Author Archive
Withdraw Withdrawal
Whether the dream shows the withdrawal in the form or a movement, such as pulling back one’s hand, or in the form of deep introversion, it depicts some aspect of pulling back the subtle extensions of oneself made in work, relationships, sex and life involvement. Consider the clues given in the dream to define what you are withdrawing.
In sleep and death consciousness gradually withdraws from the physical into its own centre rather like a snail withdrawing into its shell This disappearance of personal awareness in sleep is an entrance into the world of death. The half way meeting between the wisdom of the spirit and waking consciousness is experienced as dreams.
Occasionally extreme trauma can cause massive withdrawal. Changing from a child into an adult faces you with all manner of stresses. The risks are real. A few adolescents do commit suicide or go over the edge from anorexia, drugs or drink, alll are methods of withdrawal. Even feigning death is a powerful withdrawal; for feigning death, which in everyday terms means closing down emotionally, being introverted in some degree, not risking yourself too much in challenges such as exams or pushing in the competetive wprld. If the going gets tough you might once more ‘feign death’ and withdraw. This is not always the most productive stance, so be aware of it.
There was not an actual work problem to discover in the sense of hidden childhood trauma to release. There was no trauma or injury. There was instead a very powerful behaviour that led to repeated destruction of what I had carefully built up – like refusing to run weekends – being snotty so they will not invite me anyway – writing to cancel it once I had accepted it. Also by making a good start so it looks as if I have tried, then withdrawing effort when it comes to extending into the unknown, insecure area of advancing a cause. I can then look around and say – you see, I really did try, but it’s no good, life, circumstances were against me. Feel sorry for me. Maybe I blamed it on our lack of money, not enough time, psychological pain, but not on my own terror of walking out into the unknown and exposed areas of insecure life. At some point I remembered the tremendous physical anxiety I had felt when searching for work. It was an actual pain in my lower abdomen, a real burning gnawing deep inside. I went right into the anxiety, and it was the fear any life form feels when exposed to danger.
I believe that many reactions we develop in regard to childhood treatment are not simply traumas but are habits that got deeply etched into us as survival tactics. So not only do we need to experience and heal the feelings, but then we have to work bloody hard to develop new habits. See https://dreamhawk.com/inner-life/habits/
Something I experienced in meeting this was when I met my first habit as a new born baby. I spoke as the new born baby of my dream I really felt as if this was me, newly born. I had had a difficult birth and my reaction was that I wanted nothing to do with life. I wanted to stay curled up like an egg, not getting involved in the exterior world.
The adult observing me could see how this aspect of my inner life had led me to be withdrawn from social activity all my life, so I explained this to the baby me, saying – I need you to be ready to meet the world. You are a part of me and if you continue to withdraw I lack the enthusiasm to get involved with other people.
Back as the baby I felt totally vulnerable and didn’t want to take any risks – No I don’t want to come out of the egg. This was said with set determination.
As the adult again I said – Look, if you remain curled up this is more of a gamble than actually getting out and taking risks in life. Just lying there anything can get you. I had watched a documentary of baby turtles hurry to the sea, and some of them got eaten by seagulls.
The view of the seagulls really, really got to me as the baby. I could see that simply lying there was more dangerous than being still. I felt a change in me and a readiness to begin the journey of meeting life outside the womb. This change really made a difference to my everyday activities. A lifelong habit of being introverted gradually dropped away.
So to meet the anxious or frightened defensive self we need to understand its real feelings and that it cannot let them go without a real other view of what it could do – move instead of lying there where everything can get you – or whatever you can do to move the inner determination of your child self. Obviously you need to experiment to see what will work.
Witness Witnessing
Because of the many nature films shown on television we are used to the idea of mature and intelligent adults spending days or years watching the behaviour of animals such as hyenas or chimpanzees. In her book In The Shadow Of Man, Jane Von Lawick Goodall explains how, by watching chimpanzees and taking note of her observations, radical new insight into the behaviour of chimpanzees arose. She didn’t think beforehand what she expected to find, but simply observed and put together the information that arose. For instance on several occasions she saw the chimpanzees kill another animal and eat its flesh. The knowledge that chimpanzees were meat eaters was entirely new.
In a similar way, by observing dreams and laying bare the emotions and associated ideas and memories we have with the dream imagery, we gradually define our personality, its strengths and weaknesses, we discover new abilities and we grow beyond our old problems, and that in a depth we had never managed previously. I have called this mind watching, but it covers every aspect of human nature, not simply the intellect or thinking.
This mind watching through observation of our dreams first presents information about our personal experiences and memories and how they influenced our growth and influence present responses. Gradually the information arising from such watching leads beyond ones personal self. It shows in many cases how our unique self has arisen from, and has indissoluble links with our forebears, with our culture, with the past as a whole, and with the cosmos itself. It leads from oneself to the edge of the known, and perhaps helps us take a few steps beyond that edge into the unknown, to create new understanding.
This mind watching gradually reveals to us the many aspects of the mind’s working, and with such insight may come the growing ability to use these facets of ourselves. Not only may we discover great vistas of personal memory, but also the roots of our creativity, the subtle senses of our emotions and unconscious, and the treasures of experience we have gathered. See Your Amazing Circle – Self Observation
Tony’s Books
All of these books are avaialble from bookshops or from Amazon UK and USA
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MY DREAM JOURNAL
Every person’s dream life is completely unique. Dreams are the way in which your unconscious, instinctive self processes experiences, revitalises you and sends you powerful messages about your life. Understanding the important communications in dreams is the key to a successful life. My Dream Journal will allow you to read the story of your own dreams, make connections, see patterns and interpret the secret meaning of your own dream world. Included are questionnaires and exercises to show you how to recall, understand and maximise your dream power, and a directory revealing the meaning of the most common dream themes and images, as well as fill-in pages where you can record what you’ve dreamt. The book is available from Amazon UK and USA |
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Altered States of ConsciousnessA dream is an excellent example of an ASC. For instance, in dreams or in a state where the sense of self is diminished, people can sometimes do or experience things they cannot in ‘normal’ waking consciousness. Problems can be solved in an intuitive way; perception is heightened; some people look ahead to future events, or experience a view of things far distant from their physical body; there is also the possibility of generally impossible healing processes released in the body; memories of early childhood or even life in the womb are more readily accessible in a dream or ASC state than in normal life. Available in USA and UK |
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Be Your Own Dream InterpreterThis colourful and delightful book has one of the best introductions to dreams and understanding them – along with How To Do It. Oh yes, it also has a full dictionary of dream symbols.Available now in the UK and in USA and also in Australia – Brazil – Canada – China – France – Germany – India – Italy- Japan- Mexico – Netherlands – Spain – TurkeyYou may need to put the name of the book you are interested in. |
Working With Dreams
Dreams – Practical Techniques to explore them
Dreams – The best method to Gain Understanding is using Peer Dreamwork
Dream Dictionary – What made you want to create the Online Dictionary?
Dream Exploration – An audio example of Tony exploring a dream
Dream Images – Are not like things in waking life
Dream Images are all Aspects of Your own Mind and Abilities
Dream Interpretation – Tests of
Dream Levels – Understanding Them
Dream Meaning – A quick way to understand your own dream
Dream Process – The Influence of it
Dream Sampler – Types of dreams
Dreams – Are like strange seeds
Dreams – Are They Meaningless?
Dreams – How can we know what they mean?
Dreams – The Way to their Heart
Dreams – They are the Greatest University
Dreams and the Art of Mid-Lifery
Dreams are a Huge and Living Mirror
Dreams are a reflection of your inner world
Dreams are the Greatest University
Dreams – Being the Person or Thing
Dreams What do You bring to them?
Learn About the Different Levels of Your Mind
Dreams about Dead People
People We Know who have Died
Most dreams in which dead people appear are expressive of our attempts to deal with our feelings, guilt or anger in connection with the person who died; or our own feelings about death. When someone close to us dies we go through a period of change from relating to them as an external reality, to meeting and accepting them as alive in our memories and inner life.
But dead people can simply be people from our past. Considering that the major part of our learning and experience occur in relationship to other people, such learning and experience can be represented by characters from the past. For instance a first boyfriend in a dream would depict all the emotions and struggles we met in that relationship, and what we learned from it or took away from it that still influences present relationships. Therefore dreaming often of people we knew in the past would suggest that past experiences or lessons are very active at the moment, or we are reviewing those areas of our life. A woman who had emigrated to Britain from a very different cultural background frequently dreamt, even twenty years afterwards, of people she knew in her native country. This shows her still very much in contact with her own cultural values and experiences.
Example: ‘My husband’s mother, no longer alive, came and slid her arms carefully under me and lifted me up. I shouted ‘Put me down! Put me down! I don’t want to go yet.’ She carefully lowered me onto the bed and disappeared.’ E. H. – In this example the dreamer is feeling fear about being carried off by death.
Example: ‘A dark grey sugar loaf form materialised. This pillar lightened in shade as I watched. It didn’t move. I began to think it was Mrs. Molten who died in 1956. The feeling grew stronger but still the colour lightened. Then it bent over and kissed my head. In that instant I knew it WAS my mother. An ecstatic joy and happiness such as I have never known on earth suffused me. That happiness remained constantly in mind for the next few days.’ Mr M.
Here the dreamer has not only come to terms with his mother’s and his own death, but also found this inner reality.
Example: ‘A couple of months ago as I was waking I felt my husband’s arm across me and most realistically experienced my hand wrapping around his arm and turning toward him which I had done so often in his lifetime and saying ‘I thought you had died. Thank God you have not.’ Then I awoke alone and terribly shaken.’ Mrs I. – The example both shows the resolution of the loss, but also the paradox felt at realising the meeting was an inner reality.
A critic might say this is only a dream in which a lonely woman is replaying memories of her dead husband’s presence for her own comfort. Thus her disappointment on being disillusioned. Whatever our opinion, the women has within her such memories to replay. These are a reality. The inner reality is of what experience was left within her from the relationship. Her challenge is whether she can meet this treasure with its share of pain, and draw out of it the essence which enriches her own being. That is the spiritual life of her husband. The ‘aliveness’ of her husband in that sense is also social, because many other people share memories of the same person. What arises into their own lives from such memories, is the observable influence of the now dead person. But the dead also touch us more mysteriously, as in the next example. See: husband under family and relationships.
Example: In a recent news program on television, a man who survived the Japanese prisoner of war camp in Singapore had been given a photograph of children by a dying soldier he did not know. The man had asked him to tell his family of his death, but did not give his name. The photograph was kept for forty odd years, the man still wanting to complete his promise but not know how. One night he dreamt he was told the man’s name. Enquiries soon found the family of the man, who had an identical photograph.
