Posts Tagged ‘dreamtime’

Collective Consciousness – The Dawn of Awareness

Dreams are an expression of biological life forming a dim awareness of itself, an ill-defined awareness as it came alive in the creatures swarming on our planet. Life became conscious in that way millions of years ago. From the human point of view we do not see it as a powerful form of consciousness. But the focused self-aware consciousness of human beings feeds back into that unfocused ocean of awareness because we are a connected part of it. That fundamental awareness, or what the Australian aborigines call the Dreamtime, and what a lot of people probably mean when they use the word God, is transforming constantly through the impact of new experience. This transformation comes about through an interaction between the focused self-awareness of human beings and that fundamental awareness behind existence. That core awareness is archaic and ancient, a collective experience of everything that has lived. That core awareness is unfocused, but in that is its wonder. It doesn’t particularise. It doesn’t end up being any one thing. It remains all encompassing, a collective. Because of the interaction between physical life forms and that core awareness it is evolving all the time.

At times I have explored that deep ocean of unfocussed sentience, and at one time as I dropped deeply into it I had the sense, or the awareness, that life has a unified consciousness. In that consciousness life has the awareness of millions of years of experience through all its creatures. This awareness developed into a living framework, a living matrix. Life learned how to build, how to develop an integrated system. The lesson was learned slowly, but it was unfolded from the already existing building blocks or framework that formed the universe. Integration means connectivity. It means symbiosis, working together for mutual gain. It means love in its most profound sense – the giving of self to another as happens in pregnancy and child rearing; as happens in life where to survive we live on the death of other things such as when we eat plants or animals.

All that life has learned is now a great matrix of influence that continues to flow into the way things work, and who we are. This is like an enormous structure that directs things and holds them to that pattern. I suppose this could be seen as a sort of establishment – what is established. But this would not be a real insight into that collective awareness. Because all the time, in a sort of flashing newness of creativity the collective awareness constantly upgrades, it constantly experiments, it constantly tries out new things. It does this because of the factor of randomness, because an aspect of the universe and life is chaotic, and it has through that a freedom to do the unexpected. And Life integrates what it learns.

Life learned how to build, how to develop an integrated system. The lesson was  learned slowly, but it was unfolded from the already existing building blocks or framework that formed the universe. Integration means connectivity. It means symbiosis, working together for mutual gain. It means love in its most profound sense – the giving of self to another as happens in pregnancy and child rearing; as happens in life where to survive we live on the death of other things such as when we eat plants or animals. All that life has learned is now a great matrix of influence that continues to flow into the way things work, and who we are. This is like an enormous structure that directs things and holds them to that pattern. I suppose this could be seen as a sort of establishment – what is established. But this would not be a real insight into that collective awareness. Because all the time, in a sort of flashing newness of creativity the collective awareness constantly upgrades, it constantly experiments, it constantly tries out new things. And it integrates what it learns.

Human society with its immense variety, it is enormous range of experience, its conflicts, its pain and challenges, is the most amazing source of experience and experiment. It constantly presents variety and opportunity to try out new things. And I saw that life is learning about energy exchange, about shifts, about not holding on. Or perhaps it has learned that and it is offering that as possible behavioural responses to us human beings. In any case, for me personally, I saw that I do not need to hold on to any particular form of relationship. One of the most powerful stances we can take is that of balance. Not holding on to the shifting experiences we meet is the balance that allows us to move and shift according to this moment, this need, this person we are dealing with now.

I saw that dreams express an archaic wisdom. They express that wisdom mentioned above that the collective awareness has gathered through unimaginable variety of life experience. It expresses the possibility of all the behavioural responses that it has learned. For instance, in human society there are all manner of relationship between the man and the woman. There are men with one wife, no wife, or many wives. There are men who never enter a relationship all their life. There are women with no husband, with one husband, with several husbands, or several partners. Of course the unusual forms of sexuality such as prostitution and homosexuality explore yet more varieties of personal experience. It isn’t that any of these are right or wrong, they are simply variations on a theme. As in music that satisfies, the theme may explore conflicts, pain, or discord as the music moves toward integration, toward synthesis and satisfaction.

It is not only genetic coding that influences us to respond to present events. There is also an experience that lies behind that coding. There are the millions of years of life experience that led to the code. The archaic in us exists because of connections. The whole matrix of life exists because of connections. Many of these are obvious as we see in the food chain, as we see in the relationship between plant life and the sun and the earth. We see these connections in the way that bacterial life and plant life and human life work together. One thing relates to and depends upon another thing. At a deep level we all acknowledge that dependence. We feel it as a sort of holiness or awe. We see it as a fundamental truth but unfortunately often ignore it.

