What I Have Discovered In My Life As A Dreamer

 

1 – The living laboratory of dreams enables thoughts and emotions to take on their own physical reality as people, objects or places outside of you. Meeting them you live in a universe, a community of beings with which you have an ongoing relationship. Yet it is an apparently exterior world that is but a reflection of your own inner life. Because of this, if you are wise, you may discover in it the sources of your own obstacles in life, and transform them into opportunities. The magical variety of the things met in this world reveal your own impressive creativity. For you are the Grand Creator of all that exists in this special universe of experience. Yet – and here is the jewel – you are not imprisoned by all you have made in this world, whether noble or evil, cherished or feared. Not trapped that is, unless you choose to be, or fail to realise you have created it all.

2 – If you drive a car you cannot afford to lack skill. Your life and other people’s life depend on it. However, even if you do not drive a car you are nevertheless the driver or operator of one of the most complex vehicles ever created. It is a vehicle with many functions. It can be one of the most destructive or creative implements, and so needs enormous skill to understand and handle well. The vehicle is your own body and mind.

The essential you – the naked, decision making, responsive spark of consciousness – stands in the middle of myriad flows of energy and influence. Everything from internal urges to eat, mate, be angry, to external influences such as social pressure, music or opportunity, call you to decide or respond. To respond or decide in ways which actually satisfy you takes great skill – the lack of which leads to internal tensions, ill health, frustration, social rejection or lack of recognition and so on. Because dreams play out this position of consciousness amidst a multitude of influences, they are an excellent guide to the life skill of ‘driving’ oneself.

3 – We are all born victims of circumstance. But we need not remain a victim.

Your natural response to your environment is to be influenced by it. A disturbing event would stimulate you to feel fear, a calming event to feel pleasure. Your moods are usually influenced by what happens to you. So being in prison would be more depressing than being free. Being rejected would cause more pain than being admired or loved.

Your emotions and feelings about yourself are like a keyboard that is played upon by people and events. If you are praised or rewarded your self confidence and therefore performance will usually be enhanced. That is fine except it means you will usually depend upon the world to create your moods and your sense of your own value. This makes us victims. We may not be dependent on a drug, but on praise, success, being admired or wanted. Without them we may experience the lows the drug user does on withdrawal.

As a human being though, you have an extraordinary possibility. This dream of Ed’s explains it.

I was in a prison with several others – all in one cell. It felt as if I had been in the prison for years. I was standing near the bars angry and shouting about the injustice of my incarceration. As I stood raging I suddenly realised that all my anger was having no affect on the world. I was the only one suffering it. I saw that the peace and freedom I wanted from release I could have now by letting go of my anger. I would then be in peace, and would be free of my own negative emotions. I forgave my judges and gaolers, and a change came over me. In the following years I learnt to drop the other ideas and emotions I tortured myself with. I was filled with joy until my bliss filled the cell. In this way all had a changed relationship. In a strange way I was now utterly free.

The greatest prison of all, the greatest of torturers, is our own emotions and our concepts or ideas. While Ed felt angry and held the idea he had been wrongly accused, he was tormented and trapped – imprisoned in his own ideas and emotions. To have received a public apology and released would have changed his feelings, but he would still have remained a passive victim of events. Instead he found in his dream the greatest freedom of all – a blissful freedom – the release from his mind and emotions.

Almost every dream you have shows you what world of experience you are creating out of your memories, your habitual attitudes, your fears and hopes. Because of this, each dream can be another step toward blissful freedom. The following dream shows clearly how Emma is imprisoned in difficult feelings.

I’ve had this dream for years. I’m trapped in a long passageway or corridor. I can’t get out. I’m feeling my way along the wall – there is a small light at the end of the tunnel, I can’t get to it. I’m very frightened. I wake up before I get to the end. Then I feel afraid to go back to sleep.

Emma cannot escape by struggling. Her trap is one of the emotions and mind. No matter what helped her create the trap, she can be free by standing out of the particular web of ideas and feelings which weave together to create her trap.

4 – If I lived without ever remembering my dreams I would have a one dimensional life devoid of the possibility of extraordinary riches of experience. Dreaming, daydreaming, imagination and fantasy, so extend your range of experience, that you double or treble your experiential life span. I see this ability of the mind to play with experience or information, to rearrange it and try it in different guises and formats, as fundamental to the enlarged creativity and functioning of the human mind.

Of course, these two great principles – the gaining of experience other than through our senses from the external world; and the ability to play with information and creatively experience it in different formats, or practice new responses to old situations – are not limited rigidly to dreams. Whatever it is that creates dreams however, does appear to be the very fount of our ability to transcend the one dimensional time track of our physical life. Instead of Tuesday following Monday; and Wednesday coming after Tuesday, mechanically on and on, we have the ability on Wednesday of lifting up into the other dimension of mind and looking back at Monday. We may even imagine how we might have lived Monday differently. We can harvest information and glean new experience from it by replaying Monday over and over, if we wish. When Friday comes we are then armed with a wealth of experience, that Monday by itself never gave us, with which to enrich the day.

5 – Seeing an overall view of dreams has gradually led me from a goal oriented view of life and human beings, to one that can be called Repertoire. By this I mean that often we are led to believe that if we achieve a certain position or place we will find satisfaction – this is goal orientation which influences large numbers of us. Dreams suggest that there is no goal, but rather a fuller meeting with all the facets of oneself. One person may live largely in an experience of their genital drive; another in their emotions; someone else through their religious feelings; another in their anxieties, mind, etc. The discovery of these different aspects of oneself leads to enormous flexibility and satisfaction. Each time another ‘room’ of ones being is opened to access, your repertoire is increased, and another area of pleasure and creativity emerges.

6 – In our times a sense of the spiritual, although now a word much used, is actually atrophied. As individuals, few of us have a real sense of link with a connected whole. Lots of people meditate on ideas of the spiritual, or have an emotional response to a symbol of the whole, but few find this a function of their own being, such as their eyes are a function of their sense of an external world. Dreams show how human beings create a concept of a whole external to themselves.

The study of such imagery suggests however, that humans have a long history of disconnection from their own wholeness. To understand this one needs to consider the idea of humans prior to self consciousness – a humanoid animal still moved by deeply instinctive drives. As self consciousness emerged, with its possibility of personal will, such human beings may have felt themselves like a beast which had woken up. It was difficult, because they still had their instinct pouring through them. A shock or pain may have occurred due to becoming aware instead of being lost in unconscious and instinctive urges. History, especially that of religion, with its manipulation of sexuality and aggression, suggests there was a break with the instincts. There was a denial of the instincts. This occurred because human beings developed a society and religious beliefs which began to treat the instincts as paranoia, as an illness or disease. If you were like a beast then you were less than human. This is a part of our psychological history.

Prior to this development of personal and social influence or will, the human animal had always had a guiding light, a very present help in every situation of stress – instinctive prompting. With the suppression of instinctual guidance – the inner god who gave advice – we had to erect something else because the human beings felt devoid without their instincts. They felt devoid without their internal guidance. So we erected God. We erected religion instead. It was to serve the place of the voice of instinct which had always guided human beings in the past. We split it off from the individual human being and made it a social function. Now society would dictate the direction of the individual.

The external symbol of human instincts – god, the gods – became a means to manipulate individuals. The ability to manipulate – to ‘guide’ humans now their personal guidance was suppressed – led to a new form of human society, the human termite hill, with its hierarchy, and suppressants – i.e. kings, priests, armed guards, police, soldiery, etc.

Having seen something of this in human dreams, I feel individuals can only become self responsible if they understand these ancient processes which make them still liable to ‘guidance’. The recovery of ones own instinctive nature, allied now to rational consciousness, becomes the stimulus to a new type of human experience.

7 – Again and again dreams circle around a representation of what Jung calls The Self (See Core Experience). Such dreams develop the image of only one process, one being, one life in all the universe. Although we experience a three dimensional world in which there appears to be a passage of time, the concept of the self suggests that we are also creatures of a timeless experience beyond time and space. The strange anomalies which erupt into human life, and which appear to have little or nothing to do with time, and space and human limitation, are signs of this timeless self occasionally making its presence felt in our ‘normal’ world.

Out of this we have the apparently inexplicable phenomena seen in some dreams and in general life of telepathy, miraculous healing, knowledge of the future’ insight into people and things without the aid of the physical senses, telekinesis, flight of consciousness, etc.

Simple Ways of Exploring Your Latent Potential

 

Being a Seed is just one way of exploring your potential but here are some more wonders to explore.

 

This is a very simple way of encouraging the flow of self-expression. Although simple it can be very satisfying and interesting to do. Have plenty of space for this. You will need room to pace about without feeling restricted. So, comfortable clothes are also important. The length of time can be anything from ten minutes at the minimum, to an hour, depending on how absorbed you are in what arises.

 

1 – Start by walking around your space. Aim to get an easy flowing pace without having to worry about where you are walking or having to change direction.