Dead Person – General Meaning: This can represent some area of your life that has ‘died’. It can refer to death of feelings, such as hopelessness in connection with relationship and the loss of feelings about someone; the depression that follows big changes in your life such as loss of a loved partner, job, or child. It can also reflect the sense you have of your life in general, that it is without the stimulus of motivation and satisfaction, as when one feels oneself in a ‘going nowhere’ relationship or life situation. The dead person in the dream may link several of these feelings together, as symbols often represent huge areas of our experience. So the dead person my be a part of oneself you want to leave behind, to die out.
See: death and dreams
Dead husband or wife: Many dreams of dead people come from women who have lost their husband. It is common to have disturbing dreams for some period afterwards; or not be able to dream about the husband or wife at all; or to see the partner in the distance but not get near. In accepting the death, meeting any feelings of loss, grief, anger and continuing love, the meeting become easier.
Dead mother: As with other ‘dead person’ dreams they usually show how we are working out or unfolding our relationship with them. They can be wonderfully confirming of continued existence.
Example: ‘A dark grey sugar loaf form materialised. This pillar lightened in shade as I watched. It didn’t move. I began to think it was Mrs. Molten who died in 1956. The feeling grew stronger but still the colour lightened. Then it bent over and kissed my head. In that instant I knew it WAS my mother. An ecstatic joy and happiness such as I have never known on earth suffused me. That happiness remained constantly in mind for the next few days.’ Mr. M.
Dead child: When our child dies it is one of the most heartbreaking experiences we can meet. Sometimes it takes years to adjust to what has happened. Not only is the adjustment emotional and psychological, but also your way of life is often built around the person you have lost. Therefore the changes we meet can be enormous. However, we each have enormous resources of healing and ability to meet the new if we can access them. Very often there are experiences we have, or dreams, that continue our relationship with the child. Unfortunately we live in a culture that often denies the possibility of this.
The example below shows how this can be possible.
For instance, Dr. Morse, in his book Closer to the Light, tells of a mother who came to him because she hadn’t slept properly for 1041 nights after the death of her son. She showed him a picture of her son, but Dr Morse was suddenly called away to a ward emergency. Having dealt with the sick baby, he was writing up the notes and a nurse who had been helping said to him, ‘Who was that person who came in with you? Is he a student?’
Morse did not understand what the nurse was talking about as nobody had come into the hospital with him. As he was trying to find a pen for the notes he was writing he pulled out the photograph of the woman’s son. Immediately the nurse said, ‘That’s him. He kept trying to get your attention’.
When he returned to his office Morse asked the mother if she had ever been contacted by her son after his death. She said, ‘Oh yes. After he died, for several nights he would stand at the foot of my bed and tell me he was alright, and that I should stop crying. But that was only a crazy dream.’ However, such things are not crazy dreams, but insights into a greater reality.
After her conversation with Dr. Morse the woman slept properly for the fist time in nearly three years.
See: What Happens When I Die? – Life and Death.
Steps Toward YourSelf
The steps that are going to be described are based on two basic principles or assumptions. The first is that the way our body functions when we do not interfere with it, is an expression of the Reality of Life. If you can also agree that our planet and all the life on it do not exist outside the processes of the greater cosmos, then what happens in our body is an expression of cosmic processes. The large percentage of our bodily functions are, however, unconscious. So in this first step we aim to become more aware of things that lie near the surface of our awareness, but that we may not have given much attention to previously.
The second principle or assumption is that, ‘For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.’ (Mathew 18:20). This is suggested as it has been found again and again that when two or more people work with the principles to be outlined in a sympathetic way, dimensions of experience open that are usually denied to individuals or to groups with closed minds and hearts.
You need an environment in which you feel at ease and can express yourself in any way without being judged, either by others or yourself. It is helpful if you can have enough space around you to easily move your arms without bumping against anything. Quiet non-obtrusive music may help you to flow into what arises. Set aside ten or more minutes during which you can explore the technique in an unhurried way.
1 – Stand in your space and drop unnecessary tensions. Remind yourself that for the next few minutes you are going explore something you may not have done before. So let your body play. Drop the usual social controls we all keep our body restrained by. Let your body take the lead – give it free reign. See Keyboard Condition
2 – Open your mouth wide with head slightly dropped back and simulate yawns. As you do so notice whether a natural yawn starts to make itself felt. If it does, allow it to take over and have a really luxurious yawn. Any following impulse to yawn again should be allowed.
3 – Let the yawns come one after the other if they want to. Without acting it out, let the impulse to yawn take over your body, not just your mouth and face. So if the urge to move includes the arms or elsewhere, or if the yawn develops into a stretch, twist, or grunt, just let it happen.
4 – “Body:following its own impulses” “Spontaneous Movement”Give yourself over to the enjoyment of having time to really indulge your own natural feelings and body pleasure. In the same way you would normally allow your body to express itself in a yawn, let it express itself in whatever other form of movement, postures or stretches arise. Maybe it will be noisy yawns, so allow whatever noises you want to make, however ‘silly’. If this flows into movements that either follow the music or have a direction of their own, don’t hold yourself back. This is playtime with your body, so enjoy it. You can do whatever your body wants to do.
5 – Until the movements taper down and you feel ready to stop, simply enjoy or explore the movements and feelings that arise – even if what arises for you after the initial yawns is a desire to lie on the floor and rest. That also is you expressing your needs.
Practise this several times over a number of days until you feel at ease with it. It is very useful to keep a journal of what you experience, and record any changes or new developments during the practice of these steps.
Step Two – Relaxed Arm Test
The aim of the first step was to explore what it was like to allow your body to express its own spontaneous movements. By using it we learned to listen to our body’s urge toward movement, and left ourselves open to the yawning spreading to fuller movements than we usually allow. The results of this can be incredibly varied, so there is no right or wrong result.
Something that is helpful though, is to hold your body in a way that is what might be called the ‘piano key’ feeling. This is a condition of sensitive balance, like the keys on a piano. A touch on a piano key causes it to move and the note to play. But as soon as the finger is removed the key springs back into place ready to move again if necessary. So the aim is to let your body and feelings both be sensitive and relaxed, ready to be influenced by gentle internal urges.
Approach this step playfully. Enjoyment helps what happens.
1 – Stand in the centre of a doorway, facing in or out, with your arms toward the doorposts.
2 – Lift your arms sideways, keeping your arms straight, until the back of your hands press against the doorposts. Try to lift your arms higher, pressing harder against the doorposts as if trying to complete the movement of lifting the arm.
3 – Using a reasonable amount of effort, stay with the hand pressing against the wall for about twenty seconds.
4 – Now drop your arms and move out of the doorway, and with eyes closed relax and be aware of what happens.
5 – Try the experiment before reading on. In fact try it a couple of times before reading the next paragraph.
What you have done is to attempt a movement. Because the doorposts prevented this, the body was not able to complete the movement you asked it to make. Therefore a muscular charge built up in your shoulder (deltoid) muscle. When you stepped away from the doorpost the arms, if relaxed, were free to complete the movement. So your arms may have risen from your side as if weightless, thus discharging its energy. Some people need several tries before they can find the right body feeling to allow the arms its movement. It is easy to prevent it moving because the impulse is quite a subtle one.
The technique enables you to learn how to give your body freedom to move under its own impulse. It is also an example of how the body self-regulates through spontaneous movement. It is therefore helpful either to practice the technique until you can do it, or use it a number of times to establish your relationship with the feeling of it. The sense of allowing movement can then be used in inner-directed movement itself.
Step Three – Moving Sea
It is rare to find someone who will drop aside ready-made approaches, and listen to what their own being has to say. Such listening and learning is real respect for oneself, an admittance that the process of life sustains us. It is also an expression of trust that the unconscious secrets of Life’s experience are communicable to our listening consciousness.
It is natural for your body to move spontaneously, breathing is an example. The only reason it doesn’t do so more often is that we restrain it. In most social settings we usually restrain everything except what may be acceptable to others, expedient in the situation, or judged as correct. This means that we may not give ourselves the freedom elsewhere to allow our own creative imagination, allow our body to discharge tension through movement, experience our intuitive process, and experience our full range of feeling responses. We gradually diminish ourselves, blocking out much of ourselves that we consider not of immediate use in everyday affairs.
You will need up to an hour to complete this step.
1. If you want to, play music that does not grab your attention. Stand in your space for a while and be aware of your breath. Every so often hold your breath out for a while and notice what it feels like as your body wants to make the movement to breathe in. Unless you hold your breath for a long time, the urge is quite subtle. Have the same keyboard feeling in your body as you had with the previous steps. Do this for about five minutes.
2. Simulate yawns and allow them to develop into stretches or movements.
3. Then stand in the middle of your space and close your eyes. Lift your arms from your sides and take your hands high above your head. Do this a few times noticing the difference in feeling between having the hands high or low. Do this before reading on.
4. Now relax with hands by your sides. Hold the idea of taking the hands up high again, but do not consciously attempt the movement. Take your time. Be aware of how your hands and arms want to make the movement. Or perhaps there is no urge at all to move your arms. The point is to avoid making a mechanical movement, and be aware of your feelings and motivations. If this includes the rest of your body, or your arms go in another direction than above your head, or do not move at all, that’s fine. Explore this before reading the next paragraph.
5. Stand in your space with eyes closed. Drop unnecessary tensions as you listen to the music. Hold in mind for a moment the idea that you are giving your body space to explore how it would express the quality of water. There is no need to think about what to do. Let your body explore by itself. Trust it to find its own way to expressive movements. It is important to be patient, to wait for something to arise by itself. Allow yourself about 15 minutes for this. It is okay if nothing in particular happens.
6. Take time to observe and allow the delicate motivations (magnetic pulls) directing your body to watery movement.
7. You may find you have resources of imagination you did not suspect. Aspects of water you hadn’t consciously set out to explore will be expressed in your movements. If you are expressing deep still waters, you will actually feel a deep quietness and power. Or if it is the power of rushing rivers, then a feeling of power will surge through your body as you touch your resources of strength and healing. The flowing feelings that arise are actually healing
As you learn to trust this process and allow it to grow in expression, you will find unexpected themes will arise. Even though you are expressing water, your expression may have in it feelings that are particular to yourself.
Use this step several times before moving on to the next step. If you have experiences satisfying spontaneous movements the first time, there is no need to use the warming up stages first. Go straight into the exploration of water.
Using the ‘water movements’ has the benefit of toning the body. It brings harmony between the emotions and body. Your feelings are allowed to be active and to move towards emotional well-being. Areas of your body and mind not usually allowed pleasure are bathed in it. You can practice the ‘moving sea’ as many times as you wish.
Step Four – The Open Door
If you have practised the previous steps until you can really experience spontaneous and creative movement, and perhaps feelings arising, then you are ready for an approach that is as ancient as humankind. The open approach is an access to your whole self. Because much of yourself still awaits discovery, is still unknown to you, it is impossible to know just where to look to find your own wholeness and health. You are unique. You have personal and particular life experiences and different personal qualities of mind and body that make your needs distinctive. Allowing your being freedom of expression during inner-directed movement empowers your ability to work at and express your own special needs from your core self.
