Posts Tagged ‘spiritual’

The Eye of Dreams

By Tony Crisp

It took me forty years of experience and exploration to write this book.

The reason is that I was constantly exploring the limits or boundaries of the mind. In fact in recent scientific statements I see some of the findings I defined many years ago now stated – but in what I have written in this book I go steps further.

As I say in the introduction: The journeys I took, alone or with others, led into realms of experience that comparatively few people know exist. They are realms in which the world, our life and preoccupations, are seen from completely new perspectives. In those realms we move beyond thoughts and conjectures, interpretations and dialogue, into the jungle and mountain peaks of the direct experience of what was previously unknown to us – into passions, torrents of energy, oceans of awareness, castles of ancient defence and aggression, into the river of time. They are realms of experience that are incredibly creative, containing treasures equally as fascinating as any tomb of Tutankhamen.

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Fundamentally the book takes us to the frontiers of human thought, and it is that that brings us freedom – freedom from the habits that rule us, release from the fears that dominate us even in our dreams, the freedom from the thoughts and beliefs which are our masters, the awful ordinary lives that are the causes of so much pain.

Chapter Headings

Through the Eye of Dreams – How dreams can be as valid a means of exploration and discovery as the microscope or telescope. 

The Standing Wave – Our body and mind are like a standing wave that persists although it is constant change

Liberation – Liberating ourselves from the crushing habits, the prison of beliefs and fears is possible.

Religion Society and Identity – We as a person are not the the independent being we often like to believe. We are made up of what we surrounded by; social beliefs, parental influence and religious beliefs – even though we fight them.

Sex, Marriage and Relationships – A critical look at what constitutes love and relationships

Growing up – The Maturing Process – The most important task that faces us in transforming our selves and the world.

Work, Destiny and Meaning – Many of us fail to find that all consuming interest; yet we all have it.

Secrets of Mind and Spirit – Many of us live a life within tight walls we cannot see beyond. Here is proof that we are more than we ever believed.

The Way In – The ways to find liberation and seeing beyond the walls of our physical senses.

Breaking through to the Psychic and Spiritual

In January of 1972, two friends, Mike Tanner, Sheila Johns, and myself formed an experimental group. With ourselves as the subjects we wanted to research into the probability of the dream process breaking through into waking consciousness. Our main reason at that time was to see if the therapeutic functions of dreaming could then be more fully exploited. I for one was seeking personal healing from depression and psychosomatic pain.

I had started my own interest in dreams six years earlier, and had explored, individually and with others, various methods of working on dreams, their symbols and meaning. I had particularly worked with Jung’s active imagination, and had discovered the power of spontaneous fantasy erupting into consciousness. My book, Do You Dream? was written around the work of those early years.

My interest led me to study the work of Franz Mesmer. Subjects placed by him in a relaxed condition experienced spontaneous movements, fantasy eruption, vocalisation and abreaction of trauma. All of these connect with the dream process, in that during the dream one spontaneously experiences a dramatic fantasy, movements, vocalisation and sometimes the abreaction of trauma. Having watched humans and animals move while dreaming, I theorised that during the dream, in most people the movements being experienced only partially express through the motor nerves and muscles. I had watched a dog, for instance, make obvious running and barking movements and sounds while it dreamt. But the movements and sounds were faint. Yet in sleepwalking, the spontaneous movements and vocalisation are much more complete. So I wondered what connections existed between dreaming, sleepwalking and Mesmer’s subjects.

I found other mentions of these phenomena in as diverse places as early Christianity, in which during the Pentecostal phase, worshippers allowed spontaneous movements, vocalisation and connected phenomena. In Indonesia a group called Subud had started, which exhibited the same type of experience. And Dr. Wilhelm Reich, a student of Freud, has similarly found that patients who were helped to relax muscular tension and hold an open emotional state, experienced spontaneous physical movements, fantasy, vocalisation and abreaction. During a visit to Japan I found there a traditional practice called Seitai that has the same format. The modern teacher, Noguchi, even connects the spontaneous movements with the movements made during sleep.

