Posts Tagged ‘past lives’

The House of the Ancestors

An excerpt from the book House of the Ancestors

Some months into our connection with Dakota, a woman I loved, I dreamt I was in a large empty house alone. Perhaps I should call it a building, as it had several floors and extended in size beyond what I knew. I was on what was perhaps the second floor, or as it is known in Britain, the first floor. The room I was in was not brightly lit and although dark with age, was in no way a ruin or damaged. I was standing looking at a hole in the floor. I knew my ancestors had lived in the area or rooms below me, and I was trying to see if I could bring any object from there up to where I was. To do this I was swinging a rope or wire around through the hole. But I made no connection with anything and gave up. Then I realised I had the key to the door of the rooms below and went down to enter the apartments.

The door was of very solid construction but easily opened with the key. It led into a large area with much the same feeling as the floor above – old and empty but not ruined.

Then suddenly, as if he were a caretaker or butler, Lurch, the character in the TV series in which he plays Frankenstein’s monster, stepped out from the shadows. I observed him without feeling any anxiety, and noticed he had a large kitchen knife in his belt. I asked him why he needed such a knife, thinking that perhaps he might threaten me with it. He said that there was a large puma that sometimes jumped out on you unexpectedly from the shadows, and you needed a knife to protect yourself. Having said that he handed me such a knife, knowing somehow that I had come to explore this house of my ancestors. The suggestion in handing me the knife was that I killed the puma if it leapt on me. Then he and I started to walk into the shadowy areas of the house to begin my search.

We had only gone about ten yards into the dim space stretching before us when a very large puma leapt on me. As I felt its impact on my chest I held it firmly in my arms and realised that I had no intention to kill or hurt it. Its head was close to my face, and with surprise and love I could see that, although it had the face of a big cat, it was the face of Dakota. The puma was, I saw, her beautiful and wild sexual love for me, and an embodiment of her spirit self ready to share the journey into the house of the ancestors. So I put Puma down, and Lurch, Puma and I walked together into the darkness.

During the day following the dream I spoke with Dakota, telling her the dream. She has strong links with the Native American traditions. But what I had not previously known, and she then told me, was that the puma is her totem animal.

During the next days, weeks and months, I began a conscious search of the House of the Ancestors. I did this by identifying as fully as I could with the images and environments in the dream; by literally imagining myself within the form and or being of the person, creature or structure, and allowing feelings, associations and insights to arise.

I always find I penetrate much more deeply into that inner ocean if I make the exploration with a friend who is supportive and not disturbed by what I express. In fact my first entrance into the house of the ancestors dream was incredibly emotional. I was visiting my friend David, who I was helping to do some maintenance on his house. So after we had finished work for the day I asked him if he would give me some time while I explored the dream.

What arose is too long to report in detail but I will summarise.

When I identified with the house it took a while to really experience it as a living process rather than simply an intellectual interpretation. But when I did become the structure and experienced the extent of the house, I realised it as my body. But it was not my body as I had been taught to see it through my training as a nurse. I did not experience it simply as a biological process, or a physiological machine. I experienced it as an incredibly ancient thing, carrying or incorporating in its form and functions lessons of life gathered over millions of years of human and animal evolution. I felt that it holds within its darkness – the presently unconscious areas developed and lived in the past – enormous amounts of information or memories. We fail to be aware of these because our attention is so fixed on the world outside of us. But of course, even there, if we look carefully, we can see we are the result, our culture and language are the result, of the events and lives stretching back into the ancient past.

The great house of my dream, as I felt its atmosphere and quality, as I gave it attention and allowed what was sensed within to become more fully conscious, I knew to be not only the impersonal past out of which my present identity had been formed, but also the very personal links with my ancestors. As I met this I felt some anxiety because there are so many unknowns in such a huge place. But I wanted to become aware of the real dimensions of myself. And it must be understood that I use the word ancestors in a wider sense than referring just to my physical predecessors. But this will become clear as the exploration unfolds.

The hole in the floor was simple to grasp. Most of my adult life had been given to attempting, in many different ways, to gain entrance to and explore what is generally known today as the unconscious. I don’t mean by this Freud’s view of the unconscious as repressed infantile trauma and adult sexual drives. I mean any and every aspect of oneself that has not as yet been made conscious. And that includes not only trauma, but also talents or potentials not yet claimed; buried creative insights; the hidden and mysterious processes of the body and mind; the problem solving processes of the non-rational mind; awareness of the deep core of our being; and an awareness of the Odyssey our being has made to reach this moment, this condition, now!