Our tribal religions frequently, and unfortunately, get disconnected from that archaic source of life. The religion, although it states it is about the creative impulse in us all, often doesn’t help us to connect with that creative source, with that internal archaic awareness. So dreams, and the love that people have for each other, are always a more direct route to re-connection. They take us back to that wisdom, that tried and true experience. They arouse again the awareness of our connection with each other.

Some things life has learned are fundamental. Of course the collective consciousness has experience of all types of human relationship. That core experience knows that it is only out of the death of one life form that another exists. It is only by acknowledging and living our place in the scheme of things that we keep our own connection with that core of awareness open. In that way we maintain our integrity and growth. Each of us, from our forebears, from the circumstances of our birth and culture, through pain or wonder experienced, have achieved a particular shape or personality structure. Being that shape, we do not need to conform to somebody else’s shape or requirements. It is the variety that the core awareness treasures and absorbs. Our particular shape has its own qualities and weaknesses. What does need to happen though, is that we need to stand openly, as the shape we are, before that fundamental awareness. We need to bring ourselves just as we are to that connection with life so that it may experience us more fully. In that connection we share with it, and it shares with us. It savours us, and we savour it. If we feel guilty or attempt to hide parts of ourselves, then we remain unwhole. Unwhole in the sense that part of our nature is the core awareness. If we lack that we are only a fraction of what we might be. We are the odd shape we have become. With our core connection we are whole no matter what shape we are. Without that connection we remain separated and alone. See You Are a Dual Being

Certain things are holy, like motherhood, or fatherhood. They are holy because they are so fundamental to life as it expresses on our planet. Marriage is such a holy thing because it represents and is an expression of the wonder of reproduction and parenthood. This should not be confused with partnership, such as occurs in a homosexual relationship.(1) Because things such as marriage, that manifest the most primordial aspects of life, are holy we need to honour them, and perhaps kneel before them in some way. They transcend any one person’s life and experience. Because of this, things like motherhood develop into an immense archetype. In other words they become a focused collection of uncountable human experiences. All such huge areas of experience are patterns in the core awareness. They are immense patterns in the internal structure of human life. And although life itself honours them, although life itself largely flows through the patterns they are, life does not stop us making leaps right beyond the boundaries of those archetypes. In that way we make new connections new possibilities for life itself and for the environment.

() That is not to say that a homosexual relationship does not express another of the most profound aspects of life, that of love. But love should be seen as a transcending influence rather than simply a genital desire or an expression of need or dependence.

See Sorg.

Australian Aborigine Dream Beliefs

The Australian native peoples are divided into more than 500 tribal groups. These tribes are also of two major types – those who live inland, and those who live along the coastline. The separation of tribes and the division provided by the environment led to differences in views about the nature of human life and death, and the part dreams played. But some beliefs, such as reincarnation and the ‘Dreamtime’, were universally held.

Dreamtime refers to an experience and to beliefs that are largely peculiar to the Australian native people. There are at least four aspects to Dreamtime – The beginning of all things; the life and influence of the ancestors; the way of life and death; and sources of power in life.

Dreamtime includes all of these four facets at the same time, being a condition beyond time and space as known in everyday life. The aborigines call it the ‘all-at-once’ time instead of the ‘one-thing-after-another’ time. This is because they experience Dreamtime as the past present and future coexisting. This condition – See: altered states of consciousness – is met when the tribal member lives according to tribal rules, and then is initiated through rituals and hearing the myths of the tribe.

Although Dreamtime may sound rather mystical or mysterious to the Western mind, the experience is based on understandable and observable facts of social and mental life which are unfortunately little valued in Western society. For instance the present is observably the result of past actions or events. Present society is particularly the result of past great men and women and their – heroic – deeds. For the Australian native peoples, as with many other ancient races, the heroic deeds of past ancestors were remembered with great veneration. It was seen that all present life, and even the personal skills and character of tribal members, arose out of the life of the ancestors. The ancestors, their deeds, and what arise from them into the life of the tribe in the present, are all held in the Dreamtime beyond the shifting events of things happening one-after-the-other.

The aborigine people believed that each person had a part of their nature that was eternal. This eternal being pre-existed the life of the individual, and only became a living person through being born to a mother. The person then lived a life in time, and at death melted back into the eternal life. See Archetype of the Big Bang

In writing about the state of mind – the mental world – of early races, J. B. Priestley – in Man and Time – says that if we are to properly understand the ancient peoples we must never project onto them our own state of mind and rational thought. Studies have shown that ancient people experienced what is called an undifferentiated state of mind. Their sense of being a separate and independent person was much less than is commonly experienced in modern life. They did not separate their religious life, their social life, their economic life, their artistic life and their sexual life from each other. This is obvious to even a casual observation of such societies, or even third world cultures, where religion and eating, and work are all very much connected. To be banished from the tribe was tantamount to death for primitive individuals, so deeply were they identified in psychological and practical ways to the rest of the tribe. But it is not an unusual thing for a modern man or woman to leave their place of birth, their family or their country, and live abroad. Such simple facts illustrate the deep divide between the modern and ancient state of mind.

