Posts Tagged ‘love’

Secret of Time and Satan

By Edward Carpenter

ESP in Dreams

Many dreams extend perception in different ways.

dreaming the future – Just before his title fight in 1947, Sugar Ray Robinson dreamt he was in the ring with Doyle. ‘I hit him a few good punches and he was on his back, his blank eyes staring up at me.’ Doyle never moved and the crowd were shouting ‘He’s dead! He’s dead!’ He was so upset by the dream Robinson asked Adkins, his trainer and promoter, to call off the fight. Adkins told him, ‘Dreams don’t come true. If they did I’d be a millionaire.’ In the eighth round Doyle went down from a left hook to the jaw. He never got up, and died the next day.

The problem is that many dreams felt to be predictive never come true. Often dreamers want to believe they have precognitive dreams, perhaps to feel they will do not want to be surprised by, and thereby anxious about, the future. When the baby son of Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped, and before it was known he was murdered, 1300 people sent ‘precognitive’ dreams concerning his fate in response to newspaper headlines. Only seven of these dreams included the three vital factors – that he was dead, naked and in a ditch.

Out of 8000 dreams in his Registry For Prophetic Dreams, Robert Nelson, who was sent the dreams prior to what was predicted, has found only 48 which bear detailed and recognisable connection with later events. See: prophetic dreams.

dreaming the dead See dreaming of death

dreaming together – The Poseidia Institute of Virginia Beach, USA have run a number of group ‘mutual dreaming’ experiments. Although the institute suggests very positive results, a critical survey of the dreams and reports reveals a lack of hard evidence. Like other areas of ESP dreaming, it can seldom ever be willed. But the dreams did show themes related to problems regarding intimate meeting. Also, some of the dreams were directly about the goal of dream meeting, as in the following example.

Example: ‘I find the group of people I am looking for. There were maybe six or more people. They were asleep on mattresses except for two or three. These were awake and waiting for me, and wearing small pointed hats such as Tibetan Lamas wear. In the dream I realised this meant they had achieved sufficient inner growth to remain awake in sleep. We started to communicate and were going to wake the others.’ Tom C. See: meeting in dreams.

There are ‘meeting’ dreams however, although these seldom occur under test conditions.

Example: ‘I dreamt my sister was attacking me with a pair of scissors. She backed me against a wall and stabbed me. During the day after the dream my sister phoned me at work and said she had an awful dream in which she stabbed me with scissors.’ D.

Example: My husband is in the Navy, serving on a ship in the Gulf. We’ve always been close, through 22 years. I dreamt we were making love, and could even smell him. It ended as lovemaking always does for us, with orgasm and a cuddle into deep sleep. I woke surprised he wasn’t next to me. He phoned next day to say he had the same dream, same night. Mrs. E.H. – Gosport

the dream as extended perception – Even everyday mental functions such as thought and memory occur largely unconsciously. During sleep, perhaps because we surrender our volition, what is left of self awareness enters the realm where the nine tenths of the iceberg of our mind is active. In this realm faculties can function which on waking seem unobtainable. A list of these would include –

1       Extending awareness to a point distant from the body, to witness events confirmed by other people. This is often called Out of Body Experience or OBE, but some of these experiences suggest the nature of consciousness and time may not be dualistic having to be either here or there. See: out of body experience.

The March 24,1974, New York Times Magazine contained a report about a dream that Lieutenant Colonel H. R. P. Dickson, a British political official in Kuwait, experienced in 1937. One day, a violent sand-storm carved a hole by a palm tree in his compound. That night, he dreamed he approached the hole and saw a sarcophagus at the bottom. Inside he discovered a shroud, and when he touched the shroud a beautiful maiden rose to life. As the dream continued, shouting strangers arrived and wanted to bury the girl alive in the desert, but the colonel chased them away.

Perplexed by his dream, Dickson consulted a local Bedouin woman who had a reputation as a dream interpreter. She explained that the girl symbolised wealth beneath the sands of Kuwait and the men trying to bury her were strangers from across the sea who wished to prevent its discovery. At that time, a British oil company crew had been drilling nothing but dry wells for two years at Bahrah on Kuwait Bay.

The Bedouin interpreter told Dickson he should move the team to the desert of Burgan and concentrate drilling activities by a lonely palm tree, where they would find great treasure. When the drillers laughed at Dickson’s urgings to move the team, he sailed to London and told his dream and its interpretation to the company executives. One of them, who believed in dreams, felt the dream interpreter’s instructions deserved a try. He cabled Kuwait and the team was moved about thirty miles south to Burgan. In May 1938, the drillers discovered huge oil deposits there in the desert by a lonely palm tree.

In a recent news program on television, a man who survived the Japanese prisoner of war camp in Singapore had been given a photograph of children by a dying soldier he did not know. The man had asked him to tell his family of his death, but did not give his name. The photograph was kept for forty odd years, the man still wanting to complete his promise but not knowing how. One night he dreamt he was told the man’s name. Enquiries soon found the family of the man, who had an identical photograph.

2       Being aware of the death or danger of a member of family. Kinship and love seem to be major factors in the way the unconscious functions. See: dead people dreams; Talking with the dead

3       Seeing into the workings of the body and diagnosing an illness before it becomes apparent to waking observation. Dr Vasali Kasatkin and Professor Medard Boss have specialised in the study of such dreams. In a recent dream told to me a man looked back into a bedroom and saw a piece of the wall fall away. Waves of water gushed from a main pipe. The dreamer struggled to hold back the piece of broken pipe. Within two weeks his colon burst and he had to have a major operation. See: meditation.

I – the author – witnessed a number of extraordinary dreams told me by my first wife Brenda. One of them has become a landmark for me of what is possible in dreams. One morning Brenda woke and told me she had dreamt about the baby of two of our friends. The friends, who I will call Jane and Bob, were living about 200 miles from us. We knew Jane was pregnant, and about a week or so before the dream we had received a short letter saying the baby, a boy had been born. We were not on the telephone at the time, so the letter was our only means of communication.

In the dream Brenda saw the baby and a voice from behind her told her the child was ill. Its illness, she was given to understand, was serious, and would need to be treated with a drug taken every day for the child’s life. The reason for this illness and the drug use, she was told, was because in a past life the person now born as the baby, had committed suicide using a drug.

I did not take the dream seriously, thinking it was some sort of personally symbolic dream. But we couldn’t seem to extract any personal meaning for Brenda, so just in case I sent an account of the dream to Jane and Bob. About a week later we had a letter from them saying that the letter and dream had crystallised an already existing anxiety about the baby. It had not been feeding well and was fretful. On taking it to the doctor nothing definite could be found but special tests were made in hospital. From these it was discovered the baby was dying. It lacked an enzyme which was needed to digest calcium. To compensate it was given a drug, which it has had to take every day of its life to make up for the lacking enzyme.

4       Access to a computer-like ability to sort through a massive store of information and experience to solve problems. These dreams are often confused with precognitive ability. Prediction does occur from these dreams, but it arises, as with weather prediction, from a massive gathering of information, most of which we have forgotten consciously. Morton Schatzman, in an article in New Scientist, showed how subjects can produce answers to complex mathematical problems in their dreams. See: the dream as process as computer; creativity and problem solving in dreams.

5       Tapping a collective mind which stores all experience, and so is sensed as godlike or holy. See: spiritual life in dreams .

6       It seems likely that before the development of speech the human animal communicated largely through body language. Some dreams suggest we still have this ability to read a persons health, sexual situation, intentions and even their past, through body shape, posture and tiny movements. See: Postures Movement And Body Language.

See: Cayce, Edgar; collective unconscious. See Also: hallucinations; altered states of consciousness..

Energy, Sex and Dreams

Dreams depict this in a variety of ways. It might be shown as electricity, as something flowing, like water, or as a house. But one of the frequently used symbols is the snake. In fact many ancient cultures used the snake or serpent and even the dragon in their religious symbols to illustrate how we relate to the huge process and energy of life, but a modern symbol of it is electricity.

So, instead of using the word energy, we could use the word potential, in its latent and expressed form. Personal potential, and the part your sexual feelings play in your life, becomes clearer in the way dreams use images of the snake, electricity and water.

A good example of this is the way electricity exists in a house. First, we have the supply of electricity into the house. The wires carrying the supply to the house are not in themselves the electricity. The current is invisible, but it has great potential for good or harm. So we usually deal with it carefully, and have means of controlling it via insulation, fuses and switches. When the electricity is wired into the house, its potential can be expressed in a huge variety of ways. It can manifest as heat, light, and power to move or do things, such as with a drill or vacuum cleaner. It can produce sound or images as with television, and can, via programs for the computer, manifest in almost magical ways, storing and retrieving huge amounts of information and manipulating it.

