Posts Tagged ‘death and rebirth’

Example 9 Virtual Reality

Example: This is not a dream, but is a powerful example of how the unconscious can produce very real sense of experiencing something as physically true, that is a mental phenomena. The account is by Phillip Zimbardo in the book Psychology and Life, published by Scott, Foresman and Company.

It was my first day back to work after recovering from a traumatic automobile accident. I was lucky to be alive with only torn ligaments in my leg and a concussion: the driver had been killed by the impact of a head-on collision. As I hobbled up the three flights of stairs supported by a crutch, my initial joy of returning to school was suddenly suspended. With each step I took a strange sensation occurred: I could ‘feel’ myself BECOMING my younger brother, George. Not IMAGINE ‘as if’ I were George, but being transformed physically to be him.

I perceived my face changing to be his face and my body doing likewise. My limp became more pronounced, and it took great strength to climb the last flight. In a panic, I shut myself in my office, not wanting anyone to witness this strange transformation. I avoided looking at my reflection in the window for fear I would see his face and not mine. Had I really become my brother or was I MERELY hallucinating?

Time passed during which I tried frantically to relax, ‘to pull myself together,’ and make sense of my distorted sense impressions. After all, I was a normal, serious scientist type not given to such flights of fancy. I lived by the reality principle.

My secretary and colleagues knocked and came into the office before I could say I was busy. They were worried by my abrupt disappearing act. They were relieved to see I was ‘my old self again,’ and I was relieved to see them responding to me as if I were Phil and not George. A glance at my reflection confirmed my hope. I had changed back, ‘or was no longer George….or George was no longer manifesting himself in me.’ Whatever? Weird, no? But why?

When we were children, George had infantile paralysis and for a time had to wear leg braces and walk with crutches. I would accompany him to therapy sessions and observe his frustration, embarrassment, and anger at not being able to function normally. Since we were only eighteen months apart in age, I could readily empathise with his feelings. I may have also felt guilty at being glad I too was not crippled. Once I recall volunteering to exchange places with him in the swimming pool exercises, but the nurse chided me, ‘being crippled is not fun and games young man.’ I was about four at the time.

As I hobbled up the stairs to my office some twenty five years later, the pattern of feedback sensory stimulation reactivated this pre-recorded motor action plan. Memories of George’s posture and movement were enacted. I had retained mimicry responses of his motor activity that I had observed so intensely. Now I was changing places with him, but not consciously and not volitionally. The suddenness and vividness of the hallucination was frightening because it was so real, yet at the same time contradicted my knowledge of reality.

Another example from a man used to entering this condition.

I was suddenly shot into a dream state as I sat awake writing, yet I was still awake in this state and I had a very distinct image, along with a feeling, of a small bird fluttering close my head. What was incredibly clear and real was the way its wings were fluttering. I could really see and feel that they were not simply waving up-and-down but vibrating at great speed. The bird kept fluttering near me, and I realised it was trying to attract my attention so I would follow it. So in fact I did, and it led me into a condition of great darkness. I could see or hear nothing. But the bird led on, and I trusted it and we came to what was recognisably a dark cave from which were slowly emerging hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. I understood as I saw this that an enormous number of people throughout the world were now emerging from a dark place. I realised that this was my work, leading people from the darkness to the light.

Life and Death – Chapter Links

Life and Death was a series of features written for and published in Yoga and Health.

I had experience in the many fields of thought about death, such as Christian Beliefs, Spiritualism, Yoga, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Buddhism, the Scientific Viewpoint and everyday experience. I had personal experience of out of body travel, and felt in a good place to be able to present these chapters.

These series, with additional material, are publishes in ebook format,

under the title Dreaming about Death.

Links to Chapters

1 – Nothing is Permanent – Except Change

2 – Spiritualism and Heaven

3 – The Mystery of Sleep and Death

4 – Heaven and Hell

5 – Sit Down You’re Rockin The Boat

Artists and Dreams

We are constantly giving meaning to a torrent of impressions that we meet through our senses and from within us. We give form to raw experience. We scan our enormous wealth of words, phrases, context, to arrive at an understanding of what is communicated verbally or in writing. If we could watch this process taking place, we would observe a constant searching and rejection of non-hits, a lining up of possibilities, and a bringing to the forefront of what we sense are highest probabilities.

Our mind/brain is a flashing loom of connections, a constantly moving wonderful network of links between billions of cells. This flashing creative network that constitutes the miraculous background to our responses, our feelings, our thoughts and spontaneous fantasies and dreams, is constantly forming patterns from the multitude of experiences we have. It constantly tries to match these patterns against what is already known or learnt. It draws out from the chaos of memory and incoming experience whatever it can liken to what was met in the past. What it can’t match it tries to put into some sort of order or to give a form to. And within all this constant activity the search for personal meaning goes on – Who or what am I? How can I survive? Is there a way ….?

Out of such a profoundly integral search for meaning, as artist, writer, musician, we may project the subtle forms of our inner meanings into the art form we use. We may create shapes, places, people, and feelings. Out of the flashing web of our own sentience we create life – our life – with its own conceptions of what it is to exist, what it is to love or hate, to strive or fail.

Even the most modern of dream theories agree that it is out of the fathomless depths of our drive to give meaning to impressions, that we create dreams. It is out of the barely formed impressions and understanding of the dreaming impulse that we create and live. In fact many artists of every discipline – and I now use the word to include musicians, painters, writers and architects – have directly drawn from their dream life.

What we cannot quite grasp – what is too vast and many sided for us to hold entirely in our thoughts, we give form to in paintings, in carvings, in sound, in piling rocks one upon another to form a monument. We may then venerate or hold as of immense value such art forms. They hold in them for us the vast dimension of the ungraspable, of the infinity of our own within. They stand before us as represent a journey of lives of the alien in our midst, in ourselves. They remind us of what we are not masters of, and what may take hold of our life. See

In past times tribal people stood in awe of their own existence. They recognised, even if it were unconsciously, the incredible journey they had made from being an unconscious animal, to the attainment of personal awareness and human society. They represented this awe-full experience in rituals, and symbolic paintings and sculptures such as the totem. They also recognised in their art the immense journey ahead, of claiming the possibilities of human life, and put this into their art. How do we deal with the powers that overwhelm us and drag us into mass murder in war and social upheaval? How do we create a personal and social world that we can be proud of?

In writing about Symbolism In The Visual Arts, (Page 255 in Man And His Symbols, Jung)

Aniela Jaffe mentions the drawing of Klee, interestingly called The Limits of Understanding, which expresses this attempt to put into form what cannot be thought. Jung said that a true symbol appears only when there is a need to express what thought cannot think or what is only divined or felt.

The great artists of any culture give to us what we may have failed to see ourselves. They portray to us the spirit of our times, and our predicament, and perhaps even a passage through the dilemmas we face. Sometimes they manage to break through the cultural plethora and froth of everyday life and display an insight into the fundamental forces of life, renewing our own connection. To do this they face a personal death into the unconscious. They experience darkness and light that many of us may not dare to face. They live within the great forces of their dreams more intensely, more fully than those of us whose awareness is centred on the everyday surface produced by the concepts of life generally agreed upon.

When an artist manages to meet and give birth to one of the spirits of our age, whether it is a terrible demon of our times, or a healing angel, it speaks to us beyond our reasoning. It draws crowds, it holds attention. In the early part of this century the artist Kandinsky wrote that ‘The art of today embodies the spiritual matured to the point of revelation.

Something that we must recognise as an enormous shift in human awareness that has taken place in our own times, and which must influence art from here forwards, is the attainment of self-awareness we have been helped toward by the findings of modern psychotherapeutic schools. This form of self examination has enabled us to explore the wealth of pain and wonder usually forgotten in the mists of childhood. But it also lays bare the struggle, the enormity of the evolutionary movement toward consciousness, toward being human. And there is tremendous art here when it is discovered; art expressing the meeting between the social individual we try to be, and the animal we are still largely immersed in within the depths of our mind and body. In fact we are the whole spectrum of things from sub-atomic particles, through molecular survival and interactions, on into the basic living organisms and creatures up through the lizard, the mammal and the human. All these things are active in us, in harmony, in conflict, in process of becoming. Out of this weaving loom of life all art and music arise; all life experiences an expression of it.

As an example, Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater describes his fantastic dream life over a period of years. De Quincey started to take opium as a sedative. It led to a heightened awareness of how the mind can produce powerful images and memories. He writes that ‘In the middle of 1817, this faculty became increasingly distressing to me.’ Not only did his inner visions present ‘… nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour.’ But also ‘…. vast processions moved along continually in mournful pomp. Concurrently with this, a corresponding change took place in my dreams; a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted within my brain.’ Such experiences led De Quincey to feel ‘deep-seated anxiety and funereal melancholy.’ At times he might recall the ‘minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived.’ ‘I could not be said to recollect them; for, if I had been told of them waking, I should not have been able to acknowledge them as parts of my past experience.’ In his visionary state however, he says ‘I recognised them instantaneously . . . I feel assured that there is no such thing as an ultimate forgetting.’

De Quincey’s deep seated anxiety and melancholy, in our present times, would be signs of an underlying neurosis which could have been dealt with by exploring his fantasies to their roots in his personal history – already being touched on spontaneously by him. Whether we take the example of De Quincey’s opium aided fantasies, or the visions of Christian mystics such as the temptations of St. Antony, art and religion has at least a facet of being a symbolic way of meeting a neurosis. It is only when we reach through the symbol into what it depicts about us personally, that we move from this historical symbolic form of healing and representation.

One cannot of course limit the definition of art and dreams to that of dealing with hidden neurosis, or even of the move toward wholeness. Therefore it is interesting to remember some of the artists who directly used dreams as part of their work. William Blake for instance purposefully made use of dreams not only as sources for his art, but also for invention – his method of printing for instance. He particularly tells of the man who taught him painting in his dreams. Blake actually drew the face of this character.

In the 1950’s the painter Jasper Johns was working as a window dresser in New York. In a dream he saw himself painting an American flag. In waking he painted the flag from his vision of it in the dream. The painting became a powerful force in an American revolution in art.

Salvador Dali consistently used dreams as a basis for his paintings. He tried to preserve his dream imagery in his art, and particularly to portray the subtleties of time and space. He referred to his paintings as ‘hand painted dream photographs.’

A number of film directors also used their dreams in the art. Ingmar Bergman tried to portray episodes from his dreams as accurately as possible. He felt that dreams have the ability to help people find points of connection, to link people. Carlos Saura used fragments from his dreams to capture atmosphere and environment.

For each of us, our dreams are our own studio in which we nightly create beyond our waking talent to produce the new, the novel, the unexpected and the deeply true. We are each visionaries, artists of the night and live in another dimension than that of the body. See: archetype of the artist; compensation theory; creativity and problem solving; hallucinations and hallucinogens; hallucinations and visions.

Who Said Death Was The End

For the shorter Dream Dictionary entries see Death and Dead and also see the series Life and Death.

There is also a longer version published in eBook format – Dreaming about Death

Links to section headings:

Death can represent a fading or dying of some aspect of you

Who Said Death Was the Final End?

Death is an Energy Release

Journeying Beyond Dreams and Death

Death of oneself Death of someone close to us

Dreaming of a dead body

Dreaming of our own death

Some dreams are showing the state of those we love after death

Talking with those who have passed on

Death can represent a fading or dying of some aspect of you

The death of someone we know

The walking dead or rigor mortis

Thoughts about death

We can deal with our feelings of death

You can continue contact with the dead through your dreams

After death What Happens

Meeting death in any way can be awful, especially if you shy away from the awful caricature of death presented today as THE END. But if you dare to look the shrouded figure of death directly in the eyes, it transforms into the Naked Beauty. See Near death experience

In every moment of our life we face the possibility of death. In fact we only live because we are constantly dying. Our body is all the time dying as thousands of cells die, and in doing so the new and living body can continue. If we allow ourselves to realise that it illustrates the meaning of the phoenix – it is consumed by the flames, and yet it arose anew. We have the fire of life within us, we eat and feed the fire that consumes us and gives birth to us continuously. It is the warmth of our body, the warmth, even passion, of our emotions and that is life – continuous through death.

Example: This was not a dream, but a direct perception during sleep. I saw that a large part of my being was dying, and another part coming to life. Andy

Our bodies renew themselves every day: stomach cells renew every five days;

our skin cells are replaced every month; the skeleton is replaced every three months;

the raw material of DNA is replaced every 6 weeks; our brain cells are completely new every year.

The whole body is replaced every two years.

Every cell in your body listens to your self-talk and out-pictures the results Dr. Bruce Lipton, author of

“The Biology of Belief“

Who Said Death Was the Final End?

I have heard it said or written times uncountable that nobody has ever come to tell us what is the other side of death. As no one has come back – so the argument goes – and so there is obviously no life after death.

That is a stupid argument because hundreds of thousands have come back and told us. It is an argument put forward by people who desperately keep their eyes closed and then say they cannot see anything. Because there is a massive collection of thousands of records of people who died and revived and so told us their experience of death.

See Near Death Experiences – The Wisdom Of Near Earth Experiences – The Truth Revealed – Life After Life – The Returning Dead – The Wonder of You

Death is an Energy Release

Many modern physicists, working with the information arising in experiments with quantum theory, tell us that our view of the world is based upon our blindness, and is very limited, and through its limitation, unreal. The implications of the theorem are enormous. Something can be in two places at once, in fact everywhere at the same moment. 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. People’s experiences of this dimension:

But death of anything also involves a tremendous release of energy as the form breaks down. But the various levels of energy involved in the death of a person are never lost, for energy cannot ever be lost, it is transferred and used elsewhere. A transformation takes place. The consciousness and energy that gave the body life also goes through a process of transformation into universal life.

It is not surprising therefore that the subject of death figures in many dreams. As with any major life event, in our dreams we meet death in various forms as part of our attempt to develop a working relationship with it. For instance we died when we left behind our childhood self to become an adolescent.

Such dreams enable us to become aware of what our deepest fears or feelings are regarding our own death, or the death of someone we love or know. But they also have the possibility of showing us what our fullest inner wisdom or intuitions are about what it means to die.

If we cannot meet the spectre of death, then our ability to live a full life will be diminished. At every turn death faces us in one way or another, and if we have not met and transformed fear into wonder, then we will be paralysed in expressing freely and lovingly to what life offers.

We have to remember though that what we first meet in dreams about death are the family and culturally inherited images and ideas of what death is. For instance Western culture gradually developed a view of the world based on early scientific theories. Namely that life is purely physical, and so there can be no survival of ones personal awareness at death. It is a view gradually being eroded by findings in quantum physics, and is not shared by many other cultures.

A man describes his experience when his father unexpectedly died.

A man had died. I was his son and had just been told. Walking along the road to my home in the dark evening I passed an empty house. – It silently said to me DEATH.

On my left as I walked was the undertaker’s. Again it spoke DEATH.

In the empty street a cold wind blew fallen leaves., telling me of my fathers DEATH.

Further along the way a house was brightly lit from within, and I could see people inside. It shouted to me LIFE.

A girl child rode by on a bicycle and she was LIFE.

Nearer home I met my young son and carried him in my arms, wrapped in my coat against the wind and I was holding LIFE.

And in that way I realised that always and everywhere, everything is living and dying. And pain dropped from me.

The skeleton in the image typifies this Western view of death. But the view in older cultures is that life continually flows through birth and death, as in the second illustration. (See: the book The Field, that examines latest findings in quantum physics in an understandable way).