If we remember our early childhood, with the absence of an awareness of passing time, the fullness of each day, the eternity of a week or a month, the enormous and unquestioned – if still untraumatised – sense of connection with our family, then we will have an idea of the mental world of the older races. For the aborigine these facts of their life were tangible realities, known through their inner experience in dreams and waking visions. Prior to the development of the reasoning and questioning mind, people did not consider things by thinking about them in neat ideas and definitions. Like the parables in the Bible or Aesop’s fables, which say so much, but do so with images and through the relationship of one thing or person with another, early human beings thought in pictures or dream like images. So the aborigine would meet the influence of the ancestors in their life as an actual visionary person, rather than thoughts about tribal history. With the visionary meeting would come deep feelings and insights, making it a real educational experience. This is exactly how dreams express, and in this manner most creative or problem solving ‘thinking’ was done by ancient peoples. Therefore the entrance into dreams, or into a condition in which the imagery of dreaming could function while awake, as in visions or altered states of consciousness, was important for the aborigine. Common ways of accessing this state of mind were through ritual or initiation rites. In this way enormous learning experiences could be met, a sense of complete identification with ancestors and tribal history achieved, and personal change or growth accomplished.

This condition of mind or being in which time is ‘all-at-once’ and the past is felt as intensely close as the present, is a natural and fundamental state. It is what the baby experiences in the womb prior to the separation at birth and the development of concepts through the learning of language. So the rituals which enable the aborigine to return to the womb of all time and existence enables them to feel connected once more to all nature, to all their ancestors, and to their own personal meaning and place within the scheme of things. The Dreamtime is a return to the real existence for the aborigine. Life in time is simply a passing phase – a gap in eternity. It has a beginning and it has an end. The life in Dreamtime has no beginning and no end.

The experience of Dreamtime, whether through ritual or from dreams, flowed through into the life in time in practical ways. The individual who enters the Dreamtime feels no separation between themselves and their ancestors. The strengths and resources of the timeless enter into what is needed in the life of the present. The future is less uncertain because the individual feels their life as a continuum linking past and future in unbroken connection. Through Dreamtime the limiatations of time and space are overcome. It is a much observed feature of aboriginal life that knowledge of distant relatives and their condition is frequently displayed. Therefore if a relative is ill, a distant family member knows this and hurries to them. Often the intuitive knowledge of herbal medicine is gained also.

For the aborigine tribes, there is no ending of life at ‘death’. Dead relatives are very much a part of continuing life. It is believed that in dreams dead relatives communicate their presence. At times they may bring healing if the dreamer is in pain. Death is seen as part of a cycle of life in which one emerges from Dreamtime through birth, and eventually returns to the timeless, only to emerge again. It is also a common belief that a person leaves their body during sleep, and temporarily enters the Dreamtime.

The aboriginal tribes are connected with their local landscape in a way that perhaps no other race of recent times is. The landscape is almost an externalisation of the individual’s inner world. Each tribe had a traditional area of the land which was theirs alone, and it was believed that in the Dreamtime the ancestors shaped the flat landscape into its present features. Each feature was in some way an act of the ancestors, and therefore the tribe. Like many tribal peoples, the Australian native people were deeply dependent upon their beliefs, the landscape and their inner life for their identity and strength. This makes them vulnerable to anything which disrupts their beliefs, although, apart from such vulnerability, they have a greater psychic sense of wholeness and identity with their tribe and environment than is common in Western individuals.

See the feature Spirit-Child: The Aboriginal Experience of Pre-Birth Communication.

Test of Analysis

From all that has been said, a whole collection of methods present themselves suggesting how we can understand a dream. I suppose one could use all these methods on a single dream, and arrive at a whole spectrum of information. But the question now arises as to whether the interpretation is correct. After all the effort, is it right? It is not just a question of whether the answer satisfies us; it must also enlighten us. It must do even more than that. What we arrive at must fit the events and symbols of the dream, and unveil the characters of our inner life that have clothed themselves in the forms and events of the dream. The interpretation should make sense to other people also, so that if explained, they too can easily see the connection between dream and interpretation. The interpretation should be able to stand the test of time as well.