Limitless Potential

The usefulness of this image of the house with its electricity is that we can use it as an analogy of energy in your own life. Your potential can express as cellular activity, or physical movement. You can experience it as sexual drive and its pleasure and pain, as emotions, as sight, hearing, sensation, smell and taste. You can express it as thinking, and vocalising in speech or singing, or as the creation of a personal virtual reality, as you do in fantasy and dreams. Some psychic experiences even suggest that part of your potential is to extend your awareness over huge distances, or gain penetrating insight into another person’s state of mind or body. But all these are expressions of it, and are not IT. See Edgar Cayce; Dimensions of Your Experience

As with electricity, your potential is probably limitless, and depends upon the state of body and mind you use to approach and express it. In connection with this, something interesting happened the first time I slept in the same bed as my wife Hyone. She fell asleep quickly, and I noticed there was a great struggle with her breathing through her nose. My impression from listening was that as she started breathing in, a tension occurred in her nose, closing it in some way. This led to a gasping sound as air was forced into her closed mouth.

While she still slept I spoke to her quietly, suggesting that the muscles in her nose and face would relax. I repeated this a few times and Hyone’s breathing became easy and normal. Seeing that she responded so well, I decided to try something else. So I quietly suggested that her whole body would drop unnecessary tensions, and emotional and mental stress would melt away. I went on to say that this would open all the doors of her being, allowing cleansing and healing throughout.

There was no apparent response to this, so I lay quietly ready to sleep. But suddenly, about eight minutes later, Hyone woke, almost with a jerk, and said enthusiastically, “I just had the most amazing dream.” 

In the dream Hyone had been with her mother and sisters in a garden at the back of a house. Hyone was lying in the sun relaxing. As she relaxed she felt a wave of energy flow up her body to her head. Then, wave after wave moved up her body, giving her tremendous pleasure and feelings of well-being. But the waves got stronger and stronger, and she was frightened they would overwhelm her, and at that point she woke.

This is a very important dream because we know what prompted it, and therefore exactly what the symbols refer to. We can also see that Hyone’s energy potential, released as a healing influence, was felt as threatening when it became intense. Also, Hyone doesn’t symbolise her potential as electricity or a snake, but experiences it directly as waves of pleasure.

The Power of Life or Death

There is no suggestion in Hyone’s dream that the enormous energy flow she was experiencing would harm her. It was felt as healing and life enhancing. But we need to remember there is also a negative facet of our potential, and we need to avoid becoming a victim of it. In the following two dreams this is shown clearly. See Reaction to the unconscious

Example: I am in overalls working in a house. I am kneeling on the floor. The house is not familiar to me. In some way I had hold of, or was connected with, a large electric cable. The cable was live with electricity, and it touched my right shoulder. The effect was excruciating and shocking pain. The most intense memory is of struggling to pull the cable away from myself, fighting to stay conscious against the terrible current lashing through me. I screamed out for my mother, who I was sure was in the building somewhere, to switch off the electricity. I knew I only had a little time because I could not survive that current long. I have a vague sense that the current stopped, and then the current and struggle started again. Steve.

The second dream uses the image of the snake.

Example: I am quietly lying in bed, alone at night. I see a snake slithering toward me. It comes across the bed and bites me in the region of the heart. I manage to pull it off and suck out the poison. Jane.

Both the dreams portray a dangerous situation. We know that touching an uninsulated electrical supply wire can kill. We know that snakebite can be dangerous or fatal. But what are these dreams saying about human potential being so dangerous? But the electricity in the dream was found by the dreamer to be his own powerful energy turned inwards, short-circuited by what he felt to be the criticism, the rejection, non-understanding of his two last women partners. “I felt that I had tried and tried, while preserving my own integrity, to live in the way they wanted me to. But this felt as if it was an enormous self-denial at times. It was a self-denial that created this almost death dealing introversion of energy.”

But sex is not a universal impulse, but is determined by the energy we take in by foo and air. Experimental “starvation” was the physical condition in some other studies which made it clear the link between food and sexusl impulse.. In an investigation reported in 1919, the subjects were two groups of twelve young men. One group had their usual caloric content reduced by one-third or one-half for a period of four months, and the other group was maintained on an even lower caloric level for three weeks. Of the twenty-four men, twenty-two reported a decrease in sexual interest, sixteen claimed a decrease in nocturnal emissions, and none of them claimed recall of any sexual dreams. 43 In a 1948 study involving thirty-six male conscientious objectors, the subjects maintained a good diet for three months (about thirty-five hundred calories), a markedly reduced diet of less than sixteen hundred calories for six months, and then a rehabilitative diet for three months. The men lost about one-quarter of their body weight during the starvation period. Sex feelings and expression were virtually extinguished” in all but a few subjects. One subject declared, “I have no more sexual feeling than a sick oyster.” According to the investigators, nocturnal emissions were absent or greatly reduced and sex dreams also were greatly reduced in number and intensity.

Looking back to where the possibilities of human potential were listed, among the descriptions were thinking, fantasy, and emotions. The dangerous aspect of these is that if someone you sincerely believed was a doctor examined you and told you he or she had discovered signs of a terminal illness, you would experience all the anxieties and emotions connected with that information, even if the statement was not true. Such anxieties and emotions, even though based on a lie, could cause an illness through anxiety and stress. The point being made is that whatever negative idea you believe to be true, produces the accompanying negative emotions. Also, whatever negative emotions, such as resentment, guilt, anger or fear are generated, by whatever cause, they poison your system. Jane’s dream of the snake illustrates this. Jane had experienced feelings of resentment, anger and betrayal, in connection with her husband. Her emotional energy has the potential to be expressed in any form, but perhaps because of the betrayal, Jane was feeling anger and resentment, and the dream shows this poisoning her. However, at the time of the dream, Jane is making changes in her lifestyle and relationships that are not only stopping the poisonous emotions (she had actually experienced a breakdown and had been on antidepressants), she was also drawing out the poison from her heart. See Avoid Being Victims – Emotions_mood

Your Emotional and Physical Energy

The first dream of the electricity depicts this even more dramatically. The dreamer, Steve, feels he will die if he cannot stop the electricity. In exploring his dream, Steve felt the electricity illustrated how his enormous emotional and physical energy was being turned back on himself. Steve expressed a lot of his love through work, supporting and helping others. But in his relationship he had felt deeply criticised. And through this criticism had been holding back his flow of love. In other words his energy was being interiorised, turned back on itself. This is depicted as the electricity flowing into his body. Steve realised from the dream that he must not allow past or present criticisms to cause him to hold back his positive flow of life and love.

The damage such in-turned or negative emotions can do is enormous. Many years ago a woman who could hardly walk came to stay with my wife and I. She hobbled along using two sticks. Within a week, without any treatment, she could walk normally. She told us with great enthusiasm that she now knew what had caused her illness. Three years previously her son had married and had asked if he and his new wife could lodge in his parent’s house for a few weeks while they looked for a house of their own. His mother felt resentful that he and his wife had stayed for years and made no effort to move out. But being a Christian woman she kept her feelings to herself. She ended the story by saying, “Being on holiday away from the situation has allowed me to be free of the resentment, and this has healed my legs. So I know what I am going to do when I get home. I am going to tell my son and his wife to pack their things and move out.”

Understanding this energy and the personal misery we can create with it if we do not understand how it works, is fundamental to a satisfying life. It is strange, considering this, that it is deemed more important in school to teach children how to write, how to add and subtract, perhaps to learn the religious beliefs of those around them, rather than how to deal with their own being. Using the analogy of a car to represent yourself, it is like learning the history and make of the car and motor vehicles; learning to calculate how many miles per gallon of fuel the car might do; learning the different types of motor vehicles – but developing no understanding at all of how the accelerator, the clutch, the brake are used to control your speed and direction. Even as adults few of us learn how to handle the vehicle of our body, mind and spirit with any great skill. It is not something that is well understood or practised in western culture.

Example: In observing and thinking about this as it happened, I thought it might be some childhood trait or habit I was dealing with, or even childhood obstinacy of some sort. But it gradually developed into the circling arm movements, accompanied by the, “Yes. No.” The yes and the no coincided with the direction of the energy flow upwards or downwards.

There was a part also where I was saying, “I am. I am my life.” This has been a theme that occurred occasionally for some time. I took it simply to be a very general statement.

I was still wondering what this was about and so asked the process to help me understand. Gradually it became clear that the yes and no was a switch. For instance, life energy can be expressed in any number of ways. It can be movement, sexuality, thought, emotion, writing, swimming, and so on. The direction, or the way we direct, our energy, comes about through the yes/no action. Perhaps we do it unconsciously, but we are always applying the switch of yes or no to direct each movement, each action, each thought even

Example: Then the throat pain became unbearable. I investigated it and I became aware of doom. If I didn’t fight it, doom would take over. I was weary of fighting it so I let doom take over and sank into the doom and it was then that I found myself at the foot of the great being and total acceptance of my life. Spontaneously, before I knew it I was offering everything as a sacrifice, including past mistakes and cock-ups, and that I had to do this.