Despite the fact that virtually all the healing or helping professionsXE “Helping Professions” or techniques attempt to apply cures or methods to us, it is obvious that we know our own needs better than anyone else does and that we are largely self-righting or self-regulating. Expressed in its simplest form, if you are hungry you have an urge to eat. Beliefs or fears may degrade that pure urge into other forms. Worries about weight gain; ideas about what is healthy food; habitXE “Habit”s perverted by trying to be ‘one of the boys – or girls’ – at business / club dinners, may achieve this degrading process.
By opening to what is innately within you and consenting to it expressing itself spontaneously without structuring it,XE “Inner-Directed Movement:without structure” you allow your being to gradually shed such degradations and return to an expression and recognition of your real needs. Because you are always feeling your own personal needsXE “Personal Needs” (e.g. Hunger) the open approach to inner-directed movement helps you drop preconceived ideas and social pressures. There may even be a process of clearing out the habitXE “Habit”s, fears and pains that have stood in the way of your own healthy self. Then comes the experience of meeting and accepting the real you. The ‘you’ that is both ordinary and extraordinary. XE “Sel Acceptance”
During the following practice, if there are changes in pace, allow them. The range of possible movements and forms of expression are enormous. They include all tones of feeling from angry to loving and exalted; all vocal expressions from deep crying XE “Crying “to imitation of the sound and feeling of foreign languages; all types of movement from the most exquisite stillness to frantic tribal dancingXE “Tribal Dancing”. These are some of the spectrum of inner qualities you are capable of as a healthy and whole human being. Only whole human beings are capable of a wide range of expression that they can choose to end at any moment. It is the unhealthy person who is locked into compulsive and limited patterns of behaviour. Liberation is a sign of health. You are a keyboard, why not have all your keys available?
1. Prepare your environment of space, clothing, mood and music.
2. If you need it, put on some music that has energy but does not grab your attention too much. Use a couple of warm up movements to get your circulation more active and your body loosened. This step, as all the others, can be used alone or with others. In a group, this approach is sometimes greatly enhanced.
3. Stand in the middle of your space with feet about shoulder width apart. For a few moments hold the thought and feeling that for the next half hour you are giving up your own conscious efforts. You are allowing your being to express its own needs in its own way by opening to the WHOLE you.
4. Get the ‘keyboard’ feeling in yourself. In other words give yourself permission to allow spontaneous or unexpected movements of body and mind – don’t forget to leave yourself open to vocal expression too.
5. Start by slowly circling the arms. Make the circles cross the front of the body. This will mean the right hand will cross in front of your pelvis as it moves left and upwards above your head.
6. When you have the arms moving with ease, become aware of the shapes your fingertips are carving in space. Stay with this observation for a few moments, then notice whether your hands and fingers have any urge to create their own shapes in space. It may feel as if delicate magnetic pulls are directing your hands. If so, follow these delicate urges by letting your arms be moved by them, just as you did in the previous step. Let your hands and arms discover any movements or speed that satisfies you. Permit your whole body and voice to become involved if there is a tendency toward this.
7. When you are ready to finish the session, stop the movements and relax on the floor or in an easy chair for a few minutes. There is often a natural sense of an end of any theme XE “Themes”that has arisen.
Using the open approach you will experience movements, themesXE “Themes”, emotional expression and insights particular to your personal bodily, mental and spiritual needs. The more fully you express the more you learn to command the whole of your being. These are movements towards wholeness.
Step Five – Playing With the Voice
The Open Approach is one of the fundamental methods of listening to your body – or I should say – the body-mind. Therefore it is suggested that you use the open approach at least once each week, for 30 minutes to an hour at a time.
In essence there are three things that arise over a period of time. They are Cleansing, Growth, and Union.
The Cleansing phase is a discharge of the many traumas, hurts, confusions and negative habit patterns you have taken in from events, parents and your culture. This is sometimes uncomfortable as these past hurts and patterns are washed out of your body and consciousness. It may take many periods of practice to properly clear particular things within you.
The Growth phase is what happens each time a negative trait or attitude is cleared – your awareness and horizons of experience expand, and you become capable of a fuller perception and of easier relationships. This too can be uncomfortable at times, like being stretched. The narrow boundaries of awareness that previously held you captive and against which you struggled are gradually thinned, crossed, and moved beyond.
Union emerges at first as a growing sense of touching a transcendent or wonderful otherness. You sense something immense and full of love. You gradually realise yourself as existing beyond time and space in a transcendent bliss. Walls you lived within fall away, and you sense immense and unlimited consciousness stretching away from you in all directions. It may take years to arrive at in any fullness, but it is touched at any time in your opening to the inner process.
Take up to fifteen minutes with this practice. It may help to use music as a background – something not too invading. Prepare to explore the use of sound. To make different sounds you need to move not only your throat, but also your trunk and even limbs in different ways. Sounds also evoke feelings and move or exercise your emotions. Just as some people do not move their body outside of certain restricted and habitual gestures and actions, so also our range of sounds may be quite small.
1. For several minutes explore making sounds: Different happy sounds, types of laughter, proud, childish, funny, etc.; angry noises; animal and bird noises; sensual sounds; the sound of crying or sobbing; natural sounds such as wind, water, earthquakes; make the sounds of different languages and different situations such as a warriors chant, a mothers lullaby (without real words, just evocative sounds), a lover’s song, a hymn to Life, or even sounds about birth and death; and just plain nonsense noises. Don’t attempt to explore all these different types of sound at one session. Just choose one and explore it until you can feel yourself limbering up in it and getting past restricting feelings such as shyness or stupidness. Those are the walls of restriction.
2. Then move on by taking a full breath and letting it out noisily with an AHHHH sound. Do this until you feel it resonating in your body. This may take one or two minutes.
3. Change to a strong EEEEEEEEEE sound. Once more, continue for at least a minute.
4. Now try MMMMMMMAAAAAA.
5. If you are doing this exercise for the first time, that is sufficient for one session.
It is important to understand the power of your setting for these steps. To create the right mental setting it is necessary to decide that for at least half an hour, you have the complete luxury of being able to move and express yourself in any way pleasing you within the physical space you have prepared. What you do within that time doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t have to please anyone else. It does not have to produce anything. It can be quiet, active, noisy, sleepy, or aggressive. There is nobody but yourself involved, nobody to be judged by, and you need to withhold judgement of yourself until the end of the session. Do not judge the process, judge the fruit, the results of the exercises.
During the practice period any spontaneous movements that occur might come in waves of activity followed by waves of quietness. If there is quietness simply rest, holding the ‘piano key’ feeling in the body so you are ready to respond to any arising impulses. You do not have to ‘do’ something. Let your being find your own way of resting, your own level of activity, your own path of healing and growth.
Part of the pleasure of inner-directed movement is sharing it with others. Because it is a pleasure, and because there is support and a more powerful atmosphere or ‘holding space’ created when sharing, it is worth exercising with friends.
Step Six – The Waiting Seed
There are many ways to explain what happens when your conscious mind becomes receptive to the subconscious mind or body-mind and you allow the sort of movement you have explored. Basically they are:
• The influence arises from a transcendent source and cleanses and uplifts the practitioner.
• The influence is an expression of the fundamental self-regulatory processes of body and mind,
• The influence is a natural release of unconscious material.
We do this by learning to quieten the constant chatter that goes on in our mind and by making our conscious mind and body receptive. When we do this a current of influence works on us. Aurobindo said, “The surest way toward this integral fulfilment is to … open ourselves constantly to the Divine Power … Wisdom and Love, and trust it to effect the conversion.” This brings about a “conversion or transformation through the descent and working of the higher still concealed supramental principle.”
The problem with quieting the mind is that it is so difficult and tricky. Even having a goal such as quietness during a meditative practice is an activity of mind. Allowing spontaneous movement and expression is a way past that difficulty. When the spontaneous arises we can watch it with our conscious mind much as when one watches someone dance or mime. This is sufficient quietness to allow the mysteries of your life process to express itself.
During the first steps it might be that you only experienced movement. If you carry on, feelings and vocalisation follow. The feelings open the doorway to an enormously enlarged world. Then gradually the mind itself becomes more fluid and receptive. Visual mobility arises. A greater intuitive perception opens. Atrophied intuition takes time to reach a state of fluidity and grace.
Remember that all the miraculous and mysterious forces of life express as movement. Life breathes us. We might interfere with it, but even a baby without self-consciousness or will breathes. So who is making the movement? Life laughs and loves through us in the movements we make. Crying, having a baby, making love, feeling joy, all express as movement and sounds. Becoming receptive to these more subtle movements is a way of learning from the greatest teacher of all – Life.
It is important that you are purposely not imagining a specific movement for your body to follow. You are only holding an idea, an outline, and to follow it your body and feelings must move into the unknown and play creatively. So let your body feel its way slowly into finding its posture or movement. Don’t get frustrated if little happens during this first practise. Remember that inner-directed movements are a learnt skill. You can consider it a success if some aspect of what arises is spontaneous or unexpected. So at first it doesn’t matter if the session feels mechanical and contrived. Having those feelings mean you are sensing what is happening, and you can thereby refine your technique with their help. By letting go of the controlling urge, you can let the spontaneous and creative part of you express itself.
Prepare your environment, with sufficient space, clothing allowing mobility – loose and soft if possible, without tight undergarments. If you use music, it should not grab the attention and have it playing quite softly.
1 – Stand in the centre of your space and raise your arms above your head. Hold them so they are quite extended but slightly apart.
2 – With eyes closed, bring to mind the idea or image of an unplanted seed. It can be any sort of seed.
3 – Notice whether your body in its present posture feels as if it is expressing the form and condition of the seed. The aim is to consider how you and your body feel in relationship to the idea and sense you have of the seed. Many people find, for instance, that having the arms extended does not ‘feel’ like an unplanted seed. Don’t struggle with this. It is just an experiment, play with it, have fun.
4 – Once more follow the subtle urges of your being. Play with the feelings of what it would be like to be a seed, waiting for the right conditions for your potential to be unleashed – to germinate, grow, flower, bear fruit. Let your body play with these ideas or feelings. Use your body and feelings, even if this is a new for you. Explore in this way until you feel you have found a position that is satisfying. Take your time. Notice whether the arms and head are right. Would a seed that is not growing feel alert, sleeping, or waiting? See if you can find an inner mood that for you feels like a seed. Do not attempt to think the whole thing out or consider it scientifically. Let whatever feeling sense you have guide you.
5 – Take your time with this. As the dry seed, are you asleep, are you waiting, what does it feel like inside you? Dwell in these feelings. Notice whether, once you find an inner mood that feels right, your body expresses this. Wriggle or move into what feels right.