But many people dream that they have died and become distressed by it. But as far as I can tell such dreams are a necessary part of a natural development. The experience of death is a part of learning to go through change – as caterpillars do as the transform into butterflies. You cannot go through such personal changes unless you willing to let yourself die.

I feel strongly that all the new breed of children will need to learn how to die. It is like a process of transformation such we see caterpillars going through. In our life today there are stages of growth and points of massive transformation as one period of growth ends and another stage begins.

Learning to die was a method of passing through the transformation into the next stage of growth, and we are carving a way for children if they attempted the further stages of growth. Dreaming of our own death In the example below the dreamer does not face any great fear of death itself. The strongest feelings are of loss. Over a period of time the dreamer may move beyond such feelings of loss into exploring other possibilities of death.

I was due to be executed – what for I don’t know. I was not especially afraid of this, but my most vivid feelings were of great sadness at the people I was leaving behind, and for all the things I wanted to do in life, but would not now be able to. Then at the end I was watching myself being hanged. D.

This theme of facing death is quite frequently met, and it often leads to confronting what we really want to do before the end of this present life; what we want to express, say or give to those we love or are involved with; and what we want to achieve. So such a dream may wake us up from spending too much time in trivialities.

Examining many dreams dealing with death, it is noticeable that some dreamers are stuck in fearful or grief laden feelings, while others move on into a positive relationship with the ending of life. The difference appears to be centred on what level of emotion the dreamer can tolerate and accept, and how daring they are. Many people, on meeting death in their dream, awake with feelings of pain, fear, or dread. If they could fully meet those feelings they would pass on to develop a very different experience of death in their dreams. The following dreams illustrate this.

A young woman told me she had experienced a recurring nightmare of a piece of cloth touching her face. She would scream and scream and wake her family. One night her brother sat with her and made her meet those feelings depicted by the cloth. When she did so she realised it was her grandmother’s funeral shroud. She cried about the loss of her grandmother, felt her feelings about death, and was never troubled again by the nightmare. The dreamer in the following example meets her feelings through the actual events of the dream.

My mother in law died of cancer. I had watched the whole progression of her illness, and was very upset by her death. Shortly after she died the relatives gathered and began to sort through her belongings to share them out. That was the climax of my upset and distress, and I didn’t want any part of this sorting and taking her things. That night I dreamt I was in a room with all the relatives. They were sorting her things, and I felt my waking distress. Then my mother in law came into the room. She was very real and seemed happy. She said for me not to be upset as she didn’t at all mind her relatives taking her things. When I woke from the dream all the anxiety and upset had disappeared. It never returned.

Here is quote from a student of Jung.

“Most significantly, Herzog suggests that the experience of dying in a dream can symbolise a life-transformation. But this occurs only if the dreamer (1) can transcend the negative reaction to death’s image, and (2) be touched “by the dream’s deep resonance with the experience of death as transformation and also by the elemental power of enthusiastic joy in life.”5 This “transformation” occurs if one’s waking activity is affected such that the dreamer comes to terms with the vicissitudes of life, as well as the reality of death.”

Death can represent a fading or dying of some aspect of you

So dreaming of death is often not about the end of your or someone else’s life, but a means of showing how some aspect of your outer or inner life is fading, lost, or being superseded by a changed approach, so may be shown as dying. Other possibilities are that your love or drive to achieve something might die, and be shown as death in your dreams. The change from adolescence to puberty, or maturity to old age, is also often depicted in a dream as oneself dying. In this case it is a past way of life and identity that is passing away.

Dreaming of a dead body

This shows another aspect of death in dreams. Lost opportunities or unexpressed potentials in you are frequently shown in this way. All of us unconsciously learn attitudes or survival skills from parents and others, or we have a talent or gift that has got buried, denied or even killed out by events. If these or other facets of our personality are unrecognised or ‘buried’ they may be shown as dead. Sometimes we have killed the child or teenager in us because of difficulties or trauma at those ages, and these may be seen as a dead person in your dream, or even a corpse you find buried. Of course we may have ‘killed’ our parents in our dreams and find them buried. It is important to explore such dreams and bring the parts of you back to life. See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams

Some death dreams may show the awakening of new life in the dreamer. For instance, Sue explored a dream in which she was told her baby had died. She woke shaking with grief and tears. When she explored the dream she felt it showed her becoming alive enough to feel the grief of past pain, and the death of her hopes and love in a relationship that had just ended. She had suppressed her pain for so long. In now coming alive enough to feel her emotions, she was feeling at last that something she previously loved had died in her.

Example: My hands moved to my genital area and I had the strange and awful feeling my hips were not mine – that I was touching someone else’s body. The thighs and waist were my own, but in between was a dead, wasted area. I knew my sexuality was this stagnant, dead area. It was my manhood that had been wasted, the many wasted years of my life. My body felt such a stranger. I took my trousers off to feel myself more easily. Gradually I felt the area connected and my own again. I felt that I had dealt with the causes of my dead sexuality in past experiences, but I had never felt the actual deadness quite like this

We can deal with our feelings of death

Each of us meet our feelings and fears in different ways, and the next waking dream shows a very full meeting with death and its possibilities.

I knew I was dying and it was incredibly real. So real I wept deeply because I knew this was the end of everything and I would lose my children. All that I had created in life would be at an end too. But there was nothing I could do about that and I died. Then I seemed to be at a slight distance watching my dead body, and I saw my father, who had died some years before, come and carry the body over a threshold into a heavenly meadow. There a resurrection took place. My dead being was given new life. And the new life came from all that I had given to others, and all I had received from others, during my life. That was my spiritual life that survived death. A.C.

As can be seen from this beautiful experience, the dreamer meets the depth of feeling connected with the final ending of life, and then moves beyond it. So the last part of the dream is not an avoidance of pain, but an acceptance of the finality of death and how it is transcended by giving ourselves away to others, and receiving from them. It says that our spiritual life is a form of integrating all of our life activities and seeing what can be transferred from our limited life into the life universal. All that cannot be a part of the eternal cannot be a part of our life after death is burned out. Because dreaming about death is a very frequent theme, and has many aspects, you must look at any death dream you have had and see each part of it in context with the other parts of the dream. For instance the context of death in the first example is connected with hanging and final loss. In the second it starts similarly but ends quite differently.

Death of someone close to us

As explained above, this often refers to ones own feelings or talents that have been hurt, denied, or ‘killed out’ by events and your response to them. The following example illustrates this.

Example: ‘My son comes in and I see he is unwashed and seems preoccupied and as if he has not cared for himself for some days. I ask him what is wrong. He tells me his mother is dead. I then seem to know she has been dead for days, and my two sons have not told anyone. In fact my other son has not even accepted the fact.’ Anthony.

Anthony is a divorcee. Processing the dream he realised the two sons are ways he is relating to the death of his marriage – the children’s mother. Although the unconscious has a very real sense of its eternal nature and continuance after physical death, our conscious personality seldom shares this. Also we all we all carry within us ideas, behaviours, talents and ways of life from those now dead. The farmer today unconsciously uses the collective experience of humanity in farming. What innovation he does today his children or others will learn and carry into the future.

This aspect of a life beyond the physical is shown in many dreams. For instance a man I knew dreamt of walking with a friend of his. As they walked they came to a river. The friend crossed, but the dreamer was unable to. Even in the dream he felt crossing the river meant his friend had died. Some time later he discovered that his friend had died at about the time he experienced the dream.

As the dream points out, the friend died, but continued another type of life ‘across the river’. A woman told a similar dream to me. Her teenage son came down to breakfast looking very unhappy. When she asked him why he said he had a dream that deeply disturbed him. In it he was walking with a friend and the friend walked through a door. When her son tried to follow he could not pass through the door.

They could not find a rational explanation for the dream, but on arriving at school, her son heard that his friend had been killed in a motorbike accident on his way to school. The river and the door are often used in this way, suggesting a change to another dimension of life usually unreachable by the living. But some experiences give us a much clearer example of contact with our dead. The following is taken from the writings of Dr. Stanilav Grof and is a personal experience he met.

“In one particularly unnerving session a young man suffering from depression found himself in what seemed to be another dimension. It had an eerie luminescence, and although he could not see anyone he sensed that it was crowded with discarnate beings. Suddenly he sensed a presence very close to him, and to his surprise it began to communicate with him telepathically. It asked him to please contact a couple who lived in the Moravian city of Kromeriz and let them know that their son Ladislav was well taken care of and doing all right. It then gave him the couple’s name, street address, and telephone number.

The information meant nothing to either Grof or the young man and seemed totally unrelated to the young man’s problems and treatment. Still, Grof could not put it out of his mind. “After some hesitation and with mixed feelings, I finally decided to do what certainly would have made me the target of my colleagues’ jokes, had they found out,” says Grof. “I went to the telephone, dialled the number in Kromeriz, and asked if I could speak with Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a broken voice: ‘Our son is not with us any more; he passed away, we lost him three weeks ago.’”

Here is a beautiful experience expressed as a poem.

Example: Today I noticed for the first time
A small brown mark on my left hand.
True I have been out in the sun,
But I never grow freckles.
This is one of those marks
Old people have on their hands.

I thought – or perhaps it was a hope
That I would never have
Such brown discolourations.
In my imagination of ageing
I had seen my skin wrinkled,
But clear and vibrant.
The mark was something
I noticed in the morning,
Looked at for a few moments
And passed from to other interests.

The day was full of things to enjoy.
At fifty I feel happier
And more vigorous
Than ever before.
Then, in the afternoon,
Sitting among friends
And in the midst of our enjoyment
The thought struck me –
Supposing I fall over!
Supposing I dropped to the floor
Right now.

I was with friends,
Friends to have wild fancies with.
So I followed my mood,
Allowing it to grow leaves and stem,
And remembered,
Though I had never really forgotten,
That my father had – one day –
Fallen over on his garden path.
Busy as ever with things to do
He was walking the path
Fell over
And never got up again.

That’s when I knew
More clearly than ever before
That I am slowly dying.
If I were a leaf on a tree,
The small brown mark would be
The first sign of Autumn
As change touched me
Making me golden.
Then I would fall
From the tree.

But I am not ready
To drop.
Though I am turning brown
There is something I need.
I have a will to spend myself
On my friends,
That I might fall
Feeling well
With the coming of winter.
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 its face is beauty
For it is all things –
Naked,
Undressed of flesh,
Leafless,
Exposed,
Unclad Life –
Without the garment
That our selfhood is.

And the waters in me rose
To tears.
Bathing me in regret
That I had
So often
Forgotten
My love
For the
Naked Beauty.

Relating to The Dead

Our relationship with the dead should not be seen as the same as when alive, for we have left the body life behind and live in a dimension of experience without boundaries. Of course dreams try to help us with this but it can be difficult to understand. Below are parts of communications received.

“I am now part of your life. In this place of no boundaries it means our lives roll together. And this is part of the love that links those in life and those in death. I am also creating possibilities and situations in your life here and now.

From this dimension life and death are not separated, and that my friend Kevin partook of my life through the love developed between myself and him. The link was so pronounced that he also experienced my life as I lived it as there were no boundaries.”

You can continue contact with the dead through your dreams

There is yet another level connected with dreams about people we have known in life. This next dream and exploration of the dream shows how we can continue contact with the dead.

Example: Our son passed away on 12/22/2012. he was 24 years old. Today my 13 year old daughter told me she had a dream last night. She said she was looking in a mirror and saw her brother. She said at first it scared her then she was okay. She said she joined her brother. She said they were on a beach but it was nothing like she had ever seen. She said he was in a bright yellow shirt and tan shorts which she thought was a bit funny because he would have never worn that when he was alive.

She said the first thing she asked him was if there was a hell. She said he told her no but there was a place for those who had done really bad things to learn from them. She said that she asked a bunch of questions that he told her he wasn’t allowed to answer. She said she asked him if he missed everyone and he told her no because he could be with us whenever he wanted to. He told her he could go everywhere. He said both to beautiful and not so beautiful places. It was all his choice. He told her tell everyone he was okay. She also said he looked really good but not quite the same as he did when he was alive.

The above dream is exactly what can happen when we meet someone we love in a dream. Usually people’s minds are so full of beliefs and information that clogs up their ability to have such a clear dream. The mirror is first an indirect contact, but then the girl joined her brother in his experience of death. The answers she was given to her questions are exactly my own findings in regard to death.

Example: Yesterday my wife told me I had been calling out in my sleep, obviously dreaming. She said I had been calling my mother. She described it not as a cry of pain or anger, but as if urgently trying to get my mother’s attention.

My mother had died shortly before this dream, so I tried to explore the feeling of calling to my mother and experienced a spontaneous waking dream of my mother being in something like an old people’s home. She was very withdrawn and non-communicative, and as I explored the feeling of this I sensed she felt as if she had been abandoned and felt resentful and angry about this. She had died from multiple strokes and so was not aware of her process of death.

I could see that in fact she had not been abandoned, but was in a place where she was creating her own environment through her emotions and attitudes. I attempted to communicate with her but she refused to respond at all, and I was unsure if she really was withdrawn to a point where she couldn’t hear me, or if she was angry and so not responding. So I called to her aloud and said she must realise she was dead, not abandoned. She had failed to realise her new condition and so through resentment from feeling we had all left her, had created a growing isolation and barrier to being with others. I explained that if she remembered something of the love she had given and received in life, this would release her from the bondage of her loneliness, and bring her into contact with many people who wanted to be with her who were dead.

Here is a different approach.

Example: Did I tell you my dream about my Mother the day after she died? I kept hearing my name spoken (calling me) just as I’m waking up in the mornings……it was so strong today that I had said, “Yes” before I realized there was no one here but me.

And another thing…. the phone keeps ringing and no one is there when I pick it up…….it happens too many time to be a wrong number. I am thinking, who is out there trying to contact me? But some experiences give us a much clearer example of contact with our dead.

The following is taken from the writings of D. Stanilav Grof and is a personal experience he met.

“In one particularly unnerving session a young man suffering from depression found himself in what seemed to be another dimension. It had an eerie luminescence, and although he could not see anyone he sensed that it was crowded with discarnate beings.

Suddenly he sensed a presence very close to him, and to his surprise it began to communicate with him telepathically. It asked him to please contact a couple who lived in the Moravian city of Kromeriz and let them know that their son Ladislav was well taken care of and doing all right.

It then gave him the couple’s name, street address, and telephone number.

The information meant nothing to either Grof or the young man and seemed totally unrelated to the young man’s problems and treatment. Still, Grof could not put it out of his mind. “After some hesitation and with mixed feelings, I finally decided to do what certainly would have made me the target of my colleagues’ jokes, had they found out,” says Grof.

“I went to the telephone, dialled the number in Kromeriz, and asked if I could speak with Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a broken voice: ‘Our son is not with us any more; he passed away, we lost him three weeks ago.’”

Some dreams are showing the state of those we love after death I believe the following dreams can really give a wonderful picture of this.

I walked around the corner, looked into the room my son was in when he was living here just a few months ago. He was in his bed, on the opposite side he slept on, alone, and sick. His face was pale white with large red areas on his cheeks from fever, he had a thermometer in his mouth which he removed to say, “Ma, I’m really sick.” Maybe he also said he feels terrible, I cant recall that specifically. Most people dream their loved ones smile, or tell ,them they are ok… this dream made me cry, and feel fearful for him. Despite the difficult feeling the mother felt in response to her dream of her dead son, it describes very clearly a stage of after death experience, the burning up of physical desires.

The next dream is even more clear in its symbolism.