Our problem as an experimental group was to find a way to allow this type of breakthrough for ourselves. To start with we tried two approaches. Jung had already suggested that to break the intellectual resistance against the eruption of fantasy from the unconscious, it was helpful to let the hands start moving where they wished. It is also a fairly well established fact that nightmares frequently reproduce the movements or postures that had been experienced during past trauma. So we tried a form of fantasy that would allow, not just hands, but the whole body to take part. Also we used the technique of reproducing the position experienced in a nightmare to see if the dream would rise into consciousness and continue.

My own experience in these first experiments was based on a nightmare I had of being strangled. My head was pulled back. Also, prior to the experiment I had noticed that as I fell asleep, a powerful neck tension pulled my head back. So I reproduced the posture in which my head was pulled back by tension and left my body, emotions and voice free to express spontaneously. My body soon began to tremble. This was something we were intellectually ready for, as it was described often in cases of this type. Then the trembling developed into powerful movements. My head pulled back hard, my mouth locked open, and my voice, quite without attempt on my part, cried out for my mother. I then relived my tonsil operation I had as a six year old. It was an amazing experience, rather like a record being played, only my body, voice, mind and feelings were the amplifier.

This began a process which we entered more deeply into over the years, and with it my personal journey to healing – but also to waking up in and exploring the world of the unconscious. Not only did I find childhood trauma, but also a vast unity of minds of which I was a part. It was a unity that spilled into my life as visions and insight.

So that was the beginning. The dream process could break through into waking consciousness. But it was clearer and it was healing. A long standing neck tension and feeling of loneliness disappeared. It wasn’t a nightmare – like Mesmer’s subjects, and Reich’s – it was an abreaction or catharsis.

So one of the keys we used to unlock the dream process into consciousness was the release of muscular tension. I discovered that most people have unconscious muscular tension. If this is made conscious by having the person become aware of it, what was unconscious is already emerging into consciousness. If the tension is then given time to release, with a body and mental attitude of acceptance, spontaneous movements begin.

With further research with numerous people we found abreaction was only one of the many aspects that spontaneously emerged into consciousness. The range was as wide as the subjects covered by dreaming. i.e. sexual pleasure; experimental consideration of a life problem; creative fantasy; ESP; happy play; the exploration of the depths and heights of the mind and body, etc.

I suspected as our experience grew, that in normal dreaming, there is a suppression of motor impulses to the body. I also felt that the people we worked with, ourselves included, learned to relax this suppresser, so that full movement could emerge from the dream maker in us, along with often amazingly rich emotional and mental experience too.

Later I came across the work of Adrian Morrison and his research team at the University of Pennsylvania. They found that a small area in the brain, the pons of mammals, acts as a suppresser stopping the limbs responding to signals from the brain during dreams. When this tiny area of the pons was damaged, the animal lived out its dream fully in physical movement.

From this, researchers have been able to observe what the animals – cats – were dreaming from the movements they made during REM sleep. The cats played with dream toys, attacked or pounced on invisible adversaries, and expressed aggression.

In our own research, our observations of what emerged during periods of conscious dreaming were aided by the subjects themselves being able to give information on what they were experiencing. From these descriptions and from the privileged standpoint of being able to look directly into the dream as it happens, three main functions were observable.

Firstly, the dream process is an expression of the self-regulatory or compensatory function active throughout our being. So dreaming provides an attempt at maintaining health of body and mind. In normal dreams this may be interfered with because we interiorise fears, restraints and goals. During waking dreaming one can recognise and choose to drop the fears and restraints and thus allow the self regulating action to complete itself. This may sound rather uninteresting, but there is nothing dull about the process which constantly keeps out body in balance and dealing with the environment and food we eat, as well as managing to spontaneously lead us through growth of body and mind.

Secondly the dream process is an expression of the growth process at the psychological level. The dream can be observed to feed upon experience and integrate it into wider understanding and a freer identity. i.e. freer from anxieties, rigid viewpoints, etc.