 

2 – When you feel easy and relaxed in your pacing start repeating the words ‘I AM’. Keep repeating this as you pace and allow yourself to complete the sentence in any way that occurs. So you might simply keep on saying I AM, but the feeling of it might change. Or you might say, ‘I am bored of this’ – ‘I am feeling frustrated’ – I am always getting myself into arguments’ – ‘I am so happy’. Whatever comes to mind, whatever arises spontaneously, allow it to flow through into words and the pacing. This will probably mean that what you say and feel will change as time passes.

 

3 – It is important to have something of the ‘piano key’ in which, like a piano key, the slightest touch can produce something different that opens new feelings in yourself. Let whatever ridiculous, beautiful, painful or meaningful things you feel about yourself during the practice be stated as fully as you can in the pacing and the ‘I Am’ statements.

The I Am approach leads to a fuller realisation of who you are. It aids in easy self expression, and is enjoyable and interesting to do.

 

Having learn to walk or better still jog in a circle, here is a great extension the the exercise.

Running Meditation and Your Up and Downstairs Self

 

About forty years ago I was asked to lead a group in personal exploration. I was given no information about what the activity should deal with, so I decided to make it an exploration of one’s neglected abilities. Having witnessed the explosion of new abilities in several people I felt I has something to offer.

 

The group when they arrived were all strangers to me and there were about eight of them, evenly mixed group of women and men. In particular two of them remain in my memory – a female nurse and a businessman.

 

It was a long time ago but I believe I started the group moving to music, not the frantic dance movements we see enacted in films, I asked them to try to express in their body whatever the slow music led them to feel.

 

They enjoyed that and it loosened them up a little. Sometimes I get crazy new ideas, and on that day, I had an idea to try something new. The first part I had tried before with completely different results. In Japan I was teaching a very large group and wanted them to try using their voices by making animal or odd noises. I had the impression that the Japanese were a rather controlled people, but this group went wild and in the end after several minutes I had to shout to stop them. Arriving back in the UK I tried the same exercise with another large group. I was mortified when the whole group stopped within a few seconds and I had to shout to keep them going, without much success. I felt that the British were much more reserved in exposing themselves than the Japanese.

 

So, the new idea was to get the group to jog or run in a circle. It was a large hall and so they ran easily and when I asked them to make any crazy noises, they did it easily. I am not sure if running in a circle reminded them of schooldays or if running makes it difficult to stay in the upstairs everyday reasoning state of mind. Maybe a bit of both because the next step was the ‘master class’ of the method.

 

I asked them to stop running and see if there were any problems they needed answers to. The two people I remembered easily was the businessman and the young nurse. The businessman said he was facing a difficult question regrading his business, the nurse said that she was almost ready to leave nursing. She said that she faced death nearly every day; babies died, children, teenagers, mature individuals, and the elderly – everywhere she felt overwhelmed by the emotions of experiencing it all.

 

Everyone had such a question, so set them running again making noises. Then when they were in full flow, I shouted for them to now asked the question they sought an answer to. I said for them to allow any words, thoughts or feeling to arise as the answer.

 

I left them running and said when they had arrived at whatever they experienced they could sit and relax. When they had all finished, they sat in a circle and told their experience. I was actually astonished that every one of them had received an answer.

 

The nurses experience was one I recalled easily. She said that her difficulty about death was resolved and she was ready to continue with enthusiasm. I cannot remember her exact words, but it was about the essence of being a nurse. For nursing was not simply handing out medicines or dealing with wounds, nursing was to be a companion during the journey of life from birth to death. As a nurse we walk with the mystery of Life all the time, through the dark moments and light, and our companionship in that long walk give enormous amounts to the others making that journey. That young nurse was ready to continue walking with others making the journey.

 

It reminded me of when I was nursing on a geriatric ward. A bedridden patient, a lovely old man who had no relatives to visit him, called me and asked to sit and hold his hand. I sat for some time with his hand in mine, but the sister in charge of that ward was like a sergeant major and insisted we kept moving. I explained that to the patient and left him. That night he died.

 

The business man said his business had left him feeling he could no longer face the never ending push to succeed and it had got him to the end of his resources.

he saw during the meditation that he had himself set up the enormously high goals, ones he could never achieve, so he dropped his ambitious goals and just ran his business that provided his actual needs.

 

Running or making silly noises has the effect of making it difficult to carry on thinking in and orderly way. This opens up the possibility for another aspect of level of your mind to express. This is often called intuition but giving it such a name may limit our understanding if it.

 

The limitation occurs because we are still locked in our thinking that sees only one thing at a time and I always judging or trying to fix a meaning on what it experiences. Our thinking mind in a way often acts like a judge, jury, and executioner for what we perceive. This other aspect of our mind opens when that side of us is quietened. It is similar to walking out of a small dimly lit room onto an immense sunlight meadow. You can see animals trees the sky, the earth, people, and rivers all at once.

 

Ire reminds me of a scene I was trying to sum up. I was standing on a beach, but when I tried to define or sum up what a beach was, at first it seemed subtle and unreachable as ever. Then I imagined being the beach to define what I was – a meeting place for water, earth, air and sun – earth, air, fire and water. But the beach is not any one of them. It changes with the seasons and with the action of storms, of erosion and temperature. It isn’t the air, or the sea or the earth. It changes yet stays the same – the beach. Suddenly I felt this in myself, saying, “I am not anything. I change yet am unchanged. I am all things but nothing.” This gave me a very powerful sense of my own eternal spirit underlying all the changes of my body and personality.

 

Therefore, I cannot say I am this body or this mind; I cannot even claim to be this person. None of them separately is what I am. So, I am the indefinable amalgam of them all. In just that way I am the indefinable everything that underlies the particulars of my life. To be aware of that is amazing experience.

 

A man experiencing this said, “I recognise myself as existing without body, without family ties. I am still living the life of a man in this century. Without love I am nothing. Love is the key, and most people’s life is like a prison. But here I have access to everyone’s life. I can enter into your being D, or into that of your children. You are all wonderful. Your struggle is unique, and I love you and take you into my being. I exist out of each of you. I do not have an existence outside of you. I came into being out of countless lives that were lost, giving. I am the fire of life in its many forms. I do not organise life. I am totally out of control. I have no security, only an awareness of each moment, life living and dying each moment, constantly, forever.”

 

How can I enter this state of being; well the frustrating thing about being able to experience this state is that the harder one tries to grasp it, the further away from it one gets. The more effort one makes in trying to achieve it, the less one finds of it.

 

 

It is the ever present, self-existent core of yourself that remains when all else drops away.

 

 

Playing With the Voice

 

I know this one has been done already but there is a lot more to the voice to discover. It may help to use music as a background. Something not too invading.

 

In this next exercise you 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 them. Just as many of us do not move our body outside of certain restricted and habitual gestures and actions, so also your range of sounds may be quite small. So, for several minutes you will explore making sounds.

 

As your sound production improves though, and you begin to enjoy it, also it is good to use it in different sessions by exploring making all sorts of happy sounds; different sorts 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.

 

1 – Start by taking a full breath and letting it out noisily with an AHHHH sound.

2 – 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.

3 – Now try MMMMMMMAAAAAA.

4 – If you are doing this exercise for the first time, that is sufficient for one session. If not, go on to use one of the themes suggested above.

 

African Dancing

 

This might better be called ‘native dancing’. But the name is used because most of us have seen film of African villagers or tribes-people celebrating a dance. The movements are often very repetitive and powerful. The use of stamping is frequently used to beat out a rhythm. Movements of the pelvis are often a part of it. There is open expression of all the basic drives, from sex to awe of the divine. Suppression of our own earthy and divine feelings may lead to tension and depression. The use of African dancing is very invigorating and helpful in being more happily assertive or expressive.

 

The following description of African dance appeared in the magazine Mothering, Winter 1990, under the title African Dance & Childbirth. It was written by Amy Trussell.

 

“In Black Africa, many women traditionally pride themselves on being dancers and birthers – endeavours that require uncompromising physical strength, mental clarity, rhythmic integrity, and a direct link to forces greater than themselves. As dancers they give birth, bringing to the birth process the tremendous strength acquired over years of night long and sometimes week-long- ‘spirit dances’. Daily work, the honouring of womanhood, the deities, the ancestors, the darkness, and the celebration of birth itself are all depicted in the dance. And the dance is carried into the fibres of everyday life.”

 

1 – There is no need to learn African dancing. Deep within us we all remember our ancient heritage. We are all descendants from our African ancestors, from our primeval forebears who danced. To start you may need a recording of native drumming, but even this is not essential. If you use a recording, stand in your space and let your body feel the drum beats.

 

2 – Do not attempt to take control of your body to follow the sounds. Let your body find its own movement and its own theme to dance. If you stumble and get out of time, don’t let this stop you. This is not a dance competition. You are not trying to win a cup.

 

3 – Let your feet, your body, your emotions and voice move with the drums. Allow your strength, your womanhood or manhood, to flow into the movements with exuberance. Be aware of the movement and bounce of your breasts, pelvis and genitals, and let pleasure flow from them.

 

4 – If you wish, when you have used African dance a few times, dance out some big event in your life, like the death of your parent or baby, if such things have happened. Dance marriage, dance the struggle and wonder of growing up, dance your life!