My mother in law just passed on Aug 7th, 2010, she had cancer, and the process of her dying went rather quickly, we are a very close knit family, and my husband, sister in-laws, and especially the grandchildren are really having a hard time with her passing. However, I had this disturbing dream last night. In this dream, I was in a small soft lit room, and in this room around the 4 corners of the wall, there were framed pictures of my mother in law from a baby until adulthood even pictures of when she was ill before she passed. She looked up at me and it was my mother in law, her eyes were bulged and red, and she had tears coming down her face.

The pictures on the wall shows a full life review. This is recognisable what happens when you die. Of course it can be disturbing, after all you are reliving every moment.

Phyllis Atwater, who is an expert on near death experiences, and who has experienced them herself, says:

“For me it was a total reliving of every thought I had ever thought, every word I had ever spoken, and every deed I had ever done; plus, the effect of each thought, word and deed on everyone and anyone who had ever come within my environment or sphere of influence, whether I knew them or not (including unknown passers-by on the street).”

The fever shown in the previous dream is caused by the loss of a physical body. Without body we lose all physical desires, and that can be very difficult for some. It is like burning up of those desires that link your material life. There are other stages that we go through that you can read about in Rudolph Steiner’s Philosophy of Life and Death.

Several months after he started dreaming, Herb received some of the answers to questions he held at the time of his mother’s death. Did his mother have a message for him? Where had she gone? The veil between this life and the next was swept away in a dream:

I meet my mother as a young woman on a beautiful campus of higher learning, where there is always light. She is playing a violin here in a symphonic orchestra. She tells me that my ability will surpass my hopes and that my dreams will be a large part of the revelation of knowledge which will come through my higher self. “I had read of great Biblical prophets, such as Joseph, who had important dreams,” Herb says, “but I thought such talents were only for men such as he was, and not for such an insignificant person as myself.”

The next show how the dead can be helped by knowledge of the after death state.

My 20-year-old son, Max, died less than a month ago. I had a strong feeling when I first learned of his death that he had remained “earth bound”.

I can’t describe it exactly, but I felt very strongly that because his death was sudden and he wasn’t ready to go that he hadn’t moved on to the other side. I have prayed for a sign from him and he came to me in my dreams the past two nights.

The first night he said he wasn’t dead and I couldn’t convince him otherwise. He even said that he wouldn’t be ready to go for another “year and a half”. But I got to hug him and feel him and it was him. Last night he came to me at my house. He was sitting at the kitchen table and we just talked for a few minutes before I brought up the fact that he HAD to go into the light. He got a bit angry.

Then I told him that I knew about the drugs in Utah and he hung his head in shame. Then I told him he overdosed. At first he disagreed, I began to think about things that I could show him that would make him understand…like stuff from his funeral, but then he understood. Like he knew what I was thinking and was kinda like “don’t bother, I get it.”

I started to cry and we hugged and I began to tell him about all the books that I’ve read on the afterlife so that he wouldn’t be scared. He hugged me and asked me if our souls would always be together and I said yes, that if you’re close on earth that means the souls always stay together.

We left my house then and went to the other side. He was leery of going so I told him that once he got there he would probably see grandma Josephine and grandma Jean and that Baxter, his old dog, would probably even be there. I went further in with him, to try and find the souls he was meant to be with so that he wouldn’t be scared.

As we looked he began to feel more at ease. Drifting away from me and looking for himself. Then a crashing booming voice said something, I don’t remember what, but I knew I had to leave. So I went back to the tunnel that we had come in through and Max came, with another young man, about his age, they were wildly happy, riding what kinda looked like skateboards, but not. He took me back through the tunnel. He said he understood and that the other soul that was there with him was his friend and that they wreak havoc on the other side playing pranks and acting rambunctious.

I started to cry and he hugged me so tight and I told him I loved him so much and he whispered in my ear “I will see you soon”. He was completely calm and not upset anymore…like someone saying, “see you tomorrow” – like time wasn’t a big deal. I watched him skateboard away with the other soul and he turned back and gave me a huge smile and waved and I felt all over that he understood everything now.

The tunnel began to close in…getting smaller and smaller at his end of it so I had to turn around and walk through my side because I had to come back. I knew, even in the dream that I had helped him get there. Was this my sons spirit? Did I help him? I feel it was…and waking up today I feel better. I miss him terribly but I feel like he is safe and where he should be.

I put the above dream in because it is so clearly a healing dream. I know from personal experience what it is like to meet and know the joy you felt in helping your son. I know also that we are almost hypnotised into believing that when someone dies that is the end of them. But there are some dreams that are about the person still alive who is grieving so much it is a real pain to the dead person.

Example: Perhaps the most common dream experience in spirit communication is related to the message which in essence says, “I am fine and happy. Your grief, however, is holding me back and making me sad. You can help me greatly by trying to overcome your sorrow. You must stop grieving!”

People who grieve because of someone they love has died fail to understand the the person has not gone or left them. In fact, the ‘dead’ person is now more fully aware of those left behind, and is very influenced by what they feel. Please read Ex or a dreamed of ‘soul mate – what can I do?; Talking with the dead

Death can represent a fading or dying of some aspect of you.

Dreaming of death is often not about the end of your or someone else’s life, but a means of showing how some aspect of your outer or inner life is fading, lost, or being superseded by a changed approach, so may be shown as dying.

Other possibilities are that your love or drive to achieve something might die, and be shown as death in your dreams. The change from adolescence to puberty, or maturity to old age, is also often depicted in a dream as oneself dying. In this case it is a past way of life and identity that is passing away.

Dreaming of a dead body

If these or other facets of our personality are unrecognised or ‘buried’ they may be shown as dead. Sometimes we have killed the child or teenager in us because of difficulties or trauma at those ages, and these may be seen as a dead person in your dream, or even a corpse you find buried.

If the death is someone we know

Sometimes, as in the example below, this shows a desire to be free of someone; or unexpressed aggression; perhaps one’s love for that person has ‘died’. We often ‘kill’ our parents in dreams as we move toward independence. Or we may want someone ‘out of the way’ so we do not have to compete for attention and love.

During my teens I was engaged to be married when I found a more attractive partner and was in considerable conflict. Consistently I dreamt I was at my fiancé’s funeral until it dawned on me the dream was telling me I wanted to be free of him. When I gave him up the dreams ceased. Mrs D.

Death of oneself

Death is an extremely important event facing all of us, and yet it is a mystery, so we often experimentally confront and explore it in our dreams. A dream about one’s own death may also show a retreat from the challenge of life, or a split between mind and body.

The experience of leaving the body is sometimes an expression of this schism between the ego and one’s life processes. Other possibilities are to do with the death of old patterns of living – one’s ‘old self’, the loss of the boundaries that limit your awareness to an identity connected only to your body. This latter is usually a willing surrender of self to the process.

The next examples depict what was mentioned above. It is a way of reminding ourselves to do now what is deeply in us before we die – especially regarding love.

I dreamt I have a weak heart that will be fatal. It is the practice of doctors in such cases to administer a tablet causing one painlessly to go to sleep – die. I am completely calm and accepting of my fate. But I suddenly realise I must leave notes for my parents and children. I must let them know how much I love them, must do this quickly before my time runs out.’ Mrs M.

Talking with those who have passed on

A friend I know, Sheila, her mother died suddenly about three weeks ago, on the seventh I think. Not knowing this I received a message to ask for healing in her name. I surrendered in LifeStream and experienced dying, rising out of the death of the body, saying farewell to physical experience, meeting in wonder, loved ones, and opening to the pulse of the inner life. I knew from this that Sheila’s mother was dead or dying. When I telephoned I discovered she was dead. Never before had I honestly felt I was in contact with the dead. A new world has opened for me.

I know from personal experience what it is like to talk as the apparently dead to the living. This is because I had an extraordinary out of body experience. I had suddenly felt as if I were shooting upwards and experienced a feeling of coming out of pressure and was now free – like a cork out of a bottle. Then I was awake and looking down at my sleeping body and suddenly felt terrified (I realised afterwards it was terror that I was dying).

Then I remembered reading about experiences such as this and was laughing uncontrollably through release from terror. Then I was travelling across the German countryside where I was living, curled up with my knees to my chest, and found myself standing in our sitting room at home in London. It was such an astonishing experience I stood in shock looking down at my body, feeling it and trying to understand.

My body felt solid and real and I was dressed in outdoor clothes not my pyjamas. Then with great enthusiasm I looked up and saw my mother sitting alone knitting, our Alsatian dog lying asleep in front of the gas fire. I felt sure my mother would see me because I felt physically present and absolutely and vitally awake in a way I had never experienced before.

So I called out to her, “Mum, look what has happened.” She stopped knitting for a moment but obviously didn’t see me or hear me. So I felt if I shouted this would reach her. “Mum” I shouted, “look it’s me Tony”. There was no obvious sign that she had heard me, but two things did happen. One was that I saw or realised that she had an upstairs side of her and a downstairs side. Her upstairs (conscious) side had no awareness of me, but her downstairs side (unconscious) gave me a wonderful welcome and I had the awareness of us knowing each other in a formless love.

Then at the same time my dog must have heard me shout because he woke and came rushing to me and was so full of love for me he rushed around where I stood barking and showing his joy.

I later heard from my mother saying she had had been alone that night as my father was out, and she had seen the dog get up and bark and jump around for no apparent reason. I learned enormous and important lessons from that. I realised that having no physical body the human living cannot usually hear us. They need physical sound to know we are present, but yet another part of her knew and responded. So I saw that if she had thought of me and spoken to me I would know, even though she might not be able to hear my reply – unless she was a medium or learned to listen to thoughts. The reason being that in the body most people cannot communicate via thoughts.

Since then I have learned more and see that whenever we think of the dead with warm feelings we are immediately in their presence. So all you need to do is to imagine them and talk to them, as if you would if they were there physically. Talk to them saying whatever it is you want to communicate.

In dreams you will be able to receive their answers. I learned also that my dog could hear and see me, and that he loved me. I know it sounds simple but it is. Communication with the dead is easy, but we make such a big thing of it. Remember that at death we have no physical organs to speak through, so it all has to be done through thoughts. Also that at the level of thoughts we create huge difficulties by what we think. So a thought such as, “I am not a medium so I cannot talk with my dead son” is like a brick wall that we have created and cannot get through.

Thoughts and imagination are incredible powerful and are real at the level of dreams and the dead – and of course our own inner world. I think that reading this book would help you to clearly tell you about the after death state. http://www.amazon.com/Closer-Light-Melvin-Morse/dp/0804108323/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1307353595&sr=1-1-fkmr0

Thoughts about death

There is a disinclination to deeply consider death in North Western culture. What passes for this is the excuse that physical death ends all life, when such a statement is observable not true. Nothing that we can see in the physical world exists outside of evolutionary connections with past objects or forms. Our language, our body, our personality, have all arisen out of what existed previously. The past is obviously alive in the present, so how can there be death to anything except the limited awareness people consider to be themselves, their ego?

Death is the great adventure of the psyche. The great undertaking of individuation takes us into the meeting with our birth and infant traumas. We face the monsters created by our sense of being unloved, of parental desertion or betrayal. The demons of self-doubt, of self-destructiveness, of worldly struggle and fear spring up to meet us on the journey and we have to do battle. The negative habits of our lifetime pull at us or bind us to our past unless we can break free. The instinctive hungers and drives, of reactive fear, challenge us.

Can we take the tiny boat of our self-awareness across their swirling and torrential waters? Can we swim in the whirlpool of desire and use its energy to achieve a new awareness and transcendence? Can we meet the unconscious influences of the archetypes and find some ability not to be lost in them?

Even if we can, after all these great feats, should we find our way through them, lies not an upliftment of our being into wonder – but death! What will we make of it?

Example: I was walking with my two sons, who were young children about seven and nine. We were in a huge cave like tunnel that was natural, and reasonably light. The boys were running around on a raised bank about five feet high that was against the cave/tunnel wall. They were looking for my mother and father who had gone into some holes of potholes in the cave wall. As they looked I became worried that they would get lost down the holes, especially my youngest son. This was because I called them – shouted for them in my anxiety – to come to me and get away from the holes. I could see Peter and he had stopped searching, but David was out of sight. Then I shouted again very loudly and with an urgent tone, and David came,

I woke at this point and went to the toilet. As I lay down again, thinking about the dream, it seemed obvious it was about death, and the fact my mother and father had gone into the blackness of the hole, and never been seen again. I wondered if the boys searching was to do with my own search in the unconscious for my parents, and what is death? Or now, as I write, whether it is about the danger of death for David.

Semi awake the dream carried on. I called the police and civil authorities to search for my parents. They could find traces of their passage deep down into the holes, but no sign of them. Then I decided to equip myself and go alone. The problem was that the deeper I went, the more inertia I felt. I was then saved myself by the civil authorities.

Then I find my parents in the depths, but they are no longer physical. They have gone deep, like a burrowing creature, to undergo a transformation, and have left physical life.

Example: It seemed a terrifying thing to be dead and descends into a crypt, lifeless and without motivation. Here I felt or experienced a very strong sense almost like a dead body, if it had awareness, might feel in a crypt.

This is quite difficult to describe. I suppose what I was experiencing was a sort of ready made or social image of death. The sort of fears we have about it. It had in it the sense of dust, decay and cobwebs – the quiet dead silence of the tomb. But here, right in the midst of death, I had the sense of eternal life, of resurrection. It seemed to me as if you could not have one without the other, and this was the meaning in Christian doctrine where it says you must experience death to be reborn.

I am not sure if it was at this point that many images of the mixture of death and birth came on me. I had the experience that one needed to be bitten by the snake and die before one can be reborn into that transcendent life.

But what came next was a long experience of exploring the view of life arising out of being a biological bag of water, wind, and shit. This went on for image after image of rampant wet sexuality or eating, of seeing nothing in life except physical existence. Again it is difficult to describe because of the huge variety of the images and scenes. I suppose the underlying thing I was searching for in this series of feelings and images of the very physical side of life, such as eating and fucking, and the question was, is this all there is?

There was an underlying morbidity in what I saw and felt. I think it is all summed up in the much used phrase, “Life’s a bitch and then we die”. But I think my view that I wanted to find the transcendental in all the aspects of life, but it was difficult within the way I was looking at these feelings or parts of life experience.

I thought, or at least I came to the conclusion, that they expressed the preoccupation with the body and the physical that most of us have in present times. We are preoccupied with the physical and with examining it in detail. We are all trying to arrive at an understanding of the meaning of things, of death, through this minute examination of the physical world. The longer I was involved in these images, the more it seemed ridiculous in the light of everyday knowledge that all things rely on each other, and that everything exists as an integrated part of the cosmos.

The theme of the dream then changed. The day before this session I had a long conversation with B. She had described some of the people she works with or cares for in the old people’s home. B. had described how frightened some of the people are of dying. Although they had lived a long and varied life, they had still not come to terms with death. In the dream I realised I was looking for some way of communicating certainty about the goodness of death to B. I wanted to be able to look her in the eye and tell her she would be cared for.

Tracing it back, when we go into death through the jaws of the hunter, the lion, what do we meet? If we go back far enough we discover not anger or lust, but the lion’s desire to feed its cubs, or to survive. We find ourselves back in, back behind things. Behind the snake, behind this tiger, behind the human being, behind the decay. If we go back far enough we find ourselves in the awareness of the pack, in the species, in the formative forces of survival and reproduction that lies behind things. We find ourselves in that mystery, in the jungle where the essence of life pervades the various forms.