And then there were the images again of clefts: the earth, female genitals, undersea-ocean crusts opening and something, as yet formless, emerging. This, I suspect, is my creativity in the world.

To be aware in more detail how a dream can portray, not simply the mishandling of this energy, but also the life effects it has on a person, the following dream and the dreamer’s comments are helpful. The dream and comments were written by a man in his late forties who, as a child, was placed in an orphanage, despite his parents still being alive.

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

The Pain of Being a Child

Example: Dreamt I was standing on a street somewhere in the city of London watching an old-fashioned phone box. It was a weekend and all was quiet. The door of the phone box is open and on the floor are a variety of bones. At first I think they are from an animal, but quickly see they are human. A man enters the box to make a call. Suddenly three or four savage dogs attack, ripping him to pieces.

I worked with this dream. To begin with I felt a knotted feeling in my stomach. In exploring this by focussing my attention inwards and allowing spontaneous imagery and emotions, I found a lump that I had kept deep within that no one could touch or ever has. I split the lump and two halves of a walnut appeared. There was a picture of my mother in one half and my father in the other, as they were when I was a child. As I looked, the two halves crumpled into dust.

This was the secret I have carried since childhood, that unlike the other children in the orphanage I had parents. Yet I too was left. The emotions came to the surface and I really cried. After this wave passed I was left in a very passive state. I then saw myself go into the telephone box and try to make the call to reconnect with my parents. Again another shock. There was nobody to connect with. So once again the realisation came that I am an orphan. This brought another great wave of emotion that tore me apart.

I then turned toward the dogs as they came at me. I began to feel the sickness that I have always experienced in sessions, but I just shrugged and let the feeling wash over me. It felt like I have always ended up in hell by that route, and I realised afterwards that hell is hell and will never be anything else. I felt there was something deeper, so I kept to a centre line, trying to reach it. Again there was no feeling, so I turned toward the God dream that I had when my friend Rob was with me. The look of total love for me in God’s eyes gave me the strength to trust my own process. I then experienced God holding my hand and telling me to surrender and allow myself to die.

Then the crisis broke through, and there I was in the kid’s home as my father was leaving. I saw myself, or I should say my being, go out to him. I felt that if I loved him he wouldn’t leave my sister and me. Then he left, and I felt split in half between him and my mother, creating a schism in which I was left with a personality on either side. Schizophrenia is the word that covers this state. I felt what I would call the primal scream emerge from my being. Then I was through. I saw the dogs as my anxieties that have taken up two thirds of my energy through my life, constantly tearing me apart. I also saw that as a kid I didn’t have enough information to redirect the energy elsewhere. Kevin K.

Kevin graphically describes to us a shock and pain that split his developing personality as a child. That split and its accompanying pain directed Kevin’s potential energy into almost constant anxiety, and into feelings that he was not loved and was not lovable. In his dream the telephone depicted his attempt to reconnect the split halves of himself and to attempt to find the love he so wanted from his parents. And the dogs are his own energy turned against himself through anxiety. The dogs, his emotional energy, could have been caring and supportive. This is true of Jane’s dream of the snake also. The snake is simply potential energy. It can be poisonous or protective depending upon how we unconsciously direct it. If there are difficulties in learning how to transform the poisonous into the supportive, they lie in making conscious the unconscious factors that direct the energy. In exploring his dream, Kevin was doing exactly that. He became aware of the split in his personality. He saw how the pain created fear of abandonment, and how that fear in turn created continual anxiety. Kevin describes something of feelings that he continually lived with in the following.

Example: I have been observing that I become very upset if I am left alone for more than five minutes. Either I return to my head and experience images of me killing someone, or else I breakdown in tears. I have very little energy to really converse with people, and when quiet I choke down my feelings. I am currently feeling sorry for myself, not self-pity, just sad that a child has had to endure such pain and suffering, worse in some ways that it is myself. I have also realised that although I have stepped out of the telephone box, I am still standing alone in an empty street. It does not surprise me why I have always needed to keep a connection with several women; this feeling of isolation, and anxiety has ruled my life. I also feel that I have destroyed a lot of my relationships through these problems. 

What Fear Can Do

In the early years of being a parent, my wife and I lived in a two-bedroom house. Our three young children slept in one bedroom, my wife and I in the other. At that time I was also running a part time book business. Because it was quite a small house with little cupboard space, I used a cupboard in the children’s bedroom to store new books. Much of the work I did with the books was done in the evenings when the children were in bed. Unfortunately this meant entering the children’s bedroom while they were asleep, and with a small torch searching for books I needed. Quite quickly it became apparent that one of my children showed signs of terror each time I entered the room. From his point of view all that was visible was a small light accompanied by shuffling sounds. I realised that he believed I was some sort of strange or ghostly creature coming into his bedroom. Of course, with this belief, he was terrified.

As soon as I understood this, I waited for darkness and entered the room with my torch. I could hear my small son’s sharp intake of breath and feel his sense his terror. Then I gently spoke, explaining that I was in the room looking for a book, and I switched the light on so he could assure himself of this truth. The terror never reappeared.

I explain this because Kevin’s fears, locked in the darkness of his unconscious childhood experiences, were acting upon him like my son’s terror of a ghostly presence. Kevin had no insight into where his enormous anxieties were arising from. Therefore he could not dismiss them or deal with them. However, in understanding their source, when they arose he could remind himself that they come from childhood pain, and being a grown man he can now care for himself.

Recently, while in a waiting room, I read an article in Eve Magazine about women who work as psychologists in prisons with men with violent behaviour. A statement in the feature remained with me. The psychologist being interviewed said that without exception each of the prisoners had a history of being abused or treated with violence as children. We may have escaped such a horrific upbringing, but each of us have lesser degrees of violence in our history in some way. It is these that twist our energy into self-destruction, violent behaviour, or inner pain.

This is deeply important. Often the redirection of our emotional energy cannot take place until we are assured of certain things about what causes our energy to become an attacking force. This shift in the way one relates to one’s own potential energy is illustrated in the following two dreams. They occurred several years apart to Trevor, a man who through most of his life struggled with low self-esteem and anxiety.

The Deadly and the Healing Snake

Example: I dreamt I was walking over the hills near where I live. There were worms about that were snakes in the grass. They became poisonous snakes, only visible by their rapid movements. I had to keep a penetrating look out in case one attempted to bite and poison me. Several times I stamped on them until I broke them in half to kill them. Then my dog, who was also trying to protect me, got bitten. I thought he would die, but he slowly turned into a wildcat. I knew I had to get well away from him before the transformation was completed or else he would attack me, but if I was well away, there was no danger. Trevor.

The dream gives a very clear picture of the situation we meet when feelings pull us down into depression, or we feel threatened by them. Fear, aggression, a sense of danger, are all exhibited in the dream. It is obvious too, especially at the end of the dream that Trevor feels he must distance himself from his emotions because they might attack him. In the next dream Trevor moves towards a completely different relationship with the snakes, and therefore with himself.

Example: Last night I dreamt I was outdoors walking through open ground, like gardens. I was with others and we frequently came across large snakes that we reacted to us as if they were venomous. Then I came across a lot of them in long grass and they swarmed onto me. I froze, terrified that if I made a move I would be fatally bitten. But they just swarmed over my body and got under my clothes without harming me. Gradually I relaxed and slowly began to move about with the snakes still on me. They started to feel like a built-in defence system that would attack anyone who was aggressive to me. At one point several large and aggressive dogs walked past me. They turned as if thinking about attacking, then appeared to sense the snakes and ran off cowed. As time passed the snakes became part of my body. Trevor.

What was a drain on Trevor’s ability to deal with the world, and something he had to protect himself against, is shown in the dream as a new found strength. Knowing Trevor, I can see these changes have actually become observable in his daily life.

In such features as peer dream group; Techniques for Exploring your Dreams; A Master Class in Dreams; and Life’s Little Secrets, I have explained in detail how to explore your dreams and move toward personal transformation. Therefore I will not repeat those instructions here. Instead, I will move on to explore something of what dreams reveal about love and sexuality.

For this study I am using a collection of seven thousand dreams. Unfortunately this collection does not include any appreciable number of dreams from young children and teenagers, nor from homosexuals. Therefore I am not able to explore what dreams say about those areas of sexuality.

Nevertheless, the subject is enormous, and looking at a few dreams will help to begin the definition of this. The first dream is from a man in his 40s.

Example: I was sitting with a group of young people mostly girls. There was one in particular about 14 with long dark hair. I noticed that she kept looking over at me. When I returned the look I could see she wanted to be near me. I felt all right about this but realised that it would involve sex in a way that society could not handle, and so I sat calmly and let the feeling pass over me. Dan.

