Posts Tagged ‘brain levels’

Levels of Awareness in Waking and Dreaming

There is an immense amount of obscure writing in connection with words such as spiritual, consciousness, God, and death. However, most of us come back to the fact that everyday life confronts us with the most observable experience of reality that we have. Fortunately, if we carefully examine what we experience every day, much of the mystery surrounding the words mentioned disappears.

If we start with the word consciousness or awareness, we can begin to open the book of our own life experience. Daily we pass through an extraordinary change that we often take so much for granted we miss the wonder of it. The change occurs between sleeping and waking. For most of us being awake is when we most fully feel ourselves. Compared with this sleeping is a period during which we lose any focused awareness of being an individual, and we sink into what is generally called unconsciousness — the lack of personal awareness.

This swing between waking and sleeping can be seen as the extremes within the possibilities of our experience. Sleeping and waking are the polarities, the North and South Poles of what we can confront. In quite a real sense we can say there is nothing beyond what is included in those polarities. For without consciousness there is nothing.

Obviously that is a very general statement and needs further explanation. So to start with let me give you an example. When I was a youth I met a man who quite subtly led me to listen to music in a way that I had never done before. He played a piece of Beethoven and said that some people believed they could hear several themes playing at any one time. He asked me how many I could hear. I listened carefully and thought I could hear three or perhaps four. He then played Beethoven’s pastoral symphony and asked me to tell him when I thought the storm was approaching.

These two exercises helped me to listen to music in a new way and began my appreciation for the classics, something that I had not done previously. It also showed me that things existed that I had not been aware of. The music had been there, and I had heard it before, but I had never known there were several themes playing at once. I had never listened carefully to the music.

I use that example as an analogy of the way we live our life. There is so much of our experience that we do not “listen to carefully” and so do not appreciate its depth or possibilities. There are many aspects of waking life that this applies to, but it is particularly relevant to sleep. This may seem like a strange statement because in sleep we lose awareness, so how can we more fully appreciate it?

Of course, one of the well-known ways of discovering what lies within the obscure depths of sleep is to explore the resources of one’s dreams. When this is done the apparently black depths of sleep begin to reveal an amazing life and energy. Light is taken into the darkness. Things become visible that were hidden. What was unconscious begins to become known. The huge area of our experience that seemed to be a blank gains life and substance. Then the unconscious is recognised as an area as vast and varied as the physical world.

However, it has to be remembered that dreams occur when our core self is almost awake. During sleep the core of our being dips deep into what we call unconsciousness or ‘the unconscious’. Several times during sleep our core rises from those depths almost to the point of waking. At that point we dream. In a dream, deeper levels of our being express in the imagery and sensations of our waking experience. They express in the images and experiences we have gathered through our senses while awake, and are largely culturally programmed. It is only when we break through the dream images and touch the forces those images portray that we begin to move into the unconscious. This is explained more fully in How it Flows and Answer to Critics

The picture on the right graphically illustrates what it is like to break through surface appearances and enter into the formless worlds of experience contained in our unconsciousness.

When this happens we begin to meet the cosmic forces that form our being and the universe.

In this way, the organic, cellular and other ‘life’ processes that are usually unknown and unconscious are met. Focussed consciousness can dive all the way down through all the levels of being and know them.

The Polarities of Existence

I want to bring the word “natural” in here because it is relevant to what is being explained. If we see animals as examples of what is natural, or what happens in nature without human intervention, then we could say that it is not natural to have one’s appendix taken out when it is inflamed. It is not natural to have breast implants. It is not natural to have vaccinations against disease. But these things are all options we are capable of, along with the countless other things that humans do because they are possible. So although animals do not spend time examining their dreams, it is possible for us to do so, and thereby expand our awareness of who we are and what the possibilities of our existence are. Perhaps it was not natural for human beings to travel to the North and South Pole’s, or to journey into space; but by doing so we have enlarged our awareness of the environment and the cosmos in which we live.

There are, of course, other ways in which we can explore the polarities of our experience. Meditation, and the use of certain drugs, enables people to explore areas of experience that do not occur “naturally”. For instance, some forms of meditation enable the practitioner to enter the condition of sleep while maintaining a certain amount of critical awareness, as happens in lucid dreaming. This really is a voyage of exploration, and is different to what happens when a person explores a dream. Exploring a dream brings contents of the unconscious into waking experience. Meditation and lucidity enables a personal dive into levels of awareness that are usually cloaked in unconsciousness. Perhaps this can be likened to the first humans who dived under the sea with a submarine and began to personally witness the immense range and variety of life that exists under the surface. See LSD Hypnosis and Dreams

But it has to be mentioned that the imagery of dreams and lucid fantasy are still almost at the level of waking.

Almost immediately after Albert Hoffman discovered LSD in 1943, it was used for psychological research and psychotherapy. During that period of intense research and therapeutic use, huge areas of the unconscious became available for exploration and mapping. As with meditation, the person’s conscious sense of self could travel in areas that were usually blanketed by the fog of sleep. The human experience behind such obscure words as spirit and God became available to the West for analysis and study – although Eastern explorers had done an excellent job centuries before. The depths and heights of what is usually unconscious within us revealed worlds completely different to what we know during waking life. Those worlds are no less real than the world of our conscious personality. They are in fact a balancing polarity to what we know and experience in our daily life. (1) See: The Mind Bomb.

From the research mentioned it was seen that in waking life we generally have a sense of ourselves as distinct from anybody else. Thus your memories and experiences seem completely separated from those of another person. We refer to this personal and unique set of experiences and responses as, “Me” — or “I”. When the researchers examined the experiences of people exploring their deep unconscious, it was seen that this sense of self gradually diminishes. There are levels of this experience that can be likened to what was said about the polarities of experience. At one end of the polarity is focused self-awareness. At the other end is an ocean of awareness without any focused sense of self. This ocean of consciousness that is at the core of our being is what has been called God in other cultures or Nirvana. In India it has been described as Sat-Chit-Ananda – Being-Consciousness-Bliss. When we discover it as the centre of ourselves it is no longer seen as exterior or distant. But in waking life where we lack awareness of it we see it either as non-existent or as separate and distant. See: Realms of the Human Unconscious by Stanislav Grof.