From that place the viewpoint that we are nothing but a physical form, that we are a small cog in the wheels of life, that we must put up with what we have, seems ridiculous. From that place we look at ourselves and see what a fantastic piece of equipment our body and mind is. As a conscious person we are right in the middle of everything. To say, “Oh God, we are nothing but a piece of slime, a helpless pawn in the hands of destiny,” is ridiculous. We are the culmination of everything that has existed before. We are that growing tip, that exploring awareness, in touch with unimaginable potential. We are everything that can be. What can we do?

The walking dead or rigor mortis

Aspects of the dreamer that are denied, perhaps through fear. Dancing with or meeting death or dark figure: Facing up to death and experiencing or exploring possible ways of relating to it. Death of someone close to us:

As explained above, this often refers to one’s own feelings or talents that have been hurt, denied, or ‘killed out’ by events and your response to them. The following example illustrates this.

‘My son comes in and I see he is unwashed and seems preoccupied and as if he has not cared for himself for some days. I ask him what is wrong. He tells me his mother is dead. I then seem to know she has been dead for days, and my two sons have not told anyone. In fact, my other son has not even accepted the fact.’ Anthony.

Anthony is a divorcee. Processing the dream, he realised the two sons are ways he is relating to the death of his marriage – the children’s mother.

McCall recalls dreaming about her father a month after he died in September 2000. She was at a joyous community gathering where a hot air balloon was being launched. She saw her father sitting on a bench with her sister, in front of a church. “He was talking and laughing just as he had been in life. He was always the life of the party.” She leaned over to her sister and asks, “Dad’s so funny. Does he know he’s dead?” “Yes, I think he does,” her sister answers.

To McCall, the dream was powerful and healing. “It made me feel that he was OK.” Although the unconscious has a very real sense of its eternal nature and continuance after physical death, our conscious personality seldom shares this. Also we all we all carry within us ideas, behaviours, talents and ways of life from those now dead. The farmer today unconsciously uses the collective experience of humanity in farming. What innovation he does today his children or others will learn and carry into the future.

This aspect of a life beyond the physical is shown in many dreams. For instance, a man I knew dreamt of walking with a friend of his. As they walked they came to a river. The friend crossed, but the dreamer was unable to. Even in the dream he felt crossing the river meant his friend had died. Some time later he discovered that his friend had died at about the time he experienced the dream.

Idioms: Dead and buried; dead from the neck up/or neck down; dead to the world; play dead; dead to the world; dead tired; drop dead; stone dead; at death’s door; brush with death; death wish; kiss of death; sick to death.

Useful questions and hints:

What feelings about death does this dream highlight?

If I imagined the dream being carried forward, how would I change it? (For help doing this see Taking the Dream Forward.)

Am I changing and my past self dying?

If this is someone I know what are my feelings about them – and where are those feelings arising in me at the moment?

What part of myself have I killed?

Did an aspect of my potential get buried or killed in the past – if so what?

See: Life and Death; Life After Death; The Archetype of Rebirth or Resurrection – Life and Death – An Amazing Near Death Experience – Death and Dreams – Levels of Awareness in Waking and Dreaming – Near Death Experiences Journal.

Archetype of Crucifixion

Self sacrifice is the fundamental influence in this archetype. It has been formed by countless people giving of their life, either in death or in long lives of self giving, such as mothers give to their children, or so many give in war or a life of service, that it has created a huge behavioural pattern in the unconscious of humanity. Therefore the symbol is not referring only to Christianity, it is an image that expresses a fundamental aspect of life itself. Many processes in nature are confronted by death, or the need for self giving, in creating the new, or giving life to another. A mother gives of her body and sometimes dies in the process of giving birth. In reproduction many animals die. The sun is dying as it pours out its energy, thus enabling life on earth.

In the Roman Catholic faith the symbol also represents something other than the presented one that Christ gave his life to redeem humanity. It is an image of the social organisation that Roman Catholicism was, and still is in some countries; namely an image of the sacrifice each individual makes of their identity as they submerge their personal needs in that of the community. To quote Ron, mentioned in my book Eye of Dreams:

I saw the church and its ministers as representing the power that causes a nation or group to become like an anthill, or like a group of animals such as the mole-rats,[i] to act as one organism. The individuals have to submerge their will and personal needs for the needs of the group. This was represented by Christ on the cross – the pain of sacrificing ones life for the community. This insight was deepened by seeing that all the functions of the individual were taken on by the church and state. For instance, to act as a single organism – the body of Christ – the worker cells would not function like brain cells. That is, they would not make decisions or decide policies. This was taken over by a special group of men acting as special cells – rather like in a termite’s nest where some termites are workers, some soldiers. They are specially reared and chemically stimulated to fulfil these roles. Worker bees are fed differently to the queen for instance. Thus in the group organism of human society there are different castes or levels of function. The means of stopping workers from taking independent decisions was by the use of force, threats, fear, murder – religious or social persecution or subjugation.

Looked at in this light religion was a very functional process that induced and enforced the life of the social organism. It acted as a self regulatory or healing function in the ‘body’ of the people also. It encouraged individuals to lose themselves in the good of the whole – to give their lives to it. The overall person – the collective person – was represented by Christ. Christ also represented the life of the individual as he or she connected with the mass of other ‘cells’. It also of course enabled many to hold on to power and wealth.

The sort of self sacrifice that Ron describes is one we all face in society. None of us are whole, because the functions of deciding major aspects of our life, what we will do with our resources, are undertaken by the state – in other words by a hierarchy of individuals – and we lose our autonomy, and are thus ‘crucified’ for the needs or redemption of others.

But dreams show other aspects of the crucifixion archetype, as with the following.

Somehow I knew we were all actors performing a show or drama. It was the crucifixion, and I was to be crucified. Yet at the same time I was simply watching it, and was someone else as well. But instead of being put on a cross, a figure on a slightly higher curve of the battlement, who was also me, carefully aimed an arrow at the sacrificial me. The bowman me was like an Eros figure, and the arrow a dart of love. It was fired and hit me in the heart. Yet in some way it never pierced me, as it had a rubber sucker on the end. Nevertheless the show was over. We all dispersed. With others I walked down a street with two friends, Bill and Ray, maybe as one person. He showed me a poem he had written about his son, or a heart shaped thing.

Here, crucifixion is linked with love, and of course deep love is a way of giving yourself or dying to another person. Such a death, one arising from self-giving, is shown in the symbolism of crucifixion as opening the door to sharing a wider life. In the death or willing sacrifice of ones ego there can enter awareness of how this links you with universal life. You experience how life itself is continually sacrificing itself. But there is no real pain as birth follows death, and both are part of a huge cycle.

The symbolism of the nails in the hands and feet depict how our personal awareness, and the divine at our core, are nailed to physical life, and through being willing to work at the common tasks necessity demands, we experience the falling away of personal desires. The nail holes in the feet are the willingness to accept everyday life and earthbound consciousness, instead of struggling to rise above common humanity. The binding clothes are the restrictions of sensual consciousness as it falls away.

Remember, this is just one archetypical behaviour that has been etched into the human racial memories, so there is no suggestion of what is right or wrong here.

Yet another facet of crucifixion lies in our vulnerability as human beings. Our personal awareness is at the centre of all it is touched or impacted by. Here is the agony of personal crucifixion being met by one individual on their journey through the darkness of our times.

I had been talking with my wife about where and how do we find purpose, real manhood and womanhood in today’s world. We talked about past cultures, primitive peoples, and how many of them had the dignity and shining quality of manhood and womanhood.

I felt the situation wasn’t a simple one though, and did not necessarily mean we had to learn from the primitive. Because when the primitives, such as the Kalahari Bushmen, were stripped of their myths and fantasies, they became smashed beings who lost their purpose, their quality, their manhood, their soul. Many of such primitives became alcoholics or lost people. And aren’t modern men and women primitives who have been shorn of their ancient fantasies, religions, ways of life, territory, securities, and beliefs? But on feeling this I knew we cannot go back. We must go forward to survival with some wholeness.

What came out of this as I explored inwardly was a reply to these questions. That is, there is no way of life, whether as ancient peoples, modern human beings, hunters, intellectuals, business person, social success or failure, that will in itself give us purpose or meaning or wholeness. There is no answer to our problem in that direction. No religion, no practice or philosophy will give us that assurance and quality the primitive had by being protected by their deep involvement in their religion and traditional way of life.

The answer as I saw it is to go through the agony of completing the job that has been started. If we are primitives who are smashed because we have lost most of our fantasies that protected as from the reality, awfulness and wonder of our situation, then we must complete the process and let the rest of our fantasies fall away until we cut through to the wonder, so we can really look at reality. We must come to terms with our situation. That is the maturity and quality of manhood and womanhood today. After meltdown it is only what is left that has any survival value.

As this was happening I realised that is the meaning of Jesus’ cry – Father, father, why have you forsaken me? It’s because at the moment of aloneness when we realise there is no external being to save us, there is no longer anything but what we are, then we are stripped of all fantasy and external aids.

That is the atmosphere many of us are in at this moment. Our beliefs in anything except the physical have been stripped away. What has been put in their place are statements told as truths that there is no mystery to human life except it be chemical or hormonal. There is no reality except death. In a recent copy of the magazine New Scientist there is a reader’s letter in response to a previous statement about there being no evidence for life beyond the death of the body. It says:

I contest your statement that the “so-called ‘Lazarus phenomenon’ has never been documented in brain-dead patients” (5 August, p 6). If a flat electroencephalogram is taken as an indication of brain death, then there are documented cases. An article in December 2001 in The Lancet (vol 358, p 2039) refers to the case of a young woman ‘who had complications during brain surgery for a cerebral aneurysm. The EEG of her cortex and brainstem had become totally flat. After the operation, which was eventually successful, this patient proved to have had a very deep NDE [near death experience]’. This included an out-of-body experience, during which she observed things that happened during the period of the flat EEG and that were subsequently verified. (From issue 2567 of New Scientist magazine, 02 September 2006, page 18)

Although such evidence exists for a reality other than our existence only as chemicals and hormones, bones and muscles, our culture largely denies it. This denial is another form of crucifixion of your personal potential and the reality in which you exist. This is a description of it as met by someone being torn by this social denial:

Crucifixion is being buffeted, torn by all the fears, angers, hates, prejudices human beings are heir to. There’s no creator we are told by our pundits. We are only maggots. There is no life after death. Crucifixion is the meeting of the fears and darkness this leads to. It is to meet the death of all that ones inner life cries out for. It is the courage to meet the awful emptiness of being assured we are a meaningless lump of flesh and bones.

As I went through this it really did feel as if I had at last understood the meaning of that cry for father from the cross, and the taunts of the mob. The mob are all our own inbuilt doubts, fears, angst, cynicism that lash out at our life process. Our fears have to hit us to test the strength and validity of our existence. Also the fears we breed in us need to test that essence in us that shines out the sense of a wider and significant life; so they shout, “Crucified him. Crucify him!” They need an actual experience of testing and death to discover what the truth is; what lies beyond. And the cry from the cross is the meeting with the reality of that human condition. We are not divine. There is no father to help us. We are alone. Death confronts us. We reach rock bottom. We fully accept our humanity. Then comes death and all falls away except that Reality innate in all things.

All those feelings and stages are implicit in the archetype of crucifixion. So many men and women have trod this path of being ready to walk directly into the darkness of personal death, because life as it is painted by the extant philosophy and religion have taken away all personal connection with the underlying reality of life in them. Life is a spirit that never takes form yet is in all form. It is forever dancing absorbing experience, and only if we let drop all the things we hold onto as security can we know it as it dances. When we touch that power and it leads us to crucifixion, then we are led into an initiation in which we meet all our illusions and fears and come face to face with death. And that exposure to conscious death is a doorway to new life.

Useful Questions and Hints:

I have met many difficult life circumstance, but have I allowed myself to surrender to their impact to find what lies behind such fears and pains?

If crucifixion is the dropping of everything, have I let go of my beliefs and prejudices as well as my pains?

Have I experienced such a death and rebirth in my life, and if have, what died in myself and what was added?

See LifeStream.

[i] This refers to a species of mole that live a communal life with only one fertile female. The others are dominated via a chemical substance in the dominant female’s urine. This makes them infertile workers, actually producing physical change.

Archetype of Christ

Although people generally think of Christ as an historical figure, as a human experience he depicts powerful influences acting upon your personality. For a start, Christianity is a huge social and political force in the world. Many of us as children are educated to accept its beliefs or we meet its influence in one way or another. Therefore Christ in our dreams often depicts this enormous influence and how we relate to it – the influence can be many sided, from a recognition of the best in oneself to the hatred and anger about what organised Christianity has done to many.

Although people generally think of Christ as an historical figure, Christ is never that – even though pictures and paintings depict Christ as a human being. That is because we have been taught that Jesus and Christ are the same person. But it clearly says that when Jesus was baptised something immense happened to him. “Now when all the people were baptised, it came to pass, that Jesus also was baptised – of John in Jordan – and praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven which said, ‘Thou art my beloved Son: in thee I am well pleased.’ (Luke 3:21-22).”

It tells us that the heavens opened and something from the cosmos entered Jesus and transformed him into having Christ Consciousness. For Christ was an aspect of Godness and had always existed. It is easier to see it rather like our growth. When we were babies we grew and entered another level of awareness and ability called childhood. Later another huge change entered us and we became adolescents – again with a different mental and emotional state.

Many people have attained the change of Christ consciousness. It is a further stage of human growth. As an example Siddartha became the Buddha when he experienced such a great change. In different languages this change has different names such as Krishna Consciousness. It might shock some people to see Christ linked with Buddha and Krishna – if so you have a lot of growing to do and if you do you too can enter Christ consciousness.

Like any of the world’s great religious figures, Christ can also be a very potent compensatory symbol. Each of us have feeling responses to events. Some events lead to a pleasurable response, others to a painful response. As children, and often as adults, we are largely at the mercy of events as to whether our life is experienced as painful or pleasurable. But there is also a way of creating our own response that a few of us use consciously. If we are lonely or depressed for instance, we may read a book, go out with a friend or watch a film, stimulating feelings that displace the loneliness or despair. This ability to produce positive or different feelings is often seen in the dream process. By holding in mind an image connected with hope and love, feelings will be produced that will compensate in some measure for pain or depression we may be feeling.

But Christ is used to compensate for what may be felt as crushing or defeating life circumstances or inner despair. Such compensation may also be used to deal with things missing from ones life, such as a sexual partner or social achievement.

However, being able to achieve Christ Consciousness, or Buddha Consciousness, or even Krishna Consciousness, is much more that a compensation, it is a transformation of ones life from one in which misery is often a part to one of which is symbolised in the New Testament as walking on water. If we take it out of its symbolism it tells us that our emotions that can be stormy and difficult to deal with can be dealt with and even tamed by the immense power we hold within us, which most of us have lost contact with. I am talking about a huge force that can be contacted or allowed into ones life. Without it we are often powerless to deal with negative feelings, and so many people take the path of suicide. But with it we can meet them easily, walking over the surface of such stormy emotions.

The fundamental power of Christ as an archetypal force lies in a that direction however. As an archetype Christ enters our life with powers of redemption, of transformation, as an aid to lead us out of awful life situations, and a type of love transcending the human limitations of jealousy and dependence.

It it is a universal consciousness which is a part of every person, whatever their beliefs. To become aware of it we must somehow have broken our heart and self so be aware of such a huge awareness. See Ages of Love.

Example: It is difficult to convey the immediacy of these experiences deep in the sleep state. Over and over I experienced fantasies, the drama, of being a sacrifice. As one who expressed the new ideas, the new consciousness, I was beaten and smashed to death because I was a threat to the old instinctive order. But the fragments of my strewn body, my flesh, were eaten by those who had killed me. And my flesh was like Seeds that grew within those who devoured, and became in them the new awareness they had sought to destroy. In another of the series I was a willing sacrifice. Through the stress and ritual of being willingly lead to death, I would receive the new consciousness and in some way bring it to my people.