Dan’s dream illustrates a number of issues that relate to or influence how we deal with sexual urges. The basic theme of the dream is that Dan would like to have sex with a young girl. In his waking life there was opportunity for this, but Dan never followed through in that direction. In his dream Dan is saying that society could not deal with him having sex with a 14 year-old girl. But in our dreams we can do what we wish without harm, without social repercussions. We all know this, and yet we inject our waking difficulties, morals, and rules into our dream life. So Dan is struggling not with what society could handle, but with what he could handle in dealing with other people.

The other obvious factor in the dream is that Dan is exploring sexual feelings that he might not easily admit to himself while awake. The next example shows another side to this.

 

Your Dreams Are a Safe Place in Which to Love

Example: A young girl kept coming up to me and placing my hand upon her breast. She was just developing her breasts, and they felt so very beautiful. Les.

In this dream Les is not holding back from being involved with the young girl. The dream, any dream, is a full surround experience of virtual reality. While in the dream it usually seems totally real to us. So as far as Les is concerned, while he is dreaming, he is actually experiencing what it would be like if a young girl came up to him and put his hands on her developing breasts. This means that dreams are a wonderful gymnasium of the soul, a place where we can play, experiment, try new things, in fact allow ourselves areas of experience that we or others might forbid in waking life. The next dream shows this even more vividly. At the time of her dream Heather’s husband was frequently avoiding any sexual relationship with her. However Heather does not have any reservations about allowing herself the pleasure of her own feelings.

Example: I was with a dark, curly haired man. He was very brown, could have been a native, but he didn’t feel strange to me. We were making love, I was very aware of the pleasure in my lower body. It was very slippy-slidy and wet. There was enjoyment for both of us. Very intense body feelings with a childlike quality, not passion – but pleasure and joy in my vagina. Heather.

Although this is not yet obvious, the recognition that your dreams are a safe area in which to allow any experience, ties indirectly with what has been said above about the negative and positive aspects of personal energy. The next dream, experienced by Heather’s husband, shows this very clearly.

Example: I was in a farmyard watching a bull loose in the yard. There were cows in the field beyond a wooden fence. The bull saw the cows and smashed through the fence. It then charged the first cow to mount it, but so terrible was its energy and emotion that it could not expressed as sex. It smashed the cow aside as it had done the fence. Then it rushed the next and tossed it over its head, charging and smashing the next. Meanwhile I climbed into somebody’s garden trying to get out of the district. Peter.

Peter had grown up in a Christian culture that, at the time, looked upon sex as something not to be spoken about. Underlying that attitude was that restraining sex was somehow a spiritual discipline. Also, while in his early teens, Peter’s mother had pushed a strong fear into him that sex could kill you. She probably did this because tuberculosis was a killer disease at the time, a strong sex drive was one of the signs of the illness, and she was scared that Peter had caught TB. Consequently Peter avoided sex until overwhelmed by his own desires. In fact it took most of his adult life to find normal loving and sexual feelings.

Sex Can Also be a Pain in the Arse

Peter’s dream suggests that his restrained sexuality transforms into destructive anger. It also shows him running away from, or trying to avoid, this side of himself. Peter often experienced sexual fantasies, and desires for women other than his wife – and that because fantasy sex never became real – so he could both avoid it and experience it at the same time. But there is no sign of this in his dream, so the dream is not a wish fulfilment. It is not a way that he can fulfil his desires without actually having sex. The dream points out to Peter what he doesn’t want to see. Namely, that he is damaging himself, and those around him are suffering from his irritability and anger. Importantly, the dream reminds us of something seen in many dreams, that repressed sexual energy can transform into anger, or even murderous rage.

So, our dreams can be an area where we can freely explore any manner of experience. They can be a way of looking at and trying to resolve a conflict, such as Dan is doing in his dream of the young girl, where his desire for her conflicts with his feelings about what society permits. Our dreams can also be a mirror showing us the problems, the sickness or the beauty we hold within us. Heather’s dream shows her as a healthy passionate woman who is at ease with her own feelings and desires. Peter’s dream depicts him as avoiding the enormous conflict and destruction taking place within himself and in his own life. Yet, innate in Peter’s dream is the possibility of healing. By showing the harm that is being done, Peter’s dream is also pointing out how such harm could be avoided.

Through working with his dreams, Peter did in fact transform his relationship with the bull, and therefore with his sexuality. This is clearly seen in the following two dreams. The first one still shows his battle with himself.

Example: I climbed up a wire fence, like those around tennis courts. The bull came and reared up after me. Having a thick piece of oak in my hand, I brought it down full on the bull’s nose, knocking it down. Peter.

In the next dream, the aspects of Peters conflicts are shown together – his mother, the bull and the cow. The dream occurred some years after the two quoted above, and after much personal work with his dreams.

Example: I and two other people, a man and woman, are entering a field. It is a field in which I used to play as a child. We enter through a gate that borders a wide verge near a road, and the field rises in a fairly steep hill. The woman, who it seems now to be my mother, is leading a magnificent bull by a halter. We are going to introduce it to the cows already in the fields. Once we are through the gate, which is left open, my mother halts because she thinks the bull is resisting her and it will be difficult to lead uphill. I point out that it is not resisting her it is just walking slowly. So she walks on and the bull follows willingly. She then drops the halter to give the bull freedom. I am now above the bull slightly further up the hill. Looking down I see how beautiful the bull is. It is young, not too bulky, but obviously powerful and streamlined. I realise it has unusual features in the shape of its head, and think this will pass on genetically. As I watch, the bull lowers its head to the grass, which is lush and green, and pushes its nose deep to smell. I feel it is absorbing this new territory and becoming at one with its surroundings. It is beautiful and moving to watch. I sense I am watching a wild and live creature being moved by deeply wise and instinctive urges.

The bull then turns to the left, where a cow is visible. The halter is still hanging from its neck, so to prevent it being hindered I approach it to remove the halter. I am careful because its horns are long and splendid. I notice that the very tips of the horns are delicately carved in a simple curved design. I manage to pull the halter off and the bull sees the cow. It responds, its whole body indicating a change. I particularly notice or see its tail. This appears to be stretched out on the ground as if the bull is lying down with tail pointing backwards. As I watch I see ripples of movement in the tail, surging and pulsing. I have the impression of deep impulses of life surging in the body of the bull. The cow at first does not want the bull. There is some memory of the cow running for the open gate, but it doesn’t go out. It is unnecessary anxiety.

This is a wonderful dream and shows an enormous deepening of Peter’s personality. Instead of his conflict with his own sexuality, he now sees it as “deep impulses of life surging” through his own being. He also describes his sexuality as “deeply wise and instinctive”. The dream is so rich a very long commentary could be written about it.

Because the subject of dreams and sexuality is so huge, we can only deal with some aspects of it in this feature. But something that is fundamental and important is that of gender as dealt with in dreams. The following dream is very direct in its presentation of this. I was sent this dream while working for UK Teletext.

Example: I have several recurring dreams, but all have a common theme. I am always a young woman of about thirty years of age, and always doing mundane things such as shopping or picking up the kids from school. I know what this female ‘me’ looks like. I see her reflection in shop windows. Why am I always changing sex when I dream? Bernard – a concerned Chap! 

I Don’t Know if I’m a Man or a Woman!

Unfortunately some of our cultural values lead us to believe that if we are male and have feelings of being female it must mean we are gay. Also, that if we are female and have feelings of being male it must suggest we are butch or a lesbian. Dreams suggest something quite different, and can meaningfully explain some of the situations we find ourselves in as a human being. The next dream clarifies this point.

Example: I was giving an exercise class in a small field. It was sunny and everybody was spread out, seated on blankets, some stripped to the waist. I was only wearing my brief underpants. Somehow, in one of the exercises my pants came right off. Nobody noticed, not even myself, until I was seated with knee up, heal in groin. Then looking down I noticed my legs were very smooth skinned and I had female sex organs. There was no pubic hair at all. Making a joke of the situation I told the class to look the other way while I put my pants on. As I was putting them on a couple of the women did not look away and I noticed I now had male sex organs again. After this the class had lost its centre of interest. I had found a pair of my class trousers washed and sun dried on a wall, and put them on. I did this because I had put on an old pair of my swimming trunks over my pants, but they were split. A man in the class said that he felt bad because he had few clothes on. There was an atmosphere of shame because of sex or the body, so I told him to put his shirt on. Bob.

The message of this dream is that Bob has the characteristics of both genders. It suggests that psychologically Bob is basically male, especially in a relationship with a woman (a couple of the women did not look away and I noticed I now had male sex organs again). This is not something that Bob at first finds easy to look at about himself. This is shown by Bob trying to cover himself up again, and where the man in the class says he feels bad because he has few clothes on. As the dreaming Bob says, “There was an atmosphere of shame because of sex or the body.” But this is a cultural view Bob had taken in, and is not innate. Later dreams in this series show Bob accepting and loving his female characteristics. The following dream is an example of this.