 

African dance puts you in touch with the roots of life – with being a man or woman in the body – with the power of emotions and love, of loss and gain – with the divine joy of living. Through it you reclaim the so called primitive in you that links you with nature and the fundamental life drives. Through it the events of your individual life, its pains and joys, are allowed to connect with a greater whole that sustains you.

See https://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/

 

Seitai and the Healing Touch

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

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

 

Posture One

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

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

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

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

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

Posture Two

 

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

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

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

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

 

Posture Three

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Yuki – Touch Healing – Touch Play

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The Practice Of Yuki

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

Contraction and Expansion

This is similar to the ‘seed approach’. The only difference is that instead of taking the idea of a seed and allowing your being to explore it spontaneously, you take the idea first of contraction, then expansion.

 

This is to do with fundamental life processes. If you watch your chest for a while you will observe its contractions and expansions in breathing. Your heart too constantly contracts and expands. Sleeping and waking contract and expand consciousness. Life and death are an expansion and contraction. Perhaps even the universe goes through such a cycle.

 

1 –        Create and stand in your space – with or without music.

2 –        Observe for a minute or so the contraction and expansion of your chest. As you do so allow the feeling of letting yourself drop more fully into the contraction and emptiness. Contraction might also be defined as giving up, feeling empty of any urge to do anything, dropping out of social activity. Allow your body to find its own spontaneous expression of this in posture, movement, and even sound if there is an urge to do so.

3 –        If you find it difficult to find a spontaneous posture of contraction, try kneeling on the floor and going down into a heap or curling up in a ball. This is a position of contraction.

4 –        As you go into your expression of contraction hold in mind that you will wait in the contraction to see if any urge toward expansion occurs. This may take time, or not happen at all, so be willing to wait.

5 –        Explore how your body as a whole contracts. What does this mean as far as a posture or movement is concerned? What does it feel like inside? What does it mean in your life?

6 –        If movements and feelings arise leading to expansion, go along with them. Just observe and let yourself take in what arises.

7 –        If there are conflicts or painful memories holding you in one of the attitudes – contraction or expansion – these will be discharged during the practice

 

Using the pathway of expansion and contraction heals any area of your being locked in one or the other of these opposites. The practice enables you to learn to move easily in and out of these opposites that play such a big part in life. If you are stuck in an expansionary attitude, then the practice will balance you – or vice versa.

The Animal

 

This approach is quite playful and enjoyable. It might introduce you to movements and feelings you were not in touch with before.

 

To meet the animal in you is not only to contact the part of yourself stuck in fixed repertoires of response to people and situations. Such fixed responses – which might be as simple as only saying ‘Good morning’ to the people you meet in the street and never getting beyond that to deeper friendship – trap you. They are habits of behaviour that need reorganisation. But there is also the wonderful wisdom of your internal animal as well, with its deep understanding of relationships and body language. The meeting with your ‘animal’ can therefore be multi-faceted. It is in the mammals that playful behaviour developed and is very marked. Many humans have lost this easy physical contact and playfulness with each other, and this can be regained through meeting your ‘animal’.

The experience of your internal animals, or the traits you have gathered through love from animals you have known, may surface during your general practise of inner-directed movement. To touch it directly you can try this path to the animals.

1 –        After setting up your ‘space’ drop any arising thoughts as well as you can for about fifteen minutes. During this time hold your attention on your physical sensations and inner feelings.

2 –        Allow any movements and responses to external noises and environment to arise only from your physical sensations – sight, touch, smell, taste, hearing – and from feelings such as comfort, discomfort, pleasure, pain, restlessness, tiredness, but not from your thinking. Explore your environment from this basic level of yourself – comfort, discomfort and your feelings. Look for a comfortable place like a dog. Rub against the furniture like a cat. If you are with friends using this path, meet each other without speech, but through smell and physical contact.

3 –        As you enter into this allow your inner-directed movements to emerge, with the permission for your inner animal to express itself. Let it lead you along and show you its view of the world and its wisdom or its needs in your life.

4 –        When you begin to get the feel of this, start with the awareness of physical and feeling responses again while crawling or lying on the floor. From the feelings of an animal, sensitive to sound, feeling its own instinctive aliveness and desire to survive – its survival anxiety – take time to see if you can stand up. See if you can discover what it means to stand up with all your senses and feelings working.

5 –        Another approach is to start again from basic physical and sensory awareness. Move about in this for a while, then explore what it might have been like for the human animal to become self conscious, to realise its own body, to look at itself in water/mirror with a sense of ‘I’.

Giving permission for the animal within you to emerge enlarges your experience of yourself and the world. It can help heal the hurts and reactive fears this aspect of yourself feels, because it is the animal – i.e. the basic biological – that fears are felt. Passion for life can be regained, for it is the animal that feels honest and strong feelings about life. Your body can regain its natural pride and pleasure in movement, and the war between the intellect and the basic drives can be resolved. Through it you can gain new levels of perception of other people and society, and even find new abilities.

CONTACT

Being Polly

During this period (April 1976) a new technique of group or partner work was evolved. I have called it Contact. It has arisen out of much that we have done in the past. It is deeply penetrating and effective.

Actually experiencing this form of meeting can be an amazing adventure or a real enlightenment. Here is an account of one such session between Ed and Polly.

 

I had know Polly for some time, but I had never used this form of meeting with her. Polly is a divorcee, a nurse, and someone I naturally like. My own situation at the time was of being married.

We sat opposite each other and were quiet for a while. I wanted to be in touch with Polly’s body in some way so I told her and she felt easy with that so we moved closer and held hands. I can’t remember every detail but I remember I was feeling close but without any desire to get closer. Then Polly started telling me she had warm feelings for me. With quite some feelings she said she loved me. I had used this approach quite often so it didn’t knock me back or anything. But in observing my own feelings I couldn’t notice any response to what Polly was saying, and I had the sense she expected a reply. So I said something like, “Well, what you are saying is really strong, but I don’t feel anything like what you say. I just feel calm and observing.”

 

Polly seemed to experience something powerful and started crying, and when she did that I could feel my own emotions respond. Then she explained that what I had said had suddenly pushed her to remember that this situation we were in was like a replay of something that used to happen between herself and her father. She had felt it as some sort of duty to tell her father that she loved him, but in fact she didn’t have any feelings for him. She had grown to believe her lie though, and it wasn’t until we had started being honest with each other that the lie had been exposed. This relieved me as I couldn’t understand how, if someone felt love for me, I wouldn’t have some sense of it.

 

After that it was like a wall had been dropped between us. I began to feel feelings of warmth and connection with Polly, and she with me. We played a bit and laughed and put our noses together looking into each others eyes close up. All I could see was one big eye looking straight into me. It was a very nice feeling. Then something amazing happened and I can’t even begin to understand how. Suddenly I was Polly. I was completely in her body although I was physically sitting in front of her. It was one of the strangest things I have ever known. Although Polly didn’t feel it to the same degree, she still felt something big had happened and held me close.

 

Gradually the feeling got clearer. It was like I was trapped in a woman’s body, and was scared I wouldn’t be able to get out. I realised it was about being born and told Polly. She then held me by wrapping her legs around me so I could really feel a woman’s body holding me tight. Slowly I wriggled free, and in doing so knew that I was facing a fear that getting near a woman might somehow trap me, and with Polly’s help I was finding my way beyond this fear.

Boundaries – are they fear or intuition?

 

What is the Technique behind using Contact

It can be used either as a group where people form couples to work together, or simple a couple, male to male, female to female or male to female who wish to explore each other in depth.

 

It must be understood that the couples have agreed to be completely honest with each other, and they start by either choosing a partner to work with, or sitting opposite each other and really looking at each other. Take your time with this because in looking at each other you are deciding to give each other honest and straight feedback.

 

Such honesty might be, “I find you extremely attractive, but am scared of showing it.” Or something like, “I am feeling extremely shy and unable to really say what I feel.”

 

If you are being honest and watching your partner and your own feelings you often note subtle changes in your partners face or body and you know what they indicate – if so say what you see to your partner.

 

An enormous part of this technique is about being aware of the flow of feelings and even emerging images that you note in observing yourself. Observing your own ebb and flow of thoughts and feelings, your own habits and responses to things, it is one of the most powerful of tools to use in transforming your life. This also leads to a fuller connection with your intuitive connection with your core.

 

Much of our behaviour is largely or wholly unconscious. Becoming aware of something can by itself produce a change. If you are not aware of how you act or respond, there is less likelihood of satisfying change.

 

But before you start, remember that some things you do are not comfortable to become aware of. Personal growth is not a constant delight. There are growing pains occasionally. Remember also that self-observation is not aimed at correcting wrong behaviour. There are not a set of right things to do. But there are ways you can discover of satisfying yourself more fully, and there are ways of responding and living that have the opposite effect to producing satisfaction and peace.

 

Another important thing to remember is that most of what we do is habitual. It takes no thought or effort to do it. Habits feel right because they have been done for so long. Even emotional responses are often habitual. So when you change you are going to confront a habit. Practising the new thing is necessary. Practice self observation until it is itself a habit and easy. See Habits

 

Such honestly can have amazing effects. Here is part of an explanation of a couple of males meeting while using contact. “I also remember seeing a vision of you spinning around in a huge golden light filled tube and feeling very sad (more tears) by realizing that as a spiritual teacher it could be very lonely on that mountain top as not many people could scale those heights, then I remember us rolling around on the floor like a couple of animals hugging shouting and laughing……I described it once, as having a spiritual/psychic orgasm.”