I am going through masses of evolutionary feelings. The struggle to develop self-consciousness, and how the Messiah was first of all a fantasy, then an embodiment of this by individuals. Then how other people lived certain aspects of it, and were taken to be the Messiah, the Krishna, whatever. They did bring into the body another type of awareness, that mankind had been struggling toward for so long. This is where the mystery of the birth of Christ comes from. Why there is no real historical person. Why there is so much myth and legends surrounding such events. It is the embodiment of something mankind needed so much, to help them out of their crisis into the next revolutionary level.

Often overlooked in this influence is the power to look at oneself and life very clearly, very honestly, without hiding behind excuses or self deceptions. Perhaps more than anything else though, Christ is a cultural image depicting the power of our own highest possibilities. It is the outreach to us of collective human love.

Christ is not the only historical figure with these associations. Krishna and Shiva in the Indian culture, Mohammed in Islamic culture, Odin in the Viking age, and Quetzalcoatl/ Kukulkán/ Gukumatz in the South American culture have the same sort of power. Some aspects of the Buddha are approached for redemption and there are many saviour heroes from other cultures such as Anansi in Africa, Cúchulainn in Eire, Osiris in Egypt and Hercules in Greece. Apollonius of Tyana is also recorded as living a sacred life. But Christianity is simply a new expression of an ancient theme.

Mithra was born in a cave, and on the 25th December. He was born of a Virgin. He travelled far and wide as a teacher and illuminator of men. His great festivals were the winter solstice and the Spring equinox (Christmas and Easter). He had twelve companions or disciples (the twelve months). He was buried in a tomb, from which however he rose again; and his resurrection was celebrated yearly with great rejoicings. He was called Savior and Mediator, and sometimes figured as a Lamb; and sacramental feasts in remembrance of him were held by his followers.

Osiris was born on the 361st day of the year, say the 27th December. He too, like Mithra and Dionysus, was a great traveller. As King of Egypt he taught men civil arts, and “tamed them by music and gentleness, not by force of arms”; he was the discoverer of corn and wine. But he was betrayed by Typhon, the power of darkness, and slain and dismembered. “This happened,”says Plutarch, “on the 17th of the month Athyr, when the sun enters into the Scorpion” (the sign of the Zodiac which indicates the oncoming of Winter). His body was placed in a box, but afterwards, on the 19th, came again to life, and, as in the cults of Mithra, Dionysus, Adonis and others, so in the cult of Osiris, an image placed in a coffin was brought out before the worshippers and saluted with glad cries of “Osiris is risen.” “His sufferings, his death and his resurrection were enacted year by year in a great mystery-play at Abydos.” Quoted from Pagan and Christain Creeds by Edward Carpenter

“Such a myth, however, consists of symbols that have not been invented consciously. They have happened. It was not the man Jesus who created the myth of the god-man. It existed for many centuries before his birth. He himself was seized by this symbolic idea, which, as St. Mark tells us, lifted him out of the narrow life of the Nazarene carpenter.” Quoted from Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung

I know I hung on the wind-swept tree Nine nights through, Pierced by a spear, dedicated to Odin, I myself to myself.

There is, above all, the self-sacrifice of the hero-saviour: as Toynbee puts it in A Study of History, ‘A very god who dies for different worlds under diverse names-for a Minoan World as Zagreus, for a Sumeric World as Tammuz, for a Hittite World as Attis, for a Scandinavian World as Balder, for a Syriac World as Adonis (“Our Lord”), for an Egyptian World as Osiris, for a Shi’i World as Husayn, for a Christian World as Christ.’

Depending upon the culture we were raised in, we will unconsciously put an image to the power of change and transformation that we experience. People in all ages, all cultures and all social circumstances have experienced what is often felt to be a divine influence touching them in some way.

I believe through observation that such long held and powerful traditional beliefs are based on something functional. The description of compensation above is an example of this. To be able to survive crushing life experience is a real achievement, not an imagined one, and is therefore functional. Using an image to evoke hope and motivation doesn’t make it less of an achievement. But the archetype links with patterns of love and strength actually lived by others. They are then patterns remaining in the collective experience of us and can be accessed. When we touch these powerful racial memories we may clothe them in the image of our cultural hero or saviour.

To be clear about this, the power that is found is a release of our own potential emerging from our core self. So in this sense the image of Christ is a graphic presentation of our own innate wonder. The patterns of love and strength mentioned above, and other behaviours lived by past individuals that remain in collective memory, offer keys or clues as to how to release this innate potential. That such keys, as well as ones innate potential, are often clothed in symbols and traditional imagery, is simply because we have not made such parts of our potential or heritage clearly conscious. They thus emerge from our unconscious clothed in whatever imagery or ideas we can accept or allow. See The Inner Path of Christ.

So what does the archetype of Christ the Redeemer and Good Shepherd mean in this sense?

To understand this we must first remember that our ego, the sense that we have of being a distinct person, is not one and the same thing as our body’s biological processes, or of our deep psychological processes. We all have some understanding of this because we can observe in ourselves or in others, that we – our personality – may want something that is very much against what our body wants. People with eating disorders for instance may actually die from malnutrition. People who have a fear of sex may constantly fight or repress their sexual urge. A person is often at odds with the natural processes and urges that underlie their conscious ego.

Norman MacKenzie explains this very well in his book . Dreams and Dreaming. Writing about the clinical use of LSD to help patients deal with various forms of neurosis, he says that the drug enabled a massive observation of how people’s mind worked, and how people related to their unconscious drives. When a patient first took LSD one of the commonest reactions was massive anxiety. This degree of anxiety usually arises only when we are threatened physically or mentally. The patient fears the drug is robbing them of control and will overwhelm them. In fact what is happening is that the repressive defences the person uses to keep their inner drives and processes under control are being relaxed. See The Two Powers Explained.

People relate to this threat in two major ways. They either fight to keep control, and employ all manner of techniques such as keeping their attention focused outwardly by such things as talking, walking about, drawing, holding their breath or dancing – or they surrender to what is being experienced. To meet the parts of ones nature that have previously been pushed into unconsciousness, one needs to surrender in some degree. If the person fights the loss of control as the new material from within is emerging, it sometimes feels as if they are disintegrating. Their body may feel as if it is changing or dying, and they are losing themselves.

Below are two descriptions from people who used LSD therapeutically that illustrates these different responses.

It didn’t happen at first, but gradually I began to feel that if I relaxed I would not be able to hold back my emotions, that I would do something that would be seen as crazy. So I sat holding onto myself, literally tensing my muscles to hold back whatever might happen to me. Time seemed to stretch and I felt as if I would never get out of this tension and difficulty. I just had to sit through it, live through it, and hope there would be an end. I also wanted to get away, but I was frightened I would get lost, like I was a child of four or five. Maybe that’s how I felt at that age, so I had to stop myself from doing what I wanted to do. A.K.

Here is someone else’s description of a similar situation.

Early in the session I started having fantasies about being attacked. Each time it happened I put the fantasy aside because I couldn’t see why I would be having these feelings that I was being attacked. There were a lot of images flowing into my mind also about the horror of life in general – babies abused, children murdered, men and women shot or tortured. The fantasies returned and several men attacked me and were trying to drag me off somewhere against my will. As the fantasy progressed, or replayed, I began to realise that it only appeared like an attack because I was resisting the process. In fact the men wanted to show me something that was important to me. They were being quite gentle, but because of my resistance, it felt to me like an aggressive act. I then let myself be carried off by the men, and began to feel as if a great chunk of my nature has been held back since childhood because of anxiety. In fact I had been frightened to ‘live’ this part of me. I had held so much of myself back throughout most of my life that I constantly felt there was something I was missing and had to search for. But it wasn’t an external thing – it was the me I had denied. B.M.

AK was using tensions and experiencing fears he had developed in childhood to hold back feelings that he had been taught were not acceptable. In BM’s experience he learned to move beyond such tensions and fears.

In observing such struggles in thousands of people, the doctors and clinicians working with them saw that no matter what the patient was experiencing, even if they felt completely overwhelmed for a while and were lost in their fears and emotions, something within them was learning from the experience and attempting to integrate not only the insights gained, but also the various parts of their nature that were in conflict or split. Mackenzie says, ‘No one knows what type of ‘thinking’ this may be. It appears to be different both from ‘reality thinking’ and ‘autistic thinking,’ from the patterns of conscious thought and the imagery of fantasy – a kind of bridge between two types of mental process.’

Jung observed something similar in the psyche. He called it the Transforming Principle, or the self-regulating action, which constantly attempts psychic growth. He stated that one can watch this at work by noting many dreams from the same individual over a period of time. When one does this ‘tendencies become visible, then vanish, then return again. …… one can observe a sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency at work, creating a slow, imperceptible process of psychic growth-the process of individuation.’

Most religions call it the power of God at work in ones life, and many of them teach that if one surrenders to it, one will be healed and made whole. Different people and cultures represent or depict this transforming power within them in their own way. It is often represented as Christ, but equally as well as something more abstract. However, whatever we wish to name it, there is in us a potential that has in it more than we presently know of ourselves, and it has the power to heal and transform. It is observable that healing or therapy proceeds by a series of problem-solving movements. As soon as one difficulty is reviewed and removed, another appears, waiting in line to take its place.

In BM’s experience he learned to move beyond such tensions and fears. But also he says something that is at the heart of what this archetype brings. He says, “It wasn’t an external thing – It was the ‘me’ I had denied.”

That is the heart of the Christ archetype. It holds in it the you that may have been crushed, denied, traumatised, repressed, in some way held back from emerging as a reality in your life. It is the potential you hold within you that has not been allowed to flower. It is the very best of what you are, not some distant possibility that you have to get from outside yourself. See: life’s little secrets; compensation theory; self-regulation dreams and fantasy;.

Here is another personal description. This time not from an LSD session, but from a man allowing the transforming action to take place while fully awake and without drugs. This makes clear what it is like to confront the power of transformation within.

In the previous week I had met a feeling I could not account for, which had left me wondering what was happening. I had the very strong impression that I had killed a man and now had the guilt of blood on my hands. This time in the group, when I surrendered, something I could never have suspected happened. I was standing with my eyes closed, but it seemed I could see, because the spontaneous mental imagery was so clear, that I was standing under a clear night sky, with the stars brilliant above. But there was a star more brilliant than the others that fell to Earth, and I knew it was something wonderful and special so hurried to see what it was. Others had also seen it, simple rural people like myself. What we found was a baby. But the wonder of it was so much I fell on my knees and couldn’t stop myself crying out again and again – A baby! A baby!

The tears and the cries were because I had the clear feeling or knowledge, a direct knowing, that all of the heavens, all of life’s mystery, had come to life in this baby. And to actually know this, to feel the impact of it, was almost more than I could bear. But part of the amazement was that this was every baby born. It wasn’t just one special baby. It was my own birth too! All the mystery of life was born in me. I sobbed with the pain and wonder of it.

Then the scene changed and I was standing by a dirt road. There were lots of people lining the road waiting. I didn’t know what for. Then excitement rose as a man came walking along the road toward us. He looked very ordinary to me. But as he got near he looked right at me and a huge feeling of love swept through me. I knew this man loved me in a way I had never been loved before. Then he walked directly to me and took hold of my hands and said, ‘You are my disciple’.

I stumbled backwards away from him. The love was too much, too painful. Looking into his eyes I knew I had been born with all that love, but I had killed it in myself. The blood on my hands was because I had murdered Him/myself. I had crushed the flower of my sexuality through fear. I had denied my own wonder and value in the world, looking to others for guidance. I had killed Christ in me – Christ who was the splendour of my own life and love if I dared to live it – my own birthright. But he had touched my hands, and I went to each of the people in the group and put my hands on them, trying to rub some of that magic onto them. Thomas.

As can be seen from Thomas’s description, the image of Christ holds in it not only the power of self-revelation for him, but also the relationship of teacher to disciple, and transforming love for one in need of wholeness. Thomas cannot help but think of Christ as separate from himself, even though at the same time he realises with deep emotion, that he is gazing at and being touched by his own wholeness, his own potential. See: compensation theory; the fundamental process.

This paradox needs to be remembered not only when meeting the Redeemer archetype, but almost any archetype. Also implicit in this meeting is the possibility that because confronting ones own wholeness and seeing ones own guilt, or the smallness of oneself, can lead to great personal transformation, it may lead the present personality, as it is at the moment, to dying and being left behind. Thus the meeting with Christ may include a personal experience of death and resurrection.

So the experience of meeting Christ may be a representation of the denied force of joyous life within – denied out of attempting to live social or religious rules and regulations, or social pressure to conform. Therefore, because ultimately we are an integral part of the universe, and have no existence outside of it, when we meet Christ/our wholeness and potential, we also become aware in some degree of the hugeness we are a part of or an expression of. We meet a sense of eternity, an awareness of the symbiotic – or cooperative processes or forces – operative in human life and the cosmos.

The Sunday School or Church Christ

This is another aspect of the Christ archetype and depicts social norms, the generally accepted morals and social rules. This ‘Christ’ comes about because the church tends to represent traditional values and national history, and attempts to press people to live these values. The dreamer may have a child-like relationship with this Christ, or if attempting to be self responsible, be in conflict with it. Some people find this Christ has a castrating role in their life, and flee in horror. In fact this aspect of social indoctrination may lead to such a burden of guilt and suppression that it can create psychic cripples. Trying to do all the ‘right’ things may lead us to the point where ‘we can’t say no to a glass of water without a pang of guilt.’

Two of the great forces that push at the human soul or psyche are, firstly, social pressure, such as the moral norm; and secondly, biological pressures such as the sex drive. Individuals may fight a lifelong battle with one or the other of these. The social criminal typifies battle with social authority pressures and rules; the ascetic and the bulimic battle with biological drives.

These two forces can be seen in the symbols of Christ and Mary Magdalene. The battle of these two immense forces is not really won until there is the marriage or unity between the two. The following dream and its exploration illustrate this dynamically.

I was in the basement of the house where I lived in London. I had taken some floorboards up because they were rotten. Underneath I saw a large white serpent or worm, somehow connected with a dead evil woman like a force of destruction and evil. I seemed to understand the evil could corrupt all of London, that it lived in a great underground lake that existed under all of London. I poked at the serpent with a piece of wood and it came to life and plunged into the earth. There seemed to be an air filled hole that I poked into and the wood I was using was wrenched away from my hands.

My family thought I was crazy because I was trying to tell them about this and sent for a doctor. I was very pleased to see him because he was very unbiased though, not believing – nor disbelieving. I explained my experience and feelings. With him there I dared to poke at the floor with a long scaffold pole. The pole was ripped from my grasp by some force below. Then we tied the pole to a beam and it ripped part of the beam off. I felt there was enough power to tear down my house if I had used it as an anchor. Then I saw Christ standing on my right, and the terrifying woman on my left, and they came together and the evil was neutralised – but so was the power of Christ. Mathew

Mathew saw the Christ figure as the moral norm in the society he was raised; a morality he had struggled with all his life. The woman he experienced as the urges such as his sexual needs, with which he had also struggled. When Christ and the woman merged he felt enormous peace.

The positive aspect of ‘Sunday School Christ’ is that prior to maturing enough to take realistic self and social responsibility, people need guidelines for behaviour. They often yearn for security or certainty. Religion in the form of powerful positive declarations of ‘truth’, supply this need for many people. For such people, making personal decisions in the face of the ever shifting external situations is enormously stressful. So organised and dogmatic religion is of great strength to them.