Use this step several times during the week until you feel at ease with it. It only need take a few minutes each time.
Inner-directed movements, occurring as they do when you relax deeply, arise from the unconscious processes that control your existence and growth. It is a fuller expression of what lies behind the growth of your body and mind. It is what enables you to maintain a stable existence amidst the ever-moving forces of your environment. It holds all the systems of your being integrated in common purpose and is the foundation of consciousness. It is not something distant or separate from you, but is innately in everything you are and do.
Step Seven – The Growing Seed
First there is our personality or awareness that offers itself and is acted upon. Then there is that which acts upon it. These two are really one. Sri Aurobindo says: ‘One commences in a method, but the work is taken up by a Grace from above, from that to which one aspires.’
The energies of this higher consciousness in man and woman operate through natural processes. It is as natural as the arrival of teeth in the child, or sexuality in adolescence. In fact it is a continuation of the same process. But it seems as if this process of growth which extrudes the body and brings about human consciousness and personality, washes many folk up onto a seashore from the ocean of Life processes. Why? It appears that we must consent to and co-operate with life and allow the energies to guide us.
How do we do this? First you have to recognise clearly that some process, some force, causes you to exist. Next recognise that this process causes changes in your life, and is apparent as growth and maturing. It does this by integrating your life with everyday experience. Next, surrender to the process and go along with it. Offer yourself just as you presently are to it. Let things happen – allow changes to take place. You will be shown the way.
This path does not attempt to crush or destroy or kill the ego, the appetites, or the instincts. Rather, it hands them over as living entities so that they can be transformed and empowered for higher, purer, more sublime levels of expression, and help you reach fuller self-realisation in everyday life. So this opening, this ability to allow things to happen, is what we are aiming for, even if it is just during the time of the exercise for now.
• Find a position and feeling that expresses a dried seed planted in warm moist soil. What this means is that as the dried seed you wait with the open, keyboard feeling that you have been practising. Don’t make things happen. Surrender your effort. It doesn’t matter if no movements occur. The waiting and openness are the important things.
• Express your reaction to and interaction with water, soil, darkness, and heat and how your husk swells, softens and your kernel bulges as it becomes alive. Then you germinate and begin to grow upwards and downwards. Continue expressing the anchoring roots, the upward snaking stem, sprouting leaves, blossoms, flowers and fruit.
• It might be that as the seed you feel very strongly you do not want to grow. In which case remain in the form of the seed until you feel a change and an urge to grow, or until your session time is finished.
• When you sense the experience has finished, rest quietly for about five minutes before getting up or leaving.
The seed approach deals specifically with your growth as a person. It is a meditation in growing toward your own potential, and in doing so growing beyond any darkness and pain within you. It helps you work out, through creative movement, any restriction in expressing your potential and your physical energy. People who have not lived out their own inner needs, or are inexpressive physically, will find this particularly helpful..
Step Eight
| Being able to move, and being alive are tightly bound together. All the life processes in us express as movement of one sort or another. To breathe, to laugh, to make love, to feel anger or joy, is to move. When any important life-movements such as those taking place in the intestines, the heart, the genitals are inhibited, then we are less alive, less healthy. Every emotion we feel has its corresponding movement in action, in a body posture or in subtle changes in our muscles. When powerful emotions such as love or anger are not expressed they become ‘held-back-movement’. We usually call this tension. As such tension deepens it becomes psychosomatic illness – pain without apparent physical malfunction. In its worse form it becomes actual illness. Some of the most common ‘movements’ we hold back are those connected with love, sex, anger, fear, crying, emotional pain and sometimes even laughter and joy. In our dreams we often attempt to express movements that are suppressed during our waking life. Unfortunately our habits of tension are so deep we may not manage to find release even while asleep. (From Dreams and Dreaming by Tony Crisp) |
In the previous seven steps, the fundamental secrets of how to follow the thread of your subtle life processes have been given. Life is movement. In its movement Life laughs and cries, it sings. Life also dances, and it explores the wonders of its own sentience through imagination, imagery, the rousing of memories and creative fantasy.
So if you have followed the seven steps you may have begun to experience this dance of life, this song. Perhaps you have even experienced some leap of imagination or flight of consciousness into its huge ocean of possibilities. But of course there is more, much more, to experience. And to find this you need to come again and again to the listening, to the growth of the seed or the dance of your body in its movements or struggles.
Therefore, rather than give another approach to use, time will be taken to explain a little bit about what you are doing, and what you are opening to within yourself.
In allowing spontaneous movements, and in trying to understand the wide range of experience you may meet, consider how you might see yourself if a film were made of you like those showing speeded-up plant growth. On such films you see the plant moving and growing with incredible vigour. Its leaves and flowers open with powerful movement. If the film showed you from conception onwards, you would see amazing change and expansion. An extraordinary process would be seen causing your body and mind to unfold. You would observe incredible amounts of movement, many of them spontaneous. The movements in the womb, in babyhood and even in your adult sleep, you would see as inner-directed, and powerful. You would notice that as you gradually matured, conscious control of movement became more prevalent. But still your sleep movements, breathing, yawning, stretching, laughter and tears kept you in touch with the incredibly wise process which directed your overall growth and survival. It is this often forgotten, but very real process underlying your original growth and continued existence that you allow into a new level of expression when you relax fully.
However, to do nothing and wait, to be patient with ones own internal creative process is not a quality highly developed in many of us in today’s world. Yet this is vital if you wish to work with this miraculous process of growth and integration within yourself.
The Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, called this process the ‘transcendent function’. He named it this because he witnessed it enabling people to grow beyond problems that crippled them, problems that had appeared insoluble. Writing about this he says, ‘Here and there it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond the dark possibilities within himself, and the observation of the fact was an experience of the foremost importance to me. …. I therefore asked myself whether this possibility of outgrowing, or further psychic development, was not normal, while to remain caught in a conflict was something pathological. Everyone must posses that higher level [of possible growth], at least in embryonic form, and in favourable circumstances, must be able to develop the possibility.
Jung goes on to say, ‘What then did these people do in order to achieve the progress which freed them? As far as I could see they did nothing but let things happen… The art of letting things happen, action in non action, letting go of oneself, as taught by Master Eckhart, became a key for me… The key is this: we must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this becomes a real art of which few people know anything. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, and never leaving the simple growth of the psychic processes in peace. It would be a simple enough thing to do if only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things.’ (Quoted from Secret of the Golden Flower by Wilhelm and Jung)
Yes, simplicity and letting things happen is difficult. We do keep interfering. We rationalise what is happening and explain it away. We erect goals because of something we have read or heard, and strive in a direction other than our own internal process moves toward. We think we know best and so ignore the incredible overall viewpoint our internal awareness has.
Another viewpoint of the process is stated by J. A. Hadfield, a psychiatrist who specialised in working with dreams. He says, ‘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.’ (Quoted from Dreams and Nightmares by J. A. Hadfield) See The Secret Power for more information about self-regulation.
Step Nine – Seed Group
When using the starting point of the seed you are giving the unconscious a ready-made structure to work with. Because you may be unfamiliar with a completely unstructured approach to your inner processes, such a structure gives at least some sense of familiarity and confidence. Even so, some people find they want everything fully described, scripted or choreographed. The very point of using this approach, however, is to begin moving beyond the known in yourself, towards creative newness and the unexpected. If you cannot do this, you will not be able to discover what is presently unknown in your unconscious. So even if some anxiety is felt, it is helpful if you can gradually move beyond such resistant feelings.
To use this approach a few extra things need to be learned. This is because the group action is an integrated one, and needs some structure to help it in the early stages. So if you are working with a group of three or four, and one of the group is the seed, the other two or three can be in the roles of earth and water to the seed. The aim is to support the growth of whoever is the seed by physical and emotional contact.
1. Whoever is the Seed starts by standing in the middle of the others, who take time to make contact with her/him. They allow time to find an attitude that enables them to get closer physically and emotionally than in usual social roles. So without forcing or acting mechanically, the members touch and draw near to the Seed.
2. As a guide to this, it is helpful to consider in human terms, if you are in the water role, how you would penetrate the seed to stimulate its growth process? If you are in the earth role, again in human terms, how would you relate to the seed to give it a medium in which or from which to grow? If you are in the seed role, then you allow your spontaneous reaction to this. Allow yourself to move in any way that arises, just as occurred in the ‘seed alone’ approach. Do this without considering what you should do. Trust your inner process. You do not need to hold on to the roles rigidly. If you find you are being led into a spontaneous response, allow it. But remember, it is the Seed’s time, not yours. Do not take over the action, but support that of the Seed.
3. When this is established the Seed curls up on a prepared space – with blanket or cushions – on the floor. The members draw near and make contact again. Get close, cover the Seed’s body with yours, penetrate with your touch, as earth and water does with a seed.
The group is an intimate one. It has many dimensions of experience possible. Not only is it a meeting of people in a way not usually possible socially, but it is also a place to learn human contact, how to give caring and support to another human being, and how to communicate with others non-verbally. The support it gives can allow a very deep release of inner feelings, of creative spontaneity, of self-discovery.
Each group becomes self-initiating, each person taking it in turn to be the Seed, and to be supported by the others. Whoever is the Seed, it is up to them to determine how long to be in the middle. Obviously this depends to some extent on available time, but also on the dynamics of what they experience. It might take quite a long time for what is unfolding to complete itself. It might be short. So the Seed needs to occasionally tell their supporters what is happening, just to keep them in touch. The Seed also needs to decide when to finish. When this is done sit up and relax for a while, and share the experience by perhaps telling what happened more fully, and what it was like to be in the supporting role.
Everything good is costly, and the development of personality is one of the most costly of all things. It is a question of yea-saying to oneself, of taking the self as the most serious of tasks, keeping conscious of everything done, and keeping it constantly before one’s eyes in all its dubious aspects–truly a task that touches us to the core. Carl Jung, in Secret of the Golden Flower
Step Ten
The Freedom To Be Yourself
One of the first person’s I taught inner-directed movement to was Maria, a woman in her sixties. Maria was married, had a lovely country cottage, but had not been outdoors for months. She was suffering from aches and pains in her arms, felt life had lost its interest, and asked for help. Maria quickly learned to relax enough to allow her body freedom to express without inhibiting self-criticism. Her movements were slow and tentative at first but soon included her whole body, producing feelings of pleasure. To allow such movements Maria had to learn how to give her body and feelings time in which to explore unplanned movement – movement arising from her own subtle body impulses. Such subtle urges are often overlooked, or are crowded out by ones thoughts of what one ought to be doing, or what is appropriate in the circumstances. So Maria created a mood, and gave herself time, in which she could allow irrational movement – movement that had not been thought-out beforehand, or given by someone else. Such movements are usually quite different to the sort of things one finds recommended in exercise books. The reason being that they are often unique mixtures of exercise, dance, mime, and generally letting oneself go enough to do what might have otherwise be seen as ridiculous. Nevertheless, such irrational expression is very satisfying. In Maria’s case she started with slow arm movements. Gradually the rest of her body was included in an expression of pleasure and sensual enjoyment in which she rolled and squirmed on the floor – movements and feelings that surprised Maria.