So the hole depicted glimpses I had gained of the influence of my ancestors in my life of today. The glimpse had arisen through my lifelong delving into the unconscious. But the hole is not the real door to the ancestral life, just a way of seeing it exists.

A previous dream depicts this in another way. In the dream I was crossing the rooftops of houses and came to one that I recognised as a home I had once lived in. There was a hole in the roof and I could see into a room that had being sealed off. It contained things I had once owned, but had lost and forgotten when the room was sealed off. So I decided I must sometime enter the room to see what was relevant and useful in my present circumstances.

In that dream there is once more reference to a hole, and my looking through to realise that there are things from my past, from previous dwelling places, that I want to reclaim or investigate. It gives the very powerful suggestion that my present personality can reclaim things from its long past that will be useful in the life of today.

The key, I realised, were qualities that gave me the right to enter the dwelling place of my ancestors. It shows the ability to enter more fully into what had been glimpsed through the hole. These qualities or abilities were gained slowly over years in which I practised and learned the skills of entering the unconscious and dealing with what was found there. I tend to call this lucidity. I don’t mean just waking up in a dream, but the ability while awake to enter into a condition that allows what is existing unconsciously to be known.

I also realised, as I explored, what was suggested by the key. I saw it was forged out of confidence in moving around in the extraordinary realm of experience that is the unconscious. That confidence or sureness, allows penetration into oneself that anxiety or disbelief would prevent. Subtle ideas, beliefs, attitudes or opinions, are the very material or “world” that make up the top levels of our personal awareness.

Terminology is difficult here because I have to use the word awareness to represent the whole realm of self that includes what is conscious and what is unconscious. Using awareness in that sense for a while, I believe there is no real separation between what or who you are consciously and unconsciously. But there is a borderline, a doorway, between the two. Perhaps it would be better to call it a filter or tuning system as with radio or TV. If that didn’t exist you would have all the memories/signals from the unconscious bombarding consciousness at the same time.

The filter is controlled by what you fear, what you allow yourself to feel or experience, whether you instinctively pull away from pain, and what you believe or disbelieve. It usually is tuned quite without your awareness unless you start carefully observing what you repress, what you edit out of what plays in your consciousness. Over the years I have learned to work with the filter to allow more to flow through. But I think my ability is still rudimentary.

Nevertheless, using that key allowed me to enter more fully into a dimension of experience I had only glimpsed previously. So to state it clearly, the key depicted the abilities I had forged to work with what I have called the filter or tuning. I have learned to gradually manipulate my conscious attitudes, beliefs and fears, enough to allow more of myself to surface. And the door was that natural threshold between the conscious and the unconscious that we all have. Self-awareness, or what we call our identity or personality, is a very new and fragile thing in terms of evolution. The door or threshold that exists between this fragile personality and the unconscious protects us from being overwhelmed by what really is an awareness of reality.

Love, security and persistence in love, were also part of that key. Dakota had helped me cut the last few notches in that key and thereby enabled me to open the door to the house of the ancestors.

When I opened the door I was overwhelmed by such a huge awareness of what had been left me as an inheritance by my ancestors that I sobbed for many minutes. It wasn’t pain causing me to weep, but the intensity of what I experienced. The strength, persistence, ability to love, as imperfect as it was, the sharpness of mind, the ability to exist within a modern community, were all gifts hammered out of raw human material by my forebears, enabling me to take the few further steps in life that I have.

This is so important that I want to see if I can describe it more clearly. Recently I travelled to Namibia and stayed in the capital city Windhoek. Perhaps this is a simplification, but there are several tribal groups living together in that community. There is a dominant tribal group, a competing tribal group, and a group or tribe that were once the slaves of the now dominant tribal group. There is still enormous segregation within the community, and the old tribal feelings and views are still very much influencing them. So what I am saying about my ancestors is that they left me the heritage of being able to stand above those older patterns of behaviour. They had already dealt with many of those issues, and the gift they left me was that I could move on from there. That is an extraordinary gift, to find myself capable of thinking and moving in ways that are still very difficult for many people in the world today. I am capable of moving beyond some of the rigid forms of loving and working that my ancestors battled with and developed strategies to deal with.

For instance one thing was that my forebears lived for generations within a very rigid and in some ways punitive religious system. So one of the great gifts they left me was the ability to recognise the limitations of that system and stand beyond it. That wonderful gift was a heritage from my ancestors, along with the ability to work independently, to be creative, to learn easily, to integrate and cooperate with males or females, to be no longer a tribal being. Those are phenomenal gifts to have inherited. That was why I wept and felt such gratitude for having received so much.

