Reproduction
The great cycles of birth and death, or mating and reproduction are to be seen everywhere, and spring from eternal powers. To approach the fount of these with reverence is not irrational. To seek deeper understanding of your own life situation, your health, or your relationship with the whole, can still bring wonderful blessings and change.
The courtship and mating behaviours in reproduction and the sexual drive that urges you toward the opposite sex or toward mating in some way, is often accepted in its naked power, to find a mate and to have sex in order to procreate. Unfortunately, most of us have no real awareness that we are instinctive creatures and so are driven largely by ‘nature’ in us. Most people explain it by the idea of romance and soul mates, and so often end up deeply hurt.
You need to accept you are a mammal, a natural and largely instinctive creature, and although you have a conscious personality, it is like riding an ancient beast. So if you could imagine yourself sitting on a horse, and instead of being separate you were one creature, you would at times have to give it its way when it wanted to rub against a tree, or wanting to mate. So in a past age you would be old enough at the time of you first period or male erection to mate and have children, and that would be accepted. But being ‘civilised’ makes it difficult. Many young girls and women face the difficulty of being a healthy mammal and being a civilised woman at the same time. I believe it can help if you do not suppress your natural urges, but direct them consciously by having plan of action, or taking the urge toward creativity. After all, a woman is a wonderful creative being, and should not suppress that but use it one way or another.
If you are a female mammal, and females are instinctive urged to procreate and have babies – it is instinctive and unavoidable to at least express the urge in some way. See Animals in your Brain
Being a woman it is your nature and your potential to have a baby and give birth. You developed in this way because you are a creature of evolution. If you deny that part of you – the urge to procreate – you deny yourself even if you a have had a hysterectomy. But you do not have to become childbearing to have that creativity. Do not cut yourself off from your roots and repress the desire to reproduce, otherwise you will psychologically die. To become free of it, it is not necessary to repress that part of you. In fact, that basic, primeval drive is your source of power. It is a great river of energy. Out of that your power arises. You do not even need to have a functioning womb, because at your core you are the power of creation, and your womb is simply the host for a fertile seed. For you do not create your baby. The process of Life does it – except it is important that you are a mother to it while you experience and share this miracle.
Example: The three of us were on our way to a lively night out and I suggested a short cut through Richmond Park. Suddenly this old man stepped out and advised us not to do so as stags were rutting. I thanked him and replied they would be too busy to care about us. As we walked through, trying to ignore the fact the stags seemed to be stuck together, we felt relieved. Suddenly an enormously big stag with tremendous horns and a leering and vicious expression came swaying toward us after breaking free of a female deer. Jasmine C.
Certain things are holy, like motherhood, or fatherhood. They are holy because they are so fundamental to life as it expresses on our planet. Marriage is such a holy thing because it represents and is an expression of the wonder of reproduction and parenthood. This should not be confused with partnership; such as occurs in a homosexual relationship. Because things such as marriage, that manifest the most primordial aspects of life, are holy, we need to honour them, and perhaps kneel before them in some way.
They transcend any one person’s life and experience. Because of this, things like motherhood develop into an immense archetype. In other words, they become a focused collection of uncountable human experiences. All such huge areas of experience are patterns in the one’s core awareness. They are immense patterns in the internal structure of human life. And although life itself honours them, although life itself largely flows through the patterns they are, life does not stop us making leaps right beyond the boundaries of those archetypes. In that way we make new connections new possibilities for life itself and for the environment.
And dream images are like icons on computer screens that are lifeless unless one clicks on them. That is because dreams are not thought processes that you can analyse with the rational mind. They are a living expression of Life and its processes, created in animals millions of years ago before words and human language were formed. Their communication is emotions, body language, life and death – the whole drama if life, its struggles and triumphs, it meeting all the drama of living, fighting, loving and creating itself over and over in reproduction.
From the attitude that we are nothing but a physical form, that we are a small cog in the wheels of life, that we must put up with what we have, seems ridiculous. Realising that we look at ourselves and see what a fantastic piece of equipment our body and mind is. As a conscious person we are right in the middle of everything. To say, “Oh God, we are nothing but a piece of slime, a helpless pawn in the hands of destiny,” is ridiculous. We are the culmination of everything that has existed before. We are that growing tip, that exploring awareness, in touch with unimaginable potential. We are everything that can be. What can we do?