Within three weeks Maria went out with her husband, and bought new clothes, something she hadn’t done for years. She told me she realised she had been holding back all her pleasure, all her positive drive and feelings. In fact Maria had unconsciously been holding back HERSELF. In liberating her body and emotions she had liberated herself from the prison of her own depression. Frequently depression or lack of enthusiasm for life occurs through the suppression of our own feelings – the stagnation of our urge to move and live.
The freedom and release which arises from inner-directed movement is also evident in what happened to Jim. A group using inner-directed movement started in Bristol, UK. Jim, an unmarried gas fitter, bored with his work and life, joined the group. Within a couple of weeks Jim had learned to give his body and feelings freedom to move. He was amazed at how fertile an imagination he had when he stopped holding himself back. His movements were creative and deeply felt. Less than two months had passed before Jim had given up his job, found a woman whom he married, and together they started working in a Steiner School for children. Jim also had been holding himself back.
Both of these examples show that inner-directed movement is basically a way of allowing what is already innate in you to be expressed more fully or easily. Put in the simplest of terms, by restraining the way you express in movement and voice, you may be inhibiting important parts of your physical or psychological nature.
Finding Yourself Anew
Leslie Kenton, the author of many books on self-help with diet and exercise, in writing about inner directed movement, says:
Often, as a result of trauma, life stress and social or family situations that are not naturally supportive of individual growth and development, we become separated from our own feeling sense or we tend to relegate it to the level of insignificance. When this happens, one’s life tends to become strongly habitual, mechanical, and eventually largely unsatisfying, no matter what kind of worldly success, excitement and glitter it may contain. For any real sense of joy, satisfaction or meaning can only come when the inner and outer being are linked up and when what Crisp calls the feeling sense is allowed the freedom to regulate both physiological and psychological processes.
Sometimes the experience of inner-directed movement can be enormously joyous, particularly when the energy is flowing freely. At other times it can be very difficult. That occurs where there is some kind of energy block – when one’s vitality is temporarily trapped into some internal conflict or there are chronic areas of tension in the body that have not yet been resolved. But what is remarkable about the technique is that by going with the individual physical movements which occur, such tensions are not only gradually worked out, leaving your body stronger, straighter and more alive than before, but also the imagery and memories which occur in the process can bring exceptional insight.
I watched one woman. who was using the technique for the first time, lie quietly breathing. She then found that her hands began to move gently as though she was exploring the texture and quality of space near her body. Crisp encouraged her to go with these fine movements. Gradually they developed into larger stroking gestures in the air around her. Her imaging facilities came into play as the physical movements continued and she sensed that she was in what she later described as a kind of womb. But instead of being dark it was permeated with light, immensely safe and beautiful. Then gradually her torso and shoulders began to move as well until slowly she emerged from this extraordinary womb world into clear air and more light. She began to weep quietly, stunned by the power and the beauty of an experience which had come quite spontaneously from within her. When she later began to try and make sense of the imagery that accompanied the movements she realised that her own feeling sense (which until then she had not even been aware of) had created for her a physical expression of the particular life situation she was in at the moment. She was on the verge of a new beginning as far as her work life was concerned, and had been feeling rather unsettled and anxious about it. She found this experience enormously helpful because it made her realise that the career changes she had planned had not been motivated by some capricious wish but were very much in line with the direction in which her deepest self was leading her. She also discovered through this experience that she does indeed have a feeling sense which she can experience for herself and that if she listens to it, it will express a summary of her life situation at any particular time or help her work through whatever blocks or tensions she experiences.
| Taking time to listen to the needs of your own being is truly one of the most important, and most nourishing of things we can do. Whether you use the ‘open approach’ or the ‘seed’ doesn’t matter. What matters is that you create time and an environment allowing your own potential to express and become known. |
Year Years
The mention of year or years in a dream is often a reference to the passsge of years in which importatant events or growth or great change occurred.
The birth year is a marker of a beginning in your life and so may point to to other starting periods. Also our age in years is often very important to people depending on their feelings, negative or positive, about their age.
Example: As most lives are…mine is a long story, but I would like to give you a little background. At the time that I dreamt this dream I had been in an unfulfilled marriage of 29 years. I had not anticipate leaving my marriage at the time, though deep within I regretted my marriage and suffered much pain and unhappiness that I had repressed. It wasn’t really a marriage – neither of us married for the right reasons.
The example shows how important the passage of 29 years was, and how the years were filled with repressed pain and unhappiness.
The Gods
The Gods
In the paradigm of the present western society there are no such things as gods – maybe for many not even God. See Archetype of the Paradigm
But from the point of view of dreams and from the cultural traditions of many other countries, gods exist. Even Christianity clearly mentions gods, even though it is denied. In Genesis it says “God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them.” As it says, “let us make man.”
The word Elohim is used in the original script of this piece and it means, to quote from The Unknown God by F. J. Mayers, “Elohim” is a plural name, and yet in our bibles it is always treated as a “singular” one, and always used with a singular verb. In this verse, Elohim, in using the phrase “in our image,” etc., treats Himself as a plurality.” So the unknown God – ain soph – in expressing Himself, becomes many. So there are many expressions of the natural creative forces of our universe. In one statement it calls this ‘The One in the many’. After all, God is beyond description and so can be a paradox. In many dreams gods are also shown, and are seen as the consciousness resident throughout the cosmos, as it knows itself in various forms. And although we are used to seeing gods portrayed in human form of a mixture of animal and human forms, these are simply human ways of describing their attributes. They are often felt as beings of different dimensions, or sometimes are the consciousness behind the natural creative forces of our own lives and solar system.
But many people who have explored their own depths, find God is not outside them, but is the very basic core of their being. We are in fact all holy – as it says in Genesis “God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them.”
Example: I experienced what I saw as interface between all that we are as our everyday waking personality; between all that we have gathered and understood and lived in this lifetime, and the immensity of what we are as a spiritual being. I saw the details of this and it is quite difficult to summarise or to explain in any way. But as clearly as I can it was like the processing of information so that all that you are formed of is a sort of pattern, a synthsise or a signal, and that signal called out of the immensity of the spiritual life what was relevant to you and your further development. Now that is a very clumsy description because even as I say it I sense an enormous subtlety of what I met and experienced. What I saw was that the interface is unique in every being. This is because every being is unique and creates their own pattern. And that pattern calls out of the infinite something different. So in this sense there are as many faces of God as there are human beings.
As I saw all this I realised that if one could help people to come to that point, to bring themselves to that meeting, then they would begin to receive that influence that frees them. It frees them by growing them into more than they were, by giving them more of themselves. See Life’s Little Secrets
Example: I realise that I have been a watcher of the river of dreams. I have stood on the bridge over the river of dreams and seeing visions in the flow. I have seen the essence of human life in the river. Seen its pain and its wonder, its struggle and its triumph, its destiny. I have swum in that river and dived into the ocean of life. There in the ocean I met the great beings. The influence of these great beings passes through various configurations. It is out of this shifting change that human destiny arises. Events take shape in the earth and in the cosmos itself. The ancient beings are the very processes of life and death. They are the seeds of life and form. They are creation and destruction.
When our present culture looks back on the gods, such as those in the Roman or Greek pantheon, we tend to give them ridiculous imagery. They portray them as human beings, with all their jealousies and foibles, who yet have great powers and are long-lived. This is quite ridiculous. These ancient beings want nothing of the sort. The state of their existence is almost beyond our imagining. They have existed since the beginning of time and taken part in the very creation of our universe. They are the weavers of worlds. But in wholeness there is not only creation – there is also destruction, the breakdown of the old and the rebirth of the new
The gods are recorded in most cultures by those who had entrance to the inner life that in modern humans is seen as the unconscious. So in todays humans we are blind to this enormous awareness that includes the gods. We are so blind to what the gods are that when we portray them in drama or films they are shown as human beings who are in conflict with humans and each other. That is ridiculous.
It helps to understand this if we see that the word Elohim in Genesis is the key to much of this seeming contradiction. It is simply translated in todays bibles as God, but it means ‘the gods’ or ‘God the gods’. The word Eloha is singular, it means ‘a god’ but Elohim is plural, meaning ‘the gods’. In the ancient teachings, Elohim meant the creative and destructive manifestations, energies or attributes of the one creative reality in the cosmos. It is like the seven colours in the one light. These many ‘gods’, under the direction of the unifying ‘Clear Light’, created the being of man. This means that the many attributes of God, or the gods, are active in man’s being. Man is an image of these forces.
There are some modern humans who are not blind to this inner world.
“It took me a long time to enter deeply into this inner world, but when I did I met what I have called the Star Beings. I will simply say that I recognised them as what ancient cultures have called the gods. But they were in no way like the strange portrayals of the ancient gods we see in todays media; powerful caricatures of human beings with amazing powers. These beings did not have human form with crazy quirks, angers and desire for power that humans have. I experienced them as the spectrum of fundamental forces and energies that work together to create our universe.
However, these forces that usually we take as somehow inanimate or without awareness, like the force of gravity or the energy pouring out of the sun, I experienced as having awareness and intelligence. I knew them as existing in the water we drink and the air we breathe. I knew them as our real parents, of whose body we take into us to exist. I knew them as the beings we are constantly hurting through our destructive relationship with nature. They explained to me that we have not yet fulfilled our role, a role that placed us as the custodians of life on Earth. They also told me that the time of the Lion and the Bull is coming.”
Here is a quote from Plutarch’s Moralia in Sixteen Volumes, Vol. V, published by William Heineman
“All good things, my dear Clea, sensible men must ask from the Gods; and especially do we pray that from those mighty Gods we may, in our quest, gain a knowledge of themselves, so far as such a thing is attainable by men. For we believe that there is nothing more important for man to receive, or more ennobling for God of His grace to grant, than the truth. God gives to men the other things for which they express a desire, but of sense and intelligence He grants them only a share, inasmuch as these are His especial possessions and His sphere of activity. For the Deity is not blessed by reason of his possession of gold and silver, nor strong because of thunder and lightning, but through knowledge and intelligence. Of all the things that Homer said about the Gods, he has expressed most beautifully this thought: wisdom. I think also that a source of happiness in the eternal life, which is the lot of God, is that events which come to pass do not escape His prescience. But if His knowledge and meditation on the nature of Existence should be taken away, then, to my mind, His immortality is not living, but a mere lapse of time. Therefore the effort to arrive at the Truth, and especially the truth about the Gods, is a longing for the divine.”