But many people in the west have an image of God as a sort of great man in the sky; that is because the Catholic church has presented it as such an image, and it has been painted over and over again. But the Christian religion was an outcrop from the Hebrew view of God, which was Ain Soph – the Unknowable God. This was because the creative force was ‘Everything’ and so could not be presented as a thing, such as a man. So, I am supposing the Catholic church purposely changed that. See Criticism – Answers To – Big Bang and God are the Same

One interesting part of this exploration of the depths of human consciousness is that if you go deep enough you arrive back at what we call the external or physical world. The formless and the formed are seen to be different ends of the same thing. The ancient symbol of the snake with its tail in its mouth illustrates this closed system. Quantum physics, digging deep into the world of form, is arriving back to what mystics of all ages have discovered in their inner depths. See Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra

This leads us to an extremely important point – what we are not capable of being personally aware of does not exist for us. In a very real way nothing exists for us unless we can be aware of it in some way. There is nothing outside of consciousness. Or to put it another way, without personal awareness nothing exists for us. Therefore the polarities of our awareness hold the whole cosmos of experience for us. If most of that lies in darkness in our ‘unconscious’ then much of what we hold as a possibility remains unknown. See: The Dancing Wu Li Masters.

The Remarkable Roots of Being

Seen as a circle in which there are polarities of focussed awareness at one end and unfocused sentience at the other, helps us to realise that what occurs when self awareness plumbs the depths of its source – the unconscious – is remarkable. The roots of our being lie in the mysterious depths of subatomic particles. At this very moment you contain in yourself that level of existence. It is also a fact that what you are has emerged from, and is intricately enmeshed in, the universe and its origins. Also, you are what you are because life on this planet emerged and you hold in yourself in your very genes, cells, organs and overall structure, the full history of that emergence. So diving below the level of waking awareness is an entry into the most profoundly amazing discovery of what you are and how you have come into being. There is not space in this short feature to spell that out, but such books as The Holographic Universe and Realms of the Human Unconscious, vastly extend what is being said here.

So, with a little reflection it can be seen that each of us experience these polarities every day. As our sense of self diminishes we become unconscious. In the depths of sleep the self we know in waking does not exist — or at least, it is greatly diminished. But these areas of human experience can be known if we learn to “listen carefully”. This is what some forms of mental and emotional discipline helps us to do.

Anyone who seriously undertakes this voyage into what was previously unconscious meets phenomena that at first seem strange, or sometimes even frightening. Remember that usually we enter this realm of the unconscious in the form of sleep and dreams, and in most cases dreams use our cultural and everyday imagery and experience. So our focused self-awareness is guarded from a direct confrontation with these phenomena. The nearest most of us get to experiencing life under the surface is when we recall a dream. And in fact a dream illustrates this first level of what we meet. See Jesse Watkins Enlightenment

But there are difficulties in meeting our larger self

The human personality – the You that you call yourself, with a name, is only a tiny thing. It is moved and tossed around by all manner of drives, ambitions, emotions, fears, temptations, worries, love and desire with its pains and hopes; it is something we take so seriously and get carried away into awful situations; we take many sorts of pain killers to deal with ourselves. Things such as alcohol, coffee, medical drugs and street drugs, and yet we are still prone to break down, as can be seen by the number of people who need antidepressants or are totally lost in themselves. See Programmed

And a lot of the pain and the mental misery are largely because we put so much trust in what we think and feel. We are totally identified with it. Yet thoughts are simple photocopies of reality and are never the real things. They are just sounds we make into words to help us move around a strange and confusing world. And feelings to are simply a response to what we meet. Do you believe the person you think of is them? It can only ever be your own thoughts and feelings about them.

We are small because we know nothing about who we are and how we came to be – except of course in the words we have been taught are really the truth. We do not know anything about the mass of things that keep is alive – except what we have read, yet more words. We are largely unconscious of what makes our heart beat, and all the millions of things that life behind our existence does, so we are moved by whatever moves us – whatever that is – childhood fears and social programming, or haunted by the past.

Also as we begin to meet the Hugeness that we are we often react to it with fear or panic. So we dream or being attacked by aliens or frightening creatures. If we realise that they are things we have created with fear we will pass on.

We are many things and are unaware of our own complexity

We are probably all acquainted now with looking at the instruments on the dashboard of a car. On such a panel we can see an indication of the speed, of the amount of fuel, and of the temperature of the water cooling system. When we look at any of these gauges we are not of course directly aware of the hot water, of the amount of fuel, or of the engines revolutions. We are only seeing a graphic display of what is taking place in unseen parts of the car.

Our body and mind are far more complex than any car. There is far more that goes on in the hidden places of our being than ever goes on in an engine. But dreams perform the same function as the gauges on the dashboard. They illustrate processes that are going on in the depths of our body and mind — and in fact often in the very deepest places of the unconscious. As with the gauges, we are not directly experiencing the processes displayed in images and drama. What we are witnessing is a process that puts into imagery, into emotions and drama, things that in themselves may be quite formless, that may never previously have come near to verbal definition or conscious conceptualisation. The word imagine has its root in the word image. We literally put into images those things that lie beyond our usual senses in the formless and timeless regions of our being.

So this image making process, this myth forming creative activity of dreaming, forms environments and experiences that seem as convincing as waking life. If we find ourselves in the midst of a dream, or in the midst of this virtual reality without understanding how it works, we may be completely immersed in its apparent reality. I suppose this might be likened to looking at our hand, then looking at it with a microscope, and then with an electron microscope. There are worlds within worlds and you hold them all within you and can be conscious of. See Summing Up – Jesse Watkins Enlightenment

For many people, especially those who have stumbled upon this inner journey without guidance or understanding, or have been “opened” to it through the use of a drug, shock or mental illness, this is as far as they can travel. They become lost in the imagery and the emotions, the conflict and fears, the subtle and enchanting glamour or illusion of this first level. Or they may lose some of their mental balance, haunted by what is revealed or released into consciousness, as often happens to people who frequently take mind expanding drugs without the skills to deal with what they confront. They release these aspects or ‘creatures of the unconscious without having learned the psychotherapeutic tools or personal disciplines and understanding to integrate what they meet. They are then haunted by what emerged.

Many myths throughout the ages have illustrated this part of the journey in various ways. One Arabic myth instructs the traveller to use a sword to cut down whatever appears in front of them, even if it seems to be their mother or father. Perhaps this is a bit harsh, but it does point to the fact that at this level things are not what they may appear. Neither are they complete illusions. They are images and environments portraying something. The aim is to break through the surface level to the source from which they emerge. The point being that if you can destroy or cut through an image you are still not meeting its source. The core self is indestructible. But whenever we dream its images are not like real life. Because a dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen so that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear. So all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind.