Thirdly dreams express a contact between ones individual sense of identity and the living consciousness of our total environment. So the dream process is creative in that the individual experiences contact with the process of life, and can learn to relate to it more effectively. Also out of this contact emerges a creative response in action, emotion, art, speech, music, dance etc. In this area the dream acts like a microscope or telescope, through which the dreamer can literally explore the cosmos or the depths of their own psychobiological being. This has all the characteristics of the deepest of spiritual experiences.

We have noticed that as people learn the way of dropping the suppression of their ability to dream consciously, they can begin to tap the functions of dreaming when they wish. For instance, the dream process has a much fuller access to total memory and subliminal impressions than normal waking awareness. So once one has learnt to dream consciously, one can actually ask a question and have a direct response from the process.

People who use this technique have said it is like a very accessible intuition. As an example of using it, my wife and I located where she had dropped her glasses on moorland seventy miles from our home. People dealing with the public can much more easily discover what impressions their unconscious is picking up from the person, without having to sleep on it.

The more I observe this process, the more it seems to me that past cultures used it, but did not recognise it as being an extension of the dream. They considered such movements and vocalisation or intuition as being the work of God, Spirit or spirits. (I am not disagreeing with it being a holy experience at times, but want to stress that through understanding its connections with the dream process, one can avoid many pitfalls and misunderstandings.) It was violently crushed in some ages, being so feared. In our own culture, which has a fairly recent record of terror and persecution regarding any spontaneous expression of the unconscious, we are only now beginning a wider exploration of its potential. Having closely observed the very direct connection between the process of dreaming and the experience of ESP, religious experience, spontaneous healing, racial memory and cosmic consciousness, it seems the dream, and especially this conscious lucid dreaming, is one of the richest areas to explore.

I also feel that any investigator of lucid dreaming is limiting themselves if they hold the concept this can only occur during sleep. Consciousness can enter into the dream state in such a way as to bring about lucidity. But dreaming can also enter into consciousness in such a way as to bring about the same result.

My observation is that after practising waking dreaming for some time, the quality of sleep and dreams changes. One of the observable changes is the total vibration of the body while sleeping. As our group has never been able to afford the equipment to monitor this, we only have a subjective and physical experience of it. Also, the process in some cases leads towards lucidity, first within the symbols of the dream then the awakening beyond any images or symbols.

To myself as observer of this, and avid follower of the work being done by other researchers, I feel we are on the edge of opening a territory -consciousness – which had never been scientifically explored before. Have other human beings in the past created a bridgehead in the dimension of sleep and death, in which they now live, just as we live in the physical world? Can we learn to wake up there and develop, not simply a few minutes of excitement, but a dwelling place, a work within the realm of consciousness, and an exploration?

These questions I hope the years ahead will unfold to us. If we work together on pushing back the boundaries of human awareness, it might be we who answer them.

God and Dreams

God in a dream can depict several things: it can point to a set of emotions you use to deal with anxiety – i.e. our own belief that a higher power is in charge, so therefore you are okay in the world and are not responsible – maybe a way to lessen self responsibility. God can represent a parent image from early infancy, or a set of moral or philosophical beliefs you hold. In some dreams, because of personal feelings or beliefs, God depicts self judgement on your behavior or value – or something/someone you worship. In dreams of positive and uplifting experience, God can indicate a feeling of connection with humanity, an expression of the fundamental creative/destructive process in yourself, or an experience of your living interaction or relationship with all beings and the universe.

So to dream of God might be an expression of your religious feelings or emotional feelings about God. But it is helpful to remember that if you have strong feelings for a friend, or think about them and feel uplifted or moved, the feelings in no way are that friend. They are only about that friend. So in most cases, when someone tells us they were moved by God, they are usually meaning they were moved by feelings or ideas they experienced about God.

Jung says that while the Catholic Church admits of dreams sent by God, most theologians make little attempt to understand dreams in relationship to God.