Example: I am in love with a woman who is not from this planet. The love is so complete we literally swap minds or souls. So now I have all that she is inside me, and she has all of what I am inside her. This, I feel, will gradually merge into the rest of me and will extend all that I am capable of. Bob.

If we look back to what was said about energy, and remember that at base our psychobiological energy is pure potential, this ties in with what is emerging about how our dreams see our gender. Our energy can express as anything, creative or destructive. Also, within ourselves, we can be anything, any gender, any age, and any disposition.

This may at first seem to be an exaggeration. But if you have kept a record of your dreams over a period of years you will see the extraordinary number of people, of creatures, of places and situations you create while you sleep. For instance, Bob actually felt what it was like to be totally loved by a woman, and to have his being merged with hers in his dream. We could argue with this and say, yes but that is just a dream, and has nothing to do with reality, with waking life. But if you have that viewpoint, it is just an assumption you make based on what you have experienced so far. From those assumptions would you think that the following dream and its events were real? See Archetype of the Animus and Archetype of the Anima

 

You Are More Than You Dare to Believe

Example: I was in what looked like huge white ribs. In the ribs was a big heart beating. Beyond that was my homeopath. I could hardly breath, struggling to live. I could hear the heart beating, but as I listened I could also hear another heart beating. It seemed to me it was my sister’s heart connected to my own invisibly. The homeopath came forward and stretching open the ribs, reached into them, took hold of the invisible heart – it was like a shadow behind the other heart – and pulled it out. Immediately I could breath again and felt I was whole.

In everyday life my sister and I have been incredibly linked, even to the point of having cramps at night on the same nights, though living in different parts of the world. I had become ill recently out of this connection, but as soon as I had this dream I was well again, but my sister became ill. She has just been diagnosed as HIV positive and is dying.

Many other such dreams could be quoted, but would that convince you? It is enough if the idea has been planted so there is the possibility of future experience proving or disproving this to you.

The point being stressed is not that you can physically become anything or anybody – although that is not beyond the realms of possibility. However, within yourself you are formless, and can take on an unimaginable number of forms. You are in fact doing this each night in your dreams when you create a whole new surrounding environment, new characters, and new experiences. If you can grasp this, if you can recognise that your fundamental energy is simply potential, perhaps infinite potential, and that the personality you take to be so formed, and so immutably you, then you can shift and change and roam through babyhood, through gender, through all manner of experience. You will begin to drop away your limitations and explore a strange new limitless world. You will in fact have touched your spirit.

Whatever name you give to that enormous potential underlying your existence, whether you call it Life, Chaos, God, The Mystery, it is the source of your physical existence. We struggle with words, with concepts, when we approach that Mystery. Even the words used here, such as energy and potential, are simply attempts to define something that in the end is more than the words we use to describe it. We struggle to understand how we can to be. With great passion and one pointedness we have learned some of the secrets, as in recognition of DNA and the genetic code. But if you have followed what has been said above, dreams lead us beyond forms, beyond definitions. They cut suggest that the flow of energy that you call your sexual drive and your urge to parenthood, does not in the end belong to you. Yes, you can restrain it, deny it, completely give yourself over to it, or even attempt to wash your hands of it. You can add quality or brutality to the way it is expressed. But in the end it is like a river that flows on, and passes through you.

And isn’t love like that too? Do you ever possess it? Dreams suggest that the painful love so many of our cultural love songs mention arises out of our attempts to control or possess this natural flow, this wonder that is not ours to possess. We relate to it so personally.

See Ages of Love – Dimensions of Human Experience – Near death experience – Unconscious – Inner World – Learning to Love

 

Lumpkin – The Baby Who Became Tony

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

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

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

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

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

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

It wasn’t an auspicious beginning, but my grandmother carried off the limp body and managed to provoke breathing. I have a sense — I cannot call it a clear memory — that in reviving me, my grandmother baptised me in case I died. She blessed me with her love, and marked a cross on my forehead in oil and water. That mark has remained in my being indelibly, having been given with true love. It has opened connections to me with mysteries I might otherwise not have known.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

         My Grandmother

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last Thoughts About Lumpkin

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

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

Here is the Lumpkin dream.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

A Psychotherapeutic Experience of Premature Birth

Without hesitation I begin to feel my connection with another human being. I experience that being connected with another human being is a fundamental part of life and procreation. If something threatens that connection, then it is life threatening – the reason being, I am in the womb! To lose my connection threatens my life. But my life is threatened. I am expelled from the womb before my body and soul are mature enough to be ready to be separated, ready enough to undertake life disconnected from the placenta. I feel incredibly vulnerable. Each sound, whether a bird singing or a car going by, is a possible threat to my existence. I had been physically and psychically attached to my mother. Now the bond is broken.

I realise as I experience this that the broken bond, the feeling of life threatening isolation, enormously increased my sensitivity to threats. It set me up for what happened at three when I was placed in a convalescent home and was deeply traumatised. In itself the short absence of my mother was not as potentially traumatising as it turned out to be. But because of the birth experience, I was already traumatised to abandonment. To be hit by it again increased the volume of it enormously.

I wasnt properly formed, so it was very traumatic to be separated as a baby. I am trying to heal this at the moment. I feel the struggle of resisting what has happened to me. I cry out that I dont want to be born. I am not ready. I feel deeply alone. There is in me a sense that tells me I shouldnt be alone. It is like something that pushes me to seek not to be alone. I feel lost. Im not ready for this world. Im feeling awful.

In fact I do feel awful, like I am ill and can barely move, or move only with effort and concentration. I go on to say that I have felt awful most of my fucking life. I can see from the feelings I am meeting how they have contributed to my lifelong feelings of being lost and cut off – alone. I have always called it independence, and perhaps seen the positive side of it more than the negative. But it has been a source of restlessness and a spur to seeking a bonding with someone. Of course I want to find the security of the womb. I want to know someone is deeply committed and bonded to me.

I am so alone. Even when someone loves me I cant feel it. I want to change. I dont want to keep hurting Hy by living like she isnt there at an emotional level. But that is the feeling world I have lived in – who is there for me? I was part of something and I lost it. I was part of something that was good, and I lost it. I was a part of a woman and I lost her. I was rejected. I was rejected. Now I face this struggle just to exist, just to breath, just to be. This feeling of life being a terrible struggle just to keep going has pervaded me all my life. I’ve got to struggle to exist just to keep alive. Got to struggle just to keep alive! GOT TO STRUGGLE TO EXIST – JUST TO KEEP ALIVE! GOT TO STRUGGLE BECAUSE THERE’S NOTHING THERE. I WANT SOMETHING TO HOLD ONTO. I’VE GOT TO STRUGGLE JUST TO KEEP ALIVE.

I cry like a baby. The question burns in me – Why is life like this? I cry again. Then I realise that at first when I was born I was too small and undeveloped even to be able to cry properly, so I couldnt let out my misery. It is such a relief to cry now and be understood, to have known what I felt at that terrible time.

I am aware of my connection with my stream of life having been broken – the umbilical cord. What I realise as the adult watching this, is that because of its proximity to the genitals, there is an unconscious connection made between the genitals and the connection I seek to sustain my life. So even as a baby I am reaching for that connection with my genitals. I want to be fed. I attempt to reconnect through my genitals, but the pain of the separation is so acute even when I do try in adulthood, the pain of the separation turns me back. This is the story of the Garden Of Eden. I was in the garden and was cast out. Now when I attempt to return, an angel with a burning sword turns me back. Not only was it painful every time I attempted reconnection, but I had the unconscious expectation to be fed, to be nourished. Instead of that every time I had sex I felt cheated, deceived and betrayed. I was not fed, but deeply sucked dry of what small nourishment I had managed to build up. I wasnt fed, I was fed upon by a predator. Each sexual act was a betrayal, a predation, and a torturous pain. Yet I had to find my way to the garden again, because there lay the secret of my genesis and myself. So I would return, to be wounded once more. It is even painful to look back on those years of misery now. Why is life so painful?

Seen from this level of experience, that of the uterine baby, God is a projection. You were in connection with a great creator, the mother. You were at one with them, but now you have been cast out of the Garden of Eden, so you have lost your contact with God, the creator in whose bosom you had existed. Perhaps that is why I searched so long for God.

Archetype of Baptism

The act of baptism long pre-dated the early Christian community. One can find water for purification outside very ancient temples. Therefore the tradition of baptism is older than the historical Christian church. It had its ascendance in the love a mother felt for her children, and beyond that the love she felt and gave to other children. Beyond that still, a loving woman might suckle a creature and extend her love beyond the normal boundaries. She might hold that other child, or that creature, with the same tenderness that she held her own baby. In such a moment she would know something that was beyond herself. It is something that flows through all of us. We symbolise it as the milk, the wine, or the blood. It is the flow of love that comes from beyond our own small personality.