The Indian sage Ramakrishna says of his own journey beyond forms, “Tota Puri taught me to detach my mind from all objects and to plunge it into the heart of the Atman (core self). But despite all my efforts, I could not cross the realm of name and form and lead my spirit to the Unconditional state. I had no difficulty in detaching my mind from all objects with the one exception of the too familiar form of the radiant Mother, the essence of pure knowledge, who appeared before me as a living reality. I said to Tota Puri in despair, ‘It is no good, I shall never succeed in lifting my spirit to the “Unconditioned” state and find myself face to face with the Atman.’

He replied severely, ‘What! You say you cannot? You must!’ Looking about him, he found a piece of glass. He took it and stuck the point between my eyes, saying, ‘Concentrate your mind on that point.’ Then I began to meditate with all my might, and as soon as the gracious form of the Divine Mother appeared I used my discrimination as a sword, and I clove Her in two. The last barrier fell and my spirit immediately precipitated itself beyond the plane of the ‘conditional’, and I lost myself in Samadhi (unconditioned bliss).

However, for many people there is an enormous amount to be experienced and used at this level, existing as it does amidst the images of the ‘psychic’ realm, and expressing in a sort of more fluid mirroring of the three dimensions, time and space limited experience we meet through our senses and body. This is the world the psychic works in when they extend their perceptions to ‘communicate with the dead’, tell us about our life situation without us giving clues, and having glimpses of the future.

In attempting to understand these experiences, it must be remembered that beyond the images of a person, of a situation, of voices heard, in the way dreams present things, lies a more formless dimension of experience. It is one where the boundaries of personality and distance, time and space break down. So for many people, it is an easier task to look at this formless dimension through the translating instrument of dream image formation, and see people, places, environments, or hear voices talking to them.

The Guardian of the Threshold

This breaking through into other dimensions of experience, which occurs in successful dream insights, mediation and in some facilitated drug use, takes one to the next level of the unconscious.

In one of the old western traditions in which people were guided to make this journey, the illusionary imagery and environments were called the psychic world, as described above. One was warned that at some point you would meet The Dweller or Guardian of the Threshold. Sometimes this was illustrated as a shadowy and perhaps frightening figure, the sort we often meet in scary dreams. If you could face the Dweller without running away, the realm you enter beyond the Guardian was described as the meeting with all the forces you had perhaps unwittingly released or created in the past. They are the factors or experiences out of which the waking experience of your life has been woven. In the past this was called one’s fate, kismet, or karma. Today we tend to think of it as the many influences carried from genes, birth and early childhood, that shape the way we respond in our daily life; in other words, inherited tendencies, cultural programming and psychological traumas. But the Guardian also represented influences from prior to ones present birth. See Reincarnation

Not only is it a guardian, but also, if you meet it without fear and pass the tests it presents you with, it is also a guide and companion on the journey. If you meet this by actually facing the ‘scary monster’ of a nightmare, a similar thing happens – you meet forces that arise from the past and shape your present personality.

Any deeper exploration of the unconscious shows that it is not simply one’s infancy and its problems that we face. There are influences streaming from the long past through the body that we have inherited. There are the family influences and massive inputs from the culture we were born into, and also other intangible forces playing upon our life. As we cut through the images and drama of the dream creator, we begin to discover and gain insights into this incredible process of creation that forms and guides our life. See The Conjuring Trick

The image of Frankenstein’s creation illustrates the Guardian of the Threshold very clearly. The Guardian, like Frankenstein’s creation, is made of many different people or bodies. We face, in the Guardian, what we have created in our long past; the many personalities assumed, and lives lived, by our core self. See: Archetype of the Shadow.

Light of My Life

This world of the formative, of the archetypes, of the physiological and the cosmic processes — even the intelligences – that are the creative matrix out of which we have arisen, is strange and wonderful. Very often the traveller has to lose a great deal before they can safely explore this realm with awareness. The reason for this is quite simple. Identity, the ego, what one calls self, is an extremely new and vulnerable thing in terms of evolution. It might be likened to the fragile filament in an electric light bulb. When the current is switched on the filament glows brightly, and we can liken this to personal awareness. The current passing through us is the air, water and food that flow through in an almost continuous stream to form our energy. Whether we consider the electric light bulb, or our own sense of self, behind the existence of both, immense activities take place making them possible. The light bulb needs a great deal of cable, switching gear, and some sort of generator. Our personal existence needs a great deal more. The whole universe lies behind the ‘light’ of our self awareness. Without the cosmos we do not exist. Without the sun and the earth we do not exist. Without the bacteria and processes of plant and animal life on our planet we do not exist. Without other human beings who have taught us language and perform the constant background and foreground to our life, we do not exist.

However, this fragile thing we call self often builds powerful defences or boundaries to protect it from knowing its dependence upon the forces forming it. These defences often show themselves in rigid beliefs, in a fog of ignorance, in emotional outbursts against anything that might be felt to threaten, and also of course in the many ways in which we use drugs such as alcohol, medications and nicotine to deaden our sense perceptions of what is taking place around and within us. We do this because our ego is fragile and vulnerable. We may also do it because the journey into the unconscious diminishes the sense of self, and this can be threatening. It can be felt as a form of death, or an experience of breaking open. The boundaries that were so necessary at a certain stage of our growth fall away. The journey into that more inclusive polarity of our being is actually a form of growth, of greater maturity, of a meeting with something more permanent than the fragile ego.

Another way of looking at the business of defences against a widening awareness of oneself is to see all of it as a process of growth. Perhaps we cannot let go of our defended relationship with our identity while we still feel vulnerable or insecure. Perhaps the change comes about naturally once we feel confident enough to let down our defences.

If you have managed to enter this level of experience for any length of time you will be confronted by an enormous paradox. This is, in essence, no different to the paradox we face every day in experiencing focused individual identity, and the loss of that identity in sleep. What we meet when we pass beyond the dream stage in which everything is represented as images external to us, is a vast ocean of mind or consciousness in which all that has lived exists. It exists as an unseparated part of the ocean of awareness — yet at the same time it can manifest independently and as a separate identity. This applies to oneself also. You sense yourself as having no real separate existence from what lives and knows itself in all things. Yet at the same time you experience your own separated identity. This is a difficult paradox, and human language tends to express things as either this, or that. Things cannot be both things at once. But in this journey to one’s own centre such separation is transcended. You experience a sense of things that transcend the limitations of time and space. Things can be here and there at the same time.

The old Newtonian physics has never included mind or consciousness in its equations. As the atom was the fundamental particle, and the atom was a physical object, it was seen that there could be nothing beyond the body, its molecules and atoms. Therefore personal awareness was a trick played by the play of chemicals, and organs in the body. As for consciousness surviving death, it was seen as a childish superstition created by weak minds to deal with fear of death.