God can also depict processes in you that can be enormously transformative. Seen in a very practical way, if a person believes there is nothing in life that stands beyond their present situation and weakness, they might never open to the possibility of healing change. Even if God is only an idea, opening to the influence of that idea allows the action within oneself of an enormous enlargement of functions such as self-healing, widening of awareness, and reaching beyond ones previous limitations and boundaries.

In some dreams however, one has an experience almost as if there is no separation between what is sensed as God, and oneself. This formless, often emotionless experience, may be thought of as an opening to your fundamental and core self. The following dream illustrates this full experience of God as ones fundamental self.

Example: I thought about the dream that I had about L., the dream was that L. had a very red face and told me that she was pregnant. But I didn’t think that I could have made her pregnant and I told her so. She then changed her mind and said, ‘OK then I’m not pregnant’.

In working on the dream I imagined becoming L. I entered into her pregnant body and felt her sexuality and understood the dream. She had offered herself to me, her sexuality and her body but I hadn’t recognised it, I didn’t see it and so she withdrew. L. wants another child and she had offered herself to me but I couldn’t give myself to her. I had never given myself before. In the dream I felt I was not responsible for her pregnancy, and that represents the denial of my own sexuality and of all that results from it.

This is when I entered into the house of God. At first I saw the image of a huge cathedral or church with a magnificent domed roof and I knew that I was in the house of God. I felt the utopia. I felt like I have never felt before, so very good, so excellent. I knew all things. I didn’t have to read the bible or any kind of teachings because the answers are all here in the presence of God. In this state I could ask any question and know the answer. I knew God, yet I was God because there was no separation. Neal C.

The archetypal image of God, when investigated as in the above dream, often reveals itself to be an underlying sense that our core self is in some way life itself, the creative impulse of life. We find that the mystery that created the universe is at the core of us. This unconscious realisation that within us is the Creator, that the holy essense of life itself is expressing through us as our own being, is often so difficult to accept that it is usually projected outward to form an external God. We approach this external God as if it is something distinct from us. Yet again and again, when people delve deeply into themselves they arrive at the realisation – I AM THAT I AM.

Of course this doesn’t refer to ones personality, but to the essence of life that causes you to exist and can flow out into what you do and who you are. If it is taken personally then it can become a sort of mental confusion.

Also, the powerful emotions we sometimes experience about God may well be connected with our tremendous childhood need for love and approval from parents. But equally as likely is that the immense feelings we have about meeting God in a dream, may express the wonder and perhaps terror we experience in meeting the enormity of realising that our fundamental self is the Creator. As the ego melts and realises itself as the One Great Life, undifferentiated, there can no longer be a sense of real separation.

However, the dream God can be many things, and the next exploration of God in dreams shows a very different aspect of it.

When I explored the emotions that had surfaced in recent dreams about God, I came across something totally unexpected. I had decided I would treat the image of God like a dream image, and ‘get inside it’, find out what was behind it. When I managed to do this I found with amazement that my desperate need for my father’s love, a love he found difficult to express, had been transported into my internal sense of God.

At this point I suddenly saw that my urge for God is actually the urge for my father’s love. My unsatisfied urge to receive love from my father, became a power to create an image of a loving God, an image of a cosmic father who can love – and from this inner creation I can get the love I need. I created a loving God because that was my need. But others may create an avenging God to deal with their feelings of guilt; or a mysterious beautiful ever present God to deal with a sense of parental loss, and so on. The image takes the place of real human love – a second best. I saw also that it is much more honest to say – not God loves me – but I am touching the love within myself. I have become the father. I am the God. I have dared to take on the role of father and God.

This makes sense and links with what has been said about the fundamental creative core in ourselves when we express it in a different way. You are always the hero of your own life. You are the central character of your own drama of experience. You are the one facing life and death, love and despair. As such you are the deed doer, the hero or fallen god, especially when the dream is portraying dramatic life events.

To make what has been said about God clearer in practical language we can look at the universe we exist in. Without the universe we do not exist. We can therefore say all we experience, all that we are, has arisen out of the processes of the universe.