 

I believe the rolling around the floor started because after some time of honest sharing, Bob said to Andrew as they were breaking through barriers that had held them apart, “But if you say you love me, I wonder if the next moment you could walk away and leave me.” To which Andrew replied, “Yes, I could walk away.”

 

And that broke the last barrier and led them to meet deeply.

 

It is so simple and yet so powerful, why not try it?

 

Being Born

 

In Seitai there is no exploration of the mental and emotional possibilities of the practice. For many people inner-directed movement is largely an enjoyment of their body’s activity with some accompanying shift of feelings as the movements are enjoyed. In fact there is no need to deeply explore the realms of the psyche to gain great enjoyment and benefits from its use. However, I would not be properly describing what is achievable through the technique, if I did not give a small introduction to what might be found within the enormous realms of your mind and memory. The approaches given below are therefore for those who wish to open the door to an exploration of their own interior world of experience.

There is a warning needs to be sounded here though. The experience of your own inner life is very real. It may put you in contact with areas of yourself you may not have met before as an adult. Therefore unless you already have experience of working therapeutically – as with psychotherapy – it is best to use these aspects of inner-directed movement only with a supportive group to start with. It is a bit like learning to swim. If you did use the approaches below successfully they might introduce you to the deep waters of your feelings. So, like swimming, until you gain confidence in dealing with the new environment, it is best to learn with others. Of course, if you have already worked in this way there is no problem. Or if you are a group leader working therapeutically, the approaches are gentle ways into personal growth.

The following approaches are described for those who wish to explore something of the psychologically therapeutic side of inner-directed movement. If you are content with your experience of the practice as it is, there is no need at all to explore the mental and emotional side of yourself.

Being born was one of the great moments of your life. Not only is it an important physical event, but it is also a truly powerful process psychologically. That unborn babies have rememberable experiences, and that birth itself leaves strong memories and influences, although not yet generally accepted, appears to be well documented. Thousands of people have now recovered memories of birth through various forms of therapy, meditation and hypnosis. Some of these areas of experience suggest consciousness is in some degree continuous throughout all levels of being. (See The Secret Life of The Unborn Child by Dr. Thomas Verny, MD., and John Kelly – Sphere Books Ltd., 1982. In USA by Summit Books 1981)

 

To take the path of birth in inner-directed movement may mean recovering memories of your own birth and how it influenced your development. Such memories are completely non verbal and are composed purely of physical and emotional experience and body postures and movements. Apart from personal memories though, you may discover the power of renewal and the urge to grow expressed in the symbol of birth. This symbolic way experiencing was described well by Judith – in chapter three – when she felt like a crocus flower, struggling to open. In this way you might touch resources within yourself that have the possibility for you of emerging from old and restricting emotions, habits and ways of life.

 

1 –        If possible do this with two or three friends who are supportive and used to the action of inner-directed movement. This is not because it is unsafe to do otherwise, but because with friends you can create an excellent ‘womb’ environment.

 

2 –        If with friends, create your ‘space’ with enough room for you all to occupy a place close together on a soft duvet or blanket on the floor. Sit together making contact through holding hands, and centre down into the mood of what you are doing. Imagine yourself slipping backwards to the time when you were in the womb. When ready break contact and take an appropriate position in the middle of the blanket. Try curling up, knees to chest. Your two or three friends should now make close physical contact and cover you with their bodies so you are comfortable but enclosed in the warmth of their physical contact.

 

3 –        Once this has been done relax and wait for inner-directed movements to arise. There is no need to concentrate on the theme of being born. It is enough for you to have thought about this at the beginning. Now you can let go of any thoughts and wait and watch.

 

4 –        Do not attempt to make anything happen, or perform something for your friends. If all you do is to lie there for half an hour without movement, just do that. It is a very rewarding experience just to be quiet and close to friends in this non-verbal way. But you will probably find that after a few minutes there are changes of feeling occurring within you, and waves of impulse leading to some sort of movement or expression of feelings. Let these waves roll through you. Any movements that occur will come in waves too, so drop into quiet resting between them, and let the process unfold.

 

5 –        If practising by yourself – or alone in a group – imagine yourself going back in time and size to the point where you are in the womb ready to be born. Take up a position on your blanket that expresses this as nearly as you can. Then allow inner-directed movement as described above in 3 & 4 above.

 

6 –        What emerges will be unique to yourself. But in general it may feel like a direct experience of your own birth and relationship with your mother. Or it may be felt as an experience of psychological birth – a leaving behind of past attitudes and ways of expressing yourself that you have outgrown. It might be that you realise that for much of your life you have hardly been alive, and at last you are born and are living.

 

7 –        Perhaps what happened was incomplete, and you will need to use the path again to carry it further. Birth is such a major feature, you will need to come back to this theme anyway to really find the treasure of insights and energy dormant in it.

 

8 –        Whatever has been raised it is helpful to write it down and consider if you can see any relevance to your everyday life. For instance Joe, who used this path in his forties, experienced a difficult birth. He discovered a strong feeling of not wanting to be born, of a desire to avoid life by staying in the womb. He found this of great help in understanding the way he felt about life. His birth had been two months premature, so he could understand the feelings of not being ready to be involved in life. He had always had strong feelings of not wanting to participate in what other people were doing, of wanting to withdraw at social gatherings. On practising the ‘birth’ pathway again the feeling of withdrawal gradually receded and was replaced by a readiness to be involved in life. This made an observable difference to the way he met other people and was ready to be a part of activities.

 

If you practised with friends or within a group, share your experience with them and talk over what relevance you feel there might be with your everyday life. Also, ask for their comments on what they felt or observed. It is important to clarify for yourself what habits of feeling or attitude your birth has left, and how you wish to change these. For instance Joe was left with the habit of withdrawing from involvement with others.

 

The Pathway of birth offers the discovery of change in the amount of yourself you can bring to expression in relationship and work. It develops the ability to drop the past and to leave what is outgrown behind. Facets of yourself that were never really alive before can be born and live.

 

Body Dowsing – Releasing the Unconscious Wisdom

Every movement we make is an expression of our feelings, of what we think and will to do, of our unconscious emotions and ideas. Very often our movements express habits, such as when we are walking along a road and without thought take the turning for home when we really want to go to the shop. Through movement we show what we may not yet have fully thought or understood. And it is because of this aspect of it, especially as it arises through spontaneous movement, that such practices as dowsing are possible.

 

In various forms dowsing has been known throughout history and the world. In early European history dowsing became associated with a rod or forked stick, and was used to help find water, precious metals in the soil, coal, and lost objects. Despite the scientific scepticism of our times dowsing is still widely used even by government departments – because it works.

Dowsing is not always connected with a stick or rod though. Navaho Indians in the United States practise what they call ‘trembling hands’’’’’’.’ After a simple ritual they allow their hands to move spontaneously. From these movements they understand questions asked of them. The American anthropologist Dr. Clyde Kluckhohn and his wife investigated a practitioner on a Navaho reservation. Mrs. Kluckhohn had lost her handbag three days previously so asked the practitioner, Gregorio, if he could find it. Standing in the open air on a hill, and after rubbing corn pollen on his hands, Gregorio was able to tell them the location of the handbag. This was later confirmed.

 

Dr. Paul Brunton, in his book Search in Secret India, tells of meeting an Indian ascetic who used his arms to answer questions. He would allow his arms to move spontaneously, and from their movements could give a yes or no response. Indian dowsers do not use a rod, but experience powerful changes of sensation in their body, and are thus able to detect sources of water and minerals.

 

While investigating the intuitive faculties of Australian Aborigines, Ronald Rose tells of a more refined form of body dowsing. In his book Living Magic (Chatto and Windus, 1957) he says that the tribesmen he lived with used different areas of their body to represent relatives. So their father might be represented by their right forearm, their mother by their left forearm, their first uncle by their right bicep, and so on. In this way, if an unaccountable pain or sensation developed in a part of the body, they were able to tell which relative was hurt or needed help. Rose witnessed this in action and describes it as extremely accurate and reliable.

 

All these forms of dowsing, even when a rod is used, depend upon the involuntary responses acting through the body in answer to a question. Taken overall they demonstrate the wide range of ways such responses can be sought or experienced. All are ways to call upon the information we have perhaps unknowingly gathered in our unconscious, or upon our intuition. It is now understood that the most fundamental way information or feelings not yet conscious are expressed is through gestures or body movements. The next level of expression for unconscious content is through symbolic behaviour such as mime or drama. Freud demonstrated that slips of the tongue were another way we let our inmost but inhibited feelings show. This explains how knowledge we cannot yet vocalise clearly can be expressed through subtle body movements such as dowsers experience.

 

Within the practice of Subud there is a technique which synthesises all these approaches. It is called ‘testing’. In testing it is accepted that clear and helpful information can be gained by allowing inner-directed movement to arise in response to a question. Members of Subud often use this method to clarify the suitability of a new member to the practice, or to find what may help a sick member. It can be used to explore any question though.