But the new physics, quantum physics, has since its earliest days included mind and consciousness in its concepts. It has had to because from the earliest days of quantum experiments two unimaginable phenomena were unveiled. Irish physicist John Stewart Bell put forward a quantum theorem that has revolutionised the way reality is considered. In brief, the theorem states that when two sub-microscopic particles are split and moved to a distance from each other, the action on, or of, particle ‘A’, is instantaneously reproduced with particle ‘B’. This interaction does not rely on any known link or communication and is considered to stand above normal physical laws of nature, as it is faster than light.

Faster Than Light

Prior to such findings it was thought nothing could transcend the speed of light. Nick Herbert, in an interview published in High Frontiers writes, ‘THERE ARE LOTS OF THINGS that are being kept from the public as far as the subjects of physics and consciousness are concerned. Bell’s Theorem was proved in 1964, and it is still not taught in physics classes, and you don’t hear it on your science news programs. A theorem is a proof, and no one has found a flaw in this theorem. It’s such a simple proof that a high school kid can understand it. So physicists can understand it. They have various ways of trying to ignore it, but it can’t be refuted because it’s so simple.’

The second finding that transformed our understanding of life and the universe is that an electron can be either a particle or a wave like energy. The change occurs when a human observes it. If we do not observe it an electron remains as an energy form. If we observe it a transformation occurs and it changes into a particle. This locks human consciousness into the very fundamental workings of the deepest levels of our body and the universe. In fact quantum physicists have said we are co-creators because consciousness alters ‘reality’.

To quote Gary Zukav, ‘Quantum mechanics is THE theory. It has explained everything from subatomic particles to transistors to stellar energy. It has never failed. It has no competition.’ The implications of the theorem are enormous. Something can be in two places at once. Apparently distant objects, or people, are intricately linked in an immediate way. There is no separate existence as we previously thought. Our view of the world is not one supported by the facts of physics. Time and space are transcended. David Bohm, an eminent physicist, goes as far as to say that all things in our observable universe are inextricable linked. Nothing has separate existence. Also we all have infinite potential

When we personally meet this level of experience, when we transcend our awareness of separateness, the experiences we have gathered through our everyday life are gradually transformed. They shift, wherever possible, into concepts or insights that approach the universal or timeless and unchanging. Just as our physical body is formed by the continuous partaking of food water and air, so a more permanent body or identity is formed by the transformation of sensory experience into a body or identity that has connections with the unchanging and eternal. Buddhism calls this the diamond body, the imperishable self.

We can glimpse the meaning and possibility of this by once more looking into everyday life. At some point in human history an individual must have realised how to count. This realisation could be passed on to other people. They in turn developed it until we have the incredibly subtle knowledge of mathematics available today. This knowledge, the concepts of mathematics, preceded your own personal existence. It will also survive your own physical demise. In this sense it has a subtle life of its own, transcending the individual lives of those who first realised it, and also those of us who now learn it and perhaps develop it further.

As one meets the deeper levels of the unconscious a similar experience of self emerges. The identity we know is seen to be something that has emerged from countless lives lived in the past, the essence of which has given us shape and form. This is precisely the same as we meet in language. The language we take for granted is the result of thousands of years in which individuals, cultures and groups contributed their concepts, passions and wisdom to form new words. The words we use are living connections with the past, and if we investigate them unfold their history. Similarly, as we meet the deeper levels of self we find our own personal connections with the past. The difference is that the connections we meet in the deeper levels of self are living and profoundly felt.

In confronting this awareness of what contributes to our individual existence we cannot help but be transformed in some measure. The limited viewpoint of life we had drops away. A more inclusive and deeply centred viewpoint arises. In some manner you also meet with the realisation that all that has ever lived, and all and everybody that exists today, is alive at the core of your being. (See Creativity – Doorway to the Wonderful Fire).

This incredible background to personal life is so vast and inclusive, and holds so many wonders, that when we meet it, it becomes apparent that this is what many people have called God. It presents another of the paradoxes we find in this experience beyond opposites. It is both impersonal and yet we can have a personal relationship with it, experiencing direct communication. It is this real life beyond the limitations of our sensory experience and limited waking self, which is indicated by the word spiritual or spirit.

However, this is not the fundamental level of being. The causeless cause, the self-existent centre of us, when we find it, is seen to be one and the same as the origin of the physical universe.

In brief, our present theory of the emergence of the cosmos is that there existed what has been called a Singularity. From this emerged what is known as the Big Bang. One commentator describes our understanding of this as follows:

Because scientists cannot look back in time beyond that early epoch, the actual big bang is hidden from them. There is no way at present to detect the origin of the universe. Further, the big bang theory does not explain what existed before the big bang. Time and space began at the big bang, so that it makes no sense to discuss what happened “before” the big bang from a consciousness locked in a sense of time and space. (2)

As is suggested, it is understood that time and space was actually created during the Big Bang. So what existed prior to the big Bang is known to be beyond our concepts of time and space. Because of this we cannot even think about it because our concepts are all formed around our experience of time, space and individual existence. This is exactly what we meet when we touch that indefinable core of our being. It is impossible to reason about this experience or in any way to describe it. One translation of the Tao Te Ching, an ancient Chinese classic about the foundation of existence, says that ‘The Tao that can be named is not the Tao.’

Who am I?

One of the main constituents of what we call ‘me’ or myself, is identification. Although our sense of self seems so concrete and definite, if we turn attention back on it the creature we call self is a very slippery customer to get hold of. What does seem obvious as we make the journey to our core self, is that the body sensations, the thoughts, the emotions felt, and the image we have of ourselves, are identified with so deeply, that most people take them to be who they are. They believe their body is who they are; or their thoughts are what constitutes their real being, or their emotions or sexual experience are what they identify with. However, one can lose limbs, or even be paralysed and still have a sense of self. You can be sterilised and so lose your sexual self -and yet you still exist. And if you gradually ‘undress’ yourself of all these things – imaginatively take away hearing, remove visual impression and body sensations – you still have a sense of self without them. Dreams make this very clear. Without the senses being active, without sight, without body sensations, you still dream and have a sense of existing. Usually though, even in dreams you clothe yourself in the usual trapping of the three dimensional body life of waking awareness.

When we approach our core awareness it is like undressing. We lose body awareness if we do it while asleep. We pass through the realm of thought governed by language – so we lose thoughts. We lose all the things consciousness ‘clothes’ itself in while awake – yet we still exist. It is a very different form of existence, beyond the limitations of the body, and even time and space, but we still exist as an incredible creature alive in a world with almost no boundaries. We are godlike. In fact it seems to many when they experience this, that they are meeting God – in fact they are God.