Taken a step further, the universe as we experience it, as far as we understand through scientific investigation, did not originally exist in its present form. Originally there existed something very difficult to reason about because there was no time or space or physical matter as we now know it. Time and space, and the material universe came about after the big bang. So originally there was, or still is according to quantum physics, a timeless and spaceless existence.

An aspect of this that is often overlooked is that one condition died to give rise to another. This death and birth are repeated everywhere in what we can see in our universe. The sun is dying as it radiates its energy, and this allows life on our planet.

However we conceive of it, the coming into being of the universe was an incredibly creative process. If we consider what we know about the universe, this creativity, this death and rebirth is still going on everywhere. It is an everyday human experience. It is what underlies every aspect of our own existence.

Example: I witnessed a conversation between a man and a woman, and the man says, “Religion; that’s surely a direction for failures and people who can’t really cope with facing reality.”

And the woman he is accusing of this inability to face reality says, “You poor person! Is your mind or awareness so tiny that you have never realised the forces and processes of your own body are beyond anything you understand? Can’t you see that your very existence is brought about by things so far beyond your knowledge that it is only a statement of your impoverishment to suggest religion is an expression of some sort of smallness and failure. Have you never understood that? Have you not seen that religion is not only an acknowledgement of what we fail to understand and yet depend upon, but it is also an opening to it, a willingness to relate to it? It can also be something far more even than that. It is can be an active loving relationship. And such love is an exchange, a sharing, a way of merging one with another. It is an exchange – a sharing of bodily fluids – the very substance of life. Is that something you are afraid of?”

As expressions of the universe, that creativity, that creative leap into being from a timeless and spaceless existence is fundamantal in your own life. You and I are an expression of it. And what is found in dreams and in deep self enquiry is that if you dig deep enough into yourself, you come to an encounter with that timeless and spaceless core. You discover that what created the universe, whatever name you want to give it, is at the core of you too. And that core is eternal and enormously creative. You are enormously creative – if you touch your core.

Below are two more examples of dreaming about God, or ones core self.

I felt myself to be a primitive tribal male. Suddenly I encountered a force – or what I saw as an immense being. This being I felt was a god or God, but looking back it wasn’t an all encompassing being, so was more like a god, or an aspect of God. My visual impression of it though, was of something so huge yet visible, that I was at first terrified of it, and so were my ‘people’. If one can imagine an immense skyscraper rising into the clouds and beyond, yet not a building but a living being, that was my view of it. This being I knew as the All Shaper. It was the power that gave form or shape to everything. As such it could influence the shape one had become through the errors of history or the deeds of ones family or oneself. The pristine shape or matrix which guides the cells to form organs could be restored.

There was a problem however. This being was terrifying and beyond the gods of my people. To stand before it or acknowledge it was akin to transgressing all the lore of the tribe, all its customs. So not only was the All Shaper something more than we had known before and so threatening to our – and my – world view, but also to take it as ones god was to break with all the tribal traditions and to stand apart and different to ones whole tribe. Christopher.

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

The dream was vivid, and still gives me shivers to this day. I dreamed that I looked up and there was this incredible star that was emanating points of light in the sky. It got brighter and brighter and the bottom-most point reached down to where I was and transported me up to the star. The points of light came out from the centre in all directions, and I found myself on the end of one of the horizontal points.

A wonderful (female) voice spoke to me and said this is who you are, and I had the strong sense of being located at the end of the horizontal light bar. Then she said and this is who you are and carried (transported in some way) me to the next bar of light, where I saw another version (incarnation?) of myself (in a different time and place, although I knew that the essence of this version of me was really me). She continued transporting me from bar to bar where I experienced myself in many different versions in the past, present, and future. I had different skills and interests that were the focal point of each version of myself–a musician in one, a farmer in another.