The Ideal Christ

This is yet another facet of this archetype, and is the psychological process which causes us not to take responsibility for our own highest ideals; our own yearnings for the good; our own most powerful urges arising against what we see as evils in the world. This influences us to wait for a sign from Christ or God in our dream or waking life in order to gain authority, or to overcome the anxiety associated with the urges. We want God to say we should act in a certain way because we are not willing to be self responsible. We deny in ourselves the core self and its divinity.

Example: ‘I stood outside a castle. It was closed and guarded by soldiers in armour. Wondering how to get in I thought that if I dressed and acted as a soldier I would be allowed entrance. It worked and inside Christ met me and said he had important work for me to do.’ Sonia.

The closely guarded secret is Sonia’s own impulses to do some sort of socially creative work. She doesn’t want to own them as her own. It is much easier if she can say ‘Christ told me to do this.’ In this way she avoids direct encounter with opposition and has a feeling that she has greater authority than her own. Joan of Arc might well be seen in this light.

The Healing Christ

The Christ archetype has powerful healing influence for many people.

Example: ‘A fierce battle was raging with bullets flying. I immediately fell down and ‘played dead’. It wasn’t that I was hurt in any way, but I didn’t want to be at any risk in the fight. As I lay there I saw a tall well built man in soldiers uniform walk to me. He gave no sign of any fear concerning the bullets, and quietly knelt beside me. I felt he was Christ, but was confused by him being a soldier. He placed a hand on my back and gradually worked his fingers under the shell of a large limpet type creature that I had never before known was parasitically attached to my back. I could feel him pull it away, but knew its tentacles still ran right into my chest. It seemed and alien had entered me. He then sat me up and told me how I could rid myself of the tentacles and so be healed.’ Peter Y.

Peter, whose dream this was, had a debilitating psychosomatic illness at the time of the dream, causing pain where the tentacles ran. The shell is his defences against feeling his own hurts and inner conflicts. The dream shows him contacting a strength which is not afraid of his internal battlefield or conflicts, and can show ways of healing real human problems. The healing rests upon the dreamer’s conscious action, not Christ’s, suggesting the dreamer taking responsibility for his own situation. Peter realised he had been avoiding his own internal battles, but felt he had found a strength – in the Big Man – which would support his efforts to find healing. In fact he met his conflicts and grew beyond his ailments.

Peter’s conflicts were between his love for his children and his love for another woman. The Christ he met was his own undammed life, the flood of loving sexuality, the strength to burst through social rules and regulations because love or life pushes. When we find it in ourselves we don’t give a hang about bullets, death, right or wrong, because we have a sense of our own integral existence within life, and our own rightness and place in eternity.

The Integral or Cosmic Christ

Each of us have, perhaps deep in their unconscious, a sense of connectedness with the whole, with the cosmos. Perhaps it is best to call this our own wholeness, which incorporates all the light and darkness in us, all the expressed and the potential. We may be little aware of this. We may be denying it sceptically as Lester is in the example below.

Example: ‘I am a journalist reporting on the return of Christ. He is expected on a paddle steamer going upstream on a large river. I am very sceptical and watch disciples and followers gather on the rear deck. The guru arrives, dressed in simple white robes. He has long, beautiful auburn hair and beard, and a gentle wise face. He begins to tap a simple rhythm on a tabla or Indian drum. It develops into complex intermingling of orchestral rhythms as everyone joins in. I now realise he is Christ, and feel overwhelmed with awe as I try to play my part in the music. I’m tapping with a pen and find myself fumbling. A bottle or can opener comes to me from the direction of Christ. I try to beat a complementary rhythm, a small part of a greater, universal music.’ Lester S.

Finding this inner connection with things can enrich all that we do in life, even if it is a very humble thing like Lester’s can opener. The awareness of connectedness and wholeness brings with it a realisation of taking part in the unimaginably grand drama of life. It gives a feeling, no matter what the state of our body, crippled or healthy, that we have something that makes any faults insignificant. It doesn’t take all the difficulties out of life, but it is a wonderful companion on the way. We come to know that at base we are a wonderful shining being, and that life and its circumstances and events, are a way in which we are learning to let that internal wonder shine out.

Another way of looking at this is by seeing Christ as a process. Christ might then be seen as a collective identity arising in the consciousness of humanity. This relates to us as individuals much as our identity relates to the cells of our body. Just as our identity survives the death of billions of cells in our lifetime, so the Christ consciousness survives our death and change, integrates our experience, transcends our function, and has a personal relationship with us.

Example: We are each living that mystery play – that mysterious drama of which the Christian myth is a summary. Each in our own way play out that drama we call life. Each of us give birth to or abort the divine in us. Each of us chooses whether we are going to wash our hands of meeting that splendid call of our own being, or whether we will crucify it on our own political, monetary, or power hungry demands. Each of us makes the decision of whether we will denounce our relationship with the love that is in our own heart.

We don’t have to be a saint to live that Mystery. We are living it now! We live every tiny part of the story. For some of us, one tiny part of that grand story becomes a central theme for us — motherhood, the loss of the lover, the departed parents, the betrayal, the struggle with the forces of evil, or that grand search for the beloved.

What part of the story are you experiencing? Is it the raising of the dead? The healing of personal blindness? Feeding the hunger of the multitude? Working in the garden of life? Being a shepherd?

In dreams and religion Christ is also represented as the son of the Cosmos or God. This aspect of Christ possibly comes about because of a sense many people have that the origin of their personal life is from beyond the Earth. This powerful urge to see oneself as more than a physical body is symbolised by Christ, a being who transcends physical boundaries. Perhaps this is why the film ET is so moving for many.

Human beings of all ages have, when opening to the influence of their larger perceptions during meditation, trance, prayer, or drug use, experienced awareness of love existing behind the creation of things, a love that is the source of the big-bang itself, a love that willingly died that we might exist. Humanity became aware of this at a particular stage of the development of self-awareness. The arrival at this stage of self-awareness was expressed in what we know as the historical Jesus. The internal awareness of the love that gave us being was projected outwardly and became the Christian Myth.

As one man who encountered Christ said, “Christ is like the sun, a principle of nature. No one can own it, although different individuals or groups can relate to it or use it in various ways, as happens with electricity. The Roman Catholic Church cornered the market so to speak. Prior to the Council of Nicaea there was a free market. You could say the church fenced off a beach and started charging people to go to it on Sundays. And there are different names for this natural principle in different languages.”

See: meetings with Christ; religion and dreams; Archetype of the self.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What aspects of the Christ archetype, if any, am I influenced by?

Am I repulsed or held by the influence of the ‘live by these rules’ pressure?

Am I helped by the belief there is a divine loving presence?

Do I feel the power of an inner wonder and potential I am allowing into my life?

In recognising my relationship with Christ, can I evolve it to something more satisfying?

Try Talking with a Dream Character.

Archetypes

A page with all Archetypes listed.

Although the word archetype has a long history, Carl Jung used it to express something specific he observed in human nature. He said the archetypes are a tendency or instinctive trend in the human unconscious to express certain motifs or themes. These themes, such as death and rebirth are found throughout history and present day cultures. Jung saw them as universal, and as existing innately within what he called the collective unconscious. They are particularly apparent in religious beliefs, in literature and in the arts.

One of the important features of archetypes is they are not learned behaviour, but behaviour that is in some way innate, or unconsciously formulated or absorbed. For instance while walking near a sea-front with my wife, we saw a small boy running frantically and crying. It was near a road, so I picked him up in case he ran blindly in front of a car. As I held him his legs were still moving as if he were running. He had lost his mother and was completely panicked. As I held him I could hear his mother calling for him. I shouted back and she came and collected him, assuring him of her care.

The child did not have to learn how to feel afraid if he was separated from his parents. He didn’t have to be taught how to feel terror and to do all he could to regain contact. It is a universal response for children to feel emotional pain at the loss of a parent, and to do all they can physically or symbolically, to re-establish contact. You could say the boy was experiencing archetypical behaviour. This innate behaviour has probably arisen out of millions of years during which to be separated from ones parents or group meant probable death.

This bonding behaviour is common to most mammals, and is an example of archetypal responses. The urge to find a partner and reproduce is also an archetype, as is nest or home building, caring for young, and the urge to gain respect within ones social group. We each have an innate urge toward wholeness in some form, and toward the emergence and flowering of our own being. We each face such experiences, along with birth and death, in one way or another, in common with all other human beings past or present. The enormity of such experiences in our life are often expressed in themes of art, myths, or symbols such as the mandala, the cross, sunrise and sunset. The little boy’s loss of his parents and the enormity of what he felt is seen in many folk tales such as Babes in the Wood. Such symbols and stories remind us in some degree of the mystery involved in the fact that not only are we as an individual sharing the experience of being a man or woman, but this has happened to people since the beginning of the human race, and will continue after our life has ended. So although our life is a personal event, it is also part of an inconceivably immense continuum. Our personal life plays out themes or patterns which have been lived and added to thousands or millions of times before.

It is this collective experience which can be considered as the archetype. For instance if we could superimpose all the male faces, and all the female faces, of everyone alive today in two separate images, the resulting images would be the graphic archetype of a human male and a human female. The images would include all the features, all the racial types, all degrees of intelligence and honour. In terms of such experiences as puberty, marriage and death, the collective human experience creates such an archetype. The difficult question is how?

But it must be understood that the archetypes are all originated by human responses and behaviour – or at least by the behaviour of life forms on this planet. The holy, the devilish are all expressions of ourselves which we project as outer figures.

Jung differentiated between instincts and archetypes however. Although both are universal potentialities within us, the instincts are inherited tendencies toward behaviour, such as sex and the flight or fight response. An archetype Jung said is an inherited tendency toward certain mental or feeling responses. For instance the myth of the hero/heroine or saviour figure is world-wide and in all cultures. Because Jung believed that dreams frequently express the archetypal tendencies within the individual, he often turned to myths, fairy stories or religious motifs, to illustrate the contents of a dream. Seeing such themes arise in the dreams of people who had not studied world religions or mythology, Jung believed that far from religious and mythological stories having been consciously invented by historical authors, they had arisen directly from the unconscious in dreams or visions, and had simply been reported. Anyone who has spent time exploring the depths of their own dreams will find sympathy with and proof of this view. But as such they are still arising from human experience, but one which originates in the unconscious ability to have an overview of human experience and provides images of its findings

However, there is another important way of considering archetypes. It is that certain processes in nature and therefore in human life, reflect processes that are part of the very foundation of cosmic functioning. For instance stars are born from the death of other stars and solar systems. Birth follows death. Resurrection and new life arises out of cataclysmic destruction. Also, the very structure of our universe, as understood in quantum physics, shows how the immanent, the here and now, the limited and the physically real, is at the same time one and the same as the timeless and transcendent.

The personal experience of being a woman or man, of birth, childhood and death, are all expressions of cosmic processes, and can be understood much more deeply when seen as such. These archetypal patterns are true not only in cosmic events, but also in the most minute of human affairs.

Another way of understanding an archetype and how it came about is to consider something like a house. The earliest of human types erected shelters when these were needed. Some of the apes did the same. Over the millennia since those early beginnings people have seen what was done in the past and developed it. The old types of houses are still built around the central essence of what those early house builders had in mind. But now the house as a general object is an immense range of possibilities built around a central and ancient human and animal behaviour. This essence of house, this immense collection of behaviours humans have gradually developed around house construction is an archetype. It is an essence of all the behaviours employed in building a house. It is a deeply buried pattern of racial and cultural memory. It influences current house builders just as it influenced ancient ancestors. It is also a living thing, constantly absorbing whatever is new and being a source of creativity an influence in present individuals.

An expression of these archetypal forces lies at the heart of all major religions. As Barbara Sproul points out in her book Primal Myths, we unfortunately confuse a mythological account of an archetypal pattern with an historical account. Or we look at the mythologies of the past and see them as statements of ignorance, instead of wonderful summaries of insight into these great patterns of human behaviour, thought and feelings that pervade our life.

We see this wisdom and shrewd summary of insight in the pantheon of gods and goddesses some ancient cultures erected. Many of these gods were expressions of archetypal themes, such as death, rebirth, and womanhood. In other words, behaviour or experience repeated times beyond count. A sheep dog has in itself a greater propensity to herd animals under direction than many other dog breeds. Through rituals and worship of the gods, perhaps ancient people touched similar reservoirs of strength and healing innate in themselves, buried there by the immense number of lives that left traces of genius, or persistence against odds, of curiosity or love. Without such, the individual might find it more difficult to face the fact that death waits at the end of life, or to allow sexuality to emerge into their life at puberty. From the collective experience could arise ways of dealing with problems, or strengths, that did not reside directly in the person’s conscious personality. The negative side of this is that occasionally a person completely identifies with an archetype. For instance one may meet the archetype of Christ and come to believe that one is now the incarnation of Christ and ones mission is saviour of the world. Such powerful identifications cause dangerous alienation from a down to earth relationship with people and life. In some cultures, such as India, this may not be to harmful, in that other people may accept the identification and see the person as a guru or divine incarnation.

Another way of looking at this is of seeing that as our body and human personality are expressions of forces and processes in nature – archetypal forces and processes – we have within us enormous reserves of strength, creativity and survival. When faced by difficulties or crisis in life, turning to these reserves brings much greater power to our life than if we face them with our own limited conscious resources.

A girl suffering from anorexia told me a dream in which she was cutting off her own breasts with scissors. It takes little imagination to see the dream as portraying the development of her sexual traits – her breasts – and depicts her trying to rid herself of them. Perhaps she ‘cuts them off’ by not eating, and thus not giving her body and psyche enough energy and nourishment to mature. In the past, it would have been recommended that she give offerings to a goddess, thus aligning her with the unconscious archetype or power to become a woman. Such methods were the form of psychotherapy used by ancient cultures.

Jung’s theory of the archetypes has never been generally accepted, perhaps because it is difficult to test objectively. In more recent years however, through the tremendously amplified access to the unconscious made possible in psychiatry through such drugs as LSD, a lot more information about unconscious imagery has been made available. From this it seems possible that certain synthesising aspects of the mind produce images to represent huge areas of personal experience, i.e. the Mystic Mother or Madonna representing our accumulated positive experience of our mother, as well as the fundamental female processes seen in the fertility of the earth; and the witch as representing the frightening and negative aspect. These symbols, already presented to us outwardly through our cultural art and religious images, appear to become focal points for personal experience and realisations to crystallise around, often with enormous emotional power. Also, language and literature themselves present immense variety about all aspects of human existence and how we can usefully meet it. Each of these inputs can add to personal experience, understanding, and feelings. These cultural inputs influence our relationship with hugely important aspects of our life, such as marriage, childbirth and social relationship. Also, the fundamental processes of nature that are involved in marriage and giving birth, as seen in the unity of the sun’s energy, allied with the earth’s fertility, bringing forth life, lie behind all our human experiences.

The propensity for human beings of widely separated cultures, language, age, or gender, to meet with the same symbols in their dreams, fantasies or religious feelings suggests, not necessarily a collective unconscious, but certainly an innate sensing of collective human experience, and a meeting with the forces of the cosmos active in us. Because the mass of experience we hold, or live within, is largely unconscious, it does seem likely that when we are unguarded in our sleep, or at times of stress or heightened feelings, the themes and images connected with archetypal experience would emerge. At such times our dreams depict aspects of our individual relationship with this collective human experience, with Life itself, or what we have harvested from it. Such dreams suggest that the essence of all experience is somehow available to us, and that we are directly part of the huge processes of the cosmos.