 

Enhancing Your Intuition

Dreams and imagination are a multifaceted way of sensing things. If you consider an early human being, prior to the emergence of complex speech and the ability to think in the abstract symbols we call words, all their thought would most likely have been in images like a waking dream. A human couple in the dawn of our history, standing in wild terrain and seeing dust on the horizon, would need to know very quickly whether the dust was a sign of food to eat or an enemy to run from. Without the tool of thought using words, they would have relied upon their emotional response, and their unconscious scanning of experience and instincts, to aid them. The result would have been experienced as urges to movement and emotion, and as mental imagery. I believe it is because of this long period in our past history, when our ancestors relied on what we might now call intuition – this rapid scanning of information beneath conscious awareness – that we have this latent ability of insight without reasoning.

 

You can reclaim something of these lost abilities through the use of inner-directed movement. The amplification of the intuitive link between your conscious self and your unconscious, occurs because body dowsing – I will refer to it as Inquiring or Inquiry from here on – allows the basic forms of internal communication described above to be operative. Movement, emotions, sound and imagery are all freed to be used as means of expressing unconscious content or intuitive insights.

 

The general use of inner-directed movement opens again the door between your conscious self and your connection with your unconscious through your intuition. Inquiry enables this connection to be used to access the practical and spiritual resources you need. Inquiry works because it relies on the fundamental ways your conscious self receives information from within.

 

Communicating With Your Inner Guide

It is important to connect with the best in you, with the mass of unconscious life experience and intuition you hold within, with the shoreless sea of life of which you are a part. It is not like fortune telling or Ouija boards or a party trick. It is a meeting with the extra stores of wisdom in yourself. But do not think of the information or insight you gain as if it were an oracle, or prophecy. You are the creator of your life. You ask for inner help to gain more insight, more information from which to make wise decisions – not to search for something to hand decisions over to.

 

The possible uses for Inquiry are:

Help to understand life problems.

Unravelling the meaning of a dream.

Information about illness and what might be done to help.

Fresh insights into any research project.

Suggestions for creative ideas about work.

Finding lost objects.

Help in making difficult decisions.

Deeper understanding of a person you are dealing with in your work or in your relationships.

Insight into your spiritual life and growth.

 

At first you may be ‘stiff’ in your response, but even so you will usually get a direct reaction. A more fluid or subtle response – one in which greater detail or insight arises – comes with practise. The following steps are designed to help even the least intuitive of people find greater access to their own wider awareness. If you find your experience of inner-directed movement is very fluid, has full emotional response and leads to insights, these first stages are not necessary.

 

Move on the section on Advanced Options of Extending Your Awareness.

 

First Steps in Extending Your Awareness

            Imagine you are going to communicate with a part of yourself that has an unlimited amount of information and influence to share with you. What this dimension of yourself gives you will be in direct response to what you ask. So the question you ask will be the factor shaping the response. Therefore it is occasionally worth asking what is the right question to get effective help. Remember that all you receive has to pass through your own body, your emotions and your mind. YOU are the instrument that transforms the communication into understandable experience. If your body is full of tensions and drugs there will obviously be interference. If your emotions are taut with anxiety, flooded with disbelief, there will be blockages. If your mind is rigid in its opinions, locked into habits of thought, you will need to practise listening and receiving. Even if you can be ready to drop these for a few moments the channel can clear.

 

One of the basic actions of inner-directed movement is to make your body and psyche more mobile. This mobility gradually produces a greater intuitive link with your unconscious, and thus the collective experience and creative impulse of your life.

 

1 –        Because the basic level of your intuitive sense tends to express itself as body movements and symbols, it brings a quicker response if you use these from the start, and gradually drop them as your ability refines.

 

2 –        Create your ‘space’ and environment as described in the initial practices. Use background music if it helps.

 

3 –        Stand in the middle of your space and do two or three of the warming up movements.

 

4 –        Get into the responsive ‘piano key’ feeling. Now mentally ask the question how your body will give you a ‘no’ signal. Each person has a different way of signalling ‘no’. So your signal may be head shaking, a particular movement of a hand or some other part of your body.

 

5 –        Getting this ‘no’ response is the first step in a growing communication between your conscious self and your unconscious faculties. It is your practise area of having a to and fro ‘conversation’. Try it a few times until you are clear about the signal. If there is any uncertainty ask your unconscious for clarification.

 

Always remember – every part of you is vitally alive and full of intelligence. Your body and mind will respond and communicate if you can listen.

 

6 –        Now ask for the ‘yes’ response. Your body will move and give another movement to signify a positive response.

 

7 –        Although the yes and no response is very basic, it has enormous uses, and many questions you need clarification on can be explored deeply by investigating in this way. All the amazing processes of computers are founded on series of yes and no responses. Investigating a health question for instance, you could ask if your diet was okay in general. If there was a yes response, you could ask if there was a particular aspect of diet that was at fault. Depending on whether there was a yes or no response, you could frame further questions.

 

8 –        When you have practised using this yes and no response, you can enlarge the vocabulary used in the communication. Your unconscious will readily accept or even suggest symbols or symbolic movement. This means you could set up a sort of ‘keyboard’ representing aspects of the question you want to pursue.

 

I watched a very capable and impressive dowser work, and was struck by the excellent system he had for communicating with his unconscious source of information. He found water by allowing a series of movements with his wand, so at that stage the movements and their strength were the symbols he worked with. Once he had found the site however, he tested for depth. He did this by simply calling out a depth and watching the reaction. So he called out “20 feet – 30 feet – 40 feet” until the agreed reaction occurred.

This is rather like the yes/no reaction already dealt with, but it has a difference. The reaction has already been agreed, so he does not have to go through a lot of yes/no questions.

 

9 –        I have found some useful ways of putting this into practise. You can create a visual or imaginary symbolic map on the floor. A very elementary one would be a straight line. If you stood on the straight line stretching to your right and left, behind you could represent the past, and ahead of you the future. Behind you could represent your inner world, in front of you the external world. Your movements in relationship to this line would describe what area of experience – past/future, inner/outer – you were exploring.

 

10 –      Symbolic movements such as turning to face backwards or reaching forwards could equally well be used to represent these same concepts. Or you can ask what body movements represent the various aspects of the question you are exploring. Thus if you were exploring a business question and calling on your innate experience and intuition to look at a problem, you could create a map of the different areas such as manufacture; finance; work force; etc. Or you could ask what movements represented these before you started.

 

Although this may sound clumsy, and it certainly is less streamlined than the more accomplished ways of enhancing insight, it is amazing how much information can be gained in this way with practise. Also, for people who think they completely lack the intuitive faculty, these stages are ways to make accessible what appeared unobtainable.

 

Thoughts about Inner Directed Movement

First there is our personality or awareness. This offers itself and is acted upon – and there is that which acts upon it which men have given uncountable names. These two are really one but are seen as such only later. 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. It was in this last way that I myself came by the mind’s absolute silence, unimaginable to me before I had its actual experience’.

 

After his initial years of meditation, Gopi Krishna came to see that ‘Contrary to the belief which attributes spiritual growth to purely psychic causes, to extreme self denial and renunciation or to an extraordinary degree of religious fervour, I found that a man can rise from the normal to a higher level or consciousness by a continuous biological process as regular as any other activity of the body.’

 

The energies of this higher consciousness in man and woman are a natural process. 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, brings about human consciousness and personality, washes us up onto a seashore from the ocean of Life processes. To grow beyond the point of ordinary everyday awareness, it appears that we must agree to go along with life – must consciously decide that this is what we want – we must co-operate with the process or else be stranded on the shore.

 

Each of us is immersed in a ‘river’ of constant change. If you think about it you have been carried, pushed, impelled by this current as you were moved through babyhood, childhood, teenage and adulthood, and there are more stages of growth beyond adulthood. And as we passed through these changes we died to our old self in order to change to the new. It is the current of Life. This current then carries us on through old age and through the gates of death. All the time we are faced by decisions, and each decision directs us on a different path, helping to create our future. And this is a force of growth and change; and is fought like hell by many as they are afraid of such changes, especially getting old and facing death.

 

How do we do this? First you have to recognise clearly that some process, some force, causes you to exist. You can call this what you wish, it doesn’t matter. It remains what it is. Next recognise that this process that you are, causes changes in your life, and is apparent as growth and maturing. It does this by integrating your life and everyday experience. Next, decide to go along with this process. Offer yourself as you are to it. Let things happen – allow changes to take place. You will be shown the way.

 

This path does not attempt to crush the ego, the appetites, or the instincts. Rather, it hands them over living so that they can be transformed to higher levels of expression and reach towards fuller self-realisation in everyday life. So this opening, this ability to allow things to happen, just during the time of the exercise, is what we are aiming for.

Now you are ready to use one of the most productive of the approaches – the Growing Seed approach.