Competition is a feature of life. A rare minority of the mutations of humans have, by chance, some feature which makes them better able to compete with other creatures in the constant quest for food and other essentials, and will thus tend to survive and reproduce their own variations, while the majority of mutations come with a disadvantage of some kind and therefore tend to be lost. The laws of the jungle still apply here. The most daring, sexual, reproductive, intelligent of the species will grasp the leading roles in this emerging drama. The rewards will be that standing in this enormous and augmented energy flow will bring tremendous influence and possibilities of reproduction and financial reward. See Gods Walk amongst Us
That view gave rise to thoughts such as these, quoted from Landscapes of the Night by Christopher Evans. “Now the whole pattern becomes clear. The variations in the biological systems are all to do with successful competitions in a terrifying planetary game of life and death, where danger is omnipresent and only the most vigorous, adaptable and ruthless survive”.
Fortunately, there have been a great deal of development from the idea of the most physically fit would be the survivors. It has now been seen that none of us survive unless we are an intrinsic and balanced part of our total environment. This points to a form of symbiosis.
The Australian native peoples describe their own sense of origins and the meaning of life as Dreamtime. Dreamtime refers to an experience and to beliefs that are largely peculiar to the Australian native people. There are at least four aspects to Dreamtime – The beginning of all things; the life and influence of the ancestors; the way of life and death; and sources of power in life.
Dreamtime includes all of these four facets at the same time, being a condition beyond time and space as known in everyday life. The aborigines call it the ‘all-at-once’ time instead of the ‘one-thing-after-another’ time. This is because they experience Dreamtime as the past present and future coexisting. This condition is met when the tribal member lives according to tribal rules, and then is initiated through rituals and hearing the myths of the tribe. The aborigine people believed that each person had a part of their nature that was eternal. This eternal being pre-existed the life of the individual, and only became a living person through being born to a mother. The person then lived a life in time, and at death melted back into the eternal life.
Example: Now there was an opening and a flow of intuitive knowledge about the structure of life and consciousness. I said, “This is dynamite! This is what the dream world offers. It is about connection. It is about cutting through the crap to see what in fact we offer each other in a relationship. My lover offers me that buzzing pleasure, that stimulus that occurs between the sexes. It is a connection that keeps parts of my being alive, feeling, reaching out. I offer the same thing to her – energy exchange.”
What I saw here was that any connection between a man and woman where there is attraction stimulates those processes in us that would easily lead towards reproduction – sex as it is usually called. But we live in such a complex social system that often this cannot happen and it becomes frustration. But if we handle it correctly it can be a form of mutual stimulation to keep that energy flowing and alive. We can be creative.
In our own culture we largely accept this except where there is psychological trauma that may prevent a normal expression of sexual drive. We have the unconscious concept that there is no other possibility. This is rather like looking at lightning and saying, “Well, that’s how nature does it, and that is the only possible way it can be experienced.” But some other cultures have looked upon the sexual drive in a similar way that we have looked upon electricity. They have explored its possibilities.
To explain what they found, and its relevance to what is being said about your personal potential, we need to remember that in nature the electricity in the lightning simply earths itself. All that tremendous energy flows into the earth. What we have learned to do is to put something in between the flow, such as an electric fire or a television set. In this way the flow back to earth produces many different phenomena. New potentials of the electricity are manifest.
Although this is an analogy, we could say the same thing about human sexuality. The discharge of feelings and body fluids in sexual orgasm and ejaculation are like the flowing back to earth. Nature does its thing and the energy is gone. In most human sexuality today there is not even the possibility of reproduction. What other cultures have developed is the concept of this as energy. They say that this energy is potentially many other things than physical reproduction. So they divert the energy into the body toward the brain, rather than out of the body to be earthed. The results of this when successful are extended functions of awareness and one’s senses.
If we take for example the natural and instinctive desires for women to procreate, we can begin to see this in action. The point for a woman is that she is only incidentally part of the creative act of childbirth. The processes of creation are far deeper than her personality. Awareness is the key. The creative urge in women is obviously apparent in women’s dreams and is shown in the countless women who dream of giving birth – two examples from hundreds are below.