The urge that enables us to reach out to another person who is not our own kin, or to another creature, is a small awareness of that universal life and consciousness that pervades all things. It is an expression of the Mystery that we can perhaps never understand, that is Life.

Baptism represents a conscious opening or an introduction to that Life. It is also an entrance into the recognition of the wider family; of that mysterious body we call Life. We become brothers and sisters in a wider community. It takes some skill to recognise who these brothers and sisters are, and what part they might play in your life. Calling yourself a Christian does not necessarily mean you have been truly baptised in that spirit of life and love. In fact you might still be imprisoned by attitudes of bigotry, class, creed, skin colour or gender.

Fundamentally, baptism means a change in the stance or condition of your inner attitudes. It means relinquishing fixed opinions and having an open mind. It means opening the doors of your being to new experiences, to new possibilities, pleasurable and painful. It means learning to love without bending others to your will, without grasping them for your own needs. It also means becoming a channel for that river of Life to flow through. In this way we can become workers in the vineyard – that is, co-workers with the processes of growth and evolution in the worlds of nature. But more than anything it means being washed clean in the river of Life.

Example: For some time I had been earnestly surrendering my life to the action of God by offering my body and mind in any way. I was feeling very ill and depressed at the time, and longed for healing, but could feel no definite change. Nevertheless I sat every day with a ‘waiting’ or ‘open’ attitude. I deeply pondered the question of how the action of God showed itself. Maybe I wasn’t aware of it. But I had noticed that while I slept my body experienced a subtle vibration, like you feel when you put your fingers on a smooth running electric motor; even my wife could feel it if she touched my body. But I could observe no changes in myself from this. It felt like a river of energy was flowing through me, like baptism.

Then one night, B., my wife, got out of bed because the baby was crying. When she had settled I got up and went to the toilet. Just as I was getting into bed again I heard a voice speaking to me. Literally a loud voice came from everywhere around me. It said, “You have asked what are the results of God’s activity upon one – now watch closely.” This was an extraordinary thing to experience, and waiting for sleep to overtake me again I had a mood of expectation, waiting for something to be shown me.  In the morning I remembered the following dream.

I was in a huge theatre, or amphitheatre.  The stage was on my right.  The part of the play I observed was where the actor walked up to a mirror and looked at himself.  Then somehow the activity gradually began to take place on my left.  First of all an orchestra was playing on a slope facing left.  Then everybody was moving to see a big event that was going to take place on the left.  This was at the opposite end to the stage.

Two days later I was massively plunge into the inner workings of the spirit. See Life’s Little Secrets.

Rather like the artist archetype, the negative aspect of this is a hollow living out of baptism. We see this in some religious communities where an external ritual takes the place of the inner experience. The person is then influenced to live out a way of life dictated by the organisation or the social norm rather than by the flow of living experience connecting the person with their source.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Was my baptism an experience of life washing me clean? If so what was I cleansed of?

What change has the experience of baptism made in my life?

Was my baptism a ritual that did not touch me inwardly?

See People’s Experience of LifeStream – also Talking As.

Fatherhood At Its Best

By Belden Johnson

A man loving himself and his future children enough to heal himself of his past wounds before he chooses a woman to conceive with.

A man nourishing himself by choosing a good woman and committing to a consciously-loving relationship into which to warmly welcome wished-for children.

A man nourishing his woman by speaking total truth, by taking 100% responsibility for his reality, by supporting her highest good as well as his own, by co-creating equally with her the safe nest of home and family.

A man who tells his 8-month pregnant wife how beautiful she is.

A man who creates lullabies to sing to his baby in the womb.

A man who also wants a home birth with a midwife and is completely present during the labor and delivery.

A man who protects children, male and female, from genital mutilation and sexual abuse.

A man who chooses to work half-time so he can parent half-time.

A man who changes all the diapers.

A man who dispenses with diapers and becomes the Permanent Pooper Scooper for as many years as it takes.

A man who loves skin-to-skin contact with his babies.

A man who welcomes a family bed.

A man who carries his baby in a Snuggli or a Gerry-pack.

A man who plays the piano with one hand while holding his baby with the other.

A man who kills his television and reads his children stories.

A man who wrestles with his children and always lets them win.

A man who coaches coed sports teams for his children and, when they ask who won, tells them that whoever had fun won.

A man who creates an alternative schooling for children who need it.

A man who will gladly teach and gladly learn.

A man who listens.

A man who says it’s okay to cry, or be afraid, or angry, or excited.

A man who can cry, be afraid, and be angry without violence or blaming.

A man who knows that he is the caretaker of Divine Souls who come “trailing clouds of glory” from God who is their home.

A man who celebrates his children’s differences from him and encourages them to become whoever and whatever they wish to become.

A man who, when the time comes, can let the birds fly the nest and bless them on their way out into the global family.

A man who fathers all children and weeps for the fatherless.

These images are true and real. Such fathers are now among us.

Bless them and their fatherhood!

* Report of the Fatherhood Vision Circle, Ninth International Congress of APPPAH, San Francisco, California Dec.6, 1999. You can reach Belden Johnson at johnson@gv.net.

Growing up to Love

Surviving Tomorrow

Part Five

Tony Crisp

We all know the first need of survival is to breathe. If a newborn baby fails to breathe it will die very quickly. After that comes water and food. Then there are less urgent needs such as shelter, ones without which life would be less comfortable, less satisfying, and would leave us ‘hungry’ for something. One of these needs is love.

However, in our times we have developed a rather strange definition of love. Somehow we have, in our literature and drama, and of course in our personal experience, believed love to be some sort of magic relationship, a sort of soul mate, that if we find, we will live ‘happily ever after’, a wonderful sexual partner. But in fact few if any of us find such a mate, and ‘love’ relationships are usually only partly satisfying, or often deeply painful.

However, without love – defined differently – none of us would have survived physically or psychologically.

Whatever partner we are with we still carry our problems unless they have been resolved. Also, nature itself is dynamically in states of opposition that attempt resolution. It is a resolution that often never arrives. Thus the earth swings around the sun. The great ocean currents are constantly on the move as warm and cold meet. Resolution is impossible. Marriage simply puts us into close contact with challenge. To meet this needs real personal and interpersonal awareness – self awareness. It needs honesty of a type you may previously not have developed in yourself. It calls for this honesty to be used in communication of great intimacy in which, although great emotions may throw their lightning bolts, there needs to be underlying good will – in fact love and respect.

Birth has already been mentioned, and without someone there to meet us, and in meeting give years of their life to supporting and nurturing us during infancy, we would not survive. Not only is the giving of food and protection necessary, but also, if we are to grow into a reasonably well adjusted and happy adult, that caring person, and many others, also need to give a lot of themselves.

Somewhere in this giving and supporting of life lies a more fundamental definition of love. What has already been said above about birth is an introduction to this. Birth demonstrates to us some wonderful things about the mechanisms of love we might take for granted, but that are true at many levels. The forming baby links to its mother through the umbilical cord. This remarkable link brings nourishment to the forming child, and is an enormous self giving of the mother’s being to that of her baby. In a very real way, the umbilical cord is the flow of life. If it were cut without any substitute the baby would die.

So we can define love as the giving and receiving from each other that happens through vital connection. Having been witness to many births a very obvious event is the cutting of the umbilical cord. What is not always so obvious is that the baby almost immediately tries to reconnect. It does this in two ways.

Firstly through the mother’s breast. Through that connection it again receives nourishment, but it also receives in the milk things that help it meet the infections and threats confronting it in the external world. Again, connection means survival.

Connection means life

At an even more subtle level another connection is attempted that isn’t always achieved. The baby attempts to form a living bond with its mother. In all mammals this level of connection is vital. Without it the baby will die unless it forms that bond with another adult. However, the bond is not simply that of having someone to feed you and protect you from harm. That simply feeds the infant body. But within that body is an infant consciousness, a living, feeling, learning and wonderful being. This ‘consciousness body’ also needs feeding to survive and grow. Babies abandoned and brought up by animals never become a human being. They remain at the psychological level of the animal rearing them. i Such connection means a sharing of caring love, of ideas and thoughts, and a way of helping the infant consciousness to find ways to learn, to explore, to be curious and adventurous. See Programmed

These fundamental facts of biological and psychological life go on being true up the scale of human experience. They may not be as visible as the physical sperm and ovum merging, or the umbilical cord, but if you examine your own feelings and experience you can see them yourself. Understanding them and working with what is understood is vital for surviving in a changing world. A baby certainly faces change, and so do we. Love, in the form of vital connections at a physical and psychological level, is fundamental to human life. We need love, and we need connections.