• Repeat the step of finding a position and feeling of a dried seed. When you find a position and inner feeling that suit you, take the next step by letting yourself explore, with inner directed body movements, postures, and awareness of your feelings, what might happen when you as the seed are planted in warm moist soil and begin to grow. Continue your feeling exploration to find what will occur when you as the seed grow, put out leaves, blossoms and fulfil your cycle. Explore the whole cycle of the seed’s expression. Don’t think about what the growth of the seed means. What you are looking for is that you explore your own feeling sense in regard to the seed’s growth.

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.

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 and end the session.

The following quote from a letter I received gives an idea of the wide range of experience that can arise from this approach. Judith describes her use of this ‘seed’ approach to inner-directed movement as follows:

I am a trainee yoga teacher and have been teaching for three years. I have a small class of fourteen students who are keen and attend regularly. I decided to have my students try the seed approach to see how they would react. I explained it as well as I could, and the feedback I got was as follows – A man in his thirties said, ‘I felt I was in a womb. It was very comfortable, cosy and dark. I wanted to stay there. I didn’t want to come away – it was so peaceful. I have never experienced anything like it before’. He was very impressed.

 

A woman in her thirties felt like throwing her arms around and kicking her legs. ‘I felt I wanted to give birth and was about to deliver’. She didn’t fling herself about but held back. I think it was a pity she didn’t let go. Perhaps I didn’t explain the whole procedure clearly enough for them to understand that it was entirely free movements. The majority acted out being flowers. Only one in the class thought it was a lot of ‘bloody rubbish’, her words. She didn’t even try. She thought she would feel stupid acting out a seed.

 

I was surprised at the outcome, that so much should happen first time. I personally felt as if I became the bud of a crocus. I seemed to be slowly unfolding with difficulty. Not until I fully opened did I feel a great relief. The results of this have made me feel very positive in my outlook, and far happier.

Experiencing your growth as the seed is enjoyable without any concern about what it might do or be beneficial for. Its possibilities are worth understanding though. Judith’s experience of feeling difficulty in opening, and great relief when opened, typifies its action.

 

What this means is made clear by the experience of a man, Graham, whom I worked with personally. He found that while being the seed he had no urge whatsoever to grow. He lay on the ground for the whole period and felt how wonderful it was that he didn’t have to actively express himself.

 

When we talked this over Graham told me he could easily see the connection this had with his life. He said that although he was energetic, and as a male nurse had to deal actively with people all day, he never felt he was really present as himself. As a person he hid behind his role as a nurse and seldom exposed his real feelings to other people. In fact he wondered if he had ever really expressed actively what he felt or believed.

 

Graham then used the seed approach again. This time he felt the urge to grow and emerge from his non-expression. He gradually opened out from a curled up position and slowly moved, with hesitations, to a kneeling position. At that point he stopped. He explained that standing up – being present with his own feelings and potential with other people – was so new to him, that the half way position was as far as he could grow at that time. Nevertheless, it gave him an exultant feeling to be at last, for what he felt as the first time in his life, daring to go into the world as a real human being. He felt sure that in following sessions of the seed approach he would progressively emerge more fully.

 

The seed approach deals specifically with your growth as a person. 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 helpful. But the seed approach goes far beyond that. It is a meditation in growing toward your own potential, and in doing so growing beyond any darkness and pain within you.

 

Birth

Prior to the birth of my third son I had a series of unusual dreams. In the first I stood with my wife in a room. Both of us were afraid as the presence of an invisible being pervaded the place. Then a voice spoke to assure us. “Do not be afraid. I have come to ask you to make love to form a body for me.”

 

The dream deeply impressed me. My wife and I did, after hesitation and concerns about years of responsibility, go ahead. Before we knew if conception had taken place – this was before the days of easy pregnancy testing – I had a dream in which I heard my wife sobbing. I went to find her and discovered that she was pregnant and it was a difficult pregnancy to bear. In a third dream we both knew that it was a son she was carrying.

 

Such dreams are not unusual. Many women dream what gender and what temperament of child they are carrying. Of course many ‘pregnancy’ dreams are about anxieties and other more psychological situations. But dreams such as the above present the idea of a pre-existent being waiting for an appropriate birth situation and body to become involved in. Or the unborn personality directly asks to come into your life through being born to you. Some women have told me that they had such strong experience of meeting their unborn while pregnant, they had already bonded with their child and knew its temperament before their baby was born.

 

Robert van de Castle made a study of the dreams of pregnant women, and found that in many such dreams the mother to be ‘what was happening inside her body. These dreams enabled the woman to see how her baby was developing or if there were complications. Studies made by Carolyn Winget and Frederic Kapp suggested that many dreams about the growing baby were anxiety based, and usefully released fears, making birth easier.

 

Dreams in adulthood that in exploration lead back to birth show that we can remember the deeply engraved feelings experienced prior to and during our birth. Sometimes the theme of birth is presented in the form of meeting a person who was born with some difficulty, or the dream in some way has the theme of birth.

 

Drawn from this ‘colourless’ or timeless self is a particular theme or facet around which the present personality evolves. This personality is confronted by particular life experiences consistent with the theme being worked on. Perhaps the theme is one of persecution or there is some work desired to be done. If so then the present personality is confronted by experiences of that nature. If the present personality touches its own transcendent awareness however, the difficulties or theme of its present lifetime are seen as something only relevant to life in the present physical body. Nevertheless, at times a past personality does appear to return intact as the following example suggests.

 

An Italian couple, Captain and Mrs Battista, had a daughter who was born in Rome. The child was named Blanche. The couple employed a French-speaking Swiss “Nanny” called Marie. Marie taught Blanche to sing a lullaby in French. Blanche loved the song and sang it re­peatedly. Unfortunately Blanche died and Marie returned to Switzer­land. Captain Battista writes: “The cradle song which would have recalled to us only too painful memories of our deceased child, ceased absolutely to be heard in the house … all recollection of it completely escaped our minds.”

 

Three years later Signora Battista, became pregnant again. During the fourth month of her pregnancy she had a waking dream. In it Blanche appeared to her and said clearly, “Mother, I am coming back.” When the child was born it was once more a girl and because of Signora Battista’s insistence she was named Blanche.

 

‘Nine years after the death of the first Blanche, when the second Blanche was six years of age, an extraordinary phenomena happened. I will use Captain Battista’s own words: “While I was with my wife in my study which adjoins our bedroom, we heard, both of us, like a distant echo, the famous cradle song, and the voice came from the bedroom where we had put our little daughter Blanche fast asleep.

 

… We found the child sitting up on the bed and singing with an excellent French accent the cradle song which neither of us had certainly ever taught her. My wife asked her what it was she was singing, and the child, with the utmost promptitude answered that she was singing a French song. “Who taught you this pretty song?” I asked her. “Nobody, I know it out of my own head,” she replied.[i] [ii]

 

Death

In his book Death Dreams, Kenneth Paul Kramer says that, “Our investigation begins with the unconscious because that is the domain in which unadulterated (or as close as possible) expressions of the death-instinct can be seen to interact with awareness.”[iii]

 

In being told thousands of dreams I have seen that the death of someone close to us often presents itself in a dream. A friend’s son woke one morning troubled and told his mother that he was very distressed by a dream about a school friend. In the dream he was with his friend near a door. His friend, a young man, opened the door, beyond which was a beautiful landscape, and went through. When the dreamer tried to follow him he was stopped and could not pass through the door. On arriving at school that day he discovered that his friend had died in a motorbike accident on the way to school.

 

Another person told me that in a dream he was walking with a long-standing friend. They came to a river. The friend crossed the river but the dreamer could not cross and woke very disturbed. He found later that the friend who appeared in the dream had died about the time he had dreamt of the river crossing.

 

Dreams often portray death as a change as in those above. Passing through the door or crossing the river depict a shifting from one place or condition to another. They do not in any way show an ending of the personality, but they do show how the person who is still alive in the body cannot share the change.

 

The many dreams of those who have had a near-death-experience portray death as a time of meeting and digesting your life experience. All that you have done in life is placed against a more inclusive or universal life. These experiences suggest that your personal life is measured against the collective spirit of humankind. It is also quite clearly portrayed that in losing your body you enter into a world akin to dreams. It is a world or condition in which your very thoughts, attitudes and emotional tone become real as an exterior environment. In this condition thoughts and emotions are creative forces to an unimaginable extent. So what sort of world would a person filled with anger or darkness create for themselves? What sort of world would a person who was bubbly and loving create? Here is certainly where the concepts of heaven and hell as distinct places arose.

 

The death state is not shown in dreams – taken as a whole – as something to be afraid of. It is more like an awakening after a long troubling sleep. Or sometimes it is shown as a returning home after being held in a foreign country as in the following example:

 

I dreamt I was dying or dead, and it felt like my own little life had merged into everything and become a part of it. This was blissful and like being at peace and still. In trying to describe this I have to use the image of a great mural painted on a cliff face. The mural has trees and grass, animals and humans. I am one of the humans in the picture and have stepped out of the mural to become three dimensional. Being three dimensional is everyday life. This is life as an individual with all its difficulties, but at death I step back into the mural again. I fade into the background of life again and disappear. This is wonderful. My sense of self recedes and there is a blissful merging with all things. I want to stay there forever. I want to go to sleep into this ocean of blissfulness. I feel that I could stay there for a hundred years, and if I then took a breath I would emerge from the mural again and take up my everyday life just as I left it off, except that events will have moved on. I want to do this – Tom.