One of the biggest temptations in analysing our dreams, the thing that most often leads to a false interpretation, is to attempt a purely arbitrary translation of the symbols. By this is meant that because one dreams of a bag, a large key and a snake, one should not therefore immediately denominate these as ‘sexual symbols’. They may be; and we have to keep this possibility in mind. But the dreamer may be a locksmith who is having difficulty opening an important bag. In which case the symbols represent a problem and not sexual intercourse. And he may have a friend who keeps snakes, by one of which he was nearly bitten. So the snake might mean fear of death. This is why one has to be careful to find one’s own associations with the symbols. Only when we cannot find a personal association; or the dream setting does not point to the possible meaning, should we try a general interpretation. Jung has said that if the dreamer finds difficulty in arriving at an association, he would ask him to describe the symbol in his own words, as if Jung knew nothing about it. Therefore, if one dreamt of a table, one would say, ‘It is a thing usually made of wood and having four supports. Upon these a flat surface is fixed, so that one can place objects, food, books, etc., on it at a level nearer one’s hands or mouth.’ Or at least, one would describe it as one saw it.

As for how we can test the interpretation, dissatisfaction is the biggest clue to our inadequate understanding of the dream. If there are factors in the dream which we have not explained, or if the interpretation does not bring to light the inner feelings that shaped the dream, then one will always have a feeling of dissatisfaction. It is as if two parts of a puzzle have not been properly fitted together, or, although the pieces fit, the colours do not quite match. Thus arises the feeling of not having found the right solution.

On the other hand, when the right understanding is arrived at, a very profound thing happens. There is usually a feeling of thrill, a sudden pleasure of exaltation, a feeling of being on the track. This is usually accompanied by a sense of seeing deeply into yourself, sometimes into parts of your being never bared to view before. In all, there is a feeling of pleasure and achievement, of certainty. One is usually somewhat amazed at the wisdom of dreams, despite having felt the same many times before.

Another test of the interpretation’s accuracy, and a guard against arbitrariness, is to see whether it fits everyday experience. A dream nearly always deals with things one has experienced in one way or another. Therefore, if an interpretation does not fit or explain our actual experience, then it should be placed to one side. We must beware of using words we do not understand. For instance, we may read that Jung has said a dark-haired woman can represent a man’s anima, or female nature, while a dominant man in a woman’s dreams represents her animus. Or that Freud suggests that some cutting or scissors dreams might symbolise a fear of castration. But do we really, in our own experience, know what these mean? Can we see them in our own life? It is certainly not sufficient to label our dream symbols this, that or the other. If these ideas are true, then we shall see them in our own experience. We may not give them the same name even; but one that describes them to us! This is not to say that a knowledge of these ideas is not extremely helpful. It may even help us to see these things in our own experience. But we must beware of using such ideas without seeing them in ourselves. Therefore we have to look at ourselves and ask, ‘What part of me does this dream symbol represent? What experience is it dealing with?’ And when the word experience is used this does not simply mean events in the outer world. It means emotions, attitudes, ideas, response to people and events, relationships with others, with self, and with Life.

Sometimes, however, the dream deals with things that have not yet happened, but are about to happen. I am not here dealing with prophetic dreams. When a woman has a tummy ache and says, ‘Ah, my period is beginning’, she is not prophesying. She is speaking from past experience. In a similar way, the dream often sees that things are about to begin that are not outwardly obvious to us. For instance, a man dreamt that a bull broke loose and rushed into a field of cows. Shortly afterwards he was almost carried away by a release of sexual desires he had kept ‘chained up’. His inward feelings had warned of this in the dream. Yet outwardly he could see no sign of it. So with some dreams we have to see if ‘time’ reveals their meaning. Or to put it another way, we may interpret the dream satisfactorily but find no signs of it in our experience. Then it is for time to bring it into the realm of the real.

An example of arbitrary interpretation can be seen in this dream. ‘An unconventional looking postman delivered a registered package. But I didn’t open it.’ This was taken to mean that due to an Unconventional experience, the dreamer had realised something. Something had ‘registered’ on his consciousness, but he had not explored the possibilities of it. Although this seemed to fit the symbols, and no other ideas were forthcoming yet the dreamer could not, despite a lot of searching within, discover an experience of something registering that he had not explored. The registered package is a double symbol, because it also suggests something valuable contained in it. Therefore, despite a seemingly good interpretation, when it came down to testing it, no satisfaction was forthcoming. Which makes us realise that proper interpretation lies not only in reading the symbols, but in seeing the understanding applied to our life.

We can sum up the tests for interpretation then, as: Does it satisfy us? Does it explain us? Does it enlighten us? Can we see it as a part of our experience in the past, present or future? Above all, does it help us carry on with the business of living?