Mexico referred to the mushroom as teonanácatl, or “God’s flesh”, in homage to its believed sacred power. In 1957, Albert Hoffman, a Swiss chemist working for the pharmaceutical company Sandoz, isolated psilocybin from the mushroom. Fifteen years earlier, he had accidentally ingested LSD, left work feeling dizzy, and experienced its psychedelic effects when he got home. During the 1960s, Sandoz sold psilocybin and LSD for research in medical trials, but the substances were soon outlawed after they became associated with the 60s counterculture.

Professor Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Psilocybin remains in the most restricted category today under the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, the US 1970 Controlled Substances Act and the 1971 UK Misuse of Drugs Act, among others. David Nutt, a professor of neuropsychoparmacology at Imperial, who is overseeing the current trials, disputes the evidence for this, saying that heavily restricting the drug (and other psychedelics) has hindered research and propelled “lies” about its risks and medical potential. For him, the decision is “one of the most atrocious examples of the censorship of science and medicine in the history of the world”. (They have recently been accepted to use in the USA) See Psychedelics

If successful, the new wave of research may continue to change psilocybin’s reputation after decades of prohibition. Carhart-Harris believes the drug offers a better and more comprehensive treatment than current antidepressants, and that it could well be a powerful new therapy for a host of other mental illnesses, including anxiety and food disorders. A 2016 Johns Hopkins University study of 51 patients with life-threatening cancer showed high doses of psilocybin significantly reduced end-of-life depression and anxiety for six months in 80% of cases, and helped patients accept death; a New York University study that year showed similar results. Current trials are looking further at psilocybin’s potential for reducing smoking addiction and alcohol dependency, after initial pilots yielded powerful results. (Johns Hopkins researchers showed in a small study, for example, that 80% of heavy smokers had not smoked for a least a week, six months after psilocybin treatment.) See So What Happens When I Die?

Magic mushrooms ‘reboot’ the brain in depressed people.

Read more

Carhart-Harris thinks part of the reason the drug has been effective in treating depression in trials so far is that it can help people see their lives more clearly. When watching patients tripping, he often feels as if they see a truer version of reality than the sober therapists guiding them: “It is almost like being in the presence of someone particularly wise, in terms of what comes out of their mouth.” It is unclear how much of the depression alleviation comes from the psychiatric support surrounding the treatment. Either way, several patients have sourced top-ups independently since the first trial, as their depression has returned.

A room at Imperial College where patients take magic mushrooms. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Much about the neuroscience of psychedelics remains unknown, but fMRI scans of patients’ brains after taking psilocybin showed reduced blood flow and resting activity in the amygdala, which is often overactive in depression and anxiety. They also show looser connections between brain networks, which then reintegrate in what the Imperial team suggests is part of the brain “resetting” itself on psilocybin. This may explain why the drug drives some patients to rethink entrenched beliefs and break compulsive thought patterns and behaviours. Imperial researchers believe that psilocybin operates differently from most current treatments. If common antidepressants dull emotions to help people cope, they theorise, psilocybin works on our serotonin system to heighten emotional responses and encourage people to actively confront their depression, which can prompt enduring shifts in mind-set.

For 48-year-old university design technician Kirk Rutter, this is why psilocybin seems to work – and why he hopes it will become medically available. He sees the drug not as a silver bullet but as a medicine that shows patients deep truths and requires them to apply teachings of this kind. Some other treatments, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, also seek to reshape thinking patterns, often in conjunction with antidepressants, but for many the current options fail to work. More than 300 million people suffer from depression globally, according to the World Health Organization, but researchers say that many of the most serious cases do not respond to antidepressants.

Magic mushrooms in capsule form. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Rutter was in this group, having tried counselling and two prescription medicines in the five years before the Imperial trial, as his depression worsened following his mother’s death. After psilocybin, he began to break cycles of catastrophic thinking and had the confidence to make profound life changes, such as selling his house and moving away from abusive neighbours, reorganising his finances and travelling for enjoyment after years of not leaving the country. He says of psilocybin: “It removes any barriers and allows you to process what you need to in an almost seductive way. You are inevitably and irresistibly drawn into it.” One week after the treatment, he noticed a feeling of optimism come back to his life. “Hell,” he thought, “I haven’t had this for a long time.”

But it is hoped that the Compass trials will provide the evidence needed to get the drug medically approved for treatment-resistant depression. She founded the company with her husband, George Goldsmith, three years ago, after her son’s severe depression and OCD got progressively worse while he was being treated with traditional antidepressants in a top US hospital. He later recovered with the help of psilocybin therapy, and the company says it has now attracted around £28m in funding, including from the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and has applied to patent a process to make psilocybin at scale. Some former Compass associates fear the company seeks to monopolise the psilocybin market and control medical access, criticisms that were aired last year by the US business website Quartz, although Malievskaia denies this.

A noticeboard at Imperial College’s Centre for Psychedelic Research. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Meanwhile, Compass hopes to request marketing authorisation for the drug within three years, if its trials are successful. It is proceeding slowly, though, having treated around six people since trials began in January, and Malievskaia says the process could take a decade until approval. She aims to accelerate progress, with new treatment sites recently opened at Columbia University, as well as in New Orleans and the Netherlands, among others.

Licensing is not the only obstacle to the drug becoming a common medicine. Taken over multiple hours in clinical settings with expert guides, psilocybin therapy does not come cheap. The new Imperial treatments cost more than £2,000 each, including doctors and therapists, and many patients could need multiple treatments each year for continued benefits. Malievskaia would not comment on how much Compass would plan to charge, but says she wants to maximise how many people can access the drug. Carhart-Harris says psilocybin therapy would be significantly more expensive than antidepressants and potentially more than counselling. “There is a cold reality to why selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors [antidepressants] dominate mental healthcare and that is that they are cheap,” he says.

The scientific, legal and commercial challenges may take years to be settled. But for many of the patients who have already been treated, and for some of the therapists guiding them, there is little doubt: it is only a matter of time before psilocybin and similar psychedelics reshape how we treat suffering – and understand our minds.

Magic mushrooms lift severe depression in clinical trial

Read more

Forty-year-old operations manager Melissa Elwin is among them. After an unpleasant first treatment, in which she felt trapped, during her second psychedelic trip inside Hammersmith Hospital, she felt as though she had left her body and was seeing her problems objectively. Psilocybin helped her confront her depression, fuelled by a difficult relationship and fraught breakup, and anxiety she had had since childhood. Under the drug, she started to find a resilience that has since helped her face her father’s death from dementia and a protracted legal battle with her ex-partner. Her descriptions of the trip are similar to the awe and unity Hoffman at times experienced on psychedelics while testing them: he saw in them a powerful ability to put our self and troubles in perspective.

“I was literally everywhere [during the psilocybin trip],” says Elwin. “In the most amazing nature scenes, like the orb of light twinkling through trees, in the ocean, in waterfalls. I had no recollection of time and I just wanted it to last for ever. For so long, I felt my depression was part of me, there was nothing I could do to change it. The antidepressants only made me feel drowsy and stopped me caring about things. This made me completely break my mental shackles. I returned to work [after being unemployed] and I was euphoric. I felt: I can do this, I can change my situation.”

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