For instance if a married woman with two children falls in love with a man outside of her marriage, and her family and cultural values stress the wrongness of such feelings, she is likely to experience enormous conflict. This conflict could lead to depression, withdrawal or suicide. But in the end what she is struggling with is the opposition between personal drives – her love for the man – and her cultural and family standards. If we look at the way men and women live and survive throughout the world, then such standards appear purely local. They are not innate. So underlying the ‘local’ customs she is trying to honour but is in conflict with, exists a human potential for many different ways of dealing with love and attraction. This enormous human potential is one of the archetypes, and is represented by light, a holy figure such as Christ, or a sparkling ocean. To consciously meet this archetype could reduce or remove the conflict.

Our largely unconscious connection with the massive potential that we hold within, and our direct existence within the warp and woof of cosmic and natural forces, forms a dynamic ever moving and developing process that our conscious and apparently independent personality interacts with. This is much like our relationship with language, which existed prior to our birth, and which we only use and become a living expression of during our short lives. Language is a reservoir of past thought and endeavour, a huge and wondrous living force which holds in it the essence of all great lives and thoughts. Within language can be found as much history as can ever be found by archaeological digs. From it we gain personal self awareness and interpersonal communication. We may add to it and use it, but it is never limited to our personal self. In fact much of our meeting with collective human experience may be a meeting with language and all it conveys and produces in us.

If we could become conscious of an entire language, we would see how we and the language we use has emerged out of an immense history, an amalgamation of all human experience, constantly shifting. We would have a vision of the extraordinary mind, love, pain, and multifaceted nature of human life. This would be a god-like experience. It is perhaps the sense of such huge and real reservoirs of human experience that we sense unconsciously, and erect a god or archetypal image around.

The simplest definition of the archetypes is that they are symbols of our own enormous potential. In particular they depict potential that still remains unconscious, and the details of archetypal dreams shows us how we are relating to that potential.

But a simple way of thinking about an archetype is to consider what your reaction to the idea of death is. Whatever your response is, such as dread, avoidance of thinking about it, desire for it, you may consider it to be very personal. But your response is typical of millions of other human beings. It is also coloured and even promoted by the culture in which you live, the literature and art of your culture, or that you have been exposed to. Such collective human responses to the major life situation we face, are therefore archetypes – patterns of behaviour laid down and deepened by millions of human lives.

Whatever may be the explanation of these archetypal images and intuitions, they are important because they give us a sense of how we as an individual, and human beings collectively, have been able to develop our identity amidst enormous forces of unconsciousness, collectivity and external stresses. They depict graphically the universal levels of experience out of which our personal self is woven. They also give some personal experience of how at some level of our being we are intricately intermeshed with all creatures, with all the cosmos. This is no longer simply an imaginative or mystical idea. It is also one which is expressed by scientific thinkers such as Bohm, who says ‘Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one.’ See: collective unconscious.

The following gives a vivid example of a potently archetypal dream, which in its drama gives C. A. an immediate experience of his conscious personality being part of something vaster and more ancient. The dream has in it a number of archetypal symbols – the star; light; the female; marriage or unity; and the eternal circle of life.

Example: Before I went to sleep that night I focused on the question – Who am I, really?

The dream was vivid, and still gives me shivers to this day. I dreamed that I looked up and there was this incredible star that was emanating points of light in the sky. It got brighter and brighter and the bottom-most point reached down to where I was and transported me up to the star. The points of light came out from the centre in all directions, and I found myself on the end of one of the horizontal points. A wonderful (female) voice spoke to me and said this is who you are, and I had the strong sense of being located at the end of the horizontal light bar. Then she said and this is who you are and carried (transported in some way) me to the next bar of light, where I saw another version (incarnation?) of myself (in a different time and place, although I knew that the essence of this version of me was really me). She continued transporting me from bar to bar where I experienced myself in many different versions in the past, present, and future. I had different skills and interests that were the focal point of each version of myself–a musician in one, a farmer in another. Some of the versions were females, although I experienced the same sense of self in all of them. Then she returned me to the horizontal bar of my current self and said to me that all of this is who I am, but that now she was going to show me who I really am. Then she drew me into the centre of the star (light, energy source) where I merged with her and could see each of the emanating points of light as manifestations of a single source or spirit. It was one of the most incredible feelings of being integrated and whole that I’ve ever experienced, and I basked in the feeling for a while just absorbing and soaking it in. Then she returned me to myself (with a cosmic wink) and I slept peacefully for the rest of the night. Ever since then I haven’t felt the need to ask who or what I am, and I’ve seen my various abilities and struggles in life in a totally new way. C.A.

When considering any of the archetypal forces that act on our psyche, it needs to be remembered that there is never a single way of relating to them. It is helpful to use Hubbard’s concept of the panther on the stairs to identify the different ways we can relate to an archetype. For instance, if there were a black panther on the stairs of our house, there are several ways we could relate to it. We could attack it, flee from it, avoid it, ignore/neglect it (for instance by making out it wasn’t really there), succumb to it, or we might even make friends with it, or learn from it through observing it.

Similarly, with one of the most powerful of archetypal confrontations we can face, that of death, we might relate to it in a particular way. Perhaps we run from the image in our dreams, or even make out it isn’t there. It is therefore worth remembering that whatever stance we find ourselves in, there ARE other possibilities.

What is the difference between a normal dream symbol and an archetype?

If you begin to explore your feelings and associations with an archetype it starts to take you beyond what you personally have previously known and experienced. The archetype is a pattern or influence in a level of consciousness that, while it is a deeper level of your own being, yet is at the same time a collective pattern formed by many human beings or even animals. It is often full of collective wisdom and energy, both positive and negative, depending upon how you relate to it. In the original Greek and Roman the word referred to a template, mould, copy, pattern or model. So there could be an archetype of the human body. Such an archetype would not look like any one person or gender, but include all forms, all types of human body. In the way it is used here it refers to this type of fundamental and inclusive pattern formed by immense numbers of human actions and responses to particular life situations or environments. Being such huge sources of influence we as an individual can draw from them particular needs or energy.

Example: Now it seemed as if my awareness went beyond the frontier. This was a very visual experience. I was seeing a vast desert and I knew this represented immense periods of time, perhaps what we call eternity. So it could be called the Desert of Eternity. Here and there in the desert were huge rock formations, a little bit like what one sees in Monument Valley in Arizona. But these rock formations were not plain or slightly coloured rock. Also they were immense. They had the appearance of massive mosaics – brightly coloured mosaics. But the mosaics did not form illustrations or patterns. However, some pieces of the mosaics were larger than others. And each piece might be in itself multicoloured and a sort of miniature pictograph.

As I looked at these massive formations I understood that they had been carved or created through events in the passage of time. Each mosaic, each part of the overall mosaic, had been formed by enormous creative acts, or by long-standing actions. So these latter were like ideograms or archetypes. So, for instance, mother creatures have cared for, fought for, died for their young. This pattern of behaviour has been so enormously potent and perhaps we can use the word successful, that it has created, shaped aspects of eternity. It has left its pattern, its artwork, on time itself. Thus eternity honours that pattern by giving it a place in the very structure of itself. No one being created such a mosaic in the formations. Such a mosaic was large and had in it the essence of all the lives that formed it.

So the rock formations and the mosaics on them represented influences that will flow into the future. They were sources of power or influence that shaped the phenomenal world. They were the body under the coat so to speak.

Am I more influenced by certain archetypes more than others?

You probably are, and reading through the descriptions and questions below may help you define what patterns you link with most strongly.

Can I change the way archetypes influence me?

All of us live in a powerful archetype called a paradigm. Other words meaning something similar are groupthink, mindset and worldview. For instance during the 19^th century the common paradigm or world view was that described by the physics of the time. It seemed to know all the answers, saw the atom as the fundamental form of matter, and thus stated there was nothing beyond the physical form and brain. This led to a view of the world we called materialism. The materialistic viewpoint was a paradigm. So many people lived it and believed it that it had immense influence on individuals, and still does. It more or less created or helped create the way they saw the world and how they related to life events. But in 1906 Max Planck published what has come to be known as his quantum theory. This, with Einstein’s theory or relativity and all that arose from them, revolutionised physics and created a huge paradigm shift; one that is still only slowly entering general personal awareness. From this new paradigm the atom was by no means the fundamental particle, Human observation or consciousness was seen to be a powerful factor in how sub atomic particles manifested.

The point being made is that if you are aware that your world view is most likely formed out of an extant paradigm or world view, and this is a form of archetype, the awareness of this enables you to not be controlled by the archetype and capable of extending or rejecting it.

The greatest love story in the world

Sylvie had lost a lot of blood while giving birth to her son at home. She was sped to hospital, and didn’t quite manage to understand what the rush was about. She felt strange, and when her husband Andrew sat near the bed clutching her hand, she began to feel detached. She clearly saw her own body lying on the bed looking very ill. Then her husband called nurses and a doctor was brought. Sylvie had died. It appeared to her that she was standing above the bed looking down on the scene. In this way she witnessed the frantic attempt to resuscitate her. At the same time she detected a delightful sense of something, somewhere, calling her away. It was so urgent she began to allow herself to follow the urge. Then she noticed her husband. In her new found liberty she could easily see into him and perceive his alarm. He felt alone and lost with a child and a new born baby to rear and his wife dead. She saw him as young and fragile without her, and decided she wouldn’t leave. At that point she identified with her body again and started breathing. It was a long climb back to health.

Sylvie doesn’t claim to be a heroine. She is just the woman who lives next door. But the woman next door defeated death itself for her man and children.

Kim, on hearing this story said “That is exactly what a lot of women are angry about – that a woman has such a strong urge to give herself so completely to someone else.”

The love story of womanhood began a long time ago. Perhaps it originated on a warm mud bank millions of years back when a female creature began a new way of caring. The fragile eggs, usually extruded from her body and left vulnerable and unprotected in the earth, were held onto. Out of her caring drive, that ancient female created a warm mud bank within herself, and gradually learned to nurture the growing life with the resources of her own body. That incredible event is visible today in the shape and functions of a healthy woman. Each woman pays a price in terms of her pelvic shape, her internal organs, and personal experience, for carrying the mud bank within.

Another chapter in this story concerns the change the earliest of humanoid females made from seasonal mating to becoming fertile throughout the year. Did this come about because it was a survival advantage? Was it triggered by our ancestors moving through different climates? Because bonding is such an important part of present day mating, it is reasonable to believe that particular bonding between a male and female may have played a part in the change.

Jane Goodall, in her study of chimpanzees, noticed that although the females had close relationships with males only while on heat – oestrus – occasionally they continued a special and caring relationship with a male beyond oestrus. This special bonding may have been the move toward longer openess to partnering a mate.

My body is the picture of my love

That a woman has enormous influence over her body through her feelings is obvious. Eileen, who although married for twelve years had never fallen in love, left her husband and fell in love with Martin. She says, “Within a month of beginning our relationship, despite attempts at birth control, I became pregnant. My breasts swelled and my period was missed. During the following month the symptoms gradually disappeared. My breasts became normal and I had a natural period. Out of this I realised that because I loved Martin I deeply wanted his baby, and this desire, that I certainly had not previously admitted to myself, had produced all the physical signs of pregnancy.”

Could this level of passionate involvement with her man, have led early women to extend their oestrus, and finally transcend it altogether? Whatever the details are in this magnificent love story, the change occurred. As it did so it brought with it possibilities that are the foundations of humanness. Life-long mating is shared by other animals, notably some species of birds, but the ability to transcend the environment and the seasons, which conditions mating and birth in animals, gave human beings the capacity to have a new relationship with the world and each other. The herbivores for instance, whose every drive, instinctive as it is, locks them into particular activities at given times of year, have little space to develop any sense of separateness, any feeling of personal identity or will.

The new birth

Although few of us may give these issues much thought – we probably take them for granted – for early humans living in very rigourous circumstances, they must have been felt very deeply. So much so our ancestors have left hints in some of the greatest of ancient allegories. Very ancient peoples had no written language. They tended to express their vision of life in such things as religious rituals or great symbolic stories. One of these stories, literally written upon the stars, may be directly about the drama of woman transcending the environment. It is the story of the Zodiac, showing as it does the herbivores in the signs which fall in the usual periods of birth for them – early in the year. It depicts a woman – Virgo – fertile in the middle of the year, and the later signs as human qualities emerging from animal bodies. One of our great symbols, Christmas, portrays a virgin – Virgo, the woman fertile out of season – bearing a child in the midst of winter. What a miracle that first child born out of season must have been, the first of a new sort of human being. Facing an environment or season which was different to anything their instinctive drives prepared them for, they would have to develop different ways of surviving, and thus different types of mental attitude – the different Zodiacal types.

When Sylvie defeated the call of death to be with her husband, she was expressing the power women have garnered from millions of years of experience. In that period of time they have reorganised their body more radically than males have done. They have more fully entered into the self giving relationship with another person, whether that is their child or man. Although those skills are not placed high in our society, psychologically and biologically, they are extremely important. They confer intuitive empathy with the life processes in the body, enabling the woman to work more fully with the functions of growth and the self regulating activities of her being. There is also the ability to deal with people at a more human feeling level.

Of course, any power we have brings with it the negative as well as the positive. The enormous biological energy that moves through a woman’s urge to procreate, can be directed to illness as well as health. A woman I know who became ill and whose hair fell out when her dog died, had most likely connected her parental urge to the dog – and figuratively her child had died at the dog’s death. The powerful negative turn in her feelings adversely influenced her body. Understanding thes powerful forces can help to direct them in positive and creative ways.

The dangerous power of love

This wonderful or dangerous power of a woman’s love is often not acknowledged by women themselves. And in living a life that does not see, does not sense – that fails to take hold of the source of their own potency – women lose self understanding and the valour to create wonder with the living flower of themselves.

The spirit in women that transformed their body; that gave birth to a new sort of human being, that has the power of sickness or health, that led them through millions of years of a story of love, is wonderful. When a woman forgets this greatest of love stories, she forgets her own personal wonder. She may lose the sense of her power, of her ability to live something of beauty and importance. In bathing joyfully in the great river of her drives, stretching as the river does into the most ancient past, and creating the matrix of the future as it flows, a woman can shape things. Her most fundamental power is to be a part of fashioning all living beings. But she need not shape a child with this great drive unless she chooses. However, she ignores the river’s urge to shape something at her peril. If the river of her creativity is not consciously directed it will flow into all the dark folds of her fears, bitterness and fantasies and give them life. It may move into the sites of tension in her body and enhance the negative, causing cancer.

We need the power of women

Today we need the power of women to create a new world. Not the power which builds houses or makes airplanes. That is more a male form of creating and ultimately less important if we consider life as the most wondrous, the most unlikely, the most challenging of all things existing on our world and in the universe. What is needed is the ability to empathise with the very forces of life and the living process in our world – to touch it, to direct and heal it as it writhes under the impact of human activity. We need the power that can nurture things which grow, that through love turns the very direction of living process in a new path. We need the power of woman!

Spiritualism and Heaven

Life and Death

Part Two

At the age of sixty, Andrew Jackson Davis received his diploma of MD from the United States Medical College of New York. He had, in fact, been unofficially practising as a doctor for many years, but at this late date wished to have formal recognition. The year was 1886. Before this, Davis had used what he called his ‘superior condition’ as a means of diagnosis. In her book Breakthrough to Creativity Dr. Karagulla describes many of her colleagues and laymen who can do the same thing. They, like Davis, can see into the human being as if with X-ray eyes, and watch the activity not only of organs and cells, but also of energies at work.