Then stepping into the area beyond the door I met Lurch. In identifying with Lurch to explore what he depicted, and in watching what feelings and associations arose, I almost immediately knew Lurch to be, or to represent the guardian, the door keeper of this realm. I realised that as Lurch I am the Guardian of the Threshold. There can be no entrance into this realm unless the seeker passes me. And there are tests he or she must pass also.

As I experience these realisations I was once more amazed how our dreaming self uses images so carefully and precisely. And although I quickly got some insight into what part Lurch played in my growing awareness of what was a new realm of experience for me, it took longer to appreciate some aspects of his significance.

As a young man I had read about the Guardian of the Threshold in the writings of Rudolf Steiner and the Rosicrucian Order, where there is an initiation into the Guardian. It is a name given by western mystical traditions to a process active in what those traditions called the psychic world. Before you can enter that world you meet your past negative deeds. You meet and deal with pains and actions that still imprison you, or in some way are still unmet. In eastern traditions the Guardian is simply called karma.

Lurch, as the Guardian I met, is partly a scary figure, but is a comic character too. So in my dream I meet the guardian, but I did not turn back through fear, or the pain of experiencing past tragic events. I passed into the house of the ancestors.

Later I realised that Lurch also embodies important aspects of the house. He is Frankenstein’s monstrous creation. As such he is created out of the dead bodies of many different people. That is a truly powerful image, showing that your present life is a weaving together of many people who have lived and died in the past.

Lurch also tested me in giving me the knife. Love is an important strength in the inward odyssey. If I had killed Puma I believe I would have been rejected from the house, and have had to learn that lesson. As it was, I neither felt fear, nor had any desire to kill, so the journey could begin. That wasn’t because I was squeaky clean, just that for years I had being clearing out the infant and childhood miseries that were like blockages in the way. I had worked hard to change old destructive patterns of behaviour. There was still a lot to do, but apparently I had done enough for Lurch to let me through.

I set about exploring the further realms of the house of the ancestors. I had explored the dream itself with David. But now I planned to continue walking into the darkness that confronted Lurch, Puma and me at the end of the dream. Suzanne was my listening friend this time.

I started by imagining myself standing in the shadows of the house with Puma and Lurch. Then we walked together into the darkness. The subjective images took on a life of their own and I saw we were walking in a large underground space like great catacombs. The light was dim but we could see our surroundings, and not very far into the cave like space was a tomb on our right. It had the form of a low wall about a foot high in an oblong, and the wall surrounded a long stone in the centre, which was roughly body shaped .

As we drew level with the tomb an enormous change occurred in me. Suddenly I became a woman. It was no longer imagination. I was now completely experiencing myself as a woman whose tomb we had approached. As such I was torn by an immense pain of loss. As my complete identification deepened my body curled up with the pain as I was torn by wretched crying. Suzanne told me my voice changed as I cried out again and again for release from the pain of losing all my children, my husband, even my parents. My hands were clawing my legs in an effort to express the misery, and I was screaming that I could not bear to live any longer with such pain. I cried out to God to take me, for there was nothing left for me to live for. “Why? Why did this happen to me? Why has everything I loved been taken from me?”

There was no response to these awful cries and tearing sobs. But slowly a shift began. It seemed to me as an observer witnessing this awful pain, that by entering this place the spirit of that woman had woken in me. But as she had died in such unresolved agony of loss, that is what was met when she awoke. But gradually she realised she was alive again in a new way. She began to recognise that I was holding her within me. Because I was not frightened of pain and emotions, the misery could play itself out in me. And because my understanding of what was happening flowed into her awareness, she slowly saw and felt her loss in a different way. In fact we were both realising she was experiencing resurrection, and that in turn meant there was no final death as believed by many. Therefore there was no loss as she had originally felt it.

At this point something truly incredible occurred. She and I both realised she was one of my past dwelling places. But for her the viewpoint was slightly different; for she saw me as a continuation of a life that she had failed to be a part of because of the awful pain of loss. It had kept her from flowing into what was her future as my life.

From my perspective she was one of the past dwelling places the spirit that was at the core of my present personality had lived in and as. She was not one of my past lives, because the personality that I am was unique and had not lived that woman’s life.