The Vision
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I write that not as a criticism of our ways, but as a warning. What stood out in the visions leading to this book is that the poison we spread among others is eating away at us. Look around at the amount of alcohol consumed, for alcohol is a known poison. so why do we insist on poisoning ourselves? These drugs are used simply to manage us to face daily life, the uncountable people taking antidepressants and psychoactive medication, the suicide rate, the unbelievable gap between rich and poor, the terrible amount of murder and rape – even children – in our society, then decide for yourself if we are not poisoned by the way of life, the attitudes and the spiritual deadness we spread elsewhere. I believe the change we face is the end of an age – the death of a way of life we ourselves poisoned.
But how does a drug deal with drug addiction and enable the person to find healing? Well, first perhaps we need to put our finger on the sickness. Mabit calls it lack of meaning. That only scratches the surface though. If, as I say, we too have been absorbing the poison, what is it and what are its symptoms? Comparing our beliefs and convictions to those people we dispossessed may help with this. It is a fairly accurate generalisation to say that tribal people believed they existed as part of nature and the land. Often they owned nothing and had no concept of ownership.
What is it like to explore your unconscious or superconscious?
In most cases they had no monetary system. Food was seen as a gift from the planet or life, and reverenced and shared. They were certain their earthly life was an expression of a force or awareness far greater than their limited present life, and at death they entered this larger life. Many of them deeply respected their ancestors and could see how their present life and its advantages were a continuum from the past.
For ourselves, our medical and scientific authorities tell us we only exist because of the biological and neurological functions of our body. When those fail we are dead – finished. We have no felt connection with other forms of life such as plants and animals in any other way than that we eat them and need them to fulfill our needs. The only thing of any importance is money, because without it you are the lowest of the low – a loser who cannot take any of life’s goods. This is a huge game because everything, if you are near the bottom, is owned by somebody else, and with no money you either have to get things by crime or by obeying the demands of others. There is really no such thing as self sufficiency. It is replaced by dependence unless you have managed to hoard or obtained money or goods in whatever way. But even that is uncertain. Many humans are bred or trained to be consumers or workers, as in a beehive. To gain even a place to live, which so called primitive peoples can manage in a day or two of labour, we have to work and struggle year after year. Many never achieve that. I have seen people in India living in garbage sacks strung on sticks, or in shacks most of us in the west wouldn’t even keep our garden tools in.
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It is only with the advent of the organised approach to the Christian experience, and the scientific outlook on life, that the respect and use of personal dream and visionary experience faded into the background. Then the psychiatrists Freud, Jung and Adler resurrected them, but science, looking at these dreams, these visions, only as neurological or physiological phenomena, and modern Christianity looking at them sometimes as works of evil, still largely sees them as random, meaningless, or illusory. This is a bit like looking at the veins and digestive tract of a child and thinking you know what and who that child is. Dreams and visions are far more than any logical analysis or partial understanding of a body system reveal, just as human personality is far more than any medical or psychological diagnosis can say. They connect with all we are. Shakespeare dramatised something of this in The Merchant of Venice when Shylock wanted a pound of flesh from Antonio. But you cannot separate the flesh from the blood, and the blood from the person, and the dream or vision cannot be separated from the whole being. Through them we know something of our wholeness and our connection with the whole. Social and personal changes in the past, and those we face in the future, can also lead us into the wilderness of our mind and emotions. It is a spiritual desert. In that place the forces of mind and emotion are turned against ourselves. In that experience our will can be broken, hope vanquished and all efforts seem pointless. In the past these depressive powers that can possess a person were thought of as evil spirits. Ancient peoples everywhere found their own methods of dealing with them. They sought reconnection with the life process that had given them existence. Throughout the world and imbedded in language there are different names for this connection with ones source, everything from God to Creator or the Great Spirit. The Naskapi Indians of Labrador called it Mista peo – the Great Man. In their great isolation they depended on Mista peo to guide them through life, and in meeting the difficulties they faced in surviving. And although our rational mode of thinking and problem solving is an enormous aid in dealing with life, it does not connect us in a life giving way to our own roots. In Peru the local drug ayahuasca is used help clear out the dark fears and life experiences that cloud a life. In Gambia a shrub called ibogaine was employed for the same purpose, to heal and reconnect the person with their core. In Mexico, mushrooms containing psilocybin or cacti containing mescalin were, and still are, seen as aids to the healing of a burdened spirit or to gain life enhancing visions. Other cultures have used an enormous variety of techniques to enable people to break through the limited awareness of the conscious and rational mind to reveal the often wonderful treasures usually held within the darkness of what lies beyond our everyday awareness. |
Accessing the powerI said earlier that I observed what shifts were necessary to make in my feelings, body and attitudes, in order to allow the visionary experience. The process so fascinated me I wanted to know more and be capable of more. Besides which, as said elsewhere, some of that impulse was due to my seeking a way out of depressions and physical pain. But the further I went into the territory, the more I realised what incredible possibilities we all have. I cannot claim to be a genius of vision, but I have found healing, and I have found a sustaining peace and readiness to meet each day, feeling I have what it takes to deal with it. What I discovered was that the different pathways to vision all have a very similar basis when you look at their fundamental process. They are often very different externally, everything from dance to holding the breath. The mushroom or ayahuasca route is not one many of us wish to take, so this other drugless route has become a wide thoroughfare for people seeking healing and wholeness. Some of the pathways have become commercial enterprises, or they claim to be the one and only path. As Suzanne Segal says in describing her own wonderful awareness of the core, ‘If you could see things as only and exactly what they are, you would see that the ‘you’ that is seeing is the vastness itself.’ You are what you seek, and there is nothing you need buy from another. If the doorkeepers of such paths have something of such value, something that places them irrevocably in union with the infinite, they will give it to you with love, or ask you to support them in presenting this opportunity to others. The many different paths to the one great ocean of Life can be summarised in a simple way because they all have a common factor. It, like dancing or meditating for extended periods, quietens your normal way of thinking and looking at the world. In a meditation seminar I attended that lasted for several days I observed this with great clarity. After three days of meditation I saw my thinking mind faint. It could no longer sustain the continued concentrated pursuit of the question we were asking. In the moment of my rational thinking mind fainting there was an experience of divine Life knowing itself as this man people call Tony. In that state I knew connection with all the people around me, and the birds, trees and earth. For they and I shared the same spirit. I had arrived home at the source of things. That experience, as ephemeral as it may sound, has given me something that strengthened me to pass through big life changes, and travel joyfully into old age.vii
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You surrender your will and your body. If this did not happen the spontaneous and unwilled action of sleep couldn’t happen, and the spontaneous and unwilled action of dreams, their emotions, sexuality, movements and sounds, could not occur.
The key words here are obviously ‘surrender, spontaneous’ and ‘unwilled’. The action is to surrender and let go of your waking will.
When you experience your core self it is spontaneous and unwilled. It happens under its own impulse, not because you willed it, decided it, made it happen or created it with your imagination or desires. In other words you have two levels of will, your waking and your sleeping. There is the normal, personal awareness ‘I want’ type of will. Then there is the will or impulse that grew your body from a tiny seed and still maintains all the life functions sustaining your existence. If you have failed to see this before, or haven’t yet acknowledged the extreme importance of this, then it is a sign of the sort of blindness afflicting our culture.
The way to be healed of such afflictions is first to recognise that we only run a very small part of the show, and with the humility arising from that recognition, salute the main and sustaining force in our life. To learn this we need to watch what happens as we surrender to sleep. Learn to reproduce the letting go, the surrender, the willingness to let the spontaneous and unwilled to express without interference. If you can, stand before the unknown of yourself as naked of beliefs and preconceptions as you can.
Life is already your body and soul. It created you. So don’t be afraid to surrender everything to it. Open your body, your mind, your sexuality and emotions, your imagination and memories to that indefinable Creative that underlies your existence.
Gradually or suddenly it will be released from the bonds it has been tied by. It will emerge from the rubble of your life experiences, as painful and full of past miseries as they may be. It may shake you. It may take you on a journey into yourself and your past. It may open your eyes to worlds and experiences you never imagined possible. It may flow into your life as joy, purpose and direction, full of vigour and insight. Whatever it does trust it. The importance isn’t simply to have an interesting experience, it is important because we are, in my opinion, facing a new era of human experience, and the new always grows out of the deeps of the human spirit. What we seek is that touch from our core; the touch that resurrects the old, giving it new life.
Remember, if you do not ready know the wonderful experience of vision, then it is probably restrained, tied up, denied, even crucified and buried – maybe under generations of rubble. It may take time to grow through that rubble till you can actually see and experience its living power. Trust that as soon as you come naked to it, it reaches out to you. How can it not? It is yourself.
When you first start this it may seem as if you are naked before nothing; that despite surrendering all of you, despite being ready to be moved, even shaken, and for Life to flow through you spontaneously, nothing is happening. That may tempt you to do something that appears more proactive, something you are actively doing or in control of, like a goal oriented meditation, a holy chant, a series of exercises or regulated breathing. Believe me, they are amulets to hold while in the darkness of your disbelief and blindness. The great act is nakedness. The great journey begins as soon as you offer what you know of yourself in surrender. The journey started by that nakedness begins to strip away all the old habits of thought and feelings in which you have been encased.
If you can let love flow all the better. Imagine that – a glorious love affair with the very spirit of life! A love affair with the invisible and forever indefinable, the infinitely creative that is your very core. Is that something you can do?”
My Inner Male
By Anna
I am my own experiment 🙂
On a deeper level I have become aware of how I create my own inner world, which also includes my inner male.
What can be said about the inner male – and so the man in my dreams – is:
The animus is a synthesis of all my male contacts and:
The man in my dreams is nearly always an aspect of my own feelings, hopes and fears. Even if it is someone I know well, the dream image is never that person. It is certainly an image I have built out of my memories, my views of that person, my likes, dislikes and insights.
Given the fact that “he” is an energy/an inner life form that I have created using parts of all the men in my life as building stones, it becomes clear that I can rebuild him in a way which enables me to join with him in a loving way.
I am aware that more often than not I have felt a victim of my own inner world and my own inner male that I have created, merely because I was not aware that I am the creator.
I merely felt that my inner world was determined by my past and something very solid and dense and so not easy to transform.
So I did not see my little self/(inner)body as a bunch of thoughts, which changes easily with me changing my thoughts.
Using the Power Dreaming approach on the beach helped me to realise how easily my (inner) body responds to my decision to “walk into the bullets”, knowing that they can hurt me not.
I felt wonderfully open when I entered the pool after this “bullet walk” and this result made me aware what a powerful tool imagination is and how I can change my inner story and my feelings by using it CONSCIOUSLY.