Using this ability with a dying patient, Andrew Jackson Davis gives the following account of what he saw:

Now the head of the body became suddenly enveloped in a fine, soft, mellow, luminous atmosphere; and, as instantly, I saw the cerebrum and the cerebellum expand their most interior portions.

I saw them discontinue their appropriate galvanic functions; and then I saw that they became highly charged with the vital electricity and vital magnetism which permeates subordinate systems and structures. That is to say, the brain, as a whole, suddenly declared itself to be tenfold more positive over the lesser portions of the body than it ever was during the period of health.

This phenomenon invariably precedes physical dissolution.Now the process of dying, or of the spirit’s departure from the body was fully begun. The brain began to attract the elements of electricity, of magnetism, of motion, of life, and of sensation, into its various and numerous departments. The head became intensely brilliant, and I particularly remarked that just in the same proportion as the extremities of the organism grew dark and cold, the brain appeared light and glowing.Now I saw (in the mellow, spiritual atmosphere which emanated from and encircled her head) the distinct outlines of the formation of another head. This more and more distinctly. While this spiritual head was being created out of, and above, the material head, I saw that the surrounding aroma from the material head was in great commotion. As the new head became more distinct and perfect, this brilliant atmosphere disappeared.

In the same way as the spiritual head was formed, I saw, in their natural, progressive order, the harmonious development of the neck, the shoulders, the breast and entire spiritual organisation. The spirit rose at right angles over the head or brain of the deserted body.

But before the dissolution between the spiritual and material bodies, I saw – playing energetically between the feet of the elevated spiritual body and the head of the prostrate physical body – a bright stream or current of vital electricity.

This taught me that what is customarily termed Death is just a Birth of the Spirit from a lower into a higher state; that an inferior body and mode of existence are exchanged for superior and corresponding endowments and capabilities of happiness. I learnt that the correspondence between the birth of a child into this world and the birth of the spirit from the material body into a higher world is absolutely complete – even to the umbilical cord, which was represented by the thread of vital electricity.

The Father of Spiritualism

DAVIS has been called by many the father of modern spiritualism. He died in 1910, leaving a legacy of many books, such as ‘The Principles of Nature’ – ‘Penetralia’ – ‘The Great Harmonia’ and ‘Death and The After Life.’ His books described (often rather wordily) what he saw of life and death, growth, sickness and health, with his ‘Superior faculty’. Before Darwin published his works, Davis had already written and published very clear details on evolution, and his uniqueness as a spiritualist is in his wide range and depth of comment on life and its experience.

In trying to understand death, we cannot put aside the enormous amount of human experience gathered and synthesised into modern spiritualism. Spiritualism, unlike most religions, did not arise out of the life or teachings of one person, such as Jesus, Buddha, or Mohammed. It is based on fairly common human experience such as clairvoyance, projection of consciousness from the body, contact with the dead, mediumship and psychism generally. But we have to realise, looking at Spiritualism, that it concentrates on one area of experience, and this must be taken into account. Without trying to be precise, we can describe the varieties of human experience as –

Sensual experience via our eyes, ears, etc. This we will call ‘objective’
Subjective experience, such as memory, emotion, thinking, planning etc.
Then we have a more ‘interior’ form of experience, such as dreams, visions, intuition, psychic impressions, clairvoyance, etc. This are of experience is often felt as images, as in a dream; or as intuitive feelings or insights.
Dreams do not occur until our body sleeps, or is put in a condition of passivity. But dreams and psychic impressions are still activities of the psyche or personality. When, however, the psyche is put to sleep as the body is, we go beyond dreams and psychic impressions, to the transcendental experience of the mystics.

Andrew Jackson Davis

What happens after death?

Having said this, let us look at what spiritualism tells us of life after death.

So far, the cases of death and return explain how spiritualists feel about the moment of death. But more can be said about what occurs from there on. Although many people quickly understand what has occurred to them, quite a number, due to lack of teaching or understanding, do not realise they are dead. So fixed is the idea that death is extinction, that when they find themselves, for instance after a car accident or sudden passing, fully conscious, and in no way different except for being invisible to most people, they are extremely confused.

A tremendous frustration grows, because although they appear to themselves exactly as in ‘life’, they lack the ability to be seen or heard by most of us in the body, and cannot move physical objects in the same way.

Some people in this state at first believe that some enormous conspiracy is underfoot to ignore them or to drive them mad. Arising dazed from a bad car crash, they fail to see their mangled body. and wander of to seek help. When nobody responds to them, or appears not to see them, tremendous confusion arises.

Dennis Wheatley, in his book ‘The Ka of Gifford Hillory‘, gives a fictional account of this, and Joan Grant, in her autobiography ‘Time out of Mind’ tells how during the world wars, she left her body asleep each night, and consciously helped the dead troops to realise their situation and find their way into the ‘death’ experience. Some of the things she did were verified by returning troops.

When we enter a swimming bath, we know it is pointless trying to walk. A different set of movements and reactions have to be used to deal with water. This is like entering an out-of-the-body existence. Most of the difficulties experienced are due to using our old values and reactions in a different ‘element’.

Two of the major problems are communication with those in the body, and the power of thought and desire. Both are easy enough to understand though. Let us take communication first.

I believe that all of the central ideas to be mentioned can be proved or disproved by your own experience. In fact there is an experimental way of approaching your own inner experience, so let us perform one of these experiments to determine difficulty in bodiless communication. This experimental approach is vital if we are not to get lost within opionions about psychic phenomena.

Try the experiment yourself

Have a partner for this experiment. Read from a book to your partner who should sit facing you. In doing so you are communicating ideas, images, emotions. Having performed this first part of the experiment, go on to the second part. Continue with the book, communicate with your partner without using your body!

If you perform this experiment hundreds of times, or even dozens of times, you will come to see two things at least.

With most people, without using the body in speech, mime, expressions, etc., no conscious communication takes place.
With those where it does occur, it is communication of a completely different order. It arises in fact as subtle inner urges, feelings, mental images, subjective sounds, emotions, or a sense of knowing.

Experimentally then, we can say if human consciousness does exist apart from a physical body, communication is almost impossible for most people, and where it does occur, it arises as subtle ideas, sensations, mental images, dreams or a sense of knowing. Obviously, neither the dead, nor the living, can usually communicate without using a physical body. So communication is not just a problem of the dead.

The second question, in regard to thought, power and desire, can also be approached experimentally. Our laboratory, as in the above experiment is ourselves. The above experiment shows that if there is coninuance of existence after death, communication with the dead is in no way different to life, except that one of the major factors – the body – has been removed in one of the participants. Because of this removal, the way we relate to others and ourselves is greatly altered, and often in unexpected ways. If we hold on to this idea of death being only life with the body removed, the experiences described become logical sequences of events instead of superstitions or seeming fantasy.

For instance, in our experiment, if we remove the influx of impressions via the body senses – i.e. if we remove the body – we have nothing to anchor us to sensory experiences and an objective world. Suddenly the whole bias of our existence is pushed into the subjective, interior realm of our thoughs and emotions – and perhaps the transcendental realm of experience also.

REMEMBER, these levels of your being have always existed, and in varying degrees you are acquainted with them. But if most of your life has been given to objective and casual subjective experience, the loss of body will at first seem like being pushed in the deep end of a swimming pool. If you have already, during life in the body, explored your inner life of thoughts and emotions, our interior and transcendental self, you already have experienced something of what you would find in the death state. This is why I say, death is only life with the body removed. Also, it is the reason for the statement that Yoga is a preparation for death – that is, when Yoga or extensive self exploration is used to explore the interior and transcendental levels of your being. See: Levels of Consciousness in Sleeping and Waking.

Death is like a dream – Full surround virtual reality

We will explore that idea more fully later. First though, let us return to the problem of desires and thoughts. Spiritualism tells us the ‘dead’ live in a land in many ways similar to physical life, except in its beauty, colour, lack of sickness, pain, war, and in the expanded possibilities life without the body offers.

In this land we can fly like birds, swim underwater like fish, communicate heart to heart, mind to mind, soul to soul, without the use of clumsy words.

We have a body, but it is a body at its prime, without weight or tiredness. We have clothes, but they are creations of our thoughts and unconscious dispositions, and we are clothed by our own love and wisdom, or lack of it. We experience heaven or hell, not as punishment or reward, but because we create our own environment by our own thoughts and emotions.

Here we explore music, the arts, creativeness, knowledge, relationships, without the limitations the body imposes, and with the added wonder of a new dimension of experience. We can see in colour, sound or telepathic communication between art work and observer – or artist and observer.

William Lilley, was a spiritual healer. He lived an extraordinary life, uniting in his practice the use of ordinary medicine, herbs, massage, manipulation, sound therapy, vibration therapy, along with a clairvoyant ability to look into the body and diagnose sickness. He was able to consciously ‘leave his body’ and visit the ‘Beautiful Place’, where he met the dead. His description of this is typical of many other people’s even to the ‘going through the mists’, but it contains an unusual element not often given – but he can describe it best:

When I am going into trance, I breathe in the Yoga method shown me by Dr. Letari. Immediately I get a sensation as though I am falling, or being pulled backwards. As this sensation comes to a climax, I seem to be travelling through space at terrific speed.

I have opened my eyes many times at this point, but the only vision I have is of passing through a dense fog. Then, quite suddenly, the fog clears and I am at a stile. I climb over this stile and immediately there is a voice speaking to me over my shoulder. This voice is always with me, explaining everything I see and everyone I meet. The stile seems to be on the edge of a large field, which rises gradually to the form of a hill. I walk up the hill, and beyond it I visit many places.

I have been to the Children’s Land many times and have spoken to children with whom I used to go to school, many of whom I did not know had died until I met them. I have paid visits too, to the Halls of Learning, which seem to me more like the Acropolis at Athens.

It is always the same stile, the same hill, the same voice, and it just seems like a large country with so many different towns to visit.

The most interesting and remarkable experience I ever had during these visits into the Spirit, happened before I went into trance. Several people had been speaking of consciousness. They had asked me to describe the Spirit. Was it solid? Did I appear solid? I promised them that if I could, I would find out.

I arrived at my stile, the voice came to me, and it evidently knew my desire, because it said “Feel the earth!” I did. It was solid. “Feel the grass beneath your feet!” I did. That was solid too, and even had dew on it. “Smell these flowers!” They were perfectly natural and had the usual perfume. In fact, everything around was natural. Then I was told, “Feel your body”. I did so. It was as solid as I am materially.

‘The voice then said, “Close your eyes; make your consciousness passive”, or as you would do when preparing for a trance state. “Now feel the earth beneath your feet!” There was nothing. “Open your eyes”. It wasn’t dark, it wasn’t light. “Feel at your body”. It wasn’t there. “Such is Spirit” said the voice. “Just a consciousness holding within it all experiences of your lifetime, all the joys and sorrows, your desires, achievements and failures, whence comes spiritual evolution. In your world of the material, you are able to examine matter; everything is matter. When you think of the spiritual, naturally you build in your consciousness another material world.”

There are very few comments on spiritualism, by a renowned spiritualist, quite as descriptive and cogent as this. But before we approach it, and the other quoted experiences, I will mention two more examples to complete the evidence, so to speak.

Going beyond time and space

Sir Aukland Geddes, MD, one time Professor of Anatomy, and also British Ambassador to the United States, reported an experience to a meeting of the Royal Medical Society in Edinburgh. It was reported the next day in the Scotsman of February 27th, 1937.

Sir Aukland read the account on behalf of a doctor who wished to remain anonymous. The man in question was stricken in the middle of the night with acute gastro enteritis. At ten o’clock he tried to ring for help, but found himself unable to move.

Gradually he found his consciousness split in two; one part was now outside, and distinct from, his body, the other still in his physical form. The exterior consciousness grew stronger as time passed, and eventually the body consciousness disappeared. The remaining consciousness, “which was now me, seemed to be altogether outside my body, which it could see.”

Then he began to realise he could see, not only his body, but any other person or place he thought of or concentrated on, whether in London, Scotland, or anywhere.

‘The explanation I received – from what source I do not know – was that I was free in a time dimension of space wherein ‘now’ was in some way equivalent to ‘here’ in the ordinary three-dimensional space of everyday life. I next realised that my vision included not only ‘things’ in the ordinary three-dimensional world, but also ‘things’ in those four or more dimensional places I vas in.”

I understood from my mentor that all our brains are just end organs projecting, as it were, from the three dimensional universe into the psychic stream and flowing with it into the fourth and fifth dimensions. Around each brain, as I saw it, there seemed to be what I can only describe as a condensation of the psychic stream, which formed in each case as though it were a cloud. but it was not a cloud.”

Beside this, he saw people’s thoughts and emotions in the form of a coloured cloud around them. Someone then discovered him in his sickness and telephoned for another doctor. Camphor was injected, his heart began to speed up, and to his intense annoyance he found himself drawn back into his body, and his heightened consciousness diminishing again.

The next account is of a woman’s dream. She says:

I was looking at a blotting paper. There were two small dots on it. As I looked. they spread wider and wider, merged, and began to cover the paper. As I watched, a voice spoke from behind, and explained that the small blots represented what people had been doing to themselves in order not to have children. Although the effects seemed small at the beginning, the results would spread, creating far wider effects than ever envisaged. Instead of over population, human infertility and impotence will occur because of the things people do to themselves. This would not only be in the individuals themselves, but in their children also. “Unto the third and fourth generation”. I was told also, how difficult “the blot” would be to remove once it had occurred. This was dreamt in the 1960’s.

Three interesting cases, each with a voice, or mentor or teacher, giving unusual information and speaking authoritatively. One is a dream, one a self induced trance, one a spontaneous near death experience, and yet they have very similar elements. It might be that we can understand death through understanding trance and sleep – or understand trance and sleep through death.

If, in our laboratory of self we experiment on dreams and consciousness, we may discover the face of death. There are two sayings which we find in every language, all over the world. One says ‘Sleep is the little death.’ The other says, ‘Death is the long sleep.’ Who then can be afraid of death, when we experience it nightly?

Tony Crisp

Posts Tagged ‘death and rebirth’

Life and Death was a series of features written for and published in Yoga and Health.

Links to Chapters

1 – Nothing is Permanent – Except Change

2 – Spiritualism and Heaven

3 – The Mystery of Sleep and Death

4 – Heaven and Hell

5 – Sit Down You’re Rockin The Boat

Who Said Death Was the Final End?

Death is an Energy Release

The skeleton in the image typifies this Western view of death. But the view in older cultures is that life continually flows through birth and death, as in the second illustration. (See: the book The Field, that examines latest findings in quantum physics in an understandable way).

I feel strongly that all the new breed of children will need to learn how to die. It is like a process of transformation such we see caterpillars going through. In our life today there are stages of growth and points of massive transformation as one period of growth ends and another stage begins.

Death can represent a fading or dying of some aspect of you

Dreaming of a dead body

We can deal with our feelings of death

Death of someone close to us

Relating to The Dead

You can continue contact with the dead through your dreams

Dreaming of a dead body

If the death is someone we know

Death of oneself

Talking with those who have passed on

Thoughts about death

The walking dead or rigor mortis

The Sunday School or Church Christ

The Ideal Christ

The Healing Christ

The Integral or Cosmic Christ

A page with all Archetypes listed.

What is the difference between a normal dream symbol and an archetype?

Am I more influenced by certain archetypes more than others?

My body is the picture of my love

The new birth

The dangerous power of love

We need the power of women

Life and Death

Part Two

The Father of Spiritualism

What happens after death?

Try the experiment yourself

Death is like a dream – Full surround virtual reality

Going beyond time and space