This Core experience is often described as enlightenment. It can also be described as naked awareness. This is because what we usually know of self has become “undressed”. What that means is that what we usually call self has dropped away.

This dropping away of self is what had been called ‘enlightenment’. However, there is enormous confusion about this, as what some people who have touched it say is that you are left with no self. They say this sometimes almost like a threat – “Go there and you will lose everything. You will no longer exist.”

I see this as an incomplete process of meeting and integrating the polarity of the Core. Certainly the self that we believed we were from our sense impressions and our almost total identification with our body, thoughts, emotions and sexual feelings drops away. But what such statements fail to tell is that the Core is EVERYTHING. An unimaginable amount is added, and in the end nothing is taken away. You still have your body sensations, you can still make love with even more wonder, you have your thoughts, your emotions, you can still love and laugh and carry on with life – you simply do not identify with them as fully as you did. The concepts and sense of self arising from them is seen as limiting.

Also, one great fact that is almost never mentioned, is that the formless and the formed are not separate. They co-exist at the same time. To gain one is not to lose the other. It is part of that huge paradox that is life.

Beyond Time and Space

This opening to naked awareness, can, when healthy and adjusted to, be recognised as an expanded awareness, an unconditional love, and a deep understanding and compassion for the human condition. The limitations of time and space have fallen away to some extent.

So the past, present and future are all here and now. In terms of waking awareness, this means the person will often know something of the future, and of the past – the far past. The boundaries between themselves and other people have also to some extent fallen away, so they frequently know very much what is going on in another person’s mind and feelings. (Witness the life of Swedenborg and Edgar Cayce).

When this transcendence of time and space, and its boundaries, are very marked in the person, they express extraordinary genius and great creativity. They often demonstrate a multitude of abilities, as for instance seen in somebody like Rudolph Steiner. Whoever the author of the Shakespeare plays was, the enormous insight into human nature and the wonderful creativity, suggest he had transcended the usual boundaries of self. Wouldn’t you know a great deal more, express a great deal more, if you had transcended the boundaries of time and space, knowing as you would your core self – a self that is at the same time the core of the universe?

Of course there are all stages in between normal waking awareness bounded by the body and sense impressions, and the boundless self of naked awareness. It is a new and emerging possibility for our race, and many people only reach it either in a maladjusted form, or in small degree in a sort of psychism.

To achieve it reasonably fully in waking awareness does not make a mystic or peculiar human of you. Self awareness is fairly new to the human species. Being self awareness has an enormous range of ways it is expressed – from criminal to genius. This is also true of achieving the Core experience. Touching your core does not make of you an all wise guru. The experience is new and unstable in our species as yet. But if you achieve it you are no less human than someone who has achieved self awareness. Maurice Bucke, in his major work Cosmic Consciousness, spelt all this out in 1863.

In meeting this core however, there is something we do know. We know that everything has emerged from that Core, and all will fall back into it. The changing changes and passes away – the changeless remains pouring forth change.

(1) See LSD Psychotherapy by W. D. Caldwell: The Tao of Physics, by Fritjof Capra; Myself and I. by Constance Newland; Realms of the Human Unconscious By Stanislav Grof; and LSD – The Problem Solving Psychedelic by P. G. Stafford and B. H. Golightly.

Conditioned & Unconditioined Reflexes or Responses

As humans we are all conditioned by our parental and cultural influences. Even our education is a form of conditioning. See Programmed

But at times human or animal programming is put in place either by forced training or by suggestion using our fears, hopes etc. Fear of death, of not caring for loved ones, is massively used in advertising and political propaganda. Often we see such things as natural feelings. So what is the difference between unconditioned and conditioned programming?

It is difficult to decide, but our basic unconditioned urges are the urge to survive, to eat, sleep, find a sexual partner and have intercourse, to care and be cared for, to defend our selves and family, self assertion, also growth is an instinctive urge. But each of these is open to so much pressure from pain, from emotions, from social pressure, from child hood trauma, by the images we are presented about getting rich, getting power, getting sex, avoiding danger, that it is a very difficult area to really understand.

Although we are used to thinking of animals showing conditioned reflexes, as with Pavlovian training, we seldom realise what a large part they play in human life. This is obvious in the problems we would face in going against social conditioning. When we move against an implicit social conditioning, we feel the pressure or pain of that – whether it is sexual, clothing, or whatever it is. If we go against such conditioning we may discover the underlying feelings and forces that have created the conditioning in the first place. Dreams often reveal to us what our conditioning is, and how it was imprinted.

Human beings in general are still largely moved by the old reptilian and mammalian urges, pushed into war, conflict and murder, territorialism and old mating patterns in ways that are far from rational – these are unconditioned responses. Most of us are urged to action by factors that are still completely or largely unconscious, arising as they do from levels of our being we know little of.

Because we have moved far away from being natural animals and have existed as humans for ages, we cannot and should not try to rid ourselves of our human programming. What we can do is to attempt to become more whole by integrating our animal selves we still carry in us, and attempt to remain in contact with our core self. See Touching Your Core; Brain Levels and Dreams

Sometimes it might be we have problems about living, and suffer the civilised ills of neurosis, depression, sexual or eating problems or identity difficulties. See the link at the end of this feature.

Two examples of this follow.

Example: When I left my first wife and was living with my present wife, we shared a lovely country cottage in a small hamlet. Although beautiful, the few months I lived there were an emotional hell because I was away from my children, and because of the pain of the divorce. My second wife and I then moved to be nearer my children. We had left some beehives at the previous cottage however, and so six months later we started driving back to collect them. On the way I started experiencing severe stomach pains. The suddenness of this, and the fact I couldn’t think of any physical cause for the pain made me investigate my feelings. As soon as I did this it was obvious that a part of my nature which was usually unconscious, was just like my dog, responding in a conditioned reflexive way. The cottage was a place of torment – why were we going back? More to the point, how could it stop me going back? How could it deter me from facing that pain again? As soon as I explained that we were not staying there and the painful situations no longer existed the pain went and never came back.

An important point here that needs to be emphasised is that the unconscious is not a mechanical thing but is a part of our own living mind and consciousness, and is responsive. As shown by the example above our instincts, the animal we are and meet in dream and in the unconscious can respond by being talked to – just as a animal does that trusts us. So when you suffer panic attacks and sudden unexplained pains you can talk to your animal/instincts and it can often help.

As an example of this, some years ago I was taking a large and friendly Alsatian dog belonging to a friend for a walk. We had been playing with a stick and the dog, Sultan, was still carrying the stick in his mouth. Suddenly Sultan saw a black Labrador dog in a nearby truck. He immediately went into a frenzy of rage. I had him held tightly on a lead, so he couldn’t attack the dog, but the stick in his mouth was shredded.