Returning to basics again, it is obvious that the food we take in is central to our growth and continued existence. By food is meant the body and substance, and all they contain, of plants and animals. Those animal and plant substances are transformed into personal substance and awareness. Maybe this is a bit philosophical, but I believe that Life, in the form of its plants and animals, gives of itself to itself as a form of love. Life on this planet is fundamentally about giving and receiving from each other. You might view that as killing and taking; or you can see the wider picture or overview of it and see it as a universal process of symbiotic relationship.

However, we do not need the philosophy to see that the giving of language, the sharing of emotions and ideas, the flow that occurs in intimate relationships such as exist between mothers and their children, is what enables us to grow into a person who can talk and think. Without that you would, like the babies reared by animals, have no personal awareness. Self awareness, personality, personal existence, is not innate. It is not God given. It is a gift self aware people give to their children and each other. We literally create each other. Without such flowing, self giving – loving – connections we are either stunted in our growth, as are many fostered or abused children, or our growth stops at some point. We take each other in just as we take in the bodies of plants and animals. That is love.

Enabling, fostering and developing that sort of love does not usually last long in the romantic ‘I’ll die without you’ feelings many of us associate with love in today’s world. But, to be honest, if we do ‘fall in love’ with someone, and experience the incredible intensity of connection with that person, a huge flow is created. In that magic connection enormous amounts of exchange go on. This is because it is exactly like a psychic umbilical cord through which we give of each other, usually without being aware of what is happening. If it works well we absorb different ways of behaving or responding, different ideas or information. Perhaps we experience a different way of seeing the world and our life in it. At its most profound it opens us to experience the huge universal truths underlying existence – the wonder of birth and motherhood; the universality of having a mate; the power of nest building and how it links us with countless other forms of life.

There is a ‘but’ though. It usually doesn’t last long. When it ends there is often an inflow of negative feelings, even a breakup of the relationship, along with the accusations of failure and betrayal aimed either at ones partner or oneself.               Let us be clear about this. We are the product, an end of the line creature arising out of the need to survive incredibly challenging environments and earth changes. The imperative through our evolutionary past was to survive and procreate – whatever that took. On top of that, as is clear from the animal reared children, who we know ourselves to be is largely a product of the programming and responses other humans put into us. Living completely out of context with what was natural for us over millions of years, being raised in ways that very often lack the intense body to body, passionate emotional caring connection we need to nurture our growth, we are out of touch with what might instinctively create individual and social groupings to satisfy us.

Devoid of the innate guidance animals have that relates them spontaneously to each other and their environment, we are stranded, left largely to our own resources. For many of us, having our instinctive love injured either by parents who themselves didn’t know how to really connect physically, we do not know how to love fully – except maybe in a very dependent, needy and painful way. As such perhaps we need to learn how to ‘make love’. Not being able to rely on our rather disturbed habitual responses that were put into us as we grew; put in by a society that in no way demonstrates real lessons of love and survival; we need to form our own loving relationships out of an awareness of what is fundamental.

Having sex as a pastime, as a form of no handed masturbation in which we make no real connection with a partner, is not fundamental. Making fun relationships is not fundamental to the way life works. Most interactions in nature, even to the frequent sexual interactions of Bonobo apes, have individual and social meaning. Such interaction are for bonding and connection. But those are just suggestions, and the best way forward for each of us is to honestly admit what is or is not working. And when something is not working, we need to avoid blaming everyone and everything else. That doesn’t mean completely blaming oneself. That is anti-productive. It means daring to look closely at what assumptions, pains, feelings of dependency, loneliness or other factors contributed to what did not work – in both partners.

It might be easy to completely blame a partner who simply walks away from a relationship. However, you were the person who chose to connect with that partner. Why? If you don’t understand that you might do it again, or avoid all further relationships.

Pain in relationships, tremendous dependence, fear of abandonment, jealousy and desire to control or constantly reject or hurt ones partner, can all be understood if we recognise and work with what has been explained about the fundamental process of love.

So let us revisit some of what has been said in a new way by seeing how love passes through very clear stages.

First Stage – The Womb

Life in the womb is typified by complete dependence and helplessness. This means enormous possibility of feeling vulnerable. And if you don’t believe a foetus can feel or experience anything, think again. There is enormous evidence from the various approaches to psychotherapy that there is great sentience from the beginning.ii While there is not personal awareness, there is certainly a process of learning that involves developing responses to what is being met. For instance it is now understood that the developing child can be powerfully influenced by what the mother eats, drinks or experiences. Some recent findings show that the foetus actually adjusts to foods and other external conditions. There is in fact a growing body of research which attempts to understand the prenate as an intelligent and sentient being.

However, the aim here is not to explore the proof of prenatal sentience, but to summarise what problems might arise in adult life due to disturbances at that period of our development. Remember that this period of development is one of incredible sensitivity to influences such as drugs, including alcohol and nicotine. It is the most fundamental level of love, during which complete dependency and vulnerability exists.

Basic to stages of growth is the understanding that further development takes us into the next stage. If the particular stage is disturbed or injured in some way, then further development can be obstructed. What often gets in the way of us seeing that such damage to further development has taken place is that the body continues to mature and grow. However, the psychological or emotional development can remain at an infant or foetal level while the body ages. In fact some people remain deeply dependent throughout life, and find it impossible to survive alone.

Stage Two – Infancy

At birth we slowly emerge from the complete dependency experienced as a foetus. But we are still deeply dependent upon the loved person for ones needs, physical, emotional and social. The only difference is that if our connection with the mother fails, another person can take over our caring. If this has actually happened in ones own infancy, it can lead to the need always for more than one source of ‘love’.

This stage is typified by great anger, jealousy or pain if the loved one relates to anyone else, is lost, or threatens to leave. In an adult who has not matured beyond this stage, threatened loss of connection leads to enormous feeling reactions that may also be felt at a time of emotional withdrawal of the partner, even if there is no sign of them withdrawing physically. There is a desire for unconditional love and a need to be always with the loved one. In an adult with this level of love, sex may be a part of the relationship, but the main need is a bonded connection. This is sometimes felt as a need to have the loved person want you as much, or as desperately, as you want/need them.

Possibly the greatest fear, one that can trigger great anger, or an enormous desire to placate or earn love, is the threat or fear of being abandoned. Many so called adult relationships have actually not matured beyond this stage of love. The loss of a partner results in enormous emotional pain, anger, attempts to placate or regain the loved one, and feelings of personal worthlessness – I’m not good and unwanted – can haunt the abandoned partner.

It is from this level of emotional development that the frequent refrain heard in popular music arises – I can’t live without you. True – the baby cannot live without a loving mother.

Stage Three – Adolescence

This stage of love is about the long process of gradually becoming independent of the parent or parents. There are many strategies people use to attain this or move toward it. Anger or loathing for parents can enable the risky move of leaving them. ‘Falling in love’ with someone can unfasten the emotional and economic dependence on parents or carers and fix it on someone else. The break may be made without this transference of affection by fixing ones attention on attaining a degree or new situation in life.

Other possible facets of the adolescent stage of love may be anxiety, uncertainty or clumsiness concerning emotional and sexual contact with the opposite sex; desire to explore many relationships; discovering what ones boundaries and needs are; powerful sexual drive.

In this stage any partner will probably be loved for the person’s own needs – for example the person might need to get away from family and the ‘loved one’ is an aid to this. There may be great romantic feelings and spontaneous love which are hard to maintain in face of difficulties.

The signs of this stage of love in adulthood are usually seen as enormous emotional responses, highs and lows, to relationship. This can lead to depression, alcohol dependency and active aggression or desire to break up the relationship because of the emotional turmoil they bring about. Part of the stress is linked with the drive to become independent, so the dependent connection with a partner can result in a see-saw – be with get away from – response.

Remember, this is a time of enormous adjustment and change, physically, emotionally and socially. If these changes have not been navigated in actual adolescence, they will still be facing us as an adult in the relationships we enter into.

Stage Four – Adult Love

We do not usually emerge into the ability to love without the dependency, pain, jealousy and angers of infancy and childhood in easy progression. Many adults never manage adult love, but remain stuck in various adaptations to infant, child or adolescent love. Adult love brings with it a growing sense of recognising the needs of our partner yet not denying our own. It enables the ability to be something for the partner’s sake without losing ones own independence or will.

This means a real awareness of the issues that colour or influence relationship, and meeting them as partners. Independence and closeness or connection is achieved together. We become caring sexual partners through discovering each others needs and vulnerability, and supporting each other in them as far as we are able. This is done not through fear of abandonment or losing love, not through fear or avoidance of loneliness, but through admiration, respect and a working connection that has mutual advantage and nourishment in it.

My partner is a grown up child

Taking all the above into account, what do you think it would be like to fall in love with or get married to someone who is only four or six years old emotionally? If you can’t remember being that young, love at that age means being incredibly dependent, with an enormous need for attention, possibly very jealous if someone else gets the love you desperately want; and if you lose a parent/loved one at that age it is devastating, even life threatening. But it may mean, because of early hurts, being unable to feel or express love.