Example: Hi. Last night I dreamt that I was pregnant. I had a big stomach. And then I was giving a birth to baby boy. I felt everything, pain and so on… The boy was so lovely, he had green eyes. He was so cute. I was kissing him. He was like his father (my boyfriend in reality). Can you tell me what does it mean? I am not married yet… And I don’t have children too.
Example: I just had a dream that I delivered my own baby boy. I have 3 kids in real life, and somehow I suddenly “knew” I was going into labour despite not feeling pain, or having a pregnant belly. I gathered blankets and towels and squatted when I felt it coming out of me. It was a boy. I am white, but he was dark, like middle eastern… I cleared out his mouth, and cleaned him off with a towel, and he had lots of black hair, and I loved him instantly.
Life itself is infinitely creative, look around at all the forms it creates. Even after giving birth to several children women still have the power of creation. Of course it will try to go in the old channels, the old pathways. But it can be creative in new ways as social actions, in caring for others, in creative art work, such as writing or music, or ways beyond counting.
Very few of us realise the enormous potential of our sexual energy. We cannot see it connecting with our enormous potential, or we often cannot believe we all have an enormous potential. Of course there are often enormous barriers for us to overcome in expressing our potential. For example, the condition of our body can be a great obstacle and overcoming it can be done – with effort. See this amazing example – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNZVV4Ciccg It shows how a devastated brain is not the potential behind it.
Also I read years ago something written by a man who researched it, that no man who had been castrated had ever filed a claim for an invention in the office of Patents in the USA. It suggested that our energy behind reproduction are connected with creative potential.
Whatever name you give to that enormous potential underlying your existence, whether you call it Life, Chaos, God, The Mystery, reproduction is the source of your physical existence. We struggle with words, with concepts, when we approach that Mystery. Even the words used here, such as energy and potential, are simply attempts to define something that in the end is more than the words we use to describe it. We struggle to understand how we can to be. With great passion and one pointedness we have learned some of the secrets, as in recognition of DNA and the genetic code. But if you have followed what has been said above, dreams lead us beyond forms, beyond definitions. They cut suggest that the flow of energy that you call your sexual drive and your urge to parenthood, does not in the end belong to you. Yes, you can restrain it, deny it, completely give yourself over to it, or even attempt to wash your hands of it. You can add quality or brutality to the way it is expressed. But in the end it is like a river that flows on, and passes through you.
Example: “Then my body gradually contracted into the prenatal position, constantly feeling the sexual feelings as the centre of my whole nervous system, and realising their entanglement with each pain and pleasure of life.”
That is from the report of a man experiencing life in the womb. It shows so clearly how our centre of pleasure in sexual feelings is tied up with almost any pains or pleasure we feel. It seems as if we could do a whole course of therapy around sexual pleasure and its blockages through pain.
How can we release our potential?
Here is an example of someone realising how they had restricted their creativeness/potential.
Example: I am in a landscape and notice that everything is brown; the whole world is brown and lifeless. There is also a feeling of solemnity or dullness. I have enough lucidity to wonder why the world of my dream is so brown and dull. As I ask this I become more aware of what feeling the brownness expresses. It is seriousness – with no room for humour or fun. The feeling deepens, real enough and clear enough to look at and understand. I see it is my father’s attitude to life that I have unconsciously inherited. I realise how anxious he always felt about life, and how I took this in. That is how I became a ‘brown’ person. I see too that I do not need to be either brown or serious anymore.
Then the landscape changes. There are trees, plants and animals in brilliant colour. I wonder what this means, and the landscape begins to spin until the colours blend and shimmer. Suddenly my body seems to open to them, as if they are spinning inside of me, and with a most glorious feeling, a sensation of vibrating energy pours up my trunk to my head. With this comes realisation. I see how stupid I have been in my brown, anxious existence, how much life I have held back. The animals and plants are the different forces in my being that blend into energy and awareness. I feel I am capable of doing almost anything, like loving, writing a song, painting, telepathy, or speaking with the dead. This sparkling vibrating energy is life itself and can, if I learn to work with it, grow into any ability or direction I choose. I wake with a wonderful sense of my possibilities.