This would again seem like an irrational response if we didn’t know that Sultan had been attacked by a black Labrador when he was a pup. Mike’s response was just the same as Sultan’s. We need to remember that we are all animals, and we still carry the ‘R’ brain. We can however, mitigate such responses by understanding their origins and releasing or reprogramming the conditioned response.

A man exploring his dream world wrote:

Here I experienced what I suppose are the sort of nightmare images along with feelings of fear. A nightmare scenario. But as I meet them I recognise that they are simple and see them as projections of images arising from fears that we frighten ourselves with. There is a mechanism in us to project such images to keep us away from whatever may have been the source. This is exactly a Pavlovian conditioned reflex. The original experience produced pain or fear. The original experience also had some physical characteristics in terms of objects, places, and perhaps people. Any of those characteristics when met again can trigger a Pavlovian response. Psychologically the response is to say in huge letters, “Keep Away”. This is a natural and instinctive way of helping us to survive. Unfortunately it means that many people constantly avoid the source of their original conditioning and so cannot reprogram it.

The conditioning not only keeps one away from the people, places, and situations that were the original cause, but it also keeps one out of one’s own resources. And such conditioning stands in the way of former relationships, former self-expression and creativity.

So as I look at this nightmare scenario – these nightmare images – I recognise them for what they are and pass through them, seeing, as it were, the projectors that produce the images. I can see that the images project from some of my most profound childhood terrors. They can cause an eruption of all those old feelings about such things as my torture, abandonment, sex. And I look into these images to see what lies behind the outer form, and I see clearly my childhood fears that I am gradually meeting and integrating.

Now I have reached a point where I am trying to summarise where all this leaves me or leads me.

Well, it leaves me with a multitude of other questions. I laugh here because this is such a Me trick, to end with more questions than I began with. But let me see if I can summarise. What have I learned?

Well, it all goes on, and on, and on. There is never a final end to anything. I laugh because that is the reality that we live in. That is a part of the plan. You think you have reached your goal and that the journey has ended, and it hasn’t. A whole new area opens up – hopefully to your delight. A door opens, a door closes, another antagonist comes into the arena. Dear God, it is never ending.

So dealing with the habits that arise from conditioned reflexes is largely recognising what they are, and in doing so go through the awful images guarding them. See Life’s Little Secrets

Lumpkin – The Baby Who Became Tony

I existed long before my conception and birth. What was new was this particular body conceived by a young country girl, fathered by the son of an Italian immigrant to England, and born in Amersham just before the Second World War. It was a completely new configuration.

There are memories of being in the womb, feeling like the yolk of an egg. My genitals were the pulsing centre of that yolk, and they pulsed with gentle pleasure in time with my tiny heart. There was no sense yet of being a person, but there was an integrity that gave a feeling of being something different to other things in my awareness. And there was sense of love. It came to me in waves as the beating of my small heart roused pleasure in the centre of me, pleasure raised high as my mother’s heart and mine beat together while the two rhythms crossed.

Birth is seldom ever completely commonplace to its witnesses, and certainly not to the baby being born. Sometimes we have the strangely naïve attitude that this is a new being who has entered the world. But what is there new in nature? Can we say, if we plant an acorn, that the oak tree growing is new? Well, yes. The body and leaves of the tree will be unique. But millions of years in the lives of other trees are involved in the growth of this particular oak. It cannot, it hasn’t, simply emerged from itself, for each of us have a history of our beginnings started from the single cells from which all started. What an incredible journey we have all been on!!!

Whatever way we explain birth, the baby carries with it the influences of an immense number of men and women who lived, struggled, loved, in the past.

I have memories of my birth. Not as pictures in my mind, like old photographs. I remember through the pain in my guts, and through my feeling response to some situations. I remember because the experience of that birth sometimes wells up like a great tide overwhelming my normal, everyday, self.

My tiny body was born two months early, apparently dead. I was told the doctor threw my body to one side, saying, “Forget the baby. We need to look after the mother.” The doctor’s words were not flung out casually. I was born in the thirties, prior to intensive care units for premature babies – prior to antibiotics. Each of us is a witness to our times. We all exist within a huge web of influences and understandings, and if I try to grasp the view from which the doctor’s words arose, there is sense in what he implied. If we have children and say to one of them as he or she goes out the door, “Be careful”, we don’t need to mention all the things in today’s world that one needs to be careful of. If the child is old enough to manage the streets alone, they can already fill in most of the details about dangers they should avoid, such as drug pushers, muggers, child molesters, and other violent children. So the doctor was saying to my mother, “Within this present social and medical situation your baby has little chance of survival. If it does survive it will be weak. Let this one die and have another one.”

It wasn’t an auspicious beginning, but my grandmother carried off the limp body and managed to provoke breathing.

I have a sense — I cannot call it a clear memory — that in reviving me, my grandmother baptised me in case I died. She blessed me with her love, and marked a cross on my forehead in oil and water. That mark has remained in my being indelibly, having been given with true love. It has opened connections to me with mysteries I might otherwise not have known.

It wasn’t just my body that was impressed with the experience of birth. There are levels of awareness in us right from conception, along with the learning of responses to what is confronted. Not only does the unborn body mature in readiness for birth, so does the awareness, the receptive sentience.

In my 40s, when I traced back troublesome reactions to everyday life events, I discovered memories of the period just after birth. I found the experience of being a tiny vulnerable creature, and as that creature I was very definitely reacting to a feeling of awful exposure, even though I didn’t know myself as Tony.

Remember that in the womb my small being did not need to breathe. Food did not have to be taken in and digested. There was a stable temperature, so no exposure to temperature shifts. My nervous system was geared to survive, and in some way respond to stimuli. There was no assault of powerful and unknown sounds in the womb – sounds such as birdsong, dogs barking, house sounds. Also, in the womb one is buffered against bacterial and viral attack.

A baby is aware of all these in its own way. It has a functioning brain and nervous system that is already learning — not in words, but certainly feeling responses.

What I recall from that early period after birth — recall and put into words by my adult self — is of being afraid I could not survive in this new environment. At the time of my birth there were no intensive care units to plug my tiny body into a drip feed or oxygen tent, or an incubator to keep me warm. Neither were there antibiotics to help fight the deadly diseases so many infants and children of the time were laid low by. At that time premature babies were very likely to die.

So I couldn’t breathe easily. I couldn’t digest easily, and I was deeply anxious about the strange sounds around me. A tremendous feeling response took place in my tiny self. As an adult we would call this a decision. But in my infant self it had nothing to do with thinking or analysing. It was a total feeling and fear response. It was a rejection of life. A turning away from scrambling, struggling, for survival. I didn’t want to be in the world. I wanted to remain in the egg!