 

The face of death is therefore not an unpleasant one when we have looked beyond our fears conjured by the awful images our culture erects. As Tom suggests, meeting death is meeting all of life. It is a time to harvest, to digest all we have gathered. This beautiful description portrays something of this:

 

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). P H Atwater.[iv]

 

This last piece attempts to convey this final meeting with everything and everyone when death stands revealed.

Of a sudden I see the face of Death. I hear its voice. I know it – for we have met often and always. Death has the features of a child I made cry; the profile of my loved woman; your countenance. Have I known you? Then I have known Death. Have I betrayed any? Then I have betrayed Death. And death’s face is beauty for it is all things – naked, undressed of flesh, leafless, exposed, unclad Life – without the garment which our selfhood is – Mathew H.

 

Destiny

At birth you enter a very particular and largely unique set of circumstances. The genes you inherit carry certain tendencies of strength or weakness. You may inherit a particular physical strength or weakness. Also your parents, your time of birth in the history of events, the culture you are born into, along with the social status, financial wealth, education and background of your parents, are all deeply influential factors.

 

The influence of these factors upon the shaping of your personality, and your response to them, create what can be thought of as a personal destiny. That is, you have a tendency toward certain interests and actions or ways of acting. But the word destiny is often defined as an unalterable fate, and dreams depict it more as a destination we move toward. Maybe this is like the compass always moving to point in a certain direction no matter how it is swung about.

 

This links with what was said about birth and the bringing into incarnation of a certain theme or themes to deal with and transcend. But the more one considers the wisdom of dreams, the more it seems that there may be several threads to the possibility of destiny. This is what one dream explorer says about her intuitions when exploring a dream:

 

Suddenly, toward the end of working on my dream, I seemed to leap beyond anything I had ever experienced before. Instead of being someone separated from everybody else living a certain day in time, I was a river that flowed through all time. I had always existed and was involved in all history. As this happened I knew just as clearly as in ordinary life I know my name, that a life had been lived in which the ‘I’ of that person had been persecuted for their religious beliefs. In persecution some of their family had been killed, and as that person I had made a decision to never again to trust groups of people. The decision brought about the desire to live isolated from human group activity. With an amazing heightened vision I could see this influence flowing through all my present life, subtly shaping it. The things I had chosen to do or work at were all connected either as a means of trying to change that decision or as an expression of it – Tracy M.

 

Tracy tells us that her ‘destiny’ arose out of a long past. But it is equally true that your destiny arises from passions and pains etched into you from your present history. You may fight for those who are oppressed because you have been oppressed. You may search for meaning because you were fed lies. The passions that move you are often overlooked in the duties of daily life. Dreams remind you from where your greatest energy and creativity arise.

 

Dr Melvin Morse, a Washington-based pediatrician, studied critically ill children at the University of Wash­ington School of Medicine. He recorded their experiences as they were dying or were resuscitated. He quotes the words of one child who was resuscitated, and says they are typical of what children experience/dream as they near death:

Gosh, something really weird happened to me, and if you promise not to laugh, I’ll tell you. I thought I was floating out of my body, and I saw a light, and there were a lot of good things in that light. One boy said that he was told: “You can come back later, but you have a job to do now.”[v]

 

As they brush with death, adults also have this message of a job to undertake. The task is not usually anything fancy. It is to live ones life and harvest its experience. In this way we are all gardeners in the vineyard.

 

Illness and Misfortune

The unconscious is like an immense storage box that has everything in it. Not only are there wonderfully effective medicines and healing information, but there are toys, tricks, pieces of behaviour no longer used, memorabilia and things other people have left. Sometimes we discover in this box promissory notes that seem very difficult to claim. I mean by this that we may find in our dreams and our unconscious statements that we can be perfectly healthy, perfectly happy, and very wealthy and with wonderful talents. Claiming these promises may be altogether harder than receiving them.

 

Nevertheless, in many years of travelling the unconscious, I do not see it producing lies. What may happen is that we place our own interpretation or hopes on what is experienced. Our dream may be a reflection of our own deep desire that a particular thing may happen rather than a prediction that it will.

 

Transformation of health and of ones inner feelings of pain or despair can happen though. The power of life within us is always there to be tapped. It is like a fountain in which we can bathe and find healing and peace. There is a strange paradox in it however. Ronnie Laing, writing in his poem Bird Of Paradise[vi]says, “The truth I am trying to grasp is the grasp that is trying to grasp it.” Later he adds, “The Life I am trying to grasp is the me that is trying to grasp it. There is really nothing more to say when we come back to that beginning of all beginnings that is nothing at all. Only when you begin to lose that Alpha and Omega do you want to start to talk and to write, and then there is no end to it, words, words, words.”

 

As Laing suggests, part of the paradox is that what we want – we have to be. To get well you have to be well. But how can you be well when you are sick? Your dreams will help in this by putting you in touch with powerful images from or through which the energy of your wholeness can flow into your dis-ease. Sometimes the healing symbol may be in the form of a wonderful circle, a mandala. It may be like a beautiful jewel, a healing fountain, or a radiant love-emanating person. Here is an example. Even though this is not your dream it is nevertheless a healing symbol that you can use, by opening to its centre.

 

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

 

To touch that centre, to be renewed by it, you may need to surrender to it, to let things happen. You need to hold it as an image and drop into the centre with as much trust as you can. By doing so you are opening to the primal essence in you for renewal, for guidance – a guide in the dance. You may be out of step even with yourself. That is your sickness.

 

Alongside the surrender however, you may need a focussed and penetrating intelligence. Few of us are healed miraculously with only faith as our key. The rest of us may need to dig into our unconscious through our dreams to find the steps to help us retrace our way to that centre. These steps are made up usually of events in your life that have led you to make certain decisions, to take particular directions, to hold specific grudges and pains. Undoing these you undo your sickness too. Even if the knives you find embedded in your heart were pressed there by those you loved, discovering them leads to strength. The burdens you have carried have shaped your power and sensitivity.

 

Marriage and Relationship

Gaining information from your dreams is one of the most powerful aids to understanding and improving relationships. But this chapter is about what dreams have to say about relationships, not how to improve them.

 

The philosophy of the unconscious as it shows itself through dreams is that in our essence we are neither male nor female, but a being transcending such polarities. Also we are an integral part of a great ocean of life. There is only separation when you view the world through your physical senses and the concept of your identity, as in the following dream:

 

A small speed boat was at sea. But the sea dissolved anybody who fell in. One man fell in but held himself together as a blob of water and jumped back to the speedboat. I remember the words “The sea is a great solvent.” Anthony.

 

In Anthony’s dream the man and the sea are one and the same. He can come out of it and be an individual, or plunge into it and merge as one with it. This is important when you consider relationships and whether there is such a thing as a soul mate or perfect partner. Does the drop merged in the ocean relate more to one drop than to another? The droplet living as a ‘blob of water’ in time and space, certainly relates more fully to some people than to others – simply from being in closer proximity in one way or another.

 

One of the great principles the unconscious frequently presents in dreams is that we create each other – that we are made up of countless other people. Even your mind is not your own. You do have individual thoughts, but your means of thinking them is ancient and not your own. Language preceded you and will survive your individual life. You were immersed in it at birth and gradually learned it. You certainly never initiated even a few of the words you use or the concepts you hold. So where did they originate from? Even the energy in your body, the oxygen you breathe, the minerals of your bones have been recycled perhaps many times. The sun gave you energy. It was taken up by plants and then absorbed into your body and used. Similarly the ideas you have, your attitudes have almost entirely been passed on to you from others. Who was the first human to punch another in the face? And who was the first to share a portion of their food with another? Observation of a monkey group has shown that the innovation of washing sand out of rice practised by one female monkey was taken up by the whole group and became an accepted practice for further generations.

 

According, to the unconscious, love is a sort of eating of each other, a taking of someone else into yourself.[vii] This love can become so deep that in some way you blend with each other in some degree, just as Anthony’s man blended with the sea. At such a time you learn, or take into yourself, an enormous amount from the loved one. What appears to be telepathy emerges as you know each other so deeply, sharing thoughts and feelings at the same moment. If a loved one dies, there is no real separation because you hold them inside you so fully. The pain is from their physical absence, but much of this may be out of dependence rather than love.

 

With children, if you dare to be parents instead of baby-sitters, the unconscious shows again and again in dreams that from giving yourself to another you gain an immense spiritual reward. The reward is not something you can gain from the exterior world like the desire for money. Giving of yourself is a fundamental part of nature. The sun pours out its energy to you. The earth offers itself as food for living creatures in combination with the sun’s energy. The big-bang itself was perhaps a huge act of self giving through death so that otherness could exist. So in giving you develop a link of sympathy with the heart of life itself. If you have learnt that self-giving you find the doors to the temple of life in the unconscious are open to you. If you have fought for your children through love, then you are kin with the millions of other life forms, whether tigress or sparrow, who give themselves so fully to their offspring. Life knows you and welcomes you to its heart and its secrets.