Some of the versions were females, although I experienced the same sense of self in all of them. Then she returned me to the horizontal bar of my current self and said to me that all of this is who I am, but that now she was going to show me who I really am. Then she drew me into the centre of the star (light, energy source) where I merged with her and could see each of the emanating points of light as manifestations of a single source or spirit. It was one of the most incredible feelings of being integrated and whole that I’ve ever experienced, and I basked in the feeling for a while just absorbing and soaking it in. Then she returned me to myself (with a cosmic wink) and I slept peacefully for the rest of the night. Ever since then I haven’t felt the need to ask who or what I am, and I’ve seen my various abilities and struggles in life in a totally new way. C.A.

When Einstein gave lectures at numerous US universities, the recurring question that students asked him was:

– Do you believe in God?

And he always answered:

– I believe in the God of Spinoza.

I hope this gem of history, serves you as much as it does me:

Baruch de Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher considered one of the three great rationalists of the 17th century philosophy, along with the French Descartes.

Here’s some of him.

This is the God of nature of Spinoza:

God would have said:

Stop praying and punching yourself in the chest!

What I want you to do is go out into the world and enjoy your life.

I want you to enjoy, sing, have fun and enjoy everything I’ve made for you.

Stop going to those dark, cold temples that you built yourself and say they are my house!

My house is in the mountains, in the woods, rivers, lakes, beaches. That’s where I live and there I express my love for you.

Stop blaming me for your miserable life; I never told you there was anything wrong with you or that you were a sinner, or that your sexuality was a bad thing!

Sex is a gift I have given you and with which you can express your love, your ecstasy, your joy. So don’t blame me for everything they made you believe.

Stop reading alleged sacred scriptures that have nothing to do with me. If you can’t read me in a sunrise, in a landscape, in the look of your friends, in your son’s eyes…

➤ you will find me in no book!

Trust me and stop asking me. Will you tell me how to do my job?

Stop being so scared of me. I do not judge you, or criticize you, nor get angry, or bother, or punishment. I am pure love.

Stop asking for forgiveness, there’s nothing to forgive. If I made you… I filled you with passions, limitations, pleasures, feelings, needs, inconsistencies… free will. How can I blame you if you respond to something I put in you? How can I punish you for being the way you are, if I’m the one who made you Do you think I could create a place to burn all my children who behave badly for the rest of eternity?

What kind of god can do that?

Forget any kind of commandments, any kind of laws; those are wiles to manipulate you, to control you, that only create guilt in you.

Respect your peers and don’t do what you don’t want for yourself. All I ask is that you pay attention in your life, that your alert is your guide.

My beloved, this life is not a test, not a step, not a step in the way, not a rehearsal, nor a prelude to paradise. This life is the only thing here and now and all you need.

I have set you absolutely free, no prizes or punishments, no sins or virtues, no one carries a marker, no one keeps a record.

You are absolutely free to create in your life heaven or hell.

➤ I could tell you if there’s anything after this life but I can give you a tip. Live as if there is no. As if this is your only chance to enjoy, to love, to exist.

So, if there’s nothing, then you will have enjoyed the opportunity I gave you. And if there is, rest assured that I won’t ask if you behaved right or wrong, I’ll ask. Did you like it? Did you have fun? What did you enjoy the most? What did you learn?…

Stop believing in me; believing is assuming, guessing, imagining. I don’t want you to believe in me, I want you to feel in you. I want you to feel me in you when you kiss your beloved, when you tuck your little girl, when you caress your dog, when you bathe in the sea.

Stop praising me, what kind of egomaniac God do you think I am?

I’m bored being praised, I’m tired of being thanked. Feeling grateful? Prove it by taking care of you, your health, your relationships, the world. Feeling looked at, shocked?… Express your joy! That’s the way to praise me.

Stop complicating things and repeating as a parakeet what you’ve been taught about me.

The only thing for sure is that you are here, that you are alive, that this world is full of wonders.

What do you need more miracles for? Why so many explanations?

➤ I you look for me outside, you won’t find me. Find me inside… there I am beating on you.

Spinoza.

See: the archetype of the self; bible -dreams and symbols; religion and dreams. See also: individuation.