I am aware now that I am creating my inner world ALL THE TIME and that it serves a great purpose to become aware of the stories I create by also “catching the thoughts that move more or less secretly just beneath the surface.
I can only decide to change my creation when I become aware of what and how I create.
The Greatest is Often the Simplest
I witnessed a man talking to a woman he was confronting, “Religion;” he said, “That’s surely a direction for failures and people who can’t really cope with facing reality.”
And the woman he was accusing of this inability to face reality said, “You poor man! Is your mind or awareness so tiny that you have never realised the forces and processes of your own body are beyond anything you understand? Can’t you see that your very existence is brought about by things so far beyond your knowledge that it is only a statement of your impoverishment to suggest an awareness of God is an expression of some sort of smallness and failure? Have you never understood that?
Have you not seen that religion is not only an acknowledgement of what we fail to understand and yet depend upon, but it is also an opening to it, a willingness to relate to it? It can also be something far more even than that. It can be an active loving relationship with what gives you life. And such love is an exchange, a sharing, and a way of merging one with another. It is an exchange – a sharing of bodily fluids – the very substance of life.
Imagine that; a glorious love affair with the very spirit of life! A love affair with the invisible and forever indefinable. Is that something you are afraid of?”
That nameless woman put simple words to things the most people never come close to understanding. For she described religion as, “An acknowledgement of what we fail to understand and yet depend upon, but it is also an opening to it, a willingness to relate to it? It can also be something far more even than that. It can be an active loving relationship with what gives you life.”
She has said that God is not some far off thing that we may never know, but is known in us now as the mystery of our own life. Perhaps we can begin a relationship with that by using the following for the Kingdom of heaven is within you, said Jesus. Your body is a temple for the Spirit of God.
Try this simple approach to get closer to this. Sit quietly where you will not be disturbed for a minute or so. Close your eyes, become aware of your breathing, and then put your hand under your clothes so you can feel your heart beating and you chest moving by the spontaneous mystery of Life.
There you have it. The conscious you is touching and directly experiencing in a quiet moment how that mystery we call Life is right there in every moment of your being spontaneously giving you existence. You are touching what is usually unconscious. You can feel it moving right under your hand. You know it is not your conscious will, knowledge or beliefs that is pulsing that beautiful movement. Right now, life is breathing you and beating your heart. And that is just the very evident surface signs of what it is doing. Feel it! Do you really fully understand that? Isn’t that an amazing miracle and mystery? Wouldn’t it be wise and wonderful to get to know that mystery directly and more fully?
This amazingly wise woman goes on to say it is, “A glorious love affair with the very spirit of life! A love affair with the invisible and forever indefinable. …. such love is an exchange, a sharing, and a way of merging one with another.”
She says that it is with the invisible and indefinable; so you cannot think about it or use words because that is all acts of defining, yet you can merge with It and know it in silence.
Strangely there is something written by an unnamed monk in the latter half of the 14th century – its title – The Cloud of Unknowing, which has a similar theme. Considering this is a religious classic, it still says in its ancient way that what you seek is ‘invisible and forever indefinable.’ So I quote some passages from this amazing work.
“Look that nothing live in thy working mind, but a naked intent stretching into God.” Any thought of Him is inadequate, and for that reason defeats its own end.”
“Further, there is to be no willful choosing of method: no fussy activity of the surface intelligence. The mystic who seeks the divine Cloud of Unknowing is to be surrendered to the direction of his deeper mind, his transcendental consciousness: that “spark of the soul” which is in touch with eternal realities.”
And here is stated some of the results of this entering the Cloud of Unknowing. “That they shall feel the perfection of this work: the which calling is called ravishing. And some there be that be so subtle in grace and in spirit, and so homely with God in this grace of contemplation, that they may have it when they will in the common state of man’s soul: as it is in sitting, going, standing, or kneeling. And yet in this time they have full deliberation of all their wits bodily or ghostly, and may use them if they desire.”
A modern and simpler summary of this was written by T. S. Elliot –
I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So, the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Yes, it is all in the waiting. You are not waiting for anything, for that would be waiting wrongly with something in mind. I tried doing this for a couple of months, sitting waiting without any goal in mind , without meditating on anything or trying to get somewhere. I felt it was like waiting on a street corner for an invisible friend feeling that if and when they came they would tap me on the shoulder or let me know in some way. At the end I was getting into bed and heard a bodiless voice say, “You asked how God touches the human soul – now watch closely.”
I had never experienced anything like that before, but shortly afterwards I was unmistakably and powerfully ‘touched’. See Life’s Little Secrets
Let your light shine
There is something here I want to emphasise. It is Your Light. It is not from anywhere else. For instance you do not have to earn heaven, that it is already yours but is covered up by all the things we think and try to do to get it. You don’t have to be good or perform certain acts to get it because it is your potential waiting to be uncovered.
What we are trying to open to is not something we create. It is not a thought, a state of mind or an emotion. We cannot make it happen by thinking inspiring thoughts or feelings. It is a self-existent reality. It does not depend upon what you think or feel. It is not brought about by concentrated thought, meditation or inspiring emotions. It already exists.
At Your Basic Self You Are It
Q’s Big Question
The question you asked was what is the personality or ego? In a book I have in my collection but is packed away somewhere, the author states the case of a girl child in America in recent years who was shut in with chickens and never spoken to, but simply fed. The child never became a persons. That and other cases given in Animal Children emphasis the need for language – “A tragic orphan brought up by a pack of wild wolves will never be able to live like a normal man, say doctors. The boy who REALLY danced with the wolves was aged about seven when he was found 29 years ago in the wastes of Southern Russia by a team of oil explorers. He howled like a wolf and savagely bit one of the oil men who christened him Djuma – the Wolf Boy.
Professor Rufat Kazirbayev said doctors had battled to re-educate him to act like a normal human being – but failed. They are now giving up the fight. Professor Kazirbayev said that, “His mind is with the wolves. He will howl at the moon for the rest of his life”. Djuma, now about 37, is still in hospital. He still crawls on all fours, eats raw meat and bites when frightened.”
Speech, language is a major factor in becoming a person, for when we are taught to speak we learn such words as I, Me, You and Us. These are concepts around which we can build the idea of personal existence. If they are not learnt in early years, as with Djuma, it is difficult to become a human with a personality. So we as a person do not simply exist because we were born, we were given a ‘soul’ a human personality by our parents or carers who taught us to speak – it was not God given.
Further information extends what was said.
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One of the examples of this is told when the teacher asks the student to say what a house is. Gradually the student is led to see that it is a sum of parts, the bricks, the mortar, the wood, the nails, the windows, and so on. In breaking it down to its parts it disappears as a house. Similarly when human personality is looked at in the same way, it is not a stable reality, but a sum of parts. So the student is looking to see what lies behind the parts, until there is something indivisible. In fact some philosophy claims a self existent reality is discoverable as the noise of our thoughts and emotions are quietened. An example of this is described below, and excellently shows the sequence of such discovery.
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Now an experience of touching the core self.
“I was sitting opposite someone during a meditation. We had been posing the question for days – ‘Who are you?’ Suddenly I realised that it was a silly question, because I was the answer. All thought stopped and I existed as the answer. My being had always been this. In this state there was an awareness of being connected with everything around me, in the beginning of creation, for I am a kin to all creatures in this wide garden which exist with me. This was the first day of creation because time didn’t have the same effect in this state. For in the state in which I had just left, time was simply the passing experiences, giving an sense if movement. Also I was aware of what I felt was a monkey running to keep up with what was the real me. It was what I had always thought of as the real me, and it was nothing but a monkey that wanted to be the real thing but couldn’t. The old me was a photocopy of everything we believe or think, not the reality. Our sense of what we see and the words we put to them are photocopies and yet we are so sure we know reality.’
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Rudolf Steiner explains parts of this process very clearly. He points out that from conception through to death our physical body goes through a process of continuous change. There is never a moment when changes are not going on in the body. Also, part of this change is that physical impressions last for moments only. One impression gives way to another continuously through the day and the years. But as mentioned, something in our nature builds up a sense of self and meaning from these fleeting experiences. In fact, without these experiences through our senses we would not develop as a person. So in quite a real way our personality, or our soul as it used to be called, feeds on physical experience and develops a defined self from them. This is similar to the way the body builds up its defined shape through the continuous passage of food water and air — physical substance — through it. See: Rudolph Steiner’s Philosophy of Life and Death
So, in both cases, from ever-changing and transitory experiences, something more permanent is built. In the case of our physical self we build a body that has a certain level of constancy during change. With our personality or soul, we similarly build a sense of self from experiences we gained through our shifting physical senses. Again there is a level of constancy during continual change.
It is fairly easy to see that there is yet another level of this within our everyday experience. Our personality or sense of self that we build through our many and changing experiences, and that in itself is also changing, builds up concepts that are more lasting than the shifting sense impressions and ideas it experiences. As humans, in this way we have built up concepts about the physical nature of the world, gravity, music, astronomy and the many other things that can be passed from one person to another as ideas. Such ideas can survive not only during one’s lifetime, but pass from one person to another for immense periods of time. Here again we have constancy during change.
If we are lucky, during our lifetime we can observe that not only our physical experiences lead to the development of our personality; not only does our personality gather understanding from the many separate experiences we meet; but occasionally the concepts we arrive at are seen to gather into a higher synthesis again. At such times we glimpse or experience a universal understanding. We see how the everyday things that we experience, the concepts that arise from them, in some way connect with the universal principles in the cosmos and in life. With wonder we see that the ordinary everyday things and events around us are expressions of processes and human endeavours that flow through our lives from ancient times, perhaps even from the timeless.
This sense of the universal which in some cases is called enlightenment, or cosmic consciousness, is an experience of what has been called the spirit. In other words it is an experience of the constant underlying the ever shifting experiences of our body and our personality. And just as our personality gathers the shifting impressions of our senses into a realisation of its own continuing existence, so the spirit gathers experiences of the personality into its own continuity. This is like the tulip bulb hidden behind the short flowering of the tulip. The question to ask yourself is – What is it that in myself is the constant underlying the shifting experiences of my life?
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A dream I experienced. I remembered a dream about a large house with the round turret on its roof. It was the house with large grounds and a pond, in which we had all bathed as children. There was also a section of the grounds that had been cultivated.
There were no direct associations I could make with the house or the pond in my dream, so I started allowing spontaneous material to enter into the dream, allowing my mind to roam freely and show me out of what images and feelings the dream had been fashioned.
I started with the pond and had the most unexpected set of fantasies and feelings bubble up from within. The garden I dreamt of when we were children referred to a condition of mind, which I now experienced, in which a group shared a common awareness, and felt at one with their environment. In other words, there was no separate identity. No one in the group knew themselves as an individual. I knew as I experienced this that it was about the early condition of human beings and was represented in the Bible as the Garden of Eden. It was about the history of our development as human beings. It showed me that in the early stages of evolution all human beings lived in a state of awareness in which they had no sense of separation from nature itself. They had no sense of individual existence either but lived in a sort of paradise where there was no idea of birth or death or right or wrong. They felt at one with each other in their small groups and with the forces of nature.