 

My emotions were ripped open as if I were being burst, or torn apart in my soul. I managed to gasp out between cries that I had been in this place so many times – the Temple of the Animals – but always in the past with a closed heart. I realised as I was opened more and more that it wasn’t my heart that was closed. It was that I had always been too proud. I had been shutting out the common animal. I had killed my sexuality, my common humanity because I wanted to be different. I didn’t want to be like the common herd who had, as I felt, rejected me. I wanted to be above them. But now I felt the most extraordinary love and wisdom as I stood before all the animals – Sandra.

 

Relationship is at the heart of information we gather from the unconscious. Love is the key to relationship, but not what society usually calls love which is often about sex. That is a sort of dependent romantic, perhaps childlike, form of love. The love presented by the unconscious is about the ability to take another being into yourself. It is the strength to give of your being to another as an animal does when we eat it, or when the sperm enters the ovum and the two different worlds totally die to each other to create new life. Out of this sort of relationship the world works. And through this type of relationship you can slowly become more than you were. You gradually gain strength to allow more of life to be felt and known. In the end this widening sympathy is what leads to an experience of the transcendent.

 

Sex

Writing about her experience of frigidity and how she found release from it, Constance Newland says, ‘I would like to emphasise that I achieved this cure for myself. I believe one can achieve psychic health without recourse to therapy. It is only when one fights a consistently losing battle against an important problem one needs help.’[viii]

 

The full flowering of the sexual feelings is a subject of many dreams, as with the following:

 

I looked in the mirror and saw that my face had certain ‘Mongol’ features, especially the lower lip. I realised that I had always had these, but they had remained latent. In the dream I knew that this was Bright’s disease, of which I would surely die. Then it came to me that this had all come about through not having sex, and if I started again the features would go – Rosie.

 

It doesn’t seem to be important in dreams that you have genital sex. What is vital is that you engage in sexual intercourse. The difference is that with genital sex there may be very little ‘intercourse’ or relationship between yourself and your partner. According to dreams, it is the relationship and the blending of different personalities that is the vital centre of sex. The sex drive pushes you toward personal transcendence if only momentarily. The most awful sex confronts you with another person even if you are brutal in that meeting. I am not suggesting such brutality is acceptable, only that the drive makes you confront someone other than yourself. Without it you might never attempt anything other than a superficial relationship. Through sex there is the possibility that you may take in another person’s being and become more.

 

Sex is the most powerful form of transcendence we have. It transcends religion, politics, physical difference, skin colour, age, and culture. You and I extend beyond the narrow boundary of ourselves and dare to want another person, to need, to admit we are not self contained. Clumsy as it may be, lovers want, offer, take and give. Without love, there would only be containment, isolating and isolated. There would be no need to take in what a lover offers, there would be no absorbing and growing from the infinite richness of another being’s difference.

 

The Final Frontier

In her book Dream Power, Ann Faraday writes that from her research stretching over twenty years, she sees that the vast majority of a person’s dreams are about a “reflection of our everyday lives and conflicts.” She goes on to say that as we use such dreams to get more in “touch with ourselves and with the myriad processes that are taking place all the time just below the surface of conscious awareness,” so our growth will “open up other, more mysterious aspects of dream life …”[ix]

 

Some of these ‘other’ and mysterious aspects of dreams have already been mentioned, but it is worth defining certain of the possibilities more fully. They illustrate the immense possibilities of human potential. Although Charles Tart has written extensively about this, some of the most fascinating research was done by Stanislav Grof while observing clients undertaking drug assisted psychotherapy. Along with Jung, Grof noticed that exploring the unconscious in a consistent way not only enabled an individual to overcome personal conflicts and problems, but also revealed a continuity of communication between the conscious and unconscious. It appeared there was a drive from the unconscious to clear unfinished business and conflicts in order to move into areas uncharted by Western psychology. When his clients started experiencing things such as memories of life in the womb, Grof thought they were pure fantasy. But he checked whatever information was given and found to his astonishment that the memories often connected with real events or environments.[x] Prior to these finding Grof had been a conventional psychiatrist working within the limited attitudes of his training. As he checked the experiences of his patients, his direction changed, although at first he was not inclined to share his findings with his professional colleagues. It is difficult to summarise Grof’s findings because they are so extensive, but below is a short list:

 

– Memory of Uterine Life – People who gained these memories were convinced that as a foetus they subjectively experienced all their mother felt. This included attempted abortion, sounds, the mothers distress if she were ill, her emotions of pleasure, anger or hate, sexual arousal, as well as being unwanted or loved. They could feel the effect of alcohol, nicotine or other drugs. For some there was the memory of uterine bliss and union with the mother.

 

– Experiencing Ancestors – Grof said that in some people the experience was of ancestors fairly near in time, such as grandparents or great grandparents. But sometimes they felt as if they broke out of their usual limits of memory and found deep knowledge of ancient ancestors. These regressions were felt to be very much a part of the sub-strata of the person’s present life. I have personally experienced this and what I met gave me an enormously enlarged understanding of my grandfather, my father and my own life tendencies. My recover of ‘memory’ was of several hundred years in the past. It arose from exploring what appeared to be a simple dream.[xi] My sense was that I was not reading my genetic code, but a heritage of behaviour strategies passed on to me unconsciously by my father.

 

– The Racial or Collective Unconscious – This differs from meeting ones ancestors in that it does not bring definite information about how your present personality has grown out of ancestral or parental experience. What you meet is an experience of cultures and historical periods not directly related to you. It is nevertheless an amazing experience, bringing a rich understanding of the lives and destiny of a race, and its gift to the present. Grof reports an example where the person experienced himself as an embalmer in ancient Egypt. From it he was able to “describe the size and quality of the mummy bandages, mate­rials used in fixing the mummy cloth, and the shape and symbol­ism of the four canopic[xii] jars and the corresponding canopic chests”.

– Past Incarnations – The memory of a past life linked with the present is quite common. This has already been mentioned elsewhere. See the sections above on Birth and Destiny. All that needs to be added here is that Grof reports that these memories have the theme of revealing important loves, hates or work that have carried over from the past and need to be worked out or extended in the present life. They reveal the apparent injustices of the present in disabilities or impoverishment as having their roots in the past. Grof’s comment on this is:

Because there is not space to consider all of the many things Grof saw in his thousands of clients, I will list some without comment – Meetings with the dead – Meeting non-human intelligences or god like beings – Being at-one with all life – Experiencing creation – Other universes – Intuitive understanding of cultural or religious symbols – Identification with plants and minerals – Extraordinary healing of sickness – Time travel.

 

NOTES

[i] Paraphrased from The Case for Reincarnation by Dr. Leslie Weatherhead.

[ii] For a fuller examination of the question of rebirth see the book Many Mansions by Gina Cerminara. It is published by Signet Books. ISBN: 0451168178.

[iii] Quoted from Death Dreams by Kenneth Paul Kramer and John Larkin. Published by The Paulist Press. ISBN 0-8091-3349-0 (pbk.)

[iv] Taken from P H Atwater’s ‘Coming Back to Life’ but quoted from an article in Time Out, November 7-14 1990 – Nearly Departed, by Colette Maud.

[v] Dr. Morse’s find­ings have been published in the American Medical Association’s American Journal of Dis­eases of Children and in his book ‘Closer to the Light’. Published by Bantam – ISBN: 0553404490. The quotes appeared in an article in Time Out, November 7-14 1990 – Nearly Departed, by Colette Maud.

[vi] From The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, by R. D. Laing. Published by Penguin Books. ISBN: 357910864

[vii] As for instance in eating the body of Christ in mass.

[viii] Quoted from Myself and Iby Constance Newland. Published by Frederick Muller Ltd, 1963.

[ix] Quoted from Dream Power, by Ann Faraday. Published by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 1972. ISBN: 0 340 10560 7.

[x] See Grof, Stanislav. Realms of the Human Unconscious. Published by Souvenir Press 1979. ISBN: 0 285 64882 9.

[xi] See a fuller description in The Instant Dream Book, by Tony Crisp. Chapter Nine in the section The Dream As Microscope, Telescope And Time Travel. Published by C. W. Daniel Co. Ltd, 1984. ISBN: 85435 125 6.

[xii] An urn used to hold the entrails of the embalmed person.

[xiii] The sum total of past actions and attitudes that act to produce present experience, negative or positive.

 

“The opening of the area of past-incarnation experiences … is sometimes preceded … by instructions received intuitively that introduce the individual to the fact of reincarnation, make him recognise the responsibility for his past deeds, and present the law of karma[xiii] as an important part of the cosmic order that is mandatory for all sentient beings.”

 

So far we have not found a boundary to what is possible in certain states of consciousness. Because these various possibilities have not been well explored, we do not yet know, for instance what it really means to feel you have travelled in time. What do you find if you touch ‘another universe’ for example? Is it a purely subjective and personal experience relating to ones own growth? Or is it in some way an observation of an objective reality? We do not yet know.

 

See Your Guru the Dream – Your Guru the Dream eBook : Crisp, Tony: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store – also Big Bang – http://dreamhawk.com/dream…/archetype-of-the-big-bang/