Two things were pointed out in the man’s account, the first being his attempt to understand his ‘brown’ feelings. His attempt leads him to the understanding that it is a habitual feeling or attitude he learned from his father and that leads to a wonderful release. The release doesn’t in itself give him new abilities, but it does point the way by showing him that by working, by applying himself in a chosen direction a new ability would be manifested.
He said another thing that is a clue to releasing one’s potential was the sentence, “with a most glorious feeling, a sensation of vibrating energy pours up my trunk to my head.”
We cannot really understand this experience without some understanding of what has been called in India the serpent power, or kundalini. A great deal of mystery has surrounded this, probably because it has not been clearly understood in Western thought, but in practical terms the serpent power is the psychobiological energy that expresses in you as the many processes and functions of your body and mind. It is like the electricity that flows into a house, that while it is not the picture on the television screen, or the movement of the cooling fan, is the power underlying all the many things arising from electricity.
It is so little experienced by westerners maybe because we have a history of dominating the animals and nature around us, but a number of people do however experience vibrations starting in the genital area as this psychobiological energy starts to express more fully.
Example: But very shortly the urge arose strongly again, this time for O. to handle my genitals, and to suckle her breast. As this happened, the most tremendous sexual feelings arose, and I began to shake and vibrate at the pelvis with pleasure.
Example: There was a peculiar conscious and semiconscious experience without dream images. My hips and pubic area vibrated. Moved is not the right word, as the movement was too quick. I have seen the movement on a buck rabbit during mating. Not really a backward or forward movement, but very rapid vibration. This occurred with me quite spontaneously, and I relaxed and let it happen. There was no direction as far as I know. It happened about four or five times, then as I became more conscious, disappeared.
This usually occurs, as stated, quite spontaneously, as one learns to release the many tensions, repressive feelings, fears and emotional traumas most of us have. As these drop away our latent potential starts to move through our body, often starting at the pelvis, and then works up the trunk to the head, enlivening many of the wonders of our body/being.
If that action is blocked by the ways described above, it creates a pressure that will seek to flow somewhere. In many cases it moves into neurosis. In other words, because it is not flowing outwardly and satisfyingly into social and sexual relationships, it may turn inwards, enlivening the usually unconscious and disturbed patterns of feeling. Then the person lives out neurotic ways of expressing sexually and socially. They may for instance express anti-social behaviour in violence or destruction. They may express in destructive sexual behaviour or relationships, or be even more introverted into deep depression. So learning to work with this is to find enormous healing. See Life’s Little Secrets – Meeting yourself
To unlock the tremendous power of our potential that may be locked in our sexual nature for most people takes work, trust, courage and a strong ego/will. I know many people who follow Eastern teaching say that the ego must be got rid of, but my experience is that you cannot let go of or surrender what you do not feel in command of. So I see there is a big difference between being egoistic and having a strong sense of oneself.
In opening to a wider experience you face death of the old self, and many people are scared of death, so there is no way they can simple let things happen.
Example: I was on a road and noticed that a magnificent elephant had appeared. It had enormous tusks and ears, the latter being powdered with blue dust and adding tremendously to its impact. As it was coming in my direction I was frightened and began to run. I ran off the road, over a fence into a field. I thought the elephant would be stopped by the fence. It wasn’t. It walked straight through it after me. Then I tried to climb a low bank back to the road. The elephant was drawing nearer and I was so frightened I could hardly move to climb the bank. The elephant caught hold of me and I suddenly realised it wasn’t going to destroy me, but wanted, despite it being a magnificent and powerful beast, to sit me on its back. I was still frightened however and ran to a doctor’s surgery. The elephant came and, thrusting its trunk into the surgery, drew me out to it.
As you can see from this dream, a massive power was emerging in his life – his immense potential. His response was a massive fear, fear which block one’s potential.
What is the experience of meeting one’s potential?
As you learn to enter more fully into yourself you will gradually realise that your real self isn’t the body with a gender of male or female, but a shape shifter. You also will have learned how to dive under the surface of your conscious personality and realise that there is a huge and wonderful world often called the unconscious. It is actually awareness of Life, and in it you can become a bodiless consciousness, or be an animal, or know the wonder of animal consciousness.