When I experienced this, I understood at last what the story of Genesis meant. It was about stages of psychological development, not physical or mythical history. Humans had come out of the pool though, out of the collective awareness, and at that point I experienced a mass of impressions and images I still cannot completely understand. The images suggested that at first, maybe one or two humans climbed out of that pool and experienced personal awareness and in doing so they left a mark. They climbed out of communal awareness and put one stone on top of another. The images developed further into suggesting that many ancient monuments were an expression of this enormous sense of the newly found identity – of personal existence.
I understood this to mean that one or two humans had achieved personal identity. In that state they realised something about themselves – they could say ‘I am’. They could ask ‘Who am I?’ That had never been possible before.
I need to say what arose in me were not those words or memory or vision of definite events, but a sense of touching or experiencing an overall memory, a vast overall process. So, I am trying to put into words what I sensed. It was such a wonderful thing, so full of experience, to see this that I want to try to describe it. At the same time, it was an immense process and difficult to capture.
What I felt was that the pool was a collective consciousness such as Jung speaks of, and that it still exists now in our unconscious. At the early stages of human development though, it was the everyday experience, but the individuals who attained self awareness began to build a new type of life. They left stone monuments, carvings, paintings in caves, stone circles, pyramids; each person, each group realising deep down that this new level of awareness was a thing to be developed and built upon. The Sphinx is an image of this half way state of human and animal; between the animal instinctive with no person awareness and yet with consciousness and human personal consciousness.
One way of understanding this might be in saying that just as your genetic material is the gathered experience of thousands of lives, so your personality is the gathered material, the essence of thousands and millions of experiences of this one life time; and your spirit is the gathered material of the finest realisations and concepts gathered by your personality. It is very likely that the cosmic processes that we experience as humans and see as universal in nature do not stop there but have yet a higher synthesis.
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The essence of this is all in the New Testament where it says, “Everyone who hears these words of mine, and doesn’t do them will be like a foolish man, who built his house on the sand. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat on that house; and it fell—and great was its fall.”
I believe most people do not really see the symbolic meaning in this parable, for our personality is an every shifting and changing thing, given to great emotional pain; so building your trust upon it can lead to those things.
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Traffic
This may reflect your daily interaction with other people, but also the constant and massive flow of life events around you. What happens in the dream will indicate how you are feeling about that, or what you predict is or will arise out of it. See: Car.
The traffic we meet is not only on the roads but also the people in the streets or the amount of traffic/people appearing on a website. How do you handle or deal with the ‘traffic’ you meet each day?
Living Forever
About three years ago I came across a feature that said, “If you can live for twenty more years you can live forever. That is because of the rapid progress medical science is making, and in twenty years we should see advance in genetic and microscopic agents that can repair bones and other organs, making it possible to renew your failing body.
Then recently a headline in the Guardian newspaper said, “Extreme biohacking: the tech guru who spent $250,000 trying to live forever.” The report goes on to say, “Faguet intends to live for ever, merging with robots and becoming an ultra-human. If that goal sounds creepy, laughable or unrealistic, it’s helpful to remember that it is one shared by many influential figures in Silicon Valley. Tesla’s Elon Musk has repeatedly argued that humans need to become cyborgs to survive the inevitable robot uprising and hopes to usher in an era of transhumanism with his new brain-computer interface company, Neuralink. Bill Maris, founder and former CEO of Google Ventures, the search giant’s venture capital arm, went on to say, the sole aim of which is to “solve death”. Last November, Sean Parker, the former Facebook president, described his vision of the future thus: “Because I’m a billionaire, I’m going to have access to better healthcare so… I’m going to be, like, 160 and I’m going to be part of this class of immortal overlords.” As much as Faguet likes to think of himself as a rebel pioneer, he’s an emblem of a far wider movement in the wealthy world he inhabits.”
Obviously, we as human beings carry some things we inherited from our animal past – the shortness of life. Some trees live for thousands of years, so why shouldn’t we with some manipulation? Technology is moving in that direction fast.
The sun gives of itself as it is dying. Through its dying, life can exist on earth. This is part and parcel of the processes out of which our universe has emerged. Also, what I see as the beginning of things, the origin of our universe and ourselves, was a massive change, a death was the beginning of our universe – the Big Bang. It was a death because time and space began at the start of the Big Bang. Before that there was a condition beyond time and the spcw we know in the three dimensional world. So what went before that died to give existence to the world we know now.
I saw that our corner, our small part of the universe, has certain qualities that maybe others parts do not. One of them, especially regarding us is the shortness of life. We are tiny, short lived, biological creatures that have emerged out of the amazing processes of this world in its interplay with the cosmos and evolving life. We can see ourselves in one sense as little bags of shit. We can be thought of as little digestive reproducing bags. But we hold such amazing potential, there has always been a possibility of more in human life.
As this species we have managed to emerge beyond the level of awareness of other living forms of this earth. We have developed complex language and enormous curiosity and creativity. But the shortness of our life is a big factor in our experience of ourselves. I was shown that this shortness of life is really important for us. This because an essential part of the mystery of the universe is death; of course, what I am about to say will probably be dismissed by many but death I have seen as an immense digestive and absorbing of our whole life experience, and in doing so offers an integration and upgrade and from that a new life.
Some people who have studied our need for sleep have said that it isn’t to get rid of rubbish we collect during the day as has been stated so often, but in order to integrate the massive amount of information and synthesise it with our enormous unconscious awareness. Realising that and comparing it with many peoples near death experiences (NDE) where many people claim they face the memory of their whole life as they near death.
Phyllis Atwater, who experienced several NDE’s herself, gives an example of this huge digestive process. She says, “For me it was a total reliving of every thought I had ever thought, every word I had ever spoken, and every deed I had ever done; plus the effect of each thought, word and deed on everyone and anyone who had ever come within my environment or sphere of influence, whether I knew them or not (including unknown passers-by on the street).”
As I repeat often, “No plant or creature grows from a dead seed, the 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.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. To explore it see Opening to Life
Therefore, death is an enormous key to understanding the universe and life. Understanding death means that we become capable of letting go of ourselves, of delivering ourselves, of being able to give ourselves away to the mystery underlying our existence. The importance of this is because, if what has been said above is correct, then death is at the very centre of the mystery of life. It is at the foundation of our physical being. It is behind the urge that leads parents to a sort of death in giving themselves to the new being that emerges, to parents giving of themselves to their offspring.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict went through a death experience lasting 90 minutes. He learnt a great deal during it and wrote: “After dying, going through my death experience and coming back, I really respect life and death. In our DNA experiments we may have opened the door to a great secret. Soon we will be able to live as long as we want to live in this body. After living 150 years or so, there will be an intuitive soul sense that you will want to change channels. Living forever in one body is not as creative as reincarnation, as transferring energy in this fantastic vortex of energy that we are in. We are actually going to see the wisdom of Life and death, and enjoy it. As it is now, we have already been alive forever. This body, that you are in, has been alive forever. It comes from an unending Stream of Life, going back to the Big Bang and beyond. This body gives life to the next life, in dense and subtle energy. This body has been alive forever already.”
Fertiliser Fertilizer
The soil, which is the basis of all life, for plants are fundamental to the feed chain, comes from death and decay. We all need to compost what is dying or dead, and even our human body or waste is valuable, for in dreams as in life, nothing is wasted but is transformed into fertiliser for new growth.
The Inca description of gold was ‘excrement of the gods’! Shit can of course produce wonderfully rich fertiliser.
To really understand fertiliser, we have to be able to see that what we throw away, see as disgusting or filthy, as we often do with our body wastes, often is vital to the growth and understanding of our personality our conscious self.
The area of our nervous system around the anus and genitals is highly sensitive in babyhood. So, it may link with the self expression, the pleasure, and the feelings of deep connection the baby feels in this area. As it also links with the huge experience of learning self control, and how one’s parents dealt with you going to the toilet, it can also connect with holding on or letting go; control or relaxation; pleasure or guilt. This in turn could involve feelings of success or failure. Therefore, it associates with your WILL. Feeling punished and treated like a child, to feelings or arousal and sexual pleasure.
Example: The therapist encouraged him in the fantasy, and soon he was joyously lost in the slime-and the mussels had turned to excrement. No longer repelled, he abandoned himself to a search for a treasure he felt must lie within the darkness. When he came up, he held in his hand a pink pearl that glowed like the clouds of dawn. Then he remembered how he and his brother had fought over a pink pearl which was to be given to their mother. The pearl stood for her. Those children, wallowing in the mud beside the willows in the hot summer sun, had been performing an ancient and sacred rite, returning to the source of life and their beginnings under the sun.
These things help to explain the great importance of the anus and its products to the growth towards a full and healthy human being.
The anus also deals with what we get rid of that our body does not use. So, it can link with the experiences or the attitudes that we want to or need to get rid of. These are the waste products of our life. But our dreams often see what we pass out of our body as ‘waste’ is a wonderful enriched gift we are giving the earth – our great mother.
Treasure
The riches of your core self – the wonder, wisdom or value of your life in its wholeness. The treasure is often something we have had to face difficulties to gain, such as personal achievement, mature love, self-realisation, wholeness, so something that is enormously valuable in bringing you wholeness and health – such as a balancing of dry intellectual achievement with deeply felt love, or an introverted personality with outward activity.
There are enormous treasures to be found in the tools that enable one to mine the treasures from one’s inner life of dreams. But foremost among them is the jewels of understanding garnered in the past and that of insight into one’s personal psychological history and personal traumas. This I believe is unique to our times, and not fully appreciated generally. From this new skill a way is being developed to integrate the many aspects of one’s own multifaceted being. See Tools
Because we tend to avoid anything that is frightening or ‘dark’, we have a shadow side of us that is ‘out of sight’ our awareness, but this aspect of us also holds in it great treasure through its connection with our unconscious potential. In fact, a great deal of our energy is involved in our ‘negatives’. When we meet our shadow or our fears, we are enormously more energised in the sense of being more wholehearted in expressing oneself creatively. Also, we are meeting the shadow and unfolding the possibilities held unexpressed is our life’s work. Without it we may never become the mature and full person we are capable of being. As Prospero says to Caliban, we need to say, ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge as mine’.
Example: She began spilling tears which became a steady stream running down her cheeks. And she began to talk of the overwhelming love she was feeling as she was sobbing. The people with her listened as she described the wonder of being in the presence of a warm Light where she felt so loved, so clean, so treasured. I remember the awe that all of us had in the room. She said, “I am in the hugeness of space and am filled with love”.