I know this story very deeply, because it happens to be mine. Soon after my premature birth my ageing grandmother took over my rearing – my mother was working almost every day – so my grandmother became my first great love. But this first love of mine died before I was two. It left a very sensitive wound of loss in me.

I suppose I was one of the lucky ones as my mother took over after my grandma’s death. However, the wound was pierced once more when I was put in a hospital at three without any warning. The terror of feeling I was unwanted and was now losing my mother was beyond easy description. Then, at five my mother decided to punish me for being late home from school. Okay, she was worried, but she said to me, ‘You hurt me, and now I am going to hurt you.’ She did. She stripped me, bathed me, telling me she was sending me to the orphanage.

Remember the wound of loss? Well that really opened it up and deepened it. I was on my knees begging not to be hurt like that again. But it didn’t have the effect my mother wanted. Of course it was only an awful threat, but it was real to me, and I responded by cutting my mother out of my life as completely as I could. I cut out all love I felt for her and killed any emotional connection. It wasn’t a conscious act, more like an attempt at survival as I struggled with the apparent fact that my mother could get rid of me at any time.

It was a tragic act, and unfortunately the tragedy went two ways. My mother never received the love from her son that she could have had, and I never learned to let my love grow beyond that of a five year old. I married and helped raise five children, was capable, a hard worker and provider, but didn’t now how to love. My mother of father had never showed me, but I did have the buried memory of my grandmother.

Part of the tragedy of the lost love that had occurred in my life and can be seen in countless other lives if you look around, is that most of us have actually buried our childhood so have no awareness at all of what love is or what has been lost. So as a married adult I thought that what I was experiencing daily was natural. What gradually woke me up was what I could see concerning the way I dealt with my children. It horrified me enough to start probing to find out what the problem was. Also there was something like a buried agony in me that set me searching for something I couldn’t define. I was desperately lost in ‘normal’ life. It was and is the ‘normal’ life I see many people still lost in. Maybe your child self didn’t get buried for the same reasons mine did, but are you still searching? Do you sense something is missing? Is there a hole inside that you try to cover up with enormous external activity, ambition, alcohol or medication? Do you recognise some of the signs from what was described above about the ages of love?

My story continues in both a tragic and a transformative way. My terrible need to find what was missing drove me to leave my wife and children. I found a woman who for the first time in my life I could explore a loving relationship with. To my amazement I discovered I was a five year old emotionally – even though in other ways I was a capable and creative adult. I couldn’t let my new wife out of my sight. I was intensely jealous, and was terrified of loss. But like a shattered war victim who has buried awful memories I gradually uncovered my past. Slowly I learned to grow up to love. The empty space has gone. I am no longer desperately searching for someone who will make it alright. Loss is no longer a terror, and I honestly believe I can love without those pains.

We are all different, and I am not suffering the illusion that if I pay thousands of dollars to a millionaire she or he will be able to tell me how to get rich. It is pointless to tell you the circuitous route and the magical moments of my personal journey. But I can tell you some of the landmarks of the road to transformation from being a baby in love.

Opening the doorway to love

The doorway to change is opened by honestly admitting your emotional age and recognising that it is not normal, as our culture suggests, to feel agony or huge grief in loss. Those arise, as do jealousy, rage, and all the other responses to relationship we develop, through childhood hurts, from an almost universal sickness of our times. The fundamental needs of childhood are almost never met by modern parenting within the environment of today’s commercial and industrial world. The love sickness is seen everywhere.

There is an enormous amount of ways we could have reacted to our own love problems as a child. Those reactions remain almost totally unconscious in adulthood. Some that I have witnessed are:

• Being intellectually capable and dealing with love and relationship like a captain in command of a ship – in control – never letting it get out of hand or allowing the emergence of emotions.
• Enormous pain or discomfort if you become intimate or get emotionally close to the person you are involved with. This causes a kickback that leads you to pull away from the person. The approach and retreat goes on again and again.
• Terrible urgency to avoid being alone or without a partner. This can lead to the awful feelings that you are unwanted, unloved, or of no account in the world.
• Dreams or fears that your partner will leave you for someone else – or even die.
• Avoidance of the opposite sex, sexual connection, or of a loving, caring and prolonged relationship.
• The inability to love – i.e. to deeply give of oneself – or the rejection of love from another.
• Enormous introversion or enormous extroversion
• Brutality or hurtfulness in relationship. This can be in the form of subtle accusations or criticisms masked as rational comments.
• Fear of death.
• Release through pornography or sexual diversions.

After the admittance of your emotional age, the next landmark is to recognise what the signs of adult love might be. This may be an ideal goal as few of us reach the zenith of adult love. However, having walked some of the way myself and seen it in others, the sign of adult love is its unconditional nature. We see this in some parents. Their love doesn’t change or diminish when their children leave home and go with other partners. Such love is unconditional. It is not grasping or controlling. It does not lead to sulking or great pain, but has achieved emotional independence. Therefore it offers these things to those loved.

As I say, this is an ideal, but mature love is when we accept that the person we care for is a separate and unique individual with their own needs and directions in life. We do not love them if they obey all our needs arising out of our fears and pains. We love them simply because they are who they are, because we respect and admire them, and we allow them the freedom that hopefully we give ourselves.

Caring and honesty are a part of this acceptance into and allows us into a wider life. One needs to be honest in ones dealing with other people and oneself. This is obvious in that the wider life IS made up of other people. Unless one has achieved a trustworthy place in the hearts of friends and those near you, then you are obviously not let into the deeper aspects of their life because they cannot trust you with little things, let alone their soul or affections. This means there are various levels of marriage and love arising from this trust. There is a form of marriage that spans time and different personalities. In this form of marriage you have learned to trust someone so well you had agreed deep within self to unite your life with them for ones entire existence. This was not a conscious decision and ritual. It happened because there was nothing between yourself and the other person that could interfere with continued sympathetic contact no matter what the life situation. It didn’t matter what the gender situation was between people who married in this way. The link was one of care and trust, and it spanned many physical existences.

This is an unconditional love. It doesn’t place the conditions on the other person of only being loved or lovable when they remain our satellite. When we do that we make of them a possession, somebody manipulated by our own moods, fears, emotional blackmail, or underhanded tricks. If we are grown up in love and our partner leaves us or goes with someone else, having matured we will have already seen that as a possibility (come on, look around). It will mean difficult changes, but not ‘heartbreak’, not depression or long years of grief or anger. It will also mean that because we love that person we will continue to be interested in their welfare and be glad if they are happy. If that sort of love is not possible for you start asking yourself why, and look at the roots of you own love. Remember your youth and childhood. It is a slow thing to regain such memories, but that is the way to becoming whole. If you don’t know who you are you are really only half a person, only half remembering who you are.

To grow up and become a mature lover takes courage. Each time we try to possess the other person, lash out at them through jealousy, curtail their life through our fears and insecurities, we need to stop and say, “This is childhood behaviour. I will not let this anger, possessiveness, jealousy or emotional blackmail be perpetrated on the person I presumably love. I will face this and deal with it as my personal difficulty. I will not rationalise and excuse it by saying to my partner that I love them. That is an underhanded excuse. It is not love.”

Recognising the Face of Love

The next stage in growing up to love is another act of recognition. What you are looking for in this is whether you are seeking someone else to assure you of love. You cannot find love while you believe it depends on someone else. That is child love again that depends on the parent for all needs – perhaps even for survival.

This is a difficult one as our whole social and cultural mythology surrounding love is that we need someone else to provide it. That is true in childhood, but not in adulthood. The lie of it can be seen when we look at those abnormally dependent partners who constantly clamour for attention for fear of loss or competition. If we see that as abnormal and childlike, what is the opposite of it?

If you honestly explore where jealousy, fear of abandonment, dependency on your partner arises from, I know from experience in tracing my own and many other people’s love problems, that they arise from childhood.

Perhaps you will have to accept this on trust, but love is not something you possess or develop. It is like life itself, given to you as a part of your existence. It flows through you, and that flow may have been damaged or twisted during your life, but it is still fundamentally there in you and can be released by undoing the knots. Then it is yours whether you are with a partner or not. Love is then a meeting of equals who shine the precious flow of this wonder on each other and magnify it. We do not claw at each other trying to get what is missing in ourselves.

There are no quick fix tricks in this opening to love, just as there are no quick fix tricks to growing physically from childhood to adulthood. Both of them flow from the core processes of life in you, and need you to work with and honour that process. Physically you do not honour it by not eating good food, not sleeping, exposing yourself to excessive stress and ignoring injuries and sickness. You do not honour your personal growth to maturity by denying you have a relationship with the Life that gives you existence, and that its gift of love and wellbeing may have been injured or twisted in some way.

Just as you would tend a gash in your leg, so you need to heal the wounds to love. A wounded leg would severely limit your ability to function in life. Wounded love is no less a difficulty in living your best.