The effect this had on my adult behaviour was that I never developed the ambition to “get somewhere in life.” Just existing felt like an enormous struggle, an exhausting struggle. I turned away from opportunities because they needed involvement and participation. I didn’t want to be involved, and often had to crash out of social activities, as I did not have the coping mechanisms to engage in ordinary social events.

There was also, in my budding awareness, a sense of death. Even though my body was ill prepared for life outside the womb, it still functioned strongly enough to stand between me and death. But death felt very close. I needed to be back in the womb, kept warm, protected and given a chance to grow undisturbed. Second-best would have been to be held skin to skin against my mother’s body and breast, a sort of constant drip-feed in a warm environment. Unfortunately that did not happen. She was a working mother dashing back from work to breast feed me.

I gather from these memories, and the feelings accompanying them, that my mother, being young and inexperienced — I was her first and only child — was frightened by my fragility. All her sisters had produced heavy full-term babies. So she may even have felt lacking in some way. And I felt something of this anxiety. My own struggle, and feelings that death was sniffing around me like a waiting hyena, were not held at bay by my mother’s anxiety. As the little budding me existed beyond any sense of time there was no knowledge that things could change, only a feeling of impending doom.

Then a truly life changing event occurred. I have no awareness at all of its place in the sequence of things. But picture if you can this vulnerable and helpless creature, this spark of life and awareness not ready to deal with independent life, retreating from it, yet not wanting to die. And my spark of awareness, my forming sense of myself, is afraid, and feels alone in this fear, alone in the dark, with death as a predator sniffing around. Then suddenly I am picked up and held in arms that are strong; held by a being of love who is not afraid of death, and communicates love and courage to me. Communicates so profoundly that I feel I am in the arms of a higher being, a being who has lifted me out of darkness and fear, and has driven away skulking death itself. So I cry out to this being with the only passionate sound I can make, the panting, weeping of an infant. But if there had been the gift of words I would have been looking into the eyes of this being, crying out, “I love you! I love you! I am bonding with you! I am connecting with you forever!”

When I remembered this, when I re-experienced the moment as an adult, I too bawled like a baby, and felt the exquisite love and strength, the relief from darkness, of those moments. In fact I still weep as I write these words, for that experience was so profound.

That was my second, and most deeply felt experience of love. It was also the first, and perhaps most fundamental, experience of religious awe. It stands as some sort of nucleus in the development of myself as an adult personality. It is a touchstone against which is tested any meeting I have with love. Also, when I first re-experienced this event it was accompanied by a revelation, a certainty, that this was the resurrection.

The wonderfully loving higher being who had the power to lift me beyond the reach of death, was of course my grandmother. She was the mother of 13, some of whom had not survived. My mother was the youngest, born on the eve of the Great War. My grandmother did not have long to live herself, but I think had developed that serenity, not of the mind, for I doubt she was a thinking person, but of the heart, that comes with deep acceptance. I also have a feeling out of these experiences, that she was the heir to the wisdom gathered by a long line of women who were her ancestors. I don’t see this wisdom passed on verbally, because I doubt it was ever put into words. It was passed from eyes to eyes, from heart to heart. It was passed in the passionate responses to hard times and loss and love. And I feel my grandmother baptised me in the essence of it, and I am blessed for all time.

My Grandmother

I have wondered a great deal about what was meant by the resurrection. I know it has to do with love. I feel people apply the term to Christ because the Christ being represents, or is a symbol of, a form of love we sense in ourselves occasionally, and sometimes see in other people. It is the type of love that in its weakest form is seen in the love of parents for their children. It shows itself as the giving that enables a mother to almost totally devote herself to the needs of the helpless and completely demanding life of her baby. It is the ability some fathers have to toil year after year to feed and provide for their children.

But that is its weakest form. That love is often partly instinctive, built into us if we are healthy. Its most profound form is seen in those who reach beyond their love for their children and family, and extend it in depth, not just in duty or to be seen to do good, to people who are not their kin, and from whom no financial, sexual or social advantage is expected.

I sense the resurrection as a form of love that transcends the boundaries of kin, and is not afraid of death or risking of one’s own life for the need of another. In essence, this is the story Christianity tells. Although I am personally uncertain about the existence of an historical Jesus, I can see that as humans, we collectively sense there is a profound wonder in such self-sacrificing love. In sensing this we have created a deeply perceptive mythology around it. The mythology tells us that even if we can allow a little of such love into our life, it will give us entrance into becoming aware of an essence — the spirit — that pervades all existence, and to the survival of bodily death.

To some extent I have to acknowledge that by getting my newborn body to start breathing, my grandmother did raise me from the dead. So my unconscious mind has powerful material around which to create its own personal mythology. But the love I experienced I sense as a force beyond that, and has to be acknowledged too.

In our collective myth of Christ we have created, or witnessed, a being who extends love to all living things, and offers a life beyond death in its existence – the mystical body of Christ. Just as my grandmother lifted me from darkness and death, so Christ is said to lift humankind.

My grandmother took over my care soon after I was born. My mother told me that I slept in the same bed as she did, but one morning she woke and couldn’t find me. She panicked, and then discovered I had slipped out the side of the bed, and was as cold as stone. From that point on my grandmother took charge, which probably did nothing for my mother’s confidence.

I have not recovered memories of this period, but from looking at photographs, I grew from a tiny shrunken little creature into a happy and sometimes radiant looking child with blond hair. Things soon changed though. My grandmother died of a stroke before I was two. So suddenly the great love in my life was gone.

This was such a major event in my life that it left massive residues in strata of my psyche. The petrified remains of that event were only uncovered slowly, plunging again and again into the depths to find the heartbreaking remains of that lost love.

From my teens, through to the time of uncovering these buried feelings connected with my grandmother, I had an almost compulsive religious drive. This was never something leading me to attend church or listen to sermons, or study the Bible. It was a direct need to find God as a personal experience. I wanted to communicate, to meet, and to have a direct confrontation.

Understanding of this drive dawned slowly as I developed the skills of mental archaeology, and learned to carefully brush away the debris of years. My first discovery in this old burial mound was anger. I was angry with God – violently angry. Only slowly were the roots of that anger uncovered.

My grandmother died after a second stroke. As a young child I had no foreknowledge of this, so it was a terrible shock suddenly to no longer be able to find her. Literally she was no longer there. I didn’t even see her dead body, and I feel that was a great mistake on the part of my family. Seeing her corpse would have given me a tangible experience of her death. Lacking that experience she had simply disappeared mysteriously. I was left to seek an answer to this, and when I asked where she had gone was told that my grandmother had gone back to God.