Example: “Our dream life creates a meandering pattern in which individual strands or tendencies become visible, then vanish, then return again. If one watches this meandering design over a long period of time, one can observe a sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency at work, creating a slow, imperceptible process of psychic growth-the process of individuation.
Gradually a wider and more mature personality emerges, and by degrees becomes effective and even visible to others. The fact that we often speak of “arrested development” shows that we assume that such a process of growth and maturation is possible with every individual. Since this psychic growth cannot be brought about by a conscious effort of will power, but happens involuntarily and naturally, it is in dreams frequently symbolised by the tree, whose slow, powerful, involuntary growth fulfils a definite pattern”. Quoted from Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung
As this becomes real to you an amazing transformation takes pace in your understanding. Realising that you are or can be many things begins to emerge that whatever you believe fully can become real within you, and even in the material world. That might seem like a simple thing but it is immense. It means that within a world of constant change you can create a reality of your own. It is a gift to be so creative. But it is a gift that most people find an awful and terrible thing, because most people create a world of fear, horror, superstition, and feel, therefore believe, they are victims of fate or God. So they live in a dark world which is their own creation.
You are capable of a great deal more than you have ever been able to live. Your inner life links you with that limitless potential. In your inner life you leap beyond the limitations that usually bind and restrict you. Without effort you can fly; or you can be a visionary, looking back into past ages, or gazing into the unlimited possibilities of your future. Dreams allow you to solve intricate problems that evade you while awake – explore the complexities of a relationship by actually taking part in its drama in a full surround virtual reality of your dream life – you can explore back through the strata of your lifetime to uncover past pains that still create presents discomfort.
Those are not wild claims, but findings arrived at through the experience and the experiment in thousands of people’s lives. In fact, dreams are one of the most extraordinary experiences and resources we have. They are unlike any other form of everyday human experience. In your dreams you can explore a massive range of your emotions from terror to ecstasy. You can experience every form of relationship, love and sexuality, without any danger of repercussions, loss of present partner, or physical illness. You can experiment with the future by trying out different directions in the virtual reality of your dream. You can tread unknown regions of the mind, moving beyond the boundaries of your waking awareness into estates where you transcend the limits of your senses and swim in the ocean of consciousness. And unlike the waking experience of creative thinking or day dreaming, during which you are always in some measure an observer; in young dreams you are totally participating in whatever you are experiencing. When you dream you are in the magic place where all the past is here involved in the present, and all that is present is creating your future.
As this becomes real to you an amazing transformation takes pace in your understanding. Realising that you are or can be many things begins to emerge that whatever you believe fully can become real within you, and even in the material world. That might seem like a simple thing but it is immense. It means that within a world of constant change you can create a reality of your own. It is a gift to be so creative. But it is a gift that most people find an awful and terrible thing, because most people create a world of fear, horror, superstition, and feel, therefore believe, they are victims of fate or God. So they live in a dark world which is their own creation.
You are capable of a great deal more than you have ever been able to live. Your dreams link you with that limitless potential. In your dreams you leap beyond the limitations that usually bind and restrict you. Without effort you can fly; or you can be a visionary, looking back into past ages, or gazing into the unlimited possibilities of your future. Dreams allow you to solve intricate problems that evade you while awake – explore the complexities of a relationship by actually taking part in its drama in a full surround virtual reality – you can explore back through the strata of your lifetime to uncover past pains that still create presents discomfort.
Remember what was said about the reproductive power being at the root of enormous creativity. All of those possibilities of your inner creative power enlarge your experience in a way that would never ever be possible otherwise. From experience you learn and grow. Such experiences also channel your potential into becoming real. Potential lies at the root of your being. Think of the latent potential that slowly expressed from the time you were a sperm uniting with an ovum. From that moment till birth your weight alone increased 27 million times. All the complexities of growth were possibilities that expressed. But even when you are fully grown, there is still unlimited possibilities waiting to be expressed.
What are the details of allowing and working with this power of change can be found in – Ox Herding and what follows it? It might also be worthwhile to read People’s Experience of LifeStream