What Shaun had explained about the gradual loss of his personality, and its absorption into something more inclusive and connected with all life, illustrates this. If we give the name of spirit to what Shaun was absorbed into, and if we see that spirit dips into aspects of itself in the life of the body, and develops a unique personality, then we begin to grasp the relationship between the woman and myself.

Perhaps a clumsy analogy of this is to say an artist might paint many pictures. Each picture is unique. The artist learns from the work and difficulties in creating each picture, and can use what is learned in the next painting. But the next painting is not the reincarnation of the previous. The only link is through the artist.

Because I was gradually becoming aware of the spirit that had given me life, I was meeting the previous personalities, the previous life experiences and lessons my personality was shaped out of. The woman was a previous dwelling place of my spirit. To know her was to know more of my spirit and its eternal odyssey.

In knowing me the woman’s grief melted away, for in our meeting we both realised we gained existence out of an eternal spirit flowing into our lives. I could feel the change in her as she knew she was part of ongoing life here in the present, and the children and family she thought dead were also part of that river of lives.

It was a wonderful thing to witness and experience her resurrection. I could feel that she was a part of myself I had not known, a part of my potential I had not claimed. But the greatest feeling was of wonder that her life of the past could be resurrected into the present and given a new being, a new body, a new heaven and earth. This is a very moving thing to remember.

Looking back at this I feel that the term previous dwelling place really fits what I experienced. The woman’s personality and life events were where the spirit that lies behind my life had dwelt at one time. Remembering it meant that I was realising the continuum of experience that had, over ages, led to my present personal existence.

As I felt her integrating into my present life I asked her what she brought to me. I asked because I wondered what quality or ability this enormous experience brought to my present life. Her simple reply was, “A woman’s love.”

The dream of being on the rooftops and recognising a place I used to live in, and the decision to see what had been walled up there, was, I believe, a very clear precursor of the experience. The pain of loss had been walled up, and needed to be felt and integrated – resurrected and given life.

Meeting Dakota

So, I dived into the ocean and moved through the huge creatures that are the denizens of that realm – great thought forms created by the beliefs of millions. Such beliefs as death being the end of existence; the body and the material world being the only reality; these are living influences at that level, moving in that ocean, ready to engulf you and hold you in thrall unless you can see them for what they are – beliefs, attempts at understanding reality – never reality itself. And so, I moved among them, occasionally finding myself lost in and possessed by one of these leviathans, until liberation was found again by becoming naked awareness once more.

Then suddenly I felt the presence of Dakota with me in the ocean. But I could not see her, and called out, “Dakota, can you hear me? Are you aware of being here with me?” There was no response, and I wondered if I was creating the feeling in some way.

But just as suddenly as her presence was felt everything changed. In that realm where thoughts and emotions take on form, and form itself is fluid, Dakota and I faced each other as magnificent wolves. And I, in the manner of wolves, put my head low to the ground and tail high in the posture of invited play. Then we danced around each other in mock battle rushing headlong, bumping, rolling, pushing shoulder to shoulder, or breathlessly nose to nose. I, grabbing a stick in my mouth and throwing it in the air to distract her, or feigning indifference. She, at each new twist of the dance, came back at me, ever resourceful, ever full of vigour and intensity. And in the dance, we discovered each other, tested strengths, explored responses, found a living connection.

Then, when the dance was finished, we changed forms and expressed other qualities to each other in the shape of the Native American Indians. As such I stood before my lodge as the elder of my tribe, greeting her and saluting her qualities. For she wore the feathers showing her achievements as a wife maintaining her own family lodge; as a woman in her culture who had carved a position for herself in the world of work; as someone who reached beyond her own nearest kin and gave of herself. So, I saluted her and invited her into my lodge, and she accepted.

It was with those experiences freshly imprinted on me that I emerged from the ocean eager to tell Dakota of what had arisen. I carefully wrote the events in my journal, then copied them to send as an email. But just as I was about to send, an email arrived from Dakota. Its title read, “Dances with Wolves.” And the message was a quote from Nietzsche. It said, “Those who watched them dancing thought they were mad because they couldn’t hear the music.”

I still weep when I read those words. As much as I have roamed the immense ocean of mind I am still a man of my culture and penetrated by its blindness. To dance as wolves beyond closed eyes was one thing, but to know it was shared in some way released a blossoming wonder that is still growing. We can believe things as a defence against our own insecurities and littleness. But to experience something that was real within, and have it confirmed as an external fact is an extraordinary thing to confront. It unifies. It opened me to influences that perhaps I was previously suspicious of at some level.

To see the whole book go to HOUSE

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