When that one sentence was lifted out of the darkness of years, along with the emotions buried with it, the anger and the compulsive religious search were understood. I was angry with God for taking away the person I loved. I was searching for God because, according to what I had been told, in finding God I would find my grandmother.

It’s crazy how the mind and emotions work, but logical too. As a child I didn’t have the equipment to question the information I had been given. So it was buried intact, still channelling the energy of my drives and emotions until I managed to uncover it and re-evaluate it against a much wider database of experience and information.

Isn’t love a strange and terrible thing to keep a child held to its determined search through the long years into adulthood? Some ghost, some spirit of that small boy that I was, remained waiting in a corner of myself. Waiting and hoping for the return of his beloved grandmother. Waiting and bearing the weight of that waiting each day, gradually becoming walled up in a dungeon of debris dropped by the passing years.

The vulnerable and beautiful spirit of that child, buried in the shadows of myself, was the hidden artist behind much of the beauty and tragedy in the love story of my life. It became known to me in a dream as Lumpkin.

That’s how I waited out the years with my mother. Because I had been so close to my grandmother, in some ways my mother was a stranger. Living with her left the love child in me constantly waiting to go home. There was a feeling in me that if I could wait through this day, maybe today, or the next day, I could go home. If not today, maybe tomorrow I could be with my grandmother!

That feeling of desperate waiting, of feeling I was never “at home”, of constantly wondering where home was, lasted most of my life. A dream I experienced in Italy in 2000 shows the depth and dilemma of this. In the dream I was driving home along a country road. Ahead of me the road forked and I took the right-hand fork. I drove a little further and arrived home. It was a lovely house in its own grounds. My wife and children were happy to see me and came to greet me warmly. But something was wrong. I had no sense that these people were my family. This was not my home, and I hurried away, back to the fork in the road. There I took the left fork. Again I arrived home – another lovely house, another wife and children who warmly greeted me as husband and father. But there was still no feeling in me that I was home. Again I must go to look for where I belonged.

That dream sums up the feelings that haunted me most of my life, and the split shown by the forked road. As with the religious drive, the feeling arose because of my desire to be once more with my grandmother. After all, it was a desire etched into me over many years. Strangely enough, at the time this memory really surfaced, I was living with a friend, being homeless at the time. On the very day it came to light my friend told me I would have to find somewhere else to live. It was so strange it was almost comical.

Therefore, before ever I had any real sense of time or identity, those early experiences set patterns in me that have influenced the rest of my life. My prematurity, with its consequences of unreadiness for an outgoing life that would grasp the world and its opportunities, left a yearning, and I think an open door, to enter into the mysterious in the worlds of the mind and spirit. I wasn’t looking outward to the world. All my energy was flowing backwards into the life of the womb and its dark mystery. And there were negative aspects to that, such as lack of worldly ambition and a failure to understand the needs and functions of placing oneself well in the world to gain financial and social benefits.

What I have gained though, is an extraordinarily rich inner life. I suppose it was also a major factor in my becoming well-known in connection with dreams. Also, for never having any sense that I ought to absorb the subjects offered through schooling, as given by the establishment. But I believe there are other factors not mentioned, that played a big part in that.

The other main pattern put in place by my infant years, was the foundations upon which would be built a terror of losing the one I loved and the compulsion to be loved as desperately and urgently as I myself loved. In this way the scene was set for the drama of my destiny to unfold.

Last Thoughts About Lumpkin

I end by thinking about Lumpkin and realise what a wonderful part of me he is. I have an image of him as the Lion headed dwarf. The tiny malformed being who is yet enormous, with strength, wisdom, and power. He has that in his weakness. And in his love and compassion, he has more strength than soldiers. I have a sense that my female has taken Lumpkin deeply into herself. I have a feeling she is going to carry Lumpkin deep in her being, perhaps into another lifetime. And if that is so, I want her to recognise that Lumpkin has the seeds of enormous strength, great wisdom and love. I know that is why my lover has taken Lumpkin into herself.

Lumpkin is now also flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood.

Here is the Lumpkin dream.

“I believe it was a man, rather shadowy, who gave me a leather pull string purse or pouch. In the pouch was powder that I poured onto my rather stained trousers. Strangely, they looked like the one’s I wear now. Immediately the powder started working like yeast, or at least, I thought of it as yeast. It was cleansing and purifying my trousers in a spreading action. I knew that this yeast, or pollen, had also penetrated my body, and was gradually working through my being, purifying and healing.

I looked at the opening of the pouch, and it was in the shape of a mouth and a vagina. The powder that came out was like millions of living motes, or particles, life giving and alive. I thought at first that using the powder would empty the pouch, but I saw that in fact the living counts replenished itself. They were like sperm or pollen, they regenerated.

Then suddenly the scene shifted and it was later in the day. I was the only person at an eating-place. I heard sounds of people coming, and wasn’t sure if they were friendly or not. So, I acted as if I were working at the place by clearing one of the tables. There didn’t seem to be any proprietors or staff. Then, into the room, or space, because I believe it was outdoors, walked my friend Sheila, with a man who was shadowy, ill-defined, like the man who gave me the pouch. Sheila was now like a warrior figure, a man/woman, the genders blended. I understood, or could see, that Sheila had gone through an incredible journey or adventure. This was like one of the mythological odysseys that had transformed her in meeting its dangers and trials. She was now a very powerful figure. In her hands Sheila carried a tiny being. She held it out to me and said, “Lumpkin has been asking for you.” (Some days before the dream of the pouch and Lumpkin I experience a powerful uprising of feeling and joy. In listening to the feeling I received the distinct message that in four days I would receive a gift. I wondered what this gift might be, and understood that it was something that had always existed, but I had now grown, or opened, to the point where the gift could be received.)

Strangely, since that time, my dreams have given me four gifts – the two books, the pouch, and Lumpkin. None of them are easy gifts, and I am still riding the waves that lift me and thrown me down in my relationship with love and loneliness.

I understood that Lumpkin, this little being, had missed me and wanted to be with me. I held out my arms and took this creature, who was about 10 inches high, with spindly legs and arms. From his appearance he was incapable of individual locomotion. Lumpkin wasn’t a baby, nor an animal, but he was intelligent and could speak. He came to me and I held him, with the feeling we have known each other in the past. Art by Carlos Caban

In fact what he brings me it is the possibility of the compassion for the helpless and injured. He has, because of his own weakness, a sense of humility that allows a link with other people’s vulnerable and perhaps a